trying to heal a broken heart
by
Douglas Messerli
Christophe
Charrier (writer and director) Jonas (I Am Jonas), also Boys
/ 2018
To
describe French director’s Christophe Charrier’s film Jonas as a “coming-of-age”
film I think misses the point. In fact, the director toggles back and forth in
time precisely to discourage critics and viewers from perceiving it as a
traditional gay youth film in the manner Alex Strangelove and so very many
others.
Yes, Charrier spends a significant amount
of time on the youthful love budding between two 15-year old’s at their school,
but this is not a story so much about their love, but the results of that love
and the terrible burden of memory, regret, and guilt. You might say that this
film is closer to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend or, at a stretch, to Wong
Kar-wei’s In the Mood for Love than it is to a film such as David
Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen, which actually does portray sexual acts,
while Jonas represents love only by kisses.
The film begins, in fact, in a kind of
no-man’s land, in a time we cannot even comprehend, in which a young teenager
is being driven by his father as he makes his way to a quick-stop shop at a gas
station, the boy remaining in the car with his Game Boy, while the father goes
in to purchase something. The Game Boy doesn’t properly function, and the
teenager is pissed.
Suddenly, as he surveys the landscape, he
becomes terrified and before he can turn his eyes back to the car someone is at
the closed window trying to break it. The kid screams and quickly locks the car
up.
We comprehend that this has just been a
nightmare vision, but we won’t discover this incident occurs until the end of
the film. The father returns and tries to sympathetically reassure that
everything is fine. As one critic has written, it is like a piece of a jig-saw
puzzle which cannot yet be explained.
In the very next scene the same boy is
18 years older, and after a gay-bar fight in Boys, he is arrested by a police
woman who reminds him that she was once a friend, Caroline, whose seat was usurped
by a new boy to the class, Nathan (Tommy-Lee Baïs), just so that might sit next
to Jonas. Evidently this has not been Jonas’ first bar fight, and he is now
banned by the police from ever returning to the bar. What we won’t know until
near the end of the film, it was his youthful attempt to enter the bar that
caused the series of fights which now disallows his re-entry.
We slowly discover, as the film progresses that the surly young adult (Félix Maritaud) was, in fact, the terrified youth of the film’s first scene. What has happened to him to allow such a transformation, we can only ask?
Soon the director takes us back in time,
as a 15-year old is about to begin his 9th year of school—an
important year that may define their futures, as the principal explains. He,
Jonas (Nicolas Bauwens, as the adolescent) we sense, seems to have few friends
other than Caroline mentioned above. But when Nathan suddenly enters the room,
late, he immediately discovers not only a “friend” but a kind determined
thrill-seeker who looks for ways to get into trouble and who take him out of
the doldrums of the classroom.
Nathan has a large scar on the side of his
face, which even further fascinates Jonas, and the two quickly become fast
friends, Nathan, soon after, falling out of his chair in a faint so that,
accompanied by Lucas to the doctor’s office, the two can escape to the gym room
to, in Nathan’s case, smoke and consummate their friendship with a deep kiss,
not at all rejected by Lucas. There he also admits how he got his scar: a
pedophile priest struck him with a chalice when he wouldn’t consent to sex and
bit the priest’s penis.
Kisses, cigarettes, and Game Boy become
almost leit-motifs which link the two forever: when Lucas smokes (as he does
throughout the rest of the film) he is recalling his relationship with Nathan;
he constantly plays Game Boy on the device that Nathan has given him; and his
constant search of love (kisses) is an attempt to find something that he can’t
explain, knowing simply knowing he is seeking ineffable. We know it is the
missing love of his friend.
The elder Lucas has a current boyfriend,
Samuel, but
he cheats on him so much—even he admits he cheated “a lot”—the boyfriend grows
so tired of the cheating that he takes Lucas’ keys and throws him out, forcing Lucas
to sleep in a hotel, where, it so happens, Nathan’s younger brother, Léo (Ilian
Bergala) is the clerk. Léo later claims that he has been stalking him.
I won’t go on detailing this highly fractured
narrative, but my point is that the moment you try to grasp the young innocent Lucas,
you again meet up with the surly young adult. The minute you feel you have
begun to get a hold on the film’s realities, you realize it has slipped away
again.
Yet, finally all the pieces do finally
snap together in the penultimate scene when (and here, for one of the first
times I declare a spoiler alert) we discover that after the two boys unallowed
entry to the gay bar, are called over a man, waiting outside, who claims he can
take them to another gay bar, La Dolce Vita, and that he will even drive them
there! Nathan delights in the idea, while Lucas hangs back, only joining at the
last moment.
After
a rather long time, and not being able to perceive where they were, they ask
him to turn around; when he refuses, they again insist, which results in him
slugging Nathan, seriously injuring him. When still the car wouldn’t stop and
they realize that they are being kidnapped for a sexual act, Lucas, in the back
seat, reaches for the handbreak, resulting in the car spinning about for a
moment as Lucas jumps out, leaving his friend behind. There is not La Dolce Vita, as the police later confirm.
As a child, he has told everyone that he
was asked to leave the car, but in this scene he explains to Nathan’s mother
and brother what really happened, which reveals nearly everything in the film
that has proceeded.
Both forgive him, the mother reminding him
that he was only 15, and Léo, driving him to the hospital where Lucas works and
where intends to sleep in staff quarters, tells him that if he had stayed he
too would be dead, which he is certain has happened to elder brother.
Several viewer’s and critics have
criticized the last frames of this powerful film, but I see it as a sign of
Lucas’ possible healing. He has already left the Game Boy that Nathan has given
him on a family bed, and now as they pass an amusement park, Magic World—where
Nathan’s mother has revealed that Nathan has really gotten his scar playing
bumper car—he insists they stop, despite the protests of Léo, for a short
visit. They park and enter.
Once more Lucas is attempting to link up with
his lost youth and Nathan, but this time it is something joyous and, for him,
new. All lit up in bright lights, the world does seem almost “magic,” and perhaps
can help heal even a broken heart.
Los
Angeles, June 7, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (June 7, 2020).
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