Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Lili Marleen / 1981

swimming backwards

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manfred Purzer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joshua Sinclair, and Werner Ushkurat (screenplay, based on Lale Andersen’s autobiographical fiction The Heavens Have Many Colors), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Lili Marleen / 1981

 

For several years now, I have felt that I have seen and commented on all of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brilliant available films. But by a quirk of momentary research, I suddenly discovered that I had no essay for one of his most interesting of his films, Lili Marleen. Apparently I had seen it; it showed up on my Letterboxd list as rated, and I don’t ever rate a film without first seeing it. But when I watched it again the other day, I didn’t remember a single frame. It was like I was seeing the film for the first time, which perhaps I was.

      And what a true revelation. Although this is not one of Fassbinder’s most compelling movies, it is one of the few which actually deals with the rise of the Nazi regime, and, in that sense, is perhaps closest in subject and tone to his great masterwork, Berlin Alexanderplatz of a year earlier—although most critics link it, inexplicably I’d argue, with the female-centered movies Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982) or attempt to tie it up with his 1979 film The Marriage of Maria Braun. But this work is of a different species.

      First of all, the film features a wealthy Jewish family—something rare in Fassbinder films, and frankly one of his failures, I suggest—living in Switzerland, Robert Mendelsson (Giancarlo Mgiannini) and his father David (Mel Ferrer). They head up an underground network which, one by one, sneaks Jews out of Germany into Switzerland and other countries. The network is complex and heavily coded, even requiring its most loyal members to knock on doors in certain matters and to communicate in discreet ways. Robert breaks several of these codes and moreover, as a piano player accompanying a rather untalented German cabaret singer, Willie (Hanna Schygulla) is now actually perceived as a danger to their movement, particularly when Robert declares his love for her and his desire that they marry.

     Both father and mother, disturbed by her Aryan background and terrified of any German connections she might have, fear, when Robert and she return to Germany for a performance and, on Robert’s part, a covert action, that she might possibly discover and reveal their actions.

      David Mendelsson arranges, in part because of her unpaid debts back in Switzerland, that she is now allowed re-entry into the country, meaning she is now stranded in her homeland without her lover. Robert, furious with his father’s actions attempts to raise enough money to pay off her debts, and returns often to Germany, both to further cause of the underground’s movements and to discreetly meet up with his lover.

     We begin, accordingly, with a toggling of viewpoints between the secretive and powerful Jewish family and the rather untalented German cabaret singer. As reviewer Lisa Thatchter quite intelligently describes both the power and the failure of Fassbinder’s vision in this film and others:

 

“Fassbinder liked to make films from a female point of view because he preferred what he considered a female way of thinking which was, he believed, dialectic. This means that not only is there a thesis and antithesis but also a synthesis of perspectives. Therefore we have Nazis and underground fighters in a chiastic relation:  that is the villain is victim and the victim is villain. Fassbinder wants us to see that black and white / good and bad / perpetrator and victim are not clear-cut dialects, but rather a synthesised chaotic mass of interpretations, motivations, misinterpretations and multiple desires.

     However, in a world view based on logic, good and bad can have nothing to do with each other. They exist as each other’s polar opposite. Because Fassbinder wants us to see that synthesis— while possible—isn’t occurring, the relationship is the sacrifice as each represents a pole apart from the other.”

      The two lovers are from completely different worlds, Robert brought up in a strictly moralistic world, while Willie has no political understanding whatsoever, and has no comprehension of how she might even endanger an underground enterprise with her naivete. She loves Robert desperately, but he and his family have seemingly abandoned her, and when a Nazi official, Henkel (Karl-Heinz von Hassel) seems dedicated to advancing her career, she has no reason not to take advantage of the situation. He insists she record the popular song, revised by Robert from World War I, “Lili Marleen.” Despite her sometimes miserable recording sessions, she finishes the taping, and, when almost by accident the song is broadcast to the German troops fighting in central Europe, Bulgaria and elsewhere, she becomes not only a popular singer but someone who is almost fetishized as a link back to before the current war and to the young men’s childhood. Willie becomes “Lillie Marleen,” the poor girl waiting for her lover endlessly, still waiting for the man who never showed up. And she becomes a wealthy woman for playing the role over and over again in song. The wonderful composer Peer Raben presents us with so many different versions of this song that, by the end, we are as tortured by it as Robert is later when he is arrested by the Gestapo, who play the song endlessly to him that he might suffer for the sin of his love.

