Robin Campillo (2013)
Paris, the Gare du Nord: a group of young men – in their late teens or early twenties – fool around on the margins of the station and in a fast food place inside it. They’re also working together for pick-ups. You can’t hear what language they’re speaking and there are no subtitles on the screen at this stage. The camera focuses increasingly on one particular boy and one particular prospective punter, a man in smart casual clothes, who looks to be in his mid- to late forties and introduces himself to the younger man as Daniel. The hustler says that his name is Marek and that he doesn’t speak French. Daniel’s English is pretty basic so their conversation is halting and fragmentary. (There are subtitles by now.) Marek explains that he ‘does everything’. He asks if they can go to Daniel’s home for sex. Daniel says it’s not convenient. Marek can’t offer anywhere else to go. They agree to meet at Daniel’s place at six o’clock the following day. Daniel writes down his address. Before they part, Marek asks, in a puzzled tone, if Daniel doesn’t want to know how much he charges. Daniel asks the amount and is told fifty euros, which is fine by him. So begins Robin Campillo’s second feature as writer-director (following a 2004 zombie movie called Les Revenants: he also worked with Francois Bégaudeau on the screenplay for The Class (2008)). The documentary quality of the Gare du Nord sequences makes them absorbing but this start to Eastern Boys is overlong and the emergence of Daniel (Olivier Rabourdin) and Marek (Kirill Emelyanov) is too deliberately weighted. It feels artificial compared with the film’s opening few minutes.
Marek may be surprised that he isn’t immediately asked about his fee but Daniel’s behaviour has already prompted other questions in the viewer’s mind. Does he use rent boys regularly? There’s nothing in his manner to suggest that his approach to Marek is a first but, whether it is or not, if Daniel wants sex immediately why does he decide to wait twenty-four hours – and run the risk of giving his home address to a complete stranger? Daniel lives alone in a twelfth-floor apartment in a Paris suburb. The next day, he takes a call on the building intercom at the appointed time. The caller says he’s Marek but, when Daniel opens the door, the boy who dashes in is not the one to whom he talked the previous day. This Marek (Beka Markozashvili) is the smallest and evidently the youngest member of the group from the Gare du Nord. Daniel tries to get rid of him but the boy says that he’s only fourteen and threatens to report Daniel to the police. When the doorbell rings again, the boy runs to the door and admits two other, bigger members of the team. Now it’s Daniel who says he’ll call the police but it’s a futile threat: he’s already seriously outnumbered and, within a few minutes, pretty well the whole group from the railway station are in the apartment and making themselves at home – including their leader, Boss (Danil Vorbyev), and his girlfriend (whom we’ve not seen before). The boy whom Daniel was expecting is the last to arrive and appears to play a minimal role in what follows.
Daniel is taunted verbally by the menacing Boss. The group – or gang, as we and Daniel now see them to be – drink his booze, play loud music, remove art from the walls and other furnishings from the apartment (and load them into a van parked outside). Boss and another lad come to blows and a glass-topped table gets broken. It’s not clear to what extent Daniel joins in the party but he’s self-protective enough at least to accept a drink and we assume that he accepts too that he’s in for a long evening. When he comes to the next morning, the elegantly minimalist decor of the flat has been reduced to little more than the empty bottles and crisps bags and other debris that litter the floor. Daniel has been sleeping on the one remaining sofa. He gets up and dressed and goes to work, leaving a note and payment for his cleaner. When he comes home that evening, a caller on the intercom claims to be the original Marek and to be unaccompanied. After only slight hesitation, Daniel lets him in and he is indeed alone. Daniel and Marek have sex. Job done, Marek departs.
