François Ozon | Action verité (Truth or Dare) / 1994

the real thing

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Ozon (screenwriter and director) Action verité (Truth or Dare) / 1994 [4 minutes]

 

The four 13- or 14-year-old adolescents in Ozon’s 1994 short film represent what might be described as the prototype of I am describing in this series of essays as works that explore sexuality past, present, and future through game playing. On the surface, the games played in these films seem fairly innocent until they reveal something to or about an individual which he, she or another has kept secret but is willing to reveal in order to challenge the status quo, either through that revelation or through the positive response of the other to whom the secret is revealed. And in that sense it does not so much involve a personal “coming out,” as a public one, a revelation to an individual or a community of friends of something previously felt to be inexpressible. The game actualizes or visually makes evident what the individual has been unable to express through language or daily social action.

     In this case, given the young ages of these French players—two boys, Remy and Paul (Fabien Billet and Adrien Pastor) and two girls, Hélène and Rose (Farida Rahmatoullah and Aylin Argun)—of “action verité” or “Truth or Dare” is basically an exploration of sexual variations through an adolescent lens. The players in this case begin with simple questions about whether or not they have “made out” with the opposite sex or dare each other to heterosexual kissing, in this first instance not even with the use of the tongue.

      That soon shifts to a dare to “suck face,” a more involved, but still timed, form of kissing; and quickly moves on other parts of the body, a request for one girl to lick the other’s foot.

       Finally, it gets down to a confession of one of the girls having slept with a boy, only to be called a “liar,” yet still insists that she has control over a guessing game to find out who it might be, questions squelched by the boys. A further dare requires Rose to fondle Paul’s dick through is pants.

      That, in turn, leads as these games often do to a dare of Remy to touch tongues with Paul for 5 seconds, a form of same-sex kissing, an act particularly difficult for the two boys given the generally homophobic response to such an act particularly at that age, when boys are first learning that they are “supposed” to be attracted only to the opposite sex and are highly curious about it. A few years earlier the same boys might have found no difficultly in kissing one another or even touching each other’s genitals, but at 14 their sexual urges and, perhaps even more importantly, the parental and peer pressures push the majority of them—the normative heterosexuals—toward the opposite sex and the abandonment of their previous “boys only” society. At this age they may even jack-off together but their thoughts must are supposed to be on the female sex.

      Paul doesn’t seem to especially mind it, but Remy spits out any share saliva, Paul shouting out that he doesn’t have AIDS, which itself suggests that the boys have been told or even taught that homosexuality is the cause of the dread epidemic, homophobia having become even more prevalent in the period of the film’s creation.

      In his dare, Paul takes the next logical step, requiring rose to put her hand inside Hélène’s panties. Both girls declare the boys to be immature jerks, but as required, proceed. But when her hand returns to sight we see menstrual blood upon it, all four these children suddenly becoming utterly silent as in those few seconds they have suddenly witnessed something far beyond what they might imagined in terms of smell or touch. Sexuality has suddenly become something very real without them perhaps being even able to explain it to themselves.

     Both boys and girls may in fact prefer to turn to their own gender rather than deal with what they cannot fully comprehend.

 

Los Angeles, June 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).