Film: Before I Forget
Release date: 29th March 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 108 mins
Director: Jacques Nolot
Starring: Jacques Nolot, Marc Rioufol, Jean-Paul Dubois, Jean-Bernard Pommier, Bastien d'Asnières
Genre: Drama
Studio: Peccadillo
Format: DVD
Country: France
Before I Forget is Jacques Nolot’s third film in a semi-autobiographical trilogy of films about gay life (Hinterland, 1998; Porn Theatre, 2002). The film stars Nolot himself, and was chosen by Cahiers du cinéma as one of the ten best films of 2007.
Before I Forget tells the story of Pierre (Nolot), once a vibrant young gigolo on the Paris scene, now a lonely and loveless old man coming to terms with his lost youth and waning attraction with a regretful placidity. Now nearing 60, and HIV positive for the past 24 years, his days are spent mourning the loss of his long time lover and benefactor, and reminiscing with acquaintances (mostly aging gigolos like himself) over past glories and lost friends. These introspective meanderings are punctuated with furtive, loveless sexual encounters with young men who charge for their services…
The film is an essay on the trauma and hopelessness of growing old in a culture where youth and beauty are everything. Pierre, once vibrant and necessary and with a wealthy sugar-daddy to finance him, is now adrift and facing old age alone with no prospects for a meaningful future and no options open to him. Hustling is all he knows but nobody wants to pay an old hustler, so he has now become one of the old, lonely men who used to pay him for sex in his youth.
The pace is almost unbearably slow, at times the camera fixed for a seeming eternity as Nolot stares vacantly at a blank page or simply into thin air as he contemplates yet another disappointment or regret. With a more intense performance from an actor of greater stature this painfully introspective approach may have paid off, but sadly I found Nolot so un-engaging that watching his expressionless face for minutes on end started to wonder if he even realises he’s in the film at all. His lacklustre delivery and hangdog expression inspire neither pity nor frustration but rather makes for an intensely passionless experience - I found myself utterly indifferent to his plight.
You feel that Nolot may have missed a trick by failing to see the funny side. With a subject matter so gloomy, it feels ripe for a vein of black humour to run through it, humanising the characters and drawing us into the story. As it is, Before I Forget is so deathly serious in its presentation of these sad characters and their grim, hopeless predicaments that we might as well be watching a funeral procession amble by. It’s been said that there is some black wit behind the telling of this story, but it was obviously far too black for this reviewer to catch it.
The sex scenes themselves, like the rest of the film, are cold and unfeeling, observed by a largely static and indifferent camera. Whether sodomy glimpsed through near total darkness or fellatio with a delivery boy on a barber’s chair, they are neither particularly shocking nor engaging, and the best that can be said of them is that you are left feeling mildly uncomfortable.
Technically, Before I Forget is not a poorly made film. The camera work, while unimaginative, is competent, and the washed out palette perfectly grounds us in the bleak, emotionally vacant story. Largely also, the film is well cast, with Nolot making a believable, if unexciting, lead. With more inspiring material, one feels that as a director he may be capable of much more, but this tale of lost youth, lost hope and lost love is so drab and downright depressing it’s a struggle even to make it to the end. Those who do make it that far incidentally have a perplexing and unrewarding last scene waiting for them, which aims for powerful but comes off as pretentious and slightly ridiculous.
Before I Forget is a morose, meandering story that creeps along at a snail’s pace, analysing in excruciating detail the minutiae of an empty life of a lonely, lost soul whose best days are far behind him, whose health is failing and whose only pleasure is in romanticising the past - wallowing in self-pity or in cringe-worthy, loveless sexual encounters for money. A drab, self-indulgent effort from a filmmaker capable of far better things. LOZ
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