Wild Side

Sébastien Lifshitz’s third feature opens with the soaring Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) singing ‘I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy’, with its quavering question, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’, to a parlour of Parisian transsexuals. What follows is a meditative tone-poem on society’s marginals, drawing on the director’s collection of real migrants and misfits. Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini) is a transsexual streetwalker, called back to her past by her dying mother in the bleak north French countryside. While she resurrects recent and formative memories, she’s joined by her makeshift family of lovers: Russian night-worker Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine) and childlike hustler Jamel (Yasmine Belmadi). Discreetly shot by Agnès Godard, the film stitches the frayed threads of this trio’s lives into a non-linear tapestry that assesses their fractured and self-spun senses of family, nationality, sexuality and gender. As reticent as Lifshitz’s earlier ‘Presque Rien’, and as aloof from the norms of film drama, it’s a film that cuts loose on the inside.