Lilies

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Lilies

The Politics of Memory in John Greyson's Lilies
keith vincent

from Lilies

John Greyson, the director of the movie musical Zero Patience, a retelling from an activist's perspective of the story of the gay man the mass media viciously labeled, "the man who brought AIDS to North America", has come out with another great film. The film is called Lilies and it opens in Japan in early August. Greyson has always written his own scripts in the past, but this time he chose to adapt a popular play by the well-known French Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard called Les Feluettes, ou La Répétition d'une drame romantique. As the title suggests, the original work is not free of a slightly overly aestheticized French sensibility, but adding Greyson's keen visual sense and activist stance to the mix has resulted a truly beautiful and politically potent film.

If Zero Patience had the "politics of memory" as one of its important themes, in Lilies, this has been brought to an even greater level of sophistication. The year is 1952. An elderly Bishop named Bilodeau arrives at a prison to hear a prisoner's confession. When he enters the confessional, a cramped space vaguely reminiscent of a porno buddy booth, he finds Simon, the object of his unrequited love from forty years before, sitting on the other side of the partition. But no sooner have they spoken a few words than the door is suddenly locked from the outside. From that point on the Bishop finds himself obliged to watch a play performed by the other prisoners for him alone. The play tells the story of a crime committed by Bilodeau out of jealousy for Simon's lover Vallier, and skips back and forth in a series of brilliant transitions from the crude stage set on the prison floor to a cinematic depiction of the pastoral town in Northern Quebéc where the boys grew up. Moreover, from the first scene in the play we find the young Simon and Vallier rehearsing yet another play, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastion, the lines of which they appropriate throughout the film to express their love for each other. It was the false testimony of Bilodeau in court that got Simon put away for forty years in jail and he has produced this play as a way of discharging his resentment and hatred of Bilodeau. His plan is to use the play to extract a confession from the Bishop himself.

from Lilies

Lilies is a gay film. I worked as Greyson's interpreter when he came to Japan to do publicity for the film and almost all of the reporters who interviewed him here either completely ignored the gay issue or offered roundabout praise for the film, saying it "was a universal love story that transcended the question of homosexuality." Greyson's reply to these comments was always the same. If the film has universal value, he argued, that is because it is so attentive to the specificity of gay experience. As he wrote in the director's statement, "In Lilies, grand gestures and ironic flourishes are used to explore the mundanely brutal ways that parents, priests, and 'proper' communities annihilate the love of two boys for one another."

It is worth mentioning that all of the roles in this film are played by men. This was partly by necessity given that all of the actors in the "play" are inmates in an all-male prison. But it also serves as an implicit critique of homophobia as a pathology of male homosociality. No attempt has been made to cover over the masculine features of the actors playing female roles. They wear no make-up and their costumes are extremely simple. But the exquisite subtlety of the acting makes the question of biological gender seem meaningless next to the appeal of the characters as individuals. For the prisoners, all of whom are gay men who experience violence and discrimination on a daily basis in this man's world of the prison, participating in this play is a means to escape for a few hours into a different world. It is, in the words of Bouchard, a "love story that no one ever told me." It is a gay love story.

At the same time, however, it was Bilodeau who dealt the final blow that brought this love story to an end. Bilodeau, who is himself a homosexual and who has never been able to face his own desires. As viewers of this film we follow Bilodeau as he is forced to recall this history, as he reflects on his complicity with a homophobic society, on his own self-hatred. This film is worth a look.

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