without rational explanations
by Douglas Messerli
Jean-Paul Civeyrac and Pierre Guillaume
(screenwriters), Jean-Paul Civeyrac (director) La vie selon Luc (Life
According to Luc) / 1991
Something happened to LGBTQ cinema in the last few years of the 1980s that coalesced into a much more racially and culturally diverse and far darker vision in the early 1990s that came to be described as the New Queer Cinema. A great deal of the shift, quite obviously, had to do with the recognition of how AIDS was killing gay people as early as the mid- and late-1980s movies such as Buddies, No Sad Songs, and An Early Frost of 1985, Parting Glances (1986), and Longtime Companion (1989), all films that established the AIDS genre which would continue as a major cinematic concern throughout the following decade beginning with the grand theatrical summaria, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America of 1991-1993 (not filmed until 2003).
One of these early precursors of the films by Cheryl Dunne, Tom Kalin,
Gregg Araki, Marlon T. Riggs, and others who would define the new LGBTQ trends
was French director Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s 1991 short La vie selon Luc (Life
According to Luc).
In
a work of just 14 minutes Civeyrac crowds so many significant possibilities
that the film becomes enigmatic, as if a long novel had been shaved down into a
story of just of few pages. We can read all the signs but it is nearly
impossible to definitively interpret them.
Perhaps we should begin
with what he do know. A young man Luc (Jean Descanvelle) is a good-looking,
surly male prostitute, willing to participate in nearly any sexual act
including kissing, sucking, fucking, and being fucked and perhaps, for enough
money, other things. He hangs out, evidently, mostly at the urban stadium
swimming pool and in a dark dance bar, picking up his customers carefully and
participating in sex without any protection, about which the first partner we
encounter warns him. Luc apparently doesn’t care. Certainly, he doesn’t have
much of a life outside of tricking. He sleeps in what appears to be a temporary
room in his sister and her husband’s derelict apartment, next door to a squalling
newborn. And even that squatter’s-like room appears to be in question, since
the first time in the film when he returns to count his money, his sister
(Sabine Friess) reports that Ivan, likely her husband, wants his key back.
We also gather from a man called Serge (Thomas Badek) who demands he be
paid back for a loan, that Luc has evidently borrowed 10,000. We also know from
the scene in which his sister caught him counting this money that he has now
earned that amount. But we have no idea why he has borrowed the money or even
if he has any intention of paying it back, although Serge appears to be a
terrifying beast who threatens to kill him if he fails to pay off the debt.
And there is another wrinkle in the story. It appears that Luc has
previously had sex with a customer, Bernard (Alain Payen) who has befriended
and possibly fallen in love with the boy. Evidently he has been a regular
customer of Luc’s because the prostitute is teased by his peers who
describe Bernard as the boy’s sugar daddy or
his “old man.” Clearly, Luc no longer wants anything to do with Bernard, the
man nonetheless trying to track him down.
It
appears that Bernard is trying to find a way to release Luc from the burden of
his sexual activities. But what kind of work might begin at an 11:00 meeting at
the Stadium that might pay that kind of money? We can only wonder whether this
job involves an even more dangerous activity such as robbery or something
worse.
In any event, Luc has no intention of keeping that appointment and, in
fact, when approached again by Serge for payment offers up Bernard as the
solution: “You want your money. Bernard’s there. Mess him up and help
yourself!”
After another sexual connection in a room behind the small dance hall,
where we gather that the boy is about to be rather brutally fucked, we soon
after observe Luc leaving the place, again meeting up with Serge who tells him,
“You’ll never recognize your old man now.”
Luc walks slowly away in a manner which he might imagine represents some
sense of sorrow over his betrayal. But frankly, we don’t really know how he
feels having so readily sold out the only person who appears to genuinely care
about him.
Luc returns to his room, adds in his new bills, and slowly turns all the
banknotes in the proper direction, tapping them carefully together before he
closes the tin in which he keeps them and, instead of putting it back into the
drawer, hides it under his bed. We now perceive that he must have more in that
box than 10,000 and that he will be able to keep it all since Serge has been
paid through robbing Bernard of the money he had meant for Luc.
Luc sits on the bed in the darkening light, finally laying down
seemingly pondering the situation. The screen goes black.
What does he plan to do with the money? We might imagine that he intends
to make his escape from the life in which he has imprisoned himself. But we
have no evidence that he has made any such decision or that he even wants to
escape.
As for the reason he has borrowed the money in the first place, any
answer we might come up with tells us more about ourselves than about Luc. I
have concocted a little imaginary plot involving the work’s title, “Life
According to Luc,” which resonates for me with the Biblical text of The
Gospel According to Luke. The apostle Luke, if you recall, was a physician
as well as an artist, which was why the Apostle Luke is the patron saint of
doctors and artists. The film’s Luc is certainly no doctor and has no interest
in art as far as we can tell. But his mother is ill, in the hospital, and
perhaps he has used the borrowed 10,000 to help pay for her medical bills,
attempting to repay the loan through prostitution, the only way he might
imagine in his poor working-class world to make that kind of money fast.
But even if that were true, how to reconcile his seeming disdain of his
mother and his unnecessary betrayal of Bernard remains an enigma. Luc is not a
“good boy at heart” but a desperate man willing to do anything to get what he
wants, including selling his own body. And unlike many male prostitutes who
often insist that they are not gay and will not engage in kissing, in the few
moments in which we observe his sexual activities he seems to enjoy them, quite
ready to participate in the passion of the moment. It appears he is not at all
suffering from his chosen (or even necessary) profession. Perhaps he has simply
been seduced through his own previously innocent involvement in making love to
unknown men. But that is 11 possibilities away from any evidence. And we have
no logical end or solution to this Luc’s gospel. In a sense we know about as
much about this Luc as we do about the gentile, possibly Jewish writer of the
Book of Acts and his encounters with Christ, a man who was born possibly in Antioch
and lived possibly in Troas near the remains of the ancient Troy.
About this Luc we know only that he is a male prostitute who has a bit
more than 10,000 in banknotes and intends to keep them. Luc is no homosexual
hero even if we might imagine him as not being a total villain.
As I began this short essay, in this movie something is vastly different
from most previous LGBTQ films we have previously seen. Rational explanations
for apparently irrational behavior have disappeared.
Los Angeles, April 26, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (April 2021).
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