exploring possibilities
by Douglas
Messerli
Sébastien Lifshitz (screenwriter and director) Les corps ouverts (Open Bodies)
1998
Rémi, who is in his final year of high
school, majoring in management and commerce, also works part-time in an Arab grocery.
Told
in a non-linear method, the story makes clear that Marc and the boy end up in
bed together, and become regular sexual partners until the older man begins to
attempt to control Rémi’s exploration of the world around him, which includes
bedding a female street-dancer (Margot Abascal).
As Lisa Nesselson writes in Variety, “[This]
elliptical, fragmented tale traces Remi’s tentative explorations and presumed
emotional disarray with nonjudgmental candor. Remi finds himself arguing with
Marc and, in one of brief pic’s most interesting scenes, casually reveals to a
buddy that his main squeeze isn’t a chick.”
Yet, despite the positiveness with which
the young Rémi meets the challenge of a body open to many difference experiences,
when Marc at an early point in the film’s narrative asks him what he plans to
do with his life when he graduates, unlike what his dying father wishes for
him, a college education, Rémi insists that he has no plans for further
schooling, and appears to have no ideas about other future possibilities.
Although seemingly open to all sorts of
possibilities, the boy simply doesn’t have the imagination, it appears, to
escape the closed doors of his future, which at moments, with tears flowing
down his face, it appears the open and ready Rémi already perceives.
Fortunately, Lifshitz’s work is not that
film, but a peek into the life of a still sexually-fluid boy who is attempting openly
to discover who he might be.
The film won the prestigious Prix Jean
Vigo for 1998.
Los
Angeles, June 12, 2025
Reprinted
from My Queer Review blog (June 2025).
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