Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Am Jonas’ on Netflix, an Understated French Drama About a Gay Man’s Troubled Life

Netflix’s I Am Jonas is a French drama, small in scope, brief in run time, and intimate in narrative. Writer/director Christophe Charrier’s film is a character study in which a gay man flashes back to his teen years and the formative moment that haunts him to this day. It’s an unassuming film, almost destined to be overlooked without some good word-of-mouth. So is it worthy of obscurity, or does it deserve a boost?

I AM JONAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jonas (Felix Meritaud) sits in the backseat of a cop car. His face is scraped up, there’s blood on his shirt. How did he get here? A fight, again, at the gay bar, is one answer. Another answer slowly comes into focus as the movie gives us a broad portrait of Jonas’ life, flashing back 18 years to 1997, when he was a teenager (Nicolas Bauwens), playing his Game Boy, going to high school and hiding his emerging homosexuality. The opening scenes reference a traumatic event in vague terms, an event that may explain his current troubles.

Back to that cop car: Jonas’ aimlessness comes into focus as he’s released by the police, and his boyfriend subsequently kicks him out of the apartment for cheating on him; his empathetic heart reveals itself as he goes to work as a hospital orderly on his day off to keep an elderly woman company as her husband undergoes risky surgery.

Flashback: on the first day of 10th grade, Jonas meets new kid Nathan (Tommy-Lee Baik), who’s aggressively forward and confident where Jonas is meek and introverted. Jonas and Nathan become fast friends, skipping class to smoke cigarettes and kiss in a quiet corner of the gymnasium. As things so often go in high school, a bully hassles them, and Jonas accepts the abuse, although that doesn’t mean he isn’t angry.

One gets the sense that current-day Jonas wouldn’t be so passive — he leaves his boyfriend’s apartment, hooks up with a man he met on Grindr and finds himself at a hotel, where a young man (Ilian Bergala) with frosted blonde hair works. It’s the same young man Jonas eyeballed at the beach earlier, and whose Instagram feed he frequently stalks. Who is he? Why is Jonas so aimless? And what happened, exactly?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I Am Jonas prompted in me a great yearning to rewatch the exquisite Call Me By Your Name, which also transcends its characters’ sexuality to be about something far greater — the power of human connection.

Performance Worth Watching: Baik is the film’s sparkplug, playing Nathan at the perfect point on the spectrum between arrogance and self-confidence. He’s terrific as the film’s dramatic catalyst.

Memorable Dialogue: Two cops arrest Jonas. One is a former classmate who knows his story. The other is less sympathetic: “Were you a troublemaker back then?” he asks Jonas, and the line opens the film’s psychological can of worms.

Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond boy-on-boy makeout sessions.

Our Take: I Am Jonas is a lean, concise drama, strongly acted, smartly edited and crisply photographed. It seamlessly shifts between two timelines, bringing them together in the third act with some sleight-of-hand that’s clever without calling attention to itself. It’s expressive in a quiet, understated way, and is a thoughtful rumination on trauma and depression.

It’s also about a gay man, but ultimately isn’t about his gayness. That’s just a fact of his life, and what separates it from so many other films, which might focus on Jonas’ sexual self-discovery. Surely, he wishes that was his life’s great struggle; his damage is much bigger than that, something that many who’ve experienced debilitating psychological anguish can surely relate to. And frankly, that’s most of us.

Still, as good as I Am Jonas can be, it doesn’t fully engage the emotions. Perhaps it’s the film’s brevity; perhaps Jonas’ self-loathing keeps us, if not at arm’s length, then at least at a bent arm’s length. As a character study, it’s moderate in its depth, and feels like it needs more space and a few more scenes to fully flesh out Jonas, to draw us more intimately into his life.

Our Call: STREAM IT. I Am Jonas is a mindful, astute portrait of a troubled man. Its slightness is a blemish, not a fatal flaw.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream I Am Jonas on Netflix