For all those who recently traveled to Istanbul, it is a familiar but disconcerting view. Hordes of men walking nonchalantly around the city’s tourist spots with their poetlus naked, bloody and sometimes blindfolded leathers – not a recent zombie apocalypse but one of the famous capillary transplant clinics in Turkey. The jokes at their expense are easy and cheap, although each of these red head injuries put an individual history of insecurity and to hope for fragile for more abundant days to come. Two of them are told, with tact and care and just a little absurd, in the delicate miniature of the Belgian director Manoël Dupont “before / after”, a film that deals with the hair transplant industry with respectful journalistic interest, but not like the healing that the protagonists would like to believe it.
A star of the proxima competition of this year in Karlovy varies, where she received a special mention from the jury, “before / after” is a brief study of unpretentious character with a new semi-documentary hook: although the film is mainly of scripted fiction, its leads are two non-professional actors undergoing surgery of transplantation of hair themselves and the procedures and procedures represented on the screen own. This gives procedures for a counter -clusical and contraverse authenticity, as well as unusually increased human issues – the anxieties shown at all stages of the process here are real.
The fact that the film is also a gentle and sensitive representation of a homosexual relationship which may have seen that it is gaining ground on the Fest circuit and LGBT distribution – it was taken up last month by the French -oriented queer sale is largely resonant.
Late in one evening, Jérémy (Jérémy Lamblot) and Baptiste (Baptiste Leclere) meet by chance on the road: the first, Hitching A Rown at home, is picked up by the second, who has lived in his car for some time. A small speech leads to a drink in the big house that Jérém inherited his late father. There is an obvious shy attraction between the two, but the two men, both approaching 30 years, binds first and above all on their mutual male baldness. Baptist, large and heavy, tries to compensate for it with locks all shoulder; The most diminutive Jérémy makes gestures towards his relative youth with diamond earrings. The writing of Dupont, clear and compact and radical on the background, alludes to deeper damage in every man than their respective sieve – although the hair, at least, is a lost thing that they feel that they can find.
With a quick cup, we are in Istanbul, where Jérémy and Baptiste reserved a cheap hotel room and a series of consultation meetings with hair clinics. It is not clear how long has passed, although the pair, intimate if not a couple, does not yet seem to know each other – the shared ritual of a hair transplant signals like a bridge towards a new life for both. Their concerns seem weak in a turkey taken in the historic presidential elections of 2023: shoot on the fly in the streets of City City, Dupont and Dp Thibaut Egler capture a feeling of community agitation which creates, in its own way, with the nerves of our protagonists and our impatience for a new chapter. At the same time, if not, not completely playing in curious circumstances, Lamblot and Leclere give good performance of desire quietly, each other with a mixture of shyness and frank need.
The operation, on the other hand, is observed in methodical detail both morbid and tender, because we are part of the stress of linguistic barriers to crucial communication points, last -minute farmers on newly drawn capacities and the panic of separation when they finally pass under the scalpel. The assembly is important for men at the moment – “If we are with shitty hair, we will both be in the same boat”, they agree, strangely romantically – although what awaits them is uncertain. “A page is turned, I can become a new man,” explains Jérém immediately after the operation, while later, he and Baptiste were placed naked together, standing in each other as mirrors at their male mojo supposedly rejuvenated. A gracefully ambiguous final act, however, invites the question of how much you can feel different from the duration, before doing less cosmetic work on yourself.
