Gérard Blain | Les amis (The Friends) / 1971

the lies of his aspirations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gérard Blain and André Debaecque (screenplay), Gérard Blain (director) Les amis (The Friends) / 1971

 

French Films critic James Travers describes Gérard Blain as a paradox. After acting in Julien Duvivier’s Voici les temps des assassins (1956), Claude Chabrol’s Le Beaux Serge (1958), and Chabrol’s Les Cousins (1959), and being offered a Hollywood contract, Blain might have become a major star, but he chose instead to act in small films in France and elsewhere in Europe, works primarily forgotten today. Instead, Blain sought primarily to direct films beginning with Les amis in 1971, winning the Golden Leopard Award for the Best First Work at the Locarno International Film Festival and the high praise of François Truffaut, while primarily shocking French film audiences for its portrayal of a homosexual, seemingly pedophilic relationship between the 16-year old hero, Paul (Yan Epstein) and an older married man, Philippe (Philippe March), in many respects an semi-autobiographical work that relates to the director’s own life.

     The scandal arose despite the fact that Blain, who himself as a teenager had been involved with older men, dealt with the issue in this film rather matter-of-factly and implied, as Travers points out, that Paul and Philippe are not lovers and do not, within the confines of the film, share a bed. Rather, Blain presents the young boy, who like himself had been left behind by his father at a very young age, and finds in Philippe a loving father figure while Paul offers the elder the beauty, curiosity, and tenderness that is clearly missing from his book-reading and chess-playing wife.

    He can properly dress Paul, help to educate him, encourage him to seek out the career Paul desires by paying for his acting lessons, is able to provide him with horse-back riding lessons (a delight since Philippe’s hobby is horses), and is there to comfort him when later in the film Paul is abandoned by the wealthy friends of his own age he had made in Deauville where Philippe takes him on vacation. With the purity of image and the seeming objectivity of one of his major influences Robert Bresson, Blain’s narrative seems almost transparent and simple in its representation of a younger and older man who find joy, pleasure, and social and financial gratification in one another.

      Yet that is not the way others, including his audiences, view the same images. Certainly, the young wealthy boys and girls who annually summer at Deauville in their parent’s beachside mansions don’t see Paul’s relationship with Philippe as simply as he attempts to present it, at times suggesting Philippe is his grandfather and other moments his “godfather,” the latter of which is perhaps closer to the truth.

     The hotel staff, particularly the bell hop and elevator operator boys, eye the relationship with obvious suspicion and prurient interest. Most sophisticated film goers, who by 1971 had become quite used to reading coded movies, could not see it so simply either, preferring to read in the late-night bedroom scenes and intense sexual sessions that Blain purposely left out of his film.

    Since it was common knowledge that filmmakers were not permitted to show such activities, one simply had to imagine them, to fill in the reality of even heterosexual couples asleep in separate rooms on bedding down on separate beds.

   Even the director, at moments, allowed Philippe long, slightly-swooning moments as he looks down across the resting or sleeping boy, the pleasure he body takes as his young student leans into his body as he attempts to teach him how to drive (the whole scene which is played out as if the two were engaging in sexual intercourse), or his obvious expression of the joy of the deep hugs when it becomes necessary to console the destressed young man,  as well as Paul’s own confessions of love and admiration for his facilitator in life when he admits to his true friend Nicholas (Jean-Claude Dauphin) that he would rather have his father and mother die than Phillipe—all clue us in, so it appears, to a more  unsettling view of the relationship.  Despite his seemingly benign attentions to the boy, it is also clear that when the 16-year-old attempts to explore the world of “normal” heterosexual adolescence, Phillipe grows jealous, refusing to even greet him when Paul returns from a late night out. 

     Given the life he leads when living with his totally disinterested mother, without Philippe he would have no possibilities outside the day-to-day workhouse mentality of his sister and her husband. With Philippe, Paul enters a world he previously might only have imagined, including the love of a sexually-willing blonde horsewoman right out of the movie pictures he regularly sees with Philippe.                          The only problem is that in order to fully make “real” the world he now rubs up against with Philippe, Paul lies, both to himself and his new friends, pretending to be one of them without realizing how empty their lives are compared with his own—much like Philippe’s wife’s world in which the biggest event of her day is joining in a chess tournament. Paul pretends to be receiving the education which for him ended at age 13, hints at parental mansions to which he has only been invited to with Philippe, and imagines doting parents, to the envy of all the others, who nonetheless leave him quite alone. And in this sense he is very much like the Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, although pushing in almost the opposite direction toward assimilation instead of rebellion. Paul wants everything that Antoine rejects—and which oddly enough Antoine later receives and accepts while Paul cannot. This perhaps exemplifies the director’s own paradox. Like many young men who make their living by gratifying the sexual lusts of older gay men, in his own later life Blain had the reputation of being somewhat of a homophobe. 

     A great part of Blain’s film, accordingly, is taken up with a social satire of the upper class as we watch the bland young female beauties and their mean-spirited boyfriends learn how to behave in the manner of their parents as they casually comment on their various parental villas, display their athletic skills, practice casino gambling, and sneak off for sexual encounters that our young hero is simply not prepared for. When they actually enter the company of the adults, their parents are busy playing Monopoly, honing their own skills for further acquisition and financial greed. Although Paul sees Marie-Laure (Nathalie Fontaine) as female perfection, we see her as the wide-mouthed horsewoman she is destined to become, her mother almost immediately tripping up Paul with his lies about where he attends school. Even the most talented and rebellious among them, and the only true friend Paul retains, Nicholas, is scolded by his mother for befriending “that” boy whose behavior she dislikes—a very strange statement given that Paul is one of the most polite and respectful people in the entire film. Obviously, the older generation immediately sees poverty and abuse written across his body, and in an attempt to make sure that their labels stick advise their protected loved ones to stand clear of him.

      The only figure to whom Paul finally can turn with the expectation of love and kindness is his, let us admit it, homosexual older friend. And it is important to note that fact, for if Philippe is wealthy, he remains an outsider in his love for Paul. If there wasn’t truly any bodily contact between them, there surely should have been, at least some momentary release from a world the others have locked up in their pure, heteronormative skins. At the very moment when Paul finally realizes that fact, that he truly enjoys the company of his “amis,” he discovers that Philippe has just been killed in an auto crash.

     With Nicholas, he attends the funeral like many a gay man has had to, standing a distance from the body of man he has loved, standing apart from the regular mourners who lay claim to him. When Philippe’s wife passes, it is as if he were invisible, although we can see through the strain of her face to maintain that disdainful dismissiveness that indicates that she probably has suspected his existence all along.

      Fortunately, as Paul relates to Nicholas, if he cannot begin working immediately his mother is ready to throw him out of her apartment; but apparently Philippe has already paid for his acting lessons, so Paul can continue learning, living as he will probably for the rest of his life in his active imagination in a world in which he will never feel he is truly a part. Isn’t that what great acting and great directing is all about? In his room we see a photograph of a moment in his life—one of the only instances in which we observe Paul laughing—when he didn’t have to act.

Los Angeles, September 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).