Avant que j’oublie (2007) - film review

Pierre, 58, is coming to terms with the changes in his life, with illness and with death.  A stranger in the modern world, he shuts himself away and ponders in solemn isolation.  His inner demons continue to torment him.  Lacking inspiration, he cannot write.  He thinks of the dear friend who died so suddenly.  Yet he must live out his time, as though life itself were a disease to be patiently endured, in a world that is increasingly alien to him...

Avant que j’oublie is the third and last entry in a series of partly autobiographical films written and directed by Jacques Nolot, a highly respected actor who also plays the lead role (an ageing homosexual artist) in each film.  As in his previous two films - L'Arrière Pays (1998) and La Chatte à deux têtes (2002) - Nolot crafts an intensely melancholic study in solitude and growing old.  This is a cold and austere work that risks alienating its spectator with its languorous pace and darkly introspective peregrinations of a man who appears to be teetering on the brink of suicide upon realising the emptiness of his existence.

With its explicit depictions of gay sex, Avant que j’oublie is the most provocative of Nolot’s films, particularly as these sequences are shot in manner that is totally lacking in romantic sensibility and eroticism, portraying sex as an act of butchery or self-mutilation.  The protracted dialogue-heavy scenes pose an even greater challenge for the spectator and risk reducing the film’s subject to a languid exercise in intellectual onanism.   Taken together as a body of work, Nolot’s three films offer a stark existentialist meditation on life, difficult to engage with and yet, like an ugly piece of abstract art, strangely alluring and meaningful.

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