French Queer Cinema (review)

This is the first comprehensive overview in English of contemporary French queer authored and themed video and film. Engaged, well-informed and impressively up-to-date, it establishes a clear and accessible social–political framework for the films under discussion, with careful reference to their cultural formation and reception. Following a short introduction that unpacks the three key terms of the title, the study is arranged thematically into five chapters that consider in turn the representation of beur masculinity and queer fantasy, immigrant poverty and queer sexuality, transgender and gay identity, AIDS-related works and the effects of loss on the formation of gay identities, and the emergence of queer DIY video, notably in lesbian porn and ‘post-porn’. The most well-known and established gay directors are all covered, along with earlier pioneers like Jacques Demy and Lionel Soukaz, but Rees-Roberts also explores new and unfamiliar filmmakers often working on the margins of the industry. His account of Rémi Lange’s independently produced Beurs Appart’, for example, which underlines its affirmation of male effeminacy and engagement with American popular culture, reveals the complexity and ambition of a digital video work that might otherwise be dismissed as a rather amateurish exercise. Such emphasis on beur masculinity, including its representation in Citébeur porn, is a fundamental aspect of the book’s successful attempt to critique the troubling gaze of white filmmakers and artists by foregrounding issues of race and class, as in the case of the excellent observation that in Sébastien Lifshitz’s Wild Side, ‘[c]lass tourism ends up as the unfortunate flipside of dissident sexuality’ (p. 62). Rees-Roberts’s general approach is to privilege theoretical and political debate over the standard tropes of auteurist criticism and interpretation. He is a subtle and steady guide, and the conclusions he reaches about individual filmmakers like André Téchiné and Christophe Honoré are invariably well judged. The desire for coverage comes at a certain price, however, for structure and argument can occasionally appear unsure and haphazard, with discussion of one film suddenly being supplanted by another. Such temporary loss of focus is not helped by the continual referencing of other critics, the sometimes vague presentation of quotations, and the rather abrupt truncation of chapters. There are also some repeated errors of vocabulary, such as ‘devises’ for ‘devices’ and the awkward use of Gallicisms like ‘resume’ for ‘summarize’. It is perhaps inevitable that a study of such compendious detail should contain the odd factual error. For instance, it is not Sébastien Viala but Fouad Zéraoui who leaves the cinema alone at the end of Jacques Nolot’s La Chatte à deux têtes (p. 82). Finally, and this has more do with the constraints of publishing, it is a great shame that such an expensive hard-back contains no illustrations beyond the stunning Saïd by Pierre et Gilles on the front-cover. Viewed overall, this is a highly rewarding study that conveys genuine optimism about the current and future state of French gay/queer film. It constitutes a major contribution to the field and will become an invaluable scholarly resource.