Normally in cinema, this kind of spectacle is visited on beautiful women for the delectation of the male viewer. The inmates themselves are subject to explicit fetishism - being reduced to a series of torsos, limbs, hands, members. The phrase 'climax of the movie' begins to take on more than one meaning. This is literalised when his arousal becomes unbearable, and he begins whipping a prisoner. His gaze, though, is explicitly fetishised - he is made complicit in what he sees. All this is shown to us from the viewpoint of the warden.
It is difficult to tell whether this sequence is a flashback, flashforward, or merely a dream (the whole thing could be the warden's fantasy), but it too eventually ends in brutality and death. There are scenes which escape this hell into a kind of pastoral arcadia, where two men find happiness amidst sunny verdure. Some men get relief from this intolerable situation through masturbation, others by mad erotic breakdancing. The film, inevitably, honestly, ends as it began, with one crucial, perhaps hopeful, difference. The film is a melodrama, literalising what Nicholas Ray made figurative - imprisonment and repression. We see frustrated prisoners, trying to communicate: by passing flowers through barred windows knocking on walls through special code or, in the film's most exquisite and arousing sequence, through a shared smoking between a hole in the wall. As the audience for this kind of film is predominantly middle-class, it is the warden who sees for us an underworld we would normally run a mile from. The complicity between authority and criminality is a favourite Genet theme. Robbed of a voice, he is reduced to the role of a voyeur, becoming OUR representative.
The film begins with the figure symbolic of this power in society - authority - in this case a police warden.
This is thematically vital: set in a prison, with inmates in solitary cells, the film explores the idea of the voice - who has the power to speak, and hence represent themselves, in our society. Indeed, there are no words in this film at all, or music, or any kind of sound. Although not as rich and beguiling as Fassbinder's QUERELLE, and despite its claustrophobic lack of humour, the film lacks the prolixity that often mars Genet's most famous literary works. UN CHANT d'AMOUR is a remarkable short: sordid, brutal, provocative yet as poetic and lyrical as its title suggests.
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