Félix Maritaud in Sauvage (Critics’ Week)

Before every screening in the Critics’ Week selection at the Cannes Film Festival, artistic director Charles Tesson introduces the film and more often than not over-elaborates on its plot or themes, spelling them out pedantically. (One filmmaker, Benedikt Erlingsson of Woman at War, gently scolded Tesson for telling too much.) Given that all of the selections, except for Paul Dano’s Wildlife, were world premieres and had never been seen before, it was off-putting to be told how to interpret or feel about a movie. Yet in the case of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s Sauvage, the introductory description was spot-on; Tesson described the film as having the sensibility of the Marquis de Sade and filmmaker Maurice Pialat, presumably for its documentary-like naturalism.

Sure enough, Vidal-Naquet almost clinically depicts the hand-to-mouth life of a male sex worker, 22-year-old Léo, who goes unnamed throughout the movie (played by the uninhibited Félix Maritaud). No one will fall asleep during the sex scenes, but as much as the film realistically acts out the tricks of the trade, Léo remains an idea, a blank slate who has no fortitude to endure brutal and degrading encounters. He follows such a rigid trajectory that the fatalistic tone feels preordained, and you know from the first cough that the prognosis for his La Traviata–like symptoms can’t be good.

Little is known about him. Scruffy with a slight, muscular built, Léo plies his trade in Strasbourg in a park with little traffic, alongside a diverse group of young men, all waiting by the roadside. As the camera often zooms in on conversations and potential pickups, viewers are complicit as voyeurs; many scenes come close to documentary-porn.

Early on, Léo is paid to participate in a three-way involving a john in a wheelchair and Ahd (Éric Bernard), who, though he has sex with men and is willing to be taken care of by a sugar daddy, violently insists that he is not gay. His story line reinforces at least two stereotypes: the gay-for-pay homophobic rough trade and the gay man, Léo, who hopelessly pines away for him. Even the other hustlers notice the look on Léo’s face when he glances upon Ahd, though Ahd rejects him not through his words but with his fists. Sparse on dialogue, this gritty art house piece is nearly an action film, and in more ways than one.

The director creates intense, incredibly intimate sex scenes, but the sense of realism is undermined by the one-dimensional characterizations, which includes an impossibly generous and naive upper-middle-class white knight, Claude (Philippe Ohrel), who instantly falls in love with the taciturn and pouty Léo and opens his home to him.

As portrayed here, the hustlers’ world is sealed off, as though they are living in a vacuum. Hardly anyone has a phone, and Léo only has one pair of clothes. One of his tricks calls him filthy looking and smelly, and his jeans are, indeed, coated in mud, his sweater has stains, and he has a bloodied lip. He clearly doesn’t know how to market himself to his best advantage.

For someone who has been living on the streets for some time, Léo noticeably lacks street smarts and finds himself in situations where he has no voice. His only apparent motivation is to get high on hash or crack cocaine, and he never expresses a concern about money or what he has to do to earn it. (The director has stated he was influenced by Agnès Varda’s 1985 Vagabond, with Sandrine Bonnaire as a young homeless woman without a past, but Léo’s actions comes off as more perplexing rather than enigmatic.)

Instead, the director emphasizes the young man’s childlike qualities, from how Léo curls up in the fetal position to sleep in the park to how he reaches out to the only maternal figure he knows, a tender but tough-talking female doctor. His wide-eyed blankness recalls Fellini’s tenderhearted sex worker in Nights of Cabiria, though without having any hope for another life. He’s more like Annie Girardot’s cynical streetwalker from Rocco and His Brothers, who knowingly and stoically meets her fate. Léo leads such a dejected life that the director has him drinking from water in a street gutter.

Despite his underwritten role, Maritaud holds viewers’ attention even as they are scratching their heads, and it’s not just because he’s an actor acting out private behavior in public. What soul this film has is because of him. With good reason, Maritaud won the Louis Roederer Foundation (named for the champagne) Rising Star Award.