Man in the Bathroom - Diary of a Gay Love - DVD

Film: The air is out of the relationship of Omar (Dustin Segura-Suarez) and Emmanuel (Francois Sagat). When Omar goes to New York for a week with his best friend (Chiara Mastroianni), he wishes Emmanuel to move out of their shared apartment in a dreary suburb of Paris during that time. Love is at an end, and from then on both men do everything they can to prove to each other that they no longer feel anything for each other.

In Man in the Bathroom, director Christophe Honore (The Lovers) deals with the end of a relationship in an almost matter-of-fact way. The fact that it's a homosexual relationship is actually secondary, even if the film's staging makes it much more clearly aimed at a gay audience than, say, the much more crowd-pleasing Brokeback Mountain or A Home at the End of the World. But even if the camera virtually celebrates the body of porn star Francois Sagat and Honore does not shy away from somewhat more drastically depicted sex scenes, the essence of the story itself is absolutely universal and detached from any ethnic boundary and sexual orientation.

While Honore in his last feature film The Lovers told his story rather playfully and accompanied with musical interludes, he goes here much more sober to the point. The whole thing is supposed to seem as authentic as possible, which is strength and weakness at the same time. Strength, because the almost emotionless way of telling the story makes it easy to understand how tense both men try to convince themselves that they don't mind the separation. There's a certain intensity to this that, if you manage to engage with the form of staging, is hard to escape.

It's also a weakness, however, in that there's no real comprehensible plot progression or fleshed-out character drawing as a result of this kind of reality-based staging. The movie is more of a brief glimpse into the lives of two people, who are actually still as strange to the viewer at the end as they were at the beginning. This makes it difficult to get caught up in what's going on and develop an interest in the protagonists and their story.

Whoever has a soft spot for this currently very popular form of French arthouse cinema can definitely take a look at Diary of a Gay Love, regardless of one's sexual orientation. However, those who want to be told a story in the classic sense or who value accessible characters will not be very happy with the rather unwieldy production.

Picture + Sound: The authentic look of the film is also transferred to the audiovisual conversion for home cinema. In the image is primarily noticeable that there are some weak points in the moments captured by Omar with a video camera in New York, especially in the area of sharpness, but due to the authentic look are intended and should therefore not be evaluated negatively. The sound is limited in large parts to dialogue, quiet moments or music, which is why the surround channels are used in the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix only very limited.

Extras: In addition to the trailer for the film, there is a scarce interview with lead actor Francois Sagat as a bonus, who tells a little about the genesis and the work of shooting the film. A little lean, but not uninteresting.

Conclusion: Man in the Bathroom is a rather sober and thus very authentic looking swan song on a relationship. While the film's imagery is aimed more at a homosexual audience, in principle the story Christophe Honore tells is completely universal and applicable free of ethnic and sexual boundaries. The DVD sets the film in a technically coherent manner, the bonus material is meager but interesting

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp