In this slippery farce, a schlubby coder falls in love with a prostitute and takes in a teenager he suspects is a terrorist.
In the first few minutes of Alain Guiraudie’s meandering farce, “Nobody’s Hero,” Médéric (Jean-Charles Clichet) spots a middle-aged woman across the street and immediately declares his love. Contrary to cliché, the gesture is not romantic but droll and startlingly arbitrary — it’s early in the morning, and the two are at an empty suburban intersection. When the lucky lady, Isadora (Noémie Lvovsky), reveals she’s a prostitute, Médéric is unfazed, even after it turns out she’s also married to her pimp, Gérard (Renaud Rutten), an oddly jealous brute who resembles Dennis Hopper in “Blue Velvet.”
Guiraudie, best known for his Hitchcockian gay-cruising thriller “Stranger by the Lake,” is a gifted conjurer of paranoia with an erotic edge. Things aren’t typically “solved” at the end of his woozy mysteries, which are often set in rural dream worlds where the boundaries of gay and straight don’t seem to matter.
In “Nobody’s Hero,” this paranoid mood is played for snickers when a jihadist terrorist attack hits the town, Clermont-Ferrand, in central France, and Médéric is suddenly approached by a shifty, panhandling teen, Selim (Iliès Kadri), who looks just like a composite sketch of the perpetrator shown on TV. But Médéric, a schlubby coder, spends most of his time trying to have sex with Isadora, which proves a remarkably difficult feat given her occupation. Gérard keeps his menacing cop buddy on the lookout, and Médéric’s new employer, Florence (Doria Tillier), tends to call at the worst moment. Then there are his neighbors, who knock at his door incessantly and eventually coax Médéric into taking Selim in — it’s best he not loiter in the stairwell.
As a straight dark comedy about French Islamophobia, “Nobody’s Hero” doesn’t make a lot of sense. Guiraudie is after something much different here: creating a palpable sense of the connection between fear and desire, which, sure, aren’t the most rational of our human impulses — but neither are love, marriage or jihadist crusading.
Nobody’s Hero
Not Rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
