Johannes Meyer | Schwarzer Jäger Johanna (Black Fighter Johanna) / 1934 [in German only, film difficult to obtain]

the lesbian warrior

by Douglas Messerli

 

Heinrich Oberländer, Heinz Umbehr, and Georg von der Vring (screenplay), Johannes Meyer (director) Schwarzer Jäger Johanna (Black Fighter Johanna) / 1934 [in German only, film difficult to obtain]

 

I once watched this film in its original German, the only copy I could find; but now as I seek out to review it, even that version seems to have been taken off of the internet. I currently know of no way currently to obtain a copy, and my German was insufficient for me to be able to cogently talk about it that long ago experience.

     According to other sources such as IMDb and Letterboxd, the story begins in the Napoleonic period, when Germany was under his rule. A German woman, Johanna (Marianne Hoppe), is riding a stagecoach when another of the coach’s occupants, Major Georg Ludwig Korfes (Paul Hartmann) is arrested by the French militia. Before his capture, he has given a mysterious letter to Johanna.

     Johanna, soon after, dons black breeches and armor, crossdressing as a male, and joins the German Freikorps to help in the German resistance of Braunschweig in the 1809 attempt to fight the Napoleonic occupation. She is, of course, an immediate hero. Among the other heroes was actor Gustav Gründgens as the character Dr. Frost.

    In real life Hoppe was a lesbian, and Gründgens was gay. And only two years after the film, as the Nazis consolidated their power, the two married in the desire to protect their careers and prevent persecution. Accordingly, as critics have pointed out, the film itself is highly interrelated to the ways in which gays of the period attempted to elude imprisonment, and today is often read in the context of how many artists were able to survive in the Third Reich.

     The couple divorced at War’s end in 1946. Four years later Hoppe starred as Blanche Dubois in the German production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and after that played notable avant-garde roles in plays by Heiner Müller, Thomas Bernhard, who became her partner in private life; she also was a favorite of directors such as Claus Peymann, Robert Wilson, and Frank Castorf, among others.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2026

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (May 2026).       

Yolanda García Serrano and Juan Luis Iborra | Amor de Hombre (Love of Man), aka Manly Love / 1997

returning to the closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yolanda García Serrano and Juan Luis Iborra (screenwriters and directors) Amor de Hombre (Love of Man), aka Manly Love / 1997

 

The Spanish comedy Amor de hombre, titled alternately Love of Man and the quite inappropriate Manly Love, while featuring characters who are actively gay, focuses on a relationship between a man and a heterosexual woman who, if not for their bedroom desires, might make the perfect married couple. The close female friend of a gay man unfortunately has long been labeled a “fag hag,” a word usually suggesting a rather unattractive woman who finds the attentions of a good-looking homosexual male far more desirable than the rejection she receives from heterosexual men and even other more eligible female acquaintances.

      Esperanza (Loles León), whose 40th birthday celebration begins this film, is certainly a little overweight and has long had difficulty in finding dates or even one-night stands, but this redheaded  woman is quite beautiful and vivacious, clearly a popular schoolteacher admired by all of her friends, who just happen to be mostly gay—perhaps because the gay men with who she hangs out, particularly her beloved Ramón (Andrea Occhipinti), are all better looking and friendlier than the heterosexual men she meets. León, indeed, is so fresh and appealing in her role that perhaps we can finally retire the ugly label applied to such women and seek out new ones to describe such hetro-gay friendly acquaintances.

      Yet both Esperanza and Ramón, if only might be able to enjoy each other in sex, would have long ago exchanged rings, even if Ramón’s seemingly unquenchable search for sex partners might have made any long-term relationship impossible. A successful lawyer, Ramón often shares his evenings with loyal friends, a doctor who picks up tricks at the hospital, a devoutly religious man whose sexual proclivities are declared as sinful, and two friends who have been together for 10 years but, like many long-time couples, constantly fight. Like him, Ramón’s friends are all professionals, intelligent and likeable, despite their quirks.

     Ramón himself is nearly a drop-dead hunk who is able nightly to bed male beauties who, as David Rooney, writing in Variety, observes “he ushers out the door before the sheets have cooled down.” In one comic scene, when he cannot immediately get one of his dates to leave his bed, he calls in Espe to pretend—evidently not for the first time—to be his aggrieved wife returning home to discover her husband in bed with another man. Esperanza not only portrays a woman horrified and aggravated, but throws in the existence of a suffering child to help rid Ramón of his friendly pillow-mate. If Occhipinti’s character were heterosexual we would describe him as a rakish womanizer or something worse.

