Alexis Diop | Adieu Émile (Farewell Emile) / 2024

a return to the present and the future

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexis Diop (screenwriter and director) Adieu Émile (Farewell Emile) / 2024 [26 minutes]

 

This short film by French director Aleix Diop begins as a kind of mystery. Why has the beautiful young Tim (Benjamin Sulpice) suddenly lost he equally lovely lover, Émile (Arthur Beaudoire), who even Tim’s open-minded mother also seems to adore?

     Throughout this film, through endless imagines that Tim has filmed on his cellphone camera, we get glimpses of their wonderful times together, they joyful young lives, and their engagement with one another.

   In the background, however, we also note that Tim’s father has suddenly died of cancer, and throughout, his mother calls him, pleading that he return home just to claim whatever is left of his father’s possessions. Tim simply ignores her, having also lost his lover, and desperate again to make contact.

 

   The only connection that he has is his mostly cellphone friend Céline (Camille Léon-Fucien). In fact, most of this film uses cellphone images and messages to express it’s plot. As one Letterboxd commentator notes: “Finally accurate phone use in a film.” But frankly I find it rather boring, truly unrevealing, and utterly distracting, not the way I like to “read” my narrative, although I am sure most younger people prefer that experience. The speed through scroll of images may give us a sense of their experiences and love, there is nothing but surface issues presented here. Why has Émile left so suddenly, and why is Tim so desperately seeking Émile? We can imagine the latter, but can’t explain the first part of the question.   

     Through internet connections, he tracks down Émile, suspecting that he has returned to his former lover, a rather sleazy individual, Zahir, living on Île de France. And Céline finally provides against her better judgment, the full address his lover’s current address.

     Needing desperately to talk to Émile, Tim takes a taxi to Rue Myrha. But en route his mother calls pleading with him, one last time, to visit her and help her sort out his father’s possessions, suggesting that he has not all been there for her in her grief, and, mostly important, revealing that for the past year he has retreated from the world in his own inability to deal with his beloved father’s death.

     Obviously, this also explains, in part, his lover’s departure. Tim has not been the same loving companion with whom Émile once lived. The devastation of his father’s death has clearly taken a toll on Tim’s ability to love and think. As the taxi arrives to Rue Myrha, we see him, now with tears rolling down his eyes from his mother’s comments, remaining in the taxi and not carrying out his intended last encounter with his former lover. Among the various images we are given a view of the Garde de Nord train station, perhaps an indication that Tim might finally return back home to lay to rest his tortured past and return to being an individual capable to a new relationship. It is as if perhaps Tim has realized that he cannot return to the past.

     The film, however, stuck in the phone images of a past, does not give us clue whether Tim might be ever able to return to the present and future.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).