Tag: Christophe Honoré

Winter Boy (Le Lycéen)

Posted on by victorfraga

Seventeen-year-old Lucas (Paul Kircher) lives with his family in a small town somewhere in rural France. The high school boy (incidentally, that’s the literal translation of the French film title Le Lycéen) has a very close relationship to his father (Christophe Honoré). His elderly provides him with useful life advice during a car journey that nearly ends in an accident. It comes as a shock to Lucas, his brother Quentin (Vincent Lacoste) and his mother Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) that the man would be fatally injured in yet another car crash shortly after the first one. The tragedy leaves the three people in emotional ruin, with each one of them resorting to very different coping mechanisms. While the mother suffers mostly in silence and alone on her bed (she later confesses that she blames her late husband for “leaving” her), Quentin resumes his life as normal in Paris, and Lucas moves to the French capital in order to to live with his brother and his friend flatmate Lilio for a while. But the City of Lights has a few surprises in store for him.

The Paris trip turns into a purgative experience. The beautiful and vaguely androgynous young man (Kircker looks like a slightly younger Timothée Chalamet, as in Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 Call Me By Your Name) engages in anonymous sex with another male of around his age. He tries to kiss Lilio: he is older, far more experienced and also happens to be a rent boy. Lucas even attempts to give prostitution a go, actively approaching one of Lilio’s clients. Quention eventually finds out about his younger brother’s misadventures and sends his back to live with their mother in the relative safety of their native small town. But is Lucas ready to return to his previous existence without exorcising all of his demons one by one, and in the most absurd and unorthodox ways? Lucas’s following action will bring yet more suffering to the small family, still recovering from the father’s very recent passing.

Sex and death become dangerously intertwined more times than one in Winter Boy. Our young protagonist experiments with his sexuality while also juggling with his own mortality.He suspects that the old man may have taken his own life. At times, it seems like he wishes to follow his father. Despite being set in present-day France (people wear masks, discuss Éric Zemmour, fascism and xenophobia), Winter Boy has been consistently described as Christophe Honoré’s most autobiographical film to date. I presume that the director lost his father at the same tender age as Lucas, and that he too discovered his sexuality in a turbulent fashion (I just imagine being openly gay wasn’t as widely accepted 35 years ago as it is now). The fact that the director plays the father himself and dedicates the film to him adds an extra layer of authenticity to the story. Plus the movie is interspersed with a confessional Lucas talking directly to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, in talking heads style. A tasteful blend of fiction and autobiographic documentary. Indeed Winter Boy often feels like a biopic.

Despite the gloomy topics, Winter Boy isn’t all doom and gloom. It is Infused with diegetic music, including various characters playing the guitar, singing in italian and in a karaoke. This mostly upbeat soundtrack includes blends indie with French chanson. A eclectic soundtrack is a trademark of Honoré, with music often becoming a character per se in his films. All in all, an enjoyable little movie.

Winter Boy showed in the Official Competition of the 70th San Sebastian International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On Mubi and also on Amazon Prime in May 2023.

On a Magical Night (Chambre 212)

Posted on by victorfraga

Unlike Scrooge (the protagonist in Dickens’s novel), the greed of university professor Maria (Mastroianni) is not financial, but sentimental: over the years of her marriage to Richard (Benjamin Biolay), she became closed and reserved, having numerous extramarital affairs with younger men.

After one of these escapades, Richard finds compromising messages on her cell phone and confronts her, which makes her leave the house and spend the night in a hotel across the street. There, she is visited by a twenty-something version of her husband (Vincent Lacoste), as well as all of her former flames – and is forced to face her past head-on.

One visitor in particular arrives with an indecent proposal: Irène (Camille Cottin), the lover Richard left previously to marry Maria, asks for permission to rekindle the relationship with him. Being delighted to magically find the version of Richard she fell in love with decades ago, she allows Irène to try her luck with the older version of her husband.

The script – penned by Honoré himself – makes the plot unfold as a great marital discussion filled with fantastical elements. Richard is the man who, in the face of marital disappointment and the return of his former love, wonders whether he has made the right decision. Maria is a multifaceted creature.

She believes in love, but lies to herself about its nature. She does not show an ounce of remorse for her infidelity and always finds a justification for her behaviour. During the fight with Richard, she goes so far as to say that affairs are the way long-term marriages survive.

By romanticising the past, she holds onto the version of Richard who was left behind and, because of that, she always looks for new men to experience again that passion of yore, refusing to build something out of the present. Her husband gets to the heart of this very issue by concluding, around 50 minutes into the film: “Love is always a shared place, a past”.

Ultimately, On a Magical Night is a fable about reconciling with your emotional baggage. It raises pertinent questions about love. With an impeccable production design (courtesy of Stéphane Taillasson) and charms galore, the film is the perfect pick for a romantic night in. Just be prepared for a difficult conversation with your partner afterwards.

On a Magical Night is out on VoD on Friday, June 19th.

Sorry Angel (Plaire, Aimer et Courir Vite)

Posted on by victorfraga

This a gay film in every conceivable way: the director, the story, the soundtrack, the sensuality and the sensibility. Christophe Honoré has a crafted what’s perhaps his most personal movie to date, and the action takes place in 1993. While realistic and convincing enough, the story also gets too idiosyncratic. Honoré was 23 years of age at the time that the film takes place. So I would hazard a guess that the film contains a lot of biographical elements. The reviewer writing this piece also happens to be a gay man who began experimenting with his sexuality in the 1990s, and this is a movie that didn’t move too much.

Sorry, Angel (a very free translation of a film title that actually means roughly “pleasing, loving and running fast”) Jacques (Pierre de Deladonchamps, which was catapulted to fame with Alain Guiraudie’s LGBT sexual thriller Stranger by the Lake, 2013) is a famous gay writer in his mid 30s. He has so many lovers that at first I thought that the actor was playing multiple characters. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that. As a 39-year-old gay man, I’ve also been around the block. The problem is that the stories don’t really fit together, and the film at times feels a little disjointed. Jacques also has a child, a boy called Loulou. Loulou’s mother, who is also a close friend, explains why Jacques has so many narrative strands in his life: “he keeps it all compartmentalised”.

His lovers are all young and good-looking, and the film has plenty of eye-candy and sensual moments. These sequences feel neither vulgar nor exploitative. HIV is also a central topic. Jacques carries the virus, and we witness the tragic death of one of his lovers to then almost invariably deadly bug. Activist group ACT UP is mentioned a couple of times, which may ring bells with those who recently watched 120 BPM (Robin Campillo, 2017). Some of scenes are awkwardly touching, as the director successfully blends sex and convalescence. In two central sequences, a healthy lover seeks to give pleasure to his dying partner.

Another problem is that the film gets a little diluted in the intertext. There are way too many references to other films and French literature. Jacques allocates his various lovers to categories named after French writers, but I doubt that anyone will be able to follow this bizarre taxonomy. You might feel a little lost in translation.

The soundtrack is perhaps the most upbeat and effective element. Most of the diegetic and the non-diegetic tracks were taken from the 1990s. Lovely songs punctuate the narrative and provide a very nice perfect touch to some of the most important moments. Characters connect with their inner selves and others around them with music: in bed, dancing in the neighbour’s lounge or inside the car. Highlights include Massive Attack, the Cocteau Twins, Astrud Gilberto singing The Shadow of Your Smile, and a couple of chanson songs I couldn’t recognise.

Sorry Angel was in the Official Competition of the 71st Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 22nd. Out on VoD on Sunday, March 31st.