News

You’re looking for real intimacy and you couldn’t pick a worse place to find it. Not if you’re 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,...

There have been any number of films about lonely men who fall in love with a prostitute, but Camille Vidal-Naquet’s raw and visceral “Sauvage / Wild” is the rare film about a prostitute who falls in love with another man. But Leo can’t afford to be stingy with his affections; he’s driven by an insatiable and undiscriminating desire for intimacy.

An untethered 22-year-old sex worker who lives on the streets of Strasbourg, and is ferally embodied by Félix Maritaud (who played a supporting role in the bracing “Bpm”), Leo doesn’t care about money or moving up in the world, nor does he resent his clients the way that some of his fellow sex workers do. In fact, he seems to lack any natural ability to separate feeling from fucking, and he needs as much from his johns as his johns need from him. When Leo offers to...

SauvageNew Directors/New Films (Nd/Nf) returns to the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art for its 48th edition, and once again proves that for New Yorkers it’s the key festival to discover an exciting new crop of young filmmakers, most of them presenting debut or second features. The program includes some movies previously covered on Notebook: Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Ms Slavic 7, Peter Parlow’s The Plagiarists, and Mark Jenkin’s Bait (Berlin Film Festival premieres), Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto (Locarno Festival), Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Manta Ray (Venice), Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load (Directors' Fortnight), and Eva Torbisch’s All Is Good (Locarno). While diverse, overall, this year’s slate is thoughtful and yet agile, with films that invite both risk and ambiguity.Not since Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) has there been a film in which the main character drifts into willful dissolution with as...

"Raw, uncompromising and yet strangely romantic." Strand Releasing has debuted an official Us trailer for an erotic French drama titled Sauvage, which translates to Wild in French, which is why the poster and trailer list the titled as "Sauvage / Wild" together. From writer/director Camille Vidal-Naquet, the film follows a young French male prostitute named Leo, played by Félix Maritaud. "The men come and go, and he stays right here — longing for love. He doesn't know what the future will bring. He hits the road. His heart is pounding." It's described as a "powerful portrait of a gay male prostitute in free fall", and premiered in the Critics' Week sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Also starring Eric Bernard and Nicolas Dibla. Certainly not for everyone, but still worth a look especially considering good reviews from festivals. Here's the official Us trailer (+ poster) for Camille Vidal-Naquet's Sauvage, direct...

New Wave godmother Agnès Varda has been laden with any number of honors and tributes in recent years, but she hasn’t received a better one, albeit indirectly so, than “Sauvage.” Even the title of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s tough but invigorating debut feature recalls the unmoored, asphalt-pounding energy of Varda’s seminal 1985 character study “Vagabond,” though the feral human subject here is a gay male prostitute, as hardened by the elements and the travails of his profession as he is vulnerable to them. Played with potent, unpredictable abandon by Félix Maritaud, he’s a protagonist you fear and fear for by turns, as he recklessly roams the streets, nightclubs and backwoods of Strasbourg in search of more than just the physical contact he’s freely selling. Though hardly revolutionary in form, the frank, sometimes violent queerness of its perspective makes his Cannes Critics’ Week entry genuinely bracing: Distributors inclined towards...