Patrice Chéreau | L'homme blessé (The Wounded Man) / 1983

a ballet of sexual obsession and ecstasy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert (screenplay), Patrice Chéreau (director) L'homme blessé (The Wounded Man) / 1983

 

 One of the most significant and yet elusive gay films of the 1980s, perhaps of all time, Patrice Chéreau’s The Wounded Man remains a difficult movie to view, either in a theater or on DVD. Scenes from and discussions of it abound, but it’s not until you’ve witnessed the entire film that you comprehend just how spellbinding and amazing it is that as an LGBTQ film won the César Award for Best Writing and was entered into the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.

      Although Americans, at least those very few who saw it, in 1983 had the raw talent of Arthur J. Bressan’s almost unthinkable exploration of man-boy love in Abuse, the British were still elliptically tiptoeing around gay sexuality in Terence Davies’ Death and Transfiguration, while the Canadians of that year were quietly being shocked by Norman McLaren’s tacit declaration of his sexuality in the ballet Narcissus. The Japanese, at least, were strongly inferring that one of their war-time heroes was tortured by his repressed homosexuality in Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and German director Rosa von Praunheim was, as always, far ahead of all the others in exploring transgender sex through the queer-punk opera City of Lost Souls; but no one but French were privy to Chéreau’s intense ballet of homosexual obsession.

      Indeed, discussing The Wounded Man in terms of ballet might be the best way to explain it. How else to describe the sudden mad packing of all of Henri’s (Jean-Hugues Anglade) family as they hurry off, hours early, to the French railway station in a provincial city. One might think from the overanxious behavior of the domineering mother (Annick Alane) that the entire family were suddenly traveling to Frankfurt, but the trip will be made only by the perplexed daughter (Sophie Edmond), more disturbed by having to leave her boyfriend behind than anything else. They rush via bus and tram to the station only to sit down in the railway waiting room for the hours to pass before her train finally arrives.

      Only Henri refuses to sit still. Filled with adolescent energy and curiosity, he explores the confines of the station as an animal let loose for the first time in his life, encountering an entire world he never before knew existed.

      As Gary M. Kramer writes in City Gay News: “At a train station to see his sister…off, he wanders around, almost dazed, catching the eyes of various men, including Bosmans (Roland Bertin),” with whom he plays almost a game of cat-and-mouse. We wanders in and out of spaces, from time to time, catching the eyes of his always attendant mother, but mostly escaping for what seems for the first time in his life, her constant gaze. Terribly timid yet totally feral, Henri goes where no others will tred.

     As Sarah Fensom, writing Film Slate, summarizes it, “As he descends a winding stairway into a public bathroom, a gaggle of young men rush past him in the other direction. ‘Beat it—don’t stay here,’ one implores, as the sounds of a man moaning in pain are heard in the background. But Henri keeps going and finds Jean (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) beating an older male client, Bosmans. Jean, a handsome hustler with a perverse understanding of the desires of others, passionately kisses Henri before asking him to retrieve money from the pockets of his victim. Henri throws himself onto the floor at Jean’s request, only to find him gone a few tumultuous seconds later.”

 

     But in those few seconds it is as if suddenly all of the virgin boy’s long closeted feelings burst into full emotional force. And for the rest of the long cinematic ballet, he wanders in search of Jean, the scruffy pimp and small-time hustler Adonis.

      At first, leaving his parents’ home for what appears to be forever, a clue of which we had in the very scene when he also packed a suitcase while his mother packed his sister’s, Henri returns to the station in search of Jean, and literally moves into that world of hustlers, travelers, and true perverts who come there is search of Jean and his boys. I’d love to see someone like Claire Denis choreograph them into motion; but Chéreau gets close.

     Jean is both delighted and spooked by the boy’s attention. No matter how much he preaches hate and disgust, Jean is also openly in love with kid, perhaps himself once similarly obsessed, and refuses to involve Henri in any of the worst of his nefarious plots. He does attempt to rid himself of the boy by hooking him up with desperate client, a working man (Claude Berri) who, when Henri attempts to bolt, locks the door and insists he least let him touch him. A bit like the naïve would-be hooker Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy (1969), Henri finally, more out of fear than anger, beats the man simply to get the key to the door and the money he has promised to Jean.

