Sam Scott Schiavo | Un chant d'amour (nouveau) / 2012

who will buy?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Scott Schiavo (director) Un chant d'amour (nouveau) / 2012 [5 minutes]

 

Described as an homage to Jean Genet’s 1950 film A Song of Love, Un chant d'amour (nouveau) is the kind of movie that results from dealing only vaguely with the images of a previous film without really comprehending or even investigating its true message. Director Sam Scott Schiavo, born in Philadelphia, but who has lived for much of his adult life in Europe, is a photographer who hasn’t a clue what Genet is attempting to convey in his 1950 movie.

     Schiavo turns what in Genet’s film is the only method of expressing desire and communication, sharing cigarette smoke through a tiny hole (itself a kind of sexual emblem) into what might basically be an advertisement for a new shaving lotion, the central characters (Patrick Hollensteiner and Patrick Melech) with their slightly unshaven cheeks sharing in this version a smoking session through open bars. Except for getting a drag off each other, these boys seem far more interested in stroking themselves than in touching one another, although in this case all they have to do is reach out.

     In Genet’s prison world, sight and touch were forbidden, all there was were smoke and mirrors—the imagination of what might exist on the other side of the wall. Here, it’s just pretty boys with slightly besmudged T-shirts taking a cigarette break. The desire here is truly Narcissian, without much left over in their empty faces except the pout of further expectations.

  Don’t be fooled; this film has nothing to do with Genet and everything to do with selling a product, whatever that product turns out to be: the boys themselves or the pictures of their pouting, puffing cigarette-holding lips. In either case, I’m not buying.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).