Seul contre tous

Plot synopsis:
The history of the butcher, who doesn't have any other name, is narrated through voice-over and a montage of still photographs. Orphaned at a young age, he was sexually abused by a priest. As a teenager, unable to have the opportunity to study and learn a profession of his choice, he reluctantly embraces the career of butcher specialized in horse meat, a profession already frowned upon at the time in France. After several years of hard work, he's finally able to open his own horse meat butcher shop, and his girlfriend gives birth to a daughter. But when the woman realizes the infant is not a boy, she leaves the young father alone with the child. Embracing it as fate, the butcher decides to take care of his daughter alone. But as loneliness grows on the single father, he becomes overprotective and develops incestuous feelings for his child. When he sees blood on her skirt, he stabs the man who he thinks raped his daughter. He later understands that the stains were only menstrual blood. He is sentenced to prison and forced to sell his shop to a Muslim butcher, and his troubled daughter is sent to an institution. In prison, the butcher has sex with a cellmate. Upon his release, he vows to forget it all happened. He finds a job working as a bartender for the woman who owns the tavern where he was a regular customer. They begin dating, and soon she becomes pregnant. As they start making plans for their future together, she sells her business and they move to northern France, where she said she would buy a butcher shop for him.
There, she backs out of her promise. He has to take a night watchman job at a nursing home, where he meets a young and caring nurse, the complete opposite of his aging, careless mistress. As he and the nurse witness together an elderly patient die, the butcher thinks back about the lack of affection throughout his life, from the orphanage to a life with a careless mistress who abuses the power she has over him because of her money. When she unjustly accuses him of having an affair with the nurse, he snaps and punches her in the belly several times, very likely killing their unborn child, then steals a pistol and flees.
He decides to return to Paris, where he rents the same flophouse room where he conceived his daughter, and begins looking for a job as a horse meat butcher. But the customers' taste changed during his time in prison, provoking a collapse of the horse meat market. Despite his patience, his job interviews consistently end up with rejection. He then proceeds to broaden his job search, but in general butchery he's considered as an unskilled worker. He has to start all over again at the bottom, which he does, not long before being fired for being too old for the position. He starts looking outside his branch, but the more he broadens his searches, the more humiliating the job interviews become. He remains polite, but the more desperate he becomes, the more quickly he's rejected by managers. When he turns to his old friends for advice, they all reject him. After being turned away at a slaughterhouse that once did business with his shop, the butcher decides to kill the slaughterhouse manager. He plots the murder at a local tavern, but is ejected from the bar at gunpoint after squabbling with the owner's son. The butcher finds that he has only three bullets in his gun, and begins assigning them to the men he feels have humiliated him the most.
More and more isolated, he decides to look for the only person he feels has ever loved him, his daughter. After meeting her at the asylum in which she is a patient, he takes her back to his room where he's prey to opposite feelings towards her. As he's about to lose his sanity, he contemplates having sex with his daughter, before killing her. After the representation of this fantasy, the movie returns to the moment of the butcher's hesitation. He decides to put the gun away, resolving to be good, and tearfully embraces his daughter. But he starts again to contemplate having sex with her, in the same manner he did with her mother. Standing at a window, he unzips his daughter's jacket and begins fondling her. As he starts to abuse his daughter, the butcher, between more and more incoherent thoughts, tries to justify his act by asserting that the world condemns his love for his daughter only because it is too powerful.

Tags: revenge, dark, violence, flashback

Review:
Both films have memorable scenes that take place inside a porno theater, emphasizing the dominance sex and sexual compulsions have over each of the protagonists (though for different reasons in each of them).SEUL CONTRE TEUS, however, is less of a film about an inexorable pull toward insanity and instead is more of a film about an inescapable rage -- the rage associated with a fiercely guarded sense of pride that has a strong tendency of violence toward anything that appears the least bit insulting; and a rage that comes from endless feelings of loneliness.
My favorite is probably the line that says (something like) "there is no revolution anymore; when we are all alone there is only revenge." Valuable lines like this are mixed in with incendiary rants against foreigners and homosexuals -- thoughts and emotions rooted in painfully stubborn pride and bitter humiliation, but which sometimes have the feel of some desperate, lost, apocryphal truth to them.There are a couple of other qualities this film shares with TAXI DRIVER.
Gaspar Noë's first full-length film seeks to provide, and sometimes achieves, an elegantly bleak picture of the world through the eyes of a French butcher whose life has been devolving from day one.
