On the verge of becoming a leading figure of the new generation of French auteur cinema, Alain Guiraudie remains a complete maverick. Deeply rooted in the landscapes of his origins in southwestern France as well as in a body of legends where Middle Age knights-errant, working-class heroes and gay icons meet, Guiraudie here shapes his preoccupations into a tale wherein cycles of birth and death, desire and creativity take startling forms. Guiraudie shines as an unpredictable storyteller whose main tools are not words but bodies—young men, young women, very old men, babies, animals—all of them watched with a vibrant attention, in their nudity, their fragility, their strength and their magic powers. Rester vertical tells a story, but what it really does is invoke a cosmos, where nature and physical desire, the fear of death and the impulse to transgress interrelate as in a lively and mysterious biotope.