Wild Side DVD Review:

This is a deeply moving, gloomy and evocative film directed by Sébastien Lifshitz about the relationship between three men, namely Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini), who is a pre-op transsexual prostitute, Djamel (Yasmine Belmadi) a French-Arab bisexual street hustler and Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine) an illegal Russian immigrant stuck in menial jobs to try to make ends meet. An unusual love triangle (with a nod to Jules et Jim) and it’s made all the more so by involving Stéphanie’s mother (Josiane Stoléru) who by falling ill brings the three to Stéphanie’s home town where, once there, she remembers her childhood as a boy.

The film opens with the recent Mercury Prize winner Anthony Hegarty (from Anthony and the Johnsons) singing ‘I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy’ (with the appropriate lyric ‘are you a boy or a girl?’). Very apt and it’s a suitably soaring, rousing song played against a backdrop of a parlour full of Parisian transsexuals, neatly setting the tone for the rest of this meditative and elliptical film. It’s shot with an other-worldly, atmospheric beauty by the cinematographer Agnès Godard (Beau Travail) and complimented with a haunting score by Jocelyn Pook (Eyes Wide Shut), both evoking a sort of dream-like reality to capture the inner turmoil of the three men. Godard brilliantly uses the landscapes of the northern French countryside with its barren and sparse beauty to show the isolation and fractured reality the men exist in and with the use of flashback techniques Lifshitz gives us a sense of their ‘breaking apart’ as the characters themselves appear broken and bruised; their only real sense of belonging coming from their companionship with one another.

It’s definitely unconventional filmmaking with its refusal to play by the usual narrative arcs and with the dialogue being kept to a minimum it is left almost entirely to the images to create the meaning and the feelings of the characters making, along the way, a sort of filmic poem. The cinematography is sensual and surreal and the film is beautifully shot laying the lives of our protagonists bare, while the film itself assesses their sense of family and sexuality. The camera work is very intimate with lots of close-ups of androgynous bodies. Lifshitz’s shot of what appears to be a naked woman’s breast is soon turned on it’s head when the camera pans down to reveal (by genitalia) that this is in fact a man – a slightly jarring shot but one that necessarily plays with the viewers ideas of identity and gender. Throughout the film Lifshitz presents the three men as a family unit, they seek solace – and find it – with each other; Lifshitz romanticising rather than ostracising them and this makes for moving cinema, strikingly realised by Lifshitz, who rather than provoke just a sense of sympathy for his characters, instead, shows us the often stark beauty involved in their lives contrasted with the harsh reality of their day to day living. It focuses on them without drawing unnecessary conclusions and leaves it up to the camera and the actors to draw our affections.

The film probably won’t be to everybody’s tastes, but if you want Hollywood you won’t be casting a glance at this. Even with the lack of character development and minimal dialogue it still treats its subjects with respect, while also being much more mature filmmaking than, say, Britain’s recent stab at male identity in crisis, the vapid and in comparison, almost childish Kinky Boots. So, do as the man says and take a walk on the Wild Side.

Special Features

Interviews with Cast and Crew

Deleted scenes

16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen

DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1



Kevin Holmes