Arnaud Dufeys | Atomes (Atoms) / 2012

bending the rules

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnaud Dufeys (screenwriter and director) Atomes (Atoms) / 2012 [19 minutes]

 

This powerful short film by Belgium director Arnaud Dufeys begins with a student Jules (Benoît Cosaert) being accused by the principal of the boarding school he attends with having illegally entered a room for teachers only.

    We do not precisely know why Hugo has broken into the room, but it appears it has something to do with his teacher Hugo (Vincent Lecuyer), for whom he is retrieving some correspondence, a message, or something else that might incriminate him with regard to a sexual encounter he has had with the boy. Or he may have just entered it on his own accord, to see what might be hidden from his eyes; the important thing is that he has used his teacher Hugo’s key in order to get in.

 

    His sentence is relatively mild: he must stay in his room for the night.

    Not that that bothers Jules, who flaunts all rules and regulations. As he exits the verboten room, Hugo meets him to beg for the key back. But either Jules doesn’t have the key, the principal having taken it—he hints that the rectors suspect that it is Hugo’s key—or he simply refuses to return it.

     A short while later, he and other students have broken into a student room where they are playing loud dance music, smoking, and generally just hanging out. Hugo is forced to close down that room as well for the students’ refusal to heed his former warning. When Hugo mentions that the class bell rang six minutes earlier, Jules snaps back, “You want your dick sucked as well,” a dangerous thing to say, since we know there obviously has been something nefarious between

them. Is he threatening to go public?

    

     Hugo closes down the room and the other students leave, but he keeps Jules behind and again demands the key, Jules finally returning it.

     At another point, when Hugo is peeing in a private cubicle, Jules enters and refuses to leave, but despite Hugo’s pleas for him to leave, he refuses. From the sounds, they merely piss together, but suddenly there is a friendly rapport between them that testifies to a more intimate relationship. When Jules just as quickly leaves the cubicle and Hugo goes to wash his hands, Hugo laughs to himself for a moment at the absurdity of it all, before, seeing his image in the mirror, returning to a serious state of mind, perceiving the seriousness of the boy’s sexualized intrusions into his life.

     As the teacher makes his evening round during their lessons, the other boys seem to have finished their studies, but Jules calls him in, not able to comprehend in his chemistry lesson what makes the protons and neutrons turn around the atom’s nucleus. Hugo explains it as negative and positive energy, but Jules either still does not understand or refuses to. It is clear, however, that something like that energy relates to his and the teacher’s relationship, a negative-positive discharge between the two due to their sexual reactions to each other.

     Later, nearing bed time, Hugo attempts to herd his “boys” from the shower into their own rooms, as they play randy juvenile games with each other. Jules who has refused to take a public shower, begs Hugo, as he apparently has in the past, for a key to the faculty showers on another floor. 

     Hugo asks why Jules won’t share the public showers, but all the boy can answer is that he prefers to shower “quietly.” We suspect that he is not interested in sharing his peers’ roughhousing, and would prefer a real sexual encounter.

     After everyone else is in bed, we see Jules smoking outside, attempting for an instant to grab a peacock which evidently inhabits the school grounds. The peacock, obviously reminding us of his own strutting behavior, escapes into the surrounding woods, woods which not only express the isolation of the school, but the distance between the world of the school and the normality of homelife.

     Hugo reads for a while, puts down his book and walks toward the staircase where he finds his student, Jules, sitting. He suggests he return to his bed, an important conversation ensuing:

 

             “Listen Jules, It won’t happen again, I already told you.”

             “Why?”

             “Because it’s not….”

 

    In mid-sentence Jules grabs his teacher’s head, draws it to him, and kisses him, Hugo attempting to push him off a couple of times. Finally, the boy goes on run, Hugo grabbing him to calm him down. They sit a ways from each other in a kind of detente

     In a flashback, we realize what happened in that past instance. We see both Hugo and Jules in the faculty showers, laughing and playing together, the clear harbinger of the sexual incident we have long suspected occurred between them.

    In the final scene, we watch Hugo in a room, dressed in a coat, the teacher looking out the window. A young adolescent boy is observed walking toward the room and entering. The boy reports, “He asked me to tell you that he left and won’t come back. And also that he still doesn’t get the thing about his chemistry class.”

     Hugo slightly smiles and thanks the boy, apparently Jules’ younger brother or a relative.

   The room in which Hugo now sits is empty, as he shakes his head with seeming memories, surely regret.

      Has Hugo been asked to leave, with Jules leaving as a result? Or, has Hugo simply discovered Jules’ room empty? In a sense, it doesn’t matter, both have hit up against or perhaps crashed into the impossible: a teacher-student relationship that should not have occurred and can only end in disaster.

     An unnamed commentator on IMDb has written one of the most perceptive of such movie comments:

 

“Benoît Cosaert as Jules was perfect as the manipulative teen older than his years, a poignant mix of child and adult feeling the power he holds. Vincent Lecuyer as Hugo was excellent as the teacher who had made a mistake and was now not only regretting it but paying for it.

     The film spoke to a truism. Sexual abuse from a position of power is never acceptable but it's often the younger victim that has made the running and is not traumatised. And as the film shows, has the power and uses it.”

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queen Cinema blog (April 2024).