While recovering from a suicide attempt, Mathieu (Jérémie Elkaïm) recounts his summer affair with Cédric (Stéphane Rideau), a fling which contained moments of happiness and love, but was ultimately thwarted by the immaturity of the lovers, and their pre-adult crises of confidence.

Though poor Mathieu has to endure invasive physical examinations at a psychiatric hospital and interrogations from a smart but frightening therapist, it's the peripheral cast who seem to be heavily medicated, with girlfriends watching the boys frolic from afar and reacting only with the occasional fingering of their blouse, and a set of mothers and aunties who drink heaps and in one case, lie in bed and mumble incoherently.

Regular readers of my reviews on this website will know that I'm not a huge fan of elliptical art-house films with non-linear narratives and a tranquilsing lack of plot or action. Further, the tortured-gay-teen genre is becoming claustrophobically over-populated, and we really don't need too many more gay and lesbian film festivals chock full of movies about angsty homolescents trapped in either a) dreamy unrequited fixations on the captain of the rowing team or b) doomed misinterpreted affairs with straight buddies who are merely-experimenting. Presque Rien (Come Undone) fits neatly into both these categories, so, needless to say, it wasn't exactly a movie for me.

Having said that, Presque Rien explores late-adolescent sexuality gently and intelligently - this isn't Get Real. The film is shot in summer and several beach scenes and twighlight dune trysts are really beautiful looking. The actors too, are handsome and appealing. Though the scrambled story-order and lack of any backstory about why, say, the mother character is bedridden with a suicidal nervous breakdown and taking too many benzos skirts dangerously close to O Fantasma land, it's generally clear what's going on and indeed, peripheral story elements such as the bedridden mother add to the film's evocation of the amorphous threat that often lurks around the teenage gay years.

In short, there's an aesthetic poetry to Presque Rien but it comes at the expense of other important elements. I noticed a troubling simplicity to the metaphoric choices, such as trips to fairgrounds and rides on rickety roller-coasters prefiguring scenes of emotional conflict. Likewise, scenes of the boys playing with their foreskins in the bathroom, or even the film's explicit butt-fucking sex scene, didn't really take us beyond the point where the film already started: teens are fascinated and repelled by their bodies and their sexual needs and desires. for gay teens, these pressures can be acute.

Stanley Kubrick once said that watching a film was like taking part in a controlled dream. But this sort of aimless meditation is really like the kind of daydream you might have at work, while you stare out the window waiting for five o-clock. Presque Rien is no great thrill, but I think it's general sense of depressive ennui was best summed up by Philip French at The Observer who said that there is talent behind this movie but information that illuminates motivation is withheld or reluctantly provided, and the writer-director's gloomy world view seems to be summed up in his own name - Sébastien Lifshitz.

Related Reading:

Get Real
Prick Up Your Ears