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It is difficult for me to articulate quite why it is that I adore Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie (2007), or Before I Forget as it is known to English speakers. Ostensibly your typical French drama about middle class angst, alienation and spiritual decay, the film deals with an ageing gay man who looks back over his life with considerable bitterness as he considers all the things he lost and all the things he failed to gain. However, while filled with negativity about his own past, the central character Pierre (played by Nolot) is gripped by terror when he thinks about the future as his health dwindles, his sex drive sputters and his days come to be consumed by talk of money, food and how he will most likely die alone. There are hundreds of films that deal in exactly this kind of bourgeois malaise and many of them leave me completely cold. What makes Nolot’s films so special is that, unlike many dramas that aim for the universality of human emotions while achieving only the generic, Nolot’s films are specific. They carry the specificity that comes only from the autobiographical and it is the candour with which Nolot describes his life that makes his films so uncomfortable and yet so utterly compelling.

I first discovered the films of Jacques Nolot when researching a piece on the most disturbing films ever made. Combing forums and essays, Nolot’s film La Chatte A Deux Tetes (2002) came up with intriguing frequency. Released in the US under the deflationnary title Porn Theater, La Chatte A Deux Tetes is an almost anthropological study of the rules and rituals that govern life in one of Paris’ porn cinemas. While the film is graphic in its sexual content, it is not the sex that makes the film difficult to watch. Instead, it is the sense of intrusion that Nolot manages to inject into every scene. By taking in the film, audiences are not only watching things that are generally only done in the protective anonymity of a darkened porn cinema, they are also witnessing rare moments of emotional honesty and tenderness between strangers. This sense of intrusion is only multiplied by Nolot’s unnamed character who speaks about his sexual failings, his friends and lovers who died of AIDS and the shifting boundaries of sexual identity and how these can just as easily be drawn by expediency and ambition as by desire or self-expression. The honesty of the film along with its strict grounding in Nolot’s life make it feel like you are being assaulted with Too Much Information. This exhibitionist streak carries over into Avant Que J’Oublie.

There is little point in attempting to synopsise the plot of Avant Que J’Oublie as it does not have one. In fact, it is barely a work of narrative cinema. Instead, the film is a series of vignettes in which we see Nolot’s counterpart Pierre padding about his apartment and moving from café to therapist to rent boy. Through these different encounters, Nolot describes an ecology of homosexuality. For Nolot, young men sell themselves to older men in return for money. By the time the older men die, it is the turn of the young men to become old men and to start the cycle again with the next generation of gigolos, rent boys and appropriate segments of gilded youth. Some men escape this cycle either by jumping the fence and having children or by playing the game particularly astutely by landing a particularly old and particularly moneyed man whose death will leave them as wealthy, middle-aged men-about-town with the world at their feet. Nolot conveys this last possibility with particular wit in the form of an old friend who landed a particularly large fish before being shipped off to prison thereby seemingly living out two of Pierre’s fantasies at a stroke.

Unfortunately, most men are ground down by the cycle. Another of Pierre’s friends is a wealthy man but he spends his life obsessing over the price of gigolos and therapists and laments the fact that he ‘has nothing’. Pierre himself played the game well enough to have a place to live and to not have to work but he also hates himself for failing to be more ruthless with his old lover Toutoune, allowing the old boy’s family to swoop in and hoover up the inheritance.

While the film ends with Pierre seducing a delivery boy, deciding to take his new medication and shaving off his moustache in order to accompany a gigolo to a porn cinema in drag, there is no Damascene moment in which he comes to terms with his bitter past and terrifying future. Pierre does not fall in love, he does not realise the error of his ways and he does not break the cycle by fleeing to some tropical country where he might grow old disgracefully with the money he has. Instead Pierre’s life, much like everyone’s, is what it is : at times terrifying (Pierre at one point feels so terrible that he shits himself), at times moving (Pierre reading out an old letter from Toutoune could melt the most icily homophobic of hearts) and at times defiant (a drag-clad Pierre disappearing into the darkness of a porn cinema, elegantly closing the great thematic arc started in La Chatte a Deux Tetes with the suggestion that many gay men start out by hooking up with transvestites). Just like real life, it is always painfully real and so intimate that sometimes you cannot help but avert your gaze.

