Sauvage (2018)
Directed by Camille Vidal-Naquet

Film Review

Sauvage marks an impressive directorial debut for Camille Vidal-Naquet, his first feature after making a number of short films that include his 2001 work Backstage.  For this harrowing hyper-realist portrait of a vulnerable young man driven into the hazardous career of male prostitution, the director draws heavily on his first-hand experiences working for the charity Aux captifs la libération, which concerns itself with people living on the streets.  Vidal-Naquet's inexperience as a writer and director is amply made up for by his sincerity, although the film's stuttering narrative suffers from being somewhat repetitive and contrived.

To its credit, the aply titled Sauvage tacitly avoids being crude and sordid, or gratuitously shocking, but instead deals with the subject of male prostitution in an honest and humane manner, although it spares us nothing of its bitter physical and emotional consequences.  The film treads similar ground to André Téchiné's J'embrasse pas (1991), but does so with a far greater sense of immediacy, from which it draws its intensely visceral emotional impact.  The film presents the grim realities of male prostitution in a sober, matter-of-fact manner, and it achieves its powerful resonance by focusing throughout on its central character, played to perfection by comparative newcomer Félix Maritaud.

It was in Robin Campillo's 2017 drama 120 battements par minute that Maritaud first came to our attention.  In Vidal-Naquet's film he is a revelation, pouring everything he has into a performance of devastating intensity and reality. Despite the bleakness and shocking nature of the subject matter, Maritaud compels us to keep watching and we can but empathise with his fragile gay character as he follows a trajectory that is more likely to lead him to abject disaster than to the affectionate human coupling that he desperately pines for.  His character's feeble attempts to reach out for honest tenderness are as heartbreaking as they are pathetic.

Using a handheld camera to stick close to the central protagonist at every stage of his traumatic journey, the director endows his film with a raw documentary-like realism, alongside which the sheer gut-wrenching poignancy of Maritaud's portrayal lends it an extraordinary emotional potency.  Intermittently distressing and a tad uneven, Sauvage doesn't make for comfortable viewing, but, thanks to its arresting central performance and its director's temerity to present life as it really is, the film makes such a deep impression that it is bound to stay with you long after you have seen it.

Film Synopsis

Léo is a vulnerable 22-year-old man who is used to living on the streets. To make the money he needs to get by, he is willing to do anything, even selling his body to men he encounters on the streets of Strasbourg and its wooded environs.  He has no difficulty finding clients with ready cash who are keen to take advantage of him, but the one thing that he truly desires - genuine love - remains forever beyond his reach.  Léo can have no idea what the future has in store for him as he wends his solitary way down an evermore precarious path...