Leo (Félix Maritaud) never counts his money after he’s with a client. The gay sex worker at the center of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s film Sauvage/Wild is, honestly, happy to be there. Drifting from client to client and from place to place, the homeless hustler has one constant that is quickly disappearing: his unrequited feelings for fellow hustler (though “gay 4 pay”), Ahd (Éric Bernard). Leo’s intense yearning for human connection and affection, mixed with his somewhat paradoxical disinclination to be “kept” in a (facile) domestic situation, and ailing body but unrelenting spirit, are reminiscent of Giulietta Masina in Federico Fellini’s Nights […]

Near the end of Yann Gonzalez’s queer neo-giallo intoxicant Knife + Heart, gay porn producer and director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) finds herself in a delapidated porno theatre in 1970s Paris, watching her own work from the past projected onto the screen. The elusive murderer terrorizing the set of her newest film is also transfixed by the porn being projected. Anne’s history as creator of fantasies and the traumatic history of the masked killer who’s been knocking off her cast and crew converge, film and reality melt into one another. They’re both frozen in their tracks in the cat and mouse […]