Presque Rien (Cert 18)

by ALEXANDER WALKER, Evening Standard

This small, but imperfectly formed French film about a homosexual coming-out during vacation on the sea coast through a summer (in nostalgic flashback) and winter (in contemporary melancholy) shows how astonishingly liberal-minded the families in it are.

Not a tear, hardly a grumble, more blessing than abuse is the reaction when reticent, studious Mathieu (Jèrèmie Elk-aim) tells his mother, aunt and sister that he's sleeping with sturdy, workingclass Cèdric (Stèphane Rideau) and intends to throw up his college career and live with a pet cat and his lover.

Cèdric's father is also a model of paternal understanding. Such familial good sense is maybe admirable, but also quite unbelievable.

It's a tribute to Sèbastien Lifshitz's film that, despite some very confusing editing meant to introduce a Proustian element into events, it otherwise sketches a very credible on-off-on-again relationship between the lads, catching the insecurities, hinting at the infidelities that come with their atfirst covert and then increasingly bold relationship.

"Have you always been gay?" one asks the other. "I'm not sure I am," is the faltering reply. Truth lies in such simple exchanges.

The film was part of the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Surely it's unhelpful to promote this ghetto event any longer, now that uncloseted homosexuality is commonplace even in mainline movies.

Presque Rien, however, has got an 18 certificate because of a few onanistic shots inserted, Lifshitz claims, "to indicate that sex would be shown frontally, without beating about the bush". Not, perhaps, elegantly expressed, but one takes his point.

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