a language with no words for desire
by Douglas Messerli
Dominique Fabre and Etienne Périer (screenplay, based on the novella by
Stefan Zweig), Etienne Périer (director), La Confusion des sentiments (Confused Feelings, aka The Confusion of Feelings) / 1981 [TV film]
For the writers, director, and producers of the television film, based on
a 1927 Stefan Zweig novella, the presentation of such a clear-cut dramatization
of a homosexual man’s love for his student must have seemed in 1981 to be a
rather adventurous and controversial endeavor, particularly since it wasn’t even
a decade after the even more muted film, Death in Venice, to which their
work bears a remarkable resemblance, had been shown in the art movie houses.
The director Etienne Périer was
quite upfront about what he imagined he had accomplished:
“This was the first TV film I directed and also the first and only film
with an openly homosexual Subject ... adapted from a Stefan Zweig novel. It is
the story of a middle age professor who falls deeply in love with a young
student in his class on English literature. The student is a boarder in the
teacher's house. The teacher is married and his wife knows he is mostly
attracted to young men. She loves him nevertheless. The whole story revolves
around a book the professor will write, dictating it to his young pupil... he
will only declare his love at the end of the writing ....and it is too late....”
Zweig’s writing, despite
its immediate and continued popularity, always carried with it, it seems to me,
a sort of 19th century caution when it came to matters of sex or politics, and
his writing, particularly when compared to other German writers such as Joseph
Roth, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, and other greats of the period, generally seems
to me written for the bourgeois middle class, dangerous ideas dressed up in a
melodramatic language and aesthetics.
What’s more, what the produces
of La Confusion des sentiments could not have foretold is that by 1981
the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and others had totally altered
the landscape of gay-oriented film, and over the past couple of years movie
theaters for LGBTQ subject matter, what with the release of Carlos Hugo
Christensen’s The Intruder, Philippe Vallois We Were One Man,
Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem’s Breed of Faggots, Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No
Return and Freak Orlando (the later of the same year), Jean Rollin’s
Fascination, Salvatore Samperi’s Ernesto, and Frank Ripploh’s Taxi
to the Toilets (also from 1981). One year earlier, TV German television had
aired Fassbinder’s truly radical Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Had Confused Feelings had
come only a few years earlier, say in 1977 or even 1978, it might have been more
controversial and noticed. Today, alas, this film is nearly forgotten.
Which is a pity, really, since
it is a rather remarkable study in gay feelings so closeted that it almost makes
it appear that The Boys in the Band of nearly a decade earlier, instead
of hooting out their frustrated messages of love and hate in a quiet New York
apartment, were shouting it into a microphone while parading down the New York
streets.
Although the young Roland
(Pierre Mallet) seems to have be living a rather desolate life while attending
the university in Berlin, once he is sent by his father to the rural university
where, the moment he gets off the train, he speeds off to attend a professor’s
class where in a lecture on Shakespeare the lecturer is supposedly so brilliant
that within moments our beautiful bad boy has reformed to become a simpering
fool overwhelmed by his sudden mentor’s brilliance.
And once the professor (Michel
Piccoli) gets a good look at his new student, who hasn’t even bothered yet to
find a room, it is clearly a love made in hell, the belated pedophile almost
panting over the good-looking boy’s enthusiasm and faith, while Roland seems to
have found the loving or perhaps we might suggest “lover” of a father he’s
always been looking for. In the earliest moments of the film, his real father
even admits that he has never found the time to talk to his son; his conversation
about his son’s bad habits in the Berlin University seem to be the only full
conversation the two of them have ever shared.
For most of this movie, in
fact, Roland plays an absolute idiot when it comes to sexual matters, unable to
comprehend why the professor suddenly escapes, sometimes for a day or two at a
time, from his home and even from his classroom. Why he plans meetings with the
young student for which, at the last moment he cancels or simply doesn’t show
up. What’s the boy to think of his idol when he displays such inconsistent
behavior?
The entire situation becomes
even more fraught when, searching for the professor’s famous book on
Shakespeare and all Elizabeth culture he discovers from the local librarian
that no such book exists.
