Youre looking for real intimacy and you couldnt pick a worse place to find it. Not if youre the gay male hustler driving the plot of Sauvage/Wild, the raw and riveting debut feature from French writer-director Camille Vidal-Naquet.
My name is whatever you want it to be, this unnamed, unwashed wild child tells the tricks who use him as a piece of meat. He gets paid for it, after all. In interviews, Vidal-Naquet refers to this achingly vulnerable soul as Leo. And yet the homeless Leo, as played by the quietly devastating Flix Maritaud, feels compassion for his clients, young and old, violent and tender. He even kisses them, a taboo among sex workers. Hes drawn to men other hustlers shun, such as the disabled and the aged. But Leo, whos 22 and possessed of the youth and good looks that keep him gainfully employed, doesnt seek to be kept and protected by an older man. His extravagances are crack and tattoos. Otherwise, he lives according to his own definition of freedom, even if it means living off the streets. And he doesnt want to change.
Vidal-Naquet never steps up to the pulpit to sermonize in Sauvage / Wild. His film is an accumulation of details that illuminate a life. The filmmaker developed his script by spending three years among hustlers in Paris. And his research shows. There are searing scenes of Leo on the job, where danger looms as Leo willingly suffers pain and humiliation. There are scenes at strobe-lit dance clubs stunningly shot by director of photography Jacques Girault where Leo works up a sweat that leaves him spent and briefly, soothingly oblivious. There are scenes with three separate doctors, each in Leos view trying to put limits on his existence.
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Still, the moments that hit hardest concern Leos relationship with Ahd (a very fine Eric Bernard), another male hustler who claims hes only gay 4 pay. Of course, its this impossible object of desire who becomes Leos obsession. Maritaud, so good in BPM, achieves a wrenching poignancy with Bernard that cuts to the core of the film. In a world increasingly closed-off to feeling, Leo continues to search for another heart as open as his. A futile odyssey? Maybe. But despite the films blind alleys and repetitive dips into the moral abyss, <em>Sauvage/Wild</em> makes Leos yearning palpable and profound.
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