Michael Varrati | Infested Hearts / 2022

the kingdom of infestation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Varrati (screenwriter and director) Infested Hearts / 2022 [17 minutes]

 

A great many people suffer from entomophobia, the fear of insects. Fortunately, I don’t, but my husband is absolutely terrified by most crawling figures, demanding me to immediately come into room where he spots them to kill the beasts. I do kill the cockroaches, even the sink-bound ants, but refuse to harm to crickets and spiders, who do so much good and whose lovely voices and beautifully designed webs fascinate me more than troubling me with a sense of infestation.

    In Michael Varrati’s short, black-and-white filmeeee 2022 film, however, something far more serious is happening. It begins almost unperceptively, with a powerful slap to Ethan (Ben Baur) male partner, Dean’s (William Lott) knee where he has just spotted a small beetle crawling, a moment after he has embraced him. Naturally, Dean demands an explanation, Ethan describing the huge bug he saw crawling up his leg. But there is now no sign of it.

     But even after the explanation Dean no longer desires to “cuddle,” suggesting he needs to get up early anyway.

     This is how it begins, with a small beetle in the room. But soon after, in the middle of the night, Ethan perceives a small bug crawling in and out of his nose.

     Seemingly the very next day, Ethan asks if the book Dean is reading is the same book as he was reading on the couch the other day; but Dean points out that the incident was four days ago. Somehow time as been lost.

     Dean suggests that they should have a couple of friends over for dinner. He argues that they barely go out anymore, that it would be a good think to socialize again. But Ethan seems distressed at the couple coming “here,” into his own house. Previously, in the first scenes of this film, Ethan’s voice has expressed a problem that he seems to have about issues of “safety”: “The problem with safety is that once you know it is contingent on another, you never really had it in the first place.”

     If nothing else, Ethan seems somewhat agoraphobic and perhaps anti-social which is often a related issue. His comment further suggests that he suffers from the problem “I can’t remember when we’ve had ‘others’ here,” as if having friends over hinted at something like a foreign presence.

      Even Dean sees his friend as being somewhat “weird.” And just as suddenly, Ethan spots a spider on his lover’s hand.

      As he brushes his teeth, Dean responding erotically, Ethan suddenly spots an ant on his brush. But when they book look again, there is nothing there as in all the previous times when he has spotted bugs on their bodies.

    It’s clearly affecting their sex life, their everyday relationship. In the middle of the night, Ethan observes dozens of small insects crawling across his lover’s chest. And no matter how he cleans his chest and body with soap, the insects keep appearing. We overhear a conversation from Dean to his mother trying to explain that they’ve had two exterminators come out to check their house. Something, he has to conclude, is wrong with Ethan’s mind. But what is it? What does this bug infestation actually mean.

     Ethan cannot explain the problem, even as Dean tries to relieve him by assuring him that “Nothing is here but us.” But, as Dean describes it, it is worse: Ethan will no longer look at him anymore, will no longer touch him. Even Dean has to ask, despite he being with Ethan day and night, might he be on drugs?

     Dean asks the question we all might wonder, does Ethan still love him?

     Ethan’s only answer is, “Look, I have to ask you to understand. There is something terrible going on here.”

     And Dean can only respond, “Yes.”

     Their very next conversation regards what Dean had heard about Ethan’s previous relationship, how he’d invented reasons to push him away. And now, he feels, the same pattern is repeating itself, despite Ethan’s denials.

     Ethan insists he still loves Dean, but “they’re everyone, I can’t sleep, I can’t focus.”

    Dean is insistent, “They don’t exist. And you want to know I how I know? Because if you thought this house was infected. I you thought the problem was bugs and not me, you’d leave. Seriously, if you love me, let’s just go.”

     But Ethan can’t, he insists. He cannot leave the house despite what he is experiencing within it.

     “Because where to you think the bugs that get inside come from?”

     Dean leaves.

     The entire house becomes infested, inside and out. Even the refrigerator has bugs crawling around the bowls of leftover food.”

