Alain Guiraudie | Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream that Moves) / 2001

finding the possible in the impossible

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alain Guiraudie (screenwriter and director) Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream that Moves) / 2001 [51 minutes]

 

In French director Alain Guiraudie’s 2001 brilliant film That Old Dream that Moves, we begin by watching a handsome young man pacing back and forth and leaning outside against the wall of the Lumière Factory. Dressed in yellow and orange, he’s a lean beauty, particularly when compared with the older and mostly portly factory workers who begin to arrive to work, some of them greeting him while others clearly questioning why the stranger is standing there.

     As the manager Donand (Jean-Marie Combelles) arrives, a bit after his fellow workers, we discover the young man’s name is Jacques (Pierre Louis-Calixte) who has been hired to disassemble and pack up an old film cutting and binding machine. And soon after, we discover, that the entire gigantic factory is closing down, the few remaining workers left being paid off as they will lose their jobs at the end of the next week.

      The workers are understandably angry and distressed with the situation, and some are suspicious of the beautiful newcomer. One by one, however, they come to the far-off shed where he is constantly in motion. Most of them no longer seem to have much work to do, and are not at all interested in helping him gradually pull away some of the heavy apparatus of the complex machine. Besides, Jacques, clearly a professional at this job, insists he prefers to work alone.

      The other workers, accordingly, mostly spend their day drinking and enjoying lunches under a series of small umbrellas set up in the grass surrounding the factory sheds, where we hear them talk about their appending joblessness and what they plan to do with the buyout money, realizing they will also soon be on welfare, with no other jobs available for them. A slightly younger man, José (Jean-Claude Montheil) is set on buying a new Porsche with his 150,000 francs, a decision that his co-workers mock. Most of these married men are either resigned to an empty future or, particularly the younger ones, bitter at being laid off.    

     In comparison to their almost purposeful idleness, Jacques is endlessly at work, having been told he must finish the disassembling and packing within a week. And these now passive workers are now curious about his obvious enthusiasm for his job. After all he has no commitment to the factory where they have worked for most of their lives. He is being paid only for his weekly job, and evidently travels about the country either disassembling or reassembling just such complex machinery.

    Nonetheless, they grow interested in the newcomer, particularly the older bearded Louis (Jean Ségani) and Donand, both of who return again and again to watch the worker, amazed at his expertise but even more importantly, drawn to him for his beauty, particularly after they get a glimpse of his naked body in the factory shower.

      Although this film is only about 50 minutes in length, it reads as a feature film given all we learn about these workers and the rural French employment situation, and particularly because of the growing intensity of the erotic world which Jacques suddenly offers them, after finding out that not only is he unmarried but is homosexual.

      Despite the obvious heterosexuality of the workers, some like Louis and Donand are attracted the young man as they see in him their own past sexual lives; and Jacques, in turn, is not at all disinterested in their attentions, evidently preferring older men.

      Jacques, in fact, seems most attracted to Donand who at one point, moving closer to his new worker in older to help him lift away a large tube, encounters the young’s man’s hand frotting his cock. As Jacques finally reaches out to fully touch it, however, he quickly backs off.

       It becomes clear that Jacques would love to have sex with Donand, and Donand is terribly tempted, but is far too traditional to actually move into Guiraudie’s sexually fluid world. Louis is not, and attempts to warn Jacques that in his interest in Donand he will only become frustrated. But as it is with so many of this director’s figures, Jacques argues you cannot explain with whom you fall in love.

      As the week comes to a close, and Jacques will be leaving, Louis invites him home to dinner, explaining, after Donand finally explains that he simply cannot share in any sexual experience, Louis admits that he has gone around for a week with a hard-on; why can’t Jacques have sex with him? Is it my weight, my age, my looks, he asks Jacques. The young man replies that it is none of these, that you simply cannot explain the vagaries of the heart. Yet, in the last scene, he does go home with the elderly Louis for dinner.

     Somehow my account above, however, does not fully capture the wonderment of Guiraudie’s small masterpiece. Lawrence Garcia, writing on Letterboxd, better captures the sense of marvel with which this film entices:

 

“Repeated locations, anchored by a mysterious machine, mark the week-long immersion: a locker room, with its brusque nudity and casual homoerotic charge; an overgrown patch of land with a motley arrangement of umbrellas; a perpetually orange-tinted corridor which the avuncular boss speeds across throughout the film. Guiraudie somehow manages to fuse a gorgeous study of light and space (esp. DP Emmanuel Soyer's luminous gradations of red) with a casually political portrait of a dying community, while still remaining attentive to both physical comedy and the subterranean emotional currents running throughout. A sense of prematurely thwarted desire permeates the air—the culmination being an offer of assistance with a pipe ("Will it take long?") and an abrupt, anxious rebuff. A reverse-shot of a locker room, previously seen in just one repeated composition, observes the aftermath: an intense, climactic rush of emotion—all the more moving for how matter-of-fact sexuality and desire is in Guiraudie's worlds; for how closed-off the lead is (‘I'm used to taking care of myself’), though he refuses to accept the border between the "possible and impossible"; and for how precisely the film sculpts around its plangency. The kind of film that pulls you in and envelops you with its warmth, then lets its immense melancholy seep into your bones, marrow-deep. ‘It's so nice to believe,’ says Jacques, even when faced with the portent of failure. And as the penultimate exchange and radiant final shot suggest: Perpetual disappointment may be the default, but it isn't everything. ‘You still coming for dinner?’ ‘Of course I'm coming.’”

 

      As Robert Koehler, writing in Variety, summarized: “The rare film whose every moment is subtly and brilliantly conceived, Alain Guiraudie‘s That Old Dream that Moves manages to avoid all cliches in its distinctive handling of a story about the closing of a rusty industrial factory and the allure of a young worker to a group of soon-to-be-unemployed men.”

 

      This is the kind of film that once you watch it, you can’t get it out of your mind. It’s as if you have gone down some kind of rabbit-hole of homoeroticism that you never before knew existed, the images returning to you again and again even in your sleep. Along with his other short feature of the same year, Sunshine for the Scoundrels, which I discuss in my next essay offering, it has made me a fan of Guiraudie that his later masterwork Stranger by the Lake (2013) didn’t quite accomplish.

    That Old Dream that Moves won the award for the best short film at the Cannes Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).