Jean Genet's words have been put to celluloid in styles ranging from Fassbinder's cold Querelle to Todd Haynes's frigid Poison, but only once did Genet direct his own scenario. The 25-minute semipornographic film Un Chant d'amour (1950), set in a prison lined with murderers and roses, is so removed from the mannerism of his disciples (but so close to his own novels) it's almost funny. Every scene is plump with romanticism, every soft 35 mm shot (by cinematographer Jacques Natteau, who had worked for Max Ophüls and Jean Renoir) suffused with a longing that's three parts eroticism for every one part pain.

The film begins with an exterior shot of an actual prison wall. From offscreen left, a hand swings a pendulum of flowers on a string, while from the right, another hand grasps at it blindly, setting a rhythm like the beating of a heart. There is no sound. Inside the prison (a set built in the producer's Paris nightclub), a guard slides aside peepholes to reveal an array of sexy prisoners. There's a young man (Genet's hustler/muse Lucien Sénémaud) stroking and squeezing the tattoo on his upper arm—a sort of Asiatic Betty Boop, with swoops for eyebrows and a coquette's pursed lips—as he swivels in a slow dance step. His neighbor the next cell over, a slightly older North African, is hot for the tattooed boy. In other cells men masturbate and flail in frenzied dance.

The film cuts to various reveries—the pastoral dream of the North African frolicking with the object of his love (filmed in woods owned by Jean Cocteau), another a chiaroscuro sex fantasy envisioned, perhaps, by the voyeuristic guard—but the scene that really arrests the action takes place within the prison walls. A piece of straw, plucked from the prison bedding, passes through an infinitesimal hole in the wall to allow the North African and the tattooed boy to exchange hot clouds of cigarette smoke. The pacing (offer, wait, withdrawal, reinsertion, wait, smoke, breath) is absolutely exquisite. It is not an exaggeration to say this is one of the great screen kisses in the history of movies.

Cult Epics' release of the long-unavailable title is a little disingenuous. We're told there is no soundtrack because Genet wanted it silent. In truth, Genet wouldn't have even wanted a DVD. He disavowed Un Chant d'amour entirely later in life (he doesn't even reference it in the accompanying interviews); his biographer Edmund White speculates that the film may have reminded him of how little he really accomplished relative to his cinematic ambitions, or of the loss of his beloved Sénémaud. For the 2003 British release, BFI commissioned an original score and a commentary track by Jane Giles (author of the only book about the film). We get a couple of cocky political interviews with an elderly Genet and an intriguing but spotty commentary track by Kenneth Anger. The only useful extra is the introduction by Jonas Mekas, who was responsible for smuggling the first print into the U.S.