     Inexplicably, despite his ability to trot out the best-looking candidates in Madrid, Ramón, even more than Esperanza, is desperate to fall in love with a gay version of her and settle down into a permanent relationship. Frankly, given what we observe of his behavior his stated desires appear to be somewhat fraudulent. And, to make things worse, this otherwise quite pleasurable work takes up as its major theme Esperanza’s determination to find the man she loves a perfect male companion, turning what may have been a gay farce in the mode of the works of Pedro Almodóvar into something a bit more perverse that reminds one of Rock Hudson’s attempt to find his wife the perfect second husband upon his impending (if only imaginary) death in Send Me No Flowers (1964), allowing the closeted gay actor to droll over the men throughout before joining his best buddy next door in bed.

     Esperanza, of course, has no intentions to bed any of the young men she checks out for her Ramón, but in the process she does experience the difficulties of gay life in a far deeper way, perhaps, that her friend has ever endured. Rudely dismissed by handsome men already in relationships, men who prefer their lovers in chains and leather, and various others whose sexual quirks are far more important than any permanence in love, Espe returns home empty handed, only to be robbed by a young gay man who leaves her without money or the keys to get back into her own apartment. She stops by Ramón’s place only to find him in bed with another cute stud whom she mistakenly believes is the same boy who just robbed her.

    At another point, after Ramón picks up a lovely motorcyclist, the two of them being immediately struck by a car, she moves in with her recuperating friend to nurse him back to health, eventually hooking him up with the handsome gay physical education teacher from her school to provide him with massages for his sore back and neck.

     This time, apparently, the hook-up works, at least with regard to Ramón, who quickly falls deeply in love with his temporary masseur Roberto (Armando Del Rio), but in this instance the beauty does not at all return his admiration. Perhaps, we suspect, it has been the “chase” of another—the difficulty in courting another man—that Ramón has all along been seeking. Certainly, that is what Hudson must have felt, in part, regarding his endless attempts to woo Doris Day in his 1959 film Pillow Talk.

      In this case, however, Esperanza’s well-intentioned efforts to link up her friend with a suitable partner result in a near complete severance of her relationship with the now love-sick Ramón, who drops all of his friendships in order to court Roberto. Espe and her friends are finally convinced that Roberto is living with a wealthy older man, which explains his diffidence to Ramón. And we recognize that she is probably correct in her suspicions when the physical ed. teacher suddenly shows up at Ramón’s place, ready and willing to commit himself to the lawyer’s loving charms.

      If one might have thought this might possibly end Ramón’s isolation, it only increases it as, without his knowledge, the new lover deletes all telephone messages and refuses to join him in any get-togethers with Ramón’s old friends.

      Without any one to care about and mother other than her students Esperanza finally does date other men, even finding, she claims, some sexual satisfaction. When, after donning a blonde wig in her loving student’s don’t even recognize her, she determines to take a long-needed vacation to the beach, but cannot get Ramón on the phone to even tell him of her departure.

      Inevitably, after being visited by Roberto’s former lover, Ramón discovers the truth and realizes just how he has been manipulated by the man with whom he has been determined to spend the rest of his life. And the last scene, filmed near the ocean, returns us to a situation very much like the earliest in this film, with Ramón having joined his female companion on what has now become “their” vacation. Perhaps he has been in the kind of relationship for which he has been seeking—as sexually unfulfilling as it is—all along. Certainly, in this sense, Love of Man ends up very much like the kind of chaste male-female relationships subliminally presented as models in the Hudson-Day movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In nearly all of these works any sexual adventures, often with gay overtones, that Hudson’s characters explored in his films, forced them by the end of the movies to return to the closet in which the real actor lived, kissing the difficult-to-win blonde with a happy-ever-after smile.

     So too is Ramón and, significantly Esperanza, discovered to be living at the end of Love of Man in a paradise in which no one can ever truly be happy. Despite Serrano and Iborra’s seemingly smart and au courant gay work, their central characters seem locked into a conventional situation out of the past. Ramón might have taken a lesson from his doctor friend, who claiming to have given up any interest in permanent relationships, has by film’s end taken up housekeeping with one of the lawyer’s former clients who came to Ramón determined to divorce his wife because she seemed no longer seemed interested in him only to discover that it was he who was no longer interested in her, in the process coming out of the closet with the help of the doctor’s friendly advice. The two of them, the deliriously-in-love neophyte and the long ago disillusioned older man seem to be a happier couple than any other figures this film puts before us.

