Nobody’s Hero – first-look review

A man kit­ted out head-to-toe in flu­o­ro run­ning duds is stopped in his tracks at the sight of a woman who is smok­ing a cig­a­rette on the oth­er side of the street. The dis­may­ing­ly for­ward Médéric (Jean-Charles Clichet) who is a paunchy every­man who believes him­self to be a hunk, cross­es over and asks the woman, Isado­ra (Noémie Lvovsky), on a date. When she alerts him that she is in fact a sex work­er, he insists that they meet for a bunk up with no mon­ey exchanged because he can do things that oth­er men can’t. She is then bun­dled away in a car with the con­tact details he has forced into her hand.

The eccen­tric lat­est from French film­mak­er Alain Guiraudie (best known for 2013’s nud­ist beach who­dunit, Stranger By the Lake) is a whim­si­cal urban fairy­tale set under the dis­mal grey skies of Cler­mont-Fer­rand at Christ­mas time. It charts Médéric’s cir­cuitous attempts to whisk Isado­ra away from her over­pro­tec­tive pimp hus­band, and sel­dom suc­cumb­ing to any type of extreme emo­tion, he grinds his way towards this goal, intent to secure her love by hook or by crook.

One of his oth­er major hur­dles is a sup­posed ter­ror attack in the town cen­tre, which has served to stoke para­noia among both the cur­tain-twitch­ing denizens of our hero’s hous­ing block, and the local police con­stab­u­lary. When, one evening, a young Mus­lim drift­ed named Selim (Ilies Kadri) rolls up on Médéric’s doorstep ask­ing for char­i­ty, the lothario plays good samar­i­tan and lets him into the stair­well for warmth, unknow­ing­ly stok­ing the ten­sions of an ongo­ing gang war in the process.

With Nobody’s Hero, Guiraudie appears to be unfurl­ing an overt and acer­bic polit­i­cal screed about the dis­con­tents of life in mod­ern France, with most char­ac­ters har­bour­ing a full bin­go card of racism, misog­y­ny, hypocrisy and knee-jerk recourse to vio­lence. And yet, against all odds, the direc­tor man­ages to imbue his rogue’s gallery of mis­fits and mal­con­tents with a lev­el of sym­pa­thy that it would’ve been very easy to deny – even M Coq (Michel Masiero) on the top floor, with his arse­nal of guns and bombs, is essen­tial­ly just a man using xeno­pho­bia as an excuse to alle­vi­ate the bore­dom of his life. Hard­ly excus­able, but Guiraudie makes it understandable.

By the time of its final act, where we know the geog­ra­phy of the three prime loca­tions – Médéric’s apart­ment, Isadora’s sub­ur­ban semi and the by-the-hour hotel where she con­ducts her deal­ings – the film has shift­ed towards the tra­di­tion of the clas­si­cal French farce. Char­ac­ters are all run­ning around town look­ing for one anoth­er, get­ting into scrapes, striv­ing against the odds to achieve the aims of their quest, and, like all good farces, it all leads towards a mega punch-up on a front lawn.

It’s per­haps a bit too iron­i­cal­ly detached for its own good, and the dead­pan is so dead that it’s occa­sion­al­ly impos­si­ble to feel a pulse. Yet in its meld­ing of old school fan­ta­sy and romance with more sober con­tem­po­rary con­cerns, it does work as am enter­tain­ing, if not exact­ly tren­chant, com­men­tary on these trou­bled times.