Jean-Luc Godard | Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) / 1967, USA 1968

day and night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Catherine Vimenet and Jean-Luc Godard (writers), Jean-Luc Godard (director) Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) / 1967, USA 1968

 

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Two or Three Things I Know About Her, appeared during a period when his films were not only moving to more political concerns and, despite his love of all things American earlier his career, a time in which Godard was shifting to a strong anti-American sentiment.

       These are very much the issues of this film, which is not a typical film narrative as much as it is a kind of essay on the condition of all things French in relationship to the seemingly endless involvement in Viet Nam, which I think it is important to remember, began with the French political and social commitment to that country years earlier.

 

     It’s clear that Godard is highly disturbed throughout by not only the appropriation of American values on French culture, but the culture’s own appropriation of itself; one of the central scenes takes place in a bookstore where a writer and his assistant quote passages randomly out of piles of nearby books, presumably creating a collage of narrative fiction, which might almost describe Godard’s own methods in some part.

       One might also describe this work as a critique of a world, so influenced by US values, that “she (France),” too has turned into a kind of consumer world, in which even the bourgeois housewife at the center of this work, Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady) turns herself into a commodity, loaning out her body to loveless encounters each day to earn a little extra cash in order to purchase the new dresses, washing machines, and other products for which she also daily shops.

 

      Underneath her everyday movements of shopping, housework and child-rearing, the voice of Godard himself, kept to a near whisper, speaks of the attempt by the French government in their attempts to build major new communities on the edge of Paris, critiques the current politics, and attacks the US involvement in Viet Nam. These seemingly ordinary events accordingly are connected with global governmental forces who, the voice argues, are working to make all of us into mindless consumers—not only of products, but non-events, and even unemotional relationships.

       At one point, Juliette visits the garage where her husband works to get the car washed, her best friend, also a day-time prostitute, having joined her. Her apparently near sexless husband greets her simply as if she were another customer, simply briefly conversing with her, before sending her on her way.

      How different is Juliette’s day-time sexual activities from that of the central character of Buñuel’s heroine in Belle de Jour, a film made the very same year, and released a couple of months later. Séverine Serizy, married to a handsome doctor, is obsessed by the sexual secrecies of being a day-time prostitute, excited by her new encounters, particularly with a handsome young thug, Marcel—who ultimately turns her everyday life into a position of being a kind of nurse to her doctor husband.

      The sexual activities of Juliette, on the other hand, are absolutely banal and as aesthetically boring as the dresses and products she purchases. Her dresses are clearly mass-produced pieces, usually in stripes, whereas Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour wore dresses designed by St-Laurent. If Séverine lives with a handsome man, who clearly loves her, Juliette lives with a mechanic who believes life consists of working, eating, and sleeping; along with a constantly crying young boy, she does not live in a stylish Paris apartment, but in the bland high-rise that government has built to house its poorer citizens.

     Séverine works in a discrete apartment complex, whereas Juliette encounters her men in dreary hotel rooms or, even when she and her friend actually encounter an American in an expensive hotel (which even has a bathroom), he wants to play games more than actually have sensual sexual encounters. The American, named by Godard as John Bogus (Raoul Lévy) dressed in an ugly T-shirt emblazoned with the American flag—himself a former American advisor for the Viet Nam War—who asks Juliette and her friend to cover their faces with air-line shopping bags while he films them. Juliette passively opts out of any later activities in which her “friend” participates.

       In fact, the “her” of this film is not simply the mindless female protagonist, but is, given the French feminine endings of so many words in the language, many other things, a thing that stands in for all those “others.” As the promotional film poster argued, “her” is the subject of a great many things:

 

HER, the cruelty of neo-capitalism

HER, prostitution

HER, the Paris region

HER, the bathroom that 70% of the French don't have

HER, the terrible law of huge building complexes

HER, the physical side of love

HER, the life of today

HER, the war in Vietnam

HER, the modern call-girl

HER, the death of modern beauty

HER, the circulation of ideas

HER, the gestapo of structures

 

     Yet, ironically, as the title of Godard’s film admits, he only knows 2 or 3 things about “her,” and evidently about all these other issues. This film, after all, is not a listing of endless grievances, but a kind of playful discussion about the problems of mid-20th century life in Paris, given the world which surrounds it. If that world has become a bit tawdry with all of its American influences, it is still a kind of charming world. As the Caterpillar tractors remake the very nature of the outlying regions of the city, they also churn up the ugliness of the former concrete and asphalt landscape, bringing, if nothing else, new life to the region. This neo-capitalism may, as Godard seems to be arguing, break up also the purity of former structures of French life, but the habitants of these new spaces, like Juliette, seem happily enchanted by their lives, the rhythm of which seems to be drop the kid off at the daycare center, go shopping for a new dress, have a little sex on the side, meet up with friends or even flirt with local coffee-shop customers, get groceries, pick up the child, go home and cook your husband a good dinner.

