Written and directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau.
A Winstar release.

As Félix (Sami Bouajila) hitchhikes his way down from the small town of Dieppe down to Marseilles, where he hopes to meet the father he’s never known, his voyage is marked by a series of encounters, each introduced by a caption reading "my little brother," "my cousin," "my grandmother" and so on. It throws you a bit at first, since none of the people he meets seem to know him at all — not to mention that they’re all white and Félix is black. What’s more, the relationships Félix forms with them hardly seem to parallel what you’d think of as typical familial relations: Félix’s "little brother" turns out to be a 17-year-old art student who unsuccessfully tries to pick Félix up, then turns sullen when Félix makes it clear he’s not interested in men half his age — and he and the fellow identified as his "cousin" do a lot more than kiss. But that complexity is part of Adventures of Félix’s charms. A lesser movie might hammer you on the head with the point that Félix, with his recently deceased mother and absent father, has learned to create his own family from the people he meets. But writer/directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, who the press kit says "make their films and their life together," have nothing so schematic in mind. Though the subtitles seem to spell out the nature of the relationship about to be presented onscreen, they really call into question what such seemingly self-explanatory terms mean, and what they ought to mean. By the time we’ve progressed up to "my father," we know better than to expect any kind of pat reconciliation. Still, Ducastel and Martineau surprise us with a resolution that is anything but.

The film takes a similarly offbeat approach when it comes to dealing with the fact that Félix is HIV-positive. Rather than reveal Félix’s seropositivity through forced drama or clumsy exposition ("Don’t forget your protease inhibitors, dear!"), they contrive an absurd, even charming scene where Félix swaps details of the difference between "bitherapy" and "tritherapy" with a ditzy patient (Christiane Millet) in a hospital waiting room. Rather than the somewhat forced cheery approach they took to HIV-positive characters in their musical Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, Ducastel and Martineau have found a more naturally sob-free (or nearly so) way to dramatize the realities of living with AIDS. I can’t think of another movie which even comes close to so successfully emphasizing the "living" part of that oft-used phrase. Even the precise regimen of Félix’s daily pill-taking is suggested by the fact that he regularly takes his medicine during the first few minutes of what everyone he meets seems to find a rather execrable soap opera.

The recent trend of French social realism (in part a reaction to the perceived empty escapism of American films) has meant we’re regularly presented with characters who are little more than a bundle of social problems. And Félix is, to be sure, a black, gay single-parented HIV-positive shipworker who’s thrown out of work just before the film begins. Adventures of Félix is a little bit of magic because it never isolates one aspect of Félix from the others, or from a complex and interesting character whose identity goes far beyond the intersection of various labels. He’s plenty unlikable at times: Once, he reduces a child to tears by insisting that his mother’s boyfriend, whom he calls "Papa," is only a "false papa" because he’s never fathered a child. When the child’s mother returns to her bawling preteen, Félix dummies up, showing irritation bred of his own investment in biological connections rather than any form of compassion for the child. After all, he hasn’t traveled all this way merely to find he has nothing more in common with his birth father than DNA.

Though it only bursts into song for a few moments, as Félix improvises a song about his own journey, Adventures of Félix has some of the breezy velocity of movie musicals, coupled with moments of more conventional drama in which street-toughened Félix, already convinced he knows everything he needs to know, resists knowledge before having it forced on him by the people he meets. A subplot concerning a beating Félix witnesses but does not report tips the scales too far in favor of melodrama, but generally the tone is pitch-perfect. In a sense, the movie’s aims, its messages are utterly conventional, but part of what movies do best is to re-present the familiar in a new guise, so we see it again with our preconceptions stripped away, without the sense that we’ve seen it before. Adventures of Félix may lead to a well-known destination, but the route there is full of surprises.

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