 

Los Angeles, January 6, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).

 

 

Christopher Nolan | Following / 1998, UK release 1999

a criminal galatea

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Nolan (screenwriter and director) Following / 1998, UK release 1999

 

It’s fascinating to know that British director Christopher Nolan—who today, after the success of his Batman trio, Inception, and Dunkirk, is able to fetch a budget of $200-225 million for his most recent work Tenent—first gained critical attention from a “no-budget film” Following which he accomplished basically alone, with the help of his wife Emma Thomas, and just a few supporters for about $6,000.

     The 1998 film, released in 1999 in the United Kingdom, was carefully and artfully directed in black-and-white to cover the fact that he didn’t have the proper lighting fixtures to shoot in color and using high-grade sound systems only in a couple scenes, including the opening to alert the viewer that he was intentionally featuring an inferior sound product later when one might hear the whir of the camera itself.

      The most important thing was the use of his own intelligent script based on some of the conventions of film noir and the rehearsal of his actors so that there would be few if any second takes.

      But it is the wit of this film as well as its numerous use of intercuts and a breathtaking confusion of character motives that help to make this film far superior to what it might otherwise have been— a kind of knock-off of noir conventions where we can never quite be sure who is deluding who and who precisely are the villains.

   We certainly would never suspect the film’s rather grubby (critic Eric Villa-Boas calls him  “schlubby”) young man (Jeremy Theobald) who a bit like Knut Hamsun’s would-be novelist in Hunger, also without a name, begins suddenly to follow different people he encounters on the street. Unlike Hamsun’s starving journalist, however, The Young Man (as the script names him) has never written anything and does not necessarily follow women for the potential of romantic adventures—although that does later happen—but simply, pretends an interest in people, to discover who they might be by exploring where they go.

      To rid himself of any idea of voyeuristic associations with these acts, The Young Man applies rules. At first he cannot follow the same person more than once, and he must stop following the person if he discovers in the process where they work or live.

      The first rule alters a bit, but the second and other rules he holds himself to change only when he is caught in the act by a rather well-dressed man he has followed several times who confronts him in a restaurant about is observed actions. The man, Cobb (Alex Haw), interrogates the guilty “writer” at length—are you bored, lonely, a faggot?—before finally explaining that he is a house robber, who randomly breaks into people’s homes not to obtain money (although he does sell anything worth money to a fence), but simply to find out about their personal lives, stealing the secret trinkets that most people have in a hidden-away box, just to remind them of what they had and have now lost, as if he were a kind of immoral moralist. And he now offers our schlubby hero a chance to join him.

       If Cobb’s activities sound innocent—the only things of value he steals being CDs, a few books, or an occasional piece of inexpensive jewelry—it truly represents a kind of voyeuristic intrusion upon his victims’ lives, since he uses these mementos and curios to assess who they truly are. He is experienced enough to know where they might hide a key, their age(s), their level of education, and if they are living with someone and if so, for how long. What do their photographs suggest about them? Do they own pornography?

       Obviously, it doesn’t take long for our poor witless “writer” as I will call him, to be hooked. And Cobb quickly offers him the chance to track down their next “hit.” We also know that the young “writer” has already become intrigued by a young woman he has followed, The Blonde (Lucy Russell), who we see him encountering and talking to in a bar owned, we soon find out, by The Bald Guy for whom she was once his mistress and of whom she is still terrified. But that scene, which occurs outside of the narrative logic of our story, will force us to begin questioning our sense of what is truly going on in the “plot.”

       The young writer actually chooses his own place as his first choice of a hit. Cobb, recognizing that the tenant is clearly a starving would-be writer, angrily scuttles the robbery, describing our young friend as a failure for not having properly scouted out the victim. In fact, we much later discover—just to show you how unreliable Nolan’s narrative truly is—he has known it was the “writer’s” abode all along; as he later jokes to another figure, “the key was even under a mat that he probably went out and purchased just for the event.”

       In short, no one is quite to be trusted. The next apartment they burgle is The Blonde’s rather swanky place, where, while our hero chooses to take a few CDS and her candelabrum, Cobb seems more interested in her sexy undies and her box of secret possessions consisting of a few childhood photographs, a seahorse, etc. He takes one pearl earring while hiding another in the piano bench.

