Grande Ecole is an ordinary French film with a message that people don't ordinarily care about. The potential for love is explored so interestingly in this film that I wondered if it was just because it's a French film, or if this was a particular philosophy of relationships being explored by Salis, the director. It appears to be a bit of both.
The story begins with Paul, who is a student who has just joined a private school and moves in with two of his classmates, rather than with Agnes, his long-term girlfriend. He finds himself increasingly attracted to and obsessed with his housemate Louis, an upper-class cocky athlete, sure of himself and conscious of the effect he has on Paul. But Louis is not interested, he isn't gay or even interested in experimenting. Agnes however, does notice and proposes competing for Louis's affection. If Paul gets Louis, Agnes promises to leave him, but if Agnes gets Louis, she suggesets that Paul should stop exploring his sexuality.
While this experimenting occurs, Paul meets Mecir (played by the beautiful Salim Kechiouche), a young Arab man who is hired to do odd painting jobs at the school. Mecir is touched by Paul's defense of him against a racist supervisor and soon begins a friendship that consumes them both almost completely. Mecir introduces Paul into the world of male affection that draws them into such intimacy that Agnes and Louis fades into the background. Issues of class, inter-ethnic relationships, emerging sexuality, confusion about identities are all neatly presented and opined through the characters' experiences. Can Paul break himself from the binds of a traditional upbringing and accept his desires? Does he return to Agnes? These are the questions that the plot attempts to close with.
A couple of the lines in the movie are worth remembering. Sentences that have given me interesting pointers to understanding sexuality and dealing with relationships. They help break free from the meaninglessness of conformity.
------------Paul: How long have you been….?
Mecir: Been what…? A Fag….? That’s not it. Hetero, Homo, all that’s out. It’s meaningless. It’s because it’s you. That’s all.-----------Mecir: You know, there’s so much I’d like to say. With parents, it’s always too late. You realize you haven’t loved them enough. Or said enough.-----------
Paul: I want to be able to choose so as not to have to choose.
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It was a pleasure to see then, in the special features, Alice Taglioni (who played Agnes in the film) reading a brief essay from the press notes for the film. The notes were written by Robert Salis the director, who spoke of his interactions as a young student with the film critic Serge Daney. Daney's thoughts about homosexual desire and Salis's experiments with cinema provide the glue that holds Grand Ecole together. How do you explore your identity? How can a society that is so geared towards expressing only masculine values perceive male homosexual desire as a threat? How does adopting an identity that should actually liberate you, end up becoming the very stifling conformism that you struggle against to begin with?
I read this text as often as I can, attempting to understand it so thoroughly that the only way forward from here is to break from identities and categories permanently. Or is it?
Robert Salis:
"When I was a film student, I loved taking classes given by the brilliant Serge Daney. We were a small group who often found ourselves with him around a coffee table prolonging the pleasure of his classes. One day he brought up this subject in such a way that it still resonates in all its logic. I can’t convey the finesse and judicial development of his analysis, but he estimated, in fact, that if the majority of societies had rejected and condemned homosexuality, it is because they themselves were in fact, homosexual.
"In the sense that all the social structures were conceived, established, legitimized by men, in favour of men to preserve the privileges that they had granted themselves. In order to give themselves supremacy through which women were just trophies in their service and relegated to the background. It has only been a few decades since women started fighting to reclaim, express, and obtain their equality with men. And it still revolts me to see how women are treated in many countries and put under the male yoke. Socially men have stolen women’s voices and have spoken for them by imposing social structure based on assumed misogyny.
"And if homosexuals have in fact been so forcefully rejected it is because they dared to behave like women by loving and sleeping with other men, thus transgressing the ancient taboo of a homosexual society who dares not speak its name, in order to perpetuate itself and deceive. It is not because PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité / Civil Pact of Solidarity) exists or that there are homosexual characters in TV movies that homosexuality is now included. It is tolerated, or admitted in most cases, but included, I doubt it.
"Just saying – this person is a homosexual, is not only announcing information but it is also, and mostly, a way to pronounce an insidious judgment on him. You only have to look at homophobic arguments or visions which exist in the collective unconscious – those inept questions which still carry all that mockery. Who creates man? Who creates woman? Which one is active or passive?
"You will notice that when a man wants to insult another in a strong way, he feminizes his insults: fairy, fag, sissy. As if for him, calling a man a woman is the best way to put him down. I find the moral regression that is gaining territory very dangerous here and elsewhere. How desire can travel from one being to another, one body to another, while ignoring the sexual boundaries of youth who tries to live with this romantic crisscrosses. Desire has no gender. At least sexual, erotic and romantic preferences change when the pressure of frustrations and inhibitions is lifted.
"This puts into question the power of an upbringing which, from childhood, regiments, directs and controls desire and dictates laws on how to use it. What men fear is not so much the act with another man – to one day have this experience – but rather the fear of being called and labeled a homosexual. Of being treated like a fag or to think of yourself like that. The proof is the number of married men, with wives, homes, children, who have a double life or regular affairs or flings with other men or transsexuals as long as it stays a secret.
"There is a constant dominance of the verb that propels the law in question. A law in the biblical sense of the term that forces them to deny, suppress or feel guilt about their desires if they’re outside of the norm What is actually perverse is the power of the desire to fit the mold, that insidious desire for conformity that destroys and deforms the personality. The need to be completely normal at any cost is the greatest perversion. To paraphrase George Bataille: Perversion is the norm.
"Clearly it’s not about proselytizing or confusing desires and urges by allowing them to overtake you. Let’s just say that in all mutually consensual experiences whether the aim is to reach self-fulfillment and sexual gratification or to simply satisfy curiosity, other erotic territories deserve to be explored without shame or guilt. This hardly ever happens. A man who only goes for men, depriving himself of women would be missing out as much as a man who only goes for women and ignores the lure of masculine pleasure on the pretext that society would disapprove. But this is equally valid for women and their relationships with men."
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