       The real focus of this movie suddenly shifts from the plot to the song itself, which is truly the central foci of this film, as several commentators have noted. Although the great actress Schygulla gives it her best throughout, she, in fact loses control of the film and becomes almost an ancillary of her own fame, as a kind of ur-Marlene Dietrich, a figure that is both loved and hated by the Germans and equally popular with the Allied troops.

      Again, Thatcher is quite perceptive about this issue:

 

“Hanna Schygulla’s Willie, who is transformed to incorporate the song, “Lili Marleen,” which she performs over and over again, upholds the mythology of the Marlene Dietrich the Germans loved to hate and loved to love again. She becomes the great star of the German Empire, the metaphoric gestalt of victory. She represents the transcendent force in the new medias, the melodramatic, popular force of cinema, of a song that transcends frontiers and languages.”

     Goebbels hates the song for its nostalgia and lack of an uplifting message, but Hitler loves it, and invites her for a special performance, revealing once more, as Fassbinder has often shown us, of the kitsch and longing that are the heart of his regime. His was not at all a movement forward, but backwards into a time of the past for which all Germans longed for, something that might even have been present, at least for the soldiers, in the Weimar Regime.

      At one point Willie sings a live concert before the soldiers, but when she finishes, instead of responding to their cheers and insistence that she return and sing again, she runs off to meet secretly with Robert. Chaos eventually overwhelms them as we watch them engage in a kind of orgiastic playing out of several Germanic tropes that seem closer to the SA (Brownshirts) behavior of Ernst Röhm’s gay men than to Hitler’s soldiers, ending even with a boa wrapped round the shoulders of the propaganda minister. This scene alone requires the film to be seen not only as a heterosexual love story, but a queer tale of the relationship between these men of the past and their own love of a wild free sexual world perhaps even without the women they fetishize and adore.

      Matthew Cheney, on his Mumpsimus blog expresses it quite succinctly:

 

“One of the things I love about Lili Marleen is that its mode is utter and obvious kitsch, undeniable kitsch. It highlights the kitschiness not only of the Nazi aesthetic (which plenty of people have done, not least, though unintentionally, the Nazis themselves), but to some extent also of many movies about the Nazis. (I kept thinking of the awful TV mini-series Holocaust while watching it this time, and Elsaesser makes that connection as well.) We love to use the Nazis and the Holocaust for sentimental purposes, and representations of the Nazis and Holocaust often unintentionally veer off into poshlost. To intentionally do so is dangerous, even as critique, because it is too easy to fall into parody and render fascism as something absurd and ridiculous, but not insidious. The genius of Lili Marleen is that the insidiousness remains. It's what nags at us afterward, what lingers beneath the occasional laughter at the excess. There is a discomfort to this film, and it's not just the discomfort of undeniable parody — it is the discomfort of realizing how easily we can be drawn in to the structures being parodied: the suspense, the action, the breathless and improbable love story, the twists and turns, the pageantry, the displays of wealth and power. Our desires are easily teased, our expectations set like booby traps, and again and again those desires and expectations are frustrated and mercilessly mocked.”

     That important orgy-like situation reveals that perhaps, even in the Nazi world, boys still loved other boys, and the ultimate feminization of the Nazi struggle for masculinization, something that strongly echoes in Pete Hegseth’s notion of today’s Trump US military, as he argues for testosterone treatments for selected soldiers.

      Having finally recognized what Robert and his family have been up to, Willie demands that she too becomes a covert agent, and she redeems herself somewhat with the family, by demanding her Nazi friends take her to an early concentration camp, filming the experience, the tape of which she covertly returns to the underground, and which they use, somewhat despicably (particularly when abandoning their possibility to release that information to the world), to release Robert from his imprisonment as opposed to revealing the camps to international sources. But that film can be reproduced, a human being cannot.