This sequence of events, covering around the first half hour of Eastern Boys, sounds improbable on paper and it’s improbable as you watch. Robin Campillo’s hopes for a suspension of disbelief in Daniel’s reactions depend throughout on his giving his protagonist virtually no backstory and virtually no context. Daniel has a job but we never see him at work. He has friends: there’s a very brief sequence of his hosting a dinner party but his guests don’t have speaking parts. There’s no suggestion that Daniel confides in anyone – he has no contact with relatives. He has a mirror with a few photographs tucked into the frame (these are left undisturbed by the gang). One photo shows Daniel with a former boyfriend but you’re given no real idea of what his life has been until now. He’s a tabula rasa and this is just what Robin Campillo needs. It’s largely because Daniel’s behaviour is so baffling that the story holds your attention in the way it does. You feel there’s bound to be an explanation coming, through the revelation of something in this man’s past or personality, of why he was prepared to wait for casual sex, to supply Marek with his home address, to let him into the apartment the day after its invasion by the rest of the gang – an explanation too of why Daniel isn’t prepared to report the matter to the police and doesn’t seem concerned that the gang may pay a return visit. In the event, there is no explanation of any of this. After their first session, Marek – a Ukrainian, whose real name, he eventually reveals to Daniel, is Rouslan – comes back to the apartment increasingly frequently and a relationship between the two men develops that is about more than sex. Rouslan tells Daniel how he lost his family in Chechnya. Daniel teaches him to speak French. After a while, the older man says that he no longer wishes them to have sex. (There’s no suggestion that Daniel then has sex with anyone else.)
Robin Campillo plots Eastern Boys so that things happen when he needs them to happen, however unlikely the event or its timing may be. The gang members, from a variety of Eastern European countries, are based in a hotel that caters mostly for illegal immigrants. The largest example of delay for narrative convenience concerns the suspicions of the other gang members, and Boss in particular, about Rouslan’s activities when he’s not with the rest of the group. At one point, Rouslan tells Daniel that the others are suspicious about his state-of-the-art iphone, and his designer jacket and T-shirts – things either bought for him by Daniel or purchased with money Daniel has paid Rouslan. But the gang members don’t act on these suspicions until the last half-hour of the film, which is set in the hotel. Even during this section, Campillo postpones things further to escalate the drama – for example, the notably conscientious hotel manager (Edéa Darcque) temporarily stops being conscientious so that there’s a delay in the unlocking of a room in which Rouslan has been beaten up by Boss and his acolytes, and lies bound and gagged. Eventually, the whole gang – except for Boss and Rouslan – is apprehended by the police and we assume they will be deported. Boss escapes and returns to Daniel’s apartment but finds it empty, and breaks down weeping: this is the last we see of him. Daniel, having rescued Rouslan from the hotel, applies legally to adopt him and the strong implication of the last scene of Eastern Boys is that the application will be successful.
Olivier Rabourdin is a good actor and he does what Robin Campillo requires: he gives Daniel a surface reality and he holds the camera, concealing the hollowness of the character he’s playing. As Rouslan, Kirill Emelyanov quietly expresses resentment at being treated as a sex object when Daniel first penetrates him, and enjoyment of the more sensitive intercourse they subsequently enjoy but his feelings about Daniel – beyond fear that the latter no longer wants him and that Rouslan will have to return to Boss’s gang full-time – are largely opaque. In his review of the film in Sight and Sound (January 2015), Anton Bitel notes that:
‘… with Daniel replacing Boss as father figure for Rouslan, the film also rings the changes on western Europe’s relations with its eastern neighbours, dramatising different kinds of abuse and assimilation while (partially) transcending boundaries of ethnicity and class.’
Campillo and his cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie certainly create some resonant, melancholy images of twenty-first century Paris-scapes and convey a sense of immigrant anomie in this setting (particularly in the hotel). A larger reading of Eastern Boys depends, however, on the story being credible in its more immediate realistic dimension. If you think it is (Anton Bitel does: the ‘also’ in that quote above is significant – Bitel sees the film as ‘[mostly] … a highly nuanced love story’), you can then reasonably move on to perceive a broader metaphorical meaning. If you don’t, you’ll likely feel that Robin Campillo is banking on the evident political topicality of Eastern Boys to paper over the yawning gaps in his screenplay.
16 February 2015
