Marseille lacks tinsel but also the anxiety of cities that have so much to prove. “There are things Paris has that we don’t have, but there are also things Marseille has that Paris surely doesn’t. Like the sun!” is how one of the locals puts it. This port city in southern France, some two hours by train from Cannes, is so hot that the free glass of water that accompanies one’s espresso doesn’t come in a shot glass but a draft beer mug.
Marseille’s atmosphere is electric but non-glamorous. It isn’t Paris, nor Cannes. But a distinctly French penchant for transgression and art is in the air just the same—sometimes literally. In the middle of the Canebière, the city’s historic central artery, a large citation is suspended in the air the way Christmas decorations hang between buildings: “To create is to live twice, Albert Camus.” Underneath the banner sits an old man reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night without a care in the world.
There’s no surprise, then, to recognize that the Festival International du Cinéma Marseille’s most obvious qualities are its lack of pretense and penchant for experimentation. Filmmakers here come on stage for Q&A sessions wearing Bermuda shorts, baseball caps, and knapsacks, as if on a break from a day out at Plage des Catalans before catching a contemporary dance performance at Le Dernier Cri, where this week they would have incidentally been able to see choreographer Olivier Dubois’s sublime Tragédie, New Edit, “a choreographic poem for 18 dancers,” all of whom are completely naked on stage for the entire show.
Dubois’s unabashed ode to corporeal freedom has a lot to do with FIDMarseille’s curatorial ethos, and with France as a haven for intellectual profundity and no-fucks-given joie de vivre in general. That’s certainly something to rejoice in a world wallowing in the apathy of limitless streaming and veering back to the Middle Ages in too many places.
If Marseille is a good sample, film festivals are back, along with the indescribable frisson of crowded screening rooms, shameless mid-film texting, close-range coughing, teenage giggles being triggered by male nudity on screen, and the still astonishing post-projection certainty of having experienced actual cinema and not content. Which isn’t to say that at FIDMarseille the films are immune to the trends and aesthetics of contemporary times.
Jean Boiron-Lajous’s You Must Be Wrong consists of a series of lip-sync performances by a superb Valentin Dilas—of celebrity speeches by Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Macron, Maria Callas, Nina Simone, and more—that could have broken the internet as Tiktok material. But, again, the cinema at the FIDMarseille is categorically not content, as it’s something quite diverse. When it comes to duration, for instance, the festival takes short, medium, and feature-length films just as seriously. As such, Ellie Ga’s 40-minute Quarries and Lav Diaz’s 409-minute A Tale of Filipino Violence co-exist in the same international competition category.
Several of the films in this year’s festival reflected this emancipatory ethos so palpable in French cultural production. These are films that evoke questions around what we make of bodies, how we construct and constrain them, and how bodies break down. As well as how they hang by a thread—always needing to be propped up by someone else, whether real or fantastic, human or cyborg. And many of the films ask what happens to bodies on the rare occasions when we let them flourish, irrespective of anything or anyone.
Gaël Lépingle’s Small Town Boys is separated into three short stories about the awkwardness of living out queer desire in rural areas. Each takes place in a different provincial town in France where homophobia doesn’t exactly kill but still reduces queer subjects to anguished versions of what they could have been, sapping them of their life little by little.
In the first story, Lépingle pits the liberty of a group of drag queens perennially on tour against the dreary domesticity of gay coupledom, where monogamy and mortgage replace glitter, gold, and the promises of promiscuity. Youcef (Yves-Batek Mendy) seems to be the only young gay Black person in the village. He owns a restaurant with his fiancé and is already settled in his early 20s. That is, until the drag queens swing into town and he starts dreaming of a certain elsewhere, but mostly dreaming of femininity—that ever so fraught terrain for many a gay man trying to prove stereotypes wrong, and failing. Youcef is particularly enthralled by Baby Sun (Léo Pochat), his unabashed girliness, boldness, and freedom. Drag in the film is, thankfully, more artisanal than televisual, closer to a nomadic circus act than passable realness.
The body and its ornaments take over Youcef’s imagination. It’s also the theme of the segment about an older closeted photographer living in the countryside and the city boy (also played by Pochat) who comes to pose nude for him, and who’s terribly disappointed when he finds out that the photo session wasn’t the photographer’s pretext for a kinky hook-up. The plot brings up the need for cloaking nudity with masquerade to make desire visible, or bearable.
In this case, with froufrou collars, Marquis vests, and, of course, swords. Small Town Boys allows us to think of how gay desire, and desire writ large, calls for dress-up in order to cover something else. The plot of this segment shifts when the boy gets the photographer to wear the period costumes that the older man makes his models wear, blurring the line between gazer and gazed, at which point all hell breaks loose. What to do with the flesh when it’s stripped of its concealments? The fantasy flounders. How quickly desire becomes disgust.
