How to explain the pairing of these two completely opposite long-short films? The amateurishly overwrought American one and the cool, polished French one? Yes, Vanilla is best avoided, unless you're making a study of badness in movie-making. Just a Little Comfort isn't to be confused with the moving 2000 made-for-TV French gay coming out film Just a Question of Love (dir. Christian Faure, with Cyrille Thouvenin, Stéphan Guérin-Tillié, Eva Darlan). This short has a lazier quality. But that goes with the summer mood and the teenage boys' casual facade, though cute bi Guillaume and his passionate admirer Arnaud are both seething inside. Just a Little Comfort has a typical French elegance. Everybody looks good. Nothing is pushed too hard. For a gay film, it is provocative in beginning with straight sex, Guillaume making love with his girlfriend Van. Is there an element of gay movie-maker wish-fulfillment in the way the perfect, bee-sting-lipped Guillaume eventually consents to a brief sexual affair with the reedy, needy Arnaud? No, why? It could happen, and the film establishes that G. and A. are best buds to begin with, plus Guillaume's family life is non-existent, with his mom in a perpetual state of clinical meltdown and his dad dead. The adults are sketched in nicely, and the boys' P.O.V. justifies the sketchiness. The way Arnaud, then briefly Guillaume, softly sing along with a French song CD suggests Armand Lameloise has watched Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris and Chansons d'amour, except that this came before those films, and Lameloise's focus on a slowly blossoming gay boy's world is his own. Just a Little Comfort is just a pretty, wistful French postcard of a rueful crush, but it's the kind you might want to tack on your fridge and glance back at now and then. Why isn't there apparently anything else out since by Lamboise except an anti-discrimination piece, one 2008 episode in a TV series? As another viewer said: Vanilla, 2, Just a Little Comfort, 8. Watched on Netflix DVD that somehow got into my queue. The first short is as bad as any gay shorts anthology film (and there are lots of bad ones); the second is better than almost any.
