Biphobia is an issue when viewing new Guadeloupe film ‘Dream On’
The first bisexual character in a Guadeloupean film is a villain
REVIEW
The third edition of the Kréyòl International Film Festival (KIFF) in Paris last September, was an opportunity to discover the latest film productions from the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Among the films selected was “Dream On”, which elicits both admiration for a self-produced Franco-Caribbean film and discomfort for a viewer from the LGBT+ community.
For Erasing 76 Crimes, we will attempt to decipher this in order to answer the question of whether “Dream On”, broadcast by Canal +, is biphobic.
REVIEW
Why should you watch ‘Dream On’?
Dream On is a film about music in the French West Indies and one of the few feature films (there have been six in total) shot in Guadeloupe by locals over the past ten years.
The two writers and directors, Christopher Bordelais and Jordan Laurent, also star in the film, and Bordelais also composed all the songs. Bordelais sings in Creole on screen as Kane Davidson, who seeks to become an international music star, following in the footsteps of his elders from the band Kassav in the 1980s.
Unlike dancehall singers with inflammatory and LGBT-phobic lyrics, it is through Creole pop-rock sounds that Kane manages to unite audiences from all over the world. The story is deliberately set in today’s Guadeloupe, connected to the rest of the world through social media.
Beloved and adored, he is portrayed as a unifying and non-violent hero, far from arousing anger and wrath.
Homophile aesthetic and narrative choices
“Dream On” first takes viewers into an exclusively male urban music world through the trio of Kane, Tony, and Steams, who are the three main protagonists, while women are relegated to the role of groupies, with the exception of the enchantress, whose role is merely a nod to the magical-religious world of the Caribbean.
Throughout the film, we gradually move from a masculine, virile friendship in the early scenes, which take place at the three young men’s workplace—a warehouse—into growing homophilia as Kane begins to make his mark in music.
Kane’s friends are presented as a binary opposition: with Steams (actor Stanley Durimel) there is sexual tension in the form of meaningful glances in the moonlight on the heights of the city, while the no less latent tension with Tony (played by Jordan Laurent) is erased by his performative masculinity in the form of macho jokes and remarks about women.
For a film buff, it is difficult not to see some analogies here with Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight”, which won three Oscars in 2017 but was never distributed in cinemas in the French West Indies and French Guiana due to the refusal to commercially exploit a film dealing with Black male homosexuality.
On an island like Guadeloupe, where homophobia is completely ingrained, the two directors’ homophilic aesthetic choice is a bold one. Perhaps this is a way of illustrating what Jordan Laurent described as “the dark side of the music industry,” without elaborating further on his thoughts to KIFF festival-goers.
What ‘Dream On’ says about the unconscious perception of bisexuality in Guadeloupe
Inevitably, since homosexuality is not a central theme in the relationship between Kane, Steams, and Tony, the bisexuality of one of the characters, Tony, Kane’s manager, inevitably finds its way into the story.
On the contrary, the directors wanted to draw on this aspect of Tony’s personality, the first bisexual character in Guadeloupean cinema—if we disregard the feature film Les Konxs, shot in the Paris region in digital video format in 2006—to create a turning point in the film, where homophilia fades away.
We can still question the way in which this bisexuality is portrayed. Tony appears to be a man who hides his attraction to men and is therefore a profound liar. When cornered and confronted with his web of lies, he becomes vehement, dangerous, and threatening.
Worse still, he appears as a deceitful, treacherous, venal man with psychological problems and addicted to casinos, to the point of having completely squandered Kane’s fortune on paid sexual services from male escorts, leading to a devastating finale that feels all too familiar on an island plagued by violence and homophobia.
In Guadeloupean cinematic history, for eternity, the first and only bisexual fictional character to date is a villain. And in popular culture, this amounts to engraving this type of unconsciousness, feeding it.
Far be it from me to attribute deliberate intent to the filmmakers, especially since guaranteeing freedom of artistic creation is essential for the atmosphere to be free of censorship. Nevertheless, from an LGBT+ activist perspective, representations and, beyond that, the unconscious attitudes they convey, speak volumes.
