Twin Town

Director Pascal-Alex Vincent follows handsome twins across the French countryside as they explore their sexuality in the thriller Give Me Your Hand.

By Lawrence Ferber

GIVE ME YOUR HAND 01 X390 (PUBLICITY) | ADVOCATE.COM

Why do so many gays desire to see twins getting it on or, for that matter, find love and sex with their own mirror image? Evidence "Dopplebängers" (in urban dictionary terms), couples who do themselves up like twins, from hairstyle to wardrobe to even (shudder) manscaping. And then there's the popular Czech gay porn that a friend recently pointed out featuring bona fide twink twins indulging in illicit acts with each other (surely those lads urgently needed the money for their mother’s life-saving surgery… right?).

I’m discussing the issue/phenomenon outside Raidd, a gay bar in Paris’s très-gay Le Marais district, with film director Pascal-Alex Vincent, whose feature debut, Give Me Your Hand, dips into said territory. Following a pair of handsome, young French twins as they travel across the countryside and explore their sexuality -- and the resulting conflicts -- Vincent injects explicit queerness and plays up the homoerotic aspect. Mind you, Hand doesn’t push the incest envelope as far as the aforementioned Czech porn, but those into brotherly love fantasies will find themselves titillated.

The twins in question are Alexandre and Victor Carril, born and bred Le Marais locals famed for their public, and frequent, violent brawls with each other. Real crowd-getters. “They don’t have sex together, that’s for sure,” Vincent volunteers. “They don’t like to be asked that question, either. But whenever we go to film festivals, and sometimes I go to vacation with them, they never want to sleep in different bedrooms. They want to sleep in the same bedroom all the time. They have a very merged way of being.”

Raised in a rural town, the Le Marais–based Vincent spent his first 10 years in the film business working in distribution. Encouragement from Gallic auteur François Ozon that he should flex his own creative muscles on celluloid unleashed a beast. A crop of shorts followed, peppered with animation (notably the Japanimation tribute Candy Boy), dance numbers, fantastical imagery, and young, cute gay characters.

Obsessed with the Carrils from afar and hoping to feature them in his 2005 short film Baby Shark, an admitted Larry Clark homage marked by infrequently clothed pretty young things and spasms of lust and violence, Vincent and his producer plastered the neighborhood with casting flyers to draw them out. The scheme worked.

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Name: Scott
Date posted: 9/17/2009 1:29:58 AM
Hometown: Portland

Comment:
Guess I need to get out more.

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