Sauvage
Wild
Camille Vidal-Naquet (2018)
An hour or so into Sauvage, a middle-aged man asks the name of the film’s rent-boy protagonist. The reply is, ‘Call me anything’. Customers this young man has serviced have so far called him, among other things, ‘kitten’ and ‘piece of shit’. He’s ‘draga‘ (‘dear’ or ‘darling’) to the Eastern Europeans in the group of sex workers he hangs out with around the Bois de Boulogne. But his answer to this direct question reminds us we still don’t know his given name – or that of any other character in writer-director Camille Vidal-Naquet’s debut feature. The middle-aged man responds to ‘Call me anything’ by introducing himself as Claude. He explains that he’s French, based in Canada but back in Europe for a while: we’re suddenly back in the relatively secure world of names and addresses – the world we know but from which Sauvage has temporarily removed us. The principal character is, as well as anonymous, of no fixed abode. He occasionally spends the night in a client’s bed or a squat. Just as often, he sleeps rough.
The closing credits name several characters in addition to Claude, including two other male prostitutes in the story. They are Ahd, with whom the leading man is in love, or thinks he’s in love; and Mihal, who at one point seems keen to take Ahd’s place in his affections. The main character is nameless to the very end but Camille Vidal-Naquet, as Adam Mars-Jones puts it in the TLS, ‘hasn’t been able to prevail against the website IMDb’s appetite for information’. Mars-Jones gives a couple of mocking examples of this appetite, including the listing of ‘Paul McGann’s [character] in Withnail & I as “ I”’, though the actual IMDb listing is either dafter or more knowing than that: McGann is down as ‘… and I’. In fact, the site’s details for Sauvage tend to contradict Mars-Jones’s claim that ‘Anonymity is an existential threat to an omniscient database’. Of the twenty-three cast members listed on IMDb, only five play people with names, as distinct from jobs or other defining characteristics (greengrocer, handicapped man, sugar daddy, and so on). It’s a relief, for the purposes of writing this, that the named quintet includes the hero. He is Léo.
The opening scene introduces a brace of what will be persisting themes, Léo’s state of health and the significance of kissing. In a doctor’s surgery, Léo (Félix Maritaud) answers questions about his symptoms – cough, discomfort when he inhales, etc. His white-coated interrogator (Lionel Riou) then starts a searching physical examination. When he reaches Léo’s groin, he presses about a bit before masturbating the patient. After both have dressed, they provisionally agree another session same time next week – if, that is, the ‘doctor’ can borrow the surgery again. Léo declines a request for a kiss with a polite explanation that kissing clients has to feel natural to him. He is, though, bothered enough about his health to ask the other man, after the role play is over, if he can offer any medical advice. The client can’t oblige: he works for the inland revenue. As far as we know, the pair never meet again.
This is the first of three interviews in a doctor’s surgery – the second and third practitioners Léo visits are the genuine article. About halfway through Sauvage, when his affair with Ahd has collapsed and Léo has a black eye to prove it, he sees a quietly concerned and compassionate doctor (Marie Seux) in a scene that is no less, though very differently, remarkable from the earlier one with the faux médecin (as the closing credits call him). The reasons are threefold. First, this doctor is just about the sole female character in the film (certainly the only one in the IMDb listing: other women appear fleetingly in a sequence where the male sex workers, some of them straight, are drinking and smoking drugs together). Second, her investigation yields not only details of the poor medical condition of a young man who doesn’t eat or sleep regularly (he has some kind of lung infection, as well as oedema) but also the very little we learn about Léo’s background. He’s twenty-two and has been selling himself on the streets for ‘some time’; asked if he’s in touch with his parents, he looks away and makes no other reply. Third, this second doctor triggers an unexpected and affecting moment when she stands close to Léo to examine his chest. He suddenly hugs her and the hug lasts several seconds.
