Pascal-Alex Vincent | Doone-moi la main (Give Me Your Hand) / 2008

you can’t go home again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pascal-Alex Vincent (screenwriter and director) Donne-moi la main (Give Me Your Hand) / 2008

 

French director Pascal-Alex Vincent’s first feature film Give Me Your Hand—ostensibly a road trip movie in which two identical twin brothers walk, hitchhike, and travel by train from their French home to a small and isolated Spanish village to attend the funeral of their mother whom they can’t remember—was rather inexplicably savaged by critics.

     The Hollywood Reporter argued that the film shunned logic, being “a hazy film open to almost any interpretation.” The majority of the critics could not understand the behavior of the twins, being unable to explain their constant physical battles, their abuse of one another, and their endless  silence in the midst of somewhat inexplicable actions. Ed Gonzalez from Slant went even further in suggesting that the beautiful male duo was simply an excuse for Vincent’s camera to focus upon their wrestling bodies: “Presumably the film is meant as an inquiry into the furiously existential ties between twins, possibly even their search for individualism, but what this dreamy tour of the French and Spanish countryside more accurately represents is the most attractively shot twin porn of all time.” Mike Hale from The New York Times found “The Carrils [the twins, Alexandre and Victor] are so inexpressive and the script so sketchy that we never have much of a stake in figuring it out.”

     Critics are often a lazy bunch, demanding explanations that many everyday viewers get right off. And Vincent establishes their relationship in the very first scene of the film through an animated short in which we observe Antoine (Alexandre Carril) working in his father’s bakery meeting up with his brother Quentin (Victor) who obviously has left home. Together, without even bothering to tell their father, they escape on the adventure of traveling to their mother’s funeral in Spain. The fact that, quite obviously, the father is not interested in paying homage to his former wife and probably would not have approved of the boy’s trip, is all we need imagine to comprehend the boy’s sense of pleasure in meeting up and moving away from the village in which they have apparently spent their entire lives. It doesn’t matter that they can’t even remember their mother, the fact that the one who bore them is a stranger makes the voyage even more compelling. It is an exploration into a past they never knew about themselves.

     What we also do perceive in these early animated frames is that Antoine, the loyal son and obviously the father’s favorite, is the stronger and more capable to the two, while his brother, who spends the trip drawing portraits and images, can hardly keep up with the other and certainly spends for more time in complaint of hunger and tiredness. We see that difference played out in these first scenes when, coming to a railroad crossing, a train suddenly being announced as the protective bars fall into place as Antoine jumps over the bars and track to the other side, while the more cautious Quentin remains, even ducking out of sight to worry his brother over his disappearance after the train has sped past. If Antoine is the stronger, Quentin is far cleverer and more sensitive.

     Their constant wrestling matches concern so much more than what Gonzalez describes as a search for “individualism”; it is a way to relieve the frustration both feel for the difference that lies within their deep-loving outward similarities. Antoine has a scar over his left eye, moreover, obviously a trophy of his more violent nature.

     Once we have established this intense love-hate relationship it is not difficult to comprehend why they behave as they do. For once free of the village strictures and the father’s world, both display even more openly their differences. Antoine holds the map, while Quentin complains; and generally, it is Antoine who makes the decisions, Quentin often reluctantly following.

      This happens several times. For example, when the boys determine to catch a free ride hiding in large concrete tubes on a flatbed with a Spanish license, it is Antoine who determines when it’s time to crawl in and later, when the trucker discovers their existence and plans to use them in some nefarious act with his supplier or customer, it is Antoine who leaps out of the car first, Quentin following. 

     Yet, at an earlier stop the car makes at a gasoline station, it is Quentin who picks ups a woman, Clémentine (Anaïs Demoustier) and arranges to have sex with her in the back trailer, while Antoine is forced to sit sullenly in the front. When the three finally begin a trek on foot, it is now Antoine who jealously pulls her away from his brother to take his sexual turn, as Quentin moves away in deference and perhaps disinterest.

      What is quite obvious is that, if Antoine is the alpha-male of the two, Quentin, being freed of his father, has experimented far more with sex. This becomes even more apparent when the two go to work on a local farm to raise enough money to take the train.

      Again, Antoine takes the job first, followed by his brother. But it is Quentin who finds an attractive fellow worker, Hakim (Samir Harrag), to his sexual liking as the two spend a long romantic homosexual tryst in the fields.

      Missing his brother, Antoine goes on the search only to discover him fucking the boy—evidently with some sense of shock. He soon demands they leave the farm, presumably to get his brother away from Hakim and other such male influences. But the very fact that he had discovered Quentin is bisexual or perhaps even more fully homosexual is yet another stake in his heart concerning their inner differences.

