Alain Guiraudie's Staying Vertical is an enigmatic, challenging experience, a film which delivers its message of sexual repression and alienation through allegory and an unorthodox narrative which places more weight on character introspection and theme than on traditional storytelling values. Centered around Leo, a filmmaker who is on a scouting excursion in the South of France countryside, Alain Guiraudie's Staying Vertical paints a complex and beguiling portrait of a character who never feels at all comfortable in his own skin. A vagabond, who is homeless as he works on his next film, Leo is a very much a character in solitude, both physically and psychologically, who finds himself seduced by Marie, a free-spirited shepardess, while on his film scouting excursion. Nine months later, Marie gives birth to a child, but Leo is despondent, detached, and uninterested, sending Marie into post-natal depression, ultimately abandoning both Leo and the baby. Guiraudie's Staying Vertical is unconventional and quite brilliant, a story that evolves as it progresses, deceptive in its execution as it begins more as a story of paternity and the fear of domestication, while ultimately revealing itself to be a story of sexual repression, alienation, and seclusion. Everything about Leo is symbolic to his struggles as a homosexual man - his homeless, vagabond status being the most obvious indicator, a man who is drifting, out of place, unable to find somewhere he feels comfortable. Every interaction he has with male characters is full of sexual tension, with this repression and need for seclusion perhaps best represented by the allegorical nature of the relationship he forms with Marie's father, an older man who struggles to protect his sheep from the wolves in the plains in the south of France. There is a shared intimacy between these two characters, a repressed sexuality, with Guiraudie juxtaposing the nature of wolves and sheep with that of masculinity in society and how it treats homosexual men, with these two sexually repressed homosexual men being sheep, men who must appear heterosexual to the world, if not to be exposed and ridiculed for their differing sexual nature. Of course none of this is said throughout Guiraudie's film but it's built through mood and character, as the film always represents Leo as a man who is alone, but early on he is more confused about his sexuality, with the ending offfering him solace in a sense, the wolves being almost a symbolic representation of him accepting his sexual nature. Through much of the film, Leo's writer's block could very much be construed as an allegorical device to convey his confusion, with Guiraudie juxtaposing his struggles and confusion as a homosexual man with that of a filmmaker who struggles to complete a screenplay, an oddly satisfying decision as both art and sexuality are deeply individualistic in nature. Unorthodox, beguiling, yet ultimately satifying due to Guiraudie's uncanny ability to slowly reveal his intentions through symbolism and atmosphere, Staying Vertical is a powerful and intimate statement on sexual identity and the outside forces that can inflict harm on those individuals whose identity falls in the fringes of society.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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