From toxic and violent to tender and sweet, masculinity appears to be one of the hot topics at this year’s Berlinale. Films like John Trengrove’s deeply unhinged Manodrome, Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s provocative revenge thriller Femme, David Zonana’s military-set Heroico, and Milad Alami’s wrestling drama Opponent, all attempt to dissect the different flavors of male behavior and sexuality. A word-of-mouth hit from the youth-oriented Generation section, Belgian writer-director Zeno Graton’s feature debut The Lost Boys (Le Paradis) explores love and desire between two troubled teenagers (Khalil Gharbia and Julien de Saint Jean) in a juvenile detention center. We caught up with Graton at the premiere for a conversation about his film.
The thing that surprised me most about The Lost Boys was its tenderness – I went in expecting more rough stuff, based on the synopsis. Did you always envision it as a non-violent film?
Yeah, I think it was very purposefully done that way in order to propose other representations of masculinities. For me, one of the main threads of the movie was to give the opportunity to have male characters that were tender between each other, not only in a love or sexual way, but also in a very comrade “friends in adversity” way. Like, how you can team up as oppressed group to go against a institutional authority. One of my inspirations is of course Jean Genet’s short movie Un chant d’amour. This has always been one of my favorite movies because of this tenderness that he puts here that’s not in his novels.
Your film also doesn’t have this classic bully character we see in so many lockup films. What made you avoid that?
I think that the bossy bully character is actually the system that is oppressing them, and it was already bullying them enough. I wanted to create this lateral fraternity that had the possibility of an uprising, and one that would imply the tenderness and being together and supporting each other – whether your parents don’t visit you, whether the school didn’t accept you, whether the judge said you should stay there – every time they would come together as a group to support each other. It was very important talking about this new generation of resistance for me – it’s a movie about fighting back against imprisonment…including psychologically.
Were you able to visit some juvenile detention centers and talk with people?
I was very lucky to be able to enter those places that actually are very closed and very invisible – it was one of my main urges to talk about that, because they are very hidden. When I was a teenager, my cousin spent time spent time in them, and that’s where I started to question their efficiency, whether or not they’re helpful to these kids. Going in those places was a very important thing in order to have a depiction that was non-binary in a way. The public opinion…when they talk about them, they think it’s either a holiday camp where the kids are super comfortable and they’re not punished enough, or it’s like a dark dungeon where the kids die. I wanted to draw a line and create some complexity, and to propose a kind of a non-binary view that’s also queer.
Speaking of adding complexity, your film also shows the other side of it – that a lot of the people working in these places are deeply dedicated to their jobs, but they’re bound by this system and its rules and can only do so much.
That’s what I witnessed. The people there try a hundred percent to help these kids but they are stopped by a system of discrimination that they cannot fight against. For example, when the schools don’t accept kids who have been in detention, they can’t do anything. When the judge sends them back there, they can’t say anything…when the parents don’t show up…they can’t do anything. There is a social aspect of the movie that I wanted it to not take up all the space because I wanted it to be also an entertaining movie while elevating the passion of the love story…and also the resistance story with cinematographic tools that were outside of those prison film boxes.
You mentioned public opinion earlier. A lot of Joe’s story is about him being prepared for release. What’s the general population’s attitude toward youth rehabilitation in Belgium? Do people believe the system works and everyone deserves a second chance?
I don’t think that we treat these kids right and everything that they experience there is made for them to not be right when they’re getting out. That’s what we try to question in the movie and what we try to say in a more nuanced way than I just said. But yeah, as I talk about it in the movie, the schools really push them out – they don’t want them when they go back. Even with the jobs, they’re lucky enough not to have anything mentioned in their resume. But I don’t know, I can only talk about the people that I’ve met there because I’ve been in contact with one or two after, and nothing went right for them, you know?
We meet both characters after they’ve been incarcerated but aren’t told what they’ve done. Tell me about writing backstory into your screenplay without immediately saying “Joe did this, William did that.”
One of the political things that wanted to put in the movie is that they are always determined by what offense they did. I wanted that we don’t really know what they did, you know, because it’s, for me, it’s not what it’s important and it’s minor offenses anyway. I didn’t want them to be characterized by that. Otherwise, you would put them in a box as a spectator. Like, “He’s a thief or he’s a murderer and blah blah blah.” I didn’t want that.
So it’s a way to remove discrimination from the audience and see them first as human beings?
Exactly – to see them first as human beings who miss their freedom…who miss their rights to have another fate. I’m against imprisonment. I think it doesn’t work and I think it does very bad things to people. To answer your question about Joe, we learn what he did with his rap song and I wanted to write about what he did on his terms – he did what he did because there is discrimination – and to try to blur also the lines between who’s guilty and who’s not. Genet wrote a very important text for me after the Ulrike Meinhof assassination in the seventies – she was a German terrorist and Genet wrote a text talking about the difference between violence and brutality, using violence in order to fight brutality. In this case, the brutality would be racism and everything the system puts in their way. It’s a very beautiful text that talks about violence like a way of life.
Violence as an instinctive response to your surroundings...
Exactly. And that violence is actually very beautiful and very necessary, and is compared to a bird that needs to break shell in order to be born. I wanted that for Joe. And for William, we shot a scene where he talks about what he did, and, and actually he stabbed an educator from his school – that was also like a kind of a story of fighting back. And also, I needed like, kind of a guilty one.
What was the casting process like?
So, we saw a lot of people because we did a kind of “savage casting” in both France and Belgium.
What does that mean? Like a huge open call with a thousand people?
No, like going to voguing balls because I wanted to find a Tunisian-looking Middle Eastern queer guy. That can be difficult to find in the proper industry because a lot of them don’t want to play that part.
I can imagine. I liked this other film in the festival called Opponent about a married Irani man with same-sex feelings.
I think those films are much needed in order to normalize this representation and for them to see themselves and be out there, and see that it’s ok.
Yeah. Did you see that great queer film from Pakistan that was at Cannes…Joyland?
I’ve heard so much about it! But that one is even bigger, because it’s in Pakistan.
I loved the song that plays during the tattoo sequence in your film. What is this music and what does it mean to the story?
I’m half-Tunisian and I spend a lot of time there. It’s from this Canadian songwriter called Emel and she’s very punk rock. It’s from this album of rock covers like Nirvana and Led Zepplin, and then there’s this very soft song in the middle. I sent it to my editor in the editing process and it fit, so we reached out to Emel and she liked it and said yes. My heart stops whenever she likes something of mine on Instagram. I really want to meet her. I don’t think she has seen the whole movie, just that one scene. I also want to mention the film’s composer Bachar Mar-Khalifé, who is Lebanese. This is intertwined with the Arabness I wanted to be present in the movie to personify Joe’s inner voice…his cry for freedom…his roots…and for him to be a proud Arab queer. Bachar really understood that and we talked a lot about Rumi, the Middle Eastern poet from the Middle Ages – he wrote a lot of poems that inspired Sophism, a branch of Islam that is very connected to the body. It says you’re connected to God when you dance – when you move, you have all this sensuality. And it’s considered very queer because he wrote a lot of poems to another guy talking about how in love he was with him. It’s a very controversial thing and I’ve read a lot about it. All these poems that are addressed to God were actually addressed to another man…so it’s one of the first Muslim Middle Eastern queer stories in history. It was also about universality – when you put sexuality in a sacred space, it becomes universal. Not gay or straight anymore, just connection.
The Lost Boys premiered February 19 at the Berlinale
