Hong Khaou | 轻轻摇晃 (Qīngqīng yáohuàng) (Lilting) / 2014

softly spoken plaintive wails

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hong Khaou (screenplay and director) 轻轻摇晃 (Qīngqīng yáohuàng) (Lilting) / 2014

 

Cambodian-born British director Hong Khaou’s 2014 film Lilting is one of the many beautifully intimate dramas that are killed by the kindness of well-meaning reviewers and descriptions such as “lost gems,” or “forgotten treasures.” This film is far more than a gentle confrontation between cultural and social forces, or even a slightly oblique dramedy about gay sexuality and coming out.

     It encompasses those elements surely, but it is also a far more profound exploration of how we define our worlds and ourselves through language, and how language shapes our own experiences. A great part of the divisiveness of international relationships might be attributed to the impossibility of bridging the gaps of language.

 

     Certainly, the central characters of Khaou’s film begin the movie at war. Both have just lost their most beloved companion, Junn (Pei-Pei Cheng), her son (Andrew Leung), and for Richard (Ben Whishaw, who came out as gay the year of the film) his lover of 4 years. Although the mother is the major offender in this unnecessary struggle, constantly refusing to even acknowledge the existence of her son Kai’s “friend,” and telling her son to his face that she doesn’t like Richard, his inability to communicate with her and Kai’s fearful refusal to explain Richard’s role in his life help to fan the flames of the battle over who is the rightful focus of Kai’s love.

    What she doesn’t know is that her attitude, given the couple’s relationship, was what has put her in the lamentable situation in which she now finds herself, “locked up,” as she puts it, in a poorly decorated assisted living home supposedly because of early signs of forgetfulness. In fact, she is anything but forgetful, as she reimages again and again from different perspectives, the last visit of her son to her before his untimely death by being run down by an auto.

    During that last meeting, Jun has, as is her nature, made her son feel guilty for “putting her away” while continuing to disparage Richard, the very reason why she has been relocated. And obviously Kai has felt deep guilt, attempting to find a way to tell her about his gay relationship and perhaps bring her home to live with them. One of the very last things he does is to invite her to their home where, we later discover, he intends finally to explain to her that he is gay while Richard is walking several times around the block. The somewhat ridiculous scenario never occurs because of Kai’s death during his early shopping for the dinner.

     Junn, we gradually discover is an intransigent conservative, never truly assimilating into the British world which her deceased husband so readily embraced, and refusing to even try to learn the language. To cast the famed martial arts actor in this role was a brilliant decision. As Los Angeles Times reviewer Betsy Sharkey put it, “Cheng has set her legendary martial arts prowess aside to portray the malcontented matriarch. There is certainly the steel you see in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or the many other martial arts movies she is known for.” And for that reason, if for no other, we comprehend why Kai has so long resisted fully explaining his sexuality and, for her, his quite alien love.

     But in this film, also, we see, as Sharkey also observes, a character with greater vulnerability and a far deeper emotional makeup. For as she confesses to her son, she and another of the assisted living dwellers, Alan (Peter Bowles) have begun a kind of romantic affair with neither of them being able to speak each other’s language, perceiving one another as sort of exotic beings. They kiss, dance, and touch one another a bit like human’s dealing with pets, delighted for having the company.

     Oddly, given the centrality of Kai and Richard’s relationship, we know little about them, how they met (mentioned once in passing) or what kind of life they’ve shared—although we do later see the beautiful home they’ve mutually created and into which both would like to bring Junn if only she could fully accept their relationship. We do not even know how they are employed or anything about Richard’s background or family. All we allowed are glimpses of the loving couple in bed, which, although certainly a pleasant image to reassure us of their love for one another, does little to explain their relationship, which is arguably a failure of this otherwise powerful film.

     But then, we also have to admit that the relationship between the two young men is not at the dead center of Khaou’s work, nor is the relationship between Jun and her son the true focus. Rather, it is the relationship between Richard and Junn, and most importantly, their connection through language that matters most in this narrative.

     Now truly bitter about her son’s loss, Junn is even more infuriated by the sudden appearance at the home in which she now feels totally trapped by Richard. In the midst of her and Alan’s courtship, she hardly acknowledges that he has come bearing a gift. What does he want with her? And why does he even bother to visit a mother of a friend?

