Representing Gay Male Domesticity in French Film of the Late 1990s

REESER, Todd W. Representing Gay Male Domesticity in French Film of the Late 1990s______In: GRIFFITHS, Robin (Org.) Queer Cinema in Europe. United Kingdom: Intellect Boooks, 2008. p. 35-48.

• The gay individual was no longer the political dialogue, but the “the shift was from individuals to couples”, the issue was not only toleration any longer, but ‘recognition’, in the context of the AIDS epidemic crisis;
• Recognition as one of the AIDS lessons made same-sex couples dealing with the disease more difficult than already was;
• the European Parliament issued the Roth Report in 1994, which recommended that equality between homo- and heterosexual couples be considered by members of the EU;
• The PACS (Pacte civil de solidarité), in France, was not adopted until 1999, concerning to the legalization of same-sex partnerships; the text of the PACS itself is addressed in the second-person plural to couples defined largely by a vague notion of domestic stability;
• With the word “stable” at the centre of the definition of the PACS, then, French lawlegalized literal and symbolic stability for gay couples as well as for heterossexual couples not wanting to marry;
• Then, certain directors of the “New New Wave” in the 90s “capture the evolution of mentalities in France, where sociologists have registered an increased visibility and normalization of homosexuality and a concomitant tolerance of it > most of the them were about “coming out”;
• Les Nuits Fauves (Cyrill Collard, 1992), Les Roseaux Sauvages (André Techiné, 1994);
• In the late 1990s happened a shift from the individual to the couple > L’Homme est une femme comme les autres (Jean-Jacques Zilbermann, 1998), La confusion des genres (Ilan Cohen, 2000) > In their cultural context, films such as these implicitly allude to the possibility of legal and stable unions even as (or because) they depict their absence or impossibility;
• Interrogating why male couples cannot marry also takes place in through child, adolescent or young adult male > Ma vie en rose (Alain Berliner, 1997) > Ludovic who wants to be a girl and marries the boy next door Jêrome. The mother’s negative reaction to her son’s marriage punishes him for breaking gender norms and for appearing as a gay child in the neighbourhood, but with her “enfin, parfois,” she deconstructs the heteronormativity she embodies when she evokes a cultural context in which legal gay union is in the process of becoming possible; Ludovic is a representational tool, a technique to revision adult gay unions, even as he also symbolizes children that do not correspond to gender and/or sexual norms;
• As Ludovic, a number of gay adolescentes in French film of the late 90s begin to both question and naturalize configurations of stability for adult homosexual masculinity > they took some time of domesticity related to the coming-out process > projection of gay adulthood back onto a younger generation;
• As much representations of adolescence as of adults, these cinematic adolescents also suggest the potential for adult domesticity in the minds of gay young people > Because some strains of gay male culture are represented as (or represent themselves as) adolescent (non-committal, sexualized, sexually desiring adolescents), the adolescent easily comes to symbolize male homosexuality as a whole;
• A Toute Vitesse (Gaël Morel, 1996), Ceux qui m’aiment prendont le train (Patrice Chéreau, 1998), Drôle de Félix (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, 2000), Les Corps ouverts (Sébastien Lifshitzs, 1998), Presque Rien (Sébastien Lifshitzs, 2000);
• Une Robe d’été (François Ozon, 1996), Les Amants criminels (François Ozon, 1999), Gouttes d’eau sur pierre brülantes (François Ozon, 2000);
• We could examine all these films, but we’ll focus on two very different films in which a domestic element is central to the representation of homosexuality: Les Amants criminels (1999) and Presque Rien (2000) > the first represents the cinematic representation of domesticity and the second the absence of it;
• About Les amants criminels, Luc has a girlfriend Alice, who blindfolds him in the woods, which means as a metaphor that he is blindfolded to see his gay desire or male sexual object of desire, then the girl is dominant in the relationship in the cottage ambiente;
• In an atmosphere of Bonnie and Clyde, the film traces the results of a criminal act orchestrated largely by Alice as the two adolescents kill Saïd, a fellow student and handsome object of erotic attraction for both members of the couple; Alice wanted to remove the homoerotic part of their relation as she can see his boyfriend’s heterosexuality and masculinity was in instability;