      If Godard is clearly mocking mid-century French life, the people who suffer it seem placid as sheep walking into the slaughter-house. And like a neighborly gossip, the 2 or 3 things that the director whispers into our ears, ultimately don’t add up to much. His goal, it appears, is simply to get us thinking about a much longer list.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2018).

Lorenzo Caproni | Lazzaro vieni fuori (Lazarus Come Out) / 2015

bringing the dead to life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pietro Seghetti (screenplay), Lorenzo Caproni (director) Lazzaro vieni fuori (Lazarus Come Out) / 2015 [14 minutes]

 

After all the understandably heavy and ponder some films about the sins of gay Roman Catholic priests, it is almost a relief to discover a short comic work in which gay men basically take advantage of a bumbling 45-year-old man of the cloth, the traditional priest Don Walter (Enrico Vandini).

    In his intelligent short commentary, Rich Cline, writing in Shadows on the Wall, nicely sets up the situation:

     

“University student Michele (Fabrizio Colica) turns up in his home church to say hello to Father Walter (Vandini), announcing that his friend Claudio (Davide Lipari) is also in town and would be happy to help with the church play. In fact, he's written one about Lazarus being raised from the dead. Walter is dubious about Claudio's artsy approach, but the girls are smitten by him. More troubling, Walter suspects that Claudio is gay, and that he's too "uninhibited" to play Jesus.”

 

      After all, Don Walter is a truly traditional priest who still wears the old fashioned black tunic, not worn any longer by younger church leaders.

     The work begins in dangerous territory, the middle-aged priest teaching three young altar boys of varying ages, all preteen, how to engage in the service. But these rascals are in no danger, causing more duress to the priest that sexual excitement as, giggling in the process, they go about the conventional church movements in raucous ways, one boy even dropping the altar censor, and he quickly sends them off.

      During the rehearsal Michele has sneaked into the church, watching the activities with laughter. He explains that a friend of his from Bologna, Claudio, has arrived and, as an actor might be able to help them out with the church presentation they are planning. He doesn’t tell Walter that he has already written the play about Lazarus, starring his friend as Christ who raises the dead man back to life.

 

     When in the very next frame when get a view of Claudio we become immediately certain that this extremely handsome young man might raise anyone from the dead—at least sexually. The girls hover around him, and once the priest gets a look at the boy, he too is visibly troubled.

      One of the girls soon after asks the priest if he thinks Claudio is gay, hoping that he might tell her the boy is straight so that she can continue to pursue him.

       This is the first time Father Walter has heard that it was not Michele but Claudio, himself, who has written a script about Lazarus and the original presentation of choral singing has developed into a full play. Even the parishioner/church assistant Marina (Alla Krasovitzkaya), helping with the flowers, shouts out that she thinks Claudio is a handsome boy.

       Walter asks for a copy of the script, which Claudio immediately hands him which he begins reading, the language immediately representing the work as being a rich and sensuous work: “Imagines of chrysalises appear on a white sepulchre, symbolizing birth….” When Claudio mentions that all the characters will be wearing black, the priest argues that metamorphosis is not a sad affair and that the metamorphosis of caterpillars isn’t a miracle.

         But the other “kids” like it and Claudio, and the priest restrains himself from further criticism.

       The next day when Michele and Claudio return to the church to paint the scenery, the priest even offers to help, his eyes on Claudio, as the boy later remarks to his friend—and we soon discover lover. Claudio goes even further, suggesting to Michele that the priest is obviously gay given the way he’s been staring at him. What the boys don’t know is that even now Walter is watching them through the confessional box.

         As Claudio begins to pull his shirt off, Michele runs to prevent him, the two kiss and hugging one another instead as the priest prays. After they have left, he pushes down the cardboard box set in frustration.

         The priest himself later confesses to Marina, “I stepped away for a minute and when I came back I saw them standing in the church…dancing, touching each other, acting…rather girly. And then they kissed.”

         “You mean in front of everyone?”

         “No, of course not.”

