Lukas Dhont | Corps perdu (Headlong) / 2012

into the night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lukas Dhont (screenwriter and director) Corps perdu (Headlong) / 2012 [17 minutes]

 

A young dancer, Miller (Jelle Florizoone) has come to a strange city in order to compete in a ballet dancing competition. We see him early on in Lukas Dhont’s 17-minute film dancing a number from Giselle.

    In this strange city, however, the 16-year-old knows no one and sits alone in his hotel room overlooking the city below. Early the next morning, as he dresses for his day there is a sudden knock on his door, and when he answers it, a stranger, Jerome (Thomas Coumans) pushes his way into room, grabbing Miller and holding him briefly by the neck to tell him to remain quiet.

      The police soon knock on the door, and with no response soon leave. Jerome demands to use his cellphone as he calls up his accomplice to complain of the amateurish deal, evidently a drug pick-up.

     He asks the boy if he has a sweater or shirt that he might have, and Miller offers him a blue hoodie. Meanwhile, the criminal, announcing his thirst, pulls a drink out of the boy’s room bar and two watch a TV musical entertainment together.

      When he exits finally, he leaves his leather jacket behind, Miller discovering within a package of whatever drug his has acquired, probably cocaine.

       It’s unsure why Miller insists on tracking the stranger down to return the packet of drugs to him. Perhaps he believes Jerome as left it in the jacket by mistake, or perhaps the naïve Belgian dancer is simply lonely, and this on-the-run criminal is the first person in the strange city (not apparently in the Flanders in which he has grown up; although Jerome speaks French, Miller’s French is seemingly learned, something apart from his native Dutch) who has truly communicated with him.

      Jerome immediately tosses the packet away and warns the innocent to return to his hotel room, advice which the boy refuses to heed. And finally, trailing along after Jerome, Miller cannot even find his way back. As David Hall writing in Gay Celluloid cleverly puts it, “Ditching his ballet shoes for a walk on the wild side, the two are soon to be found dancing to the nightclub beat.”

      For the first time Jerome, obviously the product of a provincial world (instead of describing himself as 16, he replies in French, “10 and 6”), finds himself in an adult bar dancing with an attractive male. It is truly love at first dance outside of the ballet world. And he is terrified when it appears that Jerome has escaped the place without him.

      But even this “criminal” cannot leave such a true “fool” alone, pulling him out of the bar only to attempt to speed away from him, with the madly-in-love boy running after. They end up, both severely out of breath and Jerome with a bloody nose back in his hotel room. There, like the teenage boy he actually is, Miller invites his newfound friend Jerome to watch him perform his ballet of the next afternoon. Jerome is impressed and more than a little startled that the kid who has inexplicably tagged along with him is a ballet dancer. He tentatively agrees. But we realize, he cannot actually attend. There will be no "date."

      When Miller wakes up early the next morning, he finds the boy, fully clothed, sleeping on the long windowsill. After gently lifting up the boy to place him back into his own bed, the drug dealer escapes into the night.

      In the final scene, we watch Miller, bare-chested, modelling the leather jacket Jerome has left behind.

      This was the now well-known Ghent-born director Dhont’s first film. His genius is clearly evident even in the 2012 freshman outing.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).