The sudden and uncertain rupture in the relationship between a young filmmaker and his boyfriend provides the narrative framework for Man at Bath, one of Honoré’s most experimental features. Featuring gay French porn star François Sagat and shot on location in Gennevilliers (a banlieue, or suburb, of Paris) and New York, the film scrambles expectations about both cinematic and pornographic depictions of friendship, sex and love. It is no coincidence that the film centers itself in the banlieue,where the cultures of immigrants and people of color flourish (and where homosexuality is not generally a cinematic focus for “gay” directors). Alternating quasi-documentary sequences shot on consumer-grade digital video with more obviously fictional episodes, Man at Bath is as audacious as it is perversely seductive.

A rumpled, out-of-shape, middle-aged man on the prowl watches four attractive young men play tennis. Aware that desiring eyes are directed toward them, the boys remove their shirts to display youthful, muscular bodies, setting off a contest of wills that belongs as much in the bull ring as on a tennis court. Provocative and tantalizingly homoerotic, Hôtel Kuntz questions the force of fantasy when confronted with a stubbornly imperfect reality.