Dimitri Castiglioni and Clément Le Couviour | Bel(le) (Pretty Man) / 2018

look quick

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dimitri Castiglioni and Clément Le Couviour (directors) Bel(le) (Pretty Man) / 2018 [1 minute]

 

Given the limit for a mobile film festival in which the length of the film was 1 minute, the subject was “human rights,” and cinema filming device was limited to a smartphone, the young French directors Dimitri Castiglioni and Clément Le Couviour chose to focus on a subject that was encountering resistance in Europe just as much as it more recently has in the US, the subject of cross-dressing individuals who might or might not be described as “drag queens.”

     In this case, their subject, Nicolas Sap, sits in an empty theater before a performance he is about to give, talking in an overlay of voice and image about his own experiences, his demons, and his desires.

      Unfortunately, the time limit hardly permits a complex discussion of the issue as we hear him briefly intone that he works in furniture and decoration and that he performs in theater as a dancer and a cross-dresser. To him it means partying, joyfulness, and cheerfulness. But just as suddenly we are suddenly pushed into a sonic overload with a series of overlaying texts, playbacks, and other aural devices which he talks about a teacher, hiding behind a series of masks, embodying a character, playing a role, and in the end, staying at home, not going out, someone telling him he doesn’t like him. There are echoes of his childhood, of not being loved, too much emotion, etc. until finally we see the figure in full drag crying, his/her makeup blurring across Sap’s face as the words “Nobody cares” appear on the screen in translation.

      What we are forced to reconstruct from this dense overlay of images and language is that the performative pleasure of the figure has deep undertones of doubt, fear, hate, and rejection that go back to his childhood. Perhaps the joy and party-like atmosphere he creates through his cross-dressing is perceived as an alternative to his childhood rejections or possibly an imagined result of it.

      In one-minute there are not enough words to be expressed that can convey the contradictions of the central figure. And, in the end, we can simply perceive the central figure as a terribly conflicted individual. Yet, we do recognize that the pretty man is perhaps not completely happy as the pretty woman he makes himself up as in order to resolve his dilemmas. That the directors have been able to suggest this in only one moment reminds me of the kind of games straight figures play in speed-dating.

      To truly discover what a human being is about, there can be no time limits, and even a life-time would not reveal the full potential and traumas of any being. Perhaps that is as much the subject of Pretty Man as the confused cross-dresser, a symbol in this case of any of us, sputtering out his emotional responses to why he behaves as he does in his life.

 

Los Angeles, December 7, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).