Seul Contre Tous (1998)

	Also Known As: I Stand Alone
	Year of first release: 1998
	Director: Gaspar Noé (Irréversible, Enter the Void)
	Actors: Philippe Nahon (Haute Tension, Les rivières pourpres), Blandine Lenoir, Frankie Pain (Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain)
	Country: F
	Genre: Drama
	Conditions of visioning: 24.09.2013, DVD, Home cinema
Synopsis: The reflexions of an unemployed nameless butcher about life.
Review: The first feature-length film of Argentinian director Gaspar Noé before Irréversible (2002) is quite raw. Most of the time we hear the thoughts of the main character while we see him going about his miserable life. The way of telling the story made me think at first that the director wanted us to share this ultra-pessimistic view on life, and I didn't agree to it. But then it seems that this view is only the distorted one of the butcher who has never known love in his life, either from parents or family or wife, as he has never know professional success and he has then been limited to surviving in the past 50 years of his life. Surviving alone against everybody else. The direction of the movie is interesting/disturbing, with the voice-over as I said already, interrupted every five minutes by a gun shot, and sometimes by sentences written in white against black on the full screen. The image quality on the DVD I have seen is quite poor (faded colors, out of focus), I don't know if this is caused by the original material or the transfer.
Rating: 6 /10