This Friday two new films shot in the south of France by prominent auteurs will open in Chicago: Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical (which plays for a week at the Film Center) and Christophe Honoré’s Metamorphoses (which plays for a week at Facets). In addition to featuring similar geography, both films exhibit a sense of narrative liberty, shifting shape in a manner that befits the characters’ shifting lives. Staying Vertical is a dream narrative wherein characters change suddenly and frequently, while Metamorphoses, a modern-dress adaptation of about a dozen tales by Ovid, is very much about the joy of storytelling, containing playful digressions and tales within tales. It’s also worth noting that both films depict sexual activity that society deems taboo, yet the way that Staying Vertical and Metamorphoses depicts such activity is forthright, at times even positive, conveying an air of pansexual freedom that complements the freedom of the storytelling.
Léo has a baby with Marie, but the couple breaks up soon after he’s born. She charges Léo with raising the child, so he goes back to her father’s house and attempts to raise the child there. (The father, Jean-Louis, expresses sexual desire for Léo a couple times, but Léo rejects him on each occasion.) He strikes up a friendship with an ailing old man who lives with Yoan, the young man whom Léo desires, and he stalls a movie director about how his script is coming along. Léo does leave the small town at one point, but he has no idea of where to go; lacking money, he winds up destitute back in Brest. When a group of hobos strip Léo of his clothes and final belongings, Jean-Louis and Yoan randomly appear and take him back to the country. They deposit him with the ailing man, Marcel, who requests Léo’s assistance with committing suicide. Léo provides him with poison, then, at the old man’s request, sodomizes him while he’s dying. The local gendarmes find Léo with Marcel’s corpse, then inform social services, who deliver the infant back to Marie. Léo then returns to the farm to work with Jean-Louis; in the final scene, the two men find themselves on a lovely hillside, surrounded by ravenous wolves. Guiraudie ends the film before revealing whether the animals attack.
