Somewhere, someone, a Frenchman, a filmmaker, is traveling melancholically towards someone else, an American, a former lover from forty years ago, reconnected through the ordinary magic of social networks.
Stéphane Bouquet: Did it really happen like that?
Vincent Dieutre: No. Not really. But I’ve experienced a number of such reappearances, of people found after many years on the internet. Or people whose death is reported online. And when I saw the picture of Dino Koutsolioutsos with the suggestion "you might know each other" I immediately—and strangely—remembered this Greek lover, who I met 40 years ago in Paros before he died of AIDS in the ‘80s. It was as if his ghost had reappeared on the screen, and that he was now this retired psychoanalyst living in Los Angeles. As if Facebook were a present-day limbo, an airlock between life and death, between the past and the present. So I came up with the idea to film this fictive reconnecting. Isn't this virtual limbo a site of possibilities, of today's poetry? A film had to be made...
One is called Vincent, the other Dean. It's a story of today's networks...Vincent meets Dean, or rather, Vincent meets Dean again. This reconnection is full of discoveries, brief encounters, surprises and, above all, meditations.
SB: Another melancholic love movie?
VD: Yes. Yet again. At my age, how can I do otherwise?
From the airport to the house of Dean, the lover, on Cheremoya Avenue. The journey is long, slow, and so much the better, because what counts from the beginning is not so much to reach the destination as to travel, as to talk-think along the avenues of this sprawling and ghostly city, Los Angeles. It is a sort of "tragi-comedy of remarriage", a comedy for seniors as the rough language of today calls it, a couple that reconnects for a few weeks, in the middle of a pandemic, making love again, driven less by desire than perhaps by an affectionate fidelity to the past.
SB: Is Los Angeles a good place for your cinema, which is mostly driven by this impulse of talking and thinking in the same movement?
VD: Yes, at first I even thought about improvising while driving around. Meandering the endless avenues. By the ocean. Then, inspired by the poetic stand-ups that I had seen, those great declamations in front of a mic, I chose to write my voice and recite the text off-screen to the images of the city. It was as if the whole film were a long poem in two languages, but where everything is intertwined.
It's not about being nostalgic or saying that it was better before. It's about acknowledging a reality: poetry remains the only democratic, free lingo in American culture.
Because during this time, in the tiny forgotten room of The End Poetry Lounge, poets deliver texts which auscultate the inglorious state of this country and this city—as if everyone were waiting for catastrophe. Because here too, it seems, something is always coming to an end. Drought, fires, viruses, police helicopters on the prowl, thirsty snakes taking refuge in the swimming pools. In Hollywood, everything is still closed, locked down. A dull threat hangs over the city, behind the blinds. Unknown, unspoken, but which gives this journey its tinge of urgent elegy and slight but palpable anguish. The Big One? The end of times announced by the televangelists? It doesn't really matter.
SB: You say "America built me up" but at the same time you seem to witness the end of that America? Is there anything left but poetry?
VD: That's true. With time, I realized that a certain American culture—minimalism, experiments with literature, and repetitive music—had been very important in my education. And I also realized that today we are only looking at an ironic caricature, even if it is often brilliant, of this founding moment, within which I had immersed myself during my first stays in New York at the end of the ‘70s. It's not about being nostalgic or saying that it was better before. It's about acknowledging a reality: poetry remains the only democratic, free lingo in American culture. And therefore worldwide.
When the Poetry Lounge is closed, the lovers wander aimlessly through these avenues of motels, swimming pools, palm trees, shopping centers. All of L.A. passes before them, from enclave to enclave: the green Eden of its surrounding deserts, the gay district, the Latino market replete with plastic virgins, hundreds of makeshift tents on the sidewalks of predominantly Black districts. A twilight urban journey in which the narrator and Dean hardly leave the Mustang's cabin: because Los Angeles is not, as we know, a city where one walks. Because, from surfing to skateboarding, from helicopters to cars, L.A. has made sliding a kind of supreme value.
I wanted to translate this feeling of an endless loop. We all feel it in today's world but it becomes a concrete reality in L.A.
SB: You refer to the French thinker Bruce Bégout and to his book about L.A. Did the city’s unique urbanism dictate the form of the film?
VD: As someone who doesn't like driving, I found myself in the passenger seat of a car for several months. Even to buy cigarettes, I had to drive a couple of miles. So the film follows an automobile’s movement through the city, marking out its immensity. And when I came across Bruce Bégout's text, I immediately thought that his urbanistic analysis of the city was fascinating, even though it has now been largely overwritten by new migrations and virtual urbanism. I found that in his own way Bégout was also writing a sociological poem that allowed me then to introduce a new voice, a third one, as a counterpoint to my personal notes and to the poems delivered in the Lounge. In a way, Bégout took over the analysis and allowed me to remain in the realm of sensations, even if the analysis is also very important to me.
So it goes pretty well. Endless traveling shots sweep through the city as if it consisted of a single flow, a single movement, a single poem, a single body that only desired to be caressed once again. The love scenes are filmed as gifs, embraces, caresses that are constantly repeated in the loop of time—which is not so different from the harmonious loops of highways.
SB: You use the gif form to describe the sensuality of this couple—what were you looking for with these looped embraces?
VD: I wanted to translate this feeling of an endless loop. We all feel it in today's world but it becomes a concrete reality in L.A. And my relationship with Dean oscillates between memory, recognition and the impossibility of envisioning a future, whether in love, art, or politics. Is there a beauty in the loop? A beauty of repetition? If cinema is about "looking contemporary love in the face", the gif is both a brutal and gentle way to suspend it. I think that today's cinema is much more concerned with subjects than with filmic forms. And, at sixty years old, I know that it is wrong.
Text and interview: Stéphane Bouquet and Vincent Dieutre
Stéphane Bouquet is a poet, screenwriter, and film critic, who works regularly with directors such as Sébastien Lifshitz, Patric Chiha, and Vincent Dieutre.