• They are captured by an unnamed man who takes them back to his isolated cottage > that’s when Luc discovers finally his homosexuality and have sex with the man;
• Alice is shot by the police while Luc is caught by a rabbit trap (rabbits are recurring symbols of sexuality);
• When Luc and the man are arrested, Luc defends the man saying he has done nothing, that all was Alice and Luc = the criminal lovers; in so doing, Luc affirms the “criminality” of his relationship with Alice and, thus, of faked heterosexuality and of unexpressed homosexuality;
• The constraints of a direct and non-ironic representation of gay sentiment on film have also been temporarily lifted: as Luc’s gaze meets the camera’s and the film displays its status as a created work, it is the filmmaker’s adult gaze that also concludes the film;
• The feelings Luc has developed for the man in the domestic context become especially clear right after the sexual act as Luc manages to break free from his rope and release Alice; when she attempts to kill the sleeping man with a knife, again desiring to destroy her boyfriend’s object of eroticism, Luc stops her from doing so > “You will learn to like it”, was what the man said to Luc before the sexual act when he asked if Luc likes rabbits;
• While Alice and Luc are captive in the cottage, the man dug up Saïd’s body that was alreday buried and put it in the basement with Alice; when he feeds Luc saying is rabbit actually was a part of Saïd’s leg, that is, his sexual object of desire which later Luc figures and throws up > the man demonstrates contentment because was necessarry for Luc’s sexual progress;
• Luc’s angry gaze in the final scene also suggests that because the impossibility of domesticity is realized by the film, understanding its absence is a significant and necessary element in the personal and cultural move toward its possibility;
• In Presque rien, Lifshitz focuses on how with the absence of stable domesticity the gay maturation process cannot be complete > Mathieu is involved in summer beach house with Cédric in a relationship based largely on sexuality > notable absence of domesticity;
• A home/beach distinction functions as an exclusive binary opposition, as a number of scenes in the film alternate between the beach as the locus of (homo)sexuality and the vacation home of Mathieu’s family as the space of domestic problems;
• The film focuses on the boy’s separation of familial domesticity and their developing relationship, it makes being seen as a couple a central issue in the first part of what could be considered Mathieu’s coming-out process > Cédric watches and seduces Mathieu who fears to be seen with Cédric in public or near his family;
• Mathieu later apologizes for his homophobic behaviour, and the two again have sex on the beach, after which they spend much time in public as a couple > he tells his mother he loves Cédric and that he plans to move with him to Nantes to begin university;

• This conversation is indicative of the fact that the process he is going through is not so much about definition or essence (with visibility as one of its defining aspects), but is transforming into the issue of his relationship to relationships;
• Cédric had an accident and went to the hospital, when Mathieu meets his father who is curious to get to know his son’s boyfriend > after recovering there’s a dinner when Cédric raises his glass in jest and toasts “A notre mariage alors” [“Well, then, to our marriage”] > like in Ma vie en rose, the impossibility of a stable partnership in a general context when is not legalized yet;
• Mathieu falls into depression > His suicide attempt, which is never shown, provokes an intense depression, but it also effects a rupture with his boyhood. Various parallels are thus established between his mother who is depressed because she lost a child to cancer and Mathieu who has given birth to a metaphorical sick child, his relationship with Cédric > a mourning process that indicates the impossibility of being with the kind of insufficiently stable lifestyle that Cédric represents;
• Then enters in the story Pierre, Cédric’s ex-boyfriend, who studies architecture (“Pierre” means “rock” in French) > Mathieu decided to visit Pierre’s house, but he was nota t home and his mother receives him very well, offering coffee while he waits; when Pierre is back he invites him to walk on the beach > Mathieu was in the beach house in the winter;
• This preliminary integration of homosexuality and familial life transitions into the boys’ walk on the beach, the final scene of the film, which encapsulates the possibility of a gay male identity based on solidity;
• Cédric shows no interest in the architecture, preferring to have sex in the isolated locale, but when Mathieu refuses and tells him to take an interest in the architecture, he responds that they are nothing but “a bunch of rocks,” setting up a marked contrast between his ex-boyfriend, Pierre, and himself as symbol of a relationship based on affection and eroticism;
• Mathieu’s transition in the film from gay individual to a possible member of a certain kind of couple is a projection of the adult film-maker and of adult gay culture onto the idealized adolescent, a transfer that is itself represented in the film;
• The ensuing scenes reveal that this physical “coming of age” turns out to be in conjunction with his sexual “coming out.” But during the final scene of the film, Pierre also remarks that Mathieu has changed since he last saw him > he is less boyish [“moins gamin”] than before;
• In the final scenes, therefore, we can see a new French cultural context, sexuality has no longer to be the central element of the coming out process > rather, the domesticity can be its culminating point.

