Alain Guiraudie | Du soleil pour les gueux (Sunshine for the Scoundrels / aka Sunshine for the Poor) / 2001

off the track

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alain Guiraudie (screenwriter and director) Du soleil pour les gueux (Sunshine for the Scoundrels / aka Sunshine for the Poor) / 2001 [55 minutes]

 

As opposed to the multiple characters of Guiraudie’s That Old Dream that Moves of the same year, Sunshine for the Scoundrels has only four characters, although numerous others are mentioned. And the work, with it Beckettian-like tropes, might almost be perfect for stage were it not that the central action occurs on the vast open spaces of France’s Causses plateau.

     Yet there this is most definitely the territory of what used to be described as the theater of the absurd. None of these characters remain in stasis for more than a few moments, and all are seeking something almost unachievable or, if nothing else, something that cannot truly satisfy their true desires. In fact, there is something incredibly sad about each of Guiraudie’s figures in this work despite the fact that the work is basically a comedy or perhaps even a farce. Each of them is provided with a first and last name which is generally how they speak of and address one another as if no one in this world can truly come to know anyone else by their first name only.

    Nathalie Sanchez (Isabelle Giradet) has been a hair stylist back home, but has grown fed up with the daily routine and low wages, and since she has long been told by her mother that as punishment she will send her to the Central Massif, Nathalie determines finally, after she is able to get up enough nerve, to travel there and visit the famous Ounaye shepherds. Walking down a long stony path, she suddenly comes across a running figure moving at an odd angle from her straight direction. It is the bandit Carol Izba (Michel Turquin), perhaps the unsung hero of this looney saga, running in an attempt to escape the bounty hunter Pool Oxanosas Daï, sent to bring him back to the local grandee because he has just killed a wealthy female landowner while stealing her money.

      You might describe Carol Izba was the local Robin Hood who steals from the wealthy landowners partially in an attempt to protect the poor, downtrodden shepherds who are forced to work the land for their entire lives, with the own children taken away from them, just as they have been sold into bondage by their own parents. And his maddening bifurcations of the flat plains with Pool Oxanosas Daï hot on his tracks might be said to constitute the most comical elements of this beautiful fable, as well as a sublimated sexual text since it is also clear that the chased and chaser are wed to one another by their beauty, youth, fitness, and their inevitable longing and regret to meet up.

     In fact, later, when Pool Oxanosas Daï almost catches up with his prey, lassoing him without being able to bring him to a full halt, he finally looses the rope and falls, panting and out-of-breath to the ground, his well-built body spread full out, with Carol Izba daring to return and come closer just to check up to see if he is still breathing but also to fill his eyes with the naked-chested handsome male hot on his tail. It is the most homoerotic moment in this film which otherwise is basically heterosexual. And we realize in that moment that the two young men are on the run for more than just their lives, but for their sexual desire and freedom from one another.

  Carol Izba, meanwhile, tells the confused Nathalie Sanchez that if she wants to find an Ounaye shepherd she will have to move off the straight and narrow path and cross the plains at an angle, perhaps the lesson we learn again and again throughout this tale.

      She does so, and almost immediately runs into an old man, evidently a gay shepherd (so Criterion, Mubi, and other sources tell me, something I missed in my viewing of the film, which will amuse all of those who think I simply read queer into these movies). The elderly Djema Gaouda Lon (performed by the director himself) has lost his flock, and now with Nathalie at his side goes in search of them, the two offering along the way varying views of life—the young Nathalie Sanchez predictably arguing against the traditional ways and the acceptance of subjugated oppression, while Djema Gaouda Lon positing there is no way out except death—in a manner of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Hawks and Sparrows (1966). In their long discussions we learn of both their pasts and the fact that the lovely sheep they seek are not all very nice, since they often bite and spread a disease which kills the shepherds.

     The conversations between young and old, however, are as always fascinating, the one arguing for change, the other that such altercations of order are impossible and meaningless; it is difficult to know which of them is wiser. But Nathalie Sanchez does ultimately seduce the lonely old shepherd who enjoys the sex, even if the young girl is a bit disappointed—not with the sexual act

but the fact that it will result in nothing further. She, who has already become determined to stay on the Central Massif has no future there. The questions is, where might she go from here?

      The same question haunts Carol Izba, who keeps attempting to escape the Causses to the city of Montpellier. But he cannot escape his homeland any more than can Djema Gaouda Lon, and he keeps rushing back, running in unpredictable directions and angles through the landscape, determined to remain and help the shepherds, just as Pool Oxanosas Daï is determined to capture him and take him to the grandee who surely hang him for his crime.

      In fact, he eventually spots Djema Gaouda Lon’s flock and tells him where they are. But when Nathalie Sanchez and the old shepherd finally reach the sheep (which we never see), she rushes forward to pet them, everyone warning her to stay away since they bite. She is finally found a room for the night, and everyone seems settled down for another day, with perhaps Nathalie Sanchez ending up with the hero Carol Izba in her bed, but whose life will surely be a dizzying pattern of zigzags, both physically and sexually, if she dare trail along after him. The hound will always be after the hare since they are inevitably and one might say naturally attached to one another. But perhaps even that life, after all, is better than being a boring hairdresser without any money left at the end of the month to even take in a movie.

     Sunshine for the Scoundrels is perhaps one of the most joyfully intriguing films I have seen in a long while, and with Guiraudie’s That Old Dream that Moves of the same year demonstrates that director’s genius.

     You might describe these two films as bookends, the one about a gay male entering and utterly disturbing a totally heterosexual space, while in the second a heterosexual female intruding upon a primarily male world, both of whom shake-up and alter the mindsets of those involved.

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 1025

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2025).