At 22, she lives on the street where she prostitutes with male clients. She is homosexual, has no limits, accepts any request and even kisses. Nothing is known about his life, he seems to look for love and what he does he likes, he does not shy away from anything: disabled, widowed, elderly, perverts, violent, psychopaths. He takes drugs, rests in the fetal position and sleeps pleasantly even on old obese bodies...

He falls in love with a prostitute who rejects him because he is straight and because he turns tricks just to survive and be able to do what he desires, such as fighting.

Seeking love young Leo or perhaps just a little warmth, he falls ill with tuberculosis and during a doctor's visit reveals perhaps the only disturbing radical difference: that of not wanting to change his life, he sees no reason to.

He indulges in heart-warming embraces but does not follow the prescribed treatment that finds his health compromised and severely malnourished. She continues to live on the streets, being used and subjected to extreme sodomization by violent and unscrupulous young men.

He coughs, continues to cough, to the point of spitting blood, that blood of tuberculosis, which becomes a metaphor for an existential hemorrhage.

We know nothing about Leo, he lives the absolute present, he has no contacts except the friendships he weaves on the street with those who lead the same life as him; a human fabric of asphalt and horror. And if even the widower seeks human contact the boy indulges in it, seeking kisses from Ahd who, however, is gay only for pay and proudly heterosexual. And although he protects Leo he cannot accept an affair with him and leaves with a wealthy client who supports him and will allow him to do as he wishes.

Same opportunity will present itself to the 22-year-old after he is reduced to death by a psychopath in Jaguar, a torturer of prostitutes called the Doctor.

Explicit, strong and heartbreaking scenes induce the viewer to a sense of helpless protective instinct toward this boy-commodity of an unconscious existence.

A body at the disposal of extreme abuse.

No morality is attempted by the film's narrative only the depiction of the Via Crucis of a life without possibility as redemption is not even considered.

Leo's alienation is total, he is Camus' new "foreigner," living without his knowledge and making himself a commodity on the shelf on the street near the Strasbourg airport where so many rich businessmen pass by to put him in the cart and take him to the rooms of consumption.

That irresistible consumption for Leo, even when he can save himself: that is the world of a stray boy in search of something he does not know what it is, because if he had it he would not want it.

Not even self-preservation instincts can help this innocent man who "doesn't know what he's doing" and therefore from the cross must be forgiven.

After years of investigation into the world of male prostitution Camille Vidal Naquet gives us an all-male depiction of a chronicle of human-existential degradation that knows, seeks and intuits no alternative.

The void full of renunciation built by a loneliness that is not despair but a kind of weightlessness of those who find themselves moving in a society where the space of sharing is in disuse, where there is no message that holds.

Incapacity becomes the way of life for Leo, who lives the "joyful" confusion of codes to the limit where it is the code of life that is confused with that of death.

An existential inertia that breaks the heart and draws the epilogue of that market of bodies that crosses "new" areas of profit on the surgical disintegration of any residue of identity possibility.

A film that introduces the viewer to a spectral inhuman reality where loneliness is the central concept and prostitution of both the client and the "whore," the only possible condition.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice