several individuals desperately seeking new lives
by Douglas
Messerli
Dominique Choisy
(screenwriter and director) Ma vie avec James Dean (My Life with
James Dean) / 2017
One
of my very favorites of the teen years of the century, and a great many other
critics, was Dominique’s Choisy’s My Life with James Dean, a rather indefinable
film regarding genre and plot that rambled its way quite lazily through a great
many lives who accidently collide when the young film director Géraud Champreux
(the somewhat inscrutable and always slightly off quilter Johnny Rasse), who
has made a strange gay art film titled My Life with James Dean, although
having nothing at all to do with James Dean or anybody else’s experience with
him. Dean stands, presumably for a kind of bisexual force which perhaps
permeates the film, although thankfully we never see the full film nor its full
contents revealed. It is simply an art-house film that seems attract the
interest of the woman, Sylvia van den Rood (Nathalie Richard), who has invited Géraud
to come from Paris to a small town in Normandy and surrounding villages which
like-minded independent film owners nearby show to nearly empty theaters; it is
well known that in Normandy the audiences are only interested, as the film
usher declares, in American action films and comedies.
Despite his invitation to this village, which before he even gets there
by bus a young boy steals his cellphone while he is sleeping, is put up in
someone unpleasant accommodations: no phones in the room, no bar, no work-out
space, etc. The hotel desk clerk Gladys (Juliette Damiens) is clearly
interested in Géraud—she is interested in any man who might take her out of her
existence as hotel receptionist and into her in his arms into paradise—even
though she quickly perceives her new visitor is gay.
Géraud himself is distressed, having
evidently broken up with his lover, the actor who plays the central character
in his film, who when he finally does visit his director is only too ready to
return to the arms of the woman he his has left him for, perhaps his wife.
The theater which is to show the film
does not even know of the late-night showing, and the organizer/owner of the
theater, Sylvia, does not even show up for the performance. Only one mysterious
old lady shows up for the showing, and the lovely and lively young
projectionist, the central figure of the film, Balthazar (Mickaël Pelissier),
who like the famous wise men who visited Christ brings a lovely perfume of hope
into Géraud’s life. He, incidentally, is also the ticket taker, another person
terribly unhappy with his role in the small town of Le Tréport. He presents
himself as 19, although we later discover he is only 16, which although the
legal age of consent in France is 15, still terrifies, evidently, most US
reviewers and readers (even though in many states throughout the US, the age is
also 16), particularly since the absolutely insistent boy immediately falls in
love with the movie and its creator.
Seeing the situation, Géraud, having no
intention of watching his own movie yet again in an empty theater, retires to a
local bar and proceeds to get what can only be describes as “stinking drunk.”
Young Balthazar retrieves him, almost carries him back to the hotel, and with
Gladys’ help puts him properly to bed, although she surely might have liked to
help undress him.
The
next day Sylvia shows up, with great apologies, explaining she has been also
going through martial difficulties, not bothering to explain what those may be;
she has simply forgotten about the premiere of his film. Her problems continue
throughout the film, and in one of the earliest of what critics have described
as “silly but loveable” scenes, Géraud attempts to follow her like a spy out of
silent films, or more pointedly, the way Audrey Hepburn attempts to follow Cary
Grant in their famous “love” film Charade of 1963.
However, in this case, it is not only Géraud
following after Sylvia, but Balthazar after him, and Gladys trailing both. This
kind of multiple stalking happens at least a couple of times in this work, the
critic Rich Cline, withing in Shadows on the Wall, catching the lunacy
of their actions:
“The
performances are all wonderfully sweet and understated, yet with an edge of
Almodovarian silliness. Instead we have breezy coastals knocking around within
their own world and reaching for something greater, spurred on by the
inspiration of film. Richard’s Catherine, a sun-bleached lover of the cerebral
world of movies, seems like a fish out of water unless comfortably seated in
the theater. Rasse’s Géraud is a troubled, comically confused romantic who
longs for a deeper meaning when sometimes there is nothing left to discern.”
Yet, in this foray into the invasion of
other’s lives we may quickly be led to believe that Sylvia’s male lover is
having an affair with another woman, whom she calls to her face a whore. But
soon after we discover, that, in fact, the woman is Sylvia’s lover who has run
away with a man. This shifts everything, as we realize that in this film no one
who we have so far encountered in this provincial village lives or wants a
normative heterosexual life, expect perhaps for Gladys, who by film’s end, does
find, somehow as one of the trail of confused people, a male lover.
To appease Géraud, Balthazar lies, saying
after he left, several others showed up, telling the manager that he took to
the money home and will bring it in the next day.
Sylvia does manage to chauffeur her guest
to his showing at a colleague’s theater in a nearby Normandy village the next
day. And here, because of an agreement with a nurse in a nearby old age home,
he busses in its habitants to the movies on a regular basis. Attendance is just
fine, but whether or not any of the audience knows what is happening in this
movie is doubtful.
Balathazar reveals his love for Géraud and
attempts to make him understand he is what the troubled director is missing in
his life. But the midst of his own attempts at courting, Géraud’s former Paris
lover shows up. And it seems for a few moments like there might be a possible rapprochement,
until his girlfriend/wife shows up to scurry him back to Paris.
Sylvia and her lesbian lover also make up
temporarily, but it is a short return to what was previously normalcy, and she
quickly leaves once again, Sylvia finally having to face the fact.
Balthazar, meanwhile, shows up in Géraud’s
room and literally seduces him, which at least allows him one night of
remarkable sex. But when, soon after, the director discovers his real age is
not 19 but 16, he again rebuffs him.
But by this time, the boy has insisted
his own father watch Géraud’s My Life with James Dean and comes out to
his mother, both parents, being unlike shocked and controlling US parents,
realizing that perhaps it is time for their precocious son move on to Paris,
and what better hands to put him in but a 30-some year old gay man, who perhaps
will love and protect him for a while before Balthazar can actually discover
the city by himself, find a job, and a lover more age appropriate. They bless
him as he joins the now somewhat complacent Géraud, whose next film is based on
one of Gladys’ favorite genres, the Bombay musical.
Nothing really makes logical sense in
this film, but that is it’s argument, I believe.
Norman Gibney in Film Threat effectively
describes the way in which this film functions:
“This
is the leisurely pace that My Life with James Dean weaves and unfolds its
mysteries. This beguiling love letter to the power of cinema cares not that you
don’t have all the answers. You will get them, in time. But then again, it
isn’t so much about an outcome as it is the journey each of these people are
on. Sylvia [Gibney mistakenly calls her Catherine] (Nathalie Richard), the
scattered film programmer that invited Géraud to her tiny berg, is apoplectic
as her partner Louise (Marie Vernalde) has left her, forgetting to make the
screening she booked. Gladys (Juliette Damiens), manager of the front desk at
the hotel seems to have a passing interest in Géraud, though it is clear Géraud
is gay. Young Balthazar seems so fixated on the film Géraud brings to town that
he invites his father Tony (Bertrand Belin) to watch it when it screens a
second time.
While there is enough happening to keep
the viewer passively entertained, it is the unsaid that becomes the most
interesting. Choisy refrains from dropping the usual hints that orient an
audience, instead allowing scenes to unfold, letting us absorb contextual
elements that give us a sense of what is really going on. It is this method
that soon provokes us to slow down, look closer, and become accustomed to
picking up nuance.”
Los
Angeles, September 29, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).
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