         Her response is perhaps what he has all along been seeking. “So what, Walter? Why would you, of all people, judge them?”

         He immediately asks her what she means.

         Her response is obviously a clever one, denying the obvious while expressing her desire: “You’ve always been so modern, so sensitive….”

       The next evening, as the players are working on the final sound check, the priest demands, yet again, to have another word with Claudio. Taking the beautiful boy, in a crown of thorns, away from the others, Walter declares: “The think of the role of Christ isn’t appropriate for you.”

          Asked what he means, the priest attributes the problem to his “personality.”

          “You’re exuberant and so uninhibited,” continues Walther.

          You might expect him to speak of Christ’s own often uninhibited personality as revealed in the biblical texts. But like the church assistant, he turns the priest’s words upon himself: “But aren’t you ‘uninhibited’ as well?”

          But the priest still feels it inappropriate, Claudio arguing that not only is the play that next evening, but he doesn’t have the word “uninhibited” written across his forehead. Indeed, in this scene he looks almost like a cinematic rendering of the innocent Christ we have been told to conjure up from all traditional Western images.

          Again praying the next day outside the church, Michele interrupts him, lamely trying to apologize from bringing Claudio into the church presentation. Noticing his absence, Marina comes looking for the confused priest, wondering if he okay. He asks her an obvious question: “Marina, what does the crown of thorns have to do with Lazarus?”

          Even she confesses she doesn’t know, as she brings him back inside.

          The play is still on, it appears, as we see the actors in their costumes, Claudio appearing this time with a halo around his head, as Jesus.

       Walther appears, as shoos the actors off, as he himself dresses for the performance. This time, instead of his usual black, we observe him dressing in white, trying to scare the cameraman off.

       We now recognize the “crown of thorns” was not the way he was intending to play Christ, but represented what the priest himself had to bear in his own unacceptance of himself. But we also soon perceive that Don Walter has now awakened to a new being, opening himself up to new possibilities.

        This may be one of the first films of a priest himself having been helped by young gay boys to “come out.”

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

       

Douglas Messerli | Farm Boys

farm boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

In the vast list of gay films these volumes explore there are relatively few that take place or even refer to gay life on the farm—as opposed to small town life or lakeside or seaside isolation or, yet another lonely world, that of the roaming North and South American cowboy. Yet the farm, particularly in the US and in various manifestations internationally, used to be perceived as the very definition of the common man. And it seems important, consequently, that if you wish to truly discover the heart of LGBTQ life, that films return time and again to those very most isolated outposts, the farm stereotypically dominated by the hardworking, determinedly heterosexual father

and his wife of true grit.

   For a young gay person growing up in this world, or even a late coming-out elder, the battleground that serves the very definition of homeland can seem, however, to be a fairly desolate place, where work defines life and sex is rarely available for sexual minorities. The landscapes in which these loners live and love is often beautiful, with skies that light up in in multiple colors and landscapes that offer themselves up to walking, dreaming, and pondering out one’s personal fate, but to find someone to love and, particularly, to be able to express that love in such a world is horribly difficult, often representing the loneliest and sometimes most tragic of gay experiences even in today’s more accepting world—as well as providing a lot of surprises to those who believe gay sex survives only in urban settings.

     Yet I can only name a handful of films I’ve seen that engage with these issues, although I am certain, now that I have perceived this as a minor of LGBTQ genre, that I shall certainly discover others; but to date I can only think of the examples of A. P. Gonzalez’s memorable Clay Farmers (1988), Mark Christopher’s truly revelatory short Alkali, Iowa (1995), Michael Burke’s strange and visually beautiful Fishbelly White (1998), and British director Francis Lee’s feature masterwork God’s Country (2017), all of films I have discussed previously in the years in which they first appeared.

      After I wrote those paragraphs, I indeed began discovering other such films. French director Pascal-Alex Vincent’s Far West (2003), Canadian director Bill Taylor’s Silver Road (2006), another film by the US director Mark Christopher, Heartland (2007), the Irish native Gaelic speaker Daithí Ó. Cinnéide’s Between Us (2016), US filmmaker Tyler Reeves’ It’s Still Your Bed (2019), Canadian Kahil Haddad’s Farm Boy (2019), French director Marine Levéel’s Magnetic Harvest (2019), yet another French cinema creator, Pierre Menahem’s Fire at the Lake (2022), and finally, Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life (2023) all are interesting films that make major contributions to this genre which I write about below.

