the fever
by Douglas
Messerli
Christophe
Honoré (screenwriter and director) Le lycéen (Winter Boy) / 2022
What we often
forget is that not only is the US today torn apart by oppositional views
regarding politics, but that the politics themselves involve aesthetic and
cultural values that have also helped to tear apart some of our educational and
cultural institutions, as well as often creating a huge sense of confrontation
between teachers and students, creators, performers, and their audiences, and
between art, literary, and film critics themselves.
I have
heard from several university professors, in particular, how some of their
students simply refuse to read certain texts; and I had my own experience with
this a few years ago when teaching a graduate literature course at Otis College
of Art and Design when a female student announced to me and her classmates that
she would not read Gertrude Stein, which was a strange proclamation since Stein
was not even on the syllabus that semester. When I asked her for her reasons
for this refusal, she simply announced that she hated her writing. Although I
did not teach Stein that semester, I did mention her a couple of times,
presumably why the woman quickly dropped a required course, endangering her own
status in the program. Or perhaps she simply didn’t like me because I liked Stein.
Reading the reviews of what I perceived as a
moving and loving movie by French director Christophe
Honoré, Winter Boy (2022), I was again made aware of how far too often presumably
sane-mined film critics sometimes circle around the fresh body of a work of
cinema as if it were a piece of dead carrion awaiting to be delighted in or
attacked by the circling critical buzzards.
Winter Boy is admittedly a fairly complex film, even while its story remains
quite simple. Several critics were simply puzzled by the fact that this film
dared to focus on more than one genre, embracing a kind of gay coming out film along
with a psychological portrait of grief in a family when the father suddenly
dies in an automobile accident as in James Agee’s A
Death in the Family, while also exploring the problems of teenage
angst, occasionally engaging with current French politics, and hinting at an
unspoken melodrama of parental dissatisfaction with life and possible suicide.
One critic wondered with which genre the movie was trying to engage as if
somehow the director had needed to make a choice or at least choices from a
limited luncheon menu instead of attempting to embody the fullness of such an
experience for a young 17-year-old gay boy at a time in his life where
everything had suddenly become indeterminate and impossible to comprehend.
Most critics, such as Devika Girish of The New York Times threw
out most of the possible “choices,” and honed in on the what they saw as psychological
naturalism: “the film shines when it allows its actors to quietly play out
family dynamics, with [Vincent] Lacoste [as the boy’s older brother], [Juliette]
Binoche [as the boy’s mother], and especial [Paul]
Kircher [the 17-year-old boy] wearing the many shades of grief with effortless,
endearing naturalism.” Alistair Ryder, writing in The
Film Stage also saw it as a “contemporary coming-of-age tale,”
while Juan José Cruz of Premiere represented the film as “a powerful story about the scars left by
adolescence and how we face self-discovery.”
The nastiest review of the lot, Soham
Gadre’s essay in Film Inquiry, faulted the film for it “muted realism,” comparing it negatively to the
preferable melodramas of Douglas Sirk such as Imitation
of Life. Speaking of that film, Gadre writes:
“Every scene is
still crystal clear, the movements of the characters, the colors of the walls
and dresses, and the way Sirk positions and shifts the camera mid-conversations.
Completely in contrast to that was my
recent screening of Christophe Honoré’s Winter
Boy, a movie where the images, the characters, and the
mood started to leave my mind almost immediately, leaving nary a trace. I haven’t
seen a movie this forgettable in quite a while. Bad films of course leave a
lasting impression in both their unsavory aesthetic choices, insulting
thematics, and lamentation of the time wasted watching them.
Honoré’s film was genuinely harmless and
inoffensive.”
It is certainly true that, in some
respects, Honoré is not generally interested in the costumes and sets of his
scenes or in even moving his camera about in various shots. Winter Boy presents a
truly claustrophobic
world, first in the young boy Lucas’ boarding school, where his lover Oscar
(Adrien Casse) is prone to pop into his small cell at any time for a meet up in
bed, and then, when his brother Quentin, a cousin, and a family friend come to
carry him home with the bad news of his father’s death, with an entire
household of grievers who hug, hold, and fondle him like a whining puppy to
passed round the room. The streets of the small alpine villages of Chambéry and
other locations in Savorie where the film takes place are crooked and cramped.
