homosexuals

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

gwen — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Who was Sam Steward? Influential professor, ballet enthusiast, S/M practitioner, author of paperback pornos and serious novels, and tattoo artist are just a few of the roles he played in his life. Among his friends were many important cultural and literary figures of the time including Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Thorton Wilder, Ed Hardy, and Alfred Kinsey, yet he remains virtually unknown today. Justin Spring brings to light Steward’s story for the first time, drawing on his many letters and obsessively detailed records of his sexual encounters kept on index cards known as the “Stud File.” Steward dabbled in many professions and lifestyles, managing to be very talented at many things but never exceptional at anything.

The great tragedy of Steward’s life is that he could almost taste the fame and fortune in front of him, but could never quite reach out and grasp them. Most of his big plans fall through—he is rejected by the Navy and loses his dream of becoming a sailor, he is forced to give up his teaching position when his tattoo parlor and homosexual activities are discovered, and his memoirs remained unpublished at the time of his death.

Yet despite his failures, Spring makes a strong case for Steward’s significance in early American homosexual history. Steward was decades ahead of most in his views on pride in gay identity. He was not ashamed of his sexuality, and had a great disdain for those that insisted homosexuality was a disease. He displayed male pornography in his apartments and held “daisy chain” parties where many men would have sex together at a time when discovery of these activities would have resulted in imprisonment. A combination of self-destructive tendencies, sexual desire, and earnest rebellion fueled his search for sex in dangerous places with dangerous men. He nearly avoids death multiple times, and is repeatedly raped, robbed, and beaten up by men he seeks sexual encounters with. He has many pleasurable sexual encounters, however, including a memorable elevator experience with movie star Rock Hudson before he was famous.

Outside of sex, his life was mainly devoted to writing and teaching. He had numerous letter correspondences, the most moving of which was with Gertrude Stein. Steward was one of the first to have frank discussions with her about her lesbianism, and she doted on him like a son. Steward is forced to watch Stein and most of his friends die throughout his lifetime. In late life, he becomes very depressed and addicted to barbiturates. He dies almost all alone in the world, his life mostly a side note in the biographies of his celebrity friends.

Spring does a good job of chronicling Steward’s life, making him seem both interesting and endearing. The thoroughness of his biography is at once the book’s greatest asset and its greatest fault. While Spring is clearly passionate and dedicated to his subject matter, his work could have benefited from a lot of editing. For instance, it is not essential to know every time Steward gets diarrhea, or every brief love affair he has, but Spring includes everything. Nearly every page has a footnote, or several, with information that is not particularly vital to the story.

Overall, though, Secret Historian is a compelling homage to a man history has unjustly ignored. Steward may have not become famous in his lifetime but his writing, teaching, and friendships brought comfort to many other struggling writers and homosexuals in America and helped them to survive, and it is for this that Spring takes the time to give him the recognition he deserves.

Written by: Arielle Burgdorf, November 17th 2010

Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Elaine Elinson, Stan Yogi

Heyday Books

On June 16th, 2008 Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin made headlines as the first same-sex couple legally married in the state of California. The couple, who first met in the ‘50s, spent the majority of their adult lives advocating for equal rights for homosexual couples and lived to see their goal realized. Although Californians have fought the battle for same-sex marriage most visibly in the past ten years, activists such as Lyon and Martin have been addressing the issue of discrimination against homosexuals in California for several decades. Lyon and Martin’s story is just one of the many civil rights struggles highlighted in Wherever There’s a Fight, an anthology of activism in the Golden State.

Each story carries with it a delightful tinge of tension, and as I read I found myself anxiously awaiting to hear how ordinary citizens had confronted their various struggles. Elinson and Yogi, both writers with close professional ties to the California ACLU, document civil liberties struggles from abortion rights to workers rights to the right to dissent. The stories demonstrate how many Californians became lifelong activists after fighting for rights that so vitally affected their access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Ed Roberts was such a person. Roberts was infected with polio as a boy, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. After his mother lobbied the local school board to allow her son to graduate high school (the principal had denied Roberts a diploma because he was unable to complete the district’s physical education and drivers education requirements) Roberts decided he would attend college to secure a meaningful livelihood. In 1962 he became the first severely disabled student admitted to the University of California at Berkeley, although the administration was unaware when they admitted him that the straight-A student was disabled. Thus began a fight for equal access and protection that Roberts would fight for the rest of his life that made California into the birthplace of the disability rights movement in the United States.

