complications
by Douglas Messerli
Olivier Rouvièr and Anne
Fontaine (scenario and screenplay), Anne Fontaine (director) Tapin du
soir (Night Hustler) / 1996
As I’ve mentioned several times, in 1996 French Television showed a series of ten LGBTQ films, each presented on a different evening, by a wide range of international directors titled L’Amour est à réinventer. The 7th episode of the series, Tapin du soir (Night Hustler), a 5-minute short directed by Anne Fontaine, was aired on November 8, 1996.
This is an extremely simple but lovely and rather disconcerting short film that charms one more in afterthought than upon first viewing.
We
see a car pull up and another young boy walk up to its window, presumably to
discover the driver’s needs, as our young figure hunkers down on a nearby
bench, taking out a cigarette. Another car pulls up and the young
man goes over to the window, the driver calling out “How much for a
blow-job?” The young man replies, giving apparently the going rate, “$40.” And
he soon joins the driver in the car as they drive off to a quieter location
where the older but still handsome man (François Chatriot) hands him the money,
the boy, putting a prophylactic on the driver’s cock, sucking him off.
So it appears the boy is a hustler after all, and he is working the
street that night, even if he’s new to it. But something happens once again
that alters the way we perceive what we have just witnessed. The boy starts up
a conversation, “It’s cold tonight...don’t you think?”
The
man gruffly agrees and announces he’ll take the boy back to where he picked him
up. But the boy asks the unthinkable: “You want to suck me off too?”
“No,
that’s enough,” replies his apparently satisfied customer.
“I can be gentle, you
know,” the boy adds, twisting the conversation into another dimension.
Presumably, a true hustler wouldn’t want to cum simply because someone else
might hire him later for the same pleasure. Another $40 or even more be made
that evening. And “gentleness?” Perhaps for some customers but not for others.
It is certainly not a general qualification. Some like it rough.
His
gentleman friend pretends to turn the tables, so to speak. “Really. You’d pay
for it?”
“Yes,”
he immediately responds. “That would be funny.” But despite the man’s dismissal
(“You’re wasting your time”), he’s serious: “I’ll give your forty dollars
back.”
“I’m
not interested. I’ve got to get home.”
A
young boy is determined if nothing else. “I want you to suck me
off. I need it.”
“I’m not a hustler. I’m
lonely.”
The
customer starts up the car and begins to drive off. “Let’s go have a drink.”
There
is something so simply touching and honest about Fontaine’s film. Our young man
clearly recognizes that in a transactional world the only way to find love or
possible friendship is to pay or have someone else pay for it. And, strangely,
his somewhat perverted logic appears to work. But in having a drink with the
man, might he not also be perceived as a paid companion? Is any genuine
relationship possible in a world in which everything is bought and sold, to be
enjoyed for a limited time without any further complications? Our young man, if
nothing else, has complicated things, has forced the consumer to pause in his
busy schedule to possibly discover a new aspect in his sexually meaningless
life. It’s important to note that even as he ejaculates there is little but a
mild sense of release expressed upon his otherwise blank face. In expressing
his loneliness, the boy has at least reached out to touch something deep in nearly
every one of us. Perhaps before the night is out, the man might even manage a
smile.
Los Angeles, April 4,
2021
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (April
2021).
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