Thursday, June 12, 2025

Sébastien Lifshitz | Les corps ouverts (Open Bodies) / 1998

exploring possibilities

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sébastien Lifshitz (screenwriter and director) Les corps ouverts (Open Bodies) 1998

 

This moving 44-minute film by noted filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz follows the life of a gentle 18-year-old boy of North African heritage, whose mother is French which explains his name of Rémi (Yasmine Belmadi). He is close to his dying father, and gently puts him to bed each evening, as well as cooking for him when his sister is out for the night.



     Rémi, who is in his final year of high school, majoring in management and commerce, also works part-time in an Arab grocery.

     But it is his sex life which this film mostly follows, as he seeks sex mostly with older males, particularly Marc (Pierre-Loup Rajot), who appears to be primarily a wanna-be porn director, who when he comes across Rémi attempts to convince the boy that he is making a real movie, which gradually becomes a porn film, and which ultimately is also left unfinished. 


  

      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).      

     Rémi finds that he is also attracted to women, but it is men and boys in which he is mostly interested as he now seeks out a porn store with back-room booths, meeting up with rather sweet boy closer to his age (Helmer Lifshitz), who despite the lurid location, with men swarming the halls in their activities of cruising, share a sweet sexual encounter that begins with kisses before it presumably turns into any sexual action, which in any event, we never witness.



    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.

     The fact that the film ends with Marc asking him if he’d be willing to act in a porn film, perhaps asked earlier in their strange relationship, we suspect that given the boy’s societal position in French society as a North African, it may well be that the boy, who even his father suggests is not “tough enough” for the society in which he exists, may end up in the porn industry or some other occupation that would have been shameful to his doting father.



      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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