Coming-of-age films are rarely as frank about the relationship between sex and politics as André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds. The film traces the lives of students Francois, Mäité, Serge, and Henri, as they confront their, and each others’, place within a French society facing the end of its influence as a colonial power. Téchiné subtly introduces the intersection of sexual and political interests in the film’s opening scenes at a countryside wedding. Francois and Mäité, as settled as two teens can be in an ambiguously sexual, intellectually stimulating relationship, briefly meet Serge, an impossibly handsome young man their age who attends school with Francois; unlike Francois, however, Serge, the poor son of Italian farmers, is on a scholarship. Serge’s brother, Pierre, is the apparently happy groom, back home on a brief leave from serving on the frontlines of the waning Algerian war; in truth, he’s intent on recruiting his former teacher and one-time lover, Madame Alvarez — a communist, and Mäité’s mother — to arrange his safe desertion from the war. Offended by his sudden request and carelessly public invocation of their sexual history, she refuses and storms away from the wedding with Mäité and Francois in tow.
The unexpected effect of Wild Reed’s seemingly conventional coming-of-age dressing is the revelation that sex and politics are not just important means of forming one’s identity, but that one’s sexual and political awakening shouldn’t be — and perhaps can’t be — separated. After the wedding, the rest of the film tracks the young quartet’s increasingly profound confrontations with these thematic interests. Bookish Francois falls in love with the rugged Serge, who is awakened to the evils of colonialism after Pierre’s death, while strident feminist-communist Mäité tests and reaffirms her radical convictions against the equally strident colonialist Henri, an older, obstinate classmate of Francois and Serge’s, who falls unexpectedly for her. The repeated convergences and divergences amongst pairs within this quartet speaks to the jarring reality of adolescence, where the seemingly dependable trajectories of personal convictions are tested against the instinctual lurches of desire. To his credit, Téchiné, who himself was in his late teens at the time in which Wild Reeds is set, conveys a poignant closeness to all of the characters’ experiences without expressly announcing allegiance to a single one.
That isn’t to say Téchiné is uncritical. In fact, he reserves his strongest critique for the bourgeois Francois. It is not enough for him to long after Serge during the small hours of the night, subsisting on the carnal crumbs of a late-night mutual jerk-off session early in the film; nor is it enough to seek out the older, more experienced Henri as a replacement. He may be open to sex with Francois, but his attitude toward the prospect has a daring quality, terrifying in its nonchalance. It’s alien behavior to Francois, for whom each sexual encounter with another man bears a life-altering force. When Francois can’t commit to, for example, touching Henri while he’s apparently asleep, Henri shames him for his cowardice — sexual and political. Francois’ life of leisure, which he not only enjoys but, thanks to a vague heart condition that precludes him from anything beyond mild physical activity, quite literally embodies, is an impotent way to live, at a time when war is tearing families apart and the foundations of centuries-old political structures are on their way down.
Torn between political poles by the lure of sex, Francois whimpers to Mäité at a local dance party: “What if another comes along next week? It’s a curse.” He’s tied to Serge and Henri’s political convictions insofar as those ties might bring him romantic or sexual gratification. But his predicament is easy to sympathize with. The throes of attraction can make anyone a poor judge of right and wrong. And so Mäité, increasingly isolated after her mother suffers a mental break from the news of Pierre’s death and from Serge’s subsequent retreat from social life, accepts Francois’ tentative coming-out just as she grows frustrated with him.
The unlikely figure who fills in this growing empty space is Henri, who is in an existential free-fall after Madame Alvarez’s replacement at school, and the imminent end of the war, forces him to question his staunchly colonialist beliefs. In a fit of rage he packs his bag and leaves school, intent on burning down the office of the local branch of the Communist party. When he discovers Mäité living there, their diametric beliefs give way to a tender, sympathetic attraction, informed less by genuine romantic feeling than by the power of mutual recognition.
From a temporal distance, Téchiné’s moderate tendencies, which refuse clear devotion to any one character’s feelings, are a translucent film over deeper convictions. The apolitical Francois’ sexual desires for Serge and Henri are not worthy of satisfaction until he finds his own political identity, whatever that may be, and Mäité and Henri’s tentative romance is not meant to last, and never actually starts — their differences, while momentarily ignored in the offices of the communist party, can’t be forgotten at the river the following morning. In Wild Reeds, politics and sex are inextricable — the bane of Francois’s existence, at least until the film’s final moment when, after Henri departs for his train back home, the remaining trio, still searching for the direction of their political identities, can at least return to school as friends.
Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon.
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