Stéphanie, beautiful, with a fragile arrogance, is a transsexual. Men desire her, and she knows how to seduce them. Djamel is from the North African region, having grown up in the Parisian suburbs as a prostitute. Mikhail has a dark past of wars, his homeland is Chechnya, and France is a place of "clandestine" work and no papers.
Wild Side
The three meet, attract each other, trample on each other, love each other in a strange progression of complicity and passion that takes them from cold and harsh Paris to the countryside, to Stéphanie's childhood home, near her dying mother and the ghost of a father (the director's obsession) they never knew.
Wild Side is directed by Sébastien Lifshitz, born in 1968 and raised studying Warhol, Edward Ruscha, and Richard Artschwager. He arrived in film early (in 1993), after a "photography" stint as assistant to Suzanne Lafont, with the short film Il faut que je l'aime. He quickly became a child prodigy among the new French generations, moving in that zone of personal, independent cinema, not necessarily "auteur" but with a decidedly intense quality. Claire Denis's avowed master is Lifshitz; he shot a portrait of her, Claire Denis la vagabonde, and then worked on the set of Nénette and Boni. In the meantime, Les corps ouverts, an award-winning medium-length film, Presque rien, his first feature film, and La traversée, an American road trip with a geography traced by emotion, the intimate secret of a never-seen father (as in Wild Side) sought in the landscape of a dreamed-up America, a kaleidoscope of beloved visions, stolen from the imagination and now physical, before the autobiographical narcissisms of JT Leroy.
At the last Berlinale (it was in the Panorama section), Wild Side won the Teddy Bear award, the prize given to the best gay film of the festival, but the "label," of any genre, doesn't work with its subject matter. Ultimately, telling it this way can make the story seem banal. And yet. It's not about sexuality, or the ever-present attraction to threesomes, like in a modern-day Jules and Jim, or even about reconciliation, the characters finding balance in the world despite the harshness of their mutual experiences through this encounter, which also becomes the invention of another family dimension.
The charm—and strength—of Wild Side lies precisely here, in its ability to delve into archetypes (or even stereotypes) and transform them into unique, singular, elusive characters. Starting with the title, which, the director tells us, obviously harks back to Lou Reed and his Walk on the Wild Side, dark, extremist, unconventional worlds. These could also be those of David Bowie's glam rock, another passion of Lifschitz's. In his films, he loves to use quotes and references to invert them, appropriate them, and change their meaning. This is achieved to the fullest extent in Wild Side (the music is by Jocelyn Pook, Eyes Wide Shut by Kubrick, and L'emploi du temp by Cantet...). It's a game of disguise, not just sexual identity but the invention of the self and a world "apart" that the lives of the three characters are portrayed in. This choice is a vindication of a freedom, ambiguous and difficult, experienced in overexposed bodies.
Lifshitz's cinema is a very physical one, and Wild Side would be hard to imagine without its actors, Stéphanie Michelini first, then Edouard Mikitine (Mikhail) and Yasmine Belmadi (Djamel), as well as the shifting light captured by Agnès Godard (director of photography for Claire Denis but also for Techiné and Noémie Lvovsky). Nightclubs, Paris between stations, hotel rooms, suburbs, anonymous views, then the large house without Proustian nostalgia, Stéphanie's shocking clothes, the mother's vertigo, faint as a photograph from another era, distant like Mikhail's mother, waiting for a phone call in an identityless space, or like Djamel's, whom her son no longer sees, now far from the family who rejected him.
Wild Side is a love story written on these bodies and in the clash with their realities, in their fears and moments of tenderness. The desire for a wild cinema made of risk, pleasure, and invention.
