Before I Forget
Directed by Jacques Nolot
at the IFC Center
Luckily, two André Téchiné films (I Don’t Kiss and Wild Reeds) in the new Lionsgate DVD box set are now available to introduce American filmgoers to the unique sensibility of Jacques Nolot. As screenwriter of I Don’t Kiss (1991), Nolot began an unusual project—an ongoing film biography of Pierre, a boy from the provinces whose life in Paris awakens his sexual and intellectual identity. This proverbial story will never be handled better than Téchiné does. I Don’t Kiss is one of Téchiné’s very best films—in a more classical narrative style than the New Wave mastery of this year’s The Witnesses. But I Don’t Kiss also establishes the format that Nolot would take, following Pierre into adulthood while becoming a major, if little known, film director himself. Téchiné makes Nolot’s themes visually sumptuous, adding a psychological grandeur that is, literally, Shakespearean. But Nolot has pushed toward severe, sometimes abstruse poetry. Therefore, Nolot’s new film, Before I Forget, is an event.
Sex is so easily and frequently romanticized in movies that Before I Forget’s anti-romantic analysis is almost shocking. Director-writer-star Nolot is such an unabashed intellectual he goes right for the tough topics and pitiless dissection. Before I Forget’s subjects are cinematic taboos: Age, gay sexuality, death, money, memory, privation—each observed through the despondency of Pierre Pruez (Nolot), a former Parisian hustler, now 60 years old and HIV-positive. Nolot’s lucky to have a movie star’s face (like a saturnine David Niven, gray at the temples and with a mustache alternately debonair or sinister); otherwise, his unromantic investigation might be considered repugnant.
Nolot was equally audacious in his previous exposition of gay life, the superb 2005 Porn Theater. Even gay film critics retreated from that one, escaping to Tsai Ming-Liang’s similar but less confrontational Goodbye Dragon Inn the same year. Both Porn Theater and Before I Forget challenge the palliative customs of gay movies, but it’s Nolot’s bold, unrelenting rigor that commends these films to a larger (non-gay) audience. When he achieves passionate revelation—such as Pierre reading a love letter from 30 years ago or the box-office soliloquies in Porn Theater—he breaks through the analytical scheme and makes deep human connection.
Pierre is one desperate character, worried about his old age and the life insurance inheritance from his deceased lover/client Toutonne. The practice of gigolos being adopted by older men for financial support is part of the habit Nolot scrutinizes (80 euros for a shrink, 100 euros for a trick). Pierre lives on the hush-hush circuit where love and sex are bartered. Is there any other movie so blunt about the political economy of urban gay life—or as probing? Pierre remains intellectual in conversations with other aged outlaws such as Paul (Marc Rioufol), a still-hunky ex-gigolo ex-con who earned his master’s degree in prison. Sex and economics are Nolot’s routes to self-examination. Even Pierre’s hook-ups with young hustlers (“I’ve stopped doing anything. I sublimate.”) are essentially confabulations—role-playing rituals that exchange money for satisfaction even across economic and class differences.
Every scene critiques Pierre’s solitude, appetite or fear. Lying still during psychoanalysis, hands folded across his chest, he resembles a talking corpse (“I only remember sad moments”). A dramatic arc is apparent when Pierre consuls/seduces a 29-year-old chinstrap-bearded hottie (Gaetano Weysen-Volli) about annuities and his own youth: “Roland Barthes said I was a whore in the semantic sense. No attachments, no place, no roots. It’s nice.” Not just name-dropping, Pierre follows Barthes’ French intellectual custom, also fancying himself a writer. Every scene verbalizes a semiotic analysis of unpretty, unromanticized gay experience. (It’s the flip side of Téchiné, who was actually Barthes’ protégé.) This contemplative approach is announced with the film’s opening gambit—a full minute pondering a dark sphere, meditating on Pierre’s puzzlement and the oblivion he seeks.
Nolot's tough meditation on Pierre is elegant, tense and mournful, like Mahler's Third Symphony which accompanies Pierre's final crisis. A character study this spiritually obstinate lacks Téchiné's richness (Young Pierre discovered the life options Old Pierre rejects), but it no less than ranks with Scorsese’s Raging Bull--especially when Pierre launches into an intellectual confession of his own stupidity: “We see it in fervent hedonists whose orgasms serve to forget they are not happy.” This isn’t gay self-hatred, but an authentic unnerving portrait; it dares to oppose cinema's false romanticism with ruthless honesty.