Later, on one of his few moments bicycling
the streets instead of locking himself away in his room, he espies a beautiful
woman swimming naked in the local river, he discovers not only is she aware of
his voyeuristic activities and doesn’t seem to mind in the least, but that she
is the very same librarian to whom he spoke about the professor’s nonexistent
book. How even more startling when, soon after, he discovers that she, Anna
(Gila von Weitershausen), is the professor’s wife.
Knowing full well what is
going on between her husband and the boy, or rather realizing what is not going
on, she attempts to get Roland interested in young girls. But once more, Roland
seems completely clueless, just as he cannot figure out why at one moment the
professor is so friendly and solicitous of his company, and at the next seems
to shun him.
Instead of coming to any sense
of awareness regarding the closeted farce going on around him, the boy offers
to become the professor’s secretary in order to help him actually write his nonexistent
book, now devoting long hours to writing down his would-be lover’s words and
staying up late to type up the manuscript—all of which doesn’t help with his
other studies or diminish the derision the other faculty members and fellow
students demonstrate for his obvious
Still Roland remains almost
blind. Or perhaps, we might imagine—if only he were so clever—he’s really into
S&M, torturing both the professor and himself as he marches around in all
his beauty while pretending not to have a clue of the sexual tension between
the two of them.
Amazingly, the boy has
actually gotten the professor to complete his work and everyone seems to agree,
Anna included, that it is a work of genius. But, of course, now the time has
come for the genius to admit his love through the apparatus of appreciation, and
from Roland he and we expect the acceptance and actualization of that love.
Even Anna can’t believe the boy is so dumb not to know what’s coming; and, in
part, to save him from the embarrassment, she herself seduces him into her bed,
forcing him to finally realize what is expected of him in such situations, or,
perhaps even more importantly, what it is that he is truly seeking to get out
of the strange “mentorship” with which he has so willingly engaged.
Before the professor can even
enter into conversation with his confession and hopes of a possibly positive
response, Roland has already packed.
The endlessly delayed love
scene with his Tristan has been stolen off stage by his own beloved wife to
protect the dim-witted kid, who finally realizes that his love for his idol isn’t
of the of secular world, not involved with the body and earth. As IMDb commentor
Juha Varto observed: “They don’t speak of flesh.”
I once had an English professor who while
teaching Mann’s Death in Venice commented that von Aschenbach’s true
error was not in loving the startlingly young Polish Tadzio, but in his
inability to tell the boy about his love. Most of my class members were simply
scandalized by his comment, but I tried to make sense of it, finally deciding
that it truly might have helped the situation. As it is, the boy keeps staring
back at von Aschenbach simply because he cannot comprehend why the stranger is
looking so intensely at him. Had the older man simply been able to tell him, “hey
kid, I think you’re beautiful and I love you,” perhaps Tadzio would have been freed
from feeling that there was something amiss with himself given the stranger’s
endless gaze. He could have said, “Get away from me old man. Go home!” Or, if
he truly loved that gaze and the thrill it gave it, perhaps he might have begun
to explore his own sexuality, just what that pleasure of enjoying a man’s gaze really
meant.
Might Roland have run away if
the professor had actually broken through the adjoining room of their hotel or
knocked on his bedroom door and asked to spend the night? Or what if Roland had
been more honest with himself and admitted what was happening between the two
of them,
Or maybe, as one of the
Letterboxd commentators argued, there “may actually have [been] a deeper completely
repressed erotic root” to his love. But then, perhaps not since they don’t have
a language for their desires.
By the time Roland realizes what
is happening, a kiss is all that is left. Any homosexual love has dissipated like
a sour perfume into the air.
Mann’s and Zweig’s tortured
discreetness didn’t mean much in the wildly wicked late 70s and early 80s when
this film appeared. And, accordingly, it was forgotten. But as a historical
document of the painful hot-house gay romances that apparently went on so many
early 20th century households, this TV movie is a necessary work of cinema art,
with a wonderful performance by Piccoli and the eye-catching physiognomy of Mallet
to boot. And von Weitershausen’s role is everything open and joyously free of
spirit that the boy and his teacher’s friendship is not.
Los Angeles, November 25, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).