The film’s most beautiful short story is its most cryptic. It features a young boy who decides to wear high heels around town one day, looking for pleasure. The pleasure of feminine attire against his own skin, sexual pleasure, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, such as clasping his own nipples with clothes pins for no apparent reason nor audience. This sort of coming-of-age story takes place in one afternoon where the boy negotiates, and eventually overcomes, the horror of having to enjoy feminine things through clandestine means. The ecstasy of performing the feminine is, at last, allowed to spill out from the mirror into the public square.
In Delphine Kreuter’s third feature, X14, bodies are also a complicated assemblage haunted by suffering, albeit filled with the possibility of breaking free. Liz (Lucie Cure) is roommates with a voiceless, human-sized robot named X14, who’s her sort of double, considering that she, too, relies on being perpetually plugged in and charged every few hours. Liz is running on an artificial heart while waiting on a transplant, and X14 spends much time ironing her clothes, fetching her water, dancing with her, and inoffensively watching her shower.
Kreuter’s film is particularly pleasurable as long as it inhabits this strange everydayness as if there was nothing strange about its scenario—that is, when it doesn’t bother to explain its characters nor its setup. But X14 eventually becomes rife with ready-made tragic backstories that try to breathe normative narrativity into an otherwise deliciously aimless film.
Still, the depiction of the relationship that X14 establishes between its central figures is successful as a social commentary that exposes contemporary culture’s life-or-death reliance on perpetual connectivity, one that’s simply exacerbated in Liz’s character. The film exposes, too, our dependence on objects, instead of people, and the gadgets that make such sad vampirisms possible. Liz’s need to wear a high-tech vest at all times tells us something about our own assemblages on the verge of malfunctioning. Plug yourself or die, literally.
Claire Doyon’s exquisite It’s Raining Cats and Dogs turns to autism, the filmmaker’s ongoing object of cinematic analysis, at least since her recent essayistic tour de force Pénélope Mon Amour. In the film, it’s language, or one’s relationship to it, that plays the central role in making enjoyment or suffering possible, probable, or inevitable.
Keeping her filmic situation disarmingly simple, Doyon interviews a female friend named Isabelle in a garden and delicately throws in cutaway shots of flowers accompanied by the chirping of birds. Isabelle is an adult on the autism spectrum, and the things that she says often remind Doyon of her own daughter, who has a severe form of autism.
Throughout, Doyon makes the masterful decision to, although in less essayistic ways than her previous films, implicate her own self into the picture even though she never appears in the frame. The filmmaker’s presence, her violence even, is always there through her off-camera voice, barging in, taking space, sharing terse exchanges with her subject (“I’m not finished speaking!”), taking issue with how Isabelle responds to her questions, not afraid to lose her subject—risking her own film if Isabelle walks out. It’s as if Isabelle stands her ground to say what someone with autism is really like and Doyon responds by standing her own ground, showing Isabelle what a filmmaker—and the mother of an autistic child—is really made of.
It’s Raining Cats and Dogs oscillates elegantly between the pedagogical registers and political urgency of a documentary, the rawness of a filmmaker’s sketchbook, the humorous unpredictability of the best of conversations among strangers, and the vibrancy of cinema’s most awe-inspiring portraits, from Shirley Clarke’s to Agnès Varda’s.
Doyon’s work captures the magical simplicity that runs through the program at this year’s FIDMarseille. Her film is firm and nimble, determined and humble. The filmmaker’s most impressive technique has to do with the function of seduction in human relations, another French specialty. This is a film about the strength of those who create, languages and children alike. It’s one about the mind and its unseizable tricks, language as the seamstress that shapes the human subject and makes their communication to others (im-)possible.
Isabelle, dressed in a pink trench coat, tells Doyon that laughing and crying are socially constructed responses, that people with autism take things literally, that they aren’t cold but find solutions (she says that she loves Covid due to the physical distancing), and that they’re pragmatic about their empathy, not performative. So is Doyon, who’s unafraid to confront her subject instead of pitying or sheltering her. She dares her subject to speak, ruthlessly.
It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to know that when one’s speech is liberated, sexual matters are the first to emerge. When Isabelle tells Doyon that certain subjects make her uncomfortable, making her feel as though she will “liquify,” it’s clear that we’re in the domain of erotic intimacy. That unexpected proximity—embodied by a person or a question—threatens Isabelle at her core. But Doyon is unwavering. She isn’t interested in a polished hagiography of autism, but in its underbelly. They’ll take a break, Doyon agrees, but Isabelle must continue to speak—until she offers the filmmaker an allegory about a rosebush with transparent thorns that let one know where they prick. In this moment, subject and filmmaker are masters at speech at last, connected by the horrible, marvellous vicissitudes of language.
FIDMarseille runs from July 5—11.
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