 

Critic Bodil Marie Thomsen, in her essay “The Spy and the Cabaret Singer” nicely summarizes what I have just expressed:

 

“One of the central utterances is in the scene where the spy Robert is exchanged for a documentary film showing a German concentration camp. The German officer pays almost no interest to the film, and answers, when he is asked (by Robert’s father), why it was not possible to exchange more Jews for the film: “You can copy a film, not people”. This is the answer that makes it justifiable for Robert’s father to denounce Willie, who actually smuggled the film out of Germany. The film could have been copied anywhere – in Germany before the smuggling and in Switzerland before the exchange. This is perhaps the most solid and cruel statement of the film: When reality is documented in a film, it can – like any fiction film – be copied and altered according to the purpose the public wants it to serve. It can result in joy, longing desire or torture as the song ‘Lili Marleen.’ It can give a vague reference to reality, but the product itself will always be artificial. It is this insight, that the public all over the world wants to dismiss. We want to believe in history although most of it is ideology. We want to believe in big leaders or big ideologies that act as saviors or as evil incarnate.”

 

     Meanwhile, back in Switzerland, Robert’s family arranges and insists upon his marriage to a nice Jewish girl, as he moves on, by the end of the war, to become a famous orchestra conductor. Freed from her German isolation, Willie (now known as “Lili Marleen”) returns, still in love with him, to hear his concert and perhaps reconnect.

     As in a Douglas Sirk movie (Sirk being a big influence on Fassbinder’s films), she meets up by accident with his wife, who greets her, seemingly eager to have finally made her acquaintance. She, realizing finally that she no longer has any role in Robert’s life, turns and leaves, releasing him to his own future. If nothing else, she has had, despite the eventual banning of her song, a truly wondrous life.

     I believe that Fassbinder simply found it impossible to fully express the holocaust, that his films, always sympathetic of human failures, simply could not embrace the full evil. And, as much as I adore his works, this is his failure. He sees the evil, he trots it out for us to see, but ultimately, he forgives it or redeems it in his razor-sharp portrait of those of who failed and were different from all the others. His fascination with perversity cannot embrace the true evil of some of its actions and effects. The face of fascism, after all, is not banality as Hannah Arendt would have us believe, but a culturally self-created universe of desire by those within in. As Matthew Cheney interestingly comments about Lili Marleen: "[It] was like watching an anti-Nazi movie made in the style of Nazi movies." In a sense, however, that is Fassbinder’s gift; he is able to deconstruct his films even as he moves through them, making us realize the allure of what fascism provides certain individuals in Germany and elsewhere in the world is all about. It can be men involving other men in sexual relationships for their own benefit, a social unit preying on each other, a film director abusing his own actors and crew in order to create a memorable work of art, or even the drive to represent the world in art itself.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Zuheir Kredich | See You Tomorrow / 2019

the canvas of a london sky

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zuheir Kredich (screenwriter and director) See You Tomorrow / 2019 [16 minutes]

 

This rather simple film deals once more with gay death, not apparently AIDS, but cancer or something like it. In a bar on a London street Steve (John Skerrit) encounters his old friend, Alex (Richie Bratby) passing by and calls out to him. For a moment Alex doesn’t even recognize him, which Steve explains is probably the KiMo therapy; he has only a few months left before he’s going to die, he confesses.

     After talking briefly about Steve’s upcoming birthday and his birth sign, a Libra, Alex suddenly gives his old friend a deep kiss and apparently a short relationship between the two arises.

     We have no way of knowing how long this relationship lasted or what it truly consisted of. As we get glimpses of it through this short film by British student filmmaker Zuheir Kredich we see the two primarily in argument, at one time Steve being angry that Alex won’t join him for dinner, and at another point while Alex is cooking dinner for Steve, the latter suddenly determines to go out to buy a book and comes back an hour later without any book in his hand. The issue between them appears to be Alex’s inability to face up to the fact of death, particularly Steve’s death, and his selfishness about giving himself over to the other who has so little time left.

     One might even argue that Alex is the kind of lover who spends much of each day off from the other planning for the next day, a man unable to experience the joys and pleasures of the moment.

     But this is pure conjecture since we have no other evidence, and the very next scene after their having kisses is Alex calling Steve to report “It’s been ages,” only to find Steve’s father (Mark Johnson) at the other end of the line able to report only that his son is a hospice. He hangs up before even telling Alex which hospice Steve is in.

