Nans Laborde-Jourdàa | Léo la nuit (Leo by Night) / 2021

a child of sensual pleasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nans Laborde-Jourdàa (screenwriter and director) Léo la nuit (Leo by Night) / 2021 [24 minutes]

 

This truly lovely short film by French actor and director Nans Laborde-Jourdàa is a work for those who can forgive the most outrageous behavior of gay men who in their sexual activities still behave mostly as children themselves.

     We know little of the gay man Paul’s (performed by the director) past, but clearly he, at some time in the not so long ago in the past—his child Léo (Cyusa Ruzindana Rukundo Marcou) is now 8 years old—created a son with Assa (Marie-Sohna Condé), an intelligent, responsible black surgeon, years older than him, who has completely taken over the care and raising of the boy, and who has a remarkable sense of humor that allows her to amazingly cope with her childish-like former lover.

      Because of a series of circumstances, a demand for doctors and the sudden non-appearance of one of her babysitters, she demands that for just one night her one-time lover Paul pick up his son at school and care for him for the night before sending him off to school again the next morning.

       For anyone other than Paul this should have been a wonderful chance to reconnect with the beautiful young boy who absolutely adores his adolescent and long missing father. His mother expresses how excited the boy is, and once we see Léo , we recognize that his deepest love is for his impossible father.

     But even as Paul seeks out a gift for his beloved son, two male and two female mice—although though the pet shop owner advisers him to get only males—Paul is suddenly grabbed by the balls by the owner, who vaguely implores “Stop me if I am out of line.” For Paul, clearly, any sexual activity is never “out of line,” even though even he knows it will make him late in picking out Léo at school. A child himself, when it comes to sex, Paul does not know how to say no.

      When he goes to pick up his son, he discovers the child has already been retrieved by a non-nonsense music teacher, who emphatically is unwilling to give the boy up to a man she has never met, and whose credentials she cannot establish, particularly since Assa is now unreachable. The wonderful kid attempts to tell her not only that Paul is his father, but is not married nor in love with his mother, all to no avail. The music teacher is adamant, until her other student pretends to have swallowed “a key” (perhaps purely a musical metaphor) which so totally distracts her attention, that the father and son easily escape.

         But even then, he seeks out a woman friend who might take care of his son, and when she rejects his pleas, he parks the delightful Léo with a bar-hotel concierge of a presumably irreputable establishment while he runs out to a local public park to fuck a fellow late-night queer pick-up. Despite the irresponsibility of the entire affair, director Laborde-Jourdàa presents it as a highly sexual event while the young boy, although obviously impatient for the return of his father, complains primarily about being unable to find a way to turn on the TV set, although wondering when his father might return. 

       At 10:00 at night, finally Paul arrives, gift in hand, as the two and his female friend Sonia (Margot Alexandre) hide out in the room as the hotelier deals with an unexpected “real” client. Paul presents Léo with the gift the mice, the boy opening up the box to find them suffocated in the plastic in which Paul has kept them wrapped, Sonia and Paul pretending they are simply asleep, arguing they’ll wake them up in the morning.

  

     As the boy pretends to have forgotten something in the hotel bedroom, the adults all reveal their shock over the gift of dead mice, finally breaking out in horrific laughter for the absurdity of the whole affair.

       Paul goes to the room in search of his now missing son, and the two, after a sort of hide-and-seek-affair, pretend to finally discover one another, giggling in a loving encounter on the bed, revealing that despite all of Paul’s irresponsible behavior, the two still have a lively rapport. Carrying the sleepy child off to Sonia’s car, Paul declares that tomorrow they will escape for a day or so on an undeclared “vacation,” despite Assa’s previous insistence that he return the boy to school.

      Surely, the situation ahead does not bode well, and it promises to consist of a great many difficulties for the adults in the child’s life, but equally suggests that the joyful Léo will escape for just a while longer into their father-son idyll where responsible adults are not permitted, offering up the boy a true birthday gift he will long remember.

        Without ever preaching, nor entirely forgiving Paul for his appalling behavior, director Laborde-Jourdàa generously portrays the compulsive homosexual misfit through of his incomprehensible behavior as simply representative the man’s pleasure in the delights of the body’s endless capacity for play and sensual pleasure. And somehow we know that with such a father hovering in the distance, the child will inherit his father’s joy of the sensual life.

 

Los Angeles, January 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).