Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern | Saint Amour (Holy Love) / 2016

variations of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern (screenwriters and director) Saint Amour (Holy Love) / 2016

 

After posting my essay on their early 2004 film Aaltra, I discovered several of other cinematic works by the duo of filmmakers Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine including their truly revelatory and humanly touching film of 2016, Saint Amour. I found this film so openly forgiving of the everyday failures of our species that I could imagine few other comparisons outside of the works of their fellow countrymen, also writing in French, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. Along with equally compassionate filmmakers such as the French-speaking and Dutch directors Jacques Feyder, Chantal Akerman, Jaco Van Dormael, and Lukas Dont one has to wonder at the fact of this small endlessly war-ridden country’s ability to produce such absolving if rather pessimistic visions of mankind.

      The central figures of Saint Amour are anything but saints and certainly not representatives of lovers, the “hick” peasant farmers Jean (Gérard Depardieu) and his son Bruno (Benoît Poelvoorde) who travel to Paris for the annual agricultural fair with their prize bull and other cows.

      In the past Bruno (Poelvoorde substituting in the usual pairing of Kervern and Delépine) has escaped to Paris for the same event with his uncle (Gustave Kervern) who use the occasion to visit the numerous booths of the various French winemakers to imagine a visit through the various wine-making provinces of France. Consuming glass after glass as they move along the booths, the two seldom have been able to complete their “travels’” through the French “provinces” before they fall drunkenly on the floor or, in this year’s case, join the piglets in a pen which after attempting to capture them, fall into a deep stupor.

      Bruno’s father has accompanied his son this event knowing that Bruno has once again come up against the fact that he is frustrated in his role as a farmer who never has the opportunity to truly walk through the doors of French exhibition halls into the streets of a city notorious filled with the opportunities of love and other forbidden activities.

      As Bruno tearfully and painfully admits to his truly understanding pater, he has become an unattractive farmer hick without any possibility of attracting other women in his vastly delimited life. Alternatively, he imagines himself as becoming what we recognize would perhaps be even more limiting, a life where he might work as a salesman. When you perceive yourself at the bottom of the cultural totem pole, even the standard roles of cultural enslavement sound attractive.

      Commuting with his dead wife through a cellphone message taped from the day of her death, Jean explains his plans to accompany his son on an actually tour of the wine-making provinces to help provide his errant “boy” to live out some of his dreams, hopefully allowing him to return ever-after to the farmer fold.

     In what quickly becomes another Delépine and Kervern “on the road” movie, Mike, following the advice of Jean’s and Bruno’s tourist maps, rides with them through the various wine-making provinces, himself messaging back through his cellphone with his wife and children, as he moves them through the landscape, taking detours to meet up with his own previous sexual dalliances, one of who has now become a disabled wheelchair victim and another who, now pregnant literally attacks her former “lover.”

      But Jean, alas, is himself a kind of idiot, hiring a taxi driven by an equally confused driver, with the very un-French name of Mike (Vincent Lacoste) (which is suggests sounds more like John Deere, the noted US factory that produces their tractors and other farming equipment), to take off a couple of days to tour them through the French countryside.

     In what quickly becomes another Delépine and Kervern “on the road” movie, Mike, following the advice of Jean’s and Bruno’s tourist maps, rides with them through the various wine-making provinces, himself messaging back through his cellphone with his wife and children, as he moves them through the landscape, taking detours to meet up with his own previous sexual dalliances, one of who has now become a disabled wheelchair victim and another who, now pregnant literally attacks her former “lover.”

     Along the way, Jean, who has not had sex or has partaken of alcohol since the death of his wife (in the former case) or the birth of his son (in the latter), finds himself as the confident of one young waitress with whom they meet up, and with whom Bruno might have himself imagined joining in bed, and, in another instance, sharing a bed with a same-age woman with whom he shares a remarkable night, but with whom he “forgets” to have sex.

     Mike, presumably the sexual sophisticate of the group, later reveals, after Jean admits that his telephonic messages are spoken to a dead woman who is still the receptor his messages, that his own cellphone communications are to a nonexistent wife and a family he has simply created in order to deflect any questions about his love life.

     As the trio moves through space, their sexual failures become more and more evident, at one point Bruno having sex with a real-estate agent only to discover that the tryst was merely a set-up by the agent (Ovidie) to restore her relationship with her lesbian partner. At another point, hooking up with several prostitutes, Bruno admits to one of them that he is truly bi-sexual as he discovers himself the next morning in drag, wearing the prostitute’s dress.

      Mike, who quickly escapes all of his past liaisons, is forced one night to endlessly listen to the prophet-like drivel by the owner of a guest house (played by the highly controversial writer Michel Houllebecq), and later admits at his own failure with women due to his early childhood disease of penile Phlebitis, medicines for which turned the tip of his cock black.

      These failed men, their masculinity totally threatened, are redeemed into heterosexual paradise by the appearance of a figure named—what else, Venus (Céline Sallette), an amazon-like horsewoman who is determined in the last remnants of her menstruation cycle to produce a baby, and seeks out sex with all three men in order to assure herself of impregnation.

      One by one, each of these “sexual incompetents” are supposedly brought to sexual rhapsody by engaging in sex with Venus, the three of them finally embracing her as their mutual wife in their imaginary shared fatherhood with the woman, the three of them becoming, without the movie actually admitting it, a kind of polyamorous trio who bring her home of the countryside life of a farmer’s wife.

      Although heterosexual normativity is obviously the result of their ambivalent sexual explorations, Delépine and Kervern do not necessarily focus on its delimitations. Indeed, their film seems to suggest, if only through Mike’s sexual fears, Jean’s sexual abandonment, and Bruno’s utter sexual confusion, that these men are able to discover themselves as fully functioning sexual beings. Who is the father, i.e. who might have been potent enough to finally produce the sperm that creates Venus’s child, is beside the question. They now love one another just as much as they love Venus. Besides, we must remember, Venus bore not only the Roman warrior Aeneus, but fathered Cupid, the endless procreator of love itself.

 

Los Angeles, October 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).