Belgian filmmaker David Lambert has followed up his stunning feature film debut the Cannes Award Winning ‘Beyond the Walls’ with another story of a very quirky and odd relationship. It’s the tale of an obese middle-aged gay baker called Henry (Jean-Michel Balthazar) who lives in a small Belgian town and who has fallen in love over the internet with a young skinny hustler called Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart )in Argentina. Lucas is an insecure and unsucessful little runt who is not gay, but uses his only ‘asset’ of a large penis to scrape by with a bare living.
When Henry sends Lucas a plane ticket to join him he envisages the young Argentinian putting out in the bedroom, and helping out in the bakery, whilst Lucas has thought no more beyond the fact that he is finally getting out of his hand-to-mouth miserable existence back home. He is horrified at what Henry expects from him and although he reluctantly agrees to learn how to bake, he will not let poor disappointed Henry touch him. He only relents very briefly when a sex-starved and love-lorn Henry threatens to send him back to Argentina if he doesn’t perform his bedroom duties too.
Meanwhile Lucas strikes up a friendship with single mom Audrey (Monia Chokri) who works in the bakery, and with her young son Jeff and that inevitably leads to Lucas sharing Audrey’s bed even though she seems totally laissez-faire about the whole thing.
Lambert imbues a great deal of humor into this unhappy triangle of three lonely soles even though it is obvious that it will not end up well for them all. He adroitly makes good use of the bakery to vent their frustrations not just in the scenes of the men pummeling the dough, but having the baker burst into very campily lip syncing a very dramatic operatic aria.
“All Yours” is all a very astute observation on how sex is used as a bargaining tool for people to get what they think that they want, and Lambert doesn’t shy from some very explicit images to make his point. It doesn’t however strike you with the same immediate passion that one got watching from the more compelling Beyond The Walls, but it does still mark Lambert as one of the more interesting breed of new queer filmmakers today.
