Sauvage

Powerful filmmaking, although the graphic sex scenes and passive protagonist won't be for everyone

Léo has no moral judgement: he is just there. That's his life. He doesn't even know what "get out of it" means; get out of what, to go where?

• Camille Vidal-Naquet; Sauvage Production Notes

Sauvage [trans. Wild, although a lot of reviewers are incorrectly calling it Savage] is the debut film of writer/director Camille Vidal-Naquet, a former professor of film studies, and takes as its subject the daily grind of a male prostitute. Depictions of prostitution in cinema have something of a chequered history; the best known are probably Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967), which is more interested in female sexual desire than the specifics of prostitution itself, Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman (1990), and Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite (1995), both of which are fantastical and utterly divorced from reality. Thus far, it has been the province of smaller films to look at sex workers with anything approaching realism - Keren Yedaya's Or (My Treasure) (2005), Megan Griffiths's Eden (2013), David Pablos's Las elegidas (2015), and, especially, the seismic gut punch that is Lukas Moodysson's Lilja 4-Ever (2002), which is more about sex slavery, but which does deal with the reality of prostitution.

In Sauvage, Vidal-Naquet strikes a delicate balance between misery porn and objectively delineating the day-to-day of being a sex worker (a balance not found in Lilja 4-ever). The film is undeniably bleak, but it's not what you would define as miserablism. Remaining detached from what it depicts, it adopts a clinically dispassionate approach, one that remains always non-judgemental. Intermixing the degrading reality of selling one's self with unexpected moments of tenderness and warmth, Vidal-Naquet taps into something deeply compelling. Some will be put off by the (very) graphic sex scenes, the passivity of the main character, or the lack of...

Félix Maritaud is outstanding in this depiction of the seedy and sordid life of a young Parisian prostitute in love (sadly, unrequited) with another prostitute. The grim and risky extent of their existence is captured superbly by Camille Vidal-Naquet. It is a story about gay men, but need not necessarily be considered solely in a specifically gay context; this narrative could - and almost certainly does - apply to a great many people involved, willingly or otherwise, in the sex industry. It is, essentially, a love story - and that makes this all the more poignant and individual. It isn't an easy watch, but the craft with which this has been constructed makes it a must-see.