     “He once told me that there was no one here but us. But what I didn’t understand at the time, they didn’t come from outside like I thought. They were always here. …If a certain kind of bug is always there when we die, don’t we see them waiting, biding their time inevitable moment. The answer, of course, is shockingly simple. They’re already in us, hitching a ride as we go from broken moment, to broken moment, laying our infested hearts bare.”

      From AIDS myths of self-infection, to the long history of gay tales that convince us that we as gay men are ourselves infected, to the kind of myth that Kafka tells in his horrific story of otherness in the tale of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, some gay men have not been unable to separate themselves from the monsters that others perceive them to be just for being themselves.

     This is the story of infested beings who cannot allow themselves to perceive that their love is not evidence of a world inherited by the kingdom of infestation.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2023

Reprinted from My World Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

Pedro Almodóvar | Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) / 1983

beloved obsessions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) / 1983

 

What’s a seedy cabaret singer to do when, after bringing her lover a new batch of heroin, he immediately drops dead? Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) pulls out a calling card left her by the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano) of an eccentric religious mission, Redentoras humilladas (the Humiliated Redeemers) and seeks entry to the order to escape the police.

 

    If the set-up might remind you a little of Barbara Stanwyck’s situation in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire (1941) or even of Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act (1992), be not afraid. These sisters, having a long history of offering shelter and redemption to fallen women have picked up the “dark habits” of the previous prostitutes, drug addicts, and murderers who have made their home previously in the little convent in which they reside, a place now very much in disrepair. And the Mother Superior, a great admirer of Yolanda, provides her with the order’s very best room, formerly inhabited by another wayward girl, Virginia, who became a nun and ran off to Africa only to be eaten by cannibals.

      Virginia was apparently the daughter of a wealthy man who for years subsidized the convent, but he has died and his wife, the totally selfish and mindless Marchioness (Mary Carrillo) is just announced her attention to stop their subsidy, which along with the significant drop in their number, will surely doom the convent. Those who remain, having given themselves ugly names to remind them of their sins—many of which they still actively participate—Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave), Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), and Sister Snake (Lina Canalejas) are delighted to have since an obvious sinner among their midst, their first new visitor in a long while.

      The Wikipedia entry very nicely summarizes the sisters’ contributions and perpetual moral turpitudes.  

“The nurturing Sister Damned compulsively cleans the convent and coddles all the animals under her care, including an overgrown pet tiger that she treats like a son, playing the bongos for him.  The ascetic Sister Manure is consumed by thoughts of penitence and corporal self-sacrifice and cooks between LSD hallucinations. She murdered somebody and as the Mother Superior lied under oath to save her from jail, she is very devoted to her. The over-curious Sister Sewer Rat gardens and secretly, under the pen name Concha Torres, writes lurid novels about the wayward souls who visit the convent. She smuggles the novels out of the convent through her sister's periodic visits. The unassuming Sister Snake, with the help of the priest, tailors seasonal fashion collections for dressing the statues of the Virgin Mary. Her piety is a cover up for her romantic love for the chain-smoking chaplain. The mother Superior is a heavy drug user and a lesbian, whose charitable work is a means of meeting needy young women. She admits, ‘From admiring them so much I have become one of them.’”

       Yolanda quickly makes friends of the nuns and, as one might expect, the Mother Superior almost immediately falls in love with her. They enjoy their time together consuming coke and heroin until one day Yolanda determines to free herself of drugs, which for the Mother Superior only confirms her sinfulness.

      During her withdrawal, Yolanda turns to Sister Rat for friendship, trying to keep the Mother Superior out of her bedroom and, a bit abstractly, out of her private affairs.

       Now faced with Yolanda’s rejection and more threats of closure, having failed with a blackmail letter revealing information regarding Virginia and the Marquise, the Mother Superior decides to go on an even greater mission of drug trafficking to order to keep her order up and running.

       In danger, now, of losing the order, the nuns determine to throw a special celebratory party of their Mother Superior, convincing Yolanda to sing at the affair. In a far less traditional manner than in Sister Act Yolanda and the other sisters sing in honor their leader, with the Marquise herself in attendance.

