Before I Forget

With Raymond Depardon’s ‘Modern Life’ still visible in the wing mirror and both Bent Hamer’s ‘O’ Horten’ and Andreas Dresen’s ‘Cloud 9’  peeping over the horizon, it looks like 2009 could be a vintage year for films tackling the pleasures and pains of old age. Writer-director-actor Jacques Nolot (below) delivers a bold, searching and open-hearted turn as the subject of this confessional study of life as an elderly gay gent in the French capital.

He plays Pierre, a world-weary former gigolo who has been HIV positive for 24 years and still has little idea what the response to his state should be. The plaintive, artful direction (reminiscent of André Téchiné at his most sombre) and ashen palette work wonders in fleshing out this enigmatic husk of a man as he flits, ghost-like, between friends, acquaintances and male prostitutes, trying to recapture the youthful spirit of his decadent past as well as attempting to comprehend the ramifications of his impending mortality. Recommended.