        Not only is our boy now addicted to danger, but Cobb suggests he stop going around looking like he’s a potential burglar, that he cut his hair and dress up, the advice of which The Young Man takes to heart.

      Cobb has ratcheted up his role a step or two by affecting that transformation, for he is no longer anymore a mere nosey voyeur and perverted moralist, but a kind of reformer, a sort of Pygmalion able to transform this dirty boy in his Galatea. Having queried the “writer” whether or not he was a faggot, he now hints that there may something a bit queer about his continued interest in his protégé.  

        The Blonde tells the Young Man of this robbery when he earlier meets her at the bar. In other words, the viewers themselves have already been set up for this particular event, which helps us believe in her credence. What a surprise, accordingly, it is that soon after we see Cobb and The Blonde together in the same apartment, obviously having both enticed the unknowing hero into some kind of trap.

        We soon discover that the real trap may be connected to The Blonde’s request that the “writer” burgle the safe at the bar where The Bald Man is evidently holding some intimidating photographs of her as blackmail. She, conveniently, has the code for the safe, within which our stooge finds not only the envelope of photos which he has promised not to open, but a great deal of money which he duct-tapes to his body. In the process of wrapping himself up a bit like a mummy, someone shows up whom, in his fear, he bludgeons-to-death with the hammer he has brought along (Cobb having advised him to carry a claw-hammer or a just a simple hammer on every job).

        Terrified by the turn of events, The Young Man is ready to turn himself into the police, but first receives a call from The Blonde asking him to come over immediately. With suspicion finally creeping into the crevices of his muddled head, he opens the forbidden envelope he has retrieved from the safe only to discover ordinary modeling pictures of her.

        Arriving at her apartment, if for other reason than to confront her, he perceives that she is in the company of Cobb, who is worried, so he tells the young hero, because he has been seen in the apartment of an elderly woman who he discovered to be dead. Obviously, The Young Man has been set up for the murder, even primed for it, without any obvious alibi. He now even looks somewhat like Cobb.

        But Nolan has one more terrible secret to spring upon the hero and his audience. Earlier in the work, when The Young Man has asked The Blonde just how dangerous The Bald Man is, she described an instance when he brought a man who owed him money to her apartment with a couple of his criminal thugs. When the debtor couldn’t pay up, they took a hammer to each of his fingers before applying it to his skull.

         The Bald Man, suggests Cobb, tired of The Blonde’s exorbitant blackmailing, has ordered him, as his closest henchman, to take The Young Man’s hammer and perform the same acts she previously detailed upon his beautiful blonde friend.

         A continuation of the interview with police from the first scene of this movie reveals that there has been no old woman found and no evidence of a previous murder in The Blonde’s apartment; but there is plenty of proof that the young nameless one has been in contact with the now murdered Blonde, the blood of her body being one of two kinds discovered upon the hammer, as well as a box of her curios found in The Young Man’s apartment, and the photographs containing his fingerprints. They even have, so they report, discovered one of her earrings in his room.

        There is no one named Cobb, no evidence of what The Young Man has described as his hide out. Meanwhile they have traced a stolen credit card—given him earlier by Cobb—with his signature upon it. If the young would-be writer has never yet written a word, he, nonetheless, has been very actively involved in a criminal life without his knowledge.

         In the boy’s slavish belief in Cobb and readiness to be manipulated by the stranger perhaps there is something queer about him after all. Having just watched Tom Kalin’s Swoon from 7 years earlier, I learned that there is perhaps nothing a weak man might not do to keep on the good side of evil.

Los Angeles, October 10, 2020 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2020).

Ray Yeung | Yellow Fever / 1998

sticky rice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ray Yeung (screenwriter* and director) Yellow Fever / 1998

 

Hong Kong-based filmmaker Raymond Yeung has established himself over the last couple of decades as one of the most outstanding of gay film directors, producing to date three feature films and five excellent shorts, although he has as yet failed to develop the international reputation of artists working in the same genre such as François Ozon, Todd Haynes, Wong Kar-wai, and André Téchiné—but then the Asian LGBTQ scene in general has been rather overlooked, something which I do hope to help rectify in these pages.

     Yeung’s earliest work, exemplified by Yellow Fever, released in 1998, was a wonderful introduction to his concerns with Asian identity and to his often comic twists of narrative expectations. At the time Yeung had just returned from London where he had been educated as a lawyer; he would not begin his film studies at Columbia University until 2008, and certainly, there are elements of the short that hint of its director’s as well as the actors’ youth.