Cinematically, the film is shot without pretension. Silences and long, pensive takes alternate with moments of ferocious discussion and what can only be described as long speeches delivered by Nolot in a voice full of strange cadences and ill-contained emotion that hints at a person who sees himself as being on stage at all times (though naturally, Nolot would deny being ‘une reine’). The only time the artificiality is stripped from his voice is when he is reading a love letter or moaning “yes master” while being ruthlessly fucked by a psychopathically detached rent boy.

Avant Que J’Oublie is not only a fascinating and moving look into a world of marginalised homosexuality that probably does not exist anymore for most gay people, it is also an important work from the point of view of the politics of film. With its fearless description of the dark corners of homosexual life and its acknowledgement of the carnage caused by AIDS, Avant Que J’Oublie is reminiscent not only of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (2003) but also the Friedkin adaptation of Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band (1970). It is telling that all three men were born at a time when homosexuality, if not actively illegal, was officially frowned upon and subject to brutal oppression by an intolerant straight majority. These three writers were also alive, adult and sexually active before the full brunt of the AIDS epidemic was felt by the gay community. In fact, all three writers have life experiences that are probably not accessible to most young gay men today. The reason why I think that this is a political problem is that the viewpoints of these older men are effectively being erased from history by a gay cinematic culture that seems more concerned with projecting an outward image of positivity than in articulating truths not only about the gay experience but about human nature itself.

Jacques Nolot - (2007) Before I Forget.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 44 min
Size: 	1.60 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	658x572 ~> 915x572
Aspect ratio:  	16:10
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
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Audio
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https://nitro.download/view/F01D5F00FF7EFAD/Jacques_Nolot_-_(2007)_Before_I_Forget.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Nolot – Avant que j’oublie AKA Before I Forget (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

After ten years away, Jacques Pruez, an unmarried, 50-year-old, modestly successful actor, returns to his home village to comfort his dying mother. His father Yvan, a family barber who’s counting on his “successful” son to support him in his old age, refuses to believe that his wife is sick and insists that her doctors are killing her. She dies, and Jacques finds out that Yvan is not his real father. Besieged by memories of his childhood, the village and the past, Jacques wanders the streets at night, reliving the moments that set him apart from the rest….

Actor and scripter Jacques Nolot made his directorial debut with this French drama, winner of the Prix Georges Sadoul. The film written by Nolot, was initially going to be directed by Claire Denis, but when the project with Denis felt through, he took the direction. The film’s original title translate as the Back Country and makes reference to Nolot’s rural village where he grew up.

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Après dix-ans d’absence, Jacques Pruez, cinquante ans, célibataire, acteur de second rôle, retourne dans son village pour assister aux derniers jours de sa mère. Il habite pour la circonstance chez ses tantes Aimée et Jeofrette, renoue avec le passé, avec les ragots du village…
Yvan, son père, compte sur son fils qui a “réussi” pour assurer ses vieux jours. Il ne croit pas à la maladie de sa femme, pense que ce sont les médecins qui la tuent.
Après la mort de sa mère, Jacques apprendra un secret familial : son père n’est pas son vrai père. Prisonnier de son enfance, de son village, du passé, Jacques erre la nuit dans les rues, revit les moments qui ont marqué sa différence…

1.29GB | 1h 26mn | 950×570 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/56B468C924270B2/L_arriere-pays.1997.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/D3F519AAE7BA760/L’arriere_pays_(1998).eng.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Nolot – L’arrière pays aka Hinterland (1998) first appeared on Cinema of the World.