A beginning, an ending, and a continuation. Vincent Dieutre’s THIS IS THE END opens as the long isolation caused by COVID-19 has waned, chronicling a trip that will rekindle a love affair—suspended for forty years—with former companion Dean.
At once a road film, a performance film, and a chamber film, THIS IS THE END ties together, in fraternal solidarity, the voices of performers from The End Poetry Lounge, the filmmaker, and that of Éva Truffaut, reciting extracts from philosopher Bruce Bégout’s “Los Angeles, Capital of the 20th century”. From The End, where individuals are invited to read their original poems or those of others, the words of Allan Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, or Elizabeth Acevedo hurl—like pacifist weapons of insubordination—questions, prompts, and warnings in the face of a harsh world: “Hollywood will get what it deserves. (…) The Government of America will fall. But how can America fall?” A mix of political exclamations, protest songs, and vulnerable incantations, the poems unabashedly declaim and decry the brutality of the world: “We live in an America where not everyone can appreciate the beauty of immigration.”
Entwined with the enduring tracking shots captured from Dean’s Mustang, he pronounces the disintegration of the world in this city without a centre.
Untraceable hearts
In THIS IS THE END, two worlds face each other in a dissonant tension. How to portray a city—and its signature, inexhaustible sprawl—as paradoxically a site of escape and confinement? “Who” is Los Angeles really? A network of roads; a maze of junctions; an intertwining of lines; a trap of anonymous corridors, where the surplus of cars pass by in haunting repetition, advancing in tight, ordered, disciplined rows. Dieutre films this tide of traffic, which seem to spill from an inexhaustible reservoir to colonise the city, from dawn to night, from night to dawn, without end.
“Where are the walkers then?” wonders Dieutre, faced with the squadrons of drivers who surround them on the city’s clogged arteries. Where are the men and women who explore the city through the dynamics of their steps? In the same voice confesses his cinematic debts to Michael Snow, James Benning, Andy Warhol, and Richard Serra, the filmmaker inventories recent cataclysmic events: the World Trade Center, Columbine, Orlando, Trump. Entwined with the enduring tracking shots captured from Dean’s Mustang, he pronounces the disintegration of the world in this city without a centre. In the car, the two lovers glide, float, searching in vain for the untraceable heart of the city of angels
The love of the two men overflows from a private interior to blossom in the public space.
Seen through the eyes of the filmmaker, Los Angeles operates as an incessant parade, its continuous and uniform gridlock suggesting a world at once deserted and saturated. Overwhelmed by this almost sterile repetition the city seems almost absent from itself, “an unresolved void” in Bégout’s words, pronounced in the film by Truffaut’s categorical and trenchant voice. “At first glance, the urban experience is reduced to almost nothing, to a material so poor and so loose that it becomes almost evanescent. Thus, Los Angeles withholds from the person who discovers the city the time necessary to experience it, that brief moment when he could say I am there”.1"Au premier abord l’expérience urbaine s’y réduit à presque rien, à une matière si pauvre et si lâche qu’elle en devient presque évanescente. Ainsi, Los Angeles retire à celui qui la découvre le temps nécessaire pour la vivre, ce bref moment où il pourrait dire j’y suis."
An eveloping love
In THIS IS THE END Los Angeles carries an impassive coldness, it standardizes and divides: the heirs on one side, the deprived on the other. Even the swimming pools, ostensibly sites of leisure, are invaded by snakes, themselves driven out their natural habitats by perpetual wildfires. The serpents zigzag in the blue liquid, seeming to block any movement that might open up the city; they reflect the impasses of a world out of breath, exhausted.
But the bodies of the reunited lovers reinvigorate the city by enveloping it in the realm of the senses. In a scene of dazzling beauty, the bodies of Dean and the filmmaker, dressed in white, sit opposite each other, embracing, touching, caressing, kissing, recognizing each other. The graceful gestures of their hands, mounted in loops, seal—after the years, after the echoed viruses of COVID-19 and AIDS, after the confinements—the beauty of reconnection between the two lovers. The body of love is uttered, invented, remembered, listened to, confessed, in the shared intimacy of questions. The love of the two men overflows from a private interior to blossom in the public space. It confronts all that has come undone in the world, in the torpor of false fatalities and forges moment of possibilities in a time of the impossible. Here, desire a form of utopia, to be pronounced and inhabited.
Corinne Maury is associate professor at the cinema department of the University of Toulouse (France)
