A tale of social decline peppered with raw intimacy scenes, Alain Guiraudie’s Rester Vertical (Staying Vertical) has all the ingredients to become a strong prize contender at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Not unlike the Palme d’Or-winning Blue Is the Warmest Colour, which featured lingering close-up intimacy scenes between two young women, it is likely to shock, or perhaps outrage.
It features lots of coupling and a closeup of a live birth.
“Sex is more important than sexuality. It’s a world of pleasure but sex can also be a world of suffering,” Guiraudie said on Thursday, hours before his fifth feature film was to be screened.
He won the Best Director award at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sub-section in 2013 with the thriller L’Inconnu du Lac (Stranger by the Lake). It was the same year Abdellatif Kechiche won the main competition with Blue The Warmest Colour.
“I wanted to look into women, the ‘Dark Continent’ as Freud says,” Guiraudie told a news conference. “Of course women are the matrix which create life”.
In the film, 30-year-old Leo is a dilettante screenwriter looking for wolves in the Lozere region of France andstarts a relationship with Marie, a young shepherdess. They have a baby together, then split, the young boy being left with his father.
Guiraudie navigates between the brutality of real life and the smoothness of dreams as Leo succumbs to degradation.
“I wanted the film to be between reality and legend,” he explained. “I didn’t make this film in a very set way. I didn’t want to make a narrative film. I like to play with what is plausible and implausible.
“Sometimes sex is scary. It’s the origin of the world and maybe the end of the world too,” said Guiraudie, who seeks to give a light touch to the story with well-placed gags.
Leo eventually ends up living in the sheepfold of Marie’s father, in a region where several French hippies moved in the late 1960s.
