Love In the Time of Civil War

Alex's days are completely organized around doing drugs or getting the money to buy them through hustling, running errands for dealers, or committing petty crimes (most often muggings of potential johns). He shuffles from one dingy, depressing apartment to the next, sometimes on his own, sometimes in the company of fellow addicts from whom he hopes to cop a fix — though he frequently ends up getting ripped off himself. These shooting-up sessions usually involve sex as part of the package, but the sex itself seems less a matter of pleasure than a brief coming up for air before plunging back into the depths of the fix. In the hermetically sealed existence that Alex and his associates have made for themselves, the outside world is alien terrain: when Alex is forced to leave an apartment and walk down the street, he might as well be walking on the moon. Alex, a young addict who still nurtures a few dreams, sells his body in Montréal’s Centre-Sud district. He’s flanked by Bruno, Simon, Jeanne, Éric and Velma, all of them caught in the same spiral of compulsion. Marginalized by society yet hostage to its market logic, they are the fallen angels of a dark and violent time. Ghosts stripped of past and future, they roam, buffeted by the whims of the eternal now — a journey they undertake in defiant solitude punctuated by bouts of fevered consumption. Yet their beauty somehow survives, rebellious amid the ruins. From one fix to the next, desire becomes a life raft, a port in the storm as their bodies, exultant, seek to avenge the humiliation to which they are condemned. Orphans of a wild tribe, they live and love, restless vagrants in the shadows of society’s comfort and indifference. To paraphrase Jean Genet, Love in The Time Of Civil War gives a voice to the unexpressed.