Sarah Al Atassi | Mauvais genre (Not That Kind of Guy) / 2020

other kinds of beings

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sarah Al Atassi (screenwriter and director) Mauvais genre (Not That Kind of Guy) / 2020 [26 minutes]

 

Living in an industrial suburb of Tours, France, Léto (Sohan Pague) is trapped in a world in which he works at a local art house movie theater run by a beast of a manager who hates cinema. The entire neighborhood seems hostile and alien, as nearby apartment dwellers who pound his walls and leave notes on his door regarding his evening sexual activities (Léto makes little noise, but watches mostly gay porno clips on his computer without earphones). And as he goes out each morning he runs into an entire gang of nearby thugs, who director Sarah Al Atassi (she plays one of them) has presented as almost stereotypical human monsters whose major phobia apparently is homosexuality. His covered motorcycle has been graffitied in yellow, describing him as a PD or faggot.

     There seems no possible way out of this horrific world until one day, traveling back and forth to work, Léto encounters—not entirely by accident since he has found his billfold in the movie house—an attractive and mysterious seeming Syrian man, Hamza (Issa Al Issa), who works at the local ice-skating ring. Both are immediately attracted to one another, Léto to Hamza’s look of masculinity, and Hamza to Léto’s petite 20-some year-old body. Almost as if he were prophesying from a magical book of foretellings, Hamza tells his new acquaintance that the ice-skating rink is closed, but promises that Léto will return the next day.

      Leaving his house, Léto again runs across the gang of thugs, but this time when they call him a faggot, he challenges the speaker, successfully challenging his attack by grabbing and wringing his balls. But the others soon join in the vicious fray and Léto is severely beaten.

      We don’t know, in fact, if this is the following day, but he has returned to the rink, now open, joining up and renting a pair of ice skates. As he has relayed in a cellphone message to his best, perhaps only friend (Philippe Bilheur), that he has met someone, and the night before he has even dreamed of having sex with the hirsute beauty. On the ice is a practicing amateur hockey team and trained ice dancers, whereas the striking young man has clearly never before worn a pair of skates. Like his neighbors, the others all scorn Léto, but when, in the men’s room, he again comes across Hamza, the Syrian is overjoyed to see him, recognizing that there is “something different” about his new friend.

     The very next moment, however, Hamza is called to clear away a mess left by the skaters, reminding us of a previous scene between Léto and his monstrous manager, who describes cinema as shit.

   In this fable-like story, Al Atassi has, indeed, represented both Léto and Hamza as two strange beauties in a world of extreme ugliness.

    Having left the rink disappointed, Léto is now on the roof of his concrete building, peering below, the thugs having gathered below imagining that the “queer” is about to jump.

    Hamza, perhaps also frustrated for having to leave his new friend so suddenly or maybe just because he is gifted with a seventh sense, seems impatient to reconnect with Léto. When the manager calls him to clean up another mess, this time he jumps the wall and rushes off to the young gay man, having heard his address when he registered to skate.

     Having observed the thugs cruel insinuations below, he rushes to the roof, only to find Léto staring at a world in which he doesn’t feel part of, but not at all ready to jump. The two come together, but Léto warns him, he is not like other gay men, dropping his pants to reveal that his specialness arises from his being a transsexual.

     Hamza seems completely unfazed, as if he has known all along that this was the boy’s “difference.” This being a fabulous fairy tale of an entire culture, he kisses Léto, the two having found, as in the Arabian Nights, true love.

       The plot I just related, however, can’t compare with the quiet wonderment of the alien land in which Al Atassi has dropped her central characters. If the concrete apartments, deteriorating cinema house, and crowded skating rink seem a bit foreboding, the characters with which she has peopled them with what seem to be almost like the giants, dwarves, hags, and trolls right out of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, with same-sex lovers Léto and Hamza standing in for Brünnhilde and Siegfried.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).