     Truly frustrated after the many attempts he has made over the years to accommodate her without Kai’s help, Richard suddenly gets the idea to hire a translator fluent in both Mandarin and English, Vann (Naomi Yang), presumably to help Jun communicate with her elderly courtier Alan. Of course, in the process Vann cannot help—mostly unintentionally but occasionally intentionally— but intrude, expressing the viewpoints and emotional state of her employer Richard as well.

     Perhaps inevitably as Vann begins to translate for Jan and Alan, they begin to discover a great deal about one another that they do not at all like, particularly when they begin to catalogue what they don’t enjoy about one another, which includes Alan’s womanizing behavior of pinching Jan’s ass, and both the smells they carry with their bodies, in Junn’s case a mouth that reeks of garlic, and in Alan’s the pungent odor of piss. The two break away, Junn to gargle, Alan to shower.

     At a dinner celebration at the apartment Alan still maintains, Richard is asked to cook one of his famous Chinese dinners (something Kai refused to permit him to demonstrate to Jun, presuming she would only hate it), and the two warriors are forced once more to meet up. But even here, at one point, the chef and translator are ordered out of the room, as the two would-be lovers express their preference for not fully having all their feelings communicated to the other.

     Over time, however, Junn discovers than she and Alan are completely incompatible. Yet increasingly, due to Vann’s intrusions she begins to comprehend that there is a deeper reason why Richard has brought in a translator, and increasingly she becomes interested in his motives. If for no other reason, she now at least can demand her son’s possessions be returned to her, for which Richard is reluctantly willing; she insists his ashes be returned as well, which Richard refuses, obviously a mystifying resistance in her mind.

     Strangely, for all of his long criticism of his lover for resisting telling his mother of his sexuality, Richard is just as silent about their true relationship as was Kai, refusing to allow Vann to speak of it.

      It is only in the film’s final scenes in which he has invited Junn to their home, perhaps even with intention of permitting her to live there if she might come to terms with his role in her son’s life, that the two finally have it out.

    At first, he hurries to clean out any evidence of their relationship, pictures, shared clothing and the like. As it is, Jun is even somewhat taken aback to find that he has “moved into” Kai’s bedroom, a room obviously which he has always shared. She asks to be alone for a while in the room where she carefully takes up her son’s garments and objects, smelling the bedsheets, announcing after that she still smells the odor of her son. Richard responds that so too can he.

    That, in turn, finally begins an angry retort in which he finally lays out the truth that she has continued to manipulate her son through guilt, describing their actual relationship including her son’s sexuality, the conversation too long delayed—all of which Vann almost joyfully translates.

     But the film ends, oddly, with Junn talking aloud, half to herself in Mandarin only (her words now translated through subtitles, meaning Richard cannot know the meaning of what she says), about the real problem, that it is not her son’s sexuality or even choice of a mate in Richard that is at the heart of her problems, but that she cannot deal with her irreparable loss. And finally, both of the battlers realize that it is not one another they are fighting, but their own feelings of the loss of love, the vacuum in their lives, and the attendant guilt for not having been able to love more fully and better. Their anger has simply been misplaced, bounced off the other when it is truly an anger over the inequities of fate.

     If that does not explain Junn’s behavior for the long while before Kai’s death and Kai’s incriminating silence regarding who he truly was which simultaneously denied Richard his position in their relationship, the feelings expressed at film’s end at least ameliorate the situation enough that we might now at least imagine a pact between the two grievers, perhaps even allowing a change in Junn’s unhappy living conditions as the two find out more about their loved one in each other.

     The film does not promise this, however, since both must come to terms with their loss within the structures of their own relationships, their own cultures, and their own languages. Perhaps the title alone hints of a future: to lilt, lilting: “to sing, speak, or play with a light, graceful rhythm or swing,” an act long unavailable to the two warriors of this tale of their softly spoken plaintive wails.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Jamieson Pearce | For the Love of Julio / 2014

fast food

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamieson Pearce (screenwriter and director) For the Love of Julio / 2014 [11 minutes]

 

Alice (Simone Young) and George (Oliver Coleman) are more than best friends. They appear to live together and truly enjoy one another’s company. She feels free to enter the bathroom while he’s on the toilet, and he is absolutely comfortable using her eyeliner before they go out to the bars in search mostly of a finding the perfect man for George and maybe Alice, depending upon who it might be that they’re both attracted to that night. “Here’s to getting laid,” she toasts as they finish up their wine and are ready to depart.

