Have you watched a movie so palpable, it feels like you were flipping through a dust-covered photo album?  I Am Jonas is like that for me.

This is going to be a heart-tormenting blog entry.  As a proper COVID-19 warning, you might want to social distancing yourself from it if you are not emotionally fortified at the moment.  I need to get it out though.  Stuck in the 9th Hell is too much grinding (yes, I am going to sprinkle comic reliefs throughout the blog).  This blog is not going anywhere, so feel free to come back later when you are feeling well.  (this post may contain spoilers, occasionally more than just the movie plot)

The movie is in French, but the portrayal of the gay experience in the 90's is universal: a good boy meets a bad boy, he could not explain why he was gravitate toward him.  Okay, I should stop projecting.  It's not like everyone here has ever met the bad boy who made up a lame excuse to skip class (or work...), and the good boy rolled with it, because he was too confused by an encounter of the same-sex kind.  And it was also not like everyone here had ever been gay-bashed, but the only thing he could do was self-denial and stay silent (because "haters gonna hate" wasn't invented yet).  Have you ever lied to your parents, perhaps the first time in a long time, too, so you could spend time with this exotic and dangerous boy (even a conscious thought of him was making you feeling sinful)?  I think not....   (*Ashi blows the dust off the cover of memory album and flips to the next page*)  

It's a good time to interrupt and mention I had just watched Snails in the Rain right before it.  Yes, it's a movie review within a movie review inside walking down the memory lane.  Snails in the Rain is an Israeli movie about a man who was both gravitated and repulsed by a series of letters sent by what seemed to be a stalker.  With each letter, you could see the off-screen author was progressively breaking down as his love toward protagonist became fervent.  As the protagonist unfolded each letter, his anxiety accumulated slowly but steadily, and his emotional state spiraled downward, until he was feeling suffocated.  Unlike the confessor, the protagonist was less honest about his own feeling and became homophobic, to the point he became destructive to his own girlfriend and himself.  The story was intertwined with flashbacks of protagonist's time in the military, which accumulated to a one-time sexual encounter with a bisexual man (as the main character was also bisexual, as an audience you might wonder if this was a case of unreliable narrator a la Fight Club, a figment of imagination to legitimize his own action).

Much like Snails in the Rain, I Am Jonas was told in stream of consciousness, a literary device more often used in 90's movies (think Memento, Pulp Fiction, Orlando, and Fight Club).  Jonas was constantly being haunted by the memory of his childhood friend.  As story unfolded, in parallels between the Jonas the Delinquent, and Jonas of the Bygone History, he became unrecognizable to people around him in present day, at least in form.  I enjoyed the detail the production team put in to recreate the 90's, like the green and purple wide horizontal stripes t-shirt and knee-covering crop pants, or the fact Jonas was playing Tetris on Gameboy (I might have fashioned such attire and played such game in the classic handheld platform back in the days).  However, it was the fact I have greatly changed myself over the years (at least appearance-wise) that struck a chord.  It's not the first movie I've watched showing how gay guys changed their physical appearance or demeanor once we were going through that metamorphosis, as if being gay is somehow a separate life, a life must be well-hidden, so nobody from the different phases of of your lives would readily recognize you....

The movie troubled me further, opening a long-forgotten entry to the emotional attic....  In the movie, the bad boy Nathan is dead, but the one who introduced me to the deviant way of life is not, but he was very much dead in my memory.  Perhaps it is for the good?  Though I was not a stalker like Jonas became later in life (or like the Confessor in Snails), but I was glad I did it once on Facebook to see how he fairs in life, just to fulfill my curiosity.  His profile photo shows he lost quite a few hair, and he was married to a woman in a pose that looks like he was born-again Christian....  Honestly most likely I would not go back to him, and the relationship he had with me was best described as he was just toying with me.  Perhaps he was bi-curious like the protagonist in Snails.  It wasn't a great memory to re-surface, but it was a very beautiful memory while it lasted and should remain buried (instead of rehashing it like some remakes that plagues movie theatres near you).

Some viewers probably won't get this from the movie, but once I got older and had relatable experience, it awes me how much I allowed love to manipulate me.  Love makes you invincible.  Love makes you do stuff you'd never imagined doing like skipped work or use the f-word (though I didn't let him convert me into a smoker, I tried to make him quit instead).  I was probably imagining what was like kissing a man (love made me do it!), and perhaps I would even allow him to conduct the sinful act of buggery.  Love is a queer little thing.

Unlike Jonas, he was forever unsuccessful with his relationship... wait! I am not very successful with my romantic relationship either....  But what I was trying to say was, while I never had any romantic relationship after, Jonas was cheating on his boyfriends a lot.  As he finally disclosed to Nathan's mother nearly the end of the movie, he was looking for something that didn't exist....  As the fragment memory of him resurfaced, that quote was the final nail into my forehead.