As the fight for civil rights becomes more visible, and more progress is gained, perhaps a second edition of this wonderful book will include some exciting new stories. I can’t wait!

Written by: Janice Formichella, January 13th 2010

Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same-Sex Desire and Contemporary African-American Culture

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:36:00 +0000

By Stefanie Dunning

Indiana University Press

Stefanie Dunning takes the scalpel of reason to the twin sores of misogyny and homophobia that sometimes stain traditional notions of a black nationalist consciousness. The result is an intellectual illustration challenging “the notion that the black queer is "not black enough" and both examines and explains “the frequent representation of the interracial as a device signifying the ideas of nation, authenticity and blackness.” Dunning effectively answers a question that I, as a young black gay man, frequently ask: is it possible to be fully black, fully gay, and satisfy normative perceptions of traditional black masculinity simultaneously? Thankfully, one can find an affirmative answer and a stringent defense of a more comprehensive and inclusive characterization of those straddling multiple communities of origin within the text of Dunning's literary cultural exploration.

The act of loving a person of another ethnicity or miscegenation is a mental act and stance rather than something “that happens between bodies.” Once one accepts this as fact, it is easier to follow the use of “miscegephors,” or the points at which inter-raciality is used to “stage questions about race, ethnicity and belonging.” Dunning reviews miscegephorical use in music, television, and literature--including Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her_, the first novel about a black lesbian; Me'Shell NdegeOcello's hip-hop volume Plantation Lullabies_, and Eldridge Cleaver's essay “Notes on a Native Son.” The pages and lyrics of these works provide the canvas for the discourse Dunning pursues. Cleaver's essay and its characterization of the “negro homosexual” as a constituent of another group outside of the black community are challenged by such representations as the relationship (fictional albeit) of Terry and Renay in Loving Her.

This challenge was put into the most stark relief when in Shockley's Loving Her, Dunning finds a juxtaposition between the parallel images of Renay, the recently single black mother with her new white lesbian lover, Terry. We see Renay doing the “little things,” the domestic chores that Terry refuses and Dunning cites the evocation of a black women “working” for a white woman rather than loving her as it meshed “perfectly with the traditional black servant's role.” Then, we witness Renay introducing Terry to soul food, slipping into dialect―using food and language―to act as an ethnic bridge within their interracial relationship. Dunning cites Barbara Smith's review of this scene as a central challenge to the notion that being black and being gay is the assumption of a “racially de-natured” state. Renay and Terry's relationship is not constructed on color-blind terms, and the circumstances of ethnic origin that each bring to the relationship are not eroded; rather, they are amplified.

Within the creative pieces Dunning highlights and the dialogue that each seemed to further, I found the opportunity to consider my own identity and my own personal struggle to associate equally with different communities of origin. Black gay and lesbian artists, such as those that authored the works reviewed by Dunning, are not threats to biological and cultural continuity, but in reality, are at the forefront of remaking “our conceptions of blackness.”

Written by: Brandon Copeland, October 17th 2009

The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture

admin — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:52:00 +0000

By Warren Hoffman

Syracuse University Press

Once homosexuality has been fully incorporated and accepted into “mainstream” society, I wonder what group will be placed at the bottom of the totem pole. I use the word incorporated because it symbolizes a capitalistic tolerance without a desire or need to understand a person's totality. What makes this subject matter doubly difficult is when being part of one group becomes the default for another.

