Virgile Ratelle | Dog Breath / 2019

cocaine fucks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Virgile Ratelle (screenwriter and director) Dog Breath / 2019 [13 minutes]

 

How do you describe such a movie as French Canadian director Virgile Ratelle’s Dog Breath: a drug film, a rape flick, a story about an addiction to both drugs and sex that has gone beyond logic?

It is actually all of these.

    In three short segments it shows us a passive young man, Alex (Fabien Corbeil), who is followed into a bar by Sam, (Samuel Vollering) both of whom head straight to the bathroom, snort coke and fuck. In the second segment their return to what presumably is a shared house, whose bedroom is constantly busy with occupants, both gay and straight, fucking. This time, with the help of Dave (Jean-François Gagné), they heat up the crack, again go into a kind of euphoric world of dazed behavior and fuck, Dave looking on in masturbatory desire.

     In the final scene the Alpha male (Nicolas Gravel), presumably straight is seen with two other macho cohorts, who brags about having fucked a lesbian and then proceeds the wrestle with another individual whom he describes as a fag (Timmy Haineault).

     In a final snort of coke, Alex falls into a complete coma, the heterosexual braggart picking up his body with the help of another, putting him on the bed, and raping him.

     It’s difficult to glean what message this short film is attempting to convey. Addiction makes you lose of sense of reality? I’m sure it does. Sex is better with coke? Surely not if you’re not even conscious, a condition in which the passive Alex is throughout most of movie. Is this a warning against addiction? I doubt it since the film seems to take almost a voyeuristic pleasure in watching Alex get fucked.

     I can only suggest this is a bit like a snuff film since we do even know at the end whether Alex is still living.

     I certainly can’t recommend this short film to anyone interested in the experience of gay life. This is about addiction and death. I write about this film only as an example of the extremes of the medium. It bears comparison to Paul Morrissey’s 1982 film Forty Deuce.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2025).