Zeno Graton | Le paradis (The Lost Boys) / 2023

the perversity of love

by Douglas Messerli

Zeno Graton, Clara Bourreau, and Maarten Loix (screenplay), Zeno Graton (director) Le paradis (The Lost Boys) / 2023

The original title of director Zeno Braton’s Belgian film Le paradis (2023) is quite obviously a reference to paradise or heaven, having absolutely nothing to do with “lost boys,” which immediately sets me to thinking of Peter Pan’s associates in another childhood paradise of Neverland. Graton’s home for “lost boys’ in what we in the US would describe as a reform school for teenage criminal offenders.

     At first, indeed, this Belgian school, compared with such US and British institutions, might be seen as a kind of paradise. The boys’ immediate contact Sophie (Eye Haidara) is a black woman who works closely with them, sympathetically explaining the rules and attempting to help them through the process to be freed from the institution as soon as possible where, with the educational and manual skills such as soldering and woodcutting they learn, they might find support by the state until they have full-paying jobs, be relocated to their own apartment, and eventually reassimilated back into Belgian society. Judges and other authorities speak regularly to the boys about their aspirations and personal social difficulties, and evaluate each individual on their emotional and mental well-being.

      Even though they are locked up as in a prison each evening, the juveniles are relatively free to move about the facility during the day, to participate in group sports, and encouraged to discuss their problems in group sessions that further encourage their linguistic and social creativity. On some days they are taken on public exercise sessions and are allowed to visit local museums and other institutions.

      But in this seemingly best of all possible worlds their behavior is closely watched as in the prison of Jean Genet’s prison in Un chant d’amour, and for the slightest of infractions the judge may turn down their early and even their regularly-scheduled releases for their not properly attending to lessons or, in the case of figures such as Ilyas (Jonathan Couzinié), Tom (Matéo Bastien), Desar (Samuel Di Napoli), Fahd (Amine Hamidou), and Yanis (Nlandu Lubansu) for being more immature than others or simply not as intelligent and likeable. Their reassimilation into society becomes a thing postponed again and again until they so lose heart that they longer even care about obeying the rules of the world which has seemingly permanently removed them from the world at large.

      Some boys are visited on weekends by their parents, but many, such as Joe (Khalil Gharbia, having just performed one of the major roles in François Ozon’s Peter van Kant), the central figure of this film, have been banned from their own homes for their sexual behaviors or utterly ignored for the very reasons why they have found themselves in such a situation. The system, in fact, has punished them yet again for the failures of their parental environment and their familial sense of unwantedness that encouraged them to act out their hurt and anger.

      Despite his terrible maternal upbringing, however, Joe is a near-model student, intelligent, skilled, sociable, and good-looking. His only problem is that, as he realizes all too clearly, what the years of hibernation in the prison institution has already done to him. Moreover, although the movie doesn’t explicitly say this, he is an outsider, an Arab in French society. As critic Aurore Engelen points out in her review of the Berlinale 2023 Generation feature of this film, “"If a fish gets trapped in ice, it doesn’t come back to life. It dies." In The Catcher in the Rye, the young hero wonders where the ducks in Central Park go when the water is frozen. The voice we hear is that of Joe—a modern Holden Caulfield, of sorts, whose feelings have caught up with him—at the beginning of The Lost Boy, as he wonders about the fate of these fish who seemed to be a family, but whose hearts has stopped beating.”

      He realizes that his childhood belief that the frozen fish were simply hibernating was terribly mistaken; that in fact they had died in the icy cold water as they attempted to swim to the surface from where he can seem them below the ice.

      But Joe seems anything but dead or even hibernating. He is about to be released, and assured by Sophie that if he doesn’t get into further trouble he will be given his own apartment and the ability to begin his life all over again.

      Enter William (Julien De Saint Jean, fresh from Lie with Me of 2022). If Joe’s future finally suggests that his struggle to the top has ended him in the slightly warmer melting waters of societal acceptance, now everything—just as in other recent films such as Josza Anjembe’s 2019 short film Baltringue (Freed) and as early as Rachel Ward’s The Big House (2000)—puts his current situation into jeopardy as he falls almost immediately in love with the newcomer. The dilemma becomes a kind of Marxian (as in Groucho, not Karl) contradiction: how to stay when you must be going.

       Critic Austin Estrada summarizes the plot rather succinctly:

 

“William is the new kid in juvenile hall. Rumor has it that he murdered someone. William keeps to himself with no interest in the other guys in the center. But when he meets Joe, the two lock eyes and find a mutual attraction and empathy for each other. Their relationship grows as the two become vulnerable with each other, physically [involved] with each other, and learn to trust someone else again. Yet William and Joe fear their time is short-lived, as Joe also tries to earn his freedom from the juvenile hall and his mom. Joe is faced with the impossible task of earning his freedom while leaving his love in the process.”

 

       Suddenly the metaphor of Genet’s film takes on fuller meaning as, just as in the 1950 film William and Joe learn how to knock on the pipes and listen dutifully for the illegal radio with which they might share through their imaginative experiences of a love they cannot openly express. Joe’s artistic talent becomes an occasion for William to ask him to create a tattoo on his body, an event which allows all the boys to share in the S&M-like suffering of pain as William later imprints Joe’s body with the image created by his would-be lover. Whereas before, every act was symbolic, now even the slightest of touches, the sharing of looks, the reading of a rap-like poem by Joe becomes a truly sensual/sexual experience for all the boys. The orderly system of the educational institution has been existentially corrupted by their desires or, at least, voyeuristic pleasures of queer sex.

       Joe’s first major violation of the rules occurs when the boys are permitted out on one of their group health sessions, where both Joe and William find a way to escape the others so that they might engage in love-making.

       They are caught and reprimanded, rather sympathetically by Sophie, who simply attempts to make Joe understand that such behavior will have to wait until after he can free himself from the institution’s demands. But how do two young boys, long panting with unspoken desire at the very prime of their testosterone-controlled life live up to those impossible demands?

       Moreover, the system itself only helps to force the boys into an absurd catch-22 when it rejects Joe’s petition for release for the infractions he has committed due to love. Only the wild William can find an out that seemingly also destroys all their hopes to find a way to live together once they have returned to “normal” society. He creates a major fire in the physical workshop, sending everyone into escape mode. Only Joe, realizing that William remains in the room, about to be killed by the flames, races in to help him escape, the two also fleeing the premises together.

       William, however, is soon caught, while Joe cleverly makes it to the ocean, a symbolic journey to warmer waters which might thaw out his hibernation as a fish trapped under the ice.

        He too is caught, and, as Sophie has long warned them, three strikes and the boys are passed on to the adult prison system from which there is no easy escape and with no commitment at all to return them back into the Eden from which they have been falsely banned.

         Joe awakens from the effects of his capture, dizzied and terrified of the truly serious world in which he is now meaningless entrapped. When he is well enough to join the others in the exercise courtyard, he finally catches a glimpse of William. We realize that these two boys have now fully become the prisoners of Genet’s painfully poignant Song of Love, that they have been imprisoned by a society that ultimately prefers hate to its “perversities” of love. Perhaps, from Genet’s perspective, the lost boys have now, in fact, found their way to his kind of paradise.

        For me, The Lost Boys was one of the highlights of New York’s Newfest 2023.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).