GERONTOPHILIA (2013) Bruce LaBruce

With this film, Bruce LaBruce abandons the themes dear to him ( trash, vampires and exposed dicks ) to create a poignant love story that has the flavour of a Douglas Sirk melodrama and the more modern tones of Gregg Araki and Gus Van Sant .

The love story is between Luke , a nurse in his early twenties, and Mr Peabody , a rather frail 82-year-old.

The boy discovered a few years ago that he had a preference for decidedly older men, after the embarrassing erection he experienced while trying to save an elderly man with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a swimming pool. He works in a hospice ( what better place? ) where the residents are treated rather poorly and rendered mostly harmless by drugs. And it's there that he meets Mr. Peabody.

The desire to free him from the clutches of the other nurses pushes the young man to opt for a romantic getaway, helped by his girlfriend Desire ( a very sweet bookseller, who accepts with surprise the fact that she is being left for an 82-year-old man even though she is still in love ).

The journey brings the two even closer, until a bitter epilogue.

LaBruce exposes the bodies without any censorship: next to the beautiful Pier Gabriel Lajoie , he frames in close-up the wrinkles and creases of Walter Borden , who plays the fantastic Mr. Peabody.

Despite the change in style, the director's irreverence remains, with surreal scenes in which the young boy masturbates in front of his lover's decayed and undressed body or when he spies on the naked and flaccid ass of an old man, whose dressing gown he opens in his sleep.

A clever use of slow motion highlights the most intense scenes and gives a sentimental touch to a film that the director himself defined as: “ a delicately perverse romantic comedy ”.

The figure of the mother, incapable of taking care of herself and falling for any man who pays her a little attention, is a cliché played beautifully by Moe Jeudy-Lamour . The relationship between the young man and his girlfriend is funny and original, punctuated by long kisses, exchanged while obsessively mentioning the names of revolutionary women.