Eva Husson explores teen sex parties in new film Bang Gang
Eva Husson's debut film concerns a group of high school kids who decide to start their own private orgy club. But don't mistake this for Kids with millennials
We’re speaking to Eva Husson on the day the world saw Justin Bieber's penis. As we sit down to talk to the 39-year-old French filmmaker, paparazzi long-lens shots of the teen heartthrob going for a swim in the buff are currently sending Twitter into meltdown. “Nobody should care,” says Husson when we bring up the photos. “It’s his own world and why do we want to know these things, who he’s sleeping with or what he looks like naked?”
The mention of these privacy-invading photographs and their proliferation on social media isn’t just idle gossip: they’re pertinent to the themes of Husson’s bold directorial debut, Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story). (If you haven’t guessed already, the parenthetical subtitle is ironic.) The film, based on a real incident in the US, follows a group of bored middle-class teens over a sweltering summer in the sleepy coastal town of Biarritz, France. As they laze around the spacious home of the group's alpha male, Alex (Finnegan Oldfield), whose archaeologist mother is off in Morocco on a dig, George (Marilyn Lima), who’s recently slept with and been cheated on by Alex, ups the ante of a game of spin the bottle – “it’s like truth or dare with only dares” – in a foolhardy attempt to win back Alex's affections. In the process she inadvertently invents the eponymous bang gang, no-holds-barred sex parties that take their peer group by storm. It begins as an intimate affair before social media turns them into a series of massive weekly orgies that would make Caligula blush. And being millennials, these parties wouldn’t really exist without someone witnessing it through their iPhone lens. As videos of George sleeping with multiple partners begin making their way onto YouTube, we’re back to Bieber territory.
“The disappearance of intimacy is a major paradigm shift in terms of today’s teenagers,” says Husson, “and I think they will learn to deal with the world differently because of that, but I think to [older generations] it seems really sad for them.”
This may sound like some sort of ‘youth of today’ lecture, but Husson is well aware that teens dabbling in sex is nothing new. “A kid is a kid is a kid. I’m pretty sure that in ancient Rome kids were exploring. Pushing boundaries is the work of a teenager.” The context in which this experimentation takes place, however, is unique for each generation. The shadow of AIDS, for example, doesn’t hang over these Gen Y teens. As Alex says when George asks him to wear a condom: “Don’t worry, we’re not in the demographic.”
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“I think death was definitely on everyone's mind when you were having your first time in the 1990s,” notes Husson. “And I think it’s absolutely not in everyone’s mind now. They have, I think, at that age, a much harder time understanding that there will be consequences, things to go through if you take that specific door. But each generation has their own hardcore problems. For us it was AIDS, and I think for them now it’s having to deal with the learning process of how to become a young adult through an age where everything is exposed or can be exposed, and you can have very embarrassing videos or pictures of you running around online. I mean, thank God they didn’t have that in my day.”
Given the film’s subject matter, it’s no surprise that Bang Gang has been compared to Kids, Larry Clark’s powderkeg study of the sex lives of a group of nihilistic teens in 90s New York. “I was a little bit afraid of that at first because Larry Clark’s view is absolutely desperate and bleak, and mine, I think, goes in the other direction,” Husson says, although she can see why the comparisons are made. “I think what people mean is that thematically both are about a youth that seeks its own boundaries and limits, it’s just in a different world,” she says. “But really, when you think about it, you don’t have that many movies that talk about real kids, that go as far – maybe that’s what people mean.” Crucially, Husson doesn’t judge her characters: her point of view is more humane than Clark’s, more hopeful. “This was about getting as close as possible to their truth. It is in no way about penalising them. I really believe adolescence is a very plastic moment where you can bounce from it and recreate yourself and feel stronger – you’re not destroyed by it.”
“I know what it feels like to be naked in front of a camera, and it’s not easy”
Another difference is in terms of the film’s gaze. While Husson isn’t coy when it comes to depicting the carnal beauty of these teen hedonists – both the sexes – her shots never feel voyeuristic or pornographic; unlike Clark, her camera isn’t leering. “That’s because I was an actress myself, maybe?” she suggests. “I know what it feels like to be naked in front of a camera, and it’s not easy. And it’s not easy for me [as director], actually.” The key, she says, was making each young actor think of their body as just another acting instrument. “I would tell them, ‘Acting is like dancing, and we’re going to do these choreographies and we’re going to rehearse them and we’re going to be at ease in the space,’ and once they were on set I told them to undress and just do the same thing.”
The film feels dreamlike. It captures the haze of adolescence and that quality of time slowing down at those formative moments in life, the moments you realise are significant even as you’re living through them. “A lot of it is seeing the world through the characters' eyes, what they perceive of reality, which is maybe why it has this dreamlike quality that you mention,” Husson says. “I firmly believe that everything is about perception, there is no truth.” This is most pointed at four moments in the film where the characters break the fourth wall to look at us directly, as if to say, “Is this really happening to me?” “These moments actually happen in real life,” notes Husson, “the moments when the rhythm of time is just insanely subjective, and I think filmmaking is the only art form that can talk about time correctly. That’s pretty much the obsession Antonioni had in L'Avventura when he showed this idea that it’s not just about telling a realist story, you could talk about perception as well in mainstream filmmaking. And I really like that.”
Antonioni isn’t the only influence Husson wears on her sleeve. Bang Gang has the DNA of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant running through its film grammar, to name two clear touchstones, but Husson’s film is no knockoff. Her shrewd use of time and perspective is very specific. “I do think the film doesn't quite make sense as a whole,” she admits, “but it does leave you an impression as a whole. I’m convinced I’ve found things that work for me, and if they work for other people, great. If they don’t, I really don’t give a shit because I worked my ass off to get there.”
The way Husson sees it, there are perfect films (or “round” films as she calls them) and messy films. She proudly puts Bang Gang in the latter category. “A lot of people can’t respond to this film because it strikes a certain note and not everybody is going to be responsive to that specific note, but that’s what I love about filmmaking, you know? Not everybody likes Gus Van Sant or Wong Kar-wai, some people find their films extremely boring.” Husson is clearly not one of those people: “I was ecstatic while watching [Van Sant's] Gerry; it’s one of the movies that impacted me the most. But Gerry has a lot of defects – but the thing is, it doesn’t matter because you feel that you’ve been through something by watching it. That’s why I’m OK with defects as well because that’s what life is like, after all.”
Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) is released by 17 Jun Metrodome