Sylvain Coisne | Dylan Dylan / 2017

irrational responses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sylvain Coisne (screenwriter and director) Dylan Dylan / 2017 [17 minutes]

 

French director Sylvain Coisne’s film about the loss two gay men suffer for their adopted son, Dylan, has an amazing potential to be true tearjerker, and the scenes around the breakdown of their marriage are quite touching and convincing. Yanis and Hugo (Matthieu Dahan and Vincent Marie) are suffering all the difficulties of parents who lose their child, including simple things such as boxing up the boy’s stuffed bear and toys.

     Early on, Yanis is furious with Hugo for attempting to peel away the stars they have posted for their son on the sliding door of the balcony. Their varied feelings of bereavement, moreover, put each other on edge. Had the film expanded and continued to explore this territory, it might have been a somewhat profound short that explored new territory.

     But Coisne immediately thickens the plot with homophobic hate. The two discover their car has been covered over with the word “Mort,” threatening their deaths. Two newspaper reporters, both female (Julia Lacoste and Eglantine Pauget) appear to be stalking them to get an interview. When Hugo puts their son’s teddy bear in the building dumpster, Yanis retrieves it, arguing that if he were to have left it there it would be all over the evening news.

     Much of the plot consists of a trip to a distant motel to which the couple take their boxes of their son’s possessions to toss into a local dumpster, there momentarily rediscovering their love in sex. But even in their isolated spot someone has found them out, their car again covered over with a homophobic slur, the reporters having followed them as well.

     Hugo, moreover, keeps having visions of a lightning storm in which an airplane is hit by a lightning bolt. At another point he sees an image of a plane in the bathwater, which convinces us that perhaps the child died some freak air accident.

     After their sexual reconciliation, Hugo begins to leave as Yanis remains, telling him to pretend that he may never return home.

      I can well imagine is some communities that the death of an adopted child by two gay men might bring about the hostility of the right-wing neighbors. I can comprehend the fact that even the news may be interested in the situation, although any respectable media source would have not seen this incident worthy of coverage. I cannot quite imagine, however, even in the worst corners of the bigoted USA that the two would be threatened with death because of their own child’s death unless there really was an incident of neglect or abuse involved.

      But when Yanis finally speaks to the media team, he mentions that the boy was indeed intrigued by lightning and rain, and ran out every time there was a major storm, much to their chagrin. But the evening of his death, worried that he might attempt to do something similar, they ran into his room to find him already dead of an aneurism.

 

“That night it was thundering. Hugo could not sleep. So he went to see him in his bedroom. Dylan was asleep, facing the wall. But his eyes were open. Ruptured aneurism, they said. Simple. He would have died, even in the bathtub, even in the car, or with another family. It was bound to end up this way.”

      So why haven’t Hugo and Yanis told their “simple” story, if the press was that interested, in the beginning? Why have we, as well, been misled with images of lightning and aircraft? Why didn’t they immediately wash away the words of hate on their car, even if somehow they felt some sense of guilt? Surely in their seemingly upscale community, there must have been other gay or lesbian families whose children died or became ill in the past? And if there were no others, certainly some heterosexual family might have spoken out with sympathy is this particular French community, even if it is some backwater rightest French village akin to an Alabama rural community? And where, at the end of the work, has Hugo gone? Has he left Yanis? The film ultimately brings up more questions than their simple story answers.

     We feel we were purposely made to feel confused by the author, given the real story is the couple’s sadness and perhaps sense of guilt. Coisne has created a mystery where there was none to be found, embedded his work with a sense of hysteria that is hardly believable, and then resolved it without truly exploring the emotions that remain with the troubled gay couple. Perhaps he is attempting to demonstrate the irrational behavior of those who hate. But even the repetition of the child’s name hints that the director might want to have started all over again without the theatrics, telling the story of the couple who loved this boy who just happened to have been homosexuals.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).