       Having helped the Marquise to obtain a letter from Africa informing her about her long-lost grandson who has been raised by apes, the selfish old woman has become fond of Yolanda and Sister Rat, grateful for their help. And when at the end of the party The Mother General, visiting the order, announces that the convent will be dissolved, the Marquise invites Rat and Yolanda to live with her.

       Sister Damned decides to retreat to her native village, leaving her pet tiger to Sister Snake and the Priest, who now openly in love, determine to start their family with the tiger as their son.

       Only Sister Manure remains behind to help Mother Superior to recover from all of the disasters facing her, the end of the order and the loss of Yolanda. But then, it appears, she soon has larger matters regarding to drug smuggling to attend to. Perhaps she will find a new vocation which might put her in a better financial state.

       Originally, so the story goes, Almodóvar was asked by multimillionaire Hervé Hachuel, to create a film starring his current girlfriend, Cristina Sánchez Pascual. Setting up a new production company called Tesauro Production, he commissioned the Spanish director to produce a film. In Frederick Strauss’ book, Almodóvar on Almodóvar (Faber and Faber, 2006), the director himself has described what story he had created:

 

“I came up with the story of a girl who drives both men and women wild, a girl who sings, drinks, takes drugs, occasionally goes through periods of abstinence and has the extraordinary experiences one would never have, were one to live a hundred years....”

     And later: “While writing I had in mind Marlene Dietrich's work with Josef von Sternberg, especially Blonde Venus (1932), where she plays a house wife who becomes a singer, spy and prostitute, who travels the world living a life of never ending adventure.”

 

     Dark Habits was Almodóvar's third film, a work rejected by the Cannes Film Festival and treated as a scandalous affair by both members of the Italian and Spanish press for it’s supposed sacrilegious treatment of religion as well as its blasphemous and anti-Catholic views. From the director’s point of view, it represented a change in tone from his two previous films, wherein the characters’ emotions, by which they are fully driven, are presented more clearly. Yet he did not see the film as anti-religious as much as a representation of figures who had moved away from God, directing their energies more towards those suffering and in misery, particularly women—the major subject of numerous Almodóvar works. Their actions, the director argues, in some respects echoing the views of Luis Buñuel and even Robert Bresson, is closer to the original and truer visions of religion both in their ability to love and even become themselves sinners in order to fully appreciate the nature of sin. And like Buñuel, in particular, Almodóvar chose the comic, clothed in lurid Douglas Sirkean color, as the best representation of their extreme and eccentric undertaking.

     Today, many critics, including myself, feel it to be one of the best of Almodóvar's early works.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Bill Sherwood | Parting Glances / 1986

the bigamist, or dickens and mozart play “spin the bottle”

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Sherwood (screenwriter and director) Parting Glances / 1986

 

     I’m not very fond of ranking films or making sweeping statements that pit the many wonderful cinematic works I’ve witnessed against each other: yet I have to admit that Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances is one of my very favorite LGBTQ movies, not only of its decade but of all time. In its loosely focused vision of an era early on in the AIDS crisis, its exuberant overlay of various genres, and its larger lenses of comedy and drama, of sentimental realism and a cynical surrealism, of monogamous relationships and hedonistic gay sex, and of intense living and graceful dying Sherwood’s narrative almost inevitably frays at its edges but is strengthened by its very refusal to tie all its ends into a nice tidy package. People come and go, dart back, and fade out simultaneously in this fairly honest portrait of what it was to be joyfully alive in the dark days of the early 1980s—wherein then President of the US, Ronald Reagan, attempted to ignore and deny everything going on around him. This work is almost Dickensian in its embracement of the best and worst of its time.

      Proof of what I’ve just expressed may come in my realization that if I were simply to relate the plot of this work, it would make absolutely no sense. How do you explain a perfectly happy gay couple in their 20s living in New York City, Robert (John Bolger) working as a health administrator and Michael (Richard Ganoung), a freelance editor would-be writer whose relationship is about to be torn asunder by Robert’s willing—we eventually discover—assignment to two years in Africa. Life with his lover for this blow-up like model for good health and the body beautiful, it nonsensically argues, has become too easy and predictable, and accordingly a bit boring.

