On thought it was lost, tenderness. Condemned, for a time, to confidentiality according to health news. “Barrier gestures”, repeated on radio and television. Two words that came to sound the death knell of an era when the intimate was still open to the gaze of passers-by. It was counting without the fact that “live without tenderness, we could not”. Marie Laforêt, and Bourvil before her, were right.
However, this is not the first time that our affective grammar prefers the darkness of the bedroom to express itself. In 1949, to the sound of his faithful guitar, Georges Brassens described “the oblique gaze of honest passers-by” about those lovers who dared to kiss on public benches. It is therefore inappropriate for a couple to show off their happiness. Even today, these tender gestures, which we know are not the prerogative of lovers, seem like a small thing, but they never leave anyone indifferent.
Intimate outpourings
A hand rests on a knee, a head in the crook of a neck, a couple hugs or walks hand in hand. On their wrist, a bracelet symbolizes their bond. These impulses are overwhelming when, from a harmless embrace, sometimes emerges an impossible declaration of love, as in Lost in Translation, by Sofia Coppola, when Bill Murray hugs Scarlett Johansson against him in the teeming streets of Tokyo.
These effusions also disturb those who are unbearable with the unpacking of love. Especially when the couple does not fit into boxes fixed by well-meaning. In Call Me by Your Name, by Luca Guadagnino, two young men embrace on a station platform. Static goodbyes, the camera does not swirl like that of Claude Lelouch in A man and a woman.
But, in a society where one lives to be seen, where the intimate is permanently exposed, these considerations resonate differently. For many years, the influencer Emma Paris has fed her photo account exposing her couple in tender postures. Now separated from her former companion, she describes this relationship as a lie. What truth in the cliché of a ” perfect couple ” sold on Instagram all day long?
