by Douglas Messerli
Olivier Lallart (screenwriter and director) PD
(Fag) / 2019 [35 minutes]
For 17-year-old high school student Thomas (Paul Gomérieux) it all
begins at a teen house party where he sits with two of his best friends dishing
their classmates as they enter in and out of their couchbound sights. One of
the class Romeos is chatting up a good-looking girl—not, Thomas admits, his
type—when suddenly the couple’s conversation alters as they begin to fight, the
boy voyeurs laughing over the all-too public event. As the former young
courtier stalks off, one of the friends goes over to introduce himself to the
girl they’ve been observing, hoping to interlope, one imagines, on the
immediate rebound.
As in many such teenage
gatherings, we observe the stragglers playing a kind of “Truth or Dare” version
of “Spin-the-Bottle.” With the first bottle spin two women are asked to kiss
each other, which they do, quite seriously, some young boys responding that
it’s so “hot” to see two women kiss.
When another woman spins
and “dares” the chosen one to kiss the person of the second spin, the bottle
pairs up Esteban and Thomas, the former of whom almost reneges on the act
before being forced to carry out the game’s rules; after all, the girls argue,
if men can be turned on my women, why can’t the girls see two boys engage in an
intense kiss. The two boys finally offer their teenage audience the pleasure of
their inter-locked lips.
Later, having gotten quite
drunk, as his head lies on his friend’s shoulder, Thomas admits he actually
liked Esteban’s kiss. But he’s not gay he reassures his buddy.
Denials hardly matter in
this homophobic world, and by the next morning Thomas observes nearly all of
his classmates turning away from him as he enters into their space, whispering
to others with their eyes darting to catch a side glance of Thomas’ visage,
some actually engaging in cat-calls or uttering the school’s favorite slur,
“fag.” We see Esteban, obviously the recipient of similar insinuations,
slugging another boy in the distance, after which the handsome tall youth grabs
hold of his girlfriend almost as if she were a life raft.
Thomas’ friend admits to having shared the boy’s previous night’s admission, arguing that it was just something to laugh at; yet he too does not now dare to be seen talking too long to Thomas without also being labeled as a queer. A shower after track is torture for Thomas as the other boys not only shun him, but make rude remarks about his desires to fuck them.
With an eerie accompaniment
of a high-pitched electronic music by composers
MEKIAS
and J-Zeus, French director Olivier Lallart reveals the terror of suddenly
finding oneself in high school isolation by focusing his camera on side,
shoulder-and-head shots of Thomas as if he were being cast for a role of a
leper for William Wyler’s Ben Hur, Gomérieux’s naturally pouting-lips
pointing to his disappointment with his former friends and his entire life. But
we also recognize that in his sudden ostracization, Thomas must now face his
own questions about sexuality. As one of his acquaintances reminds him, he has
never asked the girls out for a date. And his eyes do give him away as
he gazes at his new enemy, Esteban, with sudden longing and now fear.
So, we perceive, we have
entered the murky territory of yet another lecture, for better or worse, on
homophobia, a crucial subject to which young men and woman must repeatedly be
exposed, but for an older viewer such as myself, a theme so threaded into the
narrative of LGBTQ cinema that one can only wonder what in a 35-minute film
Lallart can contribute to the topic.
A lecture by the high
school history professor (Marc Riso)—occasioned by overhearing one student call
another “PD” (pédé) or, in English, “fag”—attempts to provide a précis of the
history of “homosexuality” from the ancient Greeks and Romans, for whom he
argues there was no concept for and no imaginative separation between
homosexual and heterosexual acts, to the rise of religious values and the
Industrial Revolution’s hierarchies which demanded that men and women contain
themselves in the structures of family units in order to produce consumer
children. Explaining to young listeners that what they are expressing in their
hurtful terminology is a cultural invention which they’ve learned but does not
truly exist nor need to be perpetuated. Along with revealing his own
homosexuality, what he expresses appears to be enlightening to this young
student body. And by the end of the film they are finally able to turn their
attention away from something they see as the “other”—and therefore “monstrous”
in the sense of a “warning” or “demonstration” of its queerness—in order to
attend to their own normative desires. But it all seems too easy and simplified
in this movie, as if all one has to do to stop the fear of sexual difference
is to attend to one’s own sexual interests, no empathy or even curiosity
required. After all, these are modern day youths, gymnasium students who all
claim they are LGBTQ friendly, whatever that might individually mean to them.
Fortunately, Lallart does
not focus on the normative aversion to queer individuals, but on Thomas and
Esteban themselves, revealing that despite all of his macho bluffing, Esteban
is truly attracted to Thomas, using the threat of verbal abuse to actually
plant kisses of desire that he pretends that “fags” are always seeking. It’s it
a wonderfully strange scene in which Thomas, almost totally passive is
seemingly tortured by Esteban’s intense love-making mockery. It reminds anyone
who has seen the coming-out British film Get Real (1988) of school jock
John Dixon’s beating of his lover Steven Carter in the men’s locker room,
outside of which wait his sports buddies talking pleasure in Carter’s screams
of pain, while within the audience witnesses John’s slugs entering his school
bag while his friend performs a dance of howls upon the floor. Esteban’s brutal
kisses in PD are intended to be interpreted as a punishment that salves
the sufferer’s symbolic pain with the balm of love—a representation of just how
perverse gay love is in a world that nourishes self-denigration and hate.
Who wouldn’t be confused in such a closed society? Thomas even stalks down two gay men whom he observes touching each other and holding hands in a local pub to ask them his inexpressible question....”How to....” After inquiring whether he attends the lycée, they rotely answer, “It gets better,” but recognize quickly that it is no answer at all, and that perhaps it never truly does get better but, as one puts it, “you come to ignore it.” Or, hints his friend, it never truly does get better. What changes is the way you come to see yourself. They suggest that whenever he becomes the subject of their stares that instead of turning away, he look directly back at them into their eyes, almost as a kind of challenge. Yet, as we all know, that too can be dangerous.
Nonetheless, Thomas finally does accomplish something similar to that when, at the school prom, he pulls away from the girl (the very same woman that he and his friends first observed in the earliest scene of this movie) and moves across the floor to where Esteban is dancing with his girlfriend, moving his friend’s arm from where he holds his date and placing it to encircle his own waist. As if intoxicated with Thomas’ bold move, Esteban takes up the dance with his gay lover, as all the other dancers stop in place, openly staring with wonder. The two challenge them not by looking back into their stares but deeply looking into each other’s eyes as they glide across the floor. A few seconds later, the others, as if released from an ancient curse, turn back to their partners and continue their dance.
If it’s a bit difficult to
believe that “that’s all there is” to it, it’s a very lovely fairy tale which
is worth holding onto as long as one can.
Los Angeles, January 30, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January
2020).
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