In The Passing Game, Warren Hoffman explains how the term homosexuality was coined at the very same moment in history as anti-semitism, how the stereotypes of Jews from 1880 to 1920 included homosexuality, and how synonymous Jew and queer were at that time. Hoffman’s first example is the Yiddish play Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) by Sholem Asch, which first appeared in 1907 and depicted prostitution and homoerotic female love. When the English version of the play was performed on Broadway in 1923, it caused a scandal, in which the entire cast was arrested and found guilty for performing an immoral drama. The issue of homosexuality was virtually non-existent and non-recognized by wider audiences in 1907, but Hoffman shows that the uproar in 1923 indicated a shift in thought on sexuality between 1907 and 1923.

Further along the book, Hoffman focuses on the term queer and its association outside of a sexual context. In the 1946 publication of Wasteland by lesbian writer Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid), Hoffman explores the way in which this term is used in a non-sexual context, but still somehow tied to sexuality. The main character, Jake Braunowitz, is a second-generation heterosexual Jewish American, who is ashamed and embarrassed to be Jewish. Debbie is Jake’s sister, who learns through her psychiatrist to accept her lesbian identity. Jake seeks the help of this same psychiatrist, and learns that by accepting his sister as queer, he can also accept his Jewish identity.

In Hoffman’s examination of Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) and Sinclair’s Wasteland, as well as his study of cross-dressing and gender ambiguity in short stories, shows how queerness can be related to subject matter outside the context of sexuality. For example, Hoffman analyzes how the feminization of the Jewish male has shaped many Jewish men and women as they have been forced to deal with their own sexuality.

Readers of Hoffman's work may realize how anything that deviates from the mainstream culture and society, be it, culturally, “racially”, or religiously, can be considered abnormal. The Passing Game reminds us why these predominant cultural and societal mores should be changed by any means necessary.

Written by: Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, September 17th 2009

Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:12:00 +0000

By Julie Abraham

University Of Minnesota Press

Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities is a survey of the presence of homosexuality within urban contexts throughout modern Western history. Following a concise preface synthesizing the extraordinarily broad and encompassing history of the relation shared by homosexual communities and cities, she fittingly opens with a chapter tracing the lesbian body throughout urban and literary history, exploring Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal and Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes. The author acknowledges her challenge to recent assumptions regarding “the union of homosexuals and cities, namely, that the homosexuality of the city is always male,” and emphasizes an often overlooked facet of urban studies. Her treatment of the legibility of the lesbian and her privileging of this body is an important and refreshing contribution to LGBTQ studies.

Abraham is a Professor of literature and of LGBT Studies and Metropolitan Lovers evidences a marked emphasis on the relevance of literary perspectives to sociological interpretations of the city. She notes that it is in fact literature that has taught us how to “read” urban homosexuality and alludes to literary/philosophical figures such as Susan Sontag to enhance her portrayal of the theatricality of urban social life. A generous number of photographs and illustrations offer a satisfying visual element that becomes crucial to understanding the complexities of gaze and spectacle in the formulation of the modern city. Events such as Stonewall are not left unexamined in Abraham’s study as she attempts to portray as comprehensive history of the Western urban landscape through the lens of LGBTQ theory.

The tone of Metropolitan Lovers is a bit less erudite than it would appear to be based on Abraham’s scholarly career and university publisher. Her writing is lucid, accessible, perhaps more to the casual reader interested in a general introduction to an LGBTQ study of Western cities than for an academic researcher. This is not to say, however, that Abraham does not offer an insightful survey highlighting the relevance of homosexuality to the construction of the modern city. The work also provides an implicit introduction to the exercise of “queering” texts previously understood in heterocentric terms and will most certainly contribute to and stimulate future scholarship and interrogations of what it means to be urban and queer.

Written by: Melissa McCarron, June 30th 2009

United States of Tara

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:38:00 +0000

By Diablo Cody

Showtime

For those who might have been living in a remote village in the Amazonian jungle in 2007, Diablo Cody is an Oscar-winning screenwriter whose debut success, Juno, is still fresh in everyone’s minds. Its witty repartee and kooky characters were what made it so exceptional. Now, at Stephen Spielberg’s suggestion, Cody has written a television script that takes up everything we loved about Juno and combines it with superb acting to create a fabulous half-hour series that centers around the main character’s dissociative identity disorder (DID), which is the more recent name for multiple personality syndrome) and the chaos that having many people associated with one body causes in the family.

