Grande École

The DVD extras on this Region 1 edition of the film are considerably more comprehensive than the barebones Region 2 release (which is reviewed here). They include interviews and voiceovers with Director Robert Salis and his cast, who offer persuasive arguments as to why Grande École is neither pornographic, nor a film about homosexuality per se.

The film contains numerous scenes that depict extended heterosexual lovemaking; same sex, make-out sessions in a car; male frontal nudity and other intimacies in a boudoir; bare-butt-in-the-gym showers; sexually charged water polo; sexually coy bedside conversations; and, dancing on the water's surface at an indoor pool, the shimmering reflection of a group of slim, effeminately long-legged young men in Speedos.

The movie's transgressive thesis is that desire is independent of gender or sexual orientation, and that erotic impulse lies beyond the rigid definitions of society's normative boundaries.

We see how the actors rehearsed in a cramped warehouse the various scenes that build dramatic tension. These are scenes concerned with the fact Paul (Gregori Baquet) has becomes less committed to his unstable relationship with Agnès (Alice Taglioni), his erstwhile girlfriend, who is unaware of Paul's deepening relationship with Mécir, his beur working-class lover. Naively competing with her perceived rival, the handsome scion of privilege, Louis-Arnault (Jocelyn Quivrin), she insists on a prophylactic contest, one bound to remind viewers of plot elements in Stephen Fears' Liaisons Dangereuses (1988) - if Agnès lands the manipulative, sexually ambivalent, snob in the sack first, Paul must agree to discontinue his nascent self-instruction in homosexual and/or bisexual identity formation.

Taglioni's discussion of these and other scenes sheds light on the difficulties of quintessentially stage material. Quivrin also goes into some detail on his multi-year association with the project. Baquet, meanwhile, clowns around, making light of the challenges facing a straight actor playing a bisexual role that calls for explicit sexual scenes. He looks a bit long in tooth for the part, though, and the peroxide hair is a bit silly, especially considering they had trouble preserving the exact same artificial tint throughout the shoot.

The Deleted Scenes show what did not make it past the cutting room. This is small beer. It is clear that France 2 and the other co-production partners did not censor any important material. The Festivals segment, all of which took place in NY, more or less comprises a generic Q&A segment after the screening of the film, the value of which is debatable.

The storyline evokes James Ivory's Maurice (1987) and a defining kissing scene between Paul and Mécir clearly owes much to the mirror room sequence in Welles' The Lady From Shanghai (1947) so it is interesting to hear the director and actors talk about which actors - Helmut Berger, for instance - and other movies that influenced this film.

Salis suggests, in the nearly one-hour The Making of Grande École, that the fluidity that drives the film can also be applied to the narrative itself. For example, the transformation of Paul's role from protector to protected, suggests what might have ensued if Mécir had been the École Normale Supérieure matriculant, perhaps as a foreign exchange student from an oil-rich country, and Paul the lowly manual laborer. In fact, Salis significantly amped up the importance of the Mécir role, from its supportive function in the original play by Jean-Marie Besset upon which the movie is based, while preserving intact other aspects of the text.

There is some discussion regarding the main protagonists' unusual articulateness, for among the surviving leitmotifs and peculiarities is how they pedantically express themselves in sophomoric argument. Its reverse analogue is their stylised carnality.

What differentiates them from Mécir, his mother or the foreman boss character is their ability to articulate a formal analytical vocabulary and its attendant syntactical complexities. In addition, their ability to invoke a specialised range of cultural touchstones (Michel Foucault, Cocteau, Chateubriand, et. al.) further illustrates all the usual differentiatiors that typify bright grad students from the less privileged, or those less skilled in emulating passed-down, encoded modes of communication. Where the two sides sometimes meet as equals is of course, in bed.

The main protagonists' often self-important conversations - excepting Paul, for the most part, and Mécir - correspond to an emotional shallowness and socio-philosophic immaturity that betrays their youth and stands in vivid contrast to the hoped-for authenticity when having sex. But it is the touchable/untouchable Mécir who ends up serving, along with his brother (Jamal Hadir) as the catalysts in the sudden unraveling of the plot, which exposes, among other things, Louis-Arnault's near complete hypocrisy.

Mécir is aware of his "inferior" social position. But this realisation does not seem to phase him. At one point, he tells Paul that their sexual encounters do not imply he is gay - the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality to him are meaningless. It does not matter to Mécir as long as desire, and eventually love, stir and blossom within him.

If Besset himself does not necessarily agree with this vision of bisexual desire, as he has indicated in interviews, it is perhaps that his play was written in the Eighties, when the social stigma associated with homosexuality was still extremely pronounced, a position that endures rather less virulently today.

Discrimination can have multiple facets, including the discrimination against one's own desires; but, as Joseph A Massad has controversially argued in Desiring Arabs, the categories gay and lesbian are not universal in all cultures, despite what Western gay activists may claim. George Bataille's anti-bourgeois slogan, perversion is the norm, is pleasingly mentioned somewhere in the slew of DVD goodies: as argued not unconvincingly by Salis, ostensibly forbidden erotic territories should be explored without shame, if one feels so driven.

But the central notion of the film, that carnal desire and gender are mutually independent, will probably strike most straight viewers, perhaps especially those who once found themselves engaged in some of those confusing juvenile dalliances, as, no doubt, unequivocally preposterous - despite the ease of providing supportive public-private examples, such as the type of homosexual behavior commonly found in male prison populations.

An interesting film, and a rather absorbing, for a change, set of extras. In particular, the extended The Making of Grande École, which has the feel of a literate documentary that successfully captures the ongoing production process of a creative work.