Wild Side

Parisian hooker Stephanie (Michelini) lives with Jamel (Belmadi), a young North African man who hustles public toilets for male and female clients. When Stephanie meets Mikhail (Nikitine), an illegal immigrant and a deserter from the Russian army, she can't decide between him and Jamel, and so they embark on a menage-a-trois. Then Stephanie's mother (Josiane Stelru) suffers a stroke, and the trio head for Stephanie's rural home town to care for her. Lifting his title from Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, director Lifshitz offers a world populated by hustlers, prostitutes (male and female) and transsexuals. While the leading trio are regarded as social outcasts, they create their own hermetically sealed world, an unorthodox family in which Mikhail's inability to speak French, or Jamel's to speak English, is no barrier to affection and love. Building his story from a series of static images, photograph stills and vividly coloured flashbacks to Stephanie's idyllic childhood, Lifshitz creates a subdued tone-poem rather than a straightforward narrative, but the random moments of intimacy the trio snatch from the whirl of their unconventional existence are touching and uplifting. The story and the manner of its telling won't be to everyone's taste, but this is a brave and ambitious slice of filmmaking that wears its heart on its sleeve.