Noe’s ‘I Stand Alone’ Takes a Gripping Look at Bleak Life

Gaspar Noe’s “I Stand Alone” has an exhilaration that comes from looking at life at its meanest so unflinchingly that you can actually be amused by the absurdity of the human predicament. .

His story of a brutal and brutalized butcher is of a man managing to survive at society’s lower rungs only to have his life unravel hopelessly in a moment of enraged misunderstanding. A rugged man with a furious gaze and doughy nose who looks much older than the 41 years of age he’s supposed to be in the year the film is set, 1980, the butcher (Philippe Nahon) speaks to us continually in voice-over, revealing a fierce, reflective intellect that bespeaks of a self-awareness that heightens rather than relieves his profound despair. He knows a truth Noe is unafraid to tell: that many people live lives that are ultimately without meaning. This is the fate that the butcher, in a mounting rage and frustration, becomes determined to avoid but realizes he has yet to find a way to do so.

We learn that he was abandoned at age 2 by his mother, that his father, a communist, ended up in a German death camp. As a boy he managed to learn the butcher’s trade, eventually setting up his own shop in a drab industrial section of Paris. When his lover abandons him and their baby daughter he raises the child, buying a flat for the two of them. Unprepared for the onset of menstruation, the daughter, a mute, heads for her father’s shop, but he mistakes the blood on her skirt as evidence of rape. His ensuing moment of rage is enough to destroy his meager existence: He loses everything while serving time, even his daughter, who is sent to an institution.

(All of this is covered in a quick montage drawn from “Carne,” the film to which “I Stand Alone” is a sequel; but the latter film can in fact stand alone.)

Once out of prison, the butcher takes a job at a bar and begins an affair with the ample proprietress (Frankye Pain), who becomes pregnant and with whom he moves to Lille with the false hope that she will stake him to a meat market. Instead he winds up in a cramped apartment with this loathsome woman and her elderly mother (Martine Audrain). In no time he’s heading back to his old Paris neighborhood, foolishly expecting to find “real human beings” who will help him get started on a new life.

Yet the conflicted, highly emotional moment of truth to which Noe brings us is not at all predictable, and is full of ambiguity and contradictions. It is an amazing, explosive moment, preceded by a buildup so relentlessly grim and nasty, so brutalizing to the butcher, that “I Stand Alone” actually verges on comedy in the darkest way imaginable.

Nahon is a ferocious presence, a wounded beast of a man, who recalls the late Neville Brand. In both predicament and temperament this butcher has much in common with none other than that Stephen Sondheim protagonist, Sweeney Todd. (Noe regards a butcher “as the last on the chain based on a violent act, all for the survival of the strongest species.”) His butcher also brings to mind Franz Biberkopf, the hero of R.W. Fassbinder’s monumental “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” a lower depths everyman, also fresh out of prison. He is also not unlike James Ellroy’s cops, cursed with too much self-knowledge while caught up in a corrupt system.

Stylistically, “I Stand Alone” is a tour de force in black-and-white wide-screen, shot crisply in actual locales with sharp cutting punctuated by what sounds like gun shots. Noe has said his film is about survival rather than hate, and he certainly accomplished what he set out to do, creating “a real melodrama written in blood, semen and tears.” You can’t come with a better description of “I Stand Alone” than that.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: extremely blunt language, involving sex and violence, adult themes and situations.

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‘I Stand Alone’

Philippe Nahon: The Butcher

Frankye Pain: His Mistress

Blandine Lenoir: His Daughter, Cynthia

Martin Audrain: Mother of the Mistress

A Strand Releasing presentation of a Cinemas de la Zone/Lovestreams production with the participation of CNC. Writer-producer-director-cinematographer Gaspar Noe. Co-cinematographer Dominique Colin. Editors Lucille Hadzihalilovic and Noe. Music Cezame Argile Productions, Kokoa Media, Justement Productions, Lido Melodies, Canon in D Major. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

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