Faustine Crespy | Famille nucléaire (Nuclear Family) / 2020

the plastic-covered ghost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Faustine Crespy (screenwriter and director) Famille nucléaire (Nuclear Family) / 2020 [19 minutes)

 

Every summer Adèle (Catherine Grosjean) takes her son Jules (Louka Minnella) and his younger brother to a French nudist camp where she sits about naked, mostly drinking and demanding the attention of her son of Jules, now 18-years-old, and not at all as his age so comfortable about nudity, particularly given that he is gay.

     The film begins with Jules giving blood at a small trailer located on the local beach, as a handsome young man, Karim (Syrus Shahidi) queries him about any diseases and sexual activity, all the questions answered in the negative, which makes it clear that so far it has been a most uneventful summer for Jules.

     Part of his problem is that he is, in fact, the caretaker for both his mother and his 6-yeaar-old young brother. He cooks, looks after his brother and tries to ignore the endlessly sexual glances and comments of his nearly shameless mother, who would clearly take him into her bed if only she could. When the brother Tom (Lohen Van Houtte) asks if he might taste her beer, Adèle is ready to pass him her glass, and it is only Jules’ intrusion stops her from providing a pre-adolescent with alcohol. She complains that her elder son is just like his father, who obviously has left her and the boys—given what we’ve already observed of her behavior, with good reason. The big-breasted, heavy assed woman gets mad and storms off, leaving Jules, once more, to care for Tom alone.

 

    We see Jules frustratedly changing shirts as he plans to go out for the night, no mother still in sight, Tom at least safely in his room. He tells their neighbor to keep an eye on Tom, telling her brother that their mother surely must be nearby if there’s any problem.

     Tom goes in search of Karim, who he is told is on his break. His substitute, however, points over further on the beach where Karim in resting, apparently asleep. Tom sits down in a spot nearby. When Karim finally notices Tom, he invites him over as a friend. And before long he’s made a date for that night to celebrate Karim’s last evening at the resort.

      By the time he returns Tom is at the neighbor’s sharing her son’s tent. Adèle is still not to be found, and Jules, his little brother in hand goes in search of his mother. When he finally spots her she is in the non-nude part of the beach attempting to find Jules through Karim’s co-worker. Jules does not attempt to intrude for fear of being connected with the mad woman, appearing nude where least expected. They beg her to get up since she needs to be dressed on that part of the beach.

     Jules sends Tom to retrieve her. Back in the cabin Jules dresses her and put the fully drunken woman to bed. And even then she grabs him and tries to tell him how loved he is. She would surely pull him down into her bed if possible.

      What she has done is make him late for his appointment. He races the beach, but Karim finally grows impatiently with his lateness and leaves without him. Jules lays down in the sand in front of the blood trailer, only to see an image of what looks to be his mother wrapped in plastic come again in an attempt to reclaim him, almost like a ghost, which she herself claims to be—a woman long out of her prime who has never been able to except the consequences of aging.

      She sits down beside him and takes out a cigarette. Jules finally says what he should perhaps have stated long again: “You have to leave me alone, Mum.”

       Adèle finally answers rationally, “I know.”

       But, as she attempts to touch his cheek yet again, he pulls away, gets up, and walks off in tears, his plastic-wrapped ghost waddling behind him.

       Jules has lost perhaps his chance to experience his first love, and she has most definitely lost her son. The nuclear family has long before collapsed.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).