the lies of his aspirations
by Douglas
Messerli
Gérard Blain
and André Debaecque (screenplay), Gérard Blain (director) Les
amis (The Friends) / 1971
French Films critic James Travers describes Gérard Blain as a paradox.
After acting in Julien Duvivier’s Voici les temps des assassins (1956),
Claude Chabrol’s Le Beaux Serge (1958), and Chabrol’s Les Cousins
(1959), and being offered a Hollywood contract, Blain might have become a major
star, but he chose instead to act in small films in France and elsewhere in
Europe, works primarily forgotten today. Instead, Blain sought primarily to
direct films beginning with Les amis in 1971, winning the Golden Leopard
Award for the Best First Work at the Locarno International Film Festival and
the high praise of François Truffaut, while primarily shocking French film
audiences for its portrayal of a homosexual, seemingly pedophilic relationship
between the 16-year old hero, Paul (Yan Epstein) and an older married man,
Philippe (Philippe March), in many respects an semi-autobiographical work that
relates to the director’s own life.
The scandal arose despite the fact that Blain, who himself as a teenager
had been involved with older men, dealt with the issue in this film rather
matter-of-factly and implied, as Travers points out, that Paul and Philippe are
not lovers and do not, within the confines of the film, share a bed. Rather,
Blain presents the young boy, who like himself had been left behind by his
father at a very young age, and finds in Philippe a loving father figure while
Paul offers the elder the beauty, curiosity, and tenderness that is clearly
missing from his book-reading and chess-playing wife.
He can properly dress Paul, help to educate him, encourage him to seek
out the career Paul desires by paying for his acting lessons, is able to
provide him with horse-back riding lessons (a delight since Philippe’s hobby is
horses), and is there to comfort him when later in the film Paul is abandoned
by the wealthy friends of his own age he had made in Deauville where Philippe
takes him on vacation. With the purity of image and the seeming objectivity of
one of his major influences Robert Bresson, Blain’s narrative seems almost
transparent and simple in its representation of a younger and older man who
find joy, pleasure, and social and financial gratification in one another.
Yet that is not the way others, including his audiences, view the same
images. Certainly, the young wealthy boys and girls who annually summer at
Deauville in their parent’s beachside mansions don’t see Paul’s relationship
with Philippe as simply as he attempts to present it, at times
suggesting Philippe is his
grandfather and other moments his “godfather,” the latter of which is perhaps
closer to the truth.
The hotel staff, particularly the bell hop and
elevator operator boys, eye the relationship with obvious suspicion and
prurient interest. Most sophisticated film goers, who by 1971 had become quite
used to reading coded movies, could not see it so simply either, preferring to
read in the late-night bedroom scenes and intense sexual sessions that
Blain purposely left out of his film.
Since it was common knowledge that filmmakers were not permitted to show
such activities, one simply had to imagine them, to fill in the reality of even
heterosexual couples asleep in separate rooms on bedding down on separate beds.
Even the director, at moments, allowed Philippe long, slightly-swooning
moments as he looks down across the resting or sleeping boy, the pleasure he
body takes as his young student leans into his body as he attempts to teach him
how to drive (the whole scene which is played out as if the two were engaging
in sexual intercourse), or his obvious expression of the joy of the deep hugs
when it becomes necessary to console the destressed young man, as well as Paul’s own confessions of love and
admiration for his facilitator in life when he admits to his true friend
Nicholas
(Jean-Claude Dauphin) that he would
rather have his father and mother die than Phillipe—all clue us in, so it
appears, to a more unsettling view of
the relationship. Despite his seemingly
benign attentions to the boy, it is also clear that when the 16-year-old
attempts to explore the world of “normal” heterosexual adolescence, Phillipe
grows jealous, refusing to even greet him when Paul returns from a late night
out.
Given the life he leads when living with his totally disinterested
mother, without Philippe he would have no possibilities outside the day-to-day
workhouse mentality of his sister and her husband. With Philippe, Paul enters a
world he previously might only have imagined, including the love of a
sexually-willing blonde horsewoman right out of the movie pictures he regularly
sees with Philippe. The only problem is that in order to fully make “real” the world he now
rubs up against with Philippe, Paul lies, both to himself and his new friends,
pretending to be one of them without realizing how empty their lives are compared with
his own—much like Philippe’s wife’s
world in which the biggest event of her day is joining in a chess tournament.
Paul pretends to be receiving the education which for him ended at age 13,
hints at parental mansions to which he has only been invited to with Philippe,
and imagines doting parents, to the envy of all the others, who nonetheless
leave him quite alone. And in this sense he is very much like the Truffaut’s
Antoine Doinel, although pushing in almost the opposite direction toward
assimilation instead of rebellion. Paul wants everything that Antoine
rejects—and which oddly enough Antoine later receives and accepts while Paul
cannot. This perhaps exemplifies the director’s own paradox. Like many young
men who make their living by gratifying the sexual lusts of older gay men, in
his own later life Blain had the reputation of being somewhat of a
homophobe.
A great part of Blain’s film, accordingly, is taken up with a social
satire of the upper class as we watch the bland young female beauties and their
mean-spirited boyfriends learn how to behave in the manner of their parents as
they casually comment on their various parental villas, display their athletic
skills, practice casino gambling, and sneak off for sexual encounters that our
young hero is simply not prepared for. When they actually enter the company of the
adults, their parents are busy playing Monopoly, honing their own skills for
further acquisition and financial greed. Although Paul sees Marie-Laure
(Nathalie Fontaine) as female perfection, we see her as the wide-mouthed
horsewoman she is destined to become, her mother almost immediately tripping up
Paul with his lies about where he attends school. Even the most talented and
rebellious among them, and the only true friend Paul retains, Nicholas, is
scolded by his mother for befriending “that” boy whose behavior she dislikes—a
very strange statement given that Paul is one of the most polite and respectful
people in the entire film. Obviously, the older generation immediately sees
poverty and abuse written across his body, and in an attempt to make sure that
their labels stick advise their protected loved ones to stand clear of him.
The only figure to whom Paul finally can turn with the expectation of
love and kindness is his, let us admit it, homosexual older friend. And
it is important to note that fact, for if Philippe is wealthy, he remains an
outsider in his love for Paul. If there wasn’t truly any bodily contact between
them, there surely should have been, at least some momentary release from a world
the others have locked up in their pure, heteronormative skins. At the very
moment when Paul finally realizes that fact, that he truly enjoys the company
of his “amis,” he discovers that Philippe has just been killed in an
auto crash.
With Nicholas, he attends the funeral like many a gay man has had to,
standing a distance from the body of man he has loved, standing apart from the
regular mourners who lay claim to him. When Philippe’s wife passes, it is as if
he were invisible, although we can see through the strain of her face to
maintain that disdainful dismissiveness that indicates that she probably has
suspected his existence all along.
Fortunately, as Paul relates to Nicholas, if he cannot begin working
immediately his mother is ready to throw him out of her apartment; but
apparently Philippe has already paid for his acting lessons, so Paul can
continue learning, living as he will probably for the rest of his life in his
active imagination in a world in which he will never feel he is truly a part.
Isn’t that what great acting and great directing is all about? In his room we
see a photograph of a moment in his life—one of the only instances in which we
observe Paul laughing—when he didn’t have to act.
Los Angeles, September 1, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (September 2022).
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