Philippe Barassat | Mon copain Rachid (My Friend Rachid) / 1998

pay to touch

by Douglas Messerlli

 

Philippe Barassat (screenwriter and director) Mon copain Rachid (My Friend Rachid) / 1998

 

It is difficult, in some senses to imagine the charming French film My Friend Rachid as an LGBTQ film since its major focus appears to be on a young sexually curious nine-year-old boy at a time when most boys first become interested in their own bodies of those of their peers. Eric (Jonathan Reyes) is simply obsessed with the size of his older Arab friend Rachid’s (Nordine Mezaache) cock, and begs him to show it to him and let him touch it whenever possible.

     Most of the time, Rachid will show him his penis, but will not let him touch it because to fondle it or even allow it to be touched would mean he was homosexual. But gradually, Rachid learns how to manipulate the young boy into paying to touch it, Eric only too willing to beg for money, under various false pretenses, so that he might grasp and handle his large-dicked pal.

      But then there are also moments that seem almost dream-like to Eric when Rachid takes the activity a bit further, as for example, when working in an arab night club as a waiter he encourages Eric to join him on a large constructed cock which flies through the sky over the small stage as part of the act, female Arab singers performing below.

      At another point, Rachid suggests that Eric “become” his penis on the lookout for girls and others who might interested in him.  

     And on another night, after fighting with some boys over a girl who he’s hired for sex, Rachid slips into Eric’s bed and, given the description of Eric’s dream wherein Rachid was joyfully being hung on the cross while he himself suffered the pain, the narrative hints that the older boy engaged in sex with the younger in his sleep. In the morning Rachid insists Eric owes him 100 fins (francs).

     Gradually, it becomes apparent that, in some respects, this is a story not about Eric’s sexuality, but Rachid’s as he moves gradually, with his outsized cock, into prostitution. Eric grows up, marries and has children, producing an almost stereotypical bourgeois family.

      But when he encounters Rachid one day on the street, who readily greets him, Rachid’s friends ask if Eric might have been a client, Rachid insisting, no he was a fellow classmate, a pal.

      What we realize is that his “pal” helped to show Rachid how to be a male prostitute without being self-labeled as a homosexual. As long as money was exchanged, touching his cock was perfectly permissible—perhaps even enjoyable for Rachid. But when Eric’s mother, suspicious of his constant requests for money, cut off the supply, Rachid disappeared from his life.

     The naïve Eric seems not even able to perceive how he helped train a young man in the life of prostitution, the way perhaps, the French society as a whole can never truly comprehend how their racism, lack of job equality, and failure to socially accept outsiders such as Rachid help to inculcate the idea for those who remain outside their cultural boundaries that the only choices they have in order to survive are robbery, drug dealing, prostitution, or welfare.

      Barassat’s comedy, accordingly, gets turned on its head. And yes, the little film becomes very much an LGBTQ story, being as it is about a male prostitute, who like so many who perform the same role, cannot accept themselves as being queer. They use sex, so they argue, only to make money, not to enjoy the pleasures of the body, while, of course, quite enjoying being sucked off or fucking some of their clients.

      At turns light-hearted and fantastical, Barassat’s small 19-minute gem is also a lovely satire of the bourgeois French culture, which the previously sexually fascinated adolescent eventually joins and ultimately comes to represent.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).