     But back at the station, he finds nearly everyone gone, and now hungry and simply worn out, he accepts dinner with Bosman who reveals Jean’s whereabouts.

     When finally Jean meets up with Henri again he cannot resist taking him home to his female lover like a stray dog or cat he can’t shake. His sometime female companion, Elisabeth (Lisa Kreuzer), is almost as obsessed by Jean as is Henri, and has even a more difficult time of waiting for him at their small apartment. She is justifiably angry that now, after finally having shown up after days of absence, Jean has brought along another of his young male lovers. But as Jean explains, Henri is different. Although both invite him to share their bed, Henri, in his still innocent haze, prefers to remain on the couch to watch them undress and engage in sex, his wide, doe-like eyes taking in every movement of their body, and every muscle and bone of Jean’s physique. Under the focus of Chéreau’s camera lens, Henri doesn’t have to engage in sex; his eyes have already embraced him into a deep caress.

     In the morning, Elisabeth having left the bed, Jean finally invites Henri in for what the boy really wants; but he is still too shy to oblige even his own desires. Jean tries to take him into his confidence, pretending he is actually a policeman, awarding the boy a gift of a knife, but Henri realizes that he has nothing to offer him in exchange.

     Jean quickly dashes off again. After carefully dressing up in the clothes Jean has left behind, Henri now becomes a visual imitation of the man he desires, walking around the station as if he were Jean, the young hustlers taking in the transformation and wondering what to make of it.

     Hours, even days pass again with any sign of Jean, as Henri grows dirtier and remains half-undressed. At one point Henri becomes so desperate that he attempts to hustle a handsome male traveler, who quickly turns him away. Finally, at wit’s end, Henri offers a handsome Algerian (Hammou Graïa) all the money his has left just for a kiss. Together they make a sad pas de deux around the station attempting to find a private spot, out of sight of others. But unable to find such a place, they give up and engage in a public kissing session that is one of the most truly erotic moments of the film.

     In between his endless dance, Henri attempts to return home, where both times he is quickly sent away with disdain; he tries to buy a ticket to visit his sister in Frankfurt, although it is not clear that he even knows her address; in any event he doesn’t have enough money.

      Finally, he meets up again with Bosman, who agrees to take him home for a good meal and to tell him where Jean is. They first stop at a spot where heterosexual couples come to have sex in their cars, the perverted Bosman explaining the joys of just listening to the “normality” of the world, which reminds me a little of Humbert Humbert’s sudden realization of the sounds of normal life going on around him which he could never again provide for Lolita.

     When Bosman takes him to his mansion, Henri finds Jean there, holing up, evidently, after one of his petty criminal activities has gone amiss. Bosman orders the two to have sex, and Jean seems to be willing to comply as Henri awaits in almost breathless anticipation, both terrorized and trembling in preparation for what he has so long sought out. But even here, in the castle of the monstrous voyeur, who slips back in to watch over the proceedings, Jean reveals his true love of the boy, although stripping and appearing to engage in lustful sex, only imitating the acts, sucking his own thumb in pretense of engaging in oral sex with the waiting Henri. Later, with an almost wistful longing, Henri asks him why he had pretended to have sex.

    There are further wanderings, further dances and partners, including a revisit to Elisabeth and a return to Bosman’s private gay club before the film moves toward closure. But by the time Henri has reached the point where Bosman gives full access to Jean’s half passed-out and drugged body.

     Henri has become something like a wounded beast, so desperate for love and a release of his pent-up desires that after stripping and joining Jean in bed for sex, he goes wild, raping and ravaging the man of his dreams as he finally chokes him and beats Jean’s head against the wall several times in an orgasm as he fucks his god. He has apparently killed him; but by this time Henri is beyond rationality. Taking a couple of Jean’s pills left on a table beside the bed, he joins him once more, hugging him close to his body without seemingly even realizing what he has done.

     Yet, finally we have the suspicion, since Bosman asks Henri to try not to wake him up, that Bosman or others have already killed Jean with the drugs, and Henri, in his grand introduction to sexual orgasm has merely fucked a dead man. And, surely, what we have just witnessed is the very opposite of Snow White.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).