A Constant Becoming

A Constant Becoming

André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds ends in a swirling Eden, with a 360-degree pan around a serene wooded meadow in the south of France. At first, the landscape is empty of human life, but as the pan completes itself, we pick up our protagonists, teenagers François, Maïté, and Serge. As we’ve come to realize over the course of the film, all three are queer in their own way: François is drawn romantically to girls but sexually to boys; Maïté, for now, is seemingly uninterested in the whole mess of desire; and Serge is attracted to both men and women but resistant to meaningful bonds. The film takes place at the start of the 1960s, and the sociopolitical tensions of the Algerian War have only intensified the roiling emotions within these innocents. The three of them, having just experienced the agony and ecstasy of youthful desire during an afternoon swim, are about to head back into an ever-spinning world, identities unresolved. The mixture of calm and agitation in this climactic camera move is a crystalline summation of not just this particular film but of Téchiné’s entire body of work, which spans fifty years and, to our great fortune, is still growing.

By the time Téchiné arrived at his extraordinary 1990s three-punch of My Favorite Season, Wild Reeds, and Thieves, he was already in his fifties. Raised in southwestern France, he was a cinephile from adolescence and at the age of nineteen moved to Paris to pursue a film career. When his application to film school was rejected, he began writing criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, eventually finding his way to feature filmmaking in 1969 by way of crew positions on experimental and independent projects. The arc of the next couple of decades would primarily be that of an artist abandoning influence, as the stylized and mannered work of the 1970s—inspired by heroes as varied as Brecht and Bergman, Rivette and Faulkner—gave way to the more character-driven, psychologically rich, genre-defying work of the 1980s, including Hotel America, Rendez-vous, and Scene of the Crime.

It was during these middle years that Téchiné, in leaving behind conventional notions of plot and inherited style, became a great artist, embracing a novelistic density so organic and inherent to its characters that it seemed to emerge directly from observation, fully formed. As he entered the 1990s, he began confidently combining breezy humanism—captured by the fiercely observant, nonjudgmental gaze of his camera—with introspective chamber drama. And at the center of his new universe were characters in a constant state of becoming, not yet settled into sexual or social identities, at once liberated and tormented by the seemingly infinite possibilities of human desire.

My own first encounters with the films of André Téchiné came via my weekly browsing of the Tower Records at Lincoln Center, as well as a long-forgotten video store sandwiched between Hell’s Kitchen and Midtown, during my one year as a New York City resident, from 2002 to 2003. Fresh out of the University of South Carolina, theater degree in tow, I’d spent the summer before performing Shakespeare at the Utah Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City. When I moved to New York, I sealed myself off into my 6x6 bedroom, watching one strange cinematic miracle after another on my bulky Dell laptop. After a steady ten-year diet of action films, American independents, and AFI 100 Classics, the novelistic quality of Téchiné’s narratives, as well as the open sexuality of his characters, thrusted me into a strange new world of contradictions, a far cry from both my Biblical upbringing in the South and the mostly binary narratives of gay indies.

Wild Reeds

Despite having a boyfriend, my experience of sexual identity, from elementary school up through college, had been vast and fluid, and at odds with the black-and-white views embedded in South Carolina in the 1990s. Outside of Gregg Araki, with whom I was intrigued but not yet ready to fully engage, I had rarely seen this fluidity portrayed as convincingly as it was in Wild Reeds. The film, inspired by Téchiné’s own upbringing, serves as an impressionistic portrait of the sensual lives of teenagers in the southwest of France. As the Algerian War reaches a fever pitch, boarding school student François is preoccupied with negotiating his romantic feelings for Maïté, the communist daughter of his teacher, and his sexual feelings for the lower-class Serge, the son of a local farmer. With the ingredients in place for a wrenching, fatalistic melodrama about conflicted passions, one would expect things to end in turmoil and tragedy. And yet, to this Southern Baptist preacher’s kid nervously involved with a boy for the first time, it was a shock to discover that a late-night scene of intense lovemaking between François and Serge gives way not to ridicule but to a new understanding. These characters’ encounters and communications did not lead to the exhibitions of shame I would have expected but to a slack-jawed acceptance of the fact that the molecules between us can shift so unexpectedly.

This revelation—that sex between men did not have to result in humiliation or resentment—made that first DVD viewing of Wild Reeds life-altering. I couldn’t have known that, seven years later, I would be making my own film about the emotional struggles of three teenagers. The Wise Kids (2011), which takes place in the suburban South Carolina of my youth, was influenced by the anxious grace and shifting winds of Wild Reeds.

While that film served as an international breakthrough for Téchiné, the twenty-first-century output of the now seventy-six-year-old Téchiné has been largely overlooked and underrated by both critics and audiences. His work continues to explore complicated matters of the heart but in an increasingly kinetic, handheld style, with the director looking to the past and the present, and to the headlines, for story material. With The Witnesses, an ensemble drama set during the early years of the AIDS crisis, there was the usual useless “return to form” chatter (bizarre, considering the movie followed 2004’s remarkable Changing Times), but, as with almost all of his films, it became almost instantly undervalued.

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