Picture Warren Beatty’s 1970s political sex farce Shampoo, updated to contemporary France, and you’d get something very like Alain Guiraudie’s Nobody’s Hero. Beatty satirized liberal hypocrisy during the Nixon era, but Guiraudie examines sexual and political ambiguities in today’s postcolonial Europe.
Guiraudie, known for sexually fluid provocations such as the brilliant surrealist comedy Standing Vertical and the appalling, nihilistic murder mystery Stranger by the Lake, transforms Shampoo’s central joke — that its politically uncommitted hairdresser/lothario protagonist was a heterosexual dynamo (Beatty mocking himself) — into Médéric Roman, the perfect modern cuck, played by Jean-Charles Clichet as a progressive whose personal delusions personify France’s current insecurities.
Médéric propositions a middle-aged streetwalker, Isadora (Noémie Lvovsky) and, fascinated by her appetitive features and matronly voluptuousness, suggests a nonfinancial transaction. But first he states his liberal disapproval of prostitution. Their compulsive passions are interrupted by a suicide bombing in the placid suburb; Médéric and Isadora’s entanglement is then complicated by her possessive husband, Gérard (Renaud Rutten), and a young Muslim drifter, Selim (Iliés Kadri), who might be a terrorist.
Bedroom-farce helped Beatty evoke an era of promiscuousness and political discontent while Guiraudie focuses on the millennium’s psychosexual paradoxes. Droll humor catches Europe in globalist transition. The attractions and interactions of Médéric, Isadora, Gérard, and Selim crisscross as they adjust to frightening new realities. It’s uncertain territory, thus Guiraudie’s original French title: Viens je t’emmene (Come, I’ll Take You There).
Set at Christmastime in Clermont-Ferrand, the same snowy village as in Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, Guiraudie’s film dares to push Rohmer’s conservative Catholic meditation — and Beatty’s Hollywood broadmindedness — toward today’s moral confusion. Self-righteous soyboy Médéric is also a Karen who vapes — a genius touch. The nervous reflex contradicts his skills as a libertine and a computer expert. After admitting homeless Selim for a night, Médéric hacks Selim’s email and discovers jihadist websites that spook his liberal affectations.
Guiraudie blends possibly bisexual curiosity with political fear: Médéric awakes naked and discovers, “There are radicalized Muslims in my living room!” The sight of worshippers praying while watching explosions on TV sends Médéric into shock; his nightmare scream matches Isadora’s illicit orgasmic howls — a Hitchcockian-Buñuelian twist, also a shout-out to Shohei Imamura’s bawdy social satire Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.
Each character’s humane impulses conflict with natural social qualms. Médéric’s neighbors argue about harboring Selim, incurring the wrath of young radicals who might be either killers or drug dealers. (“An ISIS flag doesn’t make him a terrorist. At least he’ll be warm and safe.”) Even Muslim neighbors bicker — an irony that Guiraudie uses to deride Asghar Farhadi’s overrated A Separation.
Médéric and Isadora’s sexual temptations are unsettling and unresolved, as is comely, androgynous Selim’s desire to belong. Médéric and Gérard discuss female sexuality, toxic machismo, and l’amour fou — topics that confound political correctness. These moral and demographic changes were also at issue in Roman Polanski’s Carnage, the New York–set film version of the international stage play God of Carnage, a big hit in France. This is better. Guiraudie says, “Cinema in France (and elsewhere) has rarely dealt with the precise state of anxiety and suspicion that we are confronted with.”
Revealing anxieties within hidden desires is Guiraudie’s specialty. He surpasses Shampoo’s politics through frank, often surreal eroticism — Médéric’s sexually aggressive colleague (Doria Tillier); a seemingly innocent African teenager, Charlène (Miveck Packa), who works at Isadora’s flophouse; and pleasure-seeking Isadora lying around aroused like the odalisque in Manet’s Olympia. These scenes unveil the personal contradictions of modern, crumbling Europe — and nearly neutered America.
I stress the Shampoo comparison because contemporary American filmmakers falsify current circumstances, failing to match Guiraudie’s honest ambivalence. (“That’s France for you. We wait and do nothing,” Médéric’s neighbors complain.) Nobody’s Hero depicts contemporary globalism’s cuckoldry — the complex ways people act out their own political and psychosexual paradoxes. This is best articulated when childless Isadora ponders, “Kids with no regard for their lives or ours, it’s starting to add up: It’s more than poverty or religion. It means there’s no hope.”
Guiraudie closes with an impassioned image of Charlène suddenly shifting her infatuated attachment from homeboy Selim to Gallic Médéric. It’s a stunning way to symbolize the mutual obsessions of the encroaching third world and the collapsing first world.