| |
 CLASS,
RACE, AND SEXUAL PREFERENCES CLASH IN A FRENCH FILM
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 sucide 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 bisexal, 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
|
|
