The
School of Flesh, the English translation of the film
L’Ecole de la Chair, is based on a novel not
yet translated into English by Yukio Mishima, whose gay proclivities
came to an end though suicide in 1970. The film, released
in France in 1998 and shoehorned into art theatres in the
United States in 1999, is directed by Benoît Jacquot. The
heroine Dominique (played by Isabelle Huppert) is a good-looking
affluent divorcee in her 40s, hunting for a husband or at
least satisfying male companionship. She decides to go to
a gay bar, doubtless naively believing that gay men are more
sensitive and will become straight if only they could find
the right woman. A transsexual man, who is sensitive and talkative,
tells her that the handsome face staring at her from the bar
is bisexual, and she leaves the bar determined to make contact
with the friendly stud, Quentin (played by Vincent Martinez),
who is a Franco-Moroccan in his 20s. On her next visit to
the bar, she interacts with Quentin, and the two soon end
up in the sack, an encounter evidently the best sex that the
two ever enjoyed, and he refuses to accept payment from her.
Since she wants more than a one-night stand, she plunges into
a relationship in an almost Faustian manner but initially
unaware that she will not be the person controlling the relationship,
despite her affluence; Dominique is not a dominatrix (a pun
perhaps intended). She tries to buy control, paying off his
debts, having her "boy toy" move in with her, and she seeks
to train him Pygmalion-style to behave in the society of the
rich and famous. However, Quentin is a Don Juan accustomed
to late-night hustling, and she wants a conventional relationship,
so tears come down her cheeks on the many occasions when he
fails to come home to sleep with her. Ultimately, she cannot
take his infidelity, especially when it appears that he is
about to marry the young daughter of an affluent friend of
hers who has cuckolded her. Although he promises to visit
her for encounters while married, she cannot accept a second
fiddle role, and he ends up crying that the relationship has
ended. Two years later, they meet briefly at a subway stop.
She is married, evidently happily, but he is divorced and
has returned to live with his mother and the daughter from
his unsuccessful marriage whom he has named Dominique. While
she turns away without emotion, his last glance at her shows
that his love for her remains and will never end. Although
the film focuses on the repeated emotional stress of the woman,
in the end he is the one whom the film has not really understood,
and our intuition seems to predict that the story is far from
over; indeed, we leave the theatre begging for a sequel. The
movie is all the more remarkable because, though the concept
of a rich woman and a bicultural "kept boy" sustains the suspense
for a general audience, and perhaps could only be filmed credibly
in France, in actuality the portrayal was surely based on
the many experiences of which Yukio Mishima was doubtless
aware in which middle-aged rich men have tried to maintain
oversexed "kept boys." What moviegoers will most enjoy in
the film is doubtless the way in which the female lead goes
manhunting, is seduced, and then has to adjust to the fact
that her emotions and her objective goals are in disharmony.
However, the principal theme is surprisingly a plot from nineteenth
century romantic novels—two persons fall in love, but due
to their different social stations (and in this case two cultures),
the love is unattainable and ultimately unrequited, and the
hurt is felt mostly by the lover in the lower class, who this
time has mixed ethnic ancestry. Her tears are over disappointments
that involve her inability to control her boy, that is, joy
but lack of acceptance of her lover, whereas his tears are
over the fact that his love involved both joy and total acceptance
and thus was truly genuine yet in the context of an existence
much less unidimensional than hers. The sequel to The
School of Flesh that we seem to desire, pandering
to our idealistic images of romance, will thus inevitably
focus on the tyranny of conventional heterosexuality in a
world that is more polymorphous than perverse and on the intolerance
of the monocultural rich, male and female, who believe that
they can fool around with the bicultural poor and walk away
without remorse. MH
I
want to comment on this film
