| since the initial screenings of Canadian director John Greyson's brilliant film Lilies, writes OutUK's Stevie Gardiner. This exotic and moving gay revenge drama from the maker of queer classics Zero Patience and Uncut, won countless Best Film awards at gay and mainstream festivals around the world including Montreal, San Francisco, L.A. and Johannesburg. | |
| Lilies is not your average gay coming out feature. Set in a men's prison in Northern Quebec in 1952, a certain Bishop Bilodeau is lured into hearing the confession of Simon Doucet, a dying inmate. But Simon Doucet has a very different revelation for Bilodeau. He has enlisted his fellow inmates to stage a play which they set in 1912, when the two of them were childhood friends. |
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Because the play is being staged within a prison, the female roles are portrayed by the male prisoners and the young Bilodeau and Simon
are performed by younger and highly attractive inmates.
The play dramatises a period during Bilodeau and Simon's childhood in Roberval, Quebec, when they were both coming to terms with their homosexuality. Simon has a romantic relationship with another pupil at the school called Vallier, while Bilodeau remains repressed and tries desperately to convince Simon to join the seminary with him. The staged prison play turns out to be the re-enactment of a lethal tragedy which took place in the Catholic's boys school 40 years before - the portrayal of a gay love triangle involving an 18 year old Bilodeau and his two classmates. The Bishop is forced to confront his rejected, and forever after repressed gay desires and the death he was responsible for. Because of his jealousy, Bilodeau sets fire to a room in the school where Vallier and Simon were staying and locks the door, trapping both inside. Bilodeau is remorseful and returns in time to drag Simon to safety, but leaves Vallier behind, falsely telling the arriving policemen that Vallier is already dead. Vallier perishes in the flames. The prison play reveals that Vallier's murder becomes a crime for which Simon Doucet was falsely arrested and convicted. Thus, the play was designed not as Simon's confession of his sins, but a ploy to extract a confession from Bilodeau. Bilodeau admits his guilt, and asks Simon to kill him, but Simon refuses. | |
| Theatrical and stylised, Lilies is beautifully filmed and owes much of its success to Derek Jarman and that classic French novel of lost teenage love Le Grand Meaulnes. The male prisoners conjure up a forever lost land of teenage innocence and the raw hormone-racing sexual desire the teenagers experience. |
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Even in the flashback scenes, all the women's roles are played
by men, but you soon become accustomed to this, just as the Bishop is forced to confront
the reality of his life.
Lilies is a rollercoaster ride, with wonderful and sensual performances from the three young leads
Matthew Ferguson, Jason Cadieux and Danny Gilmore.
The film was first seen in selected film festivals in the autumn of 2005 and then released theatrically in 1996. The scandals that have hit the Catholic church around the world since then have only given added resonance to this haunting and remarkable film.
The play-within-the-film is sometimes shot in realistic settings, while other scenes explicitly take place in the prison chapel. Realist scenes segue into prison scenes through visible set changes. After a realist autumn scene, leaves are shown being removed from the chapel floor. The final lovemaking scene between Simon and Vallier is presented in realist style, but fades into a prison scene when the boat in which the couple are having sex, becomes a bathtub in the chapel. The play's dialogue and acting are deliberately heightened according to stage, rather than film conventions. In a 2017 interview with CBC Arts, John Greyson described the film as a "strange Genet-inflected-via-Fellini fable". The film screened at numerous festivals, including Sundance - the American Institute and Festival that supports independent films, that was founded and supported by the actor Robert Redford. Lilies went on to be nominated for 14 Genie Awards, and won four of them:
Best Motion Picture | |
| The film is still available in the UK on DVD, cert 15, from Amazon. |
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