Schoolboy Sins

Anticlerical Novelist Roger Peyrefitte scandalized postwar France in 1945 with Les Amities Particulieres, the story of a homosexual love affair between two boys in a Roman Catholic boarding school. As filmed by French Director Jean Delannoy, This Special Friendship turns out to be both poignant and disturbing. Its impact depends not on lubricity--the schoolboy crush at the center of the story is idealistic and unconsummated. It is based on Delannoy's deft projection of the human agony behind the cry of St. Paul: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do."

To an upper-class, priest-run school comes a new boy, Georges (Francis Lacombrade). He is 16, handsome, intelligent and reserved. The school is rigid with discipline and clerical policing, up tight with sexual tension. In this tensely celibate world, Georges is shocked to discover that the classmate who first befriended him is having a love affair with another boy.

In a crisis of conscience he turns in an incriminating letter he has found, signed by his friend's lover, who is quickly expelled. Soon Georges is attracted to Alexandre, a pretty ten-year-old in the lower school. They meet in secret, exchange poems, swear eternal friendship in a blood ceremony. The open, cheerful innocence of the younger boy neutralizes Georges' sexual longings, and the relationship remains on the platonic plane.

Around them, though, the school is seething with suspicion and suppression. A priest-teacher, whose mind is slowly cracking with frustrated desire, threatens to take Alexandre away from Georges by becoming Alexandre's confessor. Finally the two boys are discovered in a clandestine meeting by a humane priest whose wisdom has been too cramped by his spiritual discipline to foresee the tragedy he triggers.

Author Peyrefitte himself attended such a school, but that was half a century ago, and the climate of the church and its education has certainly changed. Even so, there are still forces of righteous striving, self-ignorance and guilt in the world that are capable of retracing the story of little Alexandre and poor Georges.

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