Anne-Marie Lallement

A stripped-down account of a young man's existential reckoning. "As dust hides a mirror, lust hides the self," reads one of the film's Vedanta-sourced intertitles. And indeed, while the Pierre Clementi protagonist's inner life remains obscure, the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighborhood that offers his temptations appears in harrowing detail.

1973. Paris is still a party for the marginalized, the exiles, the "flower children" of a dying era. There is Emil, American actor, Joaquin, exiled from Franco regime with his friends Jose-Luis, Balthazar and many others... Joaquin writes and sometimes drowns in artificial paradises... He loves Emil, who is very attracted to Wendy... Friendship as much as love circulates in this microcosm, but loneliness and reality end up catching up with each other... Shot in ten days, edited in hiding, Une histoire d'Emil et Joaquin is one of the first French films to depict a sexual relationship between two men, long before the decriminalization of homosexuality in France.