And later, even in Paris, Lucas’ brother Quentin lives in a small slightly disheveled
artist apartment, shared by his best friend Lilio Rossio (Erwan
Kepoa Falé). Honoré focuses on the immediate bodies and faces, not on costumes
and architectural spaces. Writing in Deadline, Stephanie Bunbury nicely sums up my argument:
“Honoré works
with a sort of narrative uncertainty principle. His account of the family’s
tumult sweeps like windscreen wipers from the endless wake to Lucas’ risky sex
life, back to the brothers’ scrapping and back again to Lucas’ increasing
confusion, continually spreading out and then peeling back the surface of their
lives. The camera stays close to them, rarely pulling back further than the
opposite wall of a small room. The psychiatric hospital where Lucas is
eventually confined, lined with airy cloisters, is paradoxically one of the few
spaces in the film that feels open and free.”
A significant number of critics, moreover,
found the work to be far too melodramatic and emotionally fraught, in the
manner of the melodramas of Sirk and Nicholas Ray. Critic Philip Brasor, for
example, observed: “The boy’s subsequent breakdown has a theatrical aspect that
makes you wonder how much of his suffering is for show, but the sudden
inconsistencies in his temperament point to something more disturbing. His mood
swings like a pendulum in a hurricane during the wake and funeral, which his
grieving mother, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), asks him not to attend, knowing
what damage it might do to his already fragile equilibrium. If Lucas’s
narration initially indicates an immature personality full of itself, the behavior
on display dispels any notion that the boy knows what he’s doing. By the time
he accompanies his older brother, Quentin (Vincent Lacoste), to his home in
Paris you don’t know what to make of him.”
Dennis Harvey, writing in the San
Francisco on-line journal 48 Hills, finds the memorable melodramatics of this film to be its downfall—just
the opposite of Gadre’s argument.
“This character
[Lucas] is so tiresomely self-over-dramatizing, we lose sympathy fast. His
response to a grievous loss is first denial, then a sort of unexplained
seizure, then all kinds of melodrama, including a pass at prostitution and a
suicide attempt. We can understand that he’s flailing. But the film seems to treat
all this as grand passion rather than the attention-needy cries of a sexually
precocious but immature, rather bratty boy. No wonder his older brother
(Vincent Lacoste) is almost constantly fed up with Lucas’ theatrics.
Honoré is an erratic talent whose work I’ve
sometimes found as exasperatingly indulgent as his protagonist’s behavior here.
Winter Boy is one of his more disciplined enterprises, but it still can be
maddening, in a peculiarly stereotypical French way wherein characters
constantly traverse the gamut of emotions as if hammering out xylophone
arpeggios.”
In short, it seems that Honoré is being
accused for using any approach to the film he might proffer or eschew. In
actuality, the director achieves a work that at moments is a quiet
naturalist-like work, while in the next it moves to high pitch, almost camp,
fever that Rainer Maria Fassbinder would have loved. The central character,
after all, is a hormonal-charged teenager, openly gay, but not at all sure yet
whether or not whether he wants to be fully tied-down to a relationship. He
loved a father who he was not at sure was proud of him or fully pleased with
his sexuality; moreover the father was on the road most of time; although Binoche’s
character was clearly in love with her husband, it is also obvious that she poured
out a great deal of her love to her second son, the elder, Quentin, having, as
Lucas himself describes it, abandoned the family.
Finally, all of the critics seem to forget
the early scene in which Lucas and his father are traveling together, his
father speaking vaguely of the dissatisfaction of his live and the next moment
almost causing an accident that might have killed both father and son; an
incident which he begs Lucas to keep from his mother, and which Lucas never
again speaks about. So there is a sense to the young boy that he, himself, is
partly guilty, both for hiding the event and perhaps for being the cause of it.
Although his mother devours him with
love, it is a needy love which he cannot truly fulfill. To care for her, he would have to abandon his
boarding school and attend a religious institution nearby. He is simultaneously
desperate to discover what else is in the world, what is available to him, and
what his response to the wider world might be. All of this comes together as a
series of confusions, angst, and anger with the fact of his father’s death,
which he himself believes might have been intentional.
