Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Director Alain Guiraudie is no stranger to delivering sex scenes that get people talking. In his superb and underrated 2013 suspense drama Stranger By the Lake, an outdoor enclave for gay men becomes the setting for several intimate and up-close sex scenes — which were filmed un-simulated using body doubles standing in for the actors. The scenes were fully thematically integrated into the film and not exploitative, but still, not a bad way to bring attention to your film during, say, the crush of a film festival (Stranger By the Lake premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival).
For his follow-up film, Staying Vertical, Guiraudie delivers a film that is a lot looser than the drum-tight Stranger By the Lake, but it once again uses an unusual sex scene to bring attention to the rest of the film. And boy does it!
The film is about Leo (Damien Bonnard), a screenwriter who can’t seem to find inspiration for his next script. We follow him wandering the French countryside, dipping into and out of people’s lives, seemingly searching for that spark of an idea but also interjecting himself and his chaos into their lives. Leo’s sexuality is fluid throughout. He flirts with a young man; he meets a shepherdess on a hill and enters into a sexual relationship with her, and they eventually have a baby. Later on, her father will express sexual desire for Leo, something Leo ultimately admits he has encouraged, if only subliminally. It’s a Kinsey scale bonanza, but none of it seems to penetrate Leo, if you’ll pardon the pun.
The only thing Leo seems to truly care about is the baby he has with the shepherdess, who he ultimately has to care for by himself. In the film’s funnier moments, we see Leo carrying this baby everywhere. Like a rolly suitcase belonging to someone who’s flying later today and won’t have time to go home so they’re just taking their luggage with them wherever they go.
The sex vibe continues to follow Leo wherever he goes. There’s a sense that he’s not the one pursuing any of this, and he’d probably advance that notion, but the more he plays tourist in these people’s lives, the more he’s upsetting the apple cart. He encounters an elderly man named Marcel, in whose home the younger man Leo has been flirting with (named Yoan) is living. Marcel is cruel to Yoan and ornery in general. He’s old and he’s dying and he’s explicit when he talks about Yoan’s gayness or hints at his own. Leo, again using himself as an instrument of imagination, takes it upon himself to intervene.
It’s here where we arrive at the sex scene that got everybody talking about staying vertical, and I’m going to warn off anybody who might want to see the film without SPOILERS. Go on. Get outta here. Skip to the next paragraph or just fire up the movie on Netflix and see for yourselves. …Okay, so now that it’s just us: not to put too fine a point on it, but Leo fucks this old man to death. Literally. Has sex with Marcel until he straight-up dies. And the movie at this point is trafficking in so many tones that you’re not even quite sure how to take it. Is this an act of benediction, of shepherding (to continue one of the film’s scenes) the old man into death? Is this the absurd continuation of Leo’s intrusive actions throughout the film and he bulldozed his way into these people’s lives? Is it a darkly funny moment, as reflected by the newspaper headlines that blare accusatorially at Leo in a later scene? Whatever it is, it is a singularly audacious sex scene that you’re simply not going to find in any other movie. And isn’t that ultimately what we go see movies for anyway? I haven’t even gotten into the part where Leo canoes up a river and finds some kind of botanist-therapist who hooks him up to a kind of bio-EKG machine. That might be even crazier than the murder-sex.
It’s tough to say whether I’d recommend Staying Vertical as a movie. It certainly has its admirers. A.O. Scott at the Times says the film “has a rough gravity that holds your attention and sticks in your mind,” which is certainly true. Justin Chang at the Los Angeles Times praises Guiraudie for having “a gift for burrowing his way into the human soul by way of the libido, and he works in a searching, serio-comic style that refuses to separate life’s wildest extremes into neat, narratively expedient compartments.” Also very true. And no less luminous a critical light than Armond White wrote at Out that the film “uncannily satirizes a gay man’s erotic soul.” (White also takes a moment to take a potshot at Stranger By the Lake for being “a banal exercise in spiking genre filmmaking with brazen gay exhibitionism,” which is just classic Armond White.)
All of these things about Staying Vertical are true, but it all feels very slight, which makes its attempts at provocation seem less substantial than they could be. But this is a movie worth watching for those moments of high provocation, because you’re simply not going to see them anywhere else.
