François Reichenbach | Last Spring / 1954

even the clean get dirtied

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Reichenbach (screenwriter and director) Last Spring / 1954

 

Boys in skin-tight denim sharing a cigarette also are the stars of his far more significant gay narrative work, Last Spring. Here too the young men at the center of the piece do not actually engage in sex or even take off their clothes. They needn’t, given the way the camera positions them neck to neck, hands spatially stretched toward one another’s crotch, and their physical acrobatics in the apple trees and other nearby natural spaces. These two James Dean look-alikes most definitely are a couple in love who sensuously portray their sexuality as surely as if they were engaged in a balletic tango. 

    

    This is a totally romantic vision of homosexual love, a love that although almost idyllically presented in the earliest scenes has the potentiality for a much more dramatic and queer-tragic ending. We have hardly observed but a few moments of their exuberant interchange with their bodies alive in nature than we begin to hear the highly romantic strains of the Baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor which, in this context, might as well be Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht in its dark tonal presage of desire and loss.

      One might almost argue that if Last Spring begins as a homophile telling of gay love, it soon moves to a queer telling as one of the boys travels, for what reason we are never told, to the city, leaving the other behind in growing despair as day by day he expectantly visits his mail box only to find it empty.

      What begins as a joyful interlude between what appears to be an expectation of the other’s return, gradually shifts to a more poignant version of “Johnny’s so long at the fair.”

 

               O dear, what can the matter be?

               O dear, what can the matter be?

               O dear, what can the matter be?

               Johnny's so long at the fair.

 

     Indeed, as his lover begins imagining what might be happening to his friend in the city, as Boto puts it, “a foreign and dangerous place, a playground of hotels and seamen, subways and dive bars,” he also recalls the joys of their past, including the two of them attending a rural fair, riding a merry-go-round, playing games on the midway, and watching the clowns which, in his fears, quickly are overlaid upon his nightmare images of the city, the midway turning into a neon-lit main street that is precisely the “dirty” queer world that tortures his thoughts.

     In an amazingly surreal scene as he sleeps under the apple tree of his “last spring” his imagination conjures up a frightening adventure in which he travels to the city in an attempt to bring back his now drunken lover, who still eludes him, forcing him to chase after his loved one with the hope of restoring their bucolic existence.

       Yet the more he chases, the faster his lover disappears as the entire scene is transformed almost into a modern balletic expression of his fears in which he is forced to climb to a seemingly forbidden temple atop a hill where his lover stands someone like a god—a figure perhaps of his own making. By the time he finally reaches the summit the lover has seemingly disappeared, his after-image only vaguely being reflected into a small pool of water into which the would-be redeemer peers only to now witness his own reflection, like a Narcissus who has no one other than himself left to love. Stranded in a natural world that once seemed to protect his and his lover’s innocence, he must now face the horror of a world emptied by a society willing to tear the gay couple apart. The apple leaves falling upon his nightmare-ridden body can now only remind him of the Eden he las lost.

      Reichenbach, accordingly, has pulled the two strands of French homosexual representation together to suggest that those who also bleed can still be tortured by a society that transforms their innocent love into a luridly destructive act. No short gay film, to my knowledge, has better expressed the repression of homosexual love by what is clearly an unstated homophobia. In such a world even the clean eventually is dirtied, denigrated, destroyed.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).