Marcel Gisler | F. es un salud (Fögi Is a Bastard) / 1998

the death of mick jagger

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcel Gisler, and Rudolf Nadler (based on the book by Martin Frank Ter Fögi ische Souhung, screenplay), Marcel Gisler (director) F. es un salud (Fögi Is a Bastard) / 1998

 

Before you can even wonder about the authorial viewpoint that the writers and director take toward the central pedophilic character, Swiss rock musician Fögi (Frédéric Andrau) in their 1998 film, they announce it in the title. They might have described him even as a monster, but things are far more complex than that in this actually quite intense, frightening, but also somewhat loving portrait of a perverse love affair that can’t quite be described in normative terms. Given the central figure’s behavior, if in fact Fögi can be perceived as the primary figure, anything but our hate may seem inappropriate, but then this probing work is about impossibilities, contradictions—and above all, resilience.

   I also realize it is nearly impossible to describe the plot of a movie about abuse, particularly when it’s an abuse sought out by the very one who himself suffers it. We don’t like to imagine or even believe that young boys actually sometimes seek out the figures who will serve as their abusers. In fact, it occurs quite often, particularly with young boys without any stable parental figure who desperately seek out love. In this case Beni Müller (Vincent Branchet), a young 15-year old impatient to leave the confines of his unloving home and also totally enchanted with the lead singer of a struggling rock band titled “The Minks.” Beni, like most young men, is a highly knowledgeable innocent, who realizes that the lead singer is rumored to be gay, but even writes him a letter to the effect that he would love to join up with the band even if he means becoming involved in gay sex.

    Whether Beni even perceives himself as being gay, doesn’t matter; he is willing to sell himself outright to the devil, given the glamour he perceives in what is actually an already washed up musician who sings the songs of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground; Beni is delighted when to be taken on as the band’s “roadie” and gradually groomed and transformed into Fögi’s sexual toy.

     For Beni is a ready initiate, so in love with the whole idea of the rock world and everything that Fögi stands for that given his undeveloped, underaged sense of being, he is ready to be molded into whatever they desire. Accepting everything that comes his way, including sex, is cool, part of the mystic the band stands for in his total adoration of the outsiderness he felt in his mother’s empty house. No one previously has bothered to even suggest who he might be, let love him for what he is.

    No one can possibility describe what such narratives gradually reveal moment by moment, just how deep embraces, kisses, fucks, and vague whisperings of love break down any logical defenses, few as they are, of a young inexperienced child. No written narrative can convey even what an hour and a half visual presentation of events summarizes. In reality, it takes hundreds of caresses, lies, promises, and eventually masses of drugs, added one by one, to break down the boy into a virtual whining dog ready to please his master until the lease becomes too tight.

     In essayistic terms, it remains inexplicable. This is a story without a plot. What happens is all in the moment to moment transformations Beni endures.

     At first, of course, it is simply a matter of feeling loved and special, even if two of the band members are straight, while the third figure Töbe (Urs Peter Halter) having perhaps once Fögi’s lover and remains still in love with him.

     The two, Beni and Töbe bond, but. of course, this is still a competition, wherein the older Töbe cannot possibly win out over a young thin frail boy doll which Beni represents to Fögi. For the first time in his life, Beni senses power, a wondrous feeling for a boy without any previous experience with love or even any significance among others in the world in which he has existed.

     I know that feeling. I wasn’t as young as 15, but I was still designated as underage in the US state where I first willingly offered up my body to older men—and I am still unrepentant! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Suddenly the sex I had been denying myself was both a source of power and immense pleasure, the feelings it produced as good as any drug might have been.

     And as with Beni and Fögi, at first there was a sense of love and the rapturous enjoyment of sex. No one ever talks about that feeling that many young abused boys feel even while they are being lured into a world they might have not truly have wished to enter had they have been of saner mind and not have been so controlled by the youthful testosterone rushing through their bodies.

     Beni is thrilled by the joy of being loved and making love simultaneously, even though the first might have been merely an illusion, and the second a chimerical experience that eventually leads one shivering back into the cold world of daily life.

