the key to independence
by Douglas Messerli
Patrice Bonneau (screenplay), André Pelletier
(director) Raisonnable / 2015 [17 minutes]
After all these years, one might think that his mother would be able to
grant him the balance the two have maintained all these years. But in this
somewhat comical but perhaps also somewhat sad small work of cinema, the
intrusive mother finally oversteps her boundaries, forcing the perfect son to
reveal things he has hidden from her for years, or, in simpler terms, demanding
that he finally, far too late, come out of the closet in which he has
comfortably lived his life.
When she isn’t complaining about a small illness, Monique constantly
finds new ways to lure her son downstairs to her flat, baking him his favorite
apple pies, buying him tickets to a concert of his favorite composer, Haydn—a
mistake, since his favorite is actually Brahms—and any other way she can
imagine to keep her son at the center of her life.
When he’s off to work, she sneaks into his apartment with a special key
to clean his apartment. When she accidently knocks over a small little black
box sitting on his bed stand, she blithely ignores the fact that it is filled
with condoms, but finds a mysterious key to which she seeks out a lock,
discovering it to be his closet door in which she finds several drawings of a
male figure, troubling her perhaps more for the fact that they have been hidden
than for what they reveal, since they are mostly simply sketches of a male
head, with apparently no nudity. She does, however, take away a key on the end
of leather necklace she has discovered in his closet.
She telephones soon after, saying nothing of what she has found, but
complaining that he had no window cleaner, of the messy condition of his rooms,
and about her asthma. In the office, his friend stops by to remind him of plans
they have for that evening.
But when she finally intrudes as Yannick and Guillaume are making love
to return the key Guillaume has given to his lover to his own flat, it is too
much. “Was that your…boyfriend?” she asks after Guillaume leaves. Trying to
convince her son that he is better off single, that the two of them are the
perfect couple, and that since his sisters have moved away, she depends on him,
as she puts her arms around him where he sits at the table in his underpants—it
is all finally too much.
“I can’t do this anymore! I can’t breathe. You’re suffocating me,” he
shouts out.
Throughout the movie, the couple have been playing a game of choosing
between two words: “Paris or Berlin,” “cohesive or distant,” etc, answering not
necessarily with one or the other but another word, a kind of evaluation of the
question itself. We see them on a bench once more playing that game at the end
of Pelletier’s short work, “Right or left?” Guillaume asks. Yannick, points to
the center of his lover’s face and envelops him in a kiss. Guillaume hands him
a new key to his apartment, and Yannick shares a ticket to the Haydn concert,
as they plan for a special event after the concert’s end.
It
takes some people years to finally break the ties that bind so that they might
live their own lives.
Los Angeles, April 10, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April
2023).
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