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The Adventures of Felix

Film Review By John Demetry

Sami Bouajila stars in The Adventures of Felix The title character of The Adventures of Felix summons the sun from behind a cloud. It's a power he claims to have had since childhood. Proof of the miracle plays across the face of the old lady whose home provides Felix rest during his journey. She is properly in awe of this young man, played by Sami Bouajila (my new movie boyfriend).

Writers-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's The Adventures of Felix is nothing less than a miracle. A Queer film that not only examines the place of queerness in society and nature, it actually argues for its necessity! In an audacious AIDS-era testimony, Felix brings the sun.

The choreography of film space and of film narrative provides an effervescent metaphor. No political rancor here; just the real deal. The wide, wondrous Cinemascope frame acts as an Impressionistic window on the world, constantly scanning and expanding the view - flowers, trees, water dancing with cars, roads, boats. The Cinemascope lens compresses space, giving even the air a vital density, the light a heightened iridescence.

Ducastel-Martineau trace the events of Felix's hitchhiking trip across France to Marseilles to meet the father he's never known. Being laid off during a workers' strike and the resulting tension with his partner are the felicitous, modern expressions of rootlessness that incite the journey. Each of his encounters with strangers along the way are mini-narratives preceded by a title: "My Little Brother," "My Grandmother," "My Cousin," "My Sister," and, finally, "My Father."

"What is my place in the world?" is the ingenuous question that Felix hopes to answer. The question is never posed explicitly, but rather introduced through the film's pondering of the metaphysical amidst the physical. The opening shot of the film features Felix riding his bike next to the ocean while singing to himself the French pop oldie that plays on the soundtrack. The camera tracks at a consistent pace while Bouajila's position oscillates in the frame between long shot and close up. One might expect the dancing citizens of French New Wave director Jacques Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Young Girls of Rochefort to join Felix.

The story seems to have the same lyrical openness as that glorious shot. It floats like Felix's kite on the wind, yet is as anchored by Ducastel-Martineau's able hands. (Felix reprimands the inconsiderate shenanigans of an unpracticed kite flyer. Ducastel-Martineau prove that filmmaking holds even more of a responsibility - the audience deserves to fly.) The breezy thematic richness holds the film together during its tangents. A witnessed incident of murderous racist violence provides an emotional line of tension while the final destination reveals the beautifully simple romantic circular structure.

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The trajectories of chance and destiny, of existential challenge and faith in The Adventures of Felix brings the legacy of the French New Wave up to date by focusing on a gay, French-Arabian, HIV-positive protagonist.

Although each of these labels proves imperative to the journey, Bouajila supplies inventive twists to his characterization that come out with each encounter - in the charged space between people. In one moment, Felix offers the following earnest rebuff to a young admirer: "I love you like a brother." In another, he makes a little boy cry during an argument about the distinction between "father" and "stepfather" - where the kid's logic, while inaccurate, feels irrefutably right. In the final encounter, Felix teaches his "Father" to fly a rainbow-colored kite.

Ducastel-Martineau's affectionate, yet unforced, technique allows Felix the freedom, will, and complexity usually afforded only to white, hetero characters. Felix gets the glory too when the camera circles around Felix and his partner during their rendezvous in Marseilles - a move of triumph out of the musicals Duscatel-Martineau clearly love.

"Grandmother" and Bouajila The filmmakers' unabashed appreciation for Bouajila's physical beauty - dramatized when the "Grandmother" stares at his naked body in bed - reverses the typical racial and sexual sources of both cinematic identification and beauty. Those labels provide the existential urgency.

It's undeniable: Racial/sexual diversity is now aesthetically necessary to keep both the film medium and pop expression adventurous. No wonder I had to listen to Erasure's Cowboy CD to sustain the movie's buzz. The titles of that CD and this movie make the connection clear: trailblazing subversions of the cultural myths of masculinity programmed into popular narratives.

The eclectic soundtrack and the story chapters in The Adventures of Felix, like Erasure's album of songs sung Andy Bell, provide the variety of relationships - of places in the world - to enrich and exalt Queer experience. Bell stands out in the call-and-response with the backup singers and the dance beats. It's an invitation to share his diverse emotional expressions - as in Bell's declarations of impending love ("Your love's gonna take a man") in Don't Say Your Love Is Killing Me and of past love ("I did not mean to harm my love") in Save Me Darling.

Ducastel-Martineau similarly position Felix/Bouajila in their choreographed vision of life and performance. Defining the moral center of the film, the filmmakers detail space through Felix's point of view during significant moments. Felix makes sure the coast is clear for some heated kissing-cousins action and gauges a police station after seeing an Arab man beaten by two drunken Frenchmen - action and non-action putting each other in moral relief.

Tenderness is displayed when Felix's "Sister" holds him during his confession of the fear he felt in the police station. It's a tears-and-pride moment in which Bouajila's performance reinforces more complicated notions of heroism. The filmmakers and Bouajila absolve guilt while dramatizing responsibility.

Like Erasure, Ducastel-Martineau's pop pleasures reconcile social conflicts. At the end, Felix has changed. He discovers that his absent partner has as well, kissing his newly-shaved face. Demy, Erasure, and Ducastel-Martineau all share this hard-earned truth: There is no guilt in pleasure like this.





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