It's a tale told over and over again: lonely souls adrift in a cruel world finding each other and creating a new kind of family with the strongest of bonds. Tell the tale incorrectly, and it can dissolve into sap and cliché. Tell it right, as director Sébastien Lifshitz and writer Stéphane Bouquet do in Wild Side, and the result is a moving story that offers hope for even the loneliest soul.Set in Paris and the countryside of Northern France, the film brings together three very different lost souls: Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini), a pre-op transsexual prostitute; her roommate Jamel, a bisexual hustler of Moroccan descent who does his best work in Paris's skankiest railway bathrooms; and Mikhail, a traumatized Russian soldier who illegally immigrated to Paris and has fallen in love with both Stephanie and Jamel. Luckily, they have both fallen in love with him too. A weirder ménage à trois you will never encounter.
Continue reading: Wild Side (2004) Review