Nobody’s Hero is perhaps the most anomalous entry among Alain Guiraudie’s filmography: a satirical comedy woven out of a bedchamber farce. The film is reminiscent of his next released film, the masterpiece Misericordia (2024), in its mastery of location, its large cast of characters, and raunchy humor.
We are in central France, in the city of Clermont Ferrand, whose landscape is dominated by a 13th century Gothic cathedral — and Christmas is around the corner. Jean-Charles Clichet plays Médérici, a computer programmer as addicted to jogging as he is to his vape. Straight out of the gate he attempts to pick up Isadora — a prostitute a good twenty years older than him — played by Noémie Lvovsky, who is renowned for her directorial work as well.
Alongside the heterosexual plotline — this time homosexuality is more like a subplot —we follow the residents of Médérici’s apartment building and their varying attitudes towards young Arab migrants after a recent terrorist attack in the city. Just as the blooming, passionate love affair is as “crazy” as in Luis Buñuel’s films back in the day, the attitudes towards different ethnicities, too, are far from conventional simplifications.
Can the issues of prostitution, asylum seeking, and islamophobia be dealt with in such a provocatively gleeful way? Well, why not, and the near-sixty-year-old Lvovsky’s upfront portrayal of a sex worker hounded by her jealous husband is a joy to watch.
Timo Malmi