Winter Boy’s Spiritual, Sexual Search

Lucas Ronis (Paul Kircher), the 17-year-old French Catholic pupil in Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy (Le Lycéen), reacts to his father’s death with grief, depravity, and a suicide attempt. His story is set during Covid, when his schoolteacher mother Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), artist brother Quentin (Vincent Lacoste), and others wear masks yet cannot hide their unhappiness. Honoré says the film is semi-autobiographical, which means its contemporary story derives from the depths of the 53-year-old filmmaker’s own adolescence — before politics codified youth experience. For Honoré, Lucas personifies private identity, not the gender confusion now imposed on youth in the trans wars.

The film’s title, Le Lycéen, translates idiomatically as “life student” — Lucas is learning from circumstances he hasn’t fully accepted and the sexual opportunities he anxiously explores. Honoré recalls the dirt of a horny adolescent’s lust, the emotional confusion that twists desire for contact and intimacy into degradation, self-abnegation, and the longing for salvation — needs effaced by the title’s unclear American translation.

But Winter Boy’s sexual specificity — Lucas’s candid spoken diary — also works as a journal of the Covid plague years. Honoré’s concentration on Lucas’s emotional development reflects spiritual turmoil so honestly that it pertains to how the current trans revolution exploits youthful vulnerability for political goals.

Baby-faced Lucas addresses the camera: “It’s the story of my shame that settled in my mind and began to rot. It rots my head and my heart.” This personal focus surpasses the social explanation for every aspect of human endeavor — the framework that gender activists try to impose on our thinking.

Honoré emphasizes Lucas’s sexual behavior as both generational license and youthful curiosity. Sent to relieve Quentin’s grief in Paris, Lucas is attracted to his brother’s black artist friend Lilio (Erwan Kepoa Falé), whose erotic art and guileless charisma provide the identification Lucas needs. This two-way recognition is brazenly erotic — part of the Sadean depiction of dangerous pleasure and demeaned joy that Lucas stumbles upon in phone hook-ups and rough-trade paid sex with an older john (Elliot Jenicot).

There’s extraordinary philosophical honesty in these scenes — more honesty than Disney’s groomers provide. Honoré’s films are distinguished by his interest in the moral consequences of sex, not political justification. He outclasses American films (Love, Simon; Moonlight; Call Me by Your Name) that promote smirky abandon in favor of political fashion.

The constant presence of Covid masks in Winter Boy remind us of a society breaking down. Baby-faced Lucas is an idealization through which Honoré interrogates the emotional effects of social upheaval. “I feel inexcusable,” Lucas says to us and himself. “I confused the best with the worst.” He tries to articulate suffering that stems from his father’s absence (Honoré himself plays the ghostly parent in flashbacks), but his crisis is larger than that. Honoré focuses on family custom — the church’s influence when Lucas visits a priest — insisting on the lifeline of moral order and personal salvation.

Progressive movies typically discredit that safety net — the Catholicism by which Lucas’s mother insists, however improbably, on “no secrets.” Yet Isabelle attempts to break through in a compelling scene of Lucas behind the wheel of their car, left to risk his own self-dramatized decision. From this moment (thanks to Kircher’s perfect casting and Binoche’s layered care and worry), Winter Boy achieves the richness missing from HBO’s cheap exploitative teenage sex-and-drugs series Euphoria: Lucas simply painting on blue fingernail polish or lying in a hospital bed singing along to a draggy French version of Billie Eilish gives the film absolute authenticity.

Honoré recognizes the stress that accompanies the formation of sexual identity, resolving the moral and aesthetic experiments of his previous films, Love Songs, Sorry Angel, On a Magical Night. Following André Téchiné (the coming-of-age master of Wild Reeds, I Don’t Kiss, The Witnesses, Being 17), Honoré is a student of France’s great, unparalleled gay-cinema tradition. Robert Palmer’s trenchant ’80s tune “John and Mary” (“Johnny’s always running around / trying to find certainty”) recalls how Téchiné used pop discourse in Wild Reeds, which was part of the legendary All the Boys and Girls of Their Time omnibus TV series. If the MUBI streaming service expands its presentation of Winter Boy to include Téchiné’s oeuvre, it would be the crucible needed for our youth and sex crisis. In Winter Boy, Lucas’s spiritual search provides answers to sexual chaos that TikTok addicts don’t know are possible.