Before I Forget.

"Before I Forget, the new feature by the French writer, actor and director Jacques Nolot, trains an unflinching spotlight on a species that, to judge from the movies, might as well be extinct: the aging homosexual." Dennis Lim in the New York Times: "Practically a lifetime removed from the buff heroes of the typical boy-meets-boy romances, Mr Nolot's Pierre is a 60ish writer and ex-gigolo who has been HIV-positive for 24 years.... 'I don't know if it's provocation, but there is a wicked pleasure to the film,' Mr Nolot said on a warm May evening at Le Select, the famous literary cafe in Montparnasse, not far from where he lives. 'I expose myself, and I show myself naked and sick. Here is how we are, how we live. People can take it or leave it.'"

Updated through 7/18.

"The catchwords for Before I Forget would seem to be direct, intimate, unsparing; yet, conversely, it also feels cavernous and, in its seeming brutal frankness, slippery and elusive," writes Michael Koresky for indieWIRE. The film "is enormously complex, a surveying of an entire life just past its midpoint via its practicalities and lost promises."

"This is the third semi-autobiographical feature made by Nolot, who collaborated on the scripts for several André Téchiné movies and may be best known to arthouse audiences as the husband who mysteriously disappears at the start of François Ozon's Under the Sand," notes Scott Foundas in the Voice. Here, "the central themes of the work - decay and loss - remain unwavering."

"Were Rainer Werner Fassbinder still with us, would his twilight films be anything like Jacques Nolot's?" wonders Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Roughly the same age as the late, great German wunderkind, Nolot displays little of Fassbinder's cinematic invention yet shares with him a tough, rigorously unsentimental eye for human intimacy and alienation, particularly when said eye is directed at his old queer self."

Earlier: Acquarello.

Updates: "Nolot's tough meditation on Pierre is elegant, tense and mournful, like Mahler's Third Symphony which accompanies Pierre's final crisis," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "A character study this spiritually obstinate lacks Téchiné's richness (Young Pierre discovered the life options Old Pierre rejects), but it no less than ranks with Scorsese's Raging Bull - especially when Pierre launches into an intellectual confession of his own stupidity: 'We see it in fervent hedonists whose orgasms serve to forget they are not happy.' This isn't gay self-hatred, but an authentic unnerving portrait; it dares to oppose cinema's false romanticism with ruthless honesty."

The AV Club's Noel Murray's take would be closer to Michael Guillén's (see comment): "Forty years ago, some members of the gay community took issue with the parade of self-pitying, self-hating queens in Mart Crowley's play (and subsequent film) The Boys in the Band, but is there really that much distance between Crowley's lonely New Yorkers and the network of Parisian hustlers and ex-hustlers in Jacques Nolot's more aesthetically respectable Before I Forget?"

Update, 7/18: "Mr Nolot's fictionalized self-portrait is proudly self-lacerating," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "While Pierre maintains an attitude of haughty independence, Mr Nolot goes out of his way to puncture any illusions he may have of being desirable to the boys he covets. As the camera studies Pierre from a distance in his dimly lighted apartment and slowly surveys the possessions on his shelves, you sense a man who has accepted the choices he has made."

"Nolot's portrait of senescence isn't about rainbow visions; his film, one of the most honest, courageous and witty of the year, instead looks at decay, insufferable loss and humiliation—all endured, particularly at the end as Mahler's Symphony No 3 blasts, with defiant, willful abjection," writes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York.

"This openness never becomes a clichéd tactic of plant-and-shoot voyeuristic stares," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "The film, like its protagonist, keeps a certain casual civility, a stance matched by the modestly neat cinematography by Josée Deshaies. Mr Nolot's restraint conveys the character's deeper weariness and barely diffused fears about holding on to who he is. His subtle performance rewards a close eye to tone and little shifts in line readings."

"Like the film, Pierre's surface is one of restraint, collection, and composure, but when he speaks Pierre does little but lament about a barely seen interior state of disarray, regretting past actions and missing old loves. This disconnect between exterior appearances and interior states makes Before I Forget one of the most unexpected surprises I've seen in some time," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"I hope - as I continually hope for that snowball's chance in Hell - that Before I Forget will find its way to movie lovers stateside, and not just the portion of moviegoers who would generally check out what are so euphemistically and blithely called 'gay-themed' pictures," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Before I Forget is, in the broad sense, 'gay-themed.' But it's also one of the loveliest, most direct and most devastating pictures about aging that I've ever seen."

"Only in retrospect is the simplicity and craft of Nolot's storytelling and visual style fully apparent," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Pierre is certainly prone to self-pity, including blithe talk about suicide. However, he maintains his dignity to the end, despite the difficulties his life has thrown at him and his masochistic tendencies that extend outside the bedroom. Nolot makes no pretense of judging his alter ego, and he seems to expect the same from his audience."

"[O]ne of the best things about Before I Forget, which was selected as one of last year's ten best films by Cahiers du Cinema [is that] it's the uncompromising work of an artist making a film for himself, rather than targeting a demographic," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at July 17, 2008 4:58 AM