Lucas Morales | Pourquoi mon fils? (Why My Son?) / 2015

losing a son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Morales (screenwriter and director) Pourquoi mon fils? (Why My Son?) / 2015 [21 minutes]

 

This moving short film begins with two teenage high school gay boys, Louis (Josef Mlekus) and Thomas (Lucas Morales) realizing that it is time they tell their parents that they’re gay and involved in a relationship with one another. They blithely toss a coin to determine which of them goes first. Thomas loses.

    Living alone with his father, Thomas sits across the breakfast table with a man (Yann Babilée) with whom most of us could not even imagine an everyday conversation, let alone a discussion about his son’s homosexuality. And indeed, before Thomas can even begin to describe that his best friend is something more than that, the father quiets him down, insisting he does not want to hear any more, staring into space as his chews on his cereal.

     Frustrated at his refusal to respond, the boy pleads for him to speak. His father stands, goes over to him, and slaps him soundly on his face, leaving Thomas in tears, not so much out of pain as much for the realization that his father will never be able to reconcile the fact: “Why, my son?” he wails.

     At school, Thomas at first pretends to Louis that all has gone well, but quickly reveals the truth that it has been very nasty. It appears from his comments that the father had previously regularly abused Thomas’ mother, the boy suggesting that at least he has been able to move on from those long ago difficulties.

      When Louis suggests he stay at his home that night, Thomas insists that it would only make things worse.

      Meanwhile, in his home, while his parents watch TV, Louis spends no time coming to the point, simply announcing, “I’m gay,” his father pleading wait until the TV show ends. His mother gets up and hugs him, suggesting that they have no problem at all about his sexuality. The whole situation goes so comically well that we find the scene to be more than an alternative fantasy rather than real representation of such an event. Even accepting parents generally have fears and alarms.

     In the middle of the night, we see Thomas up, feet dangling from his attic room loft as he ponders his father’s total silence. At breakfast, his father, for the first time in the boy’s life, reports that he will pick him up after school.

     Thomas is almost fearful of what his seemingly kind offer means, and he sits through his classes, one a long discussion in his philosophy class about making one’s way out of Plato’s cave—obviously referencing Thomas’ own need to find his way out of the world of anger, hate, and love, the contradictory feelings that keep him in his relationship with his father. Instead of taking the bus with his friend, he tells him his father is coming to pick him up, something that even troubles Louis, who tells his friend that his mother can’t wait to meet him and that he’s welcome to stay on permanently in this home.

      Meanwhile, we see Père de Thomas brooding before pulling out a drawer and taking out a handgun, momentarily picking up a picture of him, his wife, and Thomas as a beautiful young son and tossing it angrily to the floor. He gets into the car to pick up his son.

      We already know that the trip home will not lead to where either of them expect. Instead returning by the normal route, the father travels into the country where they stop at the delipidated country home, the house where he lived with Thomas’ mother and conceived Thomas. When finally the two find themselves standing face to face, the father tells his son to close his eyes.

      Thomas complains that the father’s behavior is frightening him, but the elder insists that his son obey, Thomas again asking him to stop behaving so very strangely. The father commands his son obey his wishes, which against his will Thomas does, closing his eyes as his father takes up the gun, pointing it not at his son as we might have feared, but at his own neck.

      He shoots, Thomas opening his eyes to see him making the attempt, but nothing happens.

      Thomas angrily pulls out the bullets he himself has confiscated earlier, scolding his father for being a jerk simply because he cannot accept who his son loves. The elder expresses his fears that his son can no longer love him and that he is no longer worthy of living having failed his son. It’s strange how we never imagine that a father’s anger over his son’s gay sexuality might include a sublimated fear that he is losing the boy’s love to another man.

      Thomas reassures him that despite their difficulties in expressing love that he does indeed still love him and that it is time for both to simply demonstrate what they feel for one another. They do, in fact, just that, hug in an acceptance that both have refused one another for so long.

      I don’t think French director Lucas Morales (who later directed the excellent LGBTQ film Rendez-vous avec Diego) needed the last scene, where the two boys joyfully ride together to an oceanside pier, where Thomas throws the bullets into the water. We presume with that earlier embrace of son and father that things will proceed more felicitously between all in the future.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).