Naughty Spot

On the coach there are overlapping landscapes. Not just the valley below but different depths within. The usernames and descriptions of other passengers, their profiles painted upon them. It is a hook-up app, one that leads Tonio to The Oracle. The Oracle leads Tonio to the secret places, explains the particular flavours of Corsica.

There is in the warren of the breakwater, in a maze of somewhat cylindrical tetrahedron an opportunity for reflection. Further along the coast a beach whose grassy knolls conceal nudes. "dating apps have changed the game", but not all of it.

These are landscapes differently romanticised. The interrupted, almost stopped-motion threesome, projections upon the walls, the direct direct messages, the graffiti as simple and direct as that of any other men in caves. Evolution in action, an archaeology of appetites. There's a reference to the island being off the grid, and in those letters an echo of AIDS. This is something dense and layered, subversive (at the very least of expectations) if not transgressive in its depictions.

Jean Costa's film is also titled Gare Aux Coquins, "beware of" and then something as complex as at least one of its direct translations, "rascals". In Yorkshire that might be a cake-like bun, over the Pennines it becomes "scally" with a whole other set of associations. There's a biscuit called a coquin that's more jammy than artful dodger and there is within this a sweetness.

The romance of painted profiles, of projected pornography and phone images filtered through brush upon plaster, the sound of the island's other wildlife. Written and directed by Costa, co-starring him and Christian Ruspini, this is something inevitably personal.

In a pre-recorded Q&A at Glasgow's 2022 Short Film Festival Costa explained that he had an opportunity to study in Corsica, and as part of that there was a budget to make a film. His original project did not survive contact with the island, so in his words he "went to what [he] knew" which was his sexuality. "looking at the apps [Corsica was] a really different place". He is from Rio, had lived in Paris. "In Corsica 60, 80 percent of the pictures didn't have faces." "There was something different", he started to make a documentary and was told "if you want to make a movie about gay men on Corsica it is not on the apps", "it'll be in the places". His name on the app was really "The Oracle", he took Costa to these places and told his story. Before the documentary was due to start the Oracle disappeared, and so Costa started this as fiction, with his actor, Ruspini, but then within this discussion come things that were themselves documentary, parenthetic to this fictionalisation.

The parallels between Ruspini's own experiences and those of the real Oracle are all the more notable because there were 20 years of difference in their ages. This perhaps a function of island ecologies, to preserve way of living where in other places (like the city) different competition and pressures force different behaviours. Costa talked about the "codes", not just social but descriptive, that granted access within the apps in different locations. That cocktail of nature, naturism, naturalism, the naturalist's instinct to catalogue to capture to explain. Costa talked about arriving at Corsica as "a foreigner", creating a character who "wants to understand", a "trying to understand" that becomes a connection between them. This at once highlighting a weakness of short film and a strength of Glasgow's programming, there is within the film things not visible (to me, at least) without the Q&A, but I'm not sure that that highlight could have been made without restructuring the thing so illuminated.

There is an obviously personal nature to Naughty Spot, but when its writer, director, co-star has the opportunity to talk about that personal nature because a thing not just shared with the audience but with co-star, with fictionalised inspiration, with, in turn, the audience. That sense of something hidden and revealed is itself indicative of the film's qualities, but I am unsure if there is a good distinction between relative obfuscation here and relative illumination there. In each case things that might be seen are not because other things are seen instead, and while that works at a thematic and potentially an artistic level, it is a trick that relies upon a revelation that may not come. In a film brought about in part by a disappearing act, that so heavily involves the hidden, to conceal that which is openness in plain sight is at once delight and disappointment.