Jan. 16th, 2015 09:29 pm
Tivoliating
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muckefuckThe city I grew up in had but one art cinema. Happily, it happened to be located close to where I lived. I have vivid memories of inviting several friends to see a Mike Leigh film there for my 18th birthday and having to "translate" much of the Cockney dialogue for one of them. But I remember the movies I didn't almost as well as the ones I did. When I got a circular, I would read through the synopsis of every single film even though, at best, I saw maybe one in twenty.
One which particularly lodged in my brain was Tenue de soirée ("Evening dress"; shown here under the title "Menage"), a little French film starring the then-unknown-to-me actor Gérard Depardieu. I wasn't out to myself yet, but I was moving in that direction, and the homo romance at the centre of it intrigued me. The description I remember is too detailed to have come from a single-paragraph blurb, so I must've read a review of it in the local paper as well.
It's hard to imagine what kind of effect the movie would've had on me had I actually seen it. It would've been my first full frontal nudity, my first simulated gay sex. Depardieu's Bob might've become fantasy fuel in the same way as Rod Steiger's Komarovsky. (I saw Doctor Zhivago for the first time the year after.) I certainly would've imbibed some bizarre ideas about gay relationships while having almost every stereotype of French artsiness and lubricity completely confirmed.
Seeing it nearly thirty years later is a markedly different experience. Titillating, not groundbreaking. I'm jaded enough to note how little the sex scenes show rather than how much. The rampant misogyny and rapey notions of what constitutes romance and seduction simply make me shake my head. Et je comprends en fait un peu du français. Modest though its charms, I have to admit that I had no idea where it was going and my interest in finding out never wavered.
One which particularly lodged in my brain was Tenue de soirée ("Evening dress"; shown here under the title "Menage"), a little French film starring the then-unknown-to-me actor Gérard Depardieu. I wasn't out to myself yet, but I was moving in that direction, and the homo romance at the centre of it intrigued me. The description I remember is too detailed to have come from a single-paragraph blurb, so I must've read a review of it in the local paper as well.
It's hard to imagine what kind of effect the movie would've had on me had I actually seen it. It would've been my first full frontal nudity, my first simulated gay sex. Depardieu's Bob might've become fantasy fuel in the same way as Rod Steiger's Komarovsky. (I saw Doctor Zhivago for the first time the year after.) I certainly would've imbibed some bizarre ideas about gay relationships while having almost every stereotype of French artsiness and lubricity completely confirmed.
Seeing it nearly thirty years later is a markedly different experience. Titillating, not groundbreaking. I'm jaded enough to note how little the sex scenes show rather than how much. The rampant misogyny and rapey notions of what constitutes romance and seduction simply make me shake my head. Et je comprends en fait un peu du français. Modest though its charms, I have to admit that I had no idea where it was going and my interest in finding out never wavered.