The last medical appointment takes place after Léo has moved in with Claude (Philippe Ohrel) and is soon to travel to Canada to start a new life with him there. Léo’s appearance is now strikingly changed. He has – as the third physician (Philippe Koa), a rehab doctor, remarks – put on a little weight. His hair, for the first time, is tidy and looks clean. Instead of his usual torn jacket and grubby T-shirt, he wears a pale blue sweater. In answer to questions, he insists that he’s stopped taking drugs of any kind. ‘Don’t you believe me?’ he asks the doctor. What the latter goes on to say heavily qualifies his assurance that he does believe Léo. The rehab doctor is a friend of Claude who, he says, is now happier than he’s ever known him to be; he hopes Claude will be able to rely on Léo as much as Léo can rely on Claude. In other words, the rehab doctor doesn’t really believe in the new, improved Léo and nor do we. In that nice blue sweater, he seems denatured. The title word of the film can mean savage, wild or unsociable – and all three meanings apply.
After the opening session with the taxman, Vidal-Naquet starts to describe the rent boys’ pick-up routine on the Bois de Boulogne and Léo’s relationship with Ahd. The two get into a car with a middle-aged driver (Lucas Bléger). It’s only when they’re back at this man’s house that we see he’s in a wheelchair, though he’s sexually enthusiastic and, with help from Léo and Ahd, active. Since they’re having a threesome, Léo does what’s natural to him and kisses both the other two, which makes Ahd angry. Afterwards, he tells Léo off: in Ahd’s view, kissing clients proves you feel OK about being a prostitute. And it isn’t OK to Ahd, a former professional fighter who not only self-identifies as straight but insists that he has no intention of selling sex for the rest of his working life. In their squat, he and Léo share a bed. When Léo starts jerking off there, Ahd is again furious. In order to make Léo stop, he allows him to lie in his arms and caress his chest – a sexually less dynamic arrangement that Ahd finds relatively less unacceptable. ‘We’re not animals,’ he says, with some relief.
The early scenes with Ahd also lay the ground for another main element of Sauvage: the pros and cons of going with an older man. The wheelchair-bound client is a kind of harbinger of other types whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak. In a club with Léo, Ahd bumps into a sixtyish guy (Joël Villy) – the cast list’s Sugar Daddy – whom he used to see, and now resumes seeing, regularly. This arrangement reinforces the tensions between Ahd and Léo and accelerates the breakdown between them. (The strong, stocky Ahd is himself a good few years older than Léo: there’s a decade between the two actors concerned.) For Ahd, Sugar Daddy appears to offer both a chance of greater financial security and, more oddly, a means of denying his own gayness – as if no youngish man could be truly homosexual if he chose to sleep with someone well past his physical best. When he and Léo finally part company, after several physically violent exchanges in which the latter always comes off worse, Ahd is planning to set up house with Sugar Daddy in Spain, where he may try to resurrect his fighting career. He again encourages Léo to follow his example. Hitching up with an oldie, says Ahd, is ‘the best the likes of us can hope for’.
Léo’s erratic reactions to senior partners reflect, rather, his feelings for Ahd. Shortly after Ahd has let him cuddle up in bed, Léo has a session with an elderly, widowed bookseller (Jean-Pierre Baste). Sexual penetration is too much for the old man; Léo offers instead to hold him in his arms. When the man asks if he doesn’t find him revolting, Léo tells him, ‘Not at all’. This tender, sensitive behaviour is very different from his reaction to having sex for the first time with Claude who, though much younger and more attractive than the bookseller, still counts as past it (he’s probably in his late forties). When Claude tells him he can stay as long as he wants, Léo immediately prepares to leave. Asked why, he says, ‘Because you’re old and disgusting’. This encounter takes place when Léo, although he knows he has no future with Ahd, is missing him badly. After he and Claude become an item and appear in public together, Léo, while openly affectionate, seems to exaggerate his mincing walk in Claude’s company. He seems to want to show he’s putting on an act in partnering an oldster who isn’t Ahd.
