maniacal deceptions
by Douglas Messerli
Michael Guillod (screenwriter and director)
Pastel / 2020 [15 minutes]
The highly religious mother Elisabeth
(Nathalie Sabato) in Swiss filmmaker Michael Guillod’s Pastel looks out
her window one evening and suddenly catches her son James (Yann Philipona)
kissing another boy in the backyard during a rainstorm.
Before he can even explain the situation, she has packed him off for
weekly visits to a psychiatrist for conversion therapy. Although these
sessions, which Elisabeth also attends, do not seem to be of the same sort that
we hear about in the US, where children are shipped off to isolated camps where
they are psychologically tortured into hating themselves as homosexuals,
Guillod himself has suggested in an interview that he was shocked to read that
such therapy was still permitted in his home country. And there is no question
that the central character of this film, James, totally resents the situation
and finally refuses to attend the sessions.
In
fact, the major focus of this film is not upon the suspected “criminal” James,
but on his mother, outraged by the fact that he has not told her that he had a
problem, although she should have guessed it since he once wore her heels as a
child to perform as a singer. And she is horrified by the possibility that he
has now determined to accept his gay tendencies. Although he attempts to tell
her that she is on the wrong tract, she insists that now Dr. Lambert has become
involved everything will be for the better.
When he walks out of their first sessions, she sees him as aggressive
without comprehending that the entire situation is based upon her own
aggression and her inability to even talk to him significantly about the
“problem.” Indeed, the conversation in which she brings these issues up, we
discover, is spoken in the car during her drive back—alone, she speaking aloud
as if he were in the car with her.
When a running buddy stops by a day or so later, she watches her son and
the other boy move off, her son momentarily putting his hand upon the other’s
shoulder. Later, on the run, when he turns to watch a woman who has just run
past in the other direction, stopping for a moment, his friend teases him as
being a “sissy” for not continuing in the male competition between the two of
them, and even we are now further convinced that, despite what we have just
observed, James is perhaps gay.
When he returns to the table dressed “normally,” even the girls describe
him as a “delicate man” when he refuses to speak with his mouth full.
The moment the meal is over, Elisabeth is back to her pill bottle.
It is Elisabeth alone now in therapy, as the doctor suggests they move
on to a new level. And we realize suddenly that perhaps James has never truly
been involved in these therapy sessions. That it is Elisabeth alone who is
having hallucinations. At one point, she looks out the window and sees her son
and the boy again kissing, but this time when she turns back she sees the other
“boy” pull down his rain hood revealing the long hair of a beautiful young woman.
In her mania, it is she who has misunderstood what we she has seen.
And perhaps, and of course with the directors help, we ourselves have
bought into her mania, believing that James was gay, that her “worries” were
indeed credible. If there was ever an example of a mother “turning” her mother
gay, it is represented fully in this movie.
If nothing else, Guillod has made us question even our own assumptions.
But I feel somewhat resentful in his manipulation and almost angry that he
helped lead us through the mother’s maniacal deceptions to imagine that a
straight boy was in fact gay. And the fact that I might have preferred him to
be gay may obviously suggest another kind of mania.
Los Angeles, February 27, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February
2023).
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