The impressive cast is composed of Toni Collette (Tara), John Corbett (husband Max), Keir Gilchrist (son Marshall), Brie Larson (daughter Kate), and Rosemarie DeWitt (sister Charmaine). Toni Collette actually plays a number of different characters, her alters. She is, at once, T, a lustful rebellious adolescent who curses and sulks; Alice, a 1950s Stepfordesque wife who bakes, cleans, and acts demure; and Buck, a trailer-trashy Vietnam vet who smokes and loves porn—among other alters. (I must leave you something to discover!) Toni Collette is outstanding in her acting, convincingly changing from one character to another in a matter of seconds. In general, the performances are first-rate, and there are some entertaining secondary roles, especially Kate’s two love interests, the emo samurai (Shiloh Fernandez) from the first few episodes, as well as her creepy boss at Barnabee's (Nathan Corddry).

Cody’s script is very well written, witty, subtle, and never over-the top. She deals in a straight-forward way with complex issues such as homosexuality (Marshall is gay), mental illness, and religious fundamentalism (there is a storyline around Marshall’s participation in a Hell House). All the main characters raise some ambiguities concerning Tara’s disorder (is it a true illness or intentional acting out?), and the Showtime website contains a didactic element that provides information concerning DID, a very controversial issue.

Beyond the instructive aspect, however, a quitely overt feminist message is evident in the series. The show starkly reveals a few of the never-ending roles many women are faced with in their daily lives. What woman has not had to “play” several roles, whether it be model homemaker, friend to her teenage daughter, companion to her disaffected husband, and just plain Mom? It is an ingenious ruse to disguise these roles as different personalities of the same woman, but not a far stretch of the imagination. The potential danger of the show turning a woman’s complex nature into a stereotypical hysterical mental case is done away with. Far from a rigid depiction of these seemingly traditional gender roles, the alters’ stereotypical character traits are efficiently nuanced by their interactions with other characters.

The half-hour format often seems too short when one is watching the series on television, but the constant plot twists and turns are sure to keep you watching for hours.

Written by: Sophie M. Lavoie, June 16th 2009

Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

admin — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:53:00 +0000

By Michael Snediker

University Of Minnesota Press

“The year I told my parents I was gay was also the year of my first encounter with depression,” writes Michael Snediker in the opening line of his detailed introduction.

This line struck a nerve as I know a few people who, personally, are still on the same boat. I have seen an aunt and an uncle, a lesbian and gay respectively, ostracized by the conservative, über-religious society they live in. They have suffered self-doubt, identity crisis, and depression the moment their secrets have been revealed.

Snediker’s scholarly work Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions aims to counterpoint the negativity that revolves around queer theory, which is often melancholy, self-shattering, shame and death driven, with the help of poetic lyrics coming from Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer and Elizabeth Bishop. The author’s queer optimism “doesn’t aspire toward optimism,” rather “to find happiness interesting.”

He chose the aforementioned poets as there is more to their work than their melancholic poetics; that deep inside there hides a smile that has a long-lasting effect on anyone who might want to read beyond their quatrains. It seems to be an ambitious task. By using different theories (from Michel Foucault’s to Judith Butler’s) and other bodies of work from literary critics, Snediker successfully managed to give his readers fresh views on the poets’ selected literary works to search for the ultimate quest for enjoyment and personhood.

For example, when most of the literary critics were convinced that Crane’s last work, "The Broken Tower," suggested his impending death, which they all agreed showed “deeper insight and wisdom” than his earlier poems, Snediker refuted that there was another oeuvre that could be written at the same time of his intended last poem, "The Circumstance," that salvaged the “broken stones” that “were dismantled” in "The Broken Tower." Meaning, behind the sadness of Crane’s there lingered his own optimism. Perhaps. Crane, who committed suicide in April 1932 by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico from the steamship SS Orizaba, regarded himself as a failure, partly literary and partly due to his homosexuality. His critics saw his works as difficult to understand. Yet, in the 1930s America, Crane was one of its victims: misunderstood and gay.