The shorthand summary of Sauvage on IMDb contrasts the hero’s line of work and cast of mind: Léo ‘sells his body’ but is ‘longing for love’. Camille Vidal-Naquet encourages bald distinctions of this kind by suggesting that Ahd is the love of Léo’s life – also, I think, by the inclusion of a particularly shocking and loveless sexual encounter. The one-true-love theme isn’t very convincing. Léo is instinctive rather than reflective: it’s likely that his crushes, as well as his clients, would come and go, especially since the seriously conflicted Ahd appears to offer him little sense of security. Ahd’s fists do come to his aid, though, after Léo’s gruesome experiences in the home of a couple (Nicolas Fernandez and Nicolas Chalumeau), identified on IMDb cast as ‘Le client piercing‘ (1 and 2). They make their sex worker work to increasingly horrifying effect: their subjections of Léo culminate in the insertion into him of an enormous butt-plug, which results in anal bleeding. At this point, Client 2 suggests to his more sadistic partner that they call a halt. When Léo asks for his money, Client 1 tells him he doesn’t deserve payment and violently ejects him. Léo goes weeping to Ahd, who returns to the men’s apartment, knocks out Client 1 and steals his cash to reimburse Léo.
It may not have been Vidal-Naquet’s intention but Léo’s ordeal at the hands of these two clients is so offensive and upsetting that it upstages the other sex scenes in Sauvage. It thereby becomes representative of his working life and its dangers – and the polar opposite of his abiding attachment to Ahd. The writer-director is keen to ennoble this relationship right through to the last thing that Ahd says to Léo – that ‘You were made to be loved’. It’s an uncharacteristic turn of phrase for Ahd, one that sticks in the mind without being credible. Vidal-Naquet’s dichotomising approach is puzzling because it runs counter to a main strength of his film. Rotten Tomatoes’ summary tells us Léo ‘trades in love as much as lust‘ (and, therefore, in lust as much as love) – and the two things are often indivisible in Félix Maritaud’s portrait.
The good impression Maritaud made in a supporting role in Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM (2017) hardly prepared you for what he achieves here. His remarkable physical performance goes well beyond bodily self-exposure, although the extent of that is unusual too. This twenty-six-year-old, who appears in virtually every scene, is protean in his expressiveness. When clients tell Léo he’s beautiful, the actor, very naturally, makes you believe they’re perceiving a native innocence as well as a desirable body. When the ‘piercing’ duo murmur to each other that Léo is dirty and stinks, you believe that too. (The make-up that gives Maritaud’s face a sweaty, hectic flush is very good but this is not just a matter of cosmetics.) Adams Mars-Jones takes a cool view of the performance. He reminds us that ‘explicitness is no guarantee of truthfulness’ and writes of Léo’s embrace of the woman doctor that:
‘She reacts carefully, not breaking the embrace but seeming to assess it, as if it might be some sort of desperate appeal, but that’s not how Félix Maritaud plays it. It’s just another impulse without a history.’
This isn’t an inaccurate description of how the moment is played yet it’s a negative way of looking at it. To put things more positively, Maritaud plays it to illustrate that Léo doesn’t know why he hugs the doctor (and the excellent Marie Seux plays it to convey the doctor’s professional but kindly expectation that there’s an explanation for the hug). Mars-Jones is right that Léo’s anonymity is a contrivance – but it’s that only in conception. As you watch, the anonymity emerges as a plausible expression of the instability of the lives of Léo and his kind – and the effect is all the more striking because these characters are strongly realised. Félix Maritaud gives himself so fully and imaginatively to the role that Léo’s behaviour and emotional responses are persuasive even without being anchored in, to quote Mars-Jones, ‘the continuity of personality that strings moments together’.
Ahd’s fists also play an important part in triggering the interactions between Léo and the Eastern European Mihal (Nicolas Dibla, a Romanian), whose arrival on the scene immediately angers the other rent boys because Mihal charges under the odds for a blow job. When Ahd takes him to task, Mihal is unbothered: he says he’ll sometimes do it for free if he feels like it. The confrontation ends with Mihal unconscious and bound for hospital, for treatment of a nasty head wound. When he returns to the Bois de Boulogne, Ahd is no longer operating there (he’s moved in with Sugar Daddy) and Mihal is friendly towards Léo. They go to a club and pick up a man (Thierry Desaules) who takes them back to his home. Mihal remarks on the quaint décor; the client explains he inherited the place from his mother and wanted to keep it just the way she had it.
