Leo is 22 and sells his body on the street for a bit of cash. The men come and go, and he stays right here - longing for love. He doesn't know what the future will bring. He hits the road. H... Read allLeo is 22 and sells his body on the street for a bit of cash. The men come and go, and he stays right here - longing for love. He doesn't know what the future will bring. He hits the road. His heart is pounding.Leo is 22 and sells his body on the street for a bit of cash. The men come and go, and he stays right here - longing for love. He doesn't know what the future will bring. He hits the road. His heart is pounding.
- Awards
- 10 wins & 17 nominations
- Ahd
- (as Éric Bernard)
- Garçon de la bande
- (as Nour-Eddine Maamar)
- Ana (de la bande)
- (as Lou Ravelli-Avanissian)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaFirst feature film written and directed by Camille Vidal-Naquet.
- GoofsThe right arm of Léo's jacket is not torn in the nighttime scene on the highway (at around 52 mins) although it is torn in the previous scene in the doctor's office and then again in the next scene in which it appears, when he repairs it with the stolen staple gun.
- Quotes
La femme médecin: Shall we try something to get you off the drugs for a while?
Léo: But... Why?
La femme médecin: What do you mean, why?
Léo: To do what?
La femme médecin: Hold on a second. It's not either crack or nothing.
Léo: It is.
La femme médecin: You don't want to change?
Léo: Why would I?
- SoundtracksTrapped on the Moon
Written by Jean-Christophe Couderc & Benoit Raymond
Performed by Vox Low
Opening with a beguilingly titillating twist of a role-play Léo participating with one of his clients, SAUVAGE/WILD lives and dies with Maritaud's resilient and profoundly moving performance, investing himself thoroughly to inhabit Léo's sleeping-rough, miserable existence, Maritaud brings to the fore of Léo's otherness, an almost angelic being that uncharacteristically seeks no temporal value like other men of his trade, more liable to his own instinct than any social norms (he doesn't even understand why crack, from which a kindhearted female doctor advises him to abstain, is a bad thing because for him, it is a boon that makes him feel good). Whether impassively posturing to be picked by potential kerb-crawlers, or tenderly looking for a moment of human contact with his clients, a battered Maritaud unyieldingly draws our attention and compassion through his lived-in vulnerability and wounded masculinity, not to mention those eye-popping, demandingly graphic sex scenes, which bears out an audacious resolve for authenticity without any voyeuristic agenda to sexualize the subject matter, hats off to Vidal-Naquet and his intrepid cast.
Vidal-Naquet's diligent script covers a whole gamut of what could happen to a sex worker in this parlous line of business, from Léo's love-hate entanglement with the gay-for-pay Ahd (Bernard), seeped with the latter's macho toxicity, to his sundry encounters: a gerontophiliac bonding with a senior widower; a demeaning penetration preyed on him by two callous youngsters; a skylarking bunco conducted with his fellow escort Mihal (Dibla), to whom Léo cannot reciprocate his feelings. All those segments are shot with a clinical matter-of-fact-ness that leans towards a reportage with its hand-held amateurishness.
When Ahd decides to leave with his sugar daddy, it lays bare of the best scenario which could ever happen to the practitioners of rough trade, and soon Léo's savior materializes in the form of Claude (Ohrel) exactly when he hits the rock bottom (the startling perversion and violence is rendered off screen considerately), although as a deus ex-machina, Claude is a dreamboat too perfect to be true, however Vidal-Naquet perversely goes against the grain (after his indiscriminate stock-in-trade towards all sorts of patronage, it is appalling to see Léo rebuff Claude as "old and ugly" when the latter is overlay with brimful innocuousness and tenderness), only to shatter our cexpectation and suffix a true-to-his-nature coda to Léo's self-emancipation and precious independence, with his final in utero attitude, smells like a missed opportunity for this reviewer's two cents' worth, otherwise, SAUVAGE/WILD is a belter of a debut feature giving an honest voice to the marginal and the underprivileged.
- lasttimeisaw
- Jun 8, 2019
- Permalink
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Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Official site
- Sprache
- Also known as
- Wild
- Filming locations
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $61,604
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $7,440
- Apr 14, 2019
- Gross worldwide
- $317,536
- Runtime1 hour 39 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.66 : 1