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Being at Home with Claude (Canadian French)

By Golu
This one falls into that darker corner of gay cinema. There was real potential buried in here, but the execution feels so flat that at points it plays out more like a filmed stage play than an actual movie. It's a dark psychological drama built around a street hustler confessing to a brutal, confusing murder of his own lover. Black and white flashback sequences do a solid job laying out the details of what happened, but the real focus stays on the dialogue and the writing itself. Right at the start, a young hustler has already killed his male lover Claude. Three days go by before he calls the police to turn himself in for the murder. But instead of just reporting it somewhere ordinary, he actually summons the police and the local press directly into a judge's private chambers. Yves has keys to the place, which tracks given what he does for a living, but having the press waiting right outside makes the whole scene look like some elaborate blackmail scheme against the judge. The ...
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Being at Home with Claude (Canadian French)

By Golu

This one falls into that darker corner of gay cinema. There was real potential buried in here, but the execution feels so flat that at points it plays out more like a filmed stage play than an actual movie. It's a dark psychological drama built around a street hustler confessing to a brutal, confusing murder of his own lover. Black and white flashback sequences do a solid job laying out the details of what happened, but the real focus stays on the dialogue and the writing itself.

Right at the start, a young hustler has already killed his male lover Claude. Three days go by before he calls the police to turn himself in for the murder. But instead of just reporting it somewhere ordinary, he actually summons the police and the local press directly into a judge's private chambers. Yves has keys to the place, which tracks given what he does for a living, but having the press waiting right outside makes the whole scene look like some elaborate blackmail scheme against the judge. The real mystery becomes why he did it. Claude was a university student from Quebec, had a girlfriend, and was supposedly straight. It's clear the killing happened during sex, and it was entirely consensual between them. It comes out that Claude had hired Yves years earlier, but the two of them ended up actually falling in love, turning it into a real, deeply intense relationship. On one particular night, the two of them hit this moment of total physical and emotional release where everything just felt completely in sync. That's exactly where things took a dark turn. Yves realizes Claude would eventually have to confront being gay in a world that would judge and reject him for it. Unable to stomach the idea of Claude suffering through that, he wanted to keep him locked in that one perfect moment forever. So right at the height of their shared pleasure, he killed him. In Yves's mind, he wasn't ending Claude's life so much as preserving him permanently in that instant of total happiness, sparing him from ever having to feel pain or shame.

Films like this aren't built to send you out feeling good, they're meant to leave you thinking and talking about what you just watched. But for whatever reason, whether it's the pacing or something off in the performance, I just never managed to connect with the lead character. He didn't quite have what it took to carry all the weight, passion, and emotion his role demanded. The film tries to offer up a kind of selfless motive behind what's essentially a cold blooded murder, and personally, that's not something I could ever get behind. The back and forth bickering between Yves and the cops also just wasn't engaging enough to hold my attention. I think this whole premise deserves a modern retelling, done with more finesse, more tension, and a real budget behind it. There's still something worth exploring here. As it stands though, this particular version just didn't do much for me. (3/10)

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