Posted: 07/24/2001

Come Undone [Presque Rien]

(2000)

by Parama Chaudhury

I saw this movie in a tiny theater, the sole (heterosexual) woman in a crowd of about twenty middle-aged gay men. If I had been a hetero guy and they had been lesbians, I’m sure I would have been delirious with joy. But I’m not, they weren’t and I wasn’t. If the central couple in the movie had been a boy and a girl, this would have been called a chick flick. There is the requisite shot of the gentle, more withdrawn partner, Mathieu, cradling a dead bird (he also stubs out his cigarette butt on its squished body, but, hey, I only said it might have been a chick flick!). After Mathieu finds a stray kitten in the garden, and we are treated to a prolonged sequence of him bathing it, the guys around me let out a collective, “Ohhhh!.” But, no, it’s a gay coming-of-age-during-the-summer story, and so it deserves to be shown at Cinema Village, an artsy theater in Greenwich Village, rather than at your local Loews Cineplex.

The story revolves around Mathieu, a handsome young man, who realizes his homosexuality one summer at the beach. His lover is the volatile high school dropout and sometime hustler, Cedric. The movie jumps back and forth between three periods: the summer of discovery, Mathieu’s hospital sojourn apparently following a botched suicide attempt, and his return to the place where he had found love. The first summer is shot through a nostalgic lens, and feels more like a bunch of snapshots from a favorite holiday stuck together in a long-forgotten album, than the telling of a story. Adolescent summers always make for great memories: you can remember the oppressiveness of the steamy weather, the coolness of the sea, the laziness overwhelming you, the pounding of your heart when the attractive guy comes over to talk to you. But this movie can’t seem to get beyond that wistful atmosphere and introduce us to the boys. Somewhere within, there is a touching and insightful story of a young beleaguered gay relationship, but the movie is little more than an exhibition of beautiful pictures from everyone’s image of a sixteen-year-old’s summer. The other two periods are treated with a bewildering numbness, which is evocative and promising, but seems out of sync with the tone of the rest of the movie.

To be fair, the cinematography is absolutely stunning. The director and cameraman take full advantage of Mathieu’s (Jérémie Elkaïm) aquiline features. The early shots of Mathieu framed against the train window, as he heads back to his family’s summer home near Nantes, are classics, as is the shot of Mathieu calling home from the street, the headlights of the passing cars and the neon lights of the nearby shops reflected on the glass phone booth. Mathieu and Cedric’s visit to a carnival is an excuse for a marvelous shot of them laughing wildly on a giant Ferris wheel. The loving way in which the camera treats Mathieu’s body prompts the question as to whether the director is reminiscing about his own teenage desire, rather than analyzing it. And Sébastien Lifshitz is just not good enough to pull that off.

If you’re in a generous mood, you can say that Lifshitz was trying to reflect the confusion of a teenager discovering his sexuality, by leaving a lot unsaid. Unfortunately it hints of an eidetic memory: the pictures are remembered in great detail, but the feelings are fudged. It seems like the unarticulated is what has been forgotten or has not been given much thought. But Lifshitz is young, his eye for the beautiful is impeccable, and his frequent homage to that mother of all boy-meets-world movies, 400 Blows, reminds us that he hails from a great filmmaking tradition. We cross our fingers and hope he can make it all come together in his next film.

Parama Chaudhury is a graduate student, an ex-writing instructor and a budding freelance writer, based in New York City.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com