Cannes Review: Alain Guiraudie's 'Staying Vertical' Is At Its Most Compelling When Horizontal

By now we should be at least a little wary of films about writers with writer’s block. There are masterpieces in this populous subgenre (“The Shining,” for example, and “Adaptation“) but, understanding as we all do that films start as scripts that are written by writers, there’s too often at base the essence of self-service in a movie that makes a writer battling the blank page its hero, an effect magnified when the film’s writer is also the director. “Staying Vertical” from writer/director Alain Guiraudie (his follow-up to the terrific gay sunshine-noir “Stranger By The Lake“) feels very much like the film a blocked writer, trying to follow up his well-received previous title which was celebrated at least partially for its explicit depictions of sex, would make. It’s less a convincing, involving narrative than an episodic picaresque that rambles loose-jointedly from absurdist encounter to vaguely fable-like incident, until the chance for an arrestingly graphic shot of a vagina occurs, or a scene of unsimulated childbirth, or a moment which is later, fairly accurately, reported in a newspaper as “Man Sodomizes Then Euthanizes Elderly Man In Front Of Baby.” Though the order in which the sodomy and the euthanasia occur could be contested.

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The man in question (as opposed to the sodomizee) is Leo (Damian Bonnard, expression set to “doleful”) a filmmaker constantly staving off his producer’s inquiries about his next script and asking for infusions of money from an advance he has not even begun to earn. Perhaps following a vague impulse to have an adventure that will coax his muse from her hiding place, Leo goes off for a ramble in the countryside, where after making a rebuffed pass at a young man standing sullenly on the side of the road, he meets Marie (India Hair, expression set to “suspicious”), a shepherdess with a rifle slung across her back, the better to protect her sheep from the wolves. In a jarring cut from a close up of Marie’s truculent, almost hostile gaze that seems to portend a murder, or at least a shepherdess-on-hiker assault, to a shot of her hand massaging his bulging crotch, the random encounter turns sexual. And before we know it, Leo is installed (on his own terms which means frequently leaving to go back to his sketched-in city existence) on the farm on which Marie lives with her two sons and her big lug of a father Jean-Louis (Raphaël Thiéry). Some time passes (presumably at least nine months) and with their relationship seemingly relatively stable despite Leo’s absences and and his continuing interest in Yoan (Basile Meillurat), the guy from the roadside, Marie gives birth to a son. But she has trouble connecting with the infant, which precipitates her sudden departure sans baby, who will now become Leo’s responsibility.  

Staying VerticalAll this could seem rather conventional — a story of an aimless man coming to a new sense of himself through parenthood — but for the film’s more fanciful and sometimes farcical elements, such as Yoan’s living arrangement with sclerotic, septuagenarian Pink Floyd-fan Marcel (Christian Bouillette) or Leo’s visits to new-agey therapist Mirande (Laure Calamy) or the unwelcome sexual advances from Jean-Louis, Leo’s de facto father-in-law and grandfather to his baby. But in retrospect, all of that seems like so much filler between the film’s self-consciously WTF, showstopper scenes.

But even those moments, while certainly interesting, are problematic. If there is some narrative necessity, aside from pure shock value, to showing the real birth of a real child coming out of a real woman, there’s really none at all for having the camera linger on the mother’s recently vacated vagina in such pointed fashion. Much is made of the beauty of childbirth, and perhaps this shot could be considered beautiful if you are also one to ponder the wondrous colors and contours of a dropped kebab, but the reason for its inclusion here is at best ambiguous, and at worst darkly implies that the film’s view of female sexuality is hardwired in the grotesquely biological.

Staying VerticalIndeed, the vagina-level shot is a favorite of Guiraudie’s, who often focuses on it to the exclusion of the woman it’s attached to during hetero sex scenes, while the one explicit scene of gay sex (yes, that scene of geronto-necrophilia) unfolds in a long shot with both participants in full view. Leo may be (for totally undefined reasons) assisting the suicide of an incorrigible racist by anally fucking him to death (is this a thing?), but that scene is shot with, of all things, tenderness. Hard not to feel that Marie, the film’s only woman who is largely absent from its second half, gets a raw deal as Guiraudie steers the story away from her and into a kind of “Too Many Men And A Baby” territory. 

The real issue within all of this is Leo’s emptiness and passivity, often the hallmarks of a character with whom the screenwriter identifies too closely to be able to define more clearly. This lack of perspective translates directly into a perceived lack of personality on Leo’s part; he is the blinking cursor on the blank page.

Staying VerticalAnd that’s a critical problem because Leo is the only tethering throughline to the series of contrivances and vaguely surreal/metaphorical incidents that Guiraudie strings together into the loose simulacrum of a plot. Lacking a guiding principle or a forceful sense of inner momentum, the film, which one could charitably call dreamlike in pacing, idles between provocations and too many of its potential themes — about different approaches to parenthood, about the need for human connection, about sheep and wolves and cuckoos in nests — wither on the vine. Instead, like Leo, we drift absently, passively, from one vignette to the unconnected next: some witty, some weird, some pure nonsense. But many do share one quality: they feel inorganic, like they existed before as scraps of ideas jotted onto napkins and stuffed in drawers, before being reverse-engineered into the screenplay of a floundering writer on a deadline.  [C]

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