Claudius Pan | X comme amour (X as in Love) / 2018

mud babies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claudius Pan (screenwriter and director) X comme amour (X as in Love) / 2018 [28 minutes]

 

X as In Love stars Antoine Héraly as the regional native Antoine and Xavier Prieur as Xavier who left that French region with his family 15 years previously. It’s now the summer of 2018, and Xavier, traveling with friends, has taken a day off to return to the farm where his childhood friend Antoine lived.

 

   In the summer of 2003, as children Xavier recalls, between watching E.T. and Goonies, they spent long days together playing in the fields and local stream, mostly covering themselves with mud where they imagined themselves as something akin to tribal primitives.

    Indeed, as two boys deeply in love, exploring sex, and terrified of their own feelings for one another, they must have seemed to themselves as outsiders, wild beings who found it difficult to fit into the provincial culture in which they lived, a world in which Antoine, for example, was beaten by his father for having put on some of his mother’s lipstick.

     Xavier remembers Antoine’s mother herself as being a kind of outsider, a woman who drank heavily and on occasion danced with other men at the local bar.

     In this threnody for the lost love of his youth, Xavier, obviously not totally happy and fed up with aspects of his contemporary life, reimagines his friend as a kind of twinkish, half adult, half child version of the boy Antoine who has miraculously remained on the farm, and with whom he spends a day of remembering and reexperiencing their childhood rituals as he runs through the wheat, swims in the stream, and even masturbates with his first love. Somehow in the process he and their innocent lost love is imaginatively restored.

     And by film’s end he is able to visit the cemetery where evidently Antonine’s body now lies. One can only wonder, of course, why or how Antoine died. But now, for a second at least, they miraculously reach out to invisibly touch each other over time, the last moment when the adult will ever be able to retrace and regain any of the remarkable childlike moments of that long-ago year.

      Claudius Pan’s short film is certainly far too artsy for its simple message, and the music, composed by Pan, swells up with a seriousness that would do-in even many a gay feature movie; but it’s still a lovely film to look at, and the boys are pretty enough that one wishes they didn’t have to plaster over their golden bodies over with mud in order to prove their ceremonial love.

    

Los Angeles, June 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).