A topic in the queer community today centers around the representation of queerness from queer creators. We’ve entered a time where books like Eric LaRocca’s fantastically nasty Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and movies such as Swallowed take queer characters and muddy the waters. These are messy queers. Evil queers. Problematic queers. And inevitably the conversation comes up about what kind of queer content should queer creators create. There’s a growing sense that the kind of nice, perfect queer character that we’ve typically seen is a kind of tokenism in itself. And while people like me clamor for more and more queer representation and queer stories, the question becomes whether queer creators are allowed to make messy, mean or otherwise unlikable characters or if doing so hurts the perception writ large.

This type of question isn’t new to the queer community, who’ve long struggled to find positive representations of themselves in media. Queer French theatre director and filmmaker Patrice Chéreau represents one of the creators who was more interested in making intriguing stories rather than creating idealistic depictions of homosexuality. In an obituary in The Independent, Chéreau was quoted as saying, "I never wanted to specialise in gay stories, and gay newspapers have criticised me for that. Everywhere love stories are exactly the same. The game of desire, and how you live with desire, are the same."

This quote is pertinent to his film The Wounded Man, newly restored for this Altered Innocence release. Initially Chéreau and his also queer cowriter Hervé Guibert wanted to adapt Jean Genet’s autofiction novel The Thief’s Journal, which semi-autobiographically detailed Genet’s journey through Europe and focused on three things: homosexuality, theft and betrayal. Chéreau and Guibert eventually gave up trying to literally tell his story and took to heart the core principles of the work of autofiction, creating a seedy and grotty exploration of desire intermingled with fear and uncertainty.

The Wounded Man opens with Henri (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and his family, racing to the train station to see his sister off to Frankfurt. They arrive incredibly early at the station and then the train they’re waiting for is delayed an additional hour, which sends the bored Henri racing around the station after he caught eyes with a middle aged man named Bosmans (Roland Bertin). What follows is a game of coquettish cat and mouse, with both the portly Bosmans and the naive and waifish Henri taking turns playing the different roles.

Immediately Chéreau captures the fear and desire intermingling inside the young Henri as the chases between him and Bosmans begin to represent and almost balletic game of fencing. Sometimes it’s Henri running around corners, looking back to see if Bosmans is still there, lurking. Sometimes, Henri chases after him instead. It’s hard to initially understand exactly what each of their intentions are; regardless, desire obviously fuels their cruising. But an impotent desire. One that belongs in the repressed shadows of the 80s.

Eventually, Henri ends up literally in the arms of Jean (Vittorio Mezzogiorno), a hunky hustler whose own motives are hidden behind a crooked smile and intense eyes. Jean forces Henri to beat up a John in the bathrooms before thrusting Henri against the stall and then thrusting his tongue into his mouth. Immediately besotted by the beguiling pimp, Henri finds himself both compelled and horrified by the station’s underworld and ends up returning night after night to find Jean. It becomes an almost love triangle (or, even square), as Bosmans pursues Henri while Henri pursues Jean and Jean comes across as an almost fantastical creation, always on the move; Henri’s version of the White Whale that he doesn’t seem to know whether he wants to fuck or kill.

As the beguiling narrative unfolds, Henri finds himself falling deeper into the Underworld, a place that feels both like a hellish prison and rapturous bliss. Leaving his parents and spending more and more time among the denizens of the station, including the apartment of Jean’s off-and-on girlfriend Elisabeth (Lisa Kreuzer), who fills out the desirous love square. In one striking sequence, Henri and Jean end up at a kind of carnival, putting in francs for a punching bag that tests a person’s strength. With very little effort, Jean continuously punches the bag hard enough to make it ding, taking turns with Henri who struggles so hard to match Jean’s strength. Frustrated that he isn’t able to meet Jean’s concept of manhood, he runs full strength at the punching bag, using his head instead of his fist. It clangs a successful bell, but leaves Henri dazed and bloodied; a metaphor for the kind of violence and suggestive sex that permeates The Wounded Man and gives it a hazy feeling of uncontrolled (and potentially unrequited) desire.

As Henri searches the station night after night, he becomes more and more dirty, exchanging his clothes for clothes left by Jean and attempting to become another manifestation of his desire and the destruction obsession can bring. Filmed in 1982, the AIDS crisis looms heavily over the film as we revisit it in 2023 and the dance of sexuality and violence implied in Henri’s quest for Jean becomes an almost intangible allegory for the fear that would soon grip the queer community. Chéreau’s version of cruising feels informed by the burgeoning disease, even though it’s not openly discussed in the film. It’s hard to look at it, though, and not think about how it captures lust and fear in queer spaces.

The Wounded Man is an melancholic and oftentimes dour film that I’m sure rankled gay activists in its messy portrayal of a man coming of age and to terms with his homosexual feelings and urges. Anchored by a strong performance from Jean-Hugues Anglade that oozes sensuality and uncertainty, The Wounded Man is not a cheery portrayal of young lust and cruising, but instead feels indebted to rising tensions in the community in the 80s. The characters here aren’t perfect representations of queerness, as all of the characters follow the trinity established by Genet’s book The Thief’s Journal: homosexuality, theft and betrayal. It’s an engrossing and somewhat slow burn of a picture, rife with unbridled passion with no hope for release.