Review: Sauvage Is a Bold Look at the Complexities of Queer Desire

Day and night, Leo (Félix Maritaud) roams the woods and streets of Strasbourg, looking for johns and, sometimes, love. In Sauvage, both quests turn out to be filled with violence for him—a violence that writer-director Camille Vidal-Naquet isn’t afraid to expose as not just alluring but irresistible. It’s also a specifically queer form of violence, in the sense that desire here doesn’t adhere to some kind of norm—some predetermined aim, prospect, or destination. It’s the violence of cruising as a way of life. Vidal-Naquet embraces the unavowable ugliness of all desire, particularly the violence of queer desire. He understands that where there is queer desire, there is queerphobia. The film firmly grasps the tendency of so many queer men—the characters in this film could hardly be reduced to “gay”—to make pleasure contingent on ever-increasing risk, or on a numbing pursuit for more.

Despite some awkwardly staged and gratuitously graphic sex scenes that tip Sauvage’s hand as a first feature, namely a threesome gone wrong involving Leo and a pair of cartoonishy lookalike boyfriends sporting mohawks, the film is of a piece with a string of recent films that deal with queer sexuality head-on, among them Stranger by the Lake, Eastern Boys, 4 Days in France, and Elle, all of them French, and all of which follow a character’s seemingly nonsensical death drive. But Sauvage is perhaps closer than any of those daring films to João Pedro Rodrigues’s O Fantasma in the way that the plight of its main character seems to involve a regression to some kind of bestial state. If O Fantasma’s main character eventually becomes more or less a living extension of the garbage he collects, Vidal-Naquet’s antihero flees to a forest precisely when given the palpable chance to clean up his act.

Before Leo meets a generous older man, Claude (Philippe Ohrel), who’s adamant about taking care of the young sex worker, his life is one of relentless repetition: cruising, fucking, doing drugs, and getting hurt. And at each iteration it’s as though he loses a piece of his physical self, making him all the more desperate for the love that a fellow hustler, Ahd (Eric Bernard), clearly isn’t able to give him. In one sequence, classical music wafts from the car of a potential john parked in a woodsy area of Strasbourg where Leo and other hustlers hawk their wares. Leo heads for the vehicle, like clockwork. It’s then that Ahd warns him to never get into “the pianist’s car.” Ahd says that the pianist is into blood and torture, then asks him if he’s into that sort of thing. Leo doesn’t answer, but Vidal-Naquet eventually responds for him after the pianist’s car approaches Leo when the hustler is at his lowest point.

We sense Leo increasingly tempted to get inside the pianist’s car throughout the film, even though he knows he’ll most likely not come out of it alive. It’s an uncanny motif, accompanied by the deceivingly soft notes of a piano, redolent of Stranger by the Lake’s stagnant body of water, whose pull becomes exceptionally enticing once someone has drowned in it. Eventually, Leo does get into the pianist’s car, and when he spills out of it, he resembles some kind of human waste, covered in slime and blood. But he’s still alive, and ready for the next vehicle.

Sauvage is ultimately a tale about how those who spiral so far out of control become blind, if not immune, to the severity of their symptoms. This is dramatized to astonishing effect in the film’s most memorable scene, where a battered Leo, sporting a checkered shirt that brings to mind coagulated blood, visits a doctor (Marie Seux). The woman proposes that he try something to get him off the drugs he’s been using and he genuinely questions why he should ever want to stop using crack. Leo is unable to fathom another way of life, one that chases something other than perpetual self-destruction and its many pleasures.

Unable to reason with Leo about the benefits of changing, the doctor asks him to undress so she can examine him. As she touches and, mostly, listens to his body, something happens to Leo, which gives way to the most unexpected of embraces. It’s a rare instance for any film to be able to prick an audience with such rawness, and in such disarming fashion. Though the embrace doesn’t repair much for Leo, or convince him of anything, it’s in this one moment where Sauvage stops trying to be cool or provocative, waving the panacea for a man’s agony with a kind of honesty that even Rodrigues’s O Fantasma couldn’t claim for itself.