I Stand Alone (1998)

By Adam Thomas

Monday May 1, 2006

Directed by Gaspar Noé The first feature film from the director of Irreversible is equally audacious if in a very different way. This film is a bleak, internally narrated and thuggish look at the bitter failings of a single man’s life and his conflicted sense of morality. After his wife leaves him with a mute daughter, the main character, simply known as the Butcher, stabs a man in the eye upon mistaking his daughter’s first period as a sign of rape. He goes to jail and she’s shipped off to an institution. When he gets out he tries to erase his previous failures, until he is forced to leave his new, pregnant wife after he punches her in the stomach. He returns to Paris with a mind full of venom and a loaded gun, neither of which offers much in the way of hope. The film’s last section starts with a warning that you have 30 seconds to leave the screening. If you are easily disturbed do so.