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Wild Side

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France, Belgium, United Kingdom · 2004
1h 50m
Director Sébastien Lifshitz
Starring Stéphanie Michelini, Yasmine Belmadi, Edouard Nikitine, Josiane Stoléru
Genre Drama

A transgender woman who survives by prostituting herself in Paris, returns – with her two male lovers in town – to her family home in the countryside to look after her dying mother.

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What are critics saying?

50

Variety by

Sex frequently disguises itself as friendship and love in Wild Side, a morbid and self-important homosexual "Jules & Jim" for the new millennium.

60

Village Voice by Dennis Lim

Lifshitz successfully maneuvers his trio of outcasts toward a state of grace: His vision of misfit utopianism, in its own quiet way, is as defiant as anything in Fassbinder.

60

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Stony and statuesque, Michelini is an excellent casting choice: Her impassive face and dispassionate voice serve as a carefully constructed protective mask that hides her pain, and which she rarely lets slip.

40

The A.V. Club by Nathan Rabin

A sustained mood piece of disquieting intensity, but its almost unbearable air of morose ennui becomes hard to take even in small doses, let alone in a highly concentrated torrent of misery like this.

70

L.A. Weekly by Scott Foundas

Though Lifshitz's attitude toward sex and sexuality ranks among the most progressive in contemporary movies, he doesn't belabor it; seen through his eyes, Wild Side is a love story in which love is unrestrained by matters of gender or sexual orientation or even the number of lovers.

50

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

Too elliptical and poetically structured to cohere as more than an intense mood piece with social ramifications. The movie is so enraptured with its own romantic desolation that its narrative drive becomes sidetracked.

63

New York Post by V.A. Musetto

Viewers are either going to walk out after 10 minutes or, like this tolerant critic, get caught up in the sordid lives of the three misfits and stick around for the ambiguous ending.

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