FUNNY FELIX (THE ADVENTURES OF FELIX/DROLE DE FELIX)
France, 2000 Director: Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau
Stars: Sami Bouajila, Patachou, Ariane Ascaride
For no apparent reason, the sombre worlds of HIV infection and racial violence backdrop this weak light comedy.
Félix (Sami Bouajila) likes morning television, drawing, and North-African music. He seems happy with his boyfriend and their leisurely life in northern France, but when he loses his job on the ferries (after the opening of the Chunnel) and stumbles across his dead mother’s stash of hidden letters, he embarks on a hitchhiking tour south to meet the father he’s never known. Along the way, he strings together an ad-hoc family from chance encounters with strangers. Stolen cars, brief affairs and life lessons feature in a very segmented and predictable story.
Félix’s first encounter is with son petit frere, Jules (Charley Serue) a horny seventeen year old who lives with his parents. Out for a laugh, the pair steal a woman’s car, only to find that she’s left her newborn baby on the back seat. They return the baby, but keep the car, in fact, after they split, Félix keeps it, completing a leg of his journey before abandoning it by the roadside. (So much for Félix's bravado that his journey be independent, self-funded and picaresque.) Anyway, Félix drags Jules into a gay disco, where they writhe around to nosebleed techno before getting booted out when Félix tells the bar owner that his companion is underage. (I guess the movie is called Funny Félix, not Smart, Astute or Discreet Felix.) Félix then yells at Jules for entering the disco despite being underage. (It’s not called Fair Félix with the Good Memory, either.)
Further down the road, Félix encounters his “grandmother”, a feisty old broad (played by cabaret star Patachou) who sneaks glances at his naked body, before hitching a ride with his new “cousin”, a burly gay railway worker. They stop for a romantic interlude in a flower-filled field before adjourning to the nearby bushes for sex. But fear not – when they reemerge, Félix’s “cousin” is brandishing a used condom, ready to chuck it in the bushes, and there’s even a couple of lines of cheesy dialogue that spotlight it, with Félix determined not to let his careless new friend litter the environment. Never mind that Félix has just cheated on his lover (with his “cousin” incidentally) he’s done so “safely”, by acting totally within the rules of post-AIDS instruction pamphlet gay sex and culture – and isn’t that all that matters?
The film sails on, as we meet Félix’s “sister”, a single mother with three kids to three different fathers. Félix finally arrives in Marseilles, meets his “father” then sits down to make some tough decisions. Along the way, he’s haunted by some thugs he catches bashing a mixed-race guy to death.
The film’s idea that we can find our ”brothers”, “cousins” and even “fathers” all around us is handled too deliberately, with titles announcing the arrival of each new “family” member and the film being structured as a series of short films, run in sequence but totally independent from each other. Félix is the story centre but despite his slick outfits, carefree nature and diligent approach to medication, we soon lose interest in him, and he acts like such a dickhead at times that we care increasingly less about how everything turns out for him.
Félix’s HIV infection has a strong presence in the film – we see him take his medication in almost every other scene - but no real narrative purpose. He’s just HIV-positive and on combination therapy, as well as being a jaunty bon vivant. Likewise, his North-African heritage allies him with every other mixed-race French person in the film, and he becomes emblematic of racial violence, despite not suffering any himself.
Maybe I’m missing some irony that may or may not be in the film, or maybe there’s some message here about something or other, but it seems like cheating to make a poorly-drawn and bland character afflicted or marginalised just so the audience feels that they have to like him and sympathise with his objectives. Félix’s HIV status is a device to up the stakes, and give his quest a sense of urgency and importance. And given that HIV infection in this film, and the era in which this film's been made, is a comfortable, semi-trendy thing that is easily managed with a course of shmicko pills, Félix may as well have been diabetic, or even left-handed.
Rock Hudson must be rolling in his grave: ditzy light comedies now feature HIV-positive gay characters as frothy, cute leads.
