In the Flesh: Un chant d'amour

Translated literally, Un chant d’amour means “Song of Love”, but there is no music in Jean Genet’s first and only film. There is no sound of any kind, and so we must understand the song as metaphor, as a way of understanding sublimations of desire. Smoke blown through a hollow reed. Bodies writhing alone in separate beds. Planes of flesh and hair in desperate motion, signaling their ardor to blank walls, to uncaring lovers, to the sadistic gaze of the prison guard (André Reybaz) who watches them through the peepholes in the doors of their cells. An older prisoner (Bravo) desires a younger prisoner (Lucien Sénémaud), and the film exists as an expression of that desire, its constraints an echo of the physical and institutional barriers separating the two men. It’s silent because the world they inhabit is as well. It’s fragmentary and imagistic because that is the nature of connection and desire under oppression.

Genet locates desire in objects and rituals, from the flowers swinging in the dark, grasped at haplessly by a desperate hand, to the aforementioned smoke blown through a hollow reed. In the absence of traditional intimacy, the oppressed must find substitutes. Think of the tender care with which the older prisoner selects his reed and lights his last stub of a cigarette. Think of the way he fantasizes about stroking his thumb over the bruised petals of the flower his younger lover gifts him in his daydream, as though they were the heads of little cocks. Think of the conflict and arousal on his face as the guard puts a pistol in his mouth, of the simultaneous surrender and rebellion that is eroticizing your own powerlessness in the face of death.

In the end, the guard’s sexual frustration only serves as a bridge between the separated lovers. He cannot use their desire for his own purposes, and, disgusted and confused, he departs from the prison, closing the thematic loop of the flowers swinging in the void by revealing that it is in fact a prisoner swinging a makeshift bouquet to the cell next door via their adjacent windows. This building constructed to dehumanize and exterminate its occupants has become a locus for their desires. You can throw us in prison, Genet’s film rails, but we will fuck the walls, we will love one another through ratholes and the gaps between the crumbling stones, we will turn the cruelty of our guards into the consummation of our own desires, we will flee into fantasy, and we will come and suck and love and live forever.