      Whatever their relationship, it is clear that Alex cares enough for his friend that he calls around to all the hospices until he finds Steve’s location. And he visits him, bringing flowers and candies and talking to him in a cheerful manner, although the patient is nearly comatose. Steve’s father leaves the room to let the two be together. When Steve finally awake enough to even perceive that Alex is there he attempts to say something that either Alex refuses to hear and simply can’t make out, but which, if we carefully attend, is somewhat negative, hinting that he is trying to tell Alex that he shouldn’t have come.

       Soon after he tells the now sleeping patient that he has to go, but will be there tomorrow, that he should hold on until tomorrow.

       During the next visit he is also quite chipper and caring, somewhat witty in his observations which he attributes to comments he’s learned from Steve. But his friend is hardly awake during any of the visit. Nonetheless, Alex hugs him close and holds his hand for quite a while before once more simply reporting that he has to go but will see him tomorrow, insisting that he hold for next day.

       On the third visit it’s clear that Steve has only a few hours left, so his father reports, Alex insisting that “we don’t have to say that,” and turning to Steve, completely comatose, to tell him not to worry that he’ll be fine. The clues we’ve had about Alex seem to be in evidence. He cannot accept the truth about death, which makes him rush always toward a future which he will never reach, missing the present in his rush forward.

       Steve’s father, for the first time, asks Alex how long he’s known his son, Alex responding simply, “not long,” again suggesting the brevity of even those moments we’ve glimpsed, surely the way his life must appear to him. Without living in the present there is never anything but a few remembered moments; life is not fully lived.

      The father describes how very close his son had been to his mother, and the shocking piece of information that his son left home when his mother died, although he was only 16. Now it becomes clear that at least one time in his life Steve himself could not deal with death, could not allow himself to be reminded of the place in which his beloved mother no longer existed.

      The two men take a break in their short deathwatch, standing outside the hospice. Steve looks up to the sky, hearing some birds singing, and comments that he had never much noticed nature, but Steve “painted me this beautiful canvas of the London sky,” which changed him, so he reminisces forever. Perhaps he has now begun to learn how to stay for short periods in once place, to enjoy the reality of life.

       The movie ends there, with that simple statement and its possible revelation. Evidently Kredich, a student at Central Film School at the University of Gloucestershire, based this film on his own life since the film is dedicated to “Steve.” And obviously he has now attended to a past in honor of a present in which he could not.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

William Stead | The Last Summer / 2019

the last moments of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Stead (screenwriter and director) The Last Summer / 2019 [8 minutes]

 

It’s 1936 in Germany and two young boys, a little old to be doing so but nonetheless enjoying the game of it, are using a sling shot to see if they can hit some tin cans they’ve set up. One of them, Felix, wonders if the other’s father might help him get a job the next year and asks if his friend Ben will be soon joining up in the ranks of the army. Ben doesn’t know, but queries if that is what the other might be planning. Felix responds: “If it means I get to be around all those army boys.”

 

     These two kids are clearly in a homosexual relationship in a time when they cannot yet imagine the dangers. But the film demonstrates how quickly they will need to discover what is just ahead.

       The two head back to Ben’s home to “listen to some music,” obviously having other plans in mind. But even as they head home along the path, they are met up with a young Nazi officer, Heinrich, with whom Felix decides to have some fun, his friend trying to dissuade him to stop his antics. Felix hits Heinrich in the head with a small rock.

       The reaction is immediate as Heinrich turns, calls Felix a “fucking faggot” and knocks him down kicking him with his boot several times while Ben looks on in utter dismay. Heinrich then turns on Ben, calling him a faggot as well, and warns him “Wait until your father finds out.”

      His father, it turns out, is the local commandant, seen a bit earlier typing up the categories for undesirable young German men, including the notorious pink triangle.

      The boy helps his friend, the best he can, to return back to his luxurious home; Felix is clearly seriously hurt and is suffering. But finally, they come staggering into the house, Felix sneaking upstairs as Ben is called by his father. The father, sitting at the end of a long table, typewriter in front of him, seems about to say something, but proffers only the word, “Goodnight.” The father looks back at the sheet of paper on which he is typing, featuring the pink triangle, and we are aware, suddenly, in his stare of surety, that this man is willing even to offer up his son to the cause without even a warning.

