Gerontophilia Directed by Bruce LaBruce
Gerontophilia
Directed by Bruce LaBruce
Starrings: Pier-Gabriel Lajoie, Walter Borden , Katie Boland, Yardly Kavanagh, Marie-Hélène Thibault, Shawn Campbell, Jean-Alexandre Létourneau, Dana Wright, Brian D. Wright, Nastassia Markiewicz, Patricia Wilson, Martin Stone, Adam Capriolo, Paul Stewart
Country: Canada
Year 2013
Review Author Roberto Matteucci
Click Here for Italian Version
“Shoplifting is revolutionary.”
Bruce LaBruce is a filmmaker of remarkable determination. He has created films of great depth, openly tackling complex themes, committing himself to promoting unconventional thinking.
At the 70th Venice Film Festival in 2013, he presented the funny and alternative film Gerontophilia.
The plot narrates the love between a young man and an eighty-year-old man.
It seems like a controversial topic, however, the story's shortcoming is the subject itself. Incredibly, the director lacks the courage and the audacity to tackle such a thorny issue as something normal. For the author, gerontophilia is merely a fetishism.
The handsome Canadian actor Pier-Gabriel Lajoie said in an interview:
"How would you define gerontophilia: a perversion, an illness, a fetish?”
"Fetish, for sure. But I am convinced, there is a genuine feeling between these two men. It was very touching to play Lake".
“But is it true that you asked Bruce about what fetishism was?”
"Oh yes, I had to do my research (laughs)". (1)
In the text, there is an attempt to address the natural love between an adolescent and an elderly person as a peculiarity, as a ‘fetishism’, rendering it unnatural.
In the book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud does not interpret gerontophilia as a mere fetish:
“What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person's sexuality (e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen). Such substitutes are with some justice likened to the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied.” (2)
An elderly retiree is neither a foot nor a hair. He is not even an inanimate object, since he breathes and, despite his age, he can love.
Once free from this distortion, the film is pleasant and cheerful, although the background is sad.
The eighteen-year-old Lake has an eccentric girlfriend, Desiree. She is a real fetishist. In one sequence, she gets excited by reciting the names of revolutionary women.
“I am the revolutionary and you are the saint” she tells Lake.
In fact, Lake is calm, peaceful, sweet, while she is out of her mind.
Lake is a simple boy, like many others, he plays with his skateboard, argues with his mother, something makes him strange.
Lake observes the sensuality of the senior volunteer assisting children cross the road at the pedestrian crossing.
He works as a lifeguard at a swimming pool. An elderly man collapses there. Lake dives in to save him, drags him out of the water and revives him with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Kissing the old man has aroused him, and two close young girls notice Lake's virile erection.
He lives alone with his mother, with whom he undoubtedly has a complex Oedipal relationship. He is jealous of her lover, and she scolds him for his indifference: “All day reading books. Aren’t they a bit outdated?”
He takes a job as a care assistant in a nursing home for the elderly.
Lake discovers paradise.
The attractive Lake, wearing a chain with a cross, accompanied by an evocative soundtrack washes the pressure ulcers and wrinkled bodies: "Someone has to do it". He becomes aware: he likes very old people and he pleasures them physically.
Mr. Peabody, an old-fashioned gay, a bit of a diva, with a theatrical background is hospitalized. He wears brightly colourful robe and has a frivolous attitude. Lake begins a deep friendship with him, marked by intense complicity. The boy falls in love with him.
If the subject has flaws, the screenplay is well-written, with detailed and brilliant characters. Lake is well delineated and his girlfriend completes him. Desiree is joyful, witty, and likeable. She accepts Lake's choice and defines its meaning: "You fight against nature itself." There is also a critique of the treatment of patients in nursing homes, subdued through an abundance of medicines.
The narrative is carefree, passionate, sentimental. Filmed with great devotion to the theme, Gerontophilia reaches a romantic tone when Lake takes Mr. Peabody's pills and enters a dream accompanied by heavenly music.
There is a constant soundtrack, a desire to distort the image, the use of slow motion, close-ups to enhance eroticism and unachievable grimaces to alter the young protagonist's body.
Unlike other films, the director avoids explicit sex, and this is a merit because the focus remains on the story.
Bruce La Bruce dares the impossible with the conviction of a one-sided love. Mr. Peabody is not infatuated with Lake, perhaps the looming sense of death prevents him from experiencing affection as a liberation. He is courted by other young people, triggering Lake's jealous reaction, who throws a cake at one of his admirers.
Lake's scenes with Desiree are delightful. She is magnificently crazy. The dialogue is sharp: the young man attacks the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, an idol of his girlfriend, who is supposed to meet her soon. Lake provokes her: if No Logo is against the logo, and now that No Logo has become a logo, should it be against itself?
The screenplay is significant. The film has the funniest quip heard at this year’s festival. Another dialogue between Lake and Desiree:
“I think I’m a fetishist.”
“Like leather?”
“Not that bad.”
Raffaella Serini, “Festival di Venezia 2013: «Io come Pattinson? Magari»”, www.vanityfair.it/show/cinema/13/08/29/festival-di-venezia-2013-gerontophilia-attore-pattinson, 29 agosto 2013. Translated by Review Author
Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, 123-246
If a teenage boy falls in love with an eighty-year-old man, is it a fetish? Or just ordinary love?"
The Canadian cult filmmaker Bruce LaBruce explores this very story in Gerontophilia, his controversial film screened at the 70th Venice Film Festival.