Jordan Fleury Kervella | Le goût de l'autre (The Taste of Others) / 2014

acquired tastes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jordan Fleury Kervella (screenwriter and director) Le goût de l'autre (The Taste of Others) / 2014 [9 minutes]

 

The “taste” referred to in this short film from 2014 is not a reference to a strange cannibalistic rite, a sort of precursor of the horrific 2022 film by Luca Guadagnino, Bones and All. Certainly, the central figure in this film Julien (François Marion) is obsessed with Alan (Teddy Bogaert), but the taste referred to concerns Alan’s interest in Verlaine as opposed to Rimbaud.

     In a brief meeting between the two, Julien begins with asking if Alan is a bottom or a top, which so offends him that he immediately breaks off their conversation and leaves, forgetting his cellphone on the table.

      From that first meeting Julien begins to imagine sex with his Verlaine, dreaming of a relationship between the two of them, the possibility of which he has perhaps destroyed. Although Alan calls him and makes an appointment to meet him again for the return of the phone, Julien does not show up but instead goes home with an older man, still imagining sex with his younger friend.

     When he finally does meet up again with Alan, it is at a poet’s bar where Alan, surprisingly, reads Rimbaud. After the reading, Julien asks to read, quoting a few lines from Verlaine, before he finally hands back the phone to Alan. He quips: I’m really not fond of Verlaine. Far too lecherous.”

      Alan smiles in a way that makes one wonder whether perhaps they find a way to meet up with one another again after all.

      This is the kind of French film that makes little sense to US audiences, France being a world where poetry is still taught to students even at an early age. And literature students do claim their favorites, read them in public ventures, and note what poets their friends are drawn to with the ability to perceive the significance of their tastes.

      Yet, despite its literary delights, Jordan Fluery Kervella’s short seems pretty empty with regard to contemporary LGBTQ content.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).