Leos Carax's Mauvais sang | Bad Blood | The Night Is Young (1986)

 

In 2012 the influential cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles published an article by Jean-Marc Lalanne suggesting that Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain (1973) is the film of the 70s, Arnaud Desplechin's Comment je me suis disputé… (ma vie sexuelle) the film of the 90s, and Charles Honoré's Les Chansons d'amour the film of the 2000s. Leos Carax's Mauvais sang (1986) it named as the film of the 80s. Some critics have gone so far as to call it one of French cinema's most important films.

Carax's second feature, Mauvais sang is the second of 'the Alex trilogy', and like the other two films is well within the range of the 'cinéma du look' obsessions: the subway shot early on in the film (surely a homage to Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977); a marginal main character (Alex); a number of unforgettable and highly visual scenes, such as the funambulesque running and somersaulting sequence to David Bowie's 'Modern Love', and the 'magical' tricks made by Alex to his would-be lover.

The title Mauvais sang – literally 'Bad Blood' but unbelievably stupidly also translated as The Night Is Young – is partly a reference to the title of Rimbaud's second poem in his collection Une saison en enfer (1873): Alex is a Rimbaldian, rebellious character who espouses laziness, the lack of conventional work, but loves cultural pursuits, the arbitrariness of life, etc. And the title is also a reference to AIDS, here fictionally named STBO, which 'affects couples who make love without being in love'.

Alex, in this second view of him, is no longer as aspiring screenplay writer but a magician, a juggler, an acrobat, an (illegal) bonneteau trickster, and so on. Two ageing crooks, Marc (Michel Piccoli) and Hans (Hans Meyer) are threatened to cough up the cash by a usurer nicknamed L'Américaine (Carroll Brooks), and as Alex's father is dead they now turn to his son to steal the vaccine for STBO. Alex leaves his lover Lise (Julie Delpy) and falls straight into an impossible love: he meets Anna (a young Juliette Binoche) who is faithfully – and perhaps a little unbelievably – very much in love with the much older Marc.

This film is a visual and aural feast.

Cédric Klapisch's Poisson rouge (1994)

In 1993 '3000 scénarios contre un virus' (lit. '3000 screenplays against a virus') was launched as a cultural educational preventative measure against AIDS. In fact over 4000 short screenplays were received from students in lycées as possible ideas for film shorts, of which 31 were used by directors, mostly working on a voluntary basis, with the actors doing the same. To a background of first Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf' and then of The Breeders' 'Noaloha', Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi acts. She is walking away, carrying a minimum of her belongings, which include a bowl with a goldfish in it. She is obviously distressed, but even more so when in the busy traffic she receives a jolt, drops the bowl, and retrieves the goldfish from the edge of the road. Dashing into a chemist's across the road, she jumps the queue and – desperate – explains the situation, that the fish is dying without water. The chemist produces a condom which a customer blows up, water is poured into it and the goldfish too. The motto: 'Un préservatif peut sauver la vie': 'A condom can save a life'. In just over three minutes, Cédric Klapisch has done more than many filmmakers take hours to say. The idea was from Jérôme Bettochi (aged 19) of Bessoncourt (90).

Cimetière de Montmartre (continued): #19: Bernard-Marie Koltès

Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948–89) wrote plays about exile. His works include Sallinger (1977), Dans la solitude des champs de coton (1987) and Le Retour au désert (1988). He died of AIDS.

Dominique Fernandez: La Gloire du paria (1987)

Dominique Fernandez's La Gloire du paria (lit. 'The Glory of the Pariah') is set in 1986, at about the time when AIDS was creating havoc in the developed world but also when very little was known about it. Wildly distorted media scares called it a 'plague' and perhaps inevitably represented the gay community as largely responsible for the phenomenon.

Bernard Morin (45) is a novelist from a staunch middle-class background: his father is a teacher of French in a lycée, and his mother is a well-read worker in a bookshop in the quartier Latin. For three years he has lived with in Paris with Marc Lavergne (25), a law student from a more modest background with a father who works in an office and a friendly Sicilian mother.

Marc has grown up in an era of tolerance whose his parents have – although certainly not as readily as he thinks – accepted the fact that he is gay. Bernard, though, has grown up in an age when homosexuality was taboo, something to hide, but essentially something illegal.

It is the difference between the two main characters' background experience of homosexuality which creates the tension and the interest in the novel, which begins at the time of the death of Jean Genet. Genet's death is symbolic, being the end of the days when homosexuality was associated with the outsider, the outcast, the criminal, the worship of the underworld.

It is just such a backcloth from which Bernard comes, and which he misses with considerable nostalgia. His partner Marc never knew the days of the thrill of illegality, never experienced the multiple revolutions of Paris (and beyond) in 1968, never enjoyed the casual sex of the period. Because of this, Marc accepts that Bernard regularly feels the  need to go out at night, to experience vicariously – on the street, in the metro, etc – the closeness with other men that he once enjoyed much more directly: this is a monogamous relationship.

And then Bernard (against the advice of his friend Xavier Laronde) decides to write a play about AIDS, but before it's completed he is diagnosed as having the disease, and can't complete it. Suddenly all his friends – with the exception of Laronde (and apart of course from Marc) – find petty excuses not to visit Bernard on his deathbed.

