One to Another
Directed by Pascal Arnold & Jean-Marc Barr
Youth exploitation is the rule in Hollywood, but for art filmmakers Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr, it’s a convenient rationale for porn. One to Another (Chacun sa nuit) follows a group of five French youths—four guys in a rock band and one’s sister—as they explore sex with each other. The lead singer, Pierre (Arthur Dupont) also hustles at sex parties with middle-aged men and, when his dead body is found in a woods, sister Lucie (Lizzie Brochere) reacts by conducting her own frantic investigation. She sexes up the other band members, a local cop and any potential suspect.
Using sex as interrogation sounds like a perfect porn premise—the kind Terry Southern satirized in the 1960s book and movie, Candy. But Arnold and Barr pretend to have serious purpose. Lucie and Pierre, being French movie protagonists, are also radical sexual philosophs. “You like sex,” Lucie says, lying naked next to her also-nude brother (who appears mostly in flagrante delicto flashbacks). Pierre responds, “It gives me the certainty of life. Like a kamikaze with a cause.” This hell-bent, quasi-incestuous duo babble about sex as incessantly as they perform it. They make high-flown, lunatic pronouncements: “Only a body can know another body,” Lucie eulogizes Pierre. “Only he knew mine.”
That’s porn talk. Arnold and Barr use Lucie’s naiveté (and her promiscuity) to show young people’s moral blankness regarding sexual extremes, but the film’s emphasis on raunchy couplings, threesomes and orgies smacks of dirty-old-men gloating over a new generation’s licentiousness. Big-eyed blond Lucie’s trampy behavior among the rock band suggests Fergie with the Black Eyed Peas while the boys suggest a Michael Lucas casting-call. Dupont’s Pierre, a tease every one wants to bed, bears an uncanny resemblance to Euro porn-pup Lukas Ridgeston. Yet Barr’s videography makes them all look grimy—as if bathed in dirty thoughts.
Purportedly tracking an actual crime that occurred in France, the film’s details—such as Lucie’s scarred-up legs and the boys’ casual hygiene—imply that we’re seeing crude realism. (Pierre gives a drunken bandmate a strawberry-flavored condom to chew, to remove the taste of vomit.) This dour look at the phenomenon of disaffected bisexual teens resists the ripe idealization of the young French actors in Gaël Morel’s Three Dancing Slaves and Full Speed. That’s because One to Another’s raison d’etre is to meditate on hot-to-trot adolescent lowlife. Arnold and Barr blandly accept murder as part of the habit of alienated youth and define their sexual range—from Lucie’s desperate nymphomania to the band’s gayness and Pierre’s bisexuality—as pathological.
Arnold and Barr reject the urge toward liberation and human fulfillment, as seen in youth films by Morel and André Téchiné, and constrict these characters’ spirits. Without the lustiness of honest pornographers, these middle-aged filmmakers inflict their own sexual anxieties on the young generation, then pretend to offer a poetic case study.
Pity is, One to Another’s fraudulence is fashionable—the same sick twist as the masochistic Argentinian film, Two Drifters. It also recalls Larry Clark’s pedophilia in Kids. But consider that co-director Barr has acted in at least six Lars von Trier films—too many for his own good. One to Another is exactly the sort of deliberately false, morally confused nonsense-narrative that von Trier practices. Although one image of detectives patrolling the spot where Pierre’s body was found hauntingly resembles a cruising park at peak hour, most of the murder-mystery clichés become risible. A homicide cop tells Lucie “We have one lead—a sperm stain on his shirt. A sperm that’s not his. I’m going to verify the sperm.” There’s even more prurience when a bandmate is forced to sorrowfully masturbate for police evidence. And lewd scenarios like Baptiste (Nicolas Nollet) asking Pierre, “I’d like to watch you fuck [a girl] and understand” adds more porn talk. Classic signs of adolescent curiosity and emotional resentment get distorted into depravity. This is not a new vision of modern morality; it’s a debauched view of young adult crisis. Arnold and Barr are kamikazes with a pornographic cause.