     Yet in just 26 minutes Yeung establishes the personality of his central character Montgomery (Adrian Pang), in part because he is a kind of self-willed stereotype, a gay Chinese anglophile who wants as little to do with his own culture as possible. With his primarily Anglo friends such as the cute blonde-haired Andrew (Charles Edwards)—who one might imagine as Monty’s boyfriend except that his major role in Monty’s life seems to be kissing him intensely only at parties—and pretentious Chinese friends such as Yu Ling (Jaclyn Tse) (“So you see, I just couldn’t decide whether next season’s black was brown or camel. And so I meditate. And then suddenly I see the sign—not making a decision is a decision in itself.”) and the highly effeminate Earnest (Ivan Heng) who jokes that when his mother suggested he marry his long-time friend Yu Ling, he countered, having known our hero such he was a child, “why don’t you me ask to marry Monty?”

      Yeung establishes the reality of Monty’s life from the first few seconds of the film which shows his character sprawling in the bathtub to enjoy a good, long masturbation, interrupted by a doorbell rung by his new Taiwanese neighbor Jai Ming (Gerald Chew), who after introducing himself asks the oldest come-on question in the world: “Do you have light?” Except the friendly and implacable Jai Ming is asking quite seriously, having already summarily been dismissed by Monty’s declaration that he does not speak Chinese (a lie) and that his name is, as he announces in the driest British accent possible, “Mont-gom-ry.” After finding the cigarette lighter which he cannot get to work (obviously a symbol of his sexual disinterest in the intruder), he hands it over to Jai who quickly lights his cig just in time to see the door closed in his face.

       Obviously, Monty is not comfortable in his own skin, being one of the many Asians living in Anglo cultures who, unable to bear their adopted culture’s stereotypes of Asians, play out their own counter-stereotypes of Asians who has been entirely enculturated.

     As Yeung portrays that world, however, it is a lonely place. Despite the few Andrews who love Asian boys, most of the English, so Monty is reminded when after five months of a celibate life he tries once more to score at the clubs, are not an easy task. Every time he shimmies up to a handsome boy, the lad turns and runs. He returns home completely depressed.

       In the meantime, two further encounters with his neighbor Jai confuse him and make him wonder if just possibly he is becoming “sticky rice,” a term used to describe an Asian interested in having sex with his own countrymen. After discussing the problem with his gym trainer Dex and after having a longer conversation with Andrew, he is convinced that he should simply give his neighbor a try. This time he rings the doorbell immediately kissing the man behind the door intensely until the two of them end up in bed. Given that their sex is accompanied by Madonna’s version of Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell’s song “Fever,” we perceive that the sex was quite exceptional.

        Monty, however, can hardly cope with his sudden metamorphosis, rushes to Yu Ling, but is so chocked up with confusion he can hardly express his dilemma. She becomes so frustrated that she utterly loses her “always tranquil” disposition, gently striking him. When he finally can admit that he is has slept with another Chinese man to whom he is actually attracted and, far more importantly, he genuinely likes, she dismisses his perplexity. In short, “What’s the problem?” Monty marches to a Chinese revolutionary song back to Jai’s apartment.

      As in the film’s first scene, he knocks, asking Jai “Have you got a light?” Jai momentary disappears returning with a lighter and his own cigarette which he swiftly lights, and, satirizing Humphrey Bogart’s legendary ignition of Laureen Bacall’s cigarette in Casablanca, pushes his fag towards that of his friend’s. Like a suddenly aroused penis, Monty’s cigarette rises to meet his, reassuring us that they’ll be a perfect couple from here on in.

    If this witty work is not precisely profound, it does challenge the gay Asian colonialization of themselves and asks a truly important question: why should a Chinese man be more attracted to tennis player Pete Sampras than to Michael Chang?

     The more serious issues behind Asian devotion to Western cultural values are explored in Yeung’s first feature film, Front Cover of 2015.

 

*Apparently Yellow Fever was devised collaboratively by Gerald Chow, Rosa Fong, Ivan Heng, Colette Koo, Chowee Leow, Kwong Loke, and Liam Steel.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema bog and World Cinema Review (October 2020).

