“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. 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. He faces the obligations and mortifications of his daily life with caustic wit and an air of dignified resignation. There are social calls and psychotherapy sessions, as well as sleepless nights and a regimen of pills. And even though his body can’t always keep up, there is quite a bit of sex: half-hearted encounters with young hustlers, more out of habit than desire.
“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.”
“Before I Forget,” which had its premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes last year and opens in New York on Friday, is the final installment in a trilogy of films, all concerned with loss and all starring Mr. Nolot, that he calls “partly autobiographical.” His alter ego in “L’Arrière Pays” (1998) travels to his provincial hometown to see his dying mother. “Porn Theater” (2002), a remake of a short of Mr. Nolot’s that starred his adopted son, who died with AIDS, depicts the ritualized interactions among the patrons at a movie house. “There are codes of conduct in these places, which I’ve observed myself,” he said. “There’s a lot of respect and love, even in loneliness and frustration.”
With “Before I Forget,” a memento mori in the form of a deadpan, dry-eyed comedy, Mr. Nolot, who turns 65 next month, draws even more directly from his life — and from the looming prospect of his death. “The character is not very far from myself,” he acknowledged. In referring to Pierre, he switched between the first and third person. Partly for budgetary reasons, he filmed in his own apartment. Pierre’s car is Mr. Nolot’s, as are, he noted impishly, the condoms and lubricant used in one of the sex scenes.
“When you see Jacques’s films, you recognize him,” said the director François Ozon, a friend of Mr. Nolot’s who cast him as Charlotte Rampling’s lover in “Under the Sand.” “Most of all you recognize his dark humor. He’s able to find amusement in himself. He talks of himself as an old queen with all these problems, and he’s very funny, but there is a despair inside.”
Mr. Nolot is still a striking, dapper presence, with his thin mustache and pomaded hair. But in “Before I Forget” he exposes his flaccid, mottled flesh and films himself naked in unflattering profile. “This is a man who used to be paid for his handsome young body,” he said. “I thought it was important to show his aging body.”
He is aware that this cinema of carnal embarrassment and corporeal ruin has no place amid the youth-obsessed body consciousness of mainstream gay culture. “The gay community doesn’t appreciate it because it sees itself as always irresistible,” he said. “I have nothing to do with the typical gay cinema. In fact I’m against it. I choose not to comfort the spectator.” (John Waters, writing in Artforum, called “Before I Forget” “the best feel-bad gay movie ever made.”)
The bitterest truth of “Before I Forget” is that with age comes a reversal of roles. Pierre and his friends, once beautiful kept men, are now the ones paying for sex: the hustlers have become the johns. Mr. Nolot depicts this fading generation of Parisian gay men not just as a subculture but as a veritable economy, with its own complex negotiations and transactions. Almost every conversation centers on money: the cost of rent boys and shrinks and, crucially, the inheritance that awaits when benefactors die.
“Jacques is very open about money,” Mr. Ozon said with a laugh. “He says it has to do with being a gigolo when he was young and always dealing with money.” Some details from that period of Mr. Nolot’s life — leaving his village in southwestern France, turning tricks as a naïve newcomer to Paris — can be found in “J’embrasse Pas” (“I Don’t Kiss”), a 1991 film with a screenplay by Mr. Nolot and direction by André Téchiné. (Mr. Nolot has had small roles in many of Mr. Téchiné’s films, most recently last year in “The Witnesses.”)
In “Before I Forget” Pierre reminisces about the days when he “used to go cruising with Roland Barthes,” the philosopher who was a lover of Mr. Nolot’s and who died in 1980. (Mr. Nolot was 20 when they met; Barthes was nearly 50.) “You can imagine we weren’t exactly talking semiotics when we were together,” Mr. Nolot said.
While writing the film, details of his youth came back to him, he added, among them Barthes’s memorable characterization of him as “a whore in the semantic sense.” “It’s amazing when things come back to you decades later,” he said. “That’s the magic of writing.”
Writing, for Mr. Nolot, is a primal act of self-preservation. “Malaise is a driving force,” he said. “The difficulty of living triggered the necessity of writing.” He composed his first play, he said, “on the verge of suicide.” “Before I Forget,” the threat of oblivion implicit in its title, originated under similarly urgent conditions. “I had no choice but to make this film,” he said. “I wrote it by talking into a recorder for five Sundays.”
It is a sign of his relative peace of mind that Mr. Nolot, for now, is not working on anything new.
“I feel too well,” he said. “Why write when one feels well?”
Da The New York Times, 12 Luglio 2008
