After earning a larger audience with his Cahiers du Cinéma-topping feature Stranger by the Lake, director Alain Guiraudie has followed it up with Staying Vertical. The story centers on a filmmaker, on a journey in French wilderness, who fosters a child. One of our favorite films at the Cannes Film Festival, U.S. audiences will have to wait some time to see it, so to hold one over, one can see the first trailer today, which is currently without subtitles yet conveys Guiraudie’s distinct visual style.
We said in our review, “Those only familiar with Alain Guiraudie’s sublime Stranger By the Lake, which finally brought the gifted French director to a (relatively) wider audience following a laureled Un Certain Regard premiere in 2013, will likely find themselves confounded by its follow-up, Staying Vertical. With his first entry in Cannes’ main competition, Guiraudie returns to the psychoanalytic mode of the features preceding Stranger, where he gradually and stealthily eroded the boundary between reality and fantasy to probe the complexities of human desire — particularly of the sexual kind — exposing the stifling effects of social norms and conventions to thoroughly bewildering results.”
Set for an August 24th bow in France and an early 2017 release in the U.S., check out the trailer and poster below.
Staying Vertical will be released in early 2017 by Strand Releasing in the United States.