Mathilde Bayle | Le maillot de bain (The Swimming Trunks) / 2013

the earliest revelation of sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mathilde Bayle (screenwriter and director) Le maillot de bain (The Swimming Trunks) / 2013 [21 minutes]

 

It is commonly believed that very young children do not have sexual or even erotic thoughts or feelings. Indeed, school teachers have been taught that one of the first signs of sexual abuse among their pupils is evidence of just such thoughts as evidenced in a child’s behavior. But like so many seemingly “home approved” sexual conceptions it is simply not true. Many gay men will tell you, including this writer, that childhood sexual attraction for older males comes often quite early. My own father was a handsome man, and I wanted to be by his side almost constantly—so my mother’s letters tell her father and step-mother when she wrote home. And I can well remember that when my father’s brother visited, which was seldom, I was thoroughly overwhelmed by his presence. This masculine, dark-haired, hirsute male, an Air Force pilot, would pick me out and toss me about in the air to my absolute delight. When he spoke to me, unlike my parents he talked directly to me as an adult might to other adults, teasing me, hugging and tousling with me in a manner that utterly excited me in a way that I could then not explain to myself, but realized later was pure erotic pleasure. His appearance and friendly, assured manner represented things to which I am still most attracted to in adult males.

     So too does French writer / director present us in the compelling short film The Swimming Trunks the ten-year-old (as one source claims him to be, although I might have described him as much younger) Rémi (Roger Manning) who begins the film as a nearly undistinguishable child at a pool that services a tourist stop surrounded by caravans and tents where the families enjoy their summer visits near the ocean. He swims, attempts to dig out a hole into which he has seen a cricket escape, and basically plays alone as boys often do. That is until he meets a girl even younger than he, La (Inès Giardino) who clearly is bored and wants a friend. She and her parents, she tells him, are staying in nearby trailer and will soon be moving on to Italy. She impresses him, somewhat, with that fact that she claims to also know Italian, repeating one word to prove it.

      Rémi is really not interested at all in becoming friends—that is until her father comes along, a truly handsome, hairy stud of a man who almost immediately takes the boy’s breath away as he lifts up his daughter into the air and pulls her down into a fatherly kiss. It is as if the child has seen the man of his dreams, except that he has clearly never experienced any erotic dreams and doesn’t himself understand his intense attraction. For Rémi, the girl’s father Stéphane (Stanley Weber) is simply a father he desperately wishes were his own.

      When we do get a glimpse of Rémi’s parents and their overweight friends, we comprehend why the simple difference of appearance between Stéphane and his own father might be something of fascination for a boy just beginning to sort out the differences between human beings. But there is something deeper stirring here, as Rémi suddenly finds himself hanging around Stéphane and his wife’s trailer and pretending to play with La as if she had suddenly become a close childhood friend.

     Before embarking on my précis of the film, however, I want to assure the potential viewer that  while it might appear that the narrative is filled with inappropriate scenes, perhaps exaggerated for sensation and controversies’ sake, Bayle’s movie remains quite innocent and views the events only from the eyes of the young boy himself, never from the eyes of the unaware adults.

      In a particularly poignant scene, Rémi plays the role almost of voyeur as he watches the man, his wife, and daughter near the ocean, Stéphane, in his blue-striped trunks deciding to brave the ocean waves. The boy watches almost the way an older man might a beautiful young woman or, if gay, a stunningly fit young man. But as a child he doesn’t know what even to make of his enchantment bordering on an obsession. 

      Soon after, observing Stéphane entering a shower stall that opens into nature, the boy spying the man’s swimming trunks and towel over the shower door sneaks up and steals away the swimming apparel, running off and hiding it in the bed of his tent. So begins his fantasies of being held up in the air just as La had been by the strong arms of the man, Stéphane wrestling with him as father and his son might engage.

     Rather than quelling his desire, Rémi is pulled further each day to the man, watching him closely without Stéphane even noticing or when he does spot the wide-eyed kid, presuming that he has come to play with his daughter.

    Finally, in one intense bedtime fantasy, Stéphane comes to Rémi explaining that he has been observing him despite the boy’s openly expressed doubts. And finally, to prove his love, the man bends over his bed about to plant a kiss on his lips, a bedtime story the boy tells to himself interrupted.

     The next day La reports that they are leaving. It appears, at the end of summer, the tourists are beginning to thin out. We see Rémi, the trunks in hand, running across the long strand towards the ocean. He stops at a small gathering of changing rooms and puts on the man’s trunks, amazingly almost fitting, when the string is pulled tight, around Rémi’s tiny body, although they fall lower on his thighs that the boy’s previous currant-colored tighties. He walks to the ocean and stops just at the edge of where the water laps ashore, standing there, the boy having become his would-be father.

     As one commentator named Daminio, expressing his views of this film on the internet Letterboxd site observes: “Everything is there: the beach, carefree nature of childplay though for those quick enough showing the signs of an exit to innocent childhood. The attention seeking behavior, not once questioning one's feeling of being so drawn to that ‘brawn’ and masculinity or simply put feeling of safety and reassurance that is embodied in that dad's image.”

     The film does not at all argue that Rémi is a gay boy in the making, but simply recognizes that children also perceive the world in sexual contexts, and that young gay boys often fantasize, without them even knowing what their feelings mean, about their peers and the adults who surround them. Looking back as adults, it is often those early same-sex attractions—that earliest revelation of sex—that a homosexual might point to as evidence of his or her first awareness of the difference of sexual desire. Bayle reveals those innocent first feelings quite brilliantly in her 21-minute cinematic narrative.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (December 2022).