Directed by Jacques Nolot
at the IFC Center
Luckily, two André Téchiné films (I Don’t Kiss and Wild Reeds) in the new Lionsgate DVD box set are now available to introduce American filmgoers to the unique sensibility of Jacques Nolot. As screenwriter of I Don’t Kiss (1991), Nolot began an unusual project—an ongoing film biography of Pierre, a boy from the provinces whose life in Paris awakens his sexual and intellectual identity. This proverbial story will never be handled better than Téchiné does. I Don’t Kiss is one of Téchiné’s very best films—in a more classical narrative style than the New Wave mastery of this year’s The Witnesses. But I Don’t Kiss also establishes the format that Nolot would take, following Pierre into adulthood while becoming a major, if little known, film director himself. Téchiné makes Nolot’s themes visually sumptuous, adding a psychological grandeur that is, literally, Shakespearean. But Nolot has pushed toward severe, sometimes abstruse poetry. Therefore, Nolot’s new film, Before I Forget, is an event.
Sex is so easily and frequently romanticized in movies that Before I Forget’s anti-romantic analysis is almost shocking. Director-writer-star Nolot is such an unabashed intellectual he goes right for the tough topics and pitiless dissection. Before I Forget’s subjects are cinematic taboos: Age, gay sexuality, death, money, memory, privation—each observed through the despondency of Pierre Pruez (Nolot), a former Parisian hustler, now 60 years old and HIV-positive. Nolot’s lucky to have a movie star’s face (like a saturnine David Niven, gray at the temples and with a mustache alternately debonair or sinister); otherwise, his unromantic investigation might be considered repugnant.
Nolot was equally audacious in his previous exposition of gay life, the superb 2005 Porn Theater. Even gay film critics retreated from that one, escaping to Tsai Ming-Liang’s similar but less confrontational Goodbye Dragon Inn the same year. Both Porn Theater and Before I Forget challenge the palliative customs of gay movies, but it’s Nolot’s bold, unrelenting rigor that commends these films to a larger (non-gay) audience. When he achieves passionate revelation—such as Pierre reading a love letter from 30 years ago or the box-office soliloquies in Porn Theater—he breaks through the analytical scheme and makes deep human connection.
Pierre is one desperate character, worried about his old age and the life insurance inheritance from his deceased lover/client Toutonne. The practice of gigolos being adopted by older men for financial support is part of the habit Nolot scrutinizes (80 euros for a shrink, 100 euros for a trick). Pierre lives on the hush-hush circuit where love and sex are bartered. Is there any other movie so blunt about the political economy of urban gay life—or as probing? Pierre remains intellectual in conversations with other aged outlaws such as Paul (Marc Rioufol), a still-hunky ex-gigolo ex-con who earned his master’s degree in prison. Sex and economics are Nolot’s routes to self-examination. Even Pierre’s hook-ups with young hustlers (“I’ve stopped doing anything. I sublimate.”) are essentially confabulations—role-playing rituals that exchange money for satisfaction even across economic and class differences.
Every scene critiques Pierre’s solitude, appetite or fear. Lying still during psychoanalysis, hands folded across his chest, he resembles a talking corpse (“I only remember sad moments”). A dramatic arc is apparent when Pierre consuls/seduces a 29-year-old chinstrap-bearded hottie (Gaetano Weysen-Volli) about annuities and his own youth: “Roland Barthes said I was a whore in the semantic sense. No attachments, no place, no roots. It’s nice.” Not just name-dropping, Pierre follows Barthes’ French intellectual custom, also fancying himself a writer. Every scene verbalizes a semiotic analysis of unpretty, unromanticized gay experience. (It’s the flip side of Téchiné, who was actually Barthes’ protégé.) This contemplative approach is announced with the film’s opening gambit—a full minute pondering a dark sphere, meditating on Pierre’s puzzlement and the oblivion he seeks.
Nolot's tough meditation on Pierre is elegant, tense and mournful, like Mahler's Third Symphony which accompanies Pierre's final crisis. A character study this spiritually obstinate lacks Téchiné's richness (Young Pierre discovered the life options Old Pierre rejects), but it no less than ranks with Scorsese’s Raging Bull--especially when Pierre launches into an intellectual confession of his own stupidity: “We see it in fervent hedonists whose orgasms serve to forget they are not happy.” This isn’t gay self-hatred, but an authentic unnerving portrait; it dares to oppose cinema's false romanticism with ruthless honesty.
