MON BEAU PETIT CUL

The film's principal character is the French-Swiss Jean Neuenschwander. A post office employee at the age of fifteen, he then trained in the hotel business in Bern, Lausanne and London, leaving La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1956 for Canada, where he was soon appointed director of a large luxury hotel in Vancouver. On holiday in Morocco, in 1971, he bought a house in Tangiers where he settled down a few years later, at the age of 51, for a cosy and opulent retirement. Mon beau petit cul is the account of his personal life, which Neuenschwander clearly takes delight in recounting. He is a likable hedonist who manages his affairs and his pleasures with considerable skill. The filmmaker, however, places him in an unenviable role: neither hero nor antihero, but quite frankly a non-hero who has to assert himself through the self-satisfied banality of his middle-class life. From this somewhat flat existence, Simon Bischoff subtly extracts a group portrait of the homosexual sphere in Tangiers, viewed as mythical by some, particularly when frequented by characters such as Paul Bowles, who appears as an ageing guest-star in the film.