Queering The Family In François Ozon’s Sitcom

CHILCOAT, Michelle. Queering The Family In François Ozon’s Sitcom______In: GRIFFITHS, Robin (Org.) Queer Cinema in Europe. United Kingdom: Intellect Boooks, 2008. p. 23-33.

• Part of an international “fin-de-millénaire” wave of arty family shocker films (others: Festen (Thomas Vinterberg, 1999), Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998), The War Zone (Tim Roth, 1999) > end of the patriarch;
• Women are not represented as victims, but they take active role in the film’s happy, healthy resolution of conflict;
• A new family order is represented, organised around queer relationships realised upon the elimination of the father > queering of Freud’s Oedipal drama
• The rat signifies or substitutes for the penis, which is itself, according to Freud, the “prototype of fetishes”;
• For Freud, women’s “upbringing forbids their concerning themselves intellectually with sexual problems though they nevertheless feel extremely curious about them and frightens them by condemning such curiousity as unwomanly”. > “They are scared away from any form of thinking, and knowledge loses its values for them”, but in Sitcom when women do get curious, when they touch the rat, fetishize, fantasize, think > the whole Oedipus complex takes a queer turn;
• As the rat signifies the penis, Nicola’s homosexuality is perfectly understood, because Freud, in his work “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality” argues that the aversion of women is derived from the fact they are castrated; in Sophie’s case is demonstrated when she awakens clutching her crotch and figured she is castrated and in Freudian terms jumping out the windows means she wanted to have a baby, but she’s paralised after the occurence; this is described in Freud’s work “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”;
• However, Sitcom imagines another scenario: the woman as a fetishist, who desires sexually and intellectually, through sadomasochism and dominatrix, involving the rat;
• The mother, Hélène, turns to her son, considering he is ill > then, the incest, and ignores the current Sophie’s suicide attempts and self-mutilation;
• It surrounds the movie a doubt pointed out by Sophie that her father is homosexual and the two children he had is nothing more then na alibi to heterosexuality;
• Hélène decides to cure Nicola’s homosexuality in a transgression through seducing him in his bedroom and then went to her psychotherapists, who said that is just a dream;
• In Sitcom, then, the mother’s transgression is pivotal, because Freud did not believe women could be fetishist (as we can see in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”) > queering the Oedipal complex;
• Ozon points out that the incest taboo is de-dramatizated in the movie to regulate the family order; it rests in the non-recognition of woman’s desire;
• Freud’s supposed “decoding” of
• the Oedipal drama is really about what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called “overcoding”, or controling sexuality: subjecting sexuality to law, the law of male desire;
• The family then enter in a group psychotherapy, taking place in a tranquil swimming pool: the watery union of mother, daughter and son signifies a rebirth that this time happens without the participation of the father, who continues pedant, only talking in proverbs > his presence is not necessary in the healing process;
• Through group therapy mother, daughter and son realises the rat is the root of their dystopia > then they arrange to get rid of the offensive creature;
• Jean’s idea of dealing with the rat is to consume it rather than eliminate it, and cannabilizes the animal to keep all the force of the penis (Freudian overcoding);
• The final step to undoing the Oedipal drama is the daughter killing the rat/father, but actually it was a group effort: “We did it. We’ve managed to kill him.” > the attraction Hélène and Maria had could be expressed outright, Nicolas and Abdul in their interracial/homosexual relationship and Sophie returns her movements and choice of a partner;
• As Ozon has summed it up, Sitcom is a “utopic film that reconstructs a new social order” in which “the bourgeois family is replaced by homosexual, lesbian and S&M couples;
• In contrast to a reactionary film,” what must be eliminated is not the foreigner, but the “character who incarnates the ‘law,’ familial morality, that is, the father.”;
• In Sitcom, it is the reckoning of female desire that ultimately undermines this law, opening the way for recognizing many differences (i.e., not just sexual, but also racial).
• There is the ambiguity of the last image of the film, as a white rat scurries over the father’s tomb, a potentially ominous reminder that it may be hard to keep the penis/killer down; or perhaps this image returns us to the fetish, which Freud did, after all, associate with “artfulness.”