Quentin Jabelot | Fauvre / 2021

blowback

by Douglas Messerli

 

Quentin Jabelot (screenwriter and director) Fauvre / 2021 [31 minutes]

 

Léo (Quentin Jabelot, also the writer and director) lives alone, and is also clearly lonely, hooking up mostly with Grindr guys. He’s a drama student, and meets up in the first scene of the film with his friend Léa (Lina ben Zekri) and with Alex (Antoine Chassagny)—who, it appears, have been past lovers—along with Alex’s friend, Mathis (Robin Monange) who, after studying elsewhere, is joining the company. Alex, we discern, would like to restore his relationship with Léa, but she refuses.

     One can see that there is something immediately in the looks exchanged between Léo and the new friend Mathis, but Léa quickly sweeps him away, asking him to read with her from the play she’s been asked to perform for class. It is apparent that Mathis is attractive to women.

     The friends plan an outing at a local pub that evening.

     Meanwhile, we see phone messages being sent to Léo from his family, which increasingly plays a role in his relationships with these friends since, having been divorced, his parents are planning to sell his childhood home and want him to travel and help pack up any of his possessions. Throughout the film, the event distracts him from focusing on personal relationships or perhaps puts any personal relationships he may seek into a slightly estranged context. If he were to meet someone whom he loves, he obvious fears that it might it end in the same way as the relationship between his father and mother. A pictures suggests he also has other siblings, but we never meet them or the parents themselves. Yet they hover over the entire drama.

      One of the fascinating aspects of this short work is that we see the central character interacting also through the plays they perform in front of their class. Early on we see Mathis reading to Léa’s recitation. He reads well regarding his love for her, but when the time comes for the scripted kiss, he doesn’t proceed, the teacher suggesting he go home and learn the lines before acting them.

     At the bar Léa continues to flirt with Mathis, getting somewhat drunk. When she asks Léo what he thinks of him, having observed that he keeps staring at him, Léo insists he’s just looking at his “bushy eyebrows,” besides Alex has told him that Mathis had a girlfriend and he doesn’t look gay; she laughs, arguing that Léo doesn’t “look gay” either. But she too is convinced that Mathis is straight and believes it might be interested in her.

      These 20-some youths repeat the conversations of so many of their age, at a time when they are all literally “sounding out” everyone they meet to determine not only whether they might be sexually interested in them but in this world, what gender they prefer. But Léa, in this case, plays the role of the usual straight man, presuming that anyone to whom she’s attracted is naturally heterosexual. Her conversation with Léo is only a casual check, a sought-after confirmation of her rights. And Léo’s passiveness in this scene, his easy acceptance of his friends predetermined definitions is somewhat curious. If he is this film’s “fauvre,” the wild beast, he seems particularly unable to perform the role.

       And, indeed, “performance” is operative word here, since everyone in their small set of friends is judged on how they “perform,” how they appear to behave rather than any discussion of what they truly feel and desire. They are, after all, actors who can easily portray surface emotions other than those they feel inside. These French students are quite obviously not studying “method” acting.

      As Léo stands alone broodingly looking out over the harbor, Mathis greets him, surprised to see him at the place. Mathis wonders why he’s there since he usually walks through the park on his way to the classes, the others had told him where Léo lived. Obviously, Mathis has been asking questions, but Léo doesn’t pick up on the scent, choosing instead his own line of inquiry about Léa, wondering how they have been getting on. Once more, the linguistic clues are missed: Mathis states the obvious, that they have been hanging out a lot together as they study the play they are to perform, but he’s a “bit embarrassed for Alex,” “I don’t want him to be imagining things.”

     Léo gets to the point, ”Don’t you like her?” But Mathis feels he still must obfuscate, suggesting that’s she fine but that he wouldn’t “do that to a friend,” meaning presumably he wouldn’t have sex with Léa since Alex still seems to be in love with her. But he carries the question a bit further in asking Léo, “What about you? Don’t you like her?”

       Finally, Léo has to explain that he is gay, surprised that that he hadn’t realized, Mathis responding just as Léo has about him: “But you don’t look gay.”