Snediker, an assistant professor of English at Queens’ University in Ontario, Canada, didn’t arrange his chapters chronologically, instead thematically, with each chapter relating to each other. Hence Dickinson went after Crane’s.

As a childhood favorite, I was aware of Dickinson’s masochistic tendencies. Her dedication to producing poems engorged with pain, dying and death always made me smile. This drove Snediker to probe through her works.

He also posed some questions concerning Spicer’s serial poem Billy the Kid could be his own way of struggling with his own identity. Could it be the poet’s “aggression against himself?” or some “internalized homophobia?” Was the poem about the poet’s fascination with multiplicity, the character’s ability to elude death? The famed Billy the Kid who always comes back through the numerous films where he kills and dies again and kills and dies again greatly inspired Spicer. He, by the way, was a reader of Dickinson.

How about a connection, not a spiritual one but in terms of idealization, between Crane and Bishop? Was this a sort of queer love on the part of Bishop, who never mentioned her homosexuality throughout her works unlike her contemporaries’ confessional poetry? Did she think of Crane when she composed some of her works?

These are only tips of the iceberg, if you may call them. I have learned so many things after reading Snediker’s book; it is like a new world opening up with so many perspectives and possibilities. I remember a discussion with a friend years ago about poetry: the beauty of reading poems is that it is open for interpretation. Everyone can draw his or her own conclusion. There are no boundaries.

What’s also good about Snediker’s Queer Optimism is that it is not only the homosexual community that can profit from it, but all of us, who possess different colors and sexual orientations, because pain, love, and happiness are universal.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, May 10th 2009

Desiring Arabs

admin — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:19:00 +0000

By Joseph A. Massad

University of Chicago Press

On September 24, 2007, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran drew derisive laughter from a group at Columbia University when he announced, "In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon." Joseph A. Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia, was likely among the few who were not mocking this assertion. In Desiring Arabs, Massad rejects Western sexual epistemology, which he sees as the colonizing mission of "Gay International": "an academic literature 'describing' and 'explaining' what they call 'homosexuality' in Arab and Muslim history to the present; and journalistic accounts of the lives of so-called 'gays' and (much less so) 'lesbians' in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds."

He argues that the consequence, if this Western "progressive" epistemology takes hold, will be the suppression of same-sex desire and practices as they have been and remain a part of Arab and Muslim culture. The larger frame is the damage wrought by orientalist scholarship that framed much of Arab expression of desire as "deviant"—the "love of beardless boys" being a phenomenon that needs to be explained away and eradicated. There are no homosexuals (as there are no hetereosexuals) because those categories are ahistorical and culturally constructed and fail to account for the complexity and ambiguity of “Arab desire” as understood through a decolonized historical frame of reference.

As "an act of archiving," as Massad refers to his own study, this book is remarkable and will be required reading for those studying contemporary Middle Eastern culture. He draws on a wealth of historical texts, as well as a range of contemporary criticism, to stitch together a revised notion of Arab intellectual history and, particularly, the "problem" of its sexual "licentiousness." His work is not as stylish as Edward Said’s, nor is he the memorable phrasemaker his mentor was. But he is an accomplished intellectual historian, one to be reckoned with. As a polemic, however, the book is stunningly shallow and under-documented.

I write this review on the morning a Saudi Arabian court ordered forty lashes for a 75-year-old woman who was visited by two (unrelated) men, one for whom she had served as a nursemaid and had the audacity to bring her bread. I imagine the author’s chiding me for my sympathy for the "international human rights agenda," another one of those obnoxious Western colonizers accusing the Arab world of a cultural "retardation."

I find it laudable that Massad warn against the dangers of epistemological binaries. That he leads us towards different transhistorical methods of understanding sexual desire in the literature, from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary fiction, is of great scholarly value. But his lack of sympathy for other groups struggling against oppression—or even those trying to reconstruct a sense of identity not based on someone’s notion of pathology—is troubling. In fact, his argument against the discourse of universalization leads, I think, to a new sort of binary: belief in the possibility of universal human liberation/colonization or cultural isolation and a militant defense against interference.

