I Stand Alone () is a 1998 French psychological drama art film written and directed by Gaspar Noé as his directorial debut, and starring Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir, Frankye Pain, and Martine Audrain. The film, focusing on several pivotal days in the life of a butcher facing abandonment, isolation, rejection and unemployment, was the director's first feature-length production, and is a sequel to his 1991 short film Carne.
Plot
The film opens by revealing the history of the Butcher (who is given no other name) presented in narration which plays over a montage of still photographs. Orphaned at a young age, he was sexually abused by a priest. As a teenager, without the opportunity to study and learn the profession of his choice, he reluctantly embraces the career of a butcher specializing in horse meat, a job frowned upon at the time in France.
After several years of hard work, he finally opens his own butcher shop while his girlfriend gives birth to a daughter. When the woman realizes the infant is not a boy, she leaves the young father alone with the child. Embracing it as fate, the Butcher decides to take care of his daughter himself. As the single father is consumed by loneliness, he starts to become overprotective and develops incestuous feelings for his child. One day, when he sees blood on her skirt, he thinks she's been raped and stabs the man he thinks is responsible, only to find out it was menstrual blood. He is sentenced to prison and forced to sell his shop to a Muslim butcher while his troubled daughter is sent to an institution.
In prison, the Butcher has sex with a cellmate and, upon his release, vows to forget it happened. He finds a job working as a bartender for the woman who owns the tavern where he was a regular customer. They begin dating and soon she becomes pregnant. As they start making plans for their future together, she sells her business and they move to northern France, where she says she will buy a butcher shop for him.
There, however, she backs out of their promise, which forces him to take up a job as a nightwatchman at a nursing home. During his job, he meets a young and caring nurse who is the complete opposite of his old, icy mistress. After he and the nurse witness the death of an elderly patient, the Butcher thinks back about the lack of affection throughout his life, from the orphanage to a life with an uncaring mistress who abuses the power she has over him because of her money. When his mistress unjustly accuses him of having an affair with the nurse, he snaps and punches her in the belly several times, perhaps killing their unborn child, before fleeing the scene with a pistol.
He decides to return to Paris, where he rents the same flophouse room where he conceived his daughter and begins looking for a job as a horse meat butcher. Unfortunately, due to the changing tastes of customers during his time in prison, the market for horse meat has collapsed. Despite his patience, his job interviews consistently end in rejection. He broadens his job search but is considered unskilled in terms of general butchery, forcing him to start over again at the very bottom.
He starts looking outside his field, but the more he broadens his searches, the more desperate he becomes and the more humiliating the job interviews become. When he turns to his old friends for advice, they also reject him. After being turned away at a slaughterhouse that once did business with his shop, the Butcher decides to kill the slaughterhouse manager. He plots the murder at a local tavern but is ejected from the bar at gunpoint after squabbling with the owner's son. The Butcher finds that he has only three bullets in his gun and begins assigning them to the men he feels have humiliated him the most.
Before he can take revenge, the Butcher decides to look for the only person he feels has ever loved him: his daughter. After meeting her at the asylum in which she is a patient, he takes her back to his room where he fantasizes about molesting her, killing her, and committing suicide. Then he decides to put his gun away, resolving to be good, and tearfully embraces his daughter. Again, however, he starts to contemplate having sex with her in the same manner he did with her mother.
Standing at a window, he unzips his daughter's jacket and begins fondling her. As he abuses his daughter, the Butcher, between more and more incoherent thoughts, tries to justify his act by asserting that the world does not condemn his love because it is evil but because it is too powerful.