Jérémy Piette | Le garçon qui la nuit (The Blue Shelter) / 2023

a siren for sad queer boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jérémy Piette (screenwriter and director) Le garçon qui la nuit (The Blue Shelter) / 2023 [26 minutes]

 

Young and beautiful Arthur (Paul Lemarchand) is spending his day at the beach with his friends, as they summer at Brittany, for their last days of vacation. Arthur is in love with Nassim (Anaour Kardellas) and has evidently told him so, which has somehow sadly altered their deep friendship. Nassim seems equally attracted to Nathan (Yann-Malick Le Beaudour) but also seems bisexually interested in the women of the group (Angèle Blanc and Lila Robert), encouraging the others to swim in the cold waters, and later encouraging them them to all join into a circle dance together singing along with a song about their imperviousness to love, “No One Dies from Love Anymore” (Swedish performer Tove Lo’s 2022 hit). 

    Alas the sad and terrified Arthur, attempting through film to collect and keep his memories of his love is almost doing just that, symbolized by a middle-aged hunk of a man who appears on a nearby rock and lies there through most of the film, even as the tide moves in, as if he may be dead. Arthur is dissuaded by Nassim from attempting to bring him one of their precious beers.

      It’s not that Nassim doesn’t show Arthur his joy of being with him, actually picking him up and carrying him into the ocean where the two swim and frolic, the kind of display of love that any young gay love story would feature, filmed by one of the women as evidence of their relationship.

      But something has changed. The others are all ready to move on and return home in the next few days, while Arthur cannot bear the possibilities of losing everything he loves about his now more distant friend.

      As they all lie on the beach on a sunny day, about midway through this masterfully filmed short film, we see it has turned to twilight, the others have climbed the rocky hill beyond them, perhaps on their way home, calling out his name, while he remains below, now in the dark, almost like the dead man on the rock, allowing himself to be washed away by the incoming tide. He remains below, further exploring the beach where in he finds strange jelly-fish like creatures that light up in the dark and seem to smoke when you touch them. Even more importantly, after what appears to be a fantasy where he watches Nassim and Nathan together in an intense conversation, he discovers a truly campy beach figure, tied to the shore with seaweed (Olivier Normand) who, after assuring Arthur that he does not eat young boys, sings him a beautiful if completely absurdist song without any logical rhyme, a song he claims he sings to all young boys shedding salt tears.

    It begins with some shared feelings he might share with such a boy: his father died at wore, when he was young he wore a pink angora sweater that stopped before his ribs. “Old men used to love me.” But this strange, fantastical ditty soon turns into a list of his very personal complaints. “I don’t like enclosed places.” “I feel laziness is an illness.” He likes all stories that “begin with once upon a time.” And, even more personal and strangely, he complains that “on water boats always follow me. They scare me.” French fries make him cry.

  Frankly this hilarious scene seems to come out of the theater of the ridiculous more that anything that has proceeded it, but it is a truly delicious ending, as Arthur curls up near a rock and falls asleep as if the song has been a lovely lullaby. The general description of the film suggests that this helps him move forward. The film evinces no evidence of that, but the very strangeness of this fantastical vision surely will make young Arthur realize he has new and marvelous territory still to explore in his mind if nothing else.

     This work, as some critics have suggested in a bit like the exploratory filmmaker Yann Gonzalez with Bertrand Mandico. But it doesn’t seem to have the harshness of Gonzalez’s vision. This is a kind of gentle very strange fairytale that takes our young hero, desperate to keep his love near him, into new territory where perhaps we will discover entirely new worlds.

    I truly loved this odd work, and encourage everyone to seek it out. I saw it on the subscription service, Dekkoo, but it does appear to be playing elsewhere as well.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).