Mickaël Weber | Nos sens (Our Senses) 2024

love too late

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lilian Duché and Mickaël Weber (screenplay), Mickaël Weber (director) Nos sens (Our Senses) 2024 [27 minutes]

 

French-language director Mickaël Weber’s Our Senses is a true tear-jerker about the issues I discuss in my 2011 collection of films gathered as a small omnibus in “How to Lose Your Best Friend.”

      Poor Arthur (Jean-Baptiste Lamour) is already quite aware that he is about to lose his best friend simply because Tony (Morgan Malet) is going off to school in Canada for a year. But, in the meantime he has not only become aware that he is deeply in love with Tony, but has even announced his being gay to his father.

      Meeting up with an openly gay friend, who truly might be a better match for him, he admits how he has fallen so deeply in love with Tony, and is troubled by how to tell Tony before he leaves. Tony, apparently a straight man, is convinced that Arthur is also straight, assuring himself that his friend has fallen in love with a new woman.

      The society in which these individuals live seems quite tolerant, everyone agreeing that if you love someone you ought to express it. And in long drunken party night with Tony, Arthur finally admits he is in love with a straight man without naming him. Again, all seem comfortable with the fact that their friend has just come out to them.

        When soon after, however, Arthur admits to Tony that the unnamed straight man is himself, at first  if a bit taken aback, Tony still seems comfortable with the situation. But later when they attend a movie, Tony suddenly turns to Arthur and kisses him, before escaping in rejection of the situation.

 

        What quickly becomes apparent is that Tony is himself attracted to Arthur and is a closeted gay man. But back at the university they attend, he cannot admit that anything happened in the movie theater, denouncing his friend suddenly as a faggot.

         The underlying hate of contemporary society once more reveals that the fears of homosexuality are still quite near the surface, and admitting anything about oneself in a world in which you still feel as a rejected outsider is not an easy decision.

         Arthur is obviously distraught about the situation, losing his friend and secret lover in the very same moment. Yet Tony visits him, not to apologize but to finally admit that the love suddenly showered upon him is something he actually desires but is still fearful to accept.

         After a quite powerful lecture about even in these times how difficult to is to accept what society basically doesn’t want to accept, the two kiss, realizing their love for each other, even though it is utterly fleeting since Tony is about to leave for a year. In the very last moments of this film, at least, his father calls, perhaps with a positive response to his email announcement of being gay.

        In some respects, Our Senses is pure soap opera; yet there is enough truth in it, and the acting is so powerful that we realize despite all the surface acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals in contemporary society, it is nearly impossible for the general heterosexual world to comprehend the sense of shame and separateness gay men and others still feel every day of their lives. If such issues have been hammered home in hundreds of such LGBTQ works, they are still superficially felt by the general populace, the gay movies themselves seldom seen except but by those who suffer such consequences. How to bridge the gap—particularly when inexplicably you fall in love with someone who has difficulties with excepting his sexuality or simply is straight—is nearly impossible. How to explain the centuries of isolation, dismissal, and hate that have layered themselves upon our consciousness.

         This may not be a truly profound film, but it is another important retelling, so well performed and filmed, that we appreciate what it argues, and we can even still drop a few tears for the characters who suffer such experiences, particularly at a time in their life when they should most be enjoying the sexual entry into the adult world.

       Lamour is such a beautiful long-haired boy, one wants to put one's arms around his neck, brush back his bangs, and award him a long kiss. But that is what such romances, which this most certainly is, are all about. And as usual in such works, love is fully realized far too late.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).