       I relate this particular conversation simply to demonstrate how truly dramatic Jabelot’s dialogue is: each person wants information which they are afraid to ask while expressing information about themselves that the other refuses to pick up on for fear of being mistaken. Somehow they can never simply ask or tell each other what they most want to know. A moment later, for example, there is another possible breakthrough as Mathis suggests it’s great that Léo is so “cool” about being gay, Léo asking “And how about you?” but quickly amending the real question with “Are you cool about being straight?” Even then he might have received an honest answer, but Alex suddenly appears, closing down their communication.

     The day before Léo is to leave for a week to help close down his family house, Léa insists he throw a party instead of dutifully packing as he claims is necessary. At the party, the three of them, like the younger friends in so many of the other films I’ve written about in this grouping, these young adults play “Truth or Dare.” This time Alex intrudes upon what we sense was about to be a revelation. Léa quickly pulls him into the other room. Strangely Mathis suggests they continue the game and since it’s his turn to ask, he “dares” Léo to share a “blowback,” that is the totally unhealthy sharing of cigarette smoke when a smoker blows the smoke he has just consumed from a puff back into another’s mouth. Such a gestural act can only lead to a deep kiss, but even that is again interrupted by Léa’s and Alex’s return just as the two lean in to enjoy the pleasure. And the next day Léo is off to visit his separated parents and close down his childhood house. So, it appears, any possible revelation of Mathis’ feelings have come to an end as well, despite his new fantasies.

       Léo returns from the country, arriving in the drama classroom suitcase in hand. Whispering while Léa and Mathis are about perform, Alex indicates that he and Léa may be a couple again. And during the break Mathis again tries to communicate with the lone lion, even asking if he has ever been in a relationship, Léo answering that it has not. Mathis suggests it may be difficult to find someone who is gay, and Léo responds that friends keep trying to match him with someone else who just because he also is gay Léo is expected to like.

      This time, however, Léo gets the chance to turn the conversation back on his inquisitor. “What about you? Your love life?”  Mathis assures him that there was never anything between them and apologizes for their last meeting when he run off “like a thief.” But once more he covers over his tracks, suggesting that he was high and didn’t know what he was doing. “I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea?” And before they might get the right idea, they are again joined by Léa and Alex, their well-meaning but always intuitively intrusive friends.

       But what is the right idea in this world in which no one is allowed to speak the full truth? Certainly it cannot be the lesson his character teaches Camille: “All men are liars, fickle cheaters, hypocrites, proud or cowardly, despicable, sensual; all women faithless, tricky, vain, inquisitive, and depraved.”

     It is now time for his reading, and Mathis does not even show up on time, arriving late. Léo’s character speaks of having been deceived in love, wounded, hurt.

      It is break again, and everyone leaves but Léo—and, we soon, discover Mathis. He observes Léo in tears, which he claims are on account of his allergies. But this time Mathis will not be  misled, suggesting that for an actor he is not a very good liar, and this time offering him, now as a friend, to listen to anything he wants to talk about.

     But now it is clear Léo feels that he has been toyed with, that Mathis has deceived him. Obviously, the blowback suddenly has come to mean something else, and in a short series of angry accusations, Léo makes it clear that he has fallen in love with a friend and feels betrayed by that friend who either is apparently not gay or at least won’t admit it. He himself feels, like the character Mathis has been playing, that he is now in “a cloud of smoke,” unable to find love and yet asked to perform speeches about it.

       He has, in fact, taken up Mathis’ offer, “talked,” spoken up for the first time about his own feelings which, in turn, permits Mathis to express his own confusion and lack of strength, which inevitably results in a kiss, another, and a final intense expression of their lips that doesn’t involve the dissolution of language.

       Throughout the film we have seen Léo soap up and shampoo his hairy body, and in the final scene he returns to his shower, the shampoo bottle finally empty; but the shower, we suddenly realize is full, since as the camera pans over we see Mathis standing in the corner waiting for his friend to join him in lovemaking.

 

Los Angeles, June 2, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2022).