Set in 1980, the story of "I Stand Alone"/"Seul contre tous" may also be meant to reflect the thinking of a certain French underclass of that time whose desperation and resentment toward growing minorities in the country and toward the rich and the liberal bourgeoisie led them to rally behind the far right political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.Philippe Nahon is strong in the central role.
The nonstop narration has seemed to work well up to then, but when Noë resorts to an overlapping second voice and approaches the father's sexual violation of his daughter through panning off into the street, the voice-over becomes a wall preventing us from experiencing what's been dealt with and the hitherto blunt manner -- the obscene slangy language and the gun-shot blast divisions of images and the boldly declarative intertitles (Noë is of the nothing-succeeds-like-excess school of film-making) -- comes to seem a bit of a facade.
Good, well-directed French film in the vein of TAXI DRIVER, where an out-of-work, 50-year-old butcher slowly begins to lose control with the people and the world around him as he encounters one indignity after another.
The butcher's bizarre feelings and motivations are translated to us through what he's thinking, instead of relying on talk.This is a brutal, honest, powerful movie that pulls no punches and draws the viewer into the mind of the man slowly going over the edge.
The writer-director Gaspar Noe's first-person account of a jobless butcher's trip on the down escalator has a lot of superficial resemblances to TAXI DRIVER, but the real unseen hand behind this shattering picture belongs to Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose scabrous stream-of-consciousness monologues Noe has translated into scorching, nineties angry-white-man-ese.
As the butcher's three hundred francs dwindle, and his handgun starts looking more and more appealing, Noe surgically implants us inside the antihero's head using a cascade of hilarious and horrifying nihilistic rants that don't quite resemble anything you've ever heard in a movie.Noe's ingenuity in reinventing the subjective style of TAXI DRIVER is near-limitless; his array of techniques dazzles, from the Godardian intertitles that break the action like a butcher's cleaver hammering a wooden cutting board, to the deafening gunshots accompanied by digital pans and zooms that throw a Brechtian bucket of icewater on the proceedings whenever they calm down.
The movie shocked me, it made me feel sad, sorry and ashamed.It shows how a potentially good human being can become bad due to the lack of love in our society.
This is Gaspar Noe's deliberately disturbing film of one man's resentment of his own life.
(Instead of writing about the already well known Story and the Characters, I want to let you guys know how "I Stand Alone"/"Menschenfeind" made me feel throughout its 89 minute run without putting too many spoilers....if any)At first I didn't really pay attention to Noé's debut since I wasn't the biggest fan of Irreversibel.
Don't get me wrong, I liked how it was filmed and how Noé played with a lot of avantgarde and art elements but in the end I have seen it as nothing more than a In-your-face Artmovie with interesting ideas.
And that is why I love Seul contre Tous, it's not about a super villain that wants to destroy the world, it's not about a hero that fights his inner demons but it's also not about a cold blooded murderer, it's about a desperate and angry sicko that is about to break lose and even though he's stuck in a relateable situation, what he makes out of it, is what makes him one of the most sinister characters I've ever seen.If you want to see something new, intelligent or evil this is your movie!.
I know many people who would be disgusted by this film and simply say they did not like it, it was a "bad movie." The reality is that every movie doesn't have to be uplifting and make you feel good.
The monologue the film is based upon is basically normal human thoughts of any man put in that situation, and I have to say, that, in the end, I have become the happiest person I can imagine just because those things did not happen to me.
This is his first outing as a director, and I personally think it's one of the best debuts in movie history.The story basically follows a desperate, desperate man who is losing his grip on life.
And having great performances by all actors doesn't hurt either.I Stand Alone is the second film I've seen by Mr. Noe and again, I came out very pleased.
The story is essentially the same for both films: a disillusioned white male flips out and decides to hit back at a society in which he feels marginalised.The thing that made films like Falling Down enjoyable is that you were given an insight into what drives the main character's behaviour.
I Stand Alone, like Gaspar Noe's' latter film Irreversible has a very depressing, sadistic atmosphere which is more arresting and melodramatic than anything to come out of Hollywood.It seems that the film is not at all worth viewing if it is not positively meaningful or entertaining.
Noé's debut film, "Seul contre tous" (1998) -- "I Stand Alone" or, literally, "alone against all" -- carries these more or less cynical notions as a story about an unemployed butcher who, fed up with his daily existence of boring family life, goes on a rampage against the world.
The answer is that yes, films like "I Stand Alone" should exist, and the reason why is contained within the question itself.In a sea of unoriginal and intellectually vapid cinema (the purpose of which is what really needs be on trial), a movie that inspires a viewer to actually ponder the artist's moral integrity and the content presented on screen needs to exist and continue to be made.