       The two boys sit on the floor of their room, separated by a space that might be described as the distance of two bodies of land across an ocean. Felix comments: “Henrich is an ass. You have nothing to worry about. Your father is the commandant.” 

        Ben is now in tears, suffering for everything he suddenly realizes, as Felix reaches out to assure him, “It’s okay,” presumably suggesting that he recognizes that their relationship must now come to an end.

        They hug as Felix assures him “Everything will be okay.” But we know and they know, everything is not okay. Their hug is the embrace of death.

        If Stead’s story is somewhat naïve, telling a story that might never truly have happened given the long, long hostility of the authorities and others of even the Weimar Republic against homosexuality given Paragraph 175, it nonetheless brings forward an interesting historical viewpoint, in which apparently Stead is most fascinated in his filmmaking, that reveals that even the children of such hateful beings were never truly safe. British-born Stead’s film is not about a “last summer” but concerns the very last moments of possibility of love for its youthful heroes.

 

Los Angeles, August 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023)

Jackson Lennon | Farfalle / 2024

discovering acceptance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jackson Lennon (screenwriter and director) Farfalle / 2024 [14 minutes]

If Irish director Jackson Lennon’s 2024 short film Farfalle seems to get off to a slow start, it is because we see its central figure simply as a young boy, Jake Ellis (Elliott Douglas) dancing under his headphones, his mother (Linda Ryan) attempting to tell him that he is soon to be visited for only a week by an Italian exchange student, Maria Bacco (Sofi Sabbatini), whom she has invited to stay with them.

    At first, he is reticent to even deal with her, almost disallowing her entry to their home when she suddenly appears, with dyed lilac hair at their door. She, moreover, can hardly speak coherent English.

     But gradually over the few days she is with them, sharing tea together at a regular time, she manages to show him that when she seems him dancing, she thinks he’s “cute,” and finally noting the scars among his tattoos, asks him about them.

      He quickly admits that they are from his operation; that, in fact, he is a trans man, something we previously might not even have imagined, but which suddenly makes sense for his slightly off-center behavior. In fact, he has spent much of his life in England with his father, which, as she notes, makes for a slightly different language pattern that of his mother’s.

     Her response is unusual, not to probe more deeply into his past, but to simply ask if he is “happy.

     In this encounter between the two, they have their first kiss, which presumably leads to their closer relationship.

     And the two soon become deep friends, and even more importantly, possible lovers. As he proclaims, even though she does speak the same language, she is the first person who has truly understood him.

   As all true first love stories often claim of their lovers, however, their love is short-lived, and as Maria prepares to leave, Jake lies in bed pouting, afraid, as he tells his worried mother, that he will never again find someone who so understands him. She assures him he will, but also argues that he will regret forever for not having come down to see Maria off. But imagine how difficult it must be for a trans man to find a woman who will fully accept and love him for he is. If the gay and lesbian pools, particularly in rural areas, are narrow, it is nearly unimaginable for how such young transgender men might find someone to love.

    He finally does so, handing her a short love note, which she carries off with her, later reading it aloud to the film audience, reiterating all I say above.

     Farfalle may not be a profound or even complex short film, but it captures something that I haven’t yet seen in the many troubled transgender films I’ve witnessed, presenting a completely accepted and open trans figure who is totally likeable, basically untroubled by his world, and able to more forward with full love for the gender into which he was previously born.

    I loved this film because of it’s total openness and compassion for its hero without condescension, apology, or resistance to his new identity.

    Why on earth transgender people in the US and elsewhere are tortured and punished for their identities is totally inexplicable. In this lovely Irish film, Jake is as normal as any young man seeking new love, but, obviously, still haunted by a past that is not catalogued by the film itself.

     We don’t know what his true relationship to his English father was, but there couldn’t be a more loving mother that his, who not only accepts him, but encourages him in his attempts to discover what can only be now described as heterosexual love. This film seems almost a kind a break-through from all the painful transitions I had previously encountered in films about transgender individuals.