      Almost out of resentment, when he is approached by a man wanting sex in a gas station café, he suddenly plays pimp, asking the man for a hundred Euros to fuck his brother, who’s just gone off to the bathroom. The man, who then accosts Quentin, not only startles him in his actions, but reveals his own brother’s betrayal, as the boy runs off, leaving his backpack behind.

      Perhaps regretting his action, Antoine retrieves Quentin’s backpack, expecting that, now that they have enough money, he’ll meet him at the train station. The train comes, and Quentin doesn’t appear; Antoine has no choice but get on and travel on alone.

      The brothers have, accordingly, now split up. Antonine, as he treks through the woods of Spain, clearly feeling guilty for his behavior, keeps thinking that he sees his brother. At one point, imagining him on a trail far below the one on which he walks, he attempts to scale down the cliff only to fall unconscious to the weeds below.

      It is there that a Spanish woman finds him, takes him home, and nurses him back to health. She is a no-nonsense independent figure, as verbally uncommunicative as Antoine is. At one point she enters his room, sits down on his bed, and jacks him off. There is no love, no words, just her version of quick relief of desire.

      Indeed, one of the first things we realize about these boys is not only how attractive they are, but how nearly everyone they meet is intrigued by them and desires to have sexual contact. They serve almost as physical magnets to males and females along the way, fascinating the others as twins often do. It is no accident that in both gay and heterosexual pornography, twins are a constant, nearly as common in gay porno images as are cowboys, sailors, and motorcyclists.

      The deep kinship is also felt by the twins themselves who often, at least in our sexual fantasies (but also in real life) have established their own sexual intimacy—which these boy’s wrestling bouts also hint at. All of which makes the differences between even more painful and frustrating.

      When finally Antoine reaches his destination, the funeral already in progress, he finds his brother already there. Somehow Quentin, despite his physical weakness, has beaten his brother to their destination. Antoine, at first, is just relieved that his brother has survived, reaching out to hold his hand in the midst of the closing lines of the priest’s litany. We never even get a glimpse of the mothers’ casket or her grave.

     Quentin is obviously equally happy to see Antoine. But his anger remains, and the two brothers need, once more, to wrestle to both wrest (pull out) and rest (lay to rest) their inner demons. This time the battle takes place in the nearby ocean, where for the first time Quentin bests his brother, but in the process nearly drowning him. Fearing that his brother has actually drowned, he pulls him slowly up upon the beach, attempting to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation, still seemingly without results. But finally Antoine comes back to consciousness, vomits out the water, and fully returns to life. The brothers hug. But now, having almost killed his beloved sibling, Quentin knows they cannot remain together, and walks off, for the first time leaving his brother to stay or follow him as he chooses. The differences have now become too heavy to bear daily facing the image of another version of the self; even deep love is not enough.

     Vincent has very nicely portrayed the struggle of two beautiful boys coming to terms with their own identities, paralleled by the travels they share and, as moving through space together and separate, they come to define themselves—the way all voyages since the Odyssey have accomplished. That this director does this almost in the terms of an almost silent film is all the more impressive.

     Finally, the boy’s constant wrestling bouts, of course, recall the battles we all do with ourselves, the struggles we have between contrary notions of who we are and what behavior we are willing to accept. Without too much exaggeration, one might easily see this film as an emblematic presentation of the experience of “coming out.” Imagining both young men to represent differing aspects of the same self, the queer one already forced to leave home, trying to come to terms with his own sexuality, while the normative self stays, we recognize the common genre. As he finally discovers a kind of love far deeper than his other self has discovered, he realizes he is truly gay, despite the other part of his being still rejecting it. But finally, he learns to exist on his own terms, almost killing off the old self, while leaving some of that being alive just to maintain the feeling and empathy for that which he knows he must leave behind as he moves on to a new more fulfilling queer life. This possible reading is hinted at several times, but no more fully than when Antoine meets a woman on the train and attempts to explain that he has lost his brother, she bringing up that fact that when she was young, she had an imaginary self, but has found she is better off recognizing that it was only an illusion.

     But whether we see this film as an odd realist vision or a metaphoric one, it is surely made visually rich and alive as a road trip back to the source of existence in order to discover what either both men or both aspects of the same self realize was missing from their lives, adult love. Quentin has seemed to find it in his tryst with Hakim, while Antoine is still contemplating what it might be like; and in that respect the director appears to argue that Quentin’s queerness has won the day in its endless battle with Antoine’s heteronormative play of a quick forest fuck and a jack off. As one of the film’s last verbal moments, Quentin suggests Antoine return home where his father is waiting. But whether you imagine them as two beings or one now radiantly alive one, we know that you can’t go home again. 

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).