Unfaithful

In 2009, writer-director Claude Peres pushed the envelope of gay movies beyond most movie-goers' tolerance level. The Frenchman's first feature, Unfaithful (Infideles), showed his night of sex with Marcel Schlutt, a German model, escort and professional gay porn actor.

Peres had a storyboard on the wall of the apartment in which they met, but there was no film crew. Peres was his own cameraman, editing the footage caught by fixed cameras (in positions fixed between scenes) and mobile cameras (hand-held by him and Schlutt). He recording what they said to each other (in English) and the ambient sounds of the apartment building.

Peres's first film, a short made in 2006, showed a man viewing photos of a kiss and recalling homosexual love (La memoire vive). His feature's in-your-face directness was not a complete novelty in France, as lesbian director Emilie Jouvet had already filmed live action with a similar intellectual g-string of sexual discussions added to the hard core. Most of that is hidden from view, though, in darkness, inadequate lighting of out of the fixed camera's position.

The concept had value, and it would have been interesting to experience an honest exchange of views and sexual activities by a pair of strangers. It need not have been at the self-consciously and overly intellectual level of My Dinner with Andre, but it did need two people with an ability to communicate in words and body languages. However, a coy Frenchman and blase German cannot be expected to spark verbal wonders in the English language when neither of them are fluent in it. Peres adds voice-over comments without adding to the overall impact or meaning. This film is "so not about sex", he comments, but fails to prove it.

As the DVD extras show, neither of the men is bursting with extrovert intelligence. They are nice young Europeans with good bodies, and their movie merely proves a basic fact of sexual life: that horny men are faithful to nothing but their penile urges. They are polite, considerate, use condoms, smoke joints and have breakfast; they don't teach their audience enough about male sex and bonding, or the relationship between a director and an actor, in terms of reality or symbolism.