Teenagers
encountering their first gay experiences are destined to be
frustrated, or so we discover in Come Undone (Presque
Rien), directed by Sébastien Lifshitz, a film
with many flashforwards to a time when the lead male actor
tries to commit suicide (presumably the basis for the French
title, which literally translates "almost nothing").
Chronologically, the story perhaps begins when Mathieu (played
by Jérémie Elkaïm) at age seventeen went
from his home in Paris for vacation at a French seaside resort
near Nantes in Brittany with his family. Cruised by Cédric
(played by Stéphane Rideau), another teenager, nothing
happened. One year later, both Mathieu and Cédric return
to the resort, but his time Mathieu succumbs to Cédric’s
attention, carrying on more at night than in the daytime so
that Mathieu can shield the unexpected affair from his family,
including a younger sister, Sarah (played by Laetitia Legrix),
who accompanies him to the beach each day. However, the affair
is doomed from the start because the two boys represent different
social classes. Cédric, whose birthfather abandoned
him at an early age, once hustled, now makes waffles at an
outdoor snack van, and otherwise has no employable skills,
though he plans to learn about computers in the fall. Mathieu,
who has been accepted as an architecture student at a university
in Paris, lives in his family’s resort villa with Sarah,
his hypochondriacal mother (played by Dominique Reymond),
and her sister Annick (played by Marie Matheron), who holds
the family together. Mathieu’s father remains at work
in Paris, perhaps less disinterested in the idleness of a
vacation than in the spectacle of his wife taking pills that
worsen her imagined condition. Cédric, angered that
Mathieu is trying to hide his relationship, shoves him in
full view of his sister, but his family completely accepts
his fling. Similarly, when Cédric ends up in the hospital
after falling into a deep tidal pit, his stepfather meets
Mathieu at the hospital and accepts without comment the fact
that the two boys are in love. Nevertheless, summer cannot
last forever. Cédric will have to return to his hometown
Nantes, and Mathieu will presumably go his separate path as
a university student in Paris. For a while, Mathieu contemplates
living near Cédric and going to a provincial university
instead, but the emotional conflict evidently is so considerable
that Mathieu takes poison and then ends up having his stomach
pumped and his personality psychoanalyzed until he can be
released from the hospital in the expectation that he will
not try suicide again. As the film ends, Mathieu is trying
to establish a relationship with another boy, an earlier boyfriend
of Cédric, but to no avail. Come Undone,
thus, is a coming-of-age film that tells teenage parents that
they should provide not just acceptance but hugs and some
wisdom for their gay children or risk losing them forever.
MH
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