'Sauvage' (2018) Camille Vidal-Naquet.

Camille Vidal-Naquet's uncompromisingly visceral docudrama about the increasingly frank, downwardly spiralling sexual misadventures of handsome young male prostitute Leo (Félix Maritaud), proved to a remarkably raw, singularly scintillating, frequently upsetting, sympathetic, and witheringly intimate view of a disenfranchised, seemingly self-annihilating 20-year-old sex worker whose calamitously unstable existence on the grimly unwelcoming fringes of Strasbourg's impolite society is alarmingly fraught with multitudinous dangers, wherein each of Leo's frenzied encounters teeter on the very knife's edge of impending violence! While Leo frequently acts blasé, seemingly indifferent to his itinerant existence, dingily drifting from one insalubrious coupling to another in a debilitating dope-fogged delirium, while enduring a sordid shadow life in a near-somnolent state of disgrace, he still desperately craves genuine human affection with the same burning persistent need of his increasingly life-threatening crack addiction. Not a pretty film by any means, since Leo's apparently cavalier approach to his altogether feral existence is distressing to behold, and yet, for all its trenchant, Fassbinder doom and gloom, Camille Vidal-Naquet's grievously beautiful backstreets drama 'Sauvage' is not without mordant flashes of humour, humanity, and romantic love. This is uncommonly rigorous, refreshingly bold cinema which almost miraculously turns the basest elements of humanity into rare celluloid gold! And it would be greatly remiss of me if I didn't validate the earthy, wholly relatable performances of love-lorn Félix Maritaud and his bellicose Platonic partner in grime Ahd (Éric Bernard), their evermore fractious relationship invests a singular vibrancy to Vidal-Naquet's unflinchingly raw, consistently forthright, yet warmly humane narrative, and witnessing Leo's inert, pitifully rumpled body sprawled out so ignominiously across the pavement like cruelly discarded human detritus I couldn't help but recollect Oscar Wilde's immortal quote “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” and, perhaps, Sauvage's sublimely evocative final scene may suggest that the beleaguered Leo is once again free to look up at the stars through optimistic eyes.