Benoît Jacquot | L'École de la chair (The School of Flesh) / 1998

temporary abnormalities

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Fieschi (screenplay, based on a fiction by Yukio Mishima), Benoît Jacquot (director) L'École de la chair (The School of Flesh) / 1998

 

Although French filmmaker Benoît Jacquot is well known for his several films centered upon the feminine personality within the context of the LGBTQ community, his 1998 work, L'École de la chair (The School of Flesh) might easily be overlooked as a gay film, despite the fact that one of the two central figures, Quentin (Vincent Martinez) is described as being bisexual, and he is surrounded by several gay figures, in particular Chris (Vincent Lindon), the manager of the bar in which Quentin works, and the several gay men—whom we never meet—who inhabit that bar.

      Like many young male hustlers, Quentin perceives himself, it appears, as mostly heterosexual, engaging in sex with males such as the elderly Soukaz (François Berléand) only to make good money. Besides for a young half-Berber man, despite his beauty, in 1990s Paris jobs are not easy to come by.

      The film, moreover, focuses almost entirely upon a heterosexual woman, Dominique (the always fascinating Isabelle Huppert), who one might almost describe as an unintentional, unthinking homophobe. She resists even entering the “gay” bar which her nameless female friend (Danièle Dubroux) one night encourages that they check out. And later, when she returns to the same bar on a quieter evening, she describes the atmosphere to the bartender as almost “normal.”

Later, after she comes to know Chris better, she asks him outright, “When did you become one of the girls”—a rather odd question, although Chris later describes himself as being a “girl,” put to a man who is simply effeminate, not a drag queen nor an individual transitioning. For Chris the term is simply a statement of his effeminate manners, but we sense for Dominique it is a sort of judgment.

       Indeed, Dominique is full of judgments, which are, in part, the crux of this film. Once she enters the “strange” world in which, perhaps for one of the first times in her life, she is somewhat out of her league as she is swept away, quite literally, by that handsome bartender Quentin, the two of them exchanging languorous glances the first time they encounter each other which quickly progresses to a relationship that almost resembles that of a wealthy female and her gigolo. Indeed, the Italians—Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini—might each have had much more fun with this tale. And Panamanian-born director José Quintero, a gay man, did seemingly enjoy himself with a campy version of this film’s themes in Tennessee Williams’ The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961).

       For Jacquot, however, everything is far more ponderous, for even entering upon such a relationship, Dominique barges in—forceful, intelligent, and quite successful businesswoman that she is—without quite knowing her role. Chris, also clearly in love with Quentin, attempts to fill her in with some of the attractive and more seedy details of the boy’s life, both encouraging her to take him under her wing and honestly warning her about the dangers of attempting to do so. But at the same time, one might almost describe Chris as a pimp in this relationship, especially since he latter approaches Dominique for money to pay off Quentin's "debts."

      For Dominique, however, who is quickly obsessed by the boy, there is no “correct” way to function. Sporting closely cropped hair and often wearing stylish male-like attire, she takes her seduction of him almost as a kind of “business-like” challenge, the way in fact that many a woman who discovers a man is gay—or in this case, “also gay”—believes that he only needs the proper heterosexual passion to correct his ways.

      Dominique is too smart to truly believe that she might “convert” Quentin, and it is also doubtful that she seriously wants to do so, since what she clearly finds so intriguing about him—and somewhat like Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) in Luis Buñuel’ Belle de Jour (1967)—so excitingly dangerous are the differences between them: his social “inferiority,” Quentin’s “perverted sexuality,” and finally, and most especially, his secretiveness about his entire life. Each of these “qualities” becomes something she sets out to both discover and correct, just as she might woe a recalcitrant customer for the high-end gowns and suits her company designs.

     She stalks him without pause, meeting up with his former male lover, Soukaz to discover as much as she can about their relationship, befriending the smitten but also bitter Chris, and after she goes through her new lover’s wallet and address book, tracking down his mother who works in a cafeteria, just to check her out.

     They are both such attractive people, Dominique and Quentin, that we have to believe that their sexual acts are more than fulfilling, as they both claim they are to one another. Yet Jacquot, despite his picture-perfect actors, goes out of his way to portray their sexual encounters quite discretely. Sex, it is quite clear, is not at the heart of their relationship.

