| Teenagers encountering their first gay experiences are destined to be frustrated, or so we discover in Come Undone (Presque Rien), directed by Sébastien Lifshitz, a film with many flashforwards to a time when the lead male actor tries to commit suicide (presumably the basis for the French title, which literally translates “almost nothing”). Chronologically, the story perhaps begins when Mathieu (played by Jérémie Elkaïm) at age seventeen went from his home in Paris for vacation at a French seaside resort near Nantes in Brittany with his family. Cruised by Cédric (played by Stéphane Rideau), another teenager, nothing happened. One year later, both Mathieu and Cédric return to the resort, but his time Mathieu succumbs to Cédric’s attention, carrying on more at night than in the daytime so that Mathieu can shield the unexpected affair from his family, including a younger sister, Sarah (played by Laetitia Legrix), who accompanies him to the beach each day. However, the affair is doomed from the start because the two boys represent different social classes. Cédric, whose birthfather abandoned him at an early age, once hustled, now makes waffles at an outdoor snack van, and otherwise has no employable skills, though he plans to learn about computers in the fall. Mathieu, who has been accepted as an architecture student at a university in Paris, lives in his family’s resort villa with Sarah, his hypochondriacal mother (played by Dominique Reymond), and her sister Annick (played by Marie Matheron), who holds the family together. Mathieu’s father remains at work in Paris, perhaps less disinterested in the idleness of a vacation than in the spectacle of his wife taking pills that worsen her imagined condition. Cédric, angered that Mathieu is trying to hide his relationship, shoves him in full view of his sister, but his family completely accepts his fling. Similarly, when Cédric ends up in the hospital after falling into a deep tidal pit, his stepfather meets Mathieu at the hospital and accepts without comment the fact that the two boys are in love. Nevertheless, summer cannot last forever. Cédric will have to return to his hometown Nantes, and Mathieu will presumably go his separate path as a university student in Paris. For a while, Mathieu contemplates living near Cédric and going to a provincial university instead, but the emotional conflict evidently is so considerable that Mathieu takes poison and then ends up having his stomach pumped and his personality psychoanalyzed until he can be released from the hospital in the expectation that he will not try suicide again. As the film ends, Mathieu is trying to establish a relationship with another boy, an earlier boyfriend of Cédric, but to no avail. Come Undone, thus, is a coming-of-age film that tells teenage parents that they should provide not just acceptance but hugs and some wisdom for their gay children or risk losing them forever. MH |