Equation to an Unknown

Watching Francis Savel’s 1980 gay porno Equation to an Unknown, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that it’s a porno: it takes nearly ten minutes for any sexual activity to occur. Two men, after finishing a soccer game, undress and fondle each other in a changing room while another man watches wordlessly through a window. Even then, the contact is slow and languid, the movements relaxed and lithe. The sound design is stark, the only sounds being a plaintive piano melody and the barely audible noises of head and rimming. It is far from anything you could call exciting, yet it is so intensely engrossing. Every movement feels like part of a meticulously choreographed slow dance, each touch having its own significance.

From the outset, Equation situates its sexual encounters as vastly open-ended. The intimacy on display is so matter-of-fact that it is up to the viewer to interpret it. Is the plainness of the sex tender, alienating, or tragic? Do we unflinchingly linger on a climax as a moment of ecstasy or emotional emptiness? It is these contradictions that make Equation so hard to pin down.

The film follows a drifting biker, played by Gianfranco Longhi, who drives around the suburbs of Paris looking for anonymous, wordless sex. These sexual escapades are often interspersed with enveloping dream sequences of even more intense stimulation, often resulting in a boiling undercurrent of unsatisfied desires. The world of Equation is one of atmospheric haziness and ethereal beauty, as ambiguous as its myriad sex scenes. The camera always glides and never hurries. The nude male form is treated with a mythic reverence. Originally a painter, Savel’s eye for mise-en-scene is astounding; he frequently frames the marble bodies of his beautiful actors like an X-rated Renaissance painting. Filmically, moments of Bressonian realism on Parisian streets are matched with Fassbinder-esque compositions. It is gorgeous to look at and even better to feel.

Even more stirring is how much of that filmic finesse is applied to the interstitial space between the eroticism. There’s a measured patience in the way Savel lingers on the biker’s lonely journeys; a scene of him returning home features his entirely uncut ascent up a flight of stairs. A rotating carousel of oral sex is preceded by an extended period of wordless pinball playing. It’s not as if the film is sitting the viewer through these sequences in order to reward them with money shots. These segments of liminal time embody the phantasmal elegance of the film: slow zooms and sustained camerawork creating a world which reflects the indescribable nature of the sex itself.

This focus on the banal also means that Equation balances its ghostly beauty with the cinematic language of realism. The restraint of the cinematography and bareness of the sound design is reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s slow cinema. Unlike films like Wakefield Poole’s Bijou or James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, sexual desire is not mediated through ornamented sets and exotic wonderment, but of stark, quotidian life. The sex of Equation is had in locker rooms, bar bathrooms, and rural shacks; cruising is made for the places of the everyday. Savel acutely understands the inherent mundanity of sex, yet treats that everyday plainness with an eye of beauty and adoration.

Equation may just be one of the most elusive films ever made. It blurs the line between art-house film and pornographic picture. The sex is at once despairing and joyous. Unlike the in-your-face provocation of a film like Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself, Equation is patient and opaque. The ambiguity of its construction, as well as the adventurous formal flourishes that populate the film, mean that it opens up to a multitude of interpretations. Regardless of any explicit intention of Savel’s, Equation is an artistic zenith of pre-AIDS queer filmmaking, showing a world of gay freedom and liberation before it faded away.

Get tickets for Punch Drunk’s screening of Equation to an Unknown here.