Hugo Bouillaud | une parenthèse (A Parenthesis) / 2020

the wolf inside every man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Bouillaud (screenwriter and director) une parenthèse (A Parenthesis) / 2020 [19 minutes]

 

The French film A Parenthesis, directed by Hugo Bouillaud, is an experimental work that describes itself as a fantasy. But its fantastical elements seem more to me like images conjured up in a psychiatrist’s office by a young straight man who, attending one the numerous apartment parties he apparently does, suddenly discovers himself talking to a young man of his age whose pretty floral shirt he suddenly feels compelled to unbutton.

     Returning home, he’s confused—perhaps by the poetry of his own pen which begins “Dreaming about the engraved men / Strewn on the ground of your cave / Feels like coming home.” And it is these lines that haunt his dreams wherein he suddenly sees a large scratch on his arm (which for anyone of my generation, brings up the fears we all had of discovering spots on our bodies in dread of AIDS), and is himself suddenly forced to scratch his own face, engraving marks on one of his cheeks as well before he moves down to attack his own chest.

     These presumably are the horrible feelings he describes of the wild self, the wolf of vampirism suggested throughout the film, that he discovers now within his own being, aspects of himself he has never before imagined to be there. Obviously, this beautiful young man (Alban Pellet) associates his suddenly revealed homosexual desires with some wild beast who isn’t satisfied simply by kissing the girls through a spin-the-bottle game in which strangely these 20-some-year-old partygoers still engage.

     Watching this film, I wanted to scream out, “Honey don’t hurt that pretty face anymore. You’re not a wild beast! You just found out you may have some homosexual feelings, the most normal thing in the world. Calm down, go back to sleep, and call up that young boy whose lovely shirt you were trying to remove in the morning and tell him you’d like to see him. And let things happen as they naturally might.”

     But Bouillaud stood in the way, as the handsome young man continued to suffer in agony with the realization that he may be growing tired of the opposite sex.

     The movie puts some objects under the covers to suggest that he is “the master of the puppets” which have come to haunt him, which if he’d only face them, put his pillow there, and just let go…might relieve his suffering. But unfortunately, our young hero needs first to go through the “horror theatre” to discover how wild the emotions are within him before he can come to any acceptance of his bisexuality.

      Fortunately, he eventually comes to the vision of his sexuality totality, with Verdi’s “Va, pensiero” from his opera Nabucco, the piece better known as “The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves,” playing in the background, as both his women and male friends come streaming to him with loving hugs. For a moment, he’s in ecstasy.

      Finally, he recognizes that his feelings for the boy with the pretty shirt was just a parenthesis, hence the film’s title, but that even a parenthesis can be engraved on the memory for a very long time.

     Too bad he didn’t just make the telephone call, meet up with the boy, and hop in the sack. He wouldn’t have even have had to suffer through the film’s imaginary beasts, and he certainly could have laid to rest the old wives’ tale that “there’s a wolf inside every man.” Often, it’s just the image of pretty boy which he can’t get out of his head.

     This may be one of the first bisexual “coming out” movies that uses the tropes of experimental cinema to express its meaning, although you might certainly trace some of these fears, if not  precisely the same images, back to the nightmares of Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, and Gregory Markopoulos’ gay coming-out films of the 1940s and 1950s.

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2023

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (April 2023).