I Stand Alone

The film opens with a monologue on how morality and justice favor the rich, so that the poor have to enforce their own justice. A slideshow commences, depicting the Butcher's life, narrated by himself. He explains that he is just a banal commoner: born near Paris in 1939, he was orphaned at two years old. At the end of WWII, he learns that his father was a French Communist who was killed in a concentration camp. He starts to become depressed and is sexually abused by a priest. At 14, he aspires to become a butcher and works odd jobs for a decade so he may own a horsemeat market. He succeeds at 30, setting up shop in Aubervilliers. He fathers a child with a worker, who wants nothing to do with a child, and ends up abandoning them. His daughter suffers from mutism. As she hits puberty, he admits to incestuous ideation, but does not take action. She has her first period; out of shock, he believes she has been raped after a neighbor saw her with a worker. He hunts down the worker and stabs him in the face, leading to his arrest and his daughter's institutionalization. He is evicted from his shop and flat. Out of desperation, he becomes a barman and impregnates the owner of the bar. She offers to sell her bar to start from scratch in Lille, planning to open a meat market with the proceeds. He says a final farewell to his daughter and departs. There, however, she uses her wealth against him and breaks their promise, which forces him to take up a job as a night watchman at a nursing home. During his job, he meets a young and caring nurse who is the complete opposite of his old, icy mistress. After witnessing the death of an elderly patient, the Butcher thinks back about the lack of affection throughout his life. When his mistress unjustly accuses him of having an affair with the nurse, he snaps and punches her in the belly several times, likely killing their unborn child, then flees the scene with a pistol. He decides to return to Paris, where he rents the same flophouse room where he conceived his daughter, and begins looking for a job as a horse meat butcher. Unfortunately, due to the changing tastes of customers during his time in prison, the market for horse meat has collapsed. Despite his patience, his job interviews consistently end in rejection. He broadens his job search but is considered unskilled in terms of general butchery, forcing him to start over again at the very bottom. He starts looking outside his field, but the more he broadens his searches, the more desperate he becomes, and the more humiliating the job interviews become. When he turns to his old friends for advice, they also reject him. After being turned away at a slaughterhouse that once did business with his shop, the Butcher decides to kill the slaughterhouse manager. He plots the murder at a local tavern but is ejected from the bar at gunpoint after squabbling with the owner's son. The Butcher finds that he has only three bullets in his gun and begins assigning them to the men he feels have humiliated him the most.