Anthony Schatteman | L'homme inconnu / 2021

a literary sexual fantasy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Schatteman (screenwriter and director) L'homme inconnu / 2021 [23 minutes]

 

For several years now Flemish Belgian director Anthony Shatteman has been writing and directing significant short gay films. I’ve previously written about Kiss Me Softly (2012), Hello, Stranger (2016), and Petit ami (2017), all interesting in their own way. But L’homme inconnu, in French and Dutch, seems to me to be his most profound work to date.

     This is a film about the creative imagination, and until the very end of the short film—which feels almost like a feature work—we are never quite sure of the reality of events. Certainly, this is not the first time we have seen this transposition of the creative mind upon what poses as realist experiences. There are many films which query an author’s fecund imagination, and Hitchcock forces the viewer in numerous of his works to question his central’s characters vision of the reality there are supposedly encountering. And only a year after this film, in 2022, French director Olivier Peyon demanded that we compare a writer’s vision of a past world with something closer to the original through an encounter between the older writer and his central character’s son in Lie with Me.

 

   In this film, writer Louis (Geert Van Rampelberg) begins the movie by arriving in his snazzy red sports car at a small seaside villa, filled with a library just for the occasion, on Côte d’Azur. Louis hardly gets time to unpack his typewriter before he picks up his binoculars to encounter a beautiful heterosexual couple below on the rocks making love.

      Before he even can closet his clothes, Louis himself trots down to interrupt the couple, finding them to be a truly friendly young locals Tommy (Samuel Suchod) and Melanie (Anna Sacuto). Both are perfect specimens of youth, but for the quite obviously gay Louis, Tommy is the only one that matters.

      Not only does Tommy quickly share his concern over Louis unprotected torso, but lends him his shirt and a backrub, as well as flirting with the newcomer, suggesting that he loves the Flemish man’s French accent. Louis’s eyes take it the yellow speedos just covering Tommy’s cock and the bronzed shape of his beautifully shaped body, as Schatteman’s camera voyeuristically caresses the boy’s body so that we might share in the spoils. Any gay man might well comprehend Louis’ nighttime fantasies of Tommy’s masturbatory maneuvers.

       Suddenly, the previously blocked writer lets loose with a flow of words on a new manuscript titled, what else, Tommy. And on his next visit to the couple, Tommy seems to go even a bit further, massaging Louis’s now reddened back, and in real time—and in real time, not just in Louis’ imagining—moving his hand down to also massage what’s under that skinny yellow bikini.

       Louis has even managed to send some early chapters back to his publisher, with whom he may or may not be having an affair back in Antwerp. It doesn’t matter, here all things revolve around his new character.

       Is it any wonder that when he observes the couple out swimming that Tommy’s kisses planted on Melanie’s lips are just as quickly being relocated to his own. And that during a moment when Melaine appears without Tommy that Louis, flirting with her, embraces her into a drowning to get her out of the way.

        Tommy wonders whether he’s seen Melanie in the past few days. But it doesn’t really seem to faze the pretty boy, who is just a soon frolicking with Louis in the water, imitating a sea gull, and finally giving the older man a gentle seaside kiss? Even we must now guess which scenes might be real and which are total fantasy.

 

        When Louis punches out “The End” to his fiction, running off to the local post office to mail it off, he almost bumps into a young man looking a great deal like his Tommy with his girlfriend. Louis apologizes, the boy turning toward him quizzically to ask, “Have we met?” His girlfriend calls to him, “David,” as the confused young man keeps looking back in Louis’ direction, trying to place where he might have seen the man whom clearly he has met only in the writer’s fantasies.

         I suppose if you were a gay fiction writer, there could not be a better place to find a way to escape your writer’s block. Young men have always worked far better than any Viagra pill to get a queer writer’s blood flowing and his fantasies running amok. Louis can return home fully fulfilled without even the heartbreak of love lost since it’s never been truly experienced.

 

Los Angeles, January 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2024).