Beyond the Walls [Hors les murs] **** (2012, Matila Malliarakis, Guillaume Gouix, David Salles) – Classic Movie Review 12,724

The turbulent, troubling 2012 Belgian drama film Beyond the Walls [Hors les murs] stars Matila Malliarakis as young pianist Paulo, who meets Albanian bartender Ilir (Guillaume Gouix). Ilir brings him home drunk and they become lovers, but soon Ilir is in jail. 

Belgian writer/ director David Lambert’s emotionally turbulent and troubling 2012 French / Belgian / Canadian drama film Beyond the Walls [Hors les murs] stars Matila Malliarakis as young pianist Paulo, who meets bartender Ilir (Guillaume Gouix), a bass guitar player from Albania.

Ilir brings him home incapably drunk, and they become lovers. The vulnerable, little-boy-lost Paulo returns to living in the apartment of his brittle, pushy girlfriend Anka (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin), who isn’t amused by his unexplained absences.

Confronted about what he is up to by Anka, Paulo finds himself kicked out on the street with no friends and nowhere to go. Paulo asks to move in with the much stronger seeming Ilir, who agrees reluctantly to put him up, and they start a relationship. It gets strong fast, and the shockingly dependent Paulo asks Ilir to look after him, and soon promises that he will love Ilir forever. Then Ilir leaves the city for a couple of days but fails to return, and later Paulo finds he is in jail.

The narrative takes several unexpected twists and turns in this worrying, challenging, complex story of a love, with an ebbing and flowing power struggle, a dependent/ interdependent/ independent need changing constantly with circumstance. The film starts brightly and engrossingly, and becomes increasingly unsettling and finally moving. The two men are in some ways totally made for each other, in others not quite. Is their love enough to overcome all the challenges it faces? Beyond the Walls sure is a heady emotional roller-coaster ride.

Malliarakis is especially good as the supposedly bisexual main character, though actually Paulo is presented as a man desperate for love and affection wherever it would come from. He is neither gay nor straight, neither vanilla nor S & M. Gouix is excellent too, very credible as a man you could never be sure of, sometimes magnetic, but sometimes enigmatic and alienating, just somewhere else.

The cast are Guillaume Gouix as Ilir, Matila Malliarakis as Paulo, David Salles as Grégoire, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin as Anka, Flonja Kodheli as Ilir’s sister, and Carmela Locantore as Ilir’s mother.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,724

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