     When Alice goes up to the bar to order some more wine, she runs into two accounting jerks whose self-esteem is higher than their IQs, presuming the name of their firm will send her whirling. She finally hurries off as one of them tells her, “Alice you’ve got two terrific titties,” and spits wine on her in the midst of laughing.

      Meanwhile George spots a good-looking man at the bar and gets up the nerve to approach, asking if the other man who just left his side is his boyfriend. “No, we’re just two blokes on the town looking to pick some young cock. And then you appeared,” he replies. George and he immediately fall into a series of deep kisses.

      Unfortunately, it was all just a fantasy, George coming-to as Alice demands he stop staring at the man since he’s clearly “freaking him out.” She recounts her unpleasant experience and poses the question: “Seriously, how difficult is it to find a half-interesting guy who knows what he’s doing?” Their eyes immediately go toward a straight couple madly making out in the corner, presumably both finding the man for whom they are searching.

     They end up in a Burger King, as they probably do most nights, ecstatically moaning over their burghers as they might have the perfect man that they will never find if they stay together on their search and seek out men at the kinds of open bars they have just visited. Obviously, they love Julio Iglesias singing of “El Amor” more than the real thing, and are perfectly happy to share the search with one another instead making a real love discovery.

     Australian director Jamieson Pearce’s comic short reveals why some gay boys and their female besties will never find true love or, for that matter, as Alice might restate it, even “get a good fuck.” Hunting in pairs may work well in big game hunting, but in the search for sex works better single-O.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Jamieson Pearce | The Fruity / 2016

the kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamieson Pearce (screenwriter and director) The Fruity / 2016 [11 minutes]

 

It’s Valentine’s day at The Fruity, with Geoffrey (Andrew Benson), the boss, running around in a drag version of cupid giving the young Spanish-speaking cook Jorge (Adrian Dieguez) instructions, clearly repeated every day, about how he likes the food hot, spicy for the Friday night Karaoke BBQ. Jorge is planning to have things is own way and is treated badly for even suggesting that he is, after all, the cook. Jorge wants the sauce on the top, while Geoffrey wants him to put it on the side.

 

    Lindsay (Cameron Rhodes) enters. He’s evidently a special friend, who feels free to enter through the kitchen, but also has a tender spot, we immediately perceive, for the cook Jorge, which he treats, unlike Geoffrey, quite kindly. Jorge also clearly likes Lindsay, even if the older man can’t say his name properly.

     Lindsay loves Spain he declares, even though he’s never been there, his love clearly influenced by the idea of having Jorge around, a sentiment shared by the talkative customer, beer in hand, Bruce (Brendan Miles).

    Jorge wonders why Lindsay isn’t eating dinner, but he demurs (“I can’t), while Geoffrey, now behind the bar, says you’re the one who wanted his special sauce, Bruce joining in, “Oh, don’t we all!”

     Jorge wonders if Lindsay plans to do karaoke, but again the obviously shy Lindsay suggests “he can’t.” Jorge argues that he sings well, but Lindsay argues he wouldn’t get up on stage even if Ricky Martin were to promise to give him a spanking. Geoffrey charges into the conversation, “How about a spanking from Jorge?” 

     “That’s another matter!”

    Bruce asks Jorge whether who give him a spanking, but Jorge is not sure precisely what “a spanking” entails. When asked if he might give Lindsay a kiss for singing, Jorge responds, “Sure.” “But”—he adds—"he has to do it properly, like he did when he was drunk!”

      It appears that Lindsay is truly mulling over the matter. Bruce insists he won’t do it.

     Several customers in Valentine’s Day drag suddenly enter and sashay around the room. Fruity is an Aussie older man’s gay bar in which nearly all the customers have long known one another.

Geoffrey announces that Lindsay is about to perform, and the frightened and unsure man stands with mic in hand tentatively singing Marc Bolan and T. Rex’s “Solid Baby.” The audience soