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France · 1998
1h 29m
Director Gaspar Noé
Starring Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir, Martine Audrain, Frankie Pain
Genre Drama, Thriller
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The Butcher has done some time in jail after beating up the guy who tried to seduce his teenage mentally-handicapped daughter. Now he wants to start a new life. He leaves his daughter in an institution and moves to Lille suburbs with his mistress. She promised him a new butcher shop. She lied. The butcher decides to go back to Paris and find his daughter.
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Between Nahon's pressure-cooker performance and the director's assaultive style (he's fond of brooding long takes interrupted by shotgun blasts of lurching, skip-frame edits and bold intertitles), the film would be an unbearable expression of rage, except that Noé's winking, nearly absurd sense of humor offers a disconcerting reminder of the unreality of it all.
San Francisco Chronicle by Bob Graham
I Stand Alone ("Seul contre tous" in French) is a portrait of a pathetic soul, but it is also a cautionary tale. The butcher cannot be dismissed as a monster, nor is this a creep show. Something like the butcher's story can be found almost every day in newspaper crime reports.
Charlotte Observer by Lawrence Toppman
This pretentious mediocrity from writer-director Gaspar Noe is "Taxi Driver" without depth or any humanizing of the main character. [25 Oct 1998, p.4F]
Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten
I Stand Alone uses a cannon ball to shatter the psychological horror at the heart of human society.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
Strange and unsettling as it is, Noe's clarity of vision makes his film ignite. Like a slammed door or a scream of anger, it slaps you awake.
I Stand Alone, Gaspar Noé's raw, corrosive, and relentlessly provocative response—part companion piece, part critique—to Taxi Driver unfolds with rare force and clarity of vision, rarer still for a director's first feature.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
The movie's triumph -- if that's what it is -- is in the force of its assault. It takes one man's unbearable truth and bashes us in the skull with it.
A film of alarming intensity.
San Francisco Examiner by Wesley Morris
I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.
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Gaspar Noé's oft-ignored first film remains one of the most intense cinematic experiences I've ever had. Depicting the inner life of a working-class French man, everything about this butcher is gross, from the way he comports himself to the way he treats his wife to the fantasies he has about his teenage daughter, yet, like all radically transgressive art, it's impossible to tear yourself away.