58 year-old Pierre (Jacques Nolot) is a former hustler and lonely prisoner of his past. The film opens with a black circle as a dot on a white screen. Slowly the circle enlarges until it fills the entire screen, making the viewer see the kind of oblivion which Pierre is facing. Living off money provided by former wealthy lovers, he stays in his apartment, waits for inspiration, but can't write his next book. He resorts to prostitutes for sex and discusses at length the price of their services with his friends. Pierre reminisces about his youth, beauty and time as a gigolo. "I've stopped doing things,” he says, "I sublimate." Pierre is HIV-positive and has been taking medication for years. He is weary but begins a new therapy. Slowly he pulls himself together and finds renewed inspiration with psychiatrist Dr. Manosky's (David Kessler) help. Pierre spends his days meeting old gigolo friends, going to his psychiatrist, trying to write, hiring young hustlers, and watching life pass by at his local bistro over a beer and a sandwich.
Conversations with his friends are devoid of any passion or interest in what the others have to say. Everything seems to circle around the prices of rentboys and how poorly they are paid. There is no compassion or empathy in these conversations, so the only people who can tolerate Pierre’s complaining are his psychotherapist and the hustlers who treat it as a duty to listen to him. Pierre sometimes talks of suicide but listeners think he just wants attention. Death has never really been absent in Pierre’s mind. At the age of 25 he decided not to make any investments since he didn’t expect to live much longer. For the past 24 years Pierre has had his HIV-positive status hanging over him.
At the age of 25 former society gigolo Tountoune (Albert Mainella) became his lover and benefactor. Although they never lived under the same roof, they were together for almost 35 years. Tountoune had willed his entire fortune to Pierre but his will was never registered with a lawyer, so when Tountoune suddenly died on the day they were supposed to meet for lunch, Pierre was left with only two life insurances in his name. Pierre feels cheated out of his old lover’s inheritance, but the whole ordeal only seems to motivate him to put more effort into writing.
Pierre's inability to concentrate in order to read seems to be the same force that makes him write: his fear of the oblivion, the black circle which threatens to devour him before it’s too late to leave a footprint in the world of the living. Despite his talk of suicide he doesn’t really want to go yet. Although he claims that nothing interests him anymore, he resists a new HIV treatment since it may have side effects--loss of hair and looks. He still dresses elegantly and rarely lets his guard down in front of others. His obvious vanity at age 58 suggests he is still the same proud person behind his fatalistic façade. The final scene of the film, powerfully supported by Mahler’s music, shows his defiance of the oblivion he’s inevitably facing with all the dignity you can expect from an old unbroken gigolo.
This memoir told in the present tense is an appraisal of the indignities faced by a near-death homosexual with no money, mostly dead friends and only bitchy acquaintances to lend any comfort. Sex is paid for or stolen from delivery boys, prostates flare up, work dries up, HIV medication runs out, and the hot young gays look at him with pity. The film is a somber, intimate, authentic, profound, stylish, and existential rumination on homosexuality, aging, desire and death. This is the final installment of director Jacques Nolot’s trilogy about gay life in Paris, and he stars as the melancholy Pierre. He also wrote the screenplay. In French with English subtitles. The English title is "Before I Forget".