Visceral to the human mind and emotions is a piece like "I Stand Alone", as it genuinely challenges what we've come to expect statement- wise from a movie.A narrative exploration of stream-of-conscious storytelling, the film confronts the evils tolerated by society and compares them to the evils considered unacceptable.
Actually, I don't think I did: Noe wants to make an iconoclastic vision of a man, here called just the Butcher, in a subjectively-told story of a man in a downward spiral of his life being just total s***, not finding a job in a proverbial wintry economic climate, and thinking over and over again about blowing people who raise their voices to him into smithereens.
This time I take the 'I hated it' route.Here's why: for all of Noe's possible talents with a camera, in just setting up a shot or getting an actor to act this way or that, or writing the narration in such a way that it becomes a jambalaya of rambling and nihilism, his subject matter is repulsive without a single, slight portal for a viewer to come in on the proceedings.
In "I Stand Alone," Gaspar Noe, the latest director determined to ensconce himself as the 'enfant terrible' of European film-making, presents for the viewer's consideration The World's Angriest Man, played quite convincingly by Philippe Nahon assisted by the voice-over of Olivier Doran as his inner self.
"I Stand Alone" tells about the life of a failed native born Parisian.He's an unemployed butcher(Philippe Nahon),who hates everyone.As the film begins,he's living with his expecting girlfriend and her mother-both of whom,of course,he hates.Their constant nagging finally becomes too much for him to handle,and he eventually snaps.After pummeling his girlfriend's very pregnant stomach,The Butcher makes a hasty getaway and decides to head to his hometown.Once there,he finds that unemployment is running rampant and all hell breaks loose."I Stand Alone" is a genuinely shocking and brilliant film.The bloody and nihilistic conclusion has to be seen to be believed.Philippe Nahon is excellent as angry and bitter The Butcher.His heart is full of frustration and utter desperation and this results in a misogynistic,racist and homophobic rage."My entire life is a mistake,"says The Butcher,and he has nothing left to lose.There are many faceless and alienated men like him living in a modern world they can no longer grasp because it has become increasingly foreign.The film is loaded with graphic and deeply disturbing violence,so sensitive people shouldn't bother.Still if you want to see something mind-shattering,"I Stand Alone" is a must-see.10 out of 10..
Most of the movie it's just the narrating pessimistic voice of the butcher about the sad life he's living, about how he sees the world in his mind.
I did even feel slightly sympathetic towards him at the start, but all that was eradicated from his first act of shocking violence.I Stand Alone isn't an extremely violent film, but when violence does occur it's shocking, brutal and powerful.
The debut film by the disturbing director Gaspar Noé, the first movie I seen by this director is "Enter the Void" and started watching his film in reverse order from there on.
If watching Gaspar Noe's Irreversible was like someone hitting you on the head with a ten ton sledge hammer, going through his earlier creation "Seul contre tous" ( released in English speaking world as 'I Stand Alone') is like, pardon my language, someone f*cking your brains hard.
A memorable portrait of urban desolation, Gaspar Noe's feature film debut is also a brutally honest, unflinching character study that makes 'Taxi Driver' look the 'The Wizard of Oz." Beautifully framed and photographed, its aesthetic jolt is largely based upon the complete lack of morality by its protagonist (an effective Philippe Nahon), who either commits or fantasizes about some of the most unspeakable acts ever put on celluloid.
It's so extreme it's funny at times, not because it isn't well written, but because this fellow human being is so damn angry you can only laugh.I STAND ALONE is a truthful film, a work that cuts to the bone and expresses what plenty of us are thinking.Photographically, it's a series of classical compositions in which action and dialogue occur.
Director Gaspar Noe self consciously apes Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' in several scenes, but this movie is a truly original vision.
Director Gaspar Noe self consciously apes Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' in several scenes, but this movie is a truly original vision.
We are treated to an onslaught of disgusting, anti-social, homophobic, racist thoughts while The Butcher looks for work.In the worst scene in the movie, he beats his pregnant girlfriend's stomach and then goes on to say that 'she will sh*t the baby out...' It's a rough thing to see and hear, but to those of us who have withstood films like "Cannibal Holocaust," "Ichi The Killer" and "I Spit On Your Grave," it is not that hard to take in comparison.
Still not a movie to watch with your Grandma though...I was struck by how well done the ending of this film is, how we are made to feel sorry for The Butcher in his situation.
Maybe THAT is the most disturbing thing about "I Stand Alone." Highly recommended to those who enjoy edgy, thought-provoking films and don't mind sitting through an hour of depressing material to get to a beautiful ending.8 out of 10, kids..
