Jacques Molitor | En compagnie de la poussière (With the Dust) / 2008

a matter of life and death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Molitor and Xavier Seron (screenplay), Jacques Molitor (director) En compagnie de la poussière (With the Dust) / 2008 [19 minutes]

 

Luxembourg filmmaker Jacques Molitor’s With the Dust is another of the early 21st century short masterworks, a highly complex film that involves issues of youth, aging, love, sexuality, and even possibly murder.

     Molitor’s work borders, in fact, on the horror genre, and this gay love film often moves in that direction. Good friends Michel (Thomas Coumans) and François (Guillaume Dumont) have a kind child-like interaction in which it’s clear that François is love with his friend. But obviously they have been friends for so long that it’s not truly evident that Michel even comprehends the full extent of their relationship.

     During the days, they basically play, stealing kitsch lawn ornaments and hanging out at their ramshackle cabin in a swimming hole. It is almost an idyllic world in which, even if he doesn’t quite cross the sexual lines, François can come close to playing out a fantasy relationship and pretend to have a sexual life with Michel.

     That is until one day two young women show up at the pond, particularly Alice (Anne-Catherine Reigniers) who almost challenges Michel to come close to her, swimming off only at the very last moment. Alice and Michel meet again the next evening at an art opening where François either has a self-portrait or someone else has painted him, his thin torso being exposed, along with his balls, almost as a painterly joke. While Michel is a conventionally beautiful blond, François has what you might describe as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty.

      Expecting his friend to go home with him, Michel hangs on at the part a little longer to talk with Alice, severely disappointing François, who leaves in a slight huff.

     During the late nights or early mornings, Michel works as an assistant to Benoit (Jean-Jacques Rausin), who loves to eat chips and play loud music under his earphones as the two shave and drain the liquids from the dead bodies left them. It is a rather gruesome activity with Benoit hinting at some necrophiliac interests, although we never actually witness these.

      After working Michel takes a dip in a local pool, an old man sitting each morning on the edge to watch him a bit a ghoul.

      The next evening, François again hopes Michel will show up to an event they have been evidently handing out fliers for; but once more Michel spends his free hours before work with Alice.

      And we watch the cycle repeat, Michel at work among the corpses before his morning swim. But this time when he arrives back at their cabin, Michel is crestfallen, hurt evidently by Alice breaking off their friendship. François takes his friend’s head to his breast to comfort him, but the gesture quickly turns to kissing which Michel not only does not reject, but after a brief let up returns for several moments before the feel of his friend’s hand moving below his belt frightens him, as he pushes his away and jumps up, leaving François panting for more.

 

  That evening, everything seems different in the morgue. Benoit gets a phone call and asks François to finish up.

       Meanwhile, we see François meet up with Alice in the Pond, at first simply roughhousing with her, pushing her head under before she pops back up to the surface to do the same to him.

     The camera juxtaposes this swimming event and Michel at the morgue, as he now somewhat shockingly leans over an older man he is about to place in a preserving tank and kisses him gently on the lips for a few long seconds.

       François’ pushes of Alice are becoming a little more serious, she finding it more and more difficult to escape his embrace. To further encourage her or, perhaps, just out of interest, he begins to kiss her, continuing the maneuver under water in what may be either be fully engaged kissing or an attempt to hold her under long enough so that she might run out of breath.

      Michel is now at the pool, also inexplicably sitting at the bottom at the deep end, as if contemplating something. When he rises again and swims off, he looks over at the old ghoulish man and, almost as if challenging him, asks “What?”

      Clearly both boys, François and Michel, have made some new perceptions and decisions of which they only hint without making their intentions entirely clear. But Michel might be imagined to have perceived that his refusal to share in the love of his best friend is ridiculous given the briefness of life itself with which he is daily faced. Does he perhaps love François more than he imagined.

       Frightfully, one could imagine that François has determined to rid himself once and for all of any female competitor, to take put her quite literally out of the way so that he alone might be able to return to those momentarily passionate kisses with Michel.

       Whether or not Michel will return to François for more life-giving kisses or Michel might one day soon find Alice upon his morgue table is left to the viewer’s imagination.

 

Los Angeles, June 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).