Yann Gonzalez | Les îles (Islands) / 2017

the horror

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yann Gonzalez (screenwriter and director) Les îles (Islands) / 2017 [23 minutes]

Asked in an interview with Joe Lipsett “As a horror creator, what is it about horror that attracts you?” French director Yann Gonzalez answered:

 

“Because they magnify and glorify the crazy, feverish and most forbidden fantasies. Because they’re made of dreams –and nightmares. Because they help us escape our despicable society. Because they spit on the norm; they see beauty in deviance and, in doing so, they make us proud of being freaks.

     As a teenage gay boy dealing with my sexuality, I found as much comfort in horror films as I did in queer films.”

 

     What isn’t said here, obviously, is that most horror films are, by their very nature, queer films. One certainly might challenge Gonzalez’s notion, moreover, that those society perceives as enacting deviant behavior should necessarily be described as “freaks,” despite the fact that throughout gay film history directors from Tod Browning to Ulrike Ottinger have done just that. But the important thing to recognize here is that Gonzalez’ notion of “horror” does not generally embody “terror” or “destruction,” although that many occur, particularly to the normative or those who mock the “freaks” as in his highly moving and entertaining Hideous of 2022. But generally, the “horror” one encounters is on a personal level, and depends upon the reaction of individual rather than a communal sense of fright. The horrible, Gonazlez reminds us again and again, can also be quite beautiful from a different perspective. The horrible can also be terrible thrilling, outside one’s normal experience and therefore of interest to those who are ready to explore the new and the different.

    In Islands of 2017, most definitely, the horror exists only in the eyes of the beholder. The work begins with a stage play in which Circé (Sarah-Megan Allouch) is making love to a young boy (Alphonse Maîtrepierre) who is so beautiful that he might as well be a butch lesbian.

 

    Enter the monster (Romain Merle) enters. He very much looks like the kind of Hollywood monster we’ve grown accustomed to, all blood and gruesomely shaped head and mouth. Even his bloody cock looks monstrous. Yet in this world, Circé sees even him as something beautiful and

begins to make love with “le monstre,” a sexual coupling that eventually includes even the beautiful boy.

      The play ends and the audience appreciatively applauds.

     Immediately afterwards, audience members Nassim (Thomas Ducasse) and the transsexual Simon (Simone Thiébaut) talk about their relationship before making love near an open child’s playground. The moment Nassim begins to fuck Simon “the hounds,” as Simon describes them, step out from behind the trees, adult males masturbating as voyeurs to Nassim’s and Simon’s love-making, although a couple pairs of the voyeurs soon turn to one another for their pleasure.

      In this erotic poem without a plot, no one seems to mind, as love appears something simply to be enjoyed and shared, out in the open.

    Although the word “islands” usually suggests singularity, separateness, the human being alone, in this island community sex seems to be a communal thing, a bit like Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde as filmed by Max Ophüls, where gradually we see, one by one, the entire city of Vienna linked up through sexual contacts, the maid having sex with her master who has sex with his mistress, who has sex with a friend, etc. etc. But in Gonzalez’ version, even voyeurism appears to be a shared spectator sport, the men standing separately in their masturbatory focus on the one couple but clearly enjoying the shared company as well, like a group of young heterosexual boys all beating off simultaneously on a couch as they focus on a porno tape, who cannot but be equally aware of one another’s presence, offering them a further unspoken and unadmitted sexual pleasure.

     On Gonzalez’ island, devoted to love, everyone finds a way to participate in the joy of sex without exclusion, creating a kind of paradisical world for what he would describe as the freaks, those who back on the mainland would surely be excluded from the normative societies.

     The horror here is merely in the eyes of the beholder. Some viewers surely might be horrified by the sight of so many cocks on so many handsome men ejaculating to the sight of a man and a transgender female in the midst of a fuck. But on the island the horror has become a true delight.

I can’t think of another film wherein nudity is so necessary to establish the director’s point of view. Those who cannot abide nudity and sexual difference will surely go running from the theater or immediately switch off their DVD, truly horrified and righteously indignant.

      This film won the Queer Palm in the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).