       There have also been several feature films which I discuss separately about farming and rural communities and the difficulties people in those worlds suffer by Hungarian director Ádám Császi Land of Storms (2014), French filmmaker Olivier Peyon’s Lie with Me (2022), and Belgian director’s Lukas Dhont Close (2022).

       In nearly all of these films the children and adults of the farm community suffer for their long periods of hard work and isolation, trying to bring their sexual desires into the demands of the rural societies in which they remain, in some ways more restrictive than in even small towns, but in other situations allowing them far more independence simply because they are surrounded by unimaginative friends and family members who cannot even conjure a world of diversion and difference in which these LGBTQ figures privately endure.

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

 

Pedro Almodóvar | Strange Way of Life (Extraña forma de vida) / 2023

what two men could do

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Strange Way of Life (Extraña forma de vida) / 2023 [31 minutes]

 

As critic Brian Tallerico reminds us in his review of Pedro Almodóvar’s short film Strange Way of Life, the director has long been interested in doing a US Western. Before Ang Lee, Almodóvar was interested in filming Annie Proulx’s fiction Brokeback Mountain, but felt a Hollywood production couldn’t capture the physicality of the original and that, despite Lee’s admirable attempts, the Oscar-winning film “missed that aspect of the storytelling.”

      My argument with that film, I remind the reader, was not the physicality which I felt came off rather nicely given the Hollywood restraints. But I argued there was not enough character development to understand after their original sexual encounters, why these men remained so deeply involved with one another, particularly given their own basically heterosexual familial covers and the very sporadic visits to each other. A relationship, which is what the movie argues for, is not simply a strong sexual yen, and we never come to comprehend how or why it has transformed into something deeper as the movie argues for.

     One might almost perceive his fascinating new short as a kind of homage if not a loving satire of Lee’s very popular and beloved film. And just as I immediately did after seeing it last week, critic Victor Fraga, I discovered, recognized this work in his May 2023 review in Dirty Movies as being “some sort of unpretentious Latin tribute to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. And several other critics also perceived the connection.        

     If cowboy sheep-herders Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist first get together on a cold snowy night in small tent, Almodóvar’s cowboys first discover each other’s bodies in the most unlikely place, in a small wine storage space where they have taken some local whores to enjoy the evening. The men shoot holes in a canvas wine bag, the couples holding open their mouths next to one another as the wine gushes in, resulting in a mix of kisses and red wine, the color that dominates this movie.      

     Without even knowing it, the men soon pair up to fully enjoy their sharing of liquor, embraces, and deep sucks of each other’s tongues far better than with the girls, the whores soon trailing off to leave the two new lovers, Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva (Pedro Pascal), to their own pleasures. Evidently these boys have far more than a few days after to carry on together, a least two months.

      If Ennis and Jack, however, found their way back to one another in a few years, the loving couple Jake and Silva don’t find a way to reunite until 25 unimaginably long years later, when Silva crosses the desert to rejoin Jake, who is now the town sheriff. Even Jake wonders what’s been keeping him away.

 

    Yet, the two, just like Jack and Ennis, are certainly overjoyed to see one another and after sharing a good meal, hit the sack together for a night of visually enjoyable sex. Yet oddly, given Almodóvar’s comments about the physicality required of the earlier film, in Strange Way of Life, Hawke's and Pascal's sexual reunion is rather chaste, the audience getting, at most, a view of Pascal's naked butt.

     In several interviews, the director has argued that “the ‘naked’ and ‘undressed’ dialogue” is “much more erotic and powerful than showing them fucking." Through the film's dialogue, in fact, we learn far more about those two characters in 30 minutes than we ever learn about Ennis and Jake in Lee's feature film.

    And in the clear light of the morning, Jake realizes that Pascal’s visit hasn’t just been a matter of missing his long-ago inamorato. In a far more complex web of relations than Ennis and Jack might ever even have imagined for themselves, Silva’s son Joe (George Steane), has been sexually involved with Jake’s sister-in-law, a woman whom upon his brother’s death, Jake swore to look after; and according to eye-witness evidence, Joe was seen leaving the woman’s house right after her recent murder. Clearly, Silva has shown up not only to renew old acquaintances, but to find a way to save his son, either by convincing Jake to cease his plans to arrest Joe or to get the miscreant safely away from danger.

      When it’s clear that even restoked love won’t keep Jake from doing his “duty,” Silva heads off to Joe’s ranch to command his son to get his ass over the Mexican border and never come back, willing to give him just enough money to survive the trip, while demanding that also never wants to see him again, particularly after Joe describes Jake’s dead sister as having been a whore.

