anticipation
by
Douglas Messerli
Julien
Eger (screenwriter and director) Le baiser (Romeo’s Kiss) /
2007 [12 minutes]
What
is the difference between acting and reality? Or, to put it another way, how
can we separate fantasy from what we truly wish to happen.
Thomas (Florent Arnoult) is suspiciously
curious about his sister Cécile’s (Héloïse
Adam) role as Juliette in a school production of Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet and decides to accompany her to a rehearsal of the play.
The scene performed in front of him and the
director (Didier Tournan) is the balcony scene where the two kiss. But somehow
every time the young man playing Romeo, Jérémie (Matila
Malliarakis), goes to kiss his Juliette there is an interruption, or the
director suggests it is insufficient.
Finally, just at the moment of the kiss, Cécile
receives a phone message; she is about to be accepted into a prestigious acting
program in a nearby school who wants to meet with her immediately, and she
rushes off to the meeting “just for a few moments.”
Quite inexplicably, the director calls upon Thomas to substitute for his
sister. At first he reads the lines quite clumsily, backing away each time that
Jérémie moves in for the kiss. Yet gradually Shakespeare’s language takes over,
and as the young Romeo recites “let lips do what hands do,” Thomas is enticed
to read Juliette’s lines quite convincingly.
Although he still backs off from the kiss,
at one point running off the men’s room to wash his face as if that might wake
him from the fantasy he is experiencing, it is clear that he is falling in love
with the young beauty who plays Romeo.
Cécile returns to play the role, once more
interrupting the now highly desired kiss; at home Thomas cannot resist checking
up on Jérémie on the internet either finds a semi-nude portrait of him and
imagines an encounter with the boy on a couch, this time following through with
the kiss.
s also interrupted, this time
by the director himself, as the scene cuts quickly away to the actual theater
production with Romeo declaiming, “Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is
purged.” Thomas, unable to witness the kiss between his now imagined lover and
sister, rushes from his seat, escaping to Thomas’ dressing room where, like all
interested gay boys, he sniffs the actor’s underwear before pulling a rose from
a gift bouquet to offer up to the returning Thomas. This time he is determined
to both offer and return his fantasy lover’s kiss, but is stymied yet again by
the young man’s response: “I’m sorry Thomas, but I was acting.”
Thomas faints in response, as Jérémie
returns to the mode of the play, bending as he recites the lines: “I will stay
with thee and never from this palace of dim night depart again…,” finally providing
him with the kiss before he (as Romeo) falls dead next to him.
We only have to wonder now whether in replaying
the death scene, is the real Romeo signaling the same eternal love to his now
male version of Juliette or is he suggesting that it’s simply “over” for both
of them? Being the sentimental sap that I am, and given the beauty of both
these boys, I must opt for the first of these propositions. It certainly wouldn’t
be the first time that Shakespeare’s great romance has proven its effects on
young men and women.
Los
Angeles, October 20, 2025
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).
