Failure To Communicate

I watched two gay DVDs this weekend. One arrived from overstock.com mid-week, and the other was one that b&c gave me for Christmas. I watched Presque Rien for a second time after watching Broken Sky.

I buy far too many DVDs. I'm not as bad about it as I used to be, but my experiences from the pre-Netflix era, when I would routinely run up late fees in excess of what it would have cost to purchase the movie outright, have gotten me in the habit of just purchasing any movie that I might be interested in seeing. Fortunately, I don't have as much time for watching movies as I once did, or I'd probably have rooms (instead of bookcases) full of DVDs. And as extravagances go, shelling out $20 for something that looks good is not so bad. I always tell myself that if b&c and I saw it at the theater, we'd have paid a lot more, especially after you factor in the popcorn. Mmmmm, popcorn. Also, a lot of the gay movies double as porn. But porn with artistic merit. Because I care about that, right? Actually, I do, but my rant about why I have to get movies with subtitles in order to find a film that both makes me think and gives me wood is for another time. For right now, I'll say that these foreign (Mexican and French) movies caused me to spill a lot of seed.

Anyway. Both of these films are about the fragility of young love, and about the inability of young lovers to communicate. This theme is most forcefully brought home in Broken Sky, a movie that is almost entirely without dialog. There's a bit of narration, but none of the central characters says more than twenty words during the course of the movie. Instead, they spend a lot of time staring smoulderingly at and past each other. And an equal amount of time fucking. The movie clocks in at 140 minutes, which would probably seem like an awful long time if I hadn't been stroking myself for 120 of those. The movie is also a little bit artsier than it ought to be, but sometimes that works pretty well. There's a scene that takes place in a section of bleachers that's particularly striking and made me wish that I had a really big TV. (I also wished that because I couldn't read the credits for the music at the end. The soundtrack is pretty good, and I would have liked to find some of the recordings.) If you don't like cute, young, smooth, dark, full-lipped, naked Mexican men, then, well, I just don't know how such a thing is possible, really, but the pornographic element of this movie would be lost on you, and you might not want to bother because there's a lot of flesh here.

The lovers in Broken Sky fall apart, basically, because Jonas kisses a stranger on the dance floor while Gerardo is off fetching them beers. Jonas falls instantly in love with the stranger, who is whisked off, perhaps by his own boyfriend. So what Broken Sky is saying is that you should fuck as much as possible and that a really good kiss can change your life completely. These are obvious truths that are nonetheless worth repeating.

Fernando Arroyo has a great ass.



The protagonists in Presque Rien spend plenty of time talking to each other, but they never seem to communicate on any level other than the sexual. There, they seem to get along just fine, but be warned up front that Presque Rien is really a much more mainstream movie than Broken Sky. By that I mean, there's more dialog and less flesh. There's still plenty of flesh, though, including a particularly hot, albeit brief, scene where Mathieu fucks Cedric in the dunes. You see a lot more of the emotional development of a relationship here than you see in Broken Sky (where Jonas and Gerardo are pretty much fucking from the get go), so you get to see the boys fall in love. You spend a lot of time watching innocence (always touching when it's done well, as it is here) . You also get to see a lot of innocence lost and the relationship's dissolution. Exactly why Mathieu and Cedric break up is never satisfactorily explained, but many relationships end for no very good reason, and I suspect that's one of the points being made.

Here again, if you don't like cute, young, smooth, full-lipped, naked Frenchmen, then, well, what the hell is wrong with you, anyway?

Stephane Rideau has a great ass.