       Meanwhile Jake has followed Silva’s trail and ends up at the ranch before Joe has had time to get away. The two, with guns at each other’s head, face a showdown, which Silva quickly breaks by grabbing up a riffle. Training the gun on Jake, he tells Joe to head off. Jake is about ready to test his lover’s willingness to kill him by shooting his son, as Silva’s gun goes off, hitting Jake clean through his side. Jack goes down and Joe rides off.

       Grabbing hold of Jake, Silva pulls him inside the ranch house, puts him into bed, and tends to his wounds, knowing that his gunshot will have seriously wounded without killing him.

        For several days, he tends to Jake, binding him up and keeping cold compacts upon his forehead until the fever breaks and the sheriff is finally able to talk. Jake declares that he will bring   Silva before a court for attempted murder, but his old lover argues that given the fact that he has obviously tended to his wounds, such a motive would be meaningless.

     Years before Silva had attempted to convince Jake to settle down with him on a ranch, not so very different from what Jack in Brokeback Mountain had proposed to Ennis. Jake had argued that he didn’t like ranching and that besides what could two men do if settled down on a ranch. But now Silva answers his question. They’d take joy in being together, they’d make love, and most importantly take care of one other.

        Jake doesn’t respond, so we don’t truly know if he’s finally been convinced; but he can’t go anyplace for a while longer at least, and it may be, since Silva has shown him what caring for each other really means, that he might have finally recognized the benefits in permanently shacking up and sharing a bed.

        If this duo has begun this short film as vaguely characterized as Jack and Ennis of Brokeback Mountain, by the time Almodóvar’s short film comes to an end, we know far more about the lives and motivations of these two figures. And we can at least imagine that, instead of being overwhelmed by a brooding lament, these two lovely cowboys—dressed up quite stunningly by Yves Saint Laurent head designer Anthony Vaccarello—might possibly find a happy ending together, something which to my knowledge, has never before been permitted for gay men on cinema in the American West.

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Pierre Menahem | Le feu au lac (Fire at the Lake) / 2022

asking us to sit as judge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pierre Menahem (screenwriter and director) Le feu au lac (Fire at the Lake) / 2022 [15 minutes]

 

Cow herder Félix (Hervé Lassïnce) works in paradise, watching his cows daily in the nearby mountains, while his mother Rose (Isabelle Rama) in a small house near a pristine lake in the  Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, does the laundry and cooking. We don’t know if Félix spends several days at a time in the mountains or returns home at night, but his is surely a lonely life.

     It is presumably just as lonely for his elderly mother, who works hard for someone of her age. On this particular day, in fact, she passes out, apparently having a heart attack, with only time to find her way to her bed. When Félix returns, he finds a pot of water whistling and his mother apparently dead in her bed. He pulls the curtain and sits down to ponder the situation.

     But he soon receives a call on his dating app, and in the next frame we see him driving toward the village where, at another farm, he meets up with a young man, Mathieu (Pierre Moure) who he has brought a bottle of wine.

     Mathieu brings out the glasses and apologizes for the direct and unsubtle cellphone message, suggesting he never knows how to respond to such things. Mathieu’s family, he bemoans, are all intellectuals and never drink. When asked if he lives here, Mathieu responds that he lives in Grenoble, where he was a teacher completing a degree in botany.

      For his part, Félix explains his business is cows, now up in the pasture. He doesn’t raise the animals for cheese any more but raises them in the grassy highlands for their meat.

      Mathieu admits that Félix is his first hook-up since he’s been home. There is no other opportunity with his family around. Clearly, if Félix is lonely, so is Mathieu bored and sexually frustrated. In front of the family’s roaring fire place, they have raw and lusty sex.

      Meanwhile, in an intercut, we observe Félix’s mother awakening, rising from the bed, and going over to the window and opening it. She lets the breeze chill her and she looks up to mountains.

      Félix rises from the bed on which the exhausted revelers have been resting. He strokes the sleeping boy’s hair and, much like his mother, goes to the window and looks up at the snow-packed mountains.

      Back at home, finding his mother back in her bed, he pulls a cover over her and calls the doctor, explaining that his mother Rose “is gone.” Near her bed, we notice a bunch of narcissi sitting in a vase, just what Félix first observed at Mathieu’s house. Félix sits down on a chair, tears rolling down his eyes, to wait.