Mihal has a clear plan in mind and, with Léo’s obedient help, carries it out. In the course of having sex with their host, they drug then rob him – of money and those of his possessions they fancy. In Léo’s case, there are only two such items: a bit of tourist tat (a miniature cathedral?) and a stapler, which he uses for repairs on his jacket. Mihal’s haul includes a mobile phone, which he offers to a baffled Léo: who would he use it to call? When Mihal says ‘me’, Léo still doesn’t understand: ‘But I know where you are’. This conversation marks the end of their partnership, which Mihal clearly wanted to be more than a criminal one. He says he knows Léo still misses Ahd and he feels sorry for him, since Ahd is a lost cause. Mihal also feels sorry for himself: it’s touching when this sociopathic, scary-looking man briefly suggests emotional dependency.
Although Sauvage is always more than quasi-documentary description of a way of life, Vidal-Naquet increasingly shapes the narrative for dramatic impact. He does so more successfully than many directors who panic at the eleventh hour that not enough has been happening and start to overcompensate. There are times, though, when he forces the material into something more decidedly meaningful and portentous. In an early scene, Ahd warns Léo off a punter known as ‘the pianist’ (Jean-François-Charles Martin). This sleek-looking individual, in a sleek car, cruises the sex workers’ patch. Chopin piano music discreetly issues from the car but Ahd tells Léo that its occupant is ‘into blood and torture’. When, much later on, Ahd has departed the scene and things seem hopeless to Léo, he gets into the pianist’s car. We’re fortunately spared the details of exactly how he’s then abused. In the next scene, Claude sees him, bloodied and on the point of collapse, on the bridge near Claude’s home where they first met. Claude takes him in his arms, pietà-style and Vidal-Naquet holds the shot to ensure the point isn’t missed – that is, for too long.
It’s inevitable that Léo won’t accompany Claude to Canada; on a realistic level, it’s somewhat improbable that he gets as close to doing so as the airport. Vidal-Naquet needs him to, though, in order to pick up a previous scene, when the sex workers relax together outdoors watching planes flying overhead (to another world …). In the departure lounge, Claude says he needs to buy something and will be back in a few minutes. He leaves Léo standing alone behind the plate glass window, gazing at the runway, looking every inch a caged animal. Next moment, he’s out in the open air, peeling off his sweater (a beige one this time) and shirt. It hardly makes sense to say it, but he’s making his way back home. Paradisal sunlight shines through the trees of the Bois de Boulogne. Léo clambers down to a leafy hollow, where he arranges himself in a foetal position. It’s an arresting closing image but, like the pietà on the bridge, an artificial one too. What does it mean beyond the connotations of Léo’s physical attitude? Although Vidal-Naquet is suggesting that he’s returning to his natural habitat, this wild child is surely a street creature at least as much as he’s a sylvan one. And since Léo’s final solitude in a spot he must strongly associate with Ahd is hardly conducive to repose, is he curling up in the hollow to die?
Armond White’s piece about Sauvage in National Review is, as usual with this critic, vitiated by paranoid political tub-thumping: his priority is to bury Peter Buttigieg, the newly declared, openly gay candidate for next year’s Democratic presidential nomination, than to praise Camille Vidal-Naquet. (Buttigieg’s name features more often in the review than Vidal-Naquet’s, nearly as often as Léo’s.) White is onto something, even so, in finding the film distinctive in contemporary queer cinema by ‘challeng[ing] PC notions of homosexuality’ and focusing on a protagonist and way of life that are the antithesis of ‘nice, proper, middle-class assurance and normalizing’. Camille Vidal-Naquet, at forty-six, is a latecomer to feature film-making. A former professor of film studies, he has produced a piece of work that’s far from academic. What may be his own divided feelings about his subject have yielded something flawed but fascinating. The club sequences, needless to say, include flashing lights that made them, for this viewer, sometimes unwatchable. In all other respects, Sauvage compels attention.
5 April 2019