touching the untouchables
by Douglas Messerli
Isabelle Coudrier-Kleist, Michel Grisolia,
Jacques Nolot, and André Téchiné (screenplay), André
Téchiné (director) J'embrasse pas (I Don’t Kiss) / 1991
The significant French director André Téchiné has spent his long career, as a member of the
second-generation New Wave, exploring alternate human
relationships—particularly those that involve gay and lesbian sexuality.
His 1991 film, I Don’t Kiss, however feels very personal. Like
the young almost cocky, certainly self-assured young 20-year-old hero of this
film, Pierre (Manuel Blanc), the director himself grew up in the Pyrenees and escaped his traditional educational
and parental upbringing in a move to Paris. Today he lives in an apartment
overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, which represents the pick-up place of his
gay, mostly elderly, figures. Perhaps, like Pierre, Téchiné, at first, was not
prepared for what he was about to encounter. He, too, arrived in Paris from the
Pyrenees wanting to be an actor and writer—the latter at which he succeeded—and
began to embrace gay sexuality.
Pierre is a purist, and even though he finds work at the hospital
kitchen working as a dish-washer (a job I once had as well—boring and terribly
messy, as you rinse and wash the plates of others) and begins to study drama;
he is a horrible failure at both jobs. He can’t act, even when it comes to
Hamlet’s notable monologue whose lines he cannot finish, and when he pretends
he is ill to skip his dishwashing duties, he is fired.
After a quick trip to Spain with Romain, a journey which Pierre might have suspected would lead to a sexual encounter and financial renumeration, turns in a different direction when his would-be lover picks-up another young man. Pierre escapes his new “paradise” yet again for Paris, returning to the Gardens to become a male prostitute, informing his clients: "I don't kiss, I don't suck, I don't get fucked". The question is, what does he really do, presumably letting them masturbate him or letting him fuck them? In short he has become a truly limited being, unable to express his own sexuality fully.
Arrested by the police for his behavior, Pierre falls in love with a
female prostitute and, soon after, is beaten to near-dear just previous to being
raped by her pimp and others, who force the prostitute, Ingrid (Emmanuelle
Béart) to watch. The “Noli me tangere” innocent has suddenly been fully introduced
into a violent gay world.
His answer is to join the French paratroops, ready to “lean into the
void,” parachuting into the night. Yet strangely, upon returning home to visit
his brother, he reports that he did not hate the capitol city, but simply
wasn’t prepared for it. On his way back to Paris, the former innocent stops at
a beach, removing his clothing and entering the sea, suggesting both a
cleansing of his past role as a prostitute and an embracement of his male body,
an acceptance, perhaps, of a sexuality he has previously refused.
Téchiné does not quite hint of what Pierre’s future will entail. But we
do realize he will not be a passive but active figure in the determination of
his future sexual life, wherever that may lead him. Yet “leaning into the void”
does suggest that the sexuality he once feared will now be an acceptance of the
dark attractions that once so troubled him. Perhaps he will now at least kiss,
perhaps even suck and fuck. If nothing else, we know he has now been touched.
Los Angeles, February 10, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February
2020).
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