      So why, one might ask, are transgender figures folded into the gay, lesbian, and bisexual world? Frankly, where else might they find a home but in the LGBTQ community. That is the wonder of the colorful umbrella of its embrace. Not everyone within the folds of its seeming protection might find all the others to be equal sexual brothers and sisters, but they all recognize that in the larger community, they are all outsiders who might, at least, attempt to help one another find their footing.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Lucho Bender | Uno de cada diez hombres es gay (One in Ten Argentine Men Are Gay) / 2004 [commercial advertisement]

a gay ad that doesn’t seem to understand who gay men are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucho Bender (director) Uno de cada diez hombres es gay (One in Ten Argentine Men Are Gay) / 2004 [50 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

This Argentina commercial, directed by Lucho Bender, is actually quite obnoxious to the gay community even if attempts to connects the brand of Fernet Cinzano with the gay community. It plays on the notion of masculinity and gay stereotypes to get there.

     There are ten men socializing at a house party, when one of the, reading evidently a newspaper article, notes that “One in Ten Argentine Men Are Gay,” the usual 10% quoted for representing gay behavior, although even that is today under question.

      Suddenly this group of presumably straight men, counting down the number of men in their group, begin to readjust their behavior, the first man quickly hiding up his pink-striped socks. A second man immediately removes his arm from behind his friend.

      A third man quickly uncrosses his legs, the fourth covers over his golden bracelet. A another covers up the necklace he wears, while a sixth takes the earring from his left ear.

      But finally, one of their friends, an ice cube in the front of his mouth, moves forward without any regret, a Cinzano in hand while the announce shows its product and suggests, “You can call me Fernet.”

      Strangely, it is the last man whom these scared, maybe gay boys, suddenly identify as the gay man in their midst, presuming that the Cinzano itself may be associated with the gay experience.

      Yes, there is indeed a strange irony to this short ad, and a willingness to fully identify with the gay experience, but to have to play it out through fear and all the stereotypical gay tropes is truly mind-boggling. What are they trying to say, that these men might as well just relax and drink their gay Cinzano or that all of them are already gay?

      The ad is so confused, between its bordering homophobia and its readiness to announce itself as something perfectly comfortable with being the one-in-ten, that the power that any ad might have had to embrace the gay community is completely lost.

      Perhaps this work might be described as making fun of heteronormative views of the gay world, but we are totally unsure of its own point-of-view, and the ad stands on very shaky ground.

       But I guess that if Fernet promises to suddenly turn me into a gay person, I will be happy to drink it.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (August 2026).

      

Arthur Cahn | Totems / 2023

that’s what friends are for

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Cahn (screenwriter and director) Totems / 2023 [25 minutes]

 

At an after-mass ceremony, the mother Marianne (Anne Alvaro) has arranged for a small gathering with catered food for family members and some of her recently dead son Bastien’s friends, Paul (Arthur Cahn), Delphine (Victoire Du Bois), Cyril (Solal Forte), and Eve (Lucie Gallo).

     When they ask her if there is someone to help her clean up, she explains that no, she prefers to work alone since it keeps her mind of the sadness of the event, and that she even plans later that afternoon to visit Bastien’s apartment and clean it out of his possessions.

      But that alerts one of his friends of the fact that Bastien had quite an extensive collection of dildos, and as they share the fact with one another, all four determine, with the spare key that Paul has, to visit the apartment and remove the dildo’s before the mother arrives. Although she knows her son was gay, she might indeed still be startled and even shocked to discover his vast dildo collection.

     They too are in mourning, but they realize their duties as friends and leave the gathering somewhat early.

      As they enter the apartment, almost immediately in pictures and memories sadness sets in, as it is revealed that although it was thought that Paul was a sexual partner with Bastien, and certainly he wished for it, but, as Cyril points out, it never occurred. He suspects, however, that they should check out the bedroom first, but they also all wish to snoop around for a bit. Delphine has discovered a beautiful picture of her from the past.

     But Delphine asks a far more important question, as they don rhinestone crowns that their friend obviously kept, “What if we find something that we don’t want to find, that he wanted to keep secret?”

 

      Cyril asks, “Like what?”

      And Delphine reminds them “Aren’t there things you’d prefer not to know?”

     They witness pictures of Bastien with each of them taken in a photo booth, as Paul reaches down under the bed, pulling out the totem box of dildos. They also find a cock ring or two, which the women can’t recognize. But they laugh solemnly as they look over the collection, Delphine suggesting one of the purple dildos is “cute” and even kissing it. “What do we do?” asks Paul, “Toss them? The Salvation Army won’t want them.”

