At first glance, it may appear that Stéphanie Michelini, the tragic transsexual prostitute protagonist of the miserablist French drama Wild Side, simply glowers her way through the entire film, her sad face seldom betraying even the briefest flicker of happiness or contentment. Upon further inspection, it becomes apparent that she'll occasionally throw in a glare, a frown, or even a tortured grimace. Michelini's despairing performance perfectly suits the funereal, hermetic tone of the film, which seems to exist entirely within the kind of depressive funk that alienates sufferers from everything but their own all-encompassing despair.
A love triangle of sorts, populated by a motley assortment of pretty-boy hustlers and hookers, Wild Side casts Michelini as an emotionally brittle transsexual caring for her ailing mother, turning tricks, and juggling rent boy Yasmine Belmadi and affable Russian Edouard Nikitine. It's the kind of complicated situation that seems to make everyone involved unhappy, especially Michelini, who never seems far removed from suicidal despair. Wild Side takes its title from the famed Lou Reed story-song of decadence among deviants, and its air of fashionably sordid glamour seems inspired by numerous soft-focus perfume commercials. Wild Side contains a lot of fairly explicit, unusual, and exotic sex, but it ultimately feels like pornography for depressives rather than fetishists. Co-writer/director Sébastien Lifshitz brings in a photographer's exacting eye for vivid, evocative imagery, but he never connects on a human or emotional level, which is always a hazard for films about miserable people spiraling further and further away from hope. Wild Side is a sustained mood piece of disquieting intensity, but its almost unbearable air of morose ennui becomes hard to take even in small doses, let alone in a highly concentrated torrent of misery like this.