Bernard's mother has previously visited Marc when her son was well, and reveals that she has known all the time that he is gay, that she pointed him towards Proust and works by Gide, although very near the beginning of the novel the reader knows that Bernard has written off imaginary attempts to question his parents (for instance) about the nature of Balzac's character Vautrin. It is almost as if he wanted his parents to disown him for his sexual persuasion. And sure enough the near-blind mother doesn't want to see her son again, although not because of any disgust but because she realises that Bernard is actually happy being a pariah.

When Bernard is diagnosed as having AIDS and close to death, Marc wonders – not with retrospective jealousy, as he's not that kind of person – if his partner had in fact been unfaithful during his night-time journeys. Then  Nicole, the former wife of Robert – the 'friend' of Bernard's who deliberately avoids sitting in the front rows at theatres to miss any (imagined AIDS-related) spittle hitting him, and who for the same reason has his wife sit between him and Bernard at Les Deux Magots – tells Marc she's discovered the truth.

Some years earlier Robert had badly injured Bernard's thigh in an accidental shooting incident, and Bernard as a result had to have two blood transfusions: one of which was contaminated with the AIDS virus. All of Bernard's friends have been deserting him, but this of course 'proves' that he was 'innocent', doesn't it? Marc, Nicole insists, must reveal this evidence to Bernard, as the friends who've deserted him will realise he's not a screw-around gay, won't they?

Well, perhaps, but that is the worst possible scenario, as Marc – unlike Nicole – knows Bernard and how he has always prided himself on his pariah status, knows how the re-demonising of homosexuality has brought a kind of fresh blood into his veins. Marc has also discovered about friendship, about the nature of hypocrisy, and prefers to give his dying lover the lethal injection, and knows that there's just enough poison in the syringe to take them off together at exactly the right time.

La Gloire du paria is an original novel about the nature of friendship and love, and the ugliness of the hypocrisy that so often rears its head when things get difficult.

Timothy Conigrave: Holding the Man (1995)

The expression 'holding the man' is from Australian football, and although it certainly relates to John Caleo's enthusiasm for football, it relates far more to John and the narrator Tim Conigraves's gay relationship described in this autobiographical work set in Australia.

Holding the Man details Tim's school years from the early sixties, through the swiftly developing awareness of his homosexuality in his early teenage when, after a few gay experiments with others, he finds love and happiness with John. This is very much the story of a fifteen-year-old relationship which survives the insults of homophobic school 'friends' and peers as well as the embarrassment, disgust, incomprehension and religious hypocrisy of the parents.

The book is divided into three parts: 'A Head Full of Boys', which takes the reader up to the time when Tim and John leave school; 'Out in the World', the shortest section, in which the two lovers temporarily separate and they – particularly Tim – experiment with other male partners until they come together again and discover the terrifying reality of AIDS which is beginning to bring havoc to the gay community; and 'Soft Targets' charts their diagnosis as HIV-positive, the rapid decline in their health, and John's death after which the mourning Tim awaits his own premature demise.

Holding the Man isn't afraid to detail the joys of gay sex and nor is it squeamish about clinical detail of the disintegration of the body through AIDS-related illnesses. It is at times painful to read, but often moving and powerful in its description.

Alan Turing, Sackville Park, Manchester

Alan Turing, Sackville Park, near the Gay Village, Manchester. I have to be careful about posts on subjects I know nothing about, as there's always someone picking me up on errors. OK, I know nothing of Mathematics, and I've been corrected before about Alan Turing, as in my previous post here.

In his hand is an apple: he killed himself with a cyanide-laced one aged 41, after being forced to undergo 'treatment' for his homosexuality.

'Alan Mathison Turing

1912-1954

Father of Computer Science

Mathematician, Logician

Wartime Codebreaker

Victim of Prejudice'

________________________

'Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth

but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere

like that of sculpture' - Bertrand Russell

'THE BEACON OF HOPE

The "BEACON OF HOPE" and "TREE OF LIFE" is [sic] dedicated to all those

who have lost their lives to HIV / AIDS and those living with and affected

by the virus. The Beacon is a permanent awareness of the

threat of HIV / AIDS to every individual person.

______________________________

'This project has been made possible thanks to the generous

contributions from:-

_______________________________

'Black HIV & AIDS forum; Body Positive North West; Clone Zone; Diana,

Princess of Wales Memorial Fund; George House Trust; Lesbian & Gay

Foundation;  Lifeline Project; Manchester City Council; Manchester Health

Authority; Manchester Lesbian & Gay Mardi Gras; Massow Financial

Consultants; Sackville Park Project; The Trafford Centre; The Village

Project; the Village enterprises who have held fundraising events for this

project, and not least all the customers who have supported this project.

'The Beacon of Hope was designed by

Warren Chapman and Jesse Byrne-Daniel.'

'THE TREE OF LIFE

This TREE was planted by the Lord Mayor and

the Lady Mayoress on behalf of the

Village charity, in memory of those lost to

HIV / AIDS

                                            World AIDS day 1st December 1993

________________________________________

'This area surrounding the TREE was improved

in the summer of 2000 as part of the

BEACON OF HOPE project.'