I wish Sebastien Lipshitz would make more films. Of all the French directors during the past decades who have broken the French ( hidden ) taboo on making same sex films he is the best. Techine is variable. Christophe Honore equally so and Ozon fluctuates. But Lipshitz in his clear and unsentimental way has made a handful of films that take top place in my collection. I remember seeing ' Les Invisibles ' in a small cinema near the Bastille area in 2012. Despite the onset of food poisoning due to some bad food I watched the film with a sense of sorrow, anger and tenderness. This was my generation up there on the screen, and being young in Paris in the 1960's was, despite its joys a place of pain. Young men ( I cannot speak for women ) were either bisexual or openly defiant in their open acceptance of their sexuality, but most sadly either married or hated themselves. In culture you either had Jean Genet on one side or the closet literature of Julien Green or Francois Mauriac on the other. There were lots of gay novels, some very good, some horrifically self-hating. Contempt or a tepid tolerance was the best a gay man could expect, and every gay reference in a film was held like a gem in one's hand. As for the so-called New Wave it never flowed over Gay themes, and I look back in anger at them for that. Catholicism and Communism joined a united front against us, and between Godard and the terrible films of Lelouch there was no representation. Then as the 21st century got into its stride out stepped a handful of people who made our lives a source of interest and here, I repeat Lipshitz as, and is, the best of all of them. And ' Les Invisibles ' was a quiet indictment of those heteronormative values of French society, and although he does not mention it the culture of film and literature of those days. I hope they may never return, but the spectacle of horror against Gay marriage in France was a warning not to be ignored.
Review of The Invisible Ones
