Exalted Mars

A sleeping man dreams of a city at dusk. We’ve seen several like him before. He is every angelic lover; caught off guard, silent, vulnerable, otherworldly, violently alive with each breath. What was the name of Andy Warhol’s boy from his epochal Sleep? This exposing of the intimacy of another, this offering your close one to the world—and, inevitably, a part of yourself—is also at the heart of Jean-Sébastien Chauvin’s hypnotising Exalted Mars, an erotic urban symphony in an overheated Paris. But, reversed.

Unlike other muses, Chauvin’s actor, the feverish Alain Garcia Vergara, is not taken into the camera’s possession. He’s not to be shared in complicity with the bystander, the watcher, the toucher… On the contrary, the camera is devoid of power in Exalted Mars—it rather submits, obediently under the command of its exhibitionistic lover, Vergara, who, asleep or not, takes pleasure in being seen.

The film goes in and out of his pulsating erotic dream: heated up, he dreams of landscapes, even of becoming the landscape. The outskirts of Paris are a liminal no-place that, through a series of cold twilight shots, feels both overcrowded and deserted. His skin is the highway, the full moon: his hole. Montage has rarely felt so erotic: the dreamer becomes every empty space waiting to be filled by human touch, heat traversing his yearning body as light traverses the city at dawn, from neon headlights to the crude sunlight reflected in glass buildings and on his face as he sweats uncontrollably, more and more until… Sunrise. No hands.