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).
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