      But Eve still cannot quite comprehend what it should be a secret from the mother? “We’re ashamed of who he was, and what he liked?”

      Delphine first suggests its for his mother, but also for Bastien. “There are things don’t share with their parents. If I were to die I’d hate my mom to find by sexts.”

      “When I die, burn my phone” says Cyril.

      Paul jokes, “You mean that you screw conservatives?”

      In short, in the midst of their sincere best intentions there are put-downs of each other, some comic mockery, etc, since they know one another so very well.

      They obviously have been a tight group wound around Bastien.

      Eve chastises him for evidently having seen “Pierre” again!

      Cyril explains that he just needed some bodily warmth, it being the day after the accident, obviously now explaining to the film audience how Bastien died. “I didn’t want to sleep alone.”

      Paul takes off his crown, obviously realizing that perceiving that Cyril did have a sexual relationship with Bastien that he did not.

      This is a subtle and complex film as secrets are revealed, loves, lies, and realities are rawly put on display.

      Eve suggests that perhaps they should each take a dildo in memory of him, but Delphine mocks the idea as creating a kind mausoleum, the idea of which she hates, particularly the idea of fetishizing him.

      But Eve argues that Delphine is simply whining. That she herself might put one on one of her necklaces and accuses her of being heartless.

      “I do have a heart, that’s why I don’t need all of this,” she retorts.

       But realizing this is no time to fight, she soon after apologizes.

     Paul gets a paper bag, Eve and Cyril both claiming their own favorite, while the others just get tossed into the bag to be chucked away, Paul refusing to select one.

    They walk away, tossing the many remaining dildos in the trash. Then, hug one another, and basically separate, each on their way to other business.

      A few minutes later, however, Paul returns to the trash bin to pull out his own selection. He returns to his own apartment and sits in out on display on his coffee table. He goes back into his bedroom and uses it, perhaps imagining the sexual relationship he might have had with Bastien. But he quickly breaks down in tears.

      He calls Eve, suggesting that perhaps Delphine was right, that we should have each left it all. “After all, Bastien liked controversy.”

      Maybe we should have left one dildo. One isn’t fifteen.

      “But I was happy to do that with all of you,” admits Eve.

      Eve invites him over, but he claims that he has to learn to do it on his own, to survive after the man he clearly loved as disappeared from his life.

      Paul sneaks back into Bastien’s apartment to return his dildo to its proper place, but finds the mother asleep in her own son’s bed. He quietly creeps in and puts the one remaining dildo under the bed.

      She awakens to ask Paul if Bastien was his boyfriend, and he answers, no, he as just a friend. She is curious, having met just one boyfriend Jérémie, and that was ages ago. She wonders if maybe he was too selfish to be with someone—or too busy.

      He suggests that he is on his way, but she begs to stay and talk, asking if he has a boyfriend.

      “No, I don’t,” he admits as he sits down on nearby chair.

      She continues, noting that they were such good friends, close, and asks him what he is hiding from her.

      He assures her, “Nothing.” She begs him to take whatever he wants. It’s absurd, she admits, sleeping in his bed. The loss for both of them without a full possibility of communicating their full sorrow across generations is palpable.

      Now she suddenly admits that she knows what he was replacing under the bed, since she noticed they were missing. “I’d already stopped by, you know? I saw the trunk had been moved, was that you guys?” She admits even as a child she noticed wads of tissues under his bed, a “pretty racy” page on his computer. “Bastien knew how to enjoy life. I always admired him about that.”

      “I just hope he made love—with men in the flesh,” she finally explains.

      “It was beautiful what you said at the ceremony. ….He loved you a lot you know?” Paul, almost now in tears, turns and leaves, while Marianne falls back into her beloved son’s bed.

       We might only wish that Paul could have assured her of something, that he had loved other men, that he more in his life than the dildos. But even we don’t know that. He certainly had dear friends who needn’t have worried about his mother’s response to what she found, but perhaps might have paid more attention her heart, her fears, and desires for her own son. But that is always the generational problem: parents will never learn everything.

       This is a truly profound drama by French director Arthur Cahn, that begins as a kind of comedy, but soon after makes tears well up in one’s eyes. Cahn, who has now released nine videos is certainly a filmmaker to hold one’s attention.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).