Critics reviews

It's clear that Guiraudie is fascinated by erotic desire and its attending anxieties (settling down, raising children), feelings we tend to experience strongly in dreams. Staying Vertical suggests that these feelings are strong enough to make people change their lives on a whim or turn strangers into intimates—it's like a surrealist variation on the shape-shifting dramas by another renowned French director, André Téchiné (Hotel des Ameriques, My Favorite Season, Changing Times).

What's mesmerizing about Guiraudie's latest film is the way that its narrative drifts with a logic that's entirely unpredictable and yet, in its own way, seems absolutely coherent, even somehow inevitable. That's why the casting of Bonnard as Léo is so inspired—he's such an ordinary-looking guy, slightly disheveled, permanently bemused-looking, as if he's always a couple of pages behind in the script, yet undeniably compelling in his glum but tenacious vulnerability.

On its face, it is pure surrealism; like many of Guiraudie's films it is comprised of disparate pieces that do not obviously cohere into a logical cinematic statement. However, taken as stanzas in a book-length cine-poem, connections emerge, themes assert themselves, and if we forget about the usual rulebook and just go with it, it isn't too difficult to get on Guiraudie's wavelength.

Before you can say "jump cut," there's an explicit and unsimulated one-take childbirth scene, hemorrhoids and blood and all. And you thought being a film critic was all skittles and beer. "I never thought this would happen to me," Leo says, and as he's a filmmaker you might take him for a stand in for Guiraudie, and since Guiraudie is a prominent figure in Queer French Cinema you might think, "Well bien sur," but come on, the whole point is that life is complicated.

The sexuality in Staying Vertical is frankly carnal and provocative enough to produce a highly unorthodox method of assisted suicide involving poison, penetration and Pink Floyd. You do have to keep an open mind, but whether you see Staying Vertical as art or as self-indulgence flirting with pornography, it's a good bet that once he's gotten himself upright, Leo will have his screenplay ready to go.

Guiraudie seems less preoccupied with growing his audience than with continuing to confound its expectations. Vertical, a sort of kissing cousin to his earthily anarchic comedy King of Escape, holds over some of the extreme eroticism of Stranger (i.e., close-ups of various genitalia as it's fondled) while beating a retreat from the earlier film's strict formalism—the protagonist of the new movie, which feels almost improvised, is a screenwriter who hardly has the willpower to tap out a sentence.

Various oddball moments—Léo being engulfed and stripped naked by a horde of homeless men; Marie's father (Christian Bouillette) using his infant grandchild as live bait for wolves—walk a gratifying line between funny and disturbing.

That fluvial episode exemplifies the pleasures of Guiraudie's unpredictable scenarios; the setting, thick with vegetation, recalls both the promise and the menace that imbued the arcadian grove where sex is sought in Stranger by the Lake. As always with Guiraudie's films, Staying Vertical shrewdly (and often hilariously) captures both the seriousness and the absurdity of sex.

The pacing and mise en scène of Staying Vertical are as deliberate as the events of its plot are hallucinatory, yielding a marriage of exacting form and content that encompasses the mundane and the fantastic in equal measure. As a stream of reflections on life, death, and desire put on screen, it's an exhilarating thing to behold.

The title of Alain Guiraudie's new film, Staying Vertical, is a pun that might work in French but in English translates as "audience indifference." That's too bad, because this wild, original film deserves to be seen.

It's as narratively loose and shaggy as STRANGER BY THE LAKE is tight and compressed, and is likely to puzzle viewers unfamiliar with his non-narrative earlier work... Although Guiraudie is more of a poet than a polemicist, this delightfully off-the-wall oddity is perhaps best understood as a provocative defense of gay parenthood in a country where such a notion remains a lightning rod for controversy.

The movie is provocatively queer, even though it often feels like that's all it is. Because each scene plays more like a new, self-contained panel than a reasonable continuation of what came before, the film exists on its own wavelength of aggressive playfulness, an idea of its own subversion. Léo's bizarre, circular journey is open-ended but ultimately rigid; never predictable but predetermined all the same.