Queer and Upright: Sex, Age, and Disorientation in Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical

Abstract

This chapter explores the nexus of queer relationality, sexuality, and age through the offbeat fictional worlds imagined by contemporary French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie. I have previously drawn on Foucault’s original definition of same-sex friendship models as bound up in pleasure through the example of cross-generational intimacy to interpret Guiraudie’s films Real Cool Time (2000), The King of Escape (2009), and Stranger By The Lake (2013). Here, I argue that his subsequent film, Staying Vertical (2016), echoes an earlier literary exploration of cross-generational intimacy—the director’s début novel Now The Night Begins (2014), a darkly erotic tale that recounts the desire for a nonagenarian man. Staying Vertical in part transposes this narrative focus on ‘gerontophilia’ to the screen. Unlike Stranger By The Lake, a more formally conventional thriller about gay cruising, Staying Vertical is queerer in its oblique way of troubling categories of both erotic identification and lived sexual identity: the protagonist, Léo, a creatively blocked filmmaker, lusts after boys while fathering a child with a woman whom he randomly meets. However, the real challenge posed by the film is in relation to the social conventions of ‘age-appropriate’ physicality and sexual desirability. The most provocative sequence involves an act of euthanasia through sex between Léo and an elderly man. Thinking vertically, therefore, involves the rejection of the more mainstream LGBT identity politics of sameness for Guiraudie’s hallucinatory utopian vision of unfettered eroticism for men of all ages. Staying Vertical playfully suggests that smashing taboos of age and ageing and norms of physical attractiveness and desirability provides the key to unlocking the more experimental forms of queer relationality, which seek to dispense with the fictions of sexual identity.