Is it any wonder that he seems calm and
collected at one moment and falls into a kind of tormented fit of hysteria in
the very next? I think Derek Smith, writing in Slant, perhaps best caught the director’s sense of both Lucas’ and Isabelle’s
emotional states: “Honoré approaches grief in a similarly subtle, intriguingly
indirect manner. Where many films show grief merely as a crippling hindrance, Winter Boy sees it as an
emotional state that constantly rises and recedes, disrupting the flow and
morphing the meaning of everyday experience.”
A week
with his brother in Paris seems to be the perfect answer, a way to defuse Lucas’
grief and help him simultaneously to discover new experiences. But, although
some critics seem to approve of Quentin, what Honoré shows us is a young artist
of apparently little talent, imitating the masters, while his black roommate
Lilio appears to have a true, almost Dadaist originality to his work. Yet Lilio
must work as a chauffeur and take on an occasional job as a prostitute to make
ends meet, while Quentin, backed by a supporter, gets all the shows. The
supporter/dealer suggests to Lilio that there’s an upcoming African show for
which he might consider entering work, despite the fact that Lilio is, in fact,
Spanish.
Although he invites his brother to join
him in Paris, Quentin basically abandons Lucas to the streets, insisting that
he not return home until 6:00 in the afternoon so that he might woo his dealer.
And even then Lucas returns to find the door locked, his brother having gone
off to a local bar to celebrate. Quentin invests a single morning at the Louvre
on his brother, the rest of the time ignoring him or putting him in the care of
Lilio. Is it any wonder that the boy sees in the handsome elder gay man both a
possible father and lover?
Lucas tries, successfully, to pick up
someone in an internet connection, and is open to all new experiences. As he
tells the cute young boy who would like to meet up again with him, right now he
is looking to take up space rather than construct new relationships. And when Lucas
discovers that his new hero is also a prostitute who won’t have sex with him,
he lashes out like any thoughtless boy his age by both attempting to emulate
and punish him by making a date to fuck the same man.
These are not rational acts, of course,
but they totally understandable given the overwhelming emotions of love, abandonment,
fear, and wonderment which he now daily faces. When Quentin discovers him about
to have sex with Lilio’s john, he puts him on the first train home, further
abandoning a brother who needs love, and not the kind his mother might provide.
I would argue, accordingly, that it is
perfectly comprehensible why finally this troubled boy attempts suicide. Except
for his school friend who wants a relationship and actually loves him, Lucas is
faced with a needy, suffocating mother, a disinterested brother, and a dissatisfied
father who, in his mind, took that dissatisfaction into death. To whom can he
turn for all the things he truly needs: love, adventure, guidance?
A final critic, Felipe Freitas, writing
in Always Good Movies, pointlessly castigated the director for closing down the movie in “tedious
disgrace,” the film ending “ridiculously, in flagrant hypocrisy,” presumably
because the boy winds up, after slashing his wrists and refusing to speak, in a
psychiatric hospital, certainly the last place at that age or a few years later
when I ran away to New York City without even telling my parents and lived a
gay life far wilder than Lucas’ would wanted to have ended up. But what other
choice do people without the comprehension of a young gay man’s needs have? At
least there he is cared for, free to come and go at will.
However, it is only a trip down from
Paris by Lilio, the only individual who does know precisely what this boy
needs, that resolves the situation. Lilio has clearly been in the boy’s shoes,
and admits he sometimes still is. That simple empathy, that reaching out is just
what Lucas most needs. After his visit, Lucas determines to speak again,
explaining to his mother that he is ready to return home and move on.
At film’s end, our troubled young rebel
has come of age. Even his mother finally is able to relinquish her anger over
her husband’s death. We doubt whether or not Quentin any longer cares. What
Quentin doesn’t know is that he is already a hack, destined to become another
man disappointed with life.
But nearly everything is now open to
Lucas. Perhaps he will now return to his boarding school and his good friend,
and then later move to Paris on his own to discover what he wants to do with
his life. The grief may never end, but the fever has broken.
This is a gay film about grief, angst,
politics, and anger presented alternately through the lens of realism and
theatrical exaggeration almost worthy of Fassbinder’s clueless heroes. If only
the critics, as Lilio did, could have shown the same empathy and reached out to
the movie instead of demanding it fit their desires and needs!
Los
Angeles, January 10, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(January 2025).
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