       What Dominique—with her offers of money, new employment opportunities, and even her sheik apartment which she encourages the young man to use as his own—has not quite prepared for is the young man’s pride and refusal to totally engage in the role of an older woman’s young lover. Not only is he understandably bored by the social world she inhabits, he is purposely gauche and intentionally uncomfortable in playing the role she has planned for him. Indeed, what at first intrigues both of them, but soon becomes a struggle for power between the two, is his continual testing her limits—at first with little things like picking up a whole fish to eat it in a restaurant (Dominique demands he put it back on the plate and it eat it properly, not because of dining ethics but because she is with him). At another point, he refuses to leave the video game when she demands they move on during a date. And gradually, he stays out nights, returning to her only on certain days when they once more engage in their “fantastic” sex.

     Quentin—who bears the same name as William Faulkner’s suicidal “lover” of his older sister Caddie in The Sound and the Fury—appears to be like so many of the young Czech boy hustlers in the works of Wiktor Grodecki, someone who sells his body only to intensely guard the secrets of his soul. And it is that secretiveness that infuriates the normative thinker Dominique. Despite her seeming appetite for adventure, she remains, after all, a rather heteronormative figure, at heart  a cold being, as she describes her father. When she cries, as critic Stephen Holden wrote about the actress in another role, her tears seem "to emanate from a realm somewhere beyond feeling.” To me, they do not seem to come from within, but suddenly appear, dripping from her eyes as if they crept down from her forehead to find a suitable outlet.

      So too is our young beauty, despite his seemingly “perverted” lifestyle, a seeker of the normal. Both of these figures, indeed, beneath their bluff of naughty and dangerous sexuality, are seeking normalcy much like the central figure of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and they use that cold comfort of everyday reality to torture one another.

      Hooked up with a man closer to her age by her friend, Dominque takes him back to her apartment, presumably to irritate Quentin. But when she discovers her lover is still absent, she engages in a quite standard sexual encounter with her date.

      For his part, Quentin falls in love with the daughter of one of Dominique’s wealthy clients, Marine Thorpe (Roxane Mesquida), a spoiled teenager with nothing special to offer, but who permits Quentin the macho necessity, despite her wealthy parents, of seeking to support her. Indeed, both of the empty-headed socialites find Quentin the “perfect” potential son in-law, and plot with him so that a trip he makes to Morocco with Dominque will also serve as a kind of accidental meet-up with their daughter.

     In one of the most torture-ridden moments of the film, Dominique insists upon a Japanese dinner shared by the two “new” couples, she and her new friend and Quentin and Marine. When it turns out that even her friend knows Marine’s parents, it becomes a sort of battle of the generations, the two elderly figures judging the youthful pair, while they, in turn, dismiss their elders as unable to comprehend the own feelings and emotional needs.

      Some of the nights Quentin spends apart from Dominque, she discovers, he is hustling male clients to obtain more money than even she can pay, he insists, so that he might support his new girlfriend.

     It is Dominque who now plots revenge. But unfortunately, by this time we no longer care, having recognized that they were never a good match and that her inexplicable obsession has, just as she constantly expresses her fears about nearly everything in her life, including her former husband, become “boring.”

      Chris, who out of revenge for Quentin’s betrayal of his own love, has arranged with a friend to take pictures of Quentin having sex with men, offers her the perfect tool for blackmail. We never see the pictures, but apparently the quite graphic photos show him even serving as a bottom, and certainly are revealing enough that even Marine’s spineless parents would have to cut off their daughter’s relationship with him.

       Dominque shows him the photographs, just as he appears to be ready to return to the uneasy relationship with Dominque. But recognizing that it is now all too late, she burns them, freeing him to go; but he now refuses to do so, knowing that, in truth, he has nowhere to go. What he describes as the morgue-like atmosphere of the Thorpe home, is clearly not any more “normal” than his and Dominique’s bizarre relationship. But she is now utterly disinterested in her former prey, and summons her friend to insist that Quentin leave her apartment.

        The two finally meet up quite by accident a few years later with Dominque, now with longer hair and waiting a man closer to age to pick up tickets to an evening at the theater or opera, spotting Quentin with his young daughter, a child he has had with another girl closer to his age whose parents have given him a job in the hotel they run. Both have seemingly found the normalcy they have been seeking, although even now he suggests that if his own current relationship should end, he’ll take his daughter and run. Perhaps that is, after all, contemporary normalcy. If so, I’d prefer remain in the dark shadows of Chris’ gay bar. Fortunately, something that seems beyond the realization of Jacquot’s normalized figures, there are so many hundreds of other choices.

       In the end, unfortunately, The School of Flesh educates its students in a manner that gives the LGBTQ community a bad name.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and The Queer Blog: All Things LGBTQ+ (November 2021).