`You have 30 seconds to leave the cinema." The warning flashes up on screen in huge red letters towards the end of I Stand Alone (Seul Contre Tous), French director Gaspar Noe's nightmarish journey through the mind of a brutish, nameless unemployed butcher (Philippe Nahon). Given what we've already seen and heard on screen up to then, the words seem like a further, mocking provocation. If you haven't left by this stage, you're certainly not going to now. Noe acknowledges that his film gets its fair share of walkouts.
"Some people walk out - mainly women - after he kicks the belly of his pregnant wife, and after the killing scene. I know that a man fainted at the screening in Toronto, and I've seen people come out crying or depressed."
The slight, sardonic Noe, whose previous short film, Carne focused on the same character, relishes saying the unspeakable and showing the unwatchable. With a relentless voiceover monologue that batters the audience with the butcher's nihilistic worldview, shock-effect crash editing, a soundtrack punctuated with distorted gunshot-like aural assaults, and inter-titles blazing out slogans like "Morality", "Justice", "Faggot" - I Stand Alone is an attack on the senses and the sensibilities, but its director is happy to describe all these devices as "just gimmicks".
"On a certain level, I don't take it seriously, I wanted to make a horror film with documentary elements. But I'm also aware that it's a movie, and people know that it's a game you're playing with them. So I wanted to make it glitter and to hypnotise people. When people take their subject seriously, their film-making sometimes becomes lazy."
He agrees that I Stand Alone is reminiscent in some ways of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. "I only saw Taxi Driver once, maybe 10 years ago, although I watched it again on tape recently, and I could see some similarities, because they both revolve around a lonely, violent character, and also because of the scene where the butcher goes to a porn movie." (Since we talked, at the Dublin French Film Festival, the British Board of Film Classification has insisted that the graphically ugly and explicit pornography sequence should be blurred - the BBFC version will be the one shown at the IFC.) "I think of Taxi Driver as a film that's serious, and that also has really good film-making, but often when people start talking about poverty or social problems, they seem to feel they must show it as it is, with no effects. Maybe they have a more serious approach to life than I do . . ."
Shot in Cinema-scope on 16 millimetre film, I Stand Alone has a grainy, grundgy visual style that chimes with its overtly ugly subject, although Noe admits the style was forced on him for practical reasons. Not surprisingly, he had great difficulties raising money for the film, and is contemptuous of the much-vaunted French film financing system. "The movie was turned down by all the financiers, but now it's won lots of awards and they can't ignore it any more. If I had done an `art' movie, I wouldn't have had any problems.
"There are things in France that I very much dislike - soft art, soft culture, soft thinking. Because there are so many grants, people tailor their films to what the system wants, which is bourgeois cinema d'auteur. All that traditional Parisian cinema, about students seducing their best friend's girlfriend, is so far from life." He sees France as culturally and politically stagnant. "On the posters I wanted to put `In the Bowels of France, I Stand Alone'. In one way, you can see this as a left-wing movie, and some people don't want to see a film that shows the condition of the country."
Along with sexual violence, incest and murder, the theme of fascism runs through the film, both in the butcher's racist ramblings and the urban landscapes scarred with neo-Nazi graffiti. "In France, people get scared, and say `What do you mean by that? Why are you showing that?' They want me to confirm that I'm not a fascist, and they ask me why I want to put it on the screen. I say because it's there, this is the way we live. I'm not racist, or misogynistic or homophobic, but the butcher is. I'm not that character, but I can understand him."
You get the feeling that Noe is almost disappointed by the positive critical response his film has received, although he is certainly pleased that it ensures a wider release. "The critics were great, but I was really surprised, because I expected it to be disliked. I regret the fact that, because the movie's in French, a lot of people around the world will read the subtitles rather than listen to the voice of the butcher, which will make it less powerful."
After the 30-second warning, the film's ending is both horrifying and ambiguous, appearing to offer a choice between incest and murder. Even a highly dubious moment of "reconciliation" seems to be undercut when Pachelbel's Canon in D Major - surely one of the most overused pieces of tearjerker music in the movies - swells up on the soundtrack. When I question his motives in using that particular piece, Noe smirks, and asks me if I cried (I didn't).
"Well, when I was editing that scene, I tried lots of music, and when I tried Pachelbel's Canon, I found myself crying - maybe that's my cheesy side. And my editor said, `Oh my God - it really works, like a Hollywood movie.' It's a kind of joke that also works on an emotional level. If you rationalise it, it doesn't work. Incest is a controversial subject, but I don't think people object to it if they've been with the butcher for the previous 90 minutes. They will forgive him things which they wouldn't usually. I've heard that the same music is used in Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People, which is great, because people who've seen those movies will associate it with families having problems and the sadness and beauty of love. I know it doesn't fit with the rest of the film, but I really like it."
It seemed to me, I say, like a final slap in the face for the audience from a film intended to shock and subvert at every turn, and that the only shock tactic left by the end of the film was to use flippant irony. "I don't call it irony, I call it playing with the fears of the audience. You hear all this New Age shit about life after death. There's nothing after death, but people don't like you saying that, especially in films."
I Stand Alone opens next Saturday at the IFC, Dublin