Power can be purchased through a diverse range of currencies. Love, sex, money, race. But each carries a cost of its own, as we find out in the psychological thriller Eastern Boys, showing at the 9th Tel Aviv LGBT International Film Festival.
Daniel tries to pick up Marek at Paris’s Gare Du Nord terminal. Daniel is middle aged, French, lives alone in a high-rise just beyond the Peripherique. Marek, of indeterminate age but certainly not very old, is part of a group of listless, loitering young men. Part of a gang you could say. They hang around the terminal, dodge the Gendamerie, look for the no good they can be up to. Marek agrees to go off with Daniel immediately, €50 his price. Daniel is more circumspect. Come to my flat tomorrow, he says. He gives Marek his address. Rookie error.
It’s no particular surprise when instead of Marek, his cohorts – led by the enigmatic Boss, a tightly coiled ball of charisma and violence – turn up the next day, not for sex, but to hold Daniel hostage whilst they strip his flat clean. The real surprise comes afterwards, as Daniel tries to put the gutted physical and psychic remains of his life back in order. Marek returns. He’ll have that sex and the €50 after all, thank you very much.
The sheer strangeness of their first encounters aside, Daniel and Marek make a peculiar, unsettling relationship. There’s nothing new about middle aged men and their twinks, of course. Daniel seems passionate in bed, compassionate, loving even; but he dismisses Marek afterwards with the same casual lack of attention that he employs with his cleaner. (One of the many thoughtful little details sprinkled through the film.) Marek, we know already, is in it for the money. But still, the relationship is both transactional and not- in the same breath. They begin to draw together, uncertainly, ambiguously. But the controlling menace of Boss hovers uncertainly, menacingly, in the background.
Written and directed by Robin Campillo (he directed the excellent Les Revenants, since adapted for television, about ten years ago, and before that wrote the unsettling L’Emploi du Temps), Eastern Boys is an intelligent and understated thriller. However, it only really works if one makes allowances for two ambiguous details. The first is about power: the set up for the first act relies on one accepting that a middle-class French man can be blackmailed – even for a moment – by an under-aged illegal immigrant claiming without visible cause that the former molested him. (It’s the clever subterfuge with which Boss and his gang – without Marek at first – gain access to Daniel’s flat.) Olivier Rabourdin’s Daniel looks suitably bewildered before submitting to his fate, but the premise doesn’t entirely convince.
The second quibble is just as ambiguous. Eastern Boys is steeped in a very particular polemic of the moment, the threat – real, imagined or somewhere in between – created by the opening up of the European Union eastwards. We’re never quite sure where Marek, Boss and his gang come from. Ukraine, Russia, Romania, somewhere from the East. They’re the threat from Over There. It is a debate of the moment. I mean, it was one of the principal battle grounds during the recent European Parliamentary elections. Of course, any thinking person knows, deep inside, that there is more to the challenge of migration within Europe than this baldly reductive proposition, and Eastern Boys does work with the spaces between the arguments. But in the same breadth, the film doesn’t always step aside fully from the stereotype. It makes for good drama, but I’m not so sure about the politics.
But one can understand why the film is structured thus. Eastern Boys, essentially, is a film about power relations. Marek (Kirill Emelyanov) uses his elfin good looks to seduce Daniel; Daniel, for his part, has the power of race and money that he – seemingly unconsciously – wields to his advantage. And then there is Boss (Daniil Vorobyov). Well-behaved people never get very far, he seems to have internalised at a young age. The threat of violence is never very far when he is on screen, and he gives the film a very unsettling edge.
Power can also be purchased, or earned, by love. And that’s why Eastern Boys holds its own to the very end. Love, one senses from the start, will eventually become a part of the complicated relationships, a means of wielding power. But the question is not when it will be introduced, but rather how, and why. Eastern Boys retains an unsettling ambience to the very end.
TLVFest will host a second screening of Eastern Boys on Sunday, June 15th at 20:00. Tickets may be purchased via this link: http://www.tlvfest.com/en/?p=3626
Eastern Boys (2013)
Written and Directed by Robin Campillo
Starring Olivier Rabourdin, Kirill Emelyanov, Daniil Vorobyov, Edea Darcque
128 min, French and English w. English and Hebrew subtitles
