Un enfant dans la foule

Of course the subject matter of this film was not a success as it deals with a subject most people want to ignore, and that is the sexuality between adults and young teenagers, in this case of a boy. The film seduces by its Bresson attempt at neutrality, but in my opinion it is not neutral as no work of cinematic art can be neutral. As in Bresson's ' Mouchette ' and ' Au Hasard Balthazar' we see two innocent beings, one a donkey, the other a young girl abused by others and finding either total oblivion or something else beyond death. Bresson is in no way neutral, and those who destroy others he sees as beyond redemption, or maybe worse, they have the hell of feeling nothing at all. Comparing Gerard Blain's depiction of homosexuality, for that is what it is, has the surface of neutrality as there is no real open condemnation. Blain made a previous film called ' Les Amis ' and it follows a similar path of older man and much younger man. It ends of course badly for the older man, and then comes this pitiful tale of an even younger youth's search for affection and love. I believe Jean-Claude Brialy was right in saying Blain was abused as a child/youth and that he hated homosexuals. This neutrality in both films is a cover for hatred, and in no way does it compare to Bresson and his quiet disgust at a whole world that abuses and destroys innocence. His neutrality is full of pain whereas in Blain it is a neutrality full of unstated revenge against another way of loving, and that is homosexuality. He prefers only to show the abuse and the abusers, a minority within a minority, alien to his own orientation. A nasty film and ' neutrally ' meant to be.

The story is only partly autobiographical according to the director, but it seems to have been true in all its important elements, as at least the following applies to both Gérard Blain and his creation Paul: a lonely boy, whose father had abandoned the family years before, and who gets on badly with his mother and only sibling (an elder sister), leaves school prematurely and finds himself, aged thirteen and a half in the summer of 1944, half-living on the streets of Paris; good-looking, he is soon embroiled in a series of short affairs with adults of both sexes until he receives an offer to be in a film. This is surely enough true story to explain the film's extraordinary emotional authenticity.

The historical setting of the liberation of Paris provides a fortuitously excellent dramatic background to what one might expect from the foregoing to be a steamily sensational story, but is instead something much greater: a heart-wrenching story of an eminently lovable boy's unsuccessful quest for love, told with unfailing tenderness and honesty.

I know of no other film which depicts nearly so well the emotional longings of the pubescent boy who for one reason or another is not getting the love he needs. Naturally satisfying his new sexual longings will become wrapped up in his quest for love, and it is only sound good sense that, allowed the freedom afforded to Paul by an uninterested family and the chaos of war, he will seek for love the way Paul does. Honest portrayal of this has become virtually impossible since the film was made due to the new hysteria surrounding pubescent sex. This doubtless explains why it is not receiving the acclaim it deserves, even though Blain leaves the sex underpinning some of Paul's emotional involvements to be inferred. Important truths are daringly exposed that are generally forgotten or misunderstood. The pubescent boy's new capacity for bonding with adults through sexual intimacy has historically often been his most natural and powerful means of survival until he can compete as an adult, and why disdain such a weapon? That the film is entirely non-judgmental about all involved in this is another indication of its obstinate honesty in the face of popular prejudice.

An associated modern fiction the film refuses to indulge is that a boy like Paul and his various male special friends must be gay. Sexual orientation is simply not an issue in the film just as it generally has not been for boys of thirteen who have not been indoctrinated otherwise (as all are today). Like most men attracted to adolescent boys in the not-so-very-old days before this form of love was singled out for savage suppression, the men attracted to Paul are, excepting a presumably still unmarried young man, shown to be genuinely devoted to their wives and children, whose photos they show him without sense of conflict, and not therefore gay either.

The story is tragic because Paul's quest for love is so relentlessly and undeservedly unsuccessful. Cursed with a brutally unfeeling mother who is the only real villain in the story, some of the most affecting scenes concern his touching and vain attempts to win her affection. The vicissitudes of war see off his German and American soldier lovers. An affectionate married teacher ends their liaison by frankly admitting circumstances don't allow him to give him the love he needs. The pathos of all this is greatly increased by Paul's tender disposition. Never does he react with anything but understanding to repeated rejection, nor does bitter experience diminish his own tenderness, most hauntingly captured when he alone does not join the baying crowd taunting a woman stripped naked and shaven-headed for having slept with a German, but instead gently puts his hand on her shoulder in a sign of compassion, surely one of cinema's greatest moments.

Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander's Choice, the quest for love of another boy this age, www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112