heart attract
by Douglas Messerli
Anne-Claire Poirier (screenwriter, based
on Edward O. Phillips's short story "Matthew and Chauncy," and
director) Salut Victor (Bye Bye Victor) / 1989
French-Canadian director Anne-Claire
Poirier’s highly moving depiction of two elderly gay men who come together in
an assisted living home in one of the earliest in a long tradition of
late-in-life gay love portrayed in the movies. Among the many films made after
this work in the first two decades of the new millennium in which either one or
both central characters must be described as an elder are represented by both short
and feature works such Sexy Grandpa (2001), Ageless (2013), Never or Now (2013), Love Is Strange (2014), Wayne (2015), The Carer (2016), Two Words (2018), Our Way Back (2018), Stepdaddy (2019), Hank (2019), Strangers (2019), Rialto (2019), Twilight’s Kiss (2019), Sublet
(2020), Where’s Steve?, and Supernova (2020). Even singer Doug
Locke’s music video #ThisCouldBeUs (2014) conjures up a younger couple’s
possible experiences together in old age.
Poirier’s work paved the way by following the arrival of a rather
wealthy old-timer, Philippe Lanctot (Jean-Louis Roux) who has basically decided
to abandon his mansion with servants after his younger sister’s death. A life-long
bachelor—a self-closeted homosexual—has determined, given the fact that he has
fallen and spent almost a day on the floor alone, that it is time to enter a
home, despite the fact that, as we keenly recognize on his first day, he is clearly
uncomfortable with the watchful attention of female nurses and the limitations immediately
placed upon him.
Although the room itself is elegantly
understated, it is most definitely, as we soon discover, not a room with a
view.
One of his other immediate discoveries is that there is no assured
privacy in this care home; the door remains unlocked and within just a few
moments after his arrival an eccentric resident, Victor Laprade (Jacques Godin)
barges in on his wheelchair to check out his new neighbor, although he admits he
lives in another wing of the building.
Victor, in many respects, is almost the
opposite of Philippe. While the latter is reserved, rather quiet, and quite
refined, Victor is gregarious, slightly loud, and a former construction worker
by trade. While Philippe is respectful, Victor is irreverent, challenging other
residents to wheelchair races in the hall, keeping a small stock of illegal
cognac hidden in his drawer, and generally causes havoc wherever he goes; yet
knowing of his tendencies, he remains apologetic and is willing to establish
and obey boundaries if necessary.
If Philippe might at first be taken aback by Victor—he quickly asks him
to leave so that he might rest—he soon comes to perceive, just we do, his joie
de vivre and enjoys the energy he radiates despite the fact that he as
recently suffered a major heart attack.
Before Philippe can even imagine complaining,
moreover, Victor has invited him to his room where he shares a real “view” of
the freeway filled with noisy passenger cars traveling in all directions, a
drama played out through his windows every night. The two of them watch life
passing before them with pleasure, sipping on Victor’s cognac.
In a short period of time, in fact, despite their differences the two
men become fast friends, Philippe sharing with Victor his child-like collection
of clay tiles of various shapes with which they build castles, Victor, however,
spilling them to the floor when he attempts to attach flags to their playful
constructions.
In return Philippe arranges for an elegant dinner with his friend at his
club, Victor ordering up, for the first time in his life, squab, while Phillipe
dines on veal, both sipping martinis before their wine.
And
when Victor receives a painful letter from his children, announcing that they
feel they can no longer afford to pay for his room in the expensive institution,
a potential expulsion from what has now become a substitute for paradise,
Philippe secretly arranges for the continued payment, sending what may be a
forged letter from his children saying that they have changed minds, delighting
Victor with both his change of fortune and the behavior of his estranged
children.
Eventually, Victor makes it clear that he is openly homosexual when he
is chastised for having attempted to feel up the balls of a window washer. He
explains to Philippe that he left his wife and family when he fell in love with
a pilot with whom he lived for three years before he was killed by crashing
into a mountain.
On a special visit to a botanical garden, Phillippe,
with Victor’s somewhat indiscreet prodding, finally admits that he is
homosexual, although in his world no such term even existed, and he was so
closeted that still he cannot talk about it. However, he does admit to a brief
love affair with a male Mexican houseworker, a heartthrob that lasted three
months until immigration turned up, declaring his lover to be illegal and
taking him away—an incident that is almost prescient given the current
situation in 2026 in the USA where the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s
(ICE) attack on major cities, wherein numerous individuals, children and adults
straight and gay have lost their loved ones.
As a special gift, Phillippe plans to take his new found friend up in a
hot-air balloon so that he might see the world from the air as his beloved pilot
once did. But a couple of nights before the event, Victor suffers another heart
attack and is taken away, never to return.
Unexplained and perhaps a bit preposterous, Phillippe somehow inherits Victor’s
ashes, arranging with a hot-air balloonist that he will take them up and scatter
them over the countryside, freeing Victor’s joyful soul to the skies.
Once you accept the terms of the movie, that such a wealthy individual
would be willing to enter a public institution in old age, almost everything
seems believable in Poirier’s creation, immersing you in the two gay men’s lives
in a manner that allows equal amounts of laughter and tears. This is a movie
with heart, quietly and smartly directed in an almost documentary manner that
helps to keep it from becoming sentimental.
Los Angeles, January 26, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January
2026).