The movie is admirably unflinching in the way it portrays human desperation and degradation; you're not asked to like the main character or to identify with him, but you DO come to understand some of the circumstances that have led him to such bitterness against the world ("You have a home, a family, a car; after 35 years of hard work, I have nothing").
The main character, a tormented butcher who goes to Paris in search of his daughter lets fly with some of the most outrageously misogynistic, misanthropic ranting ever committed to celluloid, but the power of the film really lies in the way the character blames such disparate targets as Nazism, homosexuals, immigrants, and France itself for his poor stature in life, only to turn around and blame them again.
If you feel like seeing a violent, disturbing, and controversial film that resembles "Taxi Driver," see "I Stand Alone.".
The protagonist's life story so far is crammed into the first five minutes, so by the time the film has actually started we feel like we know him and can identify with him.
So is Gaspar Noé's directing work.I hate (10 out of 10) and love (10 out of 10) this movie and don't know whether I ever would like to watch it again.
Noé told in a interview that in SEUL CONTRE TOUS he wanted to make a film about `his bestial side' that shows his anger against the people who rejected this film by saying `we don't want to release it'.In seul contre tous,GASPAR NOE surprise us because it reveal us a fifty years old `defeated man'(he just recently leave the prison) who lost everything:his profession(butcher),his job,money and mostly his moral.From Lille to Paris ,he walks the streets of a different and brutal `city of the lights'(ironically he can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.only the tunnel).
A man with only cents in his pocket,without hope without nothing.GASPAR NOÉ provoke us to question `the establishment'(in all terms),this man,the protagonist(at times repulsive)-who thinks all the time- is also A VICTIM of a system who creates and discard individuals like him.NOÉ first film, SEUL CONTRE TOUS(1998) is almost an `ante chamber' of Irreversible because BEFORE in one particular 'violent' scene ,Gaspar give us A WARNING in the screen:That we should stop watching it right now or tho leave the place-This shows what kind of Director he is- A visionary-.HE also chose what kind of audience he wants for his films(obviously the kind who don't leave the theatre)In the universe of GASPAR NOÉ(in his films)we find parental love who become aberrant even incestuous,of pregnancies transformed into abortion,of innocent people who pay the price of their bad choices.No matter how good a film is.there's always a IMDB user who will hate it!..
I think Gaspar Noe's exploration of the meanest, darkest, wildest feelings a man can have until the worst case scenario happens is actually very positive for the viewer who sees a reflection of himself through some of the main character's actions or thoughts, and realizes what it's like to slowly go always further and further down the spiral wishing he hadn't gone this far.
Incredible film from Gaspar Noe. Powerful, disturbing, unique, important and won't leave the viewer alone..
What follows during the movie's running time is a plethora of cynicism, hate, disgust and depravity presented in a methods of cinema.The film is full of more than dark visions of humanity and society in which nothing is kind or likable and everyone is selfish, evil and worth nothing.
The people around the butcher are stupid, mean spirited and know nothing about loving and caring, and the whole vision of life and world is one of the darkest I've ever witnessed in film.
I want also note that this film is definitely not for a casual viewer as this is so hard to take due to its extremely nihilistic attitudes, thoughts and imagery (both violent and sexual) so these challenging elements are too much for most of the people so don't even try to watch, if you feel uneasy with difficult and depressing material.
Quite Taxi Driver-like in that the central character sees the evils in the world, and wants to right them, though their anger is often misdirected, their methods unsound and themselves hardly bastions of morality.The plot is largely driven by The Butcher's internal monologue, which is very direct, candid, stream-of-consciousness and uncensored and accurately displays exactly where the man is in his life.
While much of his inner thoughts are the rantings of a bitter, dejected person, one can actually see how he could feel that way, and even agree with him in some respects.Incredibly intense and director Gaspar Noe ramps up the intensity as the movie progresses.
Take a journey into the mind of madness with The Butcher, the protagonist in Gaspar Noe's intense crime drama "I Stand Alone" aka "Seul contre tous".
This is the story of an unnamed butcher who has just been released from jail for a crime committed in the prequel to "I Stand Alone", Gaspar Noe's short film "Carne".
The butcher is so bitter, so hateful and nihilistic that I found him repulsive.Much of what I feel that Gaspar Noe wanted to say with this film is very anti-capitalist.
even though, the-butcher is not the much likable character for every decision he has taken, u still cannot help but feel sorry for him all along.i think this a great movie, but not as good as "Irreversible".