At the start of the film, the half-Arab Felix (Sami Bouajila) is bicycling through a Norman town (Dieppe) to where he has been working as a barman on a ferryboat across the English channel. With the opening of the Chunnel, he has been laid off. Going through papers of his recently deceased (Norman) mother, he finds the address in Marseilles of the father who abandoned him and his mother at birth.

Being around all day he is bored and his presence (and, in particular, watching a soap opera he saw every morning at work on the boat) disrupts his teacher lover Daniel (Pierre-Loup Rajot). Felix decides to go meet his father, though Daniel is the first of many who warns him that if his father wanted to see him he would have done so some time during the last quarter century. Felix visits the local HIV clinic to stock up on his medications (Crixivan and Combinivir). There he and another gay man reassure a woman that a triple-drug combination is not the final step in HIV treatment.

I have to say that I find it very strange that someone who has been living in Normandy his whole life does not have an umbrella, and that the only one Felix can find to buy is a flamboyant rainbow one. I thought that it was going to be an issue and/or a weapon later on, but he only carries it along everywhere.

Deciding to make the trip an adventure, Felix avoids taking public transportation or freeways. I don't know why it takes him the whole first day and part of the night to get only to Rouen--to which he could have bicycled in a few hours. There--quite close to home--he witnesses a beating and is threatened to keep quiet.

He skirts Paris and the next evening arrives in Chartres. He finds the 17-year-old Jules (Charley Serue) trying to draw a relief of Aristotle from the facade of the cathedral, helps him, and spends the night in Jules's bedroom, ignoring Jules's desire for sex.

The next day they "borrow" a car, find that there is a baby in the backseat, get the baby back to its mother and continue south. After being ejected from a gay disco when the owner discovers Jules is only 17, Felix admonishes Jules not to pout, that there will be other men in his life who m he wants but who refuse to have sex with him. Jules does not want to be a little brother and Felix continues alone.

He is picked up by a feisty old woman (Patachou, a chanteuse who appeared in Jean Renoir's "French Can-Can"), determined to enjoy her widowhood, then by a hunky railroad worker (Philippe Garziano) who is a kite aficionado (who gives him a kite to match his umbrella, gets it on with him in some poison ivy, and anoints him in shallot vinegar to relieve the itching), and helps Isabelle (Ariane Ascaride) change a tire after which she gives him a ride as she drops off three of her children to their three separate fathers in the Loire Valley. Finally, he reaches the Mediterranean, where an elderly fisherman (Maurice Benichou) tells him about fishing to fish rather than to catch anything, again suggests that the purpose of Felix's journey is dubious, and gives him a ride into Marseilles.

The film ends with Felix and Daniel on a ferry—en route to Corsica. I don't want to fill in all that happens en route, but recurrent concerns include racist violence and non-normative families, including the rejection of the older woman of her deceased husband and alive (if not living) son and the insistence by one of the children being distributed to their biological fathers for the weekend that whoever is with his mother (including, at that moment, Felix) is one of his fathers.

The film-makers (Olivier Ducastel and his life-partner Jacques Martineau) label segments with kinship terms ("my grandmother," etc.). Except for casting Jules as "my younger brother," it does not seem to me that Felix sees his brief encounters on the road as a family he is constructing -- compared, say, to Art Carney's Tonto in Paul Mazursky's "Harry and Tonto." Felix and those he spends time with develop feelings and give advice--and suggest that family is overrated, but Felix persists in journeying toward his unknown father.

As road movies go, "Drôle de Felix" is more like "Harry and Tonto" than "Kings of the Road" or "Easy Rider" or other ones with two main characters (like "It Happened One Night.") Harry goes to visit offspring and has a cat along, but there is something of the same humor, similarly quirky characters encountered en route, and similarly engaging protagonist travelers.

Felix has his sorrows, but also considerable joie de vivre, a dazzling smile, and kissable lips. The lips are locked to those of several male characters over the course of the film. There is also brief, incidental male nudity. I gather that these scenes alarm some people. There are no sex scenes: one sexual encounter clearly occurs, but off-camera.

Any male-male kissing is too much for some people, I realize (including Oakland policemen doing surveillance outside a gay bar there), but if one tabulated all the time males kiss males on American movie screens in comparison to the time males kiss females this year, I'd estimate that there are twenty hours of the latter for every minute of the former and the gay-straight ratio is higher than 1:600! (If not 1:10, then it's 1:20.)

Felix's homosexuality and HIV+ status are established early and the film is not about problems stemming from either of these statuses. Although a film with a gay protagonist, it is mostly not a film about gay life. It's a road movie, as I've said several times already. Two of the three longest (in screen time) relationships are with straight women.

Obviously, I am more bothered by the never-unfurled umbrella and by how long it takes him to get from Dieppe to Rouen than by the length of Felix's lip locks. Viewers who are not freaked out by men kissing can enjoy the French countryside scenery, the delightfully individuated characters met on the way (especially Patchou), and the warm but vulnerable (and photogenic despite somewhat deep-set eyes) title character. I certainly did.



Recommended:
Yes