      In the very next frame, however, we see him swimming far out into the cold lake. At one point he appears to turn back, but moves instead into what appears as a floating position. The camera focuses on what appears to be his head for a long while before going dark.

      The major issue of this film, clearly, is what to make of Félix’s actions, his seeming unfeeling response to his mother’s death or perhaps just a wave of illness from which she might have been saved, and his choice instead to fulfill his own sexual desires. Is Félix, himself, a kind of narcissus? Pierre Menahem’s film, accordingly, almost challenges its audience to stand in judgment, given the character he portrays, encouraging us to look into ourselves with empathy and determine which choice we should have made.

      The movie, in short, almost challenges us to continue that judgment into our interruption of the film’s last scene as either a death or a cleansing reinvigoration.

      There is no correct answer, of course. One could comment endlessly about several possible reasons for Félix’s choices or speak out in criticism of what appear to be selfish acts. And whatever I might say will clearly not change other viewer’s minds.

      Nonetheless, I feel compelled to speak—just as others are encouraged to do.

      In our popular culture the narcissus, commonly known as a daffodil, has become a symbol of self-love, of an individual so wrapped up in himself that he drowns in attempting to kiss his own image. Accordingly, as I have explained in numerous essays, the narcissus is associated naturally with same-gender sex, and indeed the myth of narcissus has been appropriated by everyone from psychiatrists to poets and writers as an image of homosexuality. It is fitting that both of the gay men are connected with the flower here, Mathieu admitting to have cut the wildflowers (something not approved of in French and Swiss cultures) for his vase, and later Félix for having brought home that vase or another filled with the same flower.

      After all, he has chosen his own sexual desires over his mother’s well-being, hasn’t he?

      I might argue, however, that in such rural cultures with long distances between, one does not call up doctor to expect him to immediately come to the rescue. And it seems apparent that Félix has believed his mother to have died, despite the wrinkle that French director Pierre Menahem has introduced, perhaps just to confound us. Farmers, particularly those who gently raise their animals for slaughter, work regularly with issues of life and death. My parents, both of whom grew up on farms could not bear that fact that my sister and I loved to have pets. In their childhood homes the dog and cat served a purpose, the dog for protection and security and the cat as a ratter. They were not allowed to name the animals, most of which would soon be sold or slaughtered at home.

       So are Félix and Rose well aware of their limited lifespans. It’s a hard life, and when the time comes for death, you simply lay down and die. There is place for hours of grieving. Even when she momentarily rises, still living, Rose appears to invite in the cold winds to embrace her, perhaps to reinvigorate herself or maybe just to ensure that death steals her away more quickly in her son’s absence.

       In this world of lonely self-survival, pleasure—despite the beauty about them—is a rare commodity. For an isolated farmer who also happens to be gay, one can be certain that any sexual possibilities that arise, even with Grindr and other contemporary dating apps, is extremely rare. The very idea that a young, handsome boy nearby is suddenly available and reaching out to have sex is something that one cannot simply ignore. What has happened is over, and in such a world in which Félix lives, one must grab any opportunity for joy. Even the city boy, Mathieu has reached out in some desperation, seeking a moment apart from family restrictions. And by the brief look of their almost desperate hugs and sexual maneuvers, we can perceive both of these men as being quite in need of sexual relief.

       Félix has simply prioritized his duties for survival. Although his mother has died, he must still go on living, and in order live he must find some meaning in his life, however momentary and temporal. Upon achieving that goal, he becomes the dutiful son.

       For some that last swim will surely wreak of guilt, an attempt to redeem himself through a kind of suicidal act.

       But living where he does, we must recognize Félix (the embodiment of happiness) must well know how to swim and the limitations to his abilities. For me he has gone out as far as he can, and is now emptying his thoughts, cooling down his repressed emotions, and regaining composure before we swims back to meet with the doctor.

       In another myth, as Pluto, the god of death, raped Prosperina, carrying her into the underworld, she dropped the white lilies she was picking; they turned to yellow daffodils reminding us of the Spring when Pluto had agreed with Jupiter to free his bride for a half year when she could return to earth.

       After a long winter, Félix has returned the cows to pasture, and summer will soon be here along with the new life and memories his sexual encounter has brought him. His swim is not a sign of death, in my thinking, but of that new life now purified.

       But in the end, it doesn’t matter what I think or what others do. That is the wonder of narrative cinema; the characters act, sometimes quite strangely, out of their own motivations, without being able to know or care about ours.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).