He is at his weakest when he departs from his role as archivist and critic of Arab cultural history and flails against international rights movements. He quickly smacks down the "white Western women’s movement, which has sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women's movement in non-Western countries." He claims that the series of events including the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 led only to major schism, and he footnotes a couple of one-sided, obviously biased accounts to support his claim. This is not only bias, but bad scholarship, and bad scholarship, even in a potentially important book, is troubling indeed.

Written by: Rick Taylor, March 28th 2009

Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South – An Oral History

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:50:00 +0000

By E. Patrick Johnson

University of North Carolina Press

The African-American community and the gay community have come under scrutiny since the passing of Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California. Black voters reportedly came out in unprecedented numbers to support the ban, furthering the stereotype of rampant homophobia among the black community.

Northwestern University professor E. Patrick Johnson has compiled an excellent collection of stories and interviews with gay black men from the South in Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. A strength of this book lies in its ability to highlight the relationship between the gay community and the black community as well as the relationship between the gay community and the South.

Johnson has chosen to keep the interviews in the original transcribed versions. This ensures that each narrative is distinctive. The conversations are often lyrical and musical, particularly with the older subjects.

The stories inspire a varied set of emotions and responses—many are heartbreaking, some are infuriating, and there are a few that will leave smiles and chuckles. This text is extremely readable because Johnson steps back and allows for the narrators’ voices to shine through. For the uninitiated, a helpfully glossary of Southern or gay phrases is included.

Oral histories are important in the African-American community. During the days of slavery when it was illegal to teach black people to read, narratives were handed down to generations through oral histories. Johnson links his stories to that tradition by using idiosyncratic voices of his subjects.

The book is organized into different topics, which creates some confusion because the reader has to remember interview subjects who make appearances throughout the book. Topics range from growing up in the South, the "down low", and AIDS/HIV. Most laudable is Johnson’s inclusion of transsexuals and transvestites—a population that often is ignored.

This is an important book because Johnson provides a forum for a topic that is often shrouded in misinformation, cliché, and prejudice. Black gay men have the unfortunate burden of straddling two subcultures that are sometimes at odds with each other. After reading this book, readers will also learn that the South’s reaction to the gay community is more complicated than just "Southerners hate gay people."

Written by: Peter Piatkowski, January 22nd 2009

Un Amour à Taire (A Love to Hide)

admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 23:02:00 +0000

Directed by Christian Faure

Picture This! Entertainment

Christian Faure’s A Love to Hide is a deeply powerful film. Set in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France, the film depicts the violent effects the Nazi criminalization of gayness. The story begins with Sara’s (Louise Monot) escape from her home, after Nazi’s have murdered her entire family. Out of desperation she contacts an old friend (and potential love interest), Jean, played with startling effect by Jérémie Renier. Jean convinces his lover, Philippe (Bruno Todeschini), to hide Sara, placing the three characters in an awkward love triangle that eventually leads to a deep friendship. Family politics between Jean and his brother Jacques (Nicolas Gob) lead to Jean’s arrest by Nazis on charges of sexual deviance. The remainder of the film deals with Sarah and Jacques’ attempts to get Jean released.

The narrative itself is dense with emotionally charged with issues of love, jealousy and violence, however, Faure ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of his powerful storyline. The first half of the film is a wonderful depiction of Jean and Philippe’s relationship, the challenges of integrating Sara into their secret world, and the underground queer culture thriving in Paris. With the introduction of Jacques, the film fizzles into little more than soap opera. The film is further strayed after Jean is arrested, shifting its focus onto the blossoming relationship between Sara and Jacques.

Regardless of the narrative flaws, the film retains its effectiveness in the performances of all the lead players. Renier, in particular, depicts with equal sensitivity Jean’s vulnerability and the strength he receives from his love with Philippe. A flawed effort, but noble nonetheless.

Written by: Ashvin Kini, July 20th 2007