The Wounded Man

Henri is eighteen and lives with his family. One night at the railway station he meets a man called Jean. Jean is a pimp, lives on the street, and is coarse and unreliable. Henri attaches himself to him and cannot let go. The station stops being a place and becomes the world of the film: corridors, toilets, waiting rooms and night. Patrice Chéreau directs. He wrote the screenplay with the writer Hervé Guibert. Jean-Hugues Anglade plays Henri and Vittorio Mezzogiorno plays Jean. The screenplay won the César for best original screenplay in 1984. The film treats homosexual desire at the start of the eighties with nothing softened; it is neither a story of identity nor one of acceptance. Its subject is obsession and humiliation. It is Jean-Hugues Anglade's first major part, and the performance is physical and nearly wordless. Patrice Chéreau was also a major theatre and opera director, and the staging here comes from the stage: bodies moving in groups through darkness. Hervé Guibert became known in later years for his books about AIDS and died of the illness in 1991. Who it is for: viewers who follow eighties French cinema and difficult narratives of desire. Who it is not for: it is uncomfortable, none of the characters are likeable, and the narrative stays deliberately unclear.