In his latest film, French filmmaker, writer, and artist Alain Guiraudie presents a powerful homoerotic thriller set in the rural south of France, exploring his core themes, such as guilt, the limits of desire, the role of religion, and social class. The plot follows the young Jérémie, who returns to his native village after many years away, leaving behind his former life. His reappearance unsettles the entire village, particularly several men who struggle to conceal their fantasies and desires for him, most notably the clergyman L’Abbé Grisolles.
Guiraudie’s second exhibition at Galerie Crèvecœur unfolds in a similar register, set entirely within a forest and a morally ambiguous, unsettling landscape. The thirteen photographs on display at the Belleville space demonstrate Guiraudie’s remarkable ability to transform mundane elements—a forest, two men, a house, a meadow with cows—into objects of desire. His work questions prevailing codes and conventions, renewing the notion of beauty while blurring the boundaries between the attractive and the ugly, making desirable those who are conventionally considered undesirable.
Born into a peasant family in the south of France, Guiraudie has long been fascinated by the ways male homosexuality exists outside urban centers, in environments historically sought by queer communities as refuges from repression. Cities, while offering a certain degree of protection through anonymity and a sense of community, have also become spaces in which gay life is often showcased—though only certain types of bodies are highlighted, resulting in a partial representation of queerness. In 2018, after a residency in Tourcoing, Guiraudie returned to photography, a practice which he had explored in his youth. His photographs convey a striking immediacy, often impossible to achieve in his filmmaking, which involves a long and collaborative process. Through analog photography and gelatin silver prints, he captures the tactile and ephemeral qualities of light, flesh, and desire.
Indeed, this series emerges from a precisely arranged scene, in which two models occupy the spaces between conventional, gendered, and ultimately sexist constructions of beauty dictated by their age and body type. Masculinity, like femininity, is deeply inscribed with socially codified stereotypes, as discussed under the feminist concept of hegemonic masculinity by Australian sociologist R. W. Connell, while homosexual relationships are often shaped and constrained by patriarchal, prescriptive norms of gender, as theorized by Jack Halberstam in Female Masculinity (1998).
Rooted in folklore, the forest naturally evokes the supernatural, the magical, and the mystical forces of the wild. Running alongside villages and the ordinariness of everyday life, it stands as a threshold space, both adjacent to and radically outside the social order. For centuries, forests have been understood as liminal territories, inhabited by those excluded from the city: witches, monsters, and outcasts. Similarly, as with the lake in Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013), the forest’s silence and seeming stillness have long served as sites for cruising and transgressive encounters. Therefore, the forest, as a place of escape, embodies a central theme in Guiraudie’s work—the escape as a psychological and existential flight—already explored, for example, in his comedy The King of Escape (2009).
Under the influence of writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Georges Bataille, Guiraudie’s literary work began around 2014 with Ici commence la nuit (2014), followed by the first volume of his ongoing monumental fresco, Rabalaïre (2021). In this series, Guiraudie once again explores troubling moral territories, probing the limits of what can be felt, understood, and represented, often arriving at deeply unsettling conclusions. Across these works, homosexuality appears inextricable from certain elements of ultimate violence, leading to secrecy, guilt, and sometimes even acts of violence. Who counts as a murderer—or, more generally—as a delinquent? And how are these categories themselves constructed to protect a bourgeois social order by stigmatizing those at the margins? How are those who repress others also themselves repressed, recalling that Catholicism—the faith that shaped Guiraudie’s childhood—remains fundamentally a religion of sin? Although his photographs can be coarse, with burlesque and occasionally mocking humor, they nonetheless raise profoundly existential questions of moral guilt and erotic desire. How will this encounter in the woods end? Will it end in sexual acts or violence? How do they perceive one another? Is their attraction mutual, or only in being watched? And when, in viewing these images, does the viewer find themselves becoming a voyeur?
Yet this series associates religious symbols with an explicit depiction of sex, and despite its unsettling composition, it conveys a particular sense of quietness and serenity, a harmony between bodies and nature, almost utopian. Sometimes hidden behind trees, the two men are sexualized tenderly, suggesting underlying, entangled violence while also conveying a profound sense of tranquility. Interspersed with images of landscapes devoid of human presence, especially a distinctive gnarled tree with numerous branches, the natural world reveals itself in its most particular expressions. Humans and trees seem to exist in the same continuum, each a different expression of the natural world, free to be as they are.
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Alain Guiraudie (b. 1964, FR) lives and works in Albi (FR).
Mathilde Cassan is a Paris-based curator and writer.
