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The New York Times
MOVIE REVIEW | 'WILD SIDE'
MORE ON 'Wild Side'
Visions of a Dangerous and Beautiful World
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 10, 2005
From its opening scene, in which Antony, the blond, androgynous singer from Antony and the Johnsons performs "I Fell in Love With a Dead Boy" in a haunted, shivering half-falsetto before a rapt audience, "Wild Side" sustains a mood of extravagant alienation and melancholy. The French film, directed by S??bastien Lifshitz from a screenplay by St??phane Bouquet, observes the world through the eyes of St??phanie (St??phanie Michelini), a (pre-operative) transsexual prostitute who works the streets, bars and discos of Paris.
She lives with Jamel, a 30-year-old bisexual North African hustler who has fled the dismal housing project where he grew up. Graphic scenes show them separately plying their trade with demanding customers in bleak, joyless settings.
When St??phanie is summoned to her childhood home in northern France by her dying mother, Liliane (Josiane Storelu), after being away for 17 years, she is flooded with memories of playing games of dress-up with her sister in the fields and of being dandled by her father. In those days, she was Pierre. And as she gently spoon-feeds soup to Liliane, to whom she bears a remarkable resemblance, she confronts her mother's intractable disapproval of what she has made of her life.
St??phanie has already met Mikhail, a dishwasher and an illegal immigrant from Russia, who falls in love with her. With Jamel, the three become a m??nage ?? trois, clinging to one another as a sexually connected alternative family. When she visits her mother, they join her.
"Wild Side" pointedly avoids overt psychologizing to portray St??phanie, Jamel and Mikhail as romantic outsiders, beautiful, bruised lost souls who have found tentative comfort in one another. The cinematography by Agn??s Godard, the longtime collaborator of Claire Denis http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=87484&inline=nyt-per , achieves the same breathtaking blend of sensuality, formal elegance and surreal detail she brought to Ms. Denis's masterpiece "Beau Travail." http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=181397&inline=nyt_ttl
Whether the camera is trained on the human body, the architecture of Paris, the fields of northern France or dancers gyrating in a disco, the movie gives you the feeling of rediscovering the world, moment by moment, in a revelatory waking dream. It is a world of layered mysteries, primitive and seething with latent violence, but exquisitely beautiful.
As a piece of storytelling, though, "Wild Side" is too elliptical and poetically structured to cohere as more than an intense mood piece with social ramifications. The movie is so enraptured with its own romantic desolation that its narrative drive becomes sidetracked.
'Wild Side'
Opens today in New York.
Directed by S??bastien Lifshitz; written (in French, with English subtitles) by St??phane Bouquet; director of photography, Agn??s Godard; edited by St??phanie Mahet; music by Jocelyn Pook; produced by Gilles Sandoz; released by Wellspring. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 93 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: St??phanie Michelini (St??phanie), Edouard Nikitine (Mikhail), Yasmine Belmadi (Jamel) and Josiane Storelu (The Mother).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/movies/10wild.html
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