Love and Labour in the Margins in Sebastien Lifshitz's "Wild Side"

In his film Wild Side (2004), Sebastien Lifshitz utilizes space to communicate several of the film’s recurring themes, most notably those regarding the boundaries of the French neoliberal nation-state and the various labour necessary for their production, especially as relates to the film’s three protagonists: Stephanie, Mikhail and Djamel. As immigrants without state sanctioned documentation (re: “illegal”), Mikhail and Djamel join Stephanie- a transgender French woman who makes her living as a sex worker- in the margins of French society. The film is set in the era of Sarkozy’s hard-line immigration reform enacted through the guise of regulating sex-work (Rees-Roberts, 144-5), which Rees-Roberts distills as, “…a conflation of “dangerous sexualities” and “dangerous classes” (145). Against this backdrop, Lifshitz gives us a glimpse of the love and “alternative” family forged by Stephanie, Djamel and Mikhail, even as we witness the unacknowledged- and required- labour this group performs in the shoring up of the very system that marginalizes the group and their love.

Space is often utilized in the film to highlight the protagonists marginalization and lack of options, beginning with one of the very first scenes of the film. After an establishing shot that slowly pans over Stephanie’s nude body shown luxuriating in the safety of her own bed, which Lifshitz uses in order to naturalize her transgender identity, we next see Stephanie on the side of a busy road among a group of other prostitutes. These women are relegated to the side of the road- a literally marginalized position- and many also have exposed breasts, exposure being another visual indicator of vulnerability. Interestingly, even as groups of these marginalized women gather in the cold in between clients to interact with each other, joking and laughing loudly, we still see Stephanie framed alone, exposed- yet set apart among her fellow sex workers by both her positioning, her dress (she keeps her breasts covered), and her lack of inclusion.

Scenes of space as a thematic element repeat throughout the film for all three characters; in Stephanie’s case, it is often an indicator of the invalidation of her transgender identity. For example, almost all of Stephanie’s flashbacks of her “boyhood” involve vast pastoral spaces in which Stephanie (then Pierre) runs through completely alone- “boyhood”, for Stephanie, would appear to have been a mostly empty, isolated existence that did not conform to her sense of personhood. The exceptions to this are scenes that involve Stephanie’s sister Caroline (before her disappearance), wherein Stephanie/Pierre and Caroline appear inseparable, almost always shot in the tight, close proximity shots that invite participation in the film’s moments of true intimacy, tenderness, and love. It is significant that the same camerawork is employed in scenes of the three protagonists, whose love- while tender and part of their daily existence (and, I would argue, their survival in an often inhospitable society) - is nonetheless non-traditional, thus made to labour in order to prop up the struggling heteronormativity that society is attempting to pass off as “natural”.

This labour is one that is demanded of all three of the protagonists, as each falls into a group that is “outside” (re: marginal) of the societally desired norm of the French neoliberal nation-state featured in the film. Mikhail, an “illegal” Russian immigrant, is the pansexual lover of both Djamel, an “illegal” Arab immigrant and hustler; both, in turn, are lovers of Stephanie, with whom they share love, a life, and a flat. Sarkozy’s push for white, heteronormative families as desired citizens, which entailed enacting legislation to make non-compliant bodies (such as Stephanie, Djamel and Mikhail) more visible, is one aspect of the French nation-state at this time that was used as a means of propping up what the film illustrates is a precarious heteronormativity at best. In fact, many of the implied “ideal”/actual citizens are clients of the two sex workers (Djamel and Stephanie), and their distance from any scene of heteronormativity calls into question whether such a thing can actually exist at all outside of the world of the three protagonists, and all of the other “undesirable” bodies, without whose existence the “heteronormative” could not be defined. We are shown multiple scenes of these ideal citizens moving into the marginal spaces occupied by Stephanie and her lovers in order to acquire “services” from these eroticized and marginalized bodies not available to them in the socially acceptable spaces they occupy. One example is the older, married man with pictures of his children displayed in the home he calls Stephanie to; in a complete upending of any “heteronormative” expectation/convention, and unlike many of her clients, this man wants to be on the receiving end of anal sex with Stephanie, thus precluding any polite fiction of traditional heteronormativity in his sexual desires.

While Stephanie, Djamel and Mikhail’s world is accessible to the “acceptable” citizenry, however, we are shown many times that the reverse is not true. Often, when situations are fraught with emotion, Stephanie, Djamel and Mikhail (depending upon the scene) are shown framed against a wall or door. At times, these walls are literally the rock walls of the French countryside- they are literally caught between the proverbial “rock and a hard place”, with little mobility allowed them as their required labour demands their continued adherence to the strict societal boundaries established to assure those of the French citizenry who follow the heteronormative ideal that they are, after all, the “normal” ones.

I was fascinated by the below clips, which present the same event (through different media outlets), and what they say about the spaces we "allow" others to inhabit- and why. The comments, especially on the third clip, seem just as relevant to these themes as the story itself.
　
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRePItoaP6Y (France closes refugee camp)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RphEvIiYyyw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNaME4sPTI&feature=related (note comments)