Before/After: New Masculinity and First-World Problems

Manoël Dupont’s docudrama, Before/After (2025), which was featured this year in Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s (KIVFF) Proxima Competition, is a mockumentary of sorts, yet under its warmly satirical veneer, there pulsates also a certain melancholy, and loneliness. The film’s general premise strikes one at first as a clear pastiche: Two not-so-young men meet one night in Brussels and decide to travel together to Istanbul, so that they can both get hair implants. From the moment of their ambiguous encounter, as Baptiste (Baptiste Leclere) hesitates to follow Jeremey (Jérémy Lamblot) into the latter’s family home, their relationship is marked by a taciturn curiosity, tempered by a degree of hesitation.

The film’s plot is straightforward, up to a point: Jérémy came into some money, and will use a portion of the funds for him and Baptiste – whom he had only just met – to undergo the procedure in Istanbul, where it’s cheaper. Why this arrangement is never clear. Much of the appeal of Dupont’s film, in fact, arises from just how much it leaves to viewers’ imagination. There is a plausible explanation, namely that Jérémy speaks no English, and Baptiste’s ability to speak it with doctors and nurses at the clinic comes in handy. But from the start Jérémy’s interest in having Baptiste’s company appears to lie elsewhere entirely. Their closeness develops by degrees, as they rent a double room, sleeping side by side on a double bed. In one particularly striking scene, as they are taking a selfie, with Baptiste sitting on the bed and Jérémy squatting on the floor, the smaller, slighter Jérémy keeps rearranging his body, positioning himself more and more squarely in Baptiste’s expansive arms, until their stilted pose becomes a cozy snuggle, and the embrace turns clearly erotic.

I thought a lot about the film’s title, Before/After, as a kind of challenge to the viewer. What exactly is the tipping point here? The slash promises a caesura. One might argue that Dupont hints at the altered identity of the two men before and after the hair transplant. In fact, Jérémy says he feels different, more confident, immediately after it’s done. His decision to finally take a dip in the Bosphorus, which he had already previously wanted to do, but had been discouraged from doing by Baptiste, indeed suggests his higher level of self-confidence. But there is something enigmatic about this scene too, perhaps because Dupont places it in the script not only after the two get the implants, and just before they are about to go back home to Brussels, but also after they go outside into the streets where then Baptiste suddenly disappears – and never actually turns up. In this sense, the dip in the Bosphorus, and Jérémy’s soulful affirmation that he is fine with Baptiste’s having gone off on his own, and vanished, is also a confession of acceptance – an acknowledgment that, when it comes to their shared experience, particularly their sexual, intimate connection, the Before/After has a more complex, indeed more wistful ring to it. The promise of the implants is an overnight transformation, a brusque change in status and identity. Meanwhile, the reality of desire, as constituting the two men’s identity, is much more amorphous, or rather, fluid, and unplaceable.

The two actors play out these subtle degrees of friction, camaraderie, and lust, with remarkable degree of tenderness and charm. The camera stays always close to them, the low-fi aesthetics enhancing the film’s overall documentary feel. Sly humor percolates throughout, particularly in Jérémy and Baptiste’s constant small talk and petty bickering – over who gets to finish whose icecream, for instance. Yet there is also a certain edge to the men’s exchanges, such as when Jérémy blithely hints at the fact that Baptiste might have been fired from his job as a teacher after hitting a student. Throughout, Dupont plants small seeds in the dialogues, as if to ask, “Who are we really?” Perhaps this is the most intriguing aspect of the film – Dupont takes a premise that suggests his story will explore the importance of hair to a man’s sense of himself, but in fact, though crucial, it turns out not nearly as constitutive as the sexuality that’s never openly discussed. In the film, Jérémy’s buying power allows for a kind of medical-cultural tourism – hilariously pastiched in the scene in which, after their surgery, the two men dutifully show up at a museum, only to listlessly mope around the various historical dioramas. Dropped into a foreign context, neither has a true yearning to learn from his new environment. And yet, as Roland Barthes recognized when he wrote his diary, Travels in China (1974), on a trip to communist China, finding himself desiring young Chinese workers, these two men are nevertheless world travelers—when they meet a young Turkish man, the common language they establish is not of cultural exchange but rather the unspoken, coded language of desire, which transgresses some preconceived boundaries, while it maintains others.

Ela Bittencourt
©FIPRESCI 2025