     Michael, on the other hand, doesn’t see it that way at all, particularly since he is caring for his former lover, who, quite the opposite of Robert, is a holy mess of contradictions: Nick (the marvelous Steve Buscemi) is a slightly elfin, ill-proportioned yet irresistibly adorable man, dying of AIDS, who would verbally chop you at the knees if you described him just as I have. A successful rock musician who loves the opera albums, mostly Mozart, Michael buys for him, Nick lives in a messy sprawl of derelict objects, including an entire wall of TV screens and other recording devices, alternating his precious time by working on his musical compositions for his traveling band and creating tape-recordings of his last will and testament, notifying his friends and family of the money—with which he is well endowed through the success of his recordings—he plans to leave or refuse them.

      His ratty, darkened, cock-roach infested apartment is the polar opposite of Michael and Robert’s sun-drenched pre-Ikea haven. And those oppositions spill over to Nick’s behavior and personality. If Robert, to express the film further in Dickensian terms, is Scrooge’s handsome nephew Fred of The Christmas Carol, Nick, is the Tiny Tim of the work—even though at moments he alternates as Scrooge, at one point in the film being visited in his waking-sleep by the specter of an old friend who warns him of what’s in store if he doesn’t change his ways.

     Yet if Parting Glances is Dickensian in its narrative thrust, it is Mozartian in its tone—an important element in this film given the fact that Sherwood was once a classical music student of composer Elliott Carter. As The Washington Post critic Michael Wilmington astutely observed:

 

“The whole movie is keyed to its musical underscoring (from disco to opera, Bronski Beat to Brahms) and, as you might guess, the music helps shape the story. The tone is slightly Mozartean: You’re reminded a little of The Marriage of Figaro seen through the prism of the Requiem, a mixture of deep sorrow and brilliant melody. (At one time, Sherwood throws in a gag nightmare inspired by Amadeus [the same scene I interpreted as an interpolation of Dickens].)”

 

     If Nick is the suffering Tiny Tim in Dickensland, he is perhaps Papageno in the Mozart world, the failed birdcatcher who nonetheless wins the prize of a faithful wife. In this case, the faithful wife is Michael, who, we realize, despite his desire for a permanent relationship with Robert, is still deeply in love with his ex-companion, Nick.

     Indeed, nearly everyone in this work loves Michael, the man trapped in between losing his two lovers, past and present. The young cute record store clerk, Peter (Adam Nathan) and his long-time lesbian artist friend Joan (Kathy Kinney) are nearly desperate for his company, and his other friends still can’t comprehend why he has settled down with the walking, talking ad for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Since suddenly Robert is leaving him and Nick is near death, who might Michael transfer his love to next? Accordingly, the real theme of this world of “parting glances” is what the future will bring.

      Neither the world that Robert’s friends inhabit nor that in which Michael’s friends live, both of which Sherwood portrays for us in the two going away parties given in Robert’s honor, seem desirable for the loving and caring “bigamist.”

 

     At Robert’s bosses’ dinner party, we meet the sleazy elderly Cecil (Patrick Tull) married to the ever forbearing Betty (Yolande Bavan). Cecil presents himself as a smug effete, who dines on gourmet food, drinks fine wines, and chases young boys who he pretends Betty never notices. He dotes on Robert and out of his jealousy for Michael’s relationship with him almost incessantly provokes arguments with his employee’s “roommate,” a designation he retains to keep the true nature of their relationship from his “innocent” wife, and which she, in turn, employs to pretend to her husband her ignorance. Theirs is a world of hypocrisy and lies. And we are not at all surprised later in the movie, while Robert is waiting for his plane to Africa, that Cecil shows up determined to accompany him at least to Rome, having left Betty for a final fling with young Sri Lankan men; Betty, who is the source of the couple’s wealth, admits to Michael that she is happy to have finally gotten rid of him. Is it any wonder that Michael cannot abide dinners with Robert’s associates? Without assigning literal roles to them, we certainly might still associate this power couple with Sarastro and The Queen of the Night

