It’s rare for a film about getting old to be as intimate as “Before I Forget” while still keeping a level head and retaining emotional nuance. Written and directed by Jacques Nolot, this partly autobiographical drama follows a middle-aged former gigolo through the paces of his daily life. In the film, which opens Friday at IFC Center, pleasure for the older man has become a practical matter, a worry like so much else, bringing full circle his days as a hustler years earlier.

Pierre, played by Mr. Nolot, divides his time mostly between padding about the house, dealing with sexual desire (more than satisfying it), and comparing notes with friends about money and other matters. The past is also a big topic: In Pierre’s cultured, deceptively comfortable Paris milieu, his friends are facing the nitty-gritty realities of sorting out emotional and financial ties with lovers, living and departed. Pierre himself is being shut out of an inheritance by a companion’s resentful family.

Paunchy, elegantly self-possessed, discreetly sardonic, Pierre is portrayed in frank detail. The film joins him as he offhandedly expresses severe doubts to his psychiatrist, has uncomfortable sex with a lean young prostitute in his perpetually darkened bedroom, reads old love letters, and frets about hair loss symptoms from HIV medication. The indignities of old age, whether surprise incontinence or old friends who have become much more successful, are not shunted aside.

This openness never becomes a clichéd tactic of plant-and-shoot voyeuristic stares. The film, like its protagonist, keeps a certain casual civility, a stance matched by the modestly neat cinematography by Josée Deshaies. Mr. Nolot’s restraint conveys the character’s deeper weariness and barely diffused fears about holding on to who he is. His subtle performance rewards a close eye to tone and little shifts in line readings.

A blocked writer, Pierre doesn’t have the security of a wealthier spendthrift friend, with whom he compares prices for rent boys. During an oyster dinner with someone resurfacing from his glory days, a flashback recounts Pierre’s humiliating failure to find a will in his companion’s sealed-off apartment after forgetting its hiding place. The film suggests a delicate, precarious economy of “cultivated” support that repeats in cycles. (But of a distant acquaintance who merely leeched off someone, Pierre scoffs disapprovingly, “Now that was a real gigolo.”)

“Before I Forget” joins a body of films that Mr. Nolot considers a continuous, ongoing chronicle of the same character, including films in which he acted for André Téchiné (director of the recently acclaimed “The Witnesses”). The previous entry was 2002’s “Porn Theater,” which Mr. Nolot directed; Pierre frequents the haunt in search of distraction, to be found mostly off the screen. The films weave in elements and sentiments from Mr. Nolot’s own eventful life. (Pierre’s line in “Before I Forget” about philosopher Roland Barthes dubbing him “in a semantic sense, a whore” is but one quotation from actual experience.)

“Before I Forget” opens with a shot so unusual and abstract that it’s worth pointing out, lest it be mistaken as a company credit: On a blank white background, a perfectly round black dot appears at the center and gradually grows to envelop the entire screen in darkness. Followed by a short scene in a cemetery, the move seems to represent the void, but it also feels like a headlong zoom through an eyehole into one man’s life. The truth lies somewhere in between, leaving one to wonder, after the enigmatic final scene, what exactly will become of Pierre — as does, no doubt, Mr. Nolot.

At IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).