the film is a mensch
by
Douglas Messerli
David Fourier (writer and director) Des majorettes dans l’espace (Majorettes in Space) / 1996
The French award-winning LGBTQ 1996 film Des majorettes dans l'espace (Majorettes in Space) is a film of definition, a comic study of Aristotelian deductive logic that attempts to explain gay values by spoofing standard logic.
It begins with two simple presumptions: “Of
all living beings, only man knows he is going to die. Of all living beings,
only man is capable of humor and poetry.” It then introduces three living
beings: Catherine, Laurent, and Vincent. Vincent, the narrative voice reports,
is a homosexual.
Suddenly the narrator along with the
visual image shifts to a hevea tree, which produces latex which, as we know,
goes into the making condoms. Showing a picture of a male nude, the narrator
declares of the object in his fingers: “This is a condom.” Condoms, the voice-over
explains, are used, for example, to prevent conception when two heterosexuals
make love. At that very moment the film displays an erect penis upon which the
condom is placed.
“Otherwise,” the narrator continues, “Catherine
and Laurent would have dozens and dozens of children. Which is impossible
because their car is too small.”
The image shifts once more to nature where
the narrator takes us from one tree to many, a group of trees, he posits, being
called a forest. A group of people often make up a march, in this case many
homosexuals celebrating in a Gay Pride parade. It is a demonstration by Vincent
and his friends, asserts our disembodied voice, to show that they exist and to
claim the same rights as heterosexuals like Catherine and Laurent. This proves
that homosexuals have a lot of humor, the unsaid presumption of course being
that Laurent and his friends are therefore human beings.
Two nude figures running near the forest
reveal that Catherine and Laurent are not at the march. “They are in the forest
and are going to make love.” Like most human beings they regularly make love, except
for,” our narrator notes, “the astronauts on Soyouz 27—my own addendum: for
those of you who may have forgotten, Soyouz 27 was the 1978 Soviet crewed
spacecraft which flew to the orbiting Salyut 6 space station—“junior majorettes,
and Jean-Paul”—who was the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 1978-2005.
Dimitri and Igor, the cosmonauts aboard
Soyouz 27, so we are told, are heterosexuals, and heterosexuals of the same sex
do not make love together...the narrator pauses...“unless the mission is prolonged.”
And here this charming philosophical
treatise collapses into something quite different from what so far we have been
lead to expect, noting that Igor has forgotten the condoms so Dimitri is
sulking. The junior majorettes don’t make love, the narrator argues, because
they are too young. In the new illogical logic which narrator has now
established, John-Paul is described as being “a rare and resistant (they show
him being shot in an assassination attempt in 1981) being called a Pope. He
lives in airports and with invisible beings in space, sorts of cosmonauts.”
The Pope, it goes without the narrator
saying it, believes in neither condoms nor in homosexuals like Vincent.
Meanwhile, in order to avoid thinking
of Igor, Dimitri has hung pictures of majorettes in his bedroom on Soyouz 27. Yet
we are told there are no real majorettes in space because when you throw a
baton it does not fall back. Besides booties, worn by majorettes, are outlawed
in outer space, just as we might remind ourselves without the narrator needing to
bother, are condoms and homosexuals outlawed by the Pope.
The narrator now reveals that this may
be the last time that Vincent attends the Gay Pride parade since he is ill. “Vincent
has AIDS. AIDS is a killer disease transmitted by blood and sexual secretions.”
John Paul is old. He will soon die. Vincent is young. He will soon die. Deductive
logic has no power in the world in which AIDS exists. The narrator cannot offer
any further rational deductions, so we are now forced to make our own.
Evidently, Vincent has not used a condom,
perhaps become the Pope has outlawed them. And now Vincent is going die at age
20, and being a human being, he knows it. He soon will no longer exist, despite
all his and his friends attempts to declare that homosexuals do, in fact, exist.
A bootie is also a slang word in English
for the ass, which is the entry, for most gay men, of sexual secretions.
Igor and
Dimitri would not need condoms in space if there were no AIDS because they
would not have children, who generally know nothing about death until they grow
up. Even though we know gravity exists, it does not exist space, where the
invisible beings with whom the Pope communicates are believed to exist.
And while homosexuality is not permitted
by the Pope, a cosmonaut can still imagine having sex with a child majorette.
This film won the 1997 BAFTA Award for
the Best Short Film and the 1998 César Award for Best Short Film, evidently for
its sense of humor. This film is evidently a human being. But let us hope it
does die.
Los Angeles, February 18, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).
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