Nobody's Hero (2022, Alain Guiraudie) (Patreon)

57/100

Sometimes the consensus is right, or at least partially right. There really are two fundamentally irreconcilable films struggling for sovereignty here, and while it eventually becomes clear which of the two Guiraudie actually cares about (hint: same one he always cares about), the journey to that destination practically redefines "muddle." That's Ed, I was hooked pretty much from the jump, joyfully gaping as a fictional Bataclan-style terror attack gets introduced (via news reports) in the midst of what's apparently the most spectacular cunnilingus of all time. IMDb informs me that I'd previously seen Jean-Charles Clichet in Things to Come (Hansen-Løve, obviously, not W.C. Menzies) and Anaïs in Love, but he hadn't made an impression; this performance takes clueless schlumpiness to new heights, even as the screenplay hilariously keeps insisting that Médéric is an irresistible Adonis with the world's most talented tongue. By the end, we're unmistakably on Guiraudie's usual emotionally and sexually fluid terrain, with everybody's heart wanting what it irrationally wants; the last few minutes (and particularly the final shot) suggest something not unlike what my beloved French Exit does, creating grudging harmony from a disparate group of barely-connected eccentrics. And it's not that satirical jabs at Islamophobic paranoia can't fit into that framework. It's that they just...don't. Guiraudie never quite works out the tricky tonal balance required, and he keeps focusing on Selim for a while at the expense of Isadora, and vice versa. The satisfying merger I desired doesn't occur until the movie's basically over, and it doesn't reverberate backwards in a way that makes what preceded it feel retroactively coherent. Maybe the decision to keep Selim mostly a cipher is at fault—had the revelation regarding his character's motives for constantly returning to Médéric's apartment (not something I'd pick up on sans prompting) emerged earlier, those scenes might not feel so utterly divorced from all the libidinous stuff. A bold new context for this director's singularly oddball sensibility, but not every risk pays off.