the sexual saturation of narcissus
by Douglas Messerli
Karl Forest and Wallace Potts (screenplay), Wallace
Potts (director) Le beau mec / 1979
For those in the know, Wallace Potts, who directed
this utterly fascinating documentary on one of the first of France’s gay porn
superstars, is best known for his numerous films of Russian-born dancer Rudolf
Nureyev’s performances. His ability to film all these important documentary
movies came about because he was Rudy’s lover and close friend for 7 years. A
soft-spoken, intensely handsome US Southern boy, Potts wowed not only Nureyev,
whose immense ego he was able to balance with his gentle southern drawn and
refusal to see himself at the center of events. After their breakup, he eventually attracted the
great cinematographer Nestor Almendros into his bed while Almendros while he
was shooting Truffaut’s The Last Metro (previously having filmed Rohmer’s “Six Moral
Tales” series, La Marquise d'O...,1976, Perceval le
Gallois, 1978, and Pauline at the Beach, 1983, as well as Terence
Mallick’s Days in Heaven, 1978 and François
Truffaut’s The Wild Child of 1970, and numerous Hollywood films.)
Mixing
recreated gay porn scenes with extant interviews this fascinating docufantasy,
long available only on truncated VHS transfers (one of which I watched before I
rented the new version), has now been reclaimed as a DVD restoration.
Forest, serving as a co-writer, comes off sometimes as a brash,
somewhat unthinking product of provincial France. He grew up in an area where
the French underground had once inhabited, leaving their active rifles and
ammunition in the caves. He and other boys behaved apparently somewhat like the boys in Italian director Matteo
Garrone’s 2008 Italian crime film Gomorrah, where the young play with real rifles as if
they were toys. Such behavior is seemingly always involved with sex, guns and
sex being the standard associations in such sexually sublimated societies.
Sex and
guns become a major sub-theme of the film, as Forest joins the military, where as
an officer, he refused, with some noted regret, to have sex with any of his
military associates, terrified that he might be referred to in the strict
system to which he was committed, as a faggot.
The
film early on asserts its significance through the deep sexual link between men
and guns, with Forest, stark naked, sprawling on the nose of a large canon. Throughout this work Potts plays with the obvious sexual relationship between
guns and cocks.
Indeed,
Forest willfully plays along moving on to other obvious sexual parallels as the
self-willed porn star speaks often almost ironically of his life, keeping
a slight distance between his role as a sex actor and an individual: “What I do
at night I don’t do in the daytime. I see that film at night. I’m the actor.”
“I work out for myself, like preparing myself for
other things. ….I use the mirror only to help me. When I see myself in the
mirror I don’t fall in love with myself, shit no, if I fell in love with myself
I wouldn’t be going to the gym.
In ten
years when the body’s gone I’ll have changed completely. But right now my life
is dressing up and showing off and all that. …But right now, it’s the body,
sex, and money.”
Potts alternates
these somewhat self-reflective comments with a large dose of open sex,
something you can’t imagine even being possible today without it being
described as pure porn. Yet we recognize this very sexy movie somehow as being
also a kind of soft-porn eroticism. The director is able to manage this because
of the sexual openness of the times, just before AIDS, and the irony in which
Forest himself is able to capture his sexual allure.
At
one point, he states “What I really like is a well-developed boy.” And in the
next moment he admits his sexual infatuation “Maybe it’s unfortunate, but I
see people only for sex.” Moreover, unlike most later porn stars, hustlers, and
sexual tricksters, Forest totally embraces his gay sexuality, admitting that “I’m
a man for all seasons. I can do anything,” explaining that he likes to fuck, be
fucked, to be sucked off, and move moreover into other sexual fetishes: “Yeah, I do fist
fucking both ways, give and take.”
It’s
this honest sexual patter that keeps Potts’ film from taking all the lusting
bodies of fucking and frotting too seriously. I truly don’t think you could
make such an honest sexual film today, much like the next year’s Equation to an
Unknown. It becomes so clear, in watching the entertainment that we have now
grown so very conservative in the gay attempt to match heterosexual
expectations that the raw difference this movie reveals is simply unacceptable.
As I
discussed with a friend of mine only yesterday, AIDS changed everything,
politics behind it so that we can simply no longer totally enjoy our bodies, or
the sexual differences between heterosexual caution and homosexual excess.
Love
clearly has nothing to do with it: “Yeah, once I was in love. As it turns out,
he wasn’t in love with me. I was in love with a boy, but since he wasn’t in
love with me, it didn’t work out. I don’t know why it didn’t, and didn’t try to
understand why it didn’t.”
Yet,
even in this dreamscape of sexual abandonment there is a true comeuppance, a
kind of inevitable sadness that we have come to expect in all gay films, alas.
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But
then that myth was always been about the beauty of the body mirrored into a duo
in which anyone might imagine himself (or herself) as the other. Nureyev,
himself, was long rumored to have choreographed the striptease sequences.
The great dancer died of complications of AIDS
at age 54 in 1993. Potts himself died if complications of lymphoma in a Los
Angeles hospital in 2006 at age 59.
Vito
Rosso was right, as usual. Beautiful gay boys are always destined to die. But
in this movie we see the beauty of their sexual energy and the vitality of
their lives.
If you’re
not squeamish about gay sex, Le beau mec is a film you have to see.
Los Angeles, November 17, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024)
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