Radical director Patrice Chéreau was a triple threat who earned praise and controversy with his risky plays, operas and films. In its staunch portrayal of a French teenager’s homosexual awakening, “The Wounded Man” is one of his most confrontational works.
The film, which premiered at Cannes in 1983 and was released in the United States two years later, has a mostly underground reputation (uncredited in Chéreau’s 2013 DailyExpertNews obituary), which is why its current revival in Anthology Film Archives some kind of event.
Set in a boring provincial town in France that resembles a huge public toilet at the end of the film, “The Wounded Man” signals his vanguard ambitions from the start. The first frontal shot of a threadbare hausfrau packing a suitcase could have been lifted from “Jeanne Dielman”; a blast from avant-garde jazz artist Albert Ayler’s saxophone announces that Henri (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and his family are racing to a bus to the train station from where his younger sister will be leaving for her college vacation.
Henri leaves his family in the waiting room and starts cruising stealthily in the busy terminal without knowing exactly what he wants. Its characteristic movement is staring, flinching, running and returning. Running around like a mouse in a maze, he catches the attention of Bosmans, a well-dressed middle-aged masochist (Roland Bertin) who may be a doctor, and Jean, a charismatic rough neck (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) who pleases Bosmans by giving him up in a toilet cubicle and seemingly pimps for the station’s plentiful young con artists.
Bosmans and Henri are both obsessed with Jean, although Bosmans also has a yen for Henri. Given the roughness and tumbling – both physical and psychological – they absorb, one of them could be the title character. All three are governed by impulse, but only Bosmans is a little introspective: “There are things you have to do to regret later,” he explains. Jean uses Henri as bait in a horrible scene. He also brings him home to his long-suffering girlfriend (Lisa Kreuzer), after which Henri steals Jean’s outfit and takes up residence in the station.
According to a profile of Chéreau published in DailyExpertNews before the film’s US release, “The Wounded Man” was inspired by Jean Genet’s quasi-autobiographical book “The Thief’s Journal”. The obsessive characters, abrupt transitions, abstract narration and hypernaturalistic attention to detail are also reminiscent of the French nouvelle novels by Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The film is both stylized and visceral. “The Wounded Man” has almost as much nudity (all male) and explicit sex as “Intimacy,” Chéreau’s “kitchen sink” riff on the anonymous pairing from “Last Tango in Paris.” Still, the careful framing of frenzied activity gives the film a certain detachment. (The Janet Maslin’s Times review found it “solemn to a fault” and consequently “laced with a certain amount of unintentional comedy”.)
A few years after the AIDS epidemic, “The Wounded Man” came under criticism for both its violence and its haunted vision of gay love. Henri’s approach-avoidance ballet inevitably culminates in a dance of death. Chéreau’s willingness to fathom that abyss mirrors that of his protagonist.
The wounded
January 5-12, Anthology Film Archives, Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org.