     As Fögi falls more and more into the vortex of drugs, losing even the aura of celebrity he brought to his performances and any creativity he might have once possessed, Beni is increasingly forced to prostitute his life, with his former lover now serving as his pimp, simply to support Fögi’s and sometimes his own drug and drinking habits.

     Having already played the literal dog to Fögi’s S&M disintegration, it is almost pleasant to meet up with often somewhat sophisticated and well-behaved older men. But after Töbe’s tragic suicide and Beni’s increasing disdain for “old geezer men” with whom he is forced to have sex, he turns to modeling, which moves into stills that might be described as pure porn. Drugs, food, clothing and all else once provided by Fögi now are paid for by Beni, as their roles in life reverse, Fögi playing the dependent, rather mindless, and now subservient prisoner of Beni’s.

   Fögi himself seems to be slipping into a suicidal fog, at one point, totally drugged out, sinking to the bathtub waters as if he might drown. But then Fögi has always insisted, like so many performers of his generation who believed in burning themselves out in their overheated lives, that he will die before turning old. Yet even then, something pushes him back into life.

     But for Beni it is now over. He has met up with an old classmate, been given a wonderful blowjob by the man who hires him for modeling, and now proclaims “Mick Jagger is dead,” a lie that reveals that all the dreams he might have had for Fögi becoming a rock sensation are over. There are no more illusions to be had. It is the true end of innocence for Beni, the moment when youthful idealism is so totally crushed that one is doomed to cynicism for rest of one’s life, one of the many results of childhood abuse of any kind.

     Beni finally challenges Fögi by expressing the disgust he now feels for him, the fact that he has in fact not lived up to any of the magical views with which the Beni once endowed him. The rock star needs believers like Beni to make him what he is, and when the biggest and final fan tells him that he no longer matters, there is nowhere else to turn but into the grave.

      Fögi can scream, kick tables over, destroy the bits and pieces of civilization that are still left, but even he must realize it is all over. He cannot even any longer find his album of the Rolling Stone’s The Beggar’s Banquet to play in honor of what he now imagines is their death. His plea for Beni to help him find it is so painful to watch that, for at least a second, all his horrible crimes are washed away in pity for him.

     Yet despite all these horrors, between them real love still exists. This is far beyond the wallowing hate/love relationship of Albee’s characters in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This is a love of true drugged-out dementia, but love nonetheless, the need of two human beings who have helped to destroy each other’s lives. “I can understand why you don’t love me anymore,” gasps Fögi, “but I still love you.” And even the abused boy can only quietly gush out remnants of love: “All I want is to be with you. To hell with everything else.”

     They leave Zürich for a seaside vacation, with Beni knowing it means that there is no return to Switzerland, no return to Fögi’s previous world.

     Fögi now watches his young boy interreacting with others people nearer his own age, as if the pedophile Humbert Humbert had had an opportunity to see Lolita suddenly engage in conversation with the young men and women he realizes he has stolen her from. Beni talks of a possible meteorite striking the world in 2004, a truly fascinating date since in that very year, just six years later, Greg Araki released his masterpiece, Mysterious Skin which dealt with the effects of child abuse and unrequited love in a similar way with even younger boys. “A scientist made research on that. And we shall all perish,” declares Beni without any seeming qualm or fear.

    Fögi, it is clear has now determined it is time to bow out of live even earlier, and Beni, despite his renewed spirit, is willing to join him in death.

     Fögi is more than a bastard, he even is willing to take his precious gift with him to the grave. Or is he? Beni survives, convinced that Fögi gave him a lesser dosage of the drug meant to kill them both. Perhaps the monster, in the end, has become a kind a savior. We have to believe so in order to retain any love we too, by now, may feel for this fragile but highly destructive being.

     Yes Fögi is a bastard; he is a monster. But he is also a man once desperately alive and selfishly in love. If Beni can forgive him, and even still love him, deluded as he might be, how can we not?

     And finally, is it any wonder that although this film has achieved a kind of underground cult following, it has received hardly any coherent analysis?

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (February 2026).