Normalizing Sexuality

CÔte D'Azur

Directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau

Lord of War

Directed by Andrew Niccol

French filmmaking team Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau have an agenda: normalizing sexuality. Their new movie Côte d'Azur, about a contemporary French family where mom, dad, daughter and son's sexual secrets are all revealed as the family summers on the Riviera, is both fascinating and surprising for its implicit critique of the reticence-that is, the dirtiness-of traditional hetero sex-farce.

In their sun-bright Côte D'Azur refuge, sexual tolerance blossoms. It is ubiquitous, natural and fluid. The mother, Beatrix (Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi), loves the father, Marc (Gilbert Melki), although she carries on an affair with a neighbor. The son, Charly (Romain Torres), arouses suspicion about his sexuality when he invites a male friend on the vacation, and daughter Laura (Sabrina Seyvecou) leaves the family cocoon for her own independent (obviously erotic) respite in Portugal with a macho leather-clad biker. Each family member is active and appetitive-a fact for which Ducastel and Martineau are neither coy nor apologetic.

This sexual candor comes out of an upfront interest in proclaiming and defending (yes, mainstreaming) gay sexuality that was apparent in Ducastel-Martineau's first feature, the 1997 ACT-UP movie musical Jeanne and the Perfect Guy. Since that debut, Ducastel-Martineau have claimed the forefront of sexually liberated, political cinema. Unlike such outré provocateurs as Catherine Breillat and Jean-Claude Brisseau, Ducastel-Martineau offer social observation with a comic emphasis on the humanity shared by disparate lovers. Their exuberant 2000 film Adventures of Felix displayed an open-hearted embrace of romantic desire. It exposed racial and sexual bias among most other filmmakers who never account for non-white or gay experience. HIV-infected French-Algerian Felix (Sami Bouajila) was sensitive to the emotional histories of everyone he met on his road trip, gay or straight. His exposure to their lives helped him understand his own longings, his desperate search for an identity and a pedigree.

In their next film, My Life on Ice, Ducastel-Martineau made a video account of a teenager's (Johnny Tavares) moral awakening through a video-diary about himself, his family and friends. It was the finest feature of 2003, yet in the U.S., it went straight to DVD. Now, returning to film, Duscastel-Martineau purposely revamp both the politics and esthetics of cinema tradition. Fans of such romantic flicks as When Harry Met Sally, Chasing Amy, Before Sunset and even 2046 ought to see Côte d'Azur and learn from it.

Côte d'Azur stands out as a benign yet bold corrective. Ducastel-Martineau dare take Eric Rohmer as their key model and scrutinized ideal. Rohmer, the great post?New Wave philosopher, dramatized romance in such early 70s hits as My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee in order to shrewdly analyze morality and faith. A descendant of Molière, Corneille, Racine and Marivaux, Rohmer originated a film genre devoted to the highly verbose articulation of romantic values. That's why the vacationing family in Côte d'Azur talk so much. They're very French in Rohmer's voluble way, but they're even more sensual-less refined-than Rohmer's archetypes. Their criss-crossed assignations and emotional deceptions are a modern version of the feints and close-calls of classical French farce. Surely, the vibrant naturalism and vivid atmosphere of Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach and A Summer Tale are what inspire the sparkling beaches and viney stone estate of Côte d'Azur. (Cinematographer Nestor Almendros made Pauline at the Beach, the most beautiful comedy ever shot in color. Ducastel-Martineau can't surpass that, but their humane openness extends Rohmer's intellectual vision.)

The comic math Molière, Feydeau and Rohmer wouldn't dare (about possibly gay characters) breaks cinema's heterosexual mold. Ducastel-Martineau divide and multiply spiritual confidences. By openly exploring sexual roles, they critique the political assumptions people take for granted. Their vacationing family (a stand-in for society) liberate themselves from typical models of social behavior. Young Charly resembles a presexual androgyne as pale and long-haired as an Aubrey Beardsley nymph-but he's straight, even though everyone else is confused about him. Charly remains healthily open, which means he is surprised by his parents' sexual confusion. The tolerant, older-generation mother is ironically caught up in maintaining propriety while the father, who encounters an old male flame, internalizes the fear of AIDS-era risk.

Instead of making a romantic comedy that turns out as one expects, Ducastel-Martineau encourage their characters to fulfill their best idiosyncratic instincts. The father reunites with his ex-lover, the mother expands her emotions even further, the son learns acceptance and the daughter sustains her sense of freedom. Each comic character is open, decent, kindly. Ducastel-Martineau intentionally avoid the French bourgeois attitudes and possessiveness that underlie Rohmer's splendid hetero art. "It's wrong to want things to be square, clean-cut, orderly," the father finally realizes. "Let nature have its way [through] a little imagination."

During an interview with Ducastel-Martineau, I asked about their utopian vision and Martineau specified: "Utopia is never something you achieve. It's something you strive toward." That's their agenda. And it's laudable. Most filmmakers don't realize they have agendas; they just blindly serve an ideology that reinforces the status quo. In Côte d'Azur, Ducastel-Martineau celebrate the possibilities of human emotion. Its best moment shows the mother and father debating their standards-thinking past them-as dawn rises. Less good is a song-and-dance finale. Martineau told HX magazine that they got the idea from Takeshi Kitano's marvelous folk-pop climax for Zatoichi, yet it is unfortunately clumsy. (There's more joie de vivre in the Hair parody that ends The 40-Year-Old Virgin.) Still, Côte d'Azur remains a romantic comedy that dreams of a better world; it stands out for resolving society's dirty-minded restrictions through the pure force of whim.

Brecht would retch at the flamboyant misuse of politics and drama in Lord of War. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol (The Truman Show, Simone) it is predictably glib, fatuously "clever." Niccol thinks he's telling hard truths about contemporary moral corruption by exploring a young American (Nicolas Cage, spawn of Hollywood's high-concept ethos) involved in international arms dealing. Spewing smart-ass observations every other minute ("Forget gang wars, the real money is in actual wars between countries," "I'm an equal opportunity merchant of death"), Niccol inadvertantly reveals a mind-his own-obviously raised on graphic novels. He is so pleased with own grim brilliance (and his multimillion-dollar facility for staging scenes of luxury and violence) that he can't make his sincerity stick.

Anyone who writes dialogue like "I'm a one man genocide" or "I never sold to Osama Bin Laden-not on any moral grounds. Back then he was bouncing checks" is too gaudy and dishonest to portray an individual's moral crisis, much less the world's. Niccol out-ventures David Fincher, imitating the superfluity of Scorsese's technique in GoodFellas and Coppola's in Apocalypse Now to make this nihilistic extravaganza, a modern-day Heart of Darkness.

But Lord of War raises a problem more troubling than unsolvable global politics: How do we assimilate our sadness or turn our common sense of tragedy (seeing cities sink, religions fail, children killed) without turning it into slick cynicism? Lord of War won't convince you that the world's a mean place; it will just leave you more cynical about it.