     Yet Michael’s friends offer a society that is nearly as unsustainable. Joan (Kathy Kinney) may be a lovely, ballsy woman upon whom one can always rely, but hardly anyone wants the art she creates, symbolically the love she has to offer.  The invitees to her party are the societal “hanger’s on” The pompous corpulent queen and Monostatos of the event, Douglas (Richard Wall), who living off of his ill-gotten Wall Street gains, is currently writing a gay science fiction film script— explaining Michael’s current editing job—that sounds a bit like the 1982 film about alien sex monsters Liquid Sky and dozens of intentionally campy LGBTQ Sci-Fi works of the current century. The German duo of decadent performance artists Liselotte (Nada) and Klaus (Theodore Ganger) perform for the partygoers, with Liselotte later observed having sex in the shower with a young female attendee.

      Peter—a Narcissus about to bud—meanwhile corners Nick to find out more about Michael, and without knowing that Nick and Michael were former lovers, declares his love for the Tanino of the night, revealing in the process his banal aspirations to become the next Great Gatsby.

     When the insensitive Peter also displays his sympathy for Nick’s having acquired AIDS, the “victim” hurriedly slinks away from the party, while Tanino goes in search of his Pamina, who, hidden away on apartment roof, has gotten soused with a female friend.

      I assure you, in describing the above events, I wasn’t snorting Joan’s cocaine.

     The very next morning reality returns, as Michael, angry again for Robert’s abandonment—however temporary—of their relationship accuses his current lover of escaping so that he will not have to face Nick’s death.

     No sooner does the now lonely Michael turn back to everyday life, attempting to edit Douglas’ horrific script, than Nick calls to report that he is “on the Island”: “Can’t take it anymore, Mike. This is it.” What “it” might mean is anyone’s guess, but obviously Michael fears for his birdcatcher’s life. He immediately books a bi-plane to fly out to save him, but the feathers he wears in this third act of Sherwood’s crazy tale, are not those of The Magic Flute but of the Indians he and Nick has portrayed in raiding Douglas’ Fire Island estate years earlier, the memory of which we have witnessed a few frames before this. So have we moved from Dickens and Mozart into boyhood games such as “Cowboys and Indians” and, as we soon shall see, “Pin the Horse on the Donkey” or “Spin the Bottle,” in which the latter, if you recall, the spinner must kiss the person to whom the bottle points.

     Before Michael can even board the plane to save Nick, Robert has disembarked his plane, returning home to plant a kiss on the surprised Michael’s neck and—long before that possibility was imagined—to save his gay marriage. Happy as he is the reconciliation, Michael must fulfill his mission and takes off for a Fire Island trip that reverses all those many gay films that featured the fun, drugs, and sex of the summer gay paradise.

      The beach in the cold light of the “off-season” is barren except for a leather-coated, denim wearing Nick; smoking a cigarette, his James Dean-like visage reminding one a bit like a winter-stranded version of Warhol’s 1965 hustler standing at water’s edge staring off into the horizon. After it’s established that he’s okay, Nick seems determined to play a geographical game, pointing outward to ask if Europe is in that direction. Michael corrects his misconception, and the game continues with Nick’s attempt to fix the direction of other continents, Africa, and South America.

      Nick finally demands that Michael participate in his version of “Spin the Bottle,” blindfolding and spinning Michael to point in a direction of their next journey. Michael spins, accompanied by a musical muzurka, pointing finally to Europe. Nick’s response: “Ah, Europe’s too poofy. [Putting on his sunglasses and beginning to walk away] How ‘bout we go visit Robert in Africa.”

       Two weeks in Africa, without Robert, might be the perfect solution to Michael’s dilemma about where his future might lead him.

       So beautiful is Sherwood’s tragi-comedy that one would have loved to see what he might have accomplished later; he died of AIDS, however, in 1990.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).