GAYLETTER

Christophe Honoré’s 2010 film Man At Bath takes its name from an 1884 oil painting by French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. In the painting, a man stands, back turned to the viewer, drying his naked body with a towel. It is both intimate and appealing, setting up a duality between the masculinity of the subject and the vulnerability of seeing him so exposed. Honoré aims for a similar relationship in his film’s titular homme au bain: gay porn titan François Sagat’s Emmanuel is gruff and stony, an oft-naked hustler who pushes the limits too far with his boyfriend Omar (Omar Ben Sellem) and winds up ruining the relationship for good. With Omar abroad in New York, Emmanuel is left to look after himself, an experience that shows us just how at odds our initial perception of him (beautiful, sculpted, impenetrable) is with the man’s true nature (dejected, humiliated, alone). The film bounces between Omar and Emmanuel’s separate adventures, as the former traipses around Manhattan with a handicam and an actress friend (the always delightful Chiara Mastroianni) while the latter struggles finding enough johns just to keep him financially afloat.

Man At Bath isn’t without its faults. The Omar sequences often feel inessential to the story being told, perhaps as a result of Honoré blending documentary and fiction by using actual footage he shot while promoting a film in New York and merging them with Omar’s fling with a Canadian student. François Sagat, however, starring here in his second serious lead role, is formidable. There’s no question that he films well, and Honoré takes great measures to make us fully understand Sagat’s appeal (as if we needed convincing to begin with). But what makes this role more surprising is the emotional depths Sagat is capable of conveying in one hard, expressionless look, the understanding that this man has experienced things that we can’t begin to fathom. Man At Bath may be about the nuances and eventual collapse of a relationship, but seen through this lens, it’s also one very obviously biased toward its namesake.

Man At Bath is available on DVD today. Watch the trailer below: