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).
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