Avant que j’oublie

In the last part of his trilogy about the lives of homosexuals, Jacques Nolot again plays his own leading man. In Before I Forget he plays the HIV-infected former gigolo Pierre, who has now seen better years and is doing less well than his friends, who managed to ensure a nice inheritance from their regular customers. Nolot’s explicitly portrayed sexual transactions between the ageing men and a younger generation of exploiters may be confrontational, but his portrayal of the slow but sure demise of Pierre is also loving and filled with pleasant irony. The calm and well-dosed camerawork avoids false vanity and opens the door to an open-hearted settlement of fragile elderliness in a world that functions according to the rules of ‘one good turn deserves another’.
The clumsiness of Pierre contrasts with the other men and forms an honest emotional backdrop for camouflaged rancidness and pretentious sponging. Sharp conversations between the characters betray a skilful dialogue writer who exposes – with few side tracks and a great sense of black humour – the most important motivating factor for each character: fear of being alone. Pierre is the personification of this, occasionally verging on the pathetic – but one wonders whether he really is any worse off than the rest.

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