On the surface of things, writer/director Jérôme Reybaud’s haunting debut (or the much more poetic Jours de France in his native tongue) has a rather contemporary conceit.
A queer highlight of this year’s , we watch Pierre (Pascal Cervo) leave his lover Paul (Arthur Igual) in the middle of the night, hopping in their Alfa Romeo and putting Paris behind him. Guided by Grindr hookups and mobile numbers written on the toilet walls of roadside beats, he sets out on a voyage across France.
For all Reybaud’s use of the ubiquitous GPS app - something he acknowledges no film about gay men today can avoid - the movie has an older soul.
Meeting unusual men and women along the way, they function almost as if oracles bearing wisdom, like a mythical odyssey. I put it to Reybaud that Paul using Pierre’s Grindr presence to try and track down his fleeing lover made me think of Theseus using string to navigate his way back out of the labyrinth.
“So when someone talks about The Odyssey and mythology, it seems like big words,” Reybaud says over the phone from Paris, “but in fact for me the real mythology is in the little details. It’s like the woods and the world are alive.”
He continues: “Pierre, through this journey in France, tries to listen to the sounds of the world. He can maybe sense the presence of the roots of the trees. What I love about mythology in general is the fact that humans can see actual gods in a flower.”
Source: Supplied by Danyal Syed
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Knowing and adoring our physical place in the world is why Reybaud says he isn’t a big fan of Grindr personally, though he hopes – and I agree – that the film does not judge this meet-up medium. “I don’t think movies should tell the opinion of the director, so I don’t judge Grindr at all, but personally I think it’s the ugliest way to connect because I am more of the old-fashioned gay. I need the places, the streets or the banks because for me the magic and beauty of a meeting, an encounter with a stranger, goes with the geography.”
Reybaud grew up in Cannes, home of the famous film festival nestled on the on the Côte d'Azur, so it’s no wonder he insists on beauty when falling for a lover or simply cruising for sex. “That’s how I discovered my sexuality back in the 80s. It was on the Croisette or in woods or by the sea and you spend so much time there just waiting, waiting, waiting that you must feel the geography and the presence of the world between the men. Grindr is just like a menu of qualities, they must speak through the picture and it’s like a product. When you see a man in the world, he does not advertise. He is there, and there is desire or there is not.”
There’s actually very little in the way of explicit sex in 4 Days in France, unlike, say Alain Guiraudie’s similarly spirited Stranger by the Lake, but the film is loaded with a lustful longing tinged with dislocated loneliness that’s quite intoxicating.
An early sensuous encounter with an angular-faced youth plays with what Reybaud notes is almost a cliché for young gay men, the desire to run away from their rural home and head to the capital. As the young man says, “I’d love to see Paris,” and Pierre retorts, “Paris would love to see you too.”
Source: Supplied by Danyal Syed
It is at its most erotic in an intriguing encounter with a heterosexual car salesman in a shabby motel, where paper-thin walls allow for mutual pleasure without transgressing the boundaries of their understanding of their sexual identity.
“I went to that shit hotel once and I was traumatised by the thinness of the walls, because you can hear everything the other one is making and it’s terrible for me,” Reybaud chuckles. “But it gave me the solution for the best way to create an honest sexual and human connection between a homosexual and a heterosexual without fulfilling my own director’s fantasy of the beautiful heterosexual man that will just have sex with you in five minutes,” he says. “It is absolutely ugly landscape, but in its ugliness I think there can be a certain kind of beauty and it’s the same in this loneliness. There can be a kind of beauty in that too and I tried to put that in the scene between those two men.”
Written specifically for Cervo – and, indeed, for most of the actors assembled here – he is uniquely suited for the role or Pierre, Reybaud argues. “I saw him in his first movie, Catherine Corsini’s Les Amoureux (Lovers, 1994), when he was 17 years old and every movie since. He has a quality of absence, of not being there and being there at the same time. He’s very subtle, and so the character was built with his voice and his way of talking and his way of walking. He walks like nobody else.”
This almost invisibility allowed Reybaud to direct audiences in feeling the presence of that grand countryside. A landscape that also feels unmoored, as one hotel owner in a ghost town that claims to be at the heart of the country mourns, “France has lost its centre.”
Reybaud says that this idea is key to 4 Days in France. “What is a country? What is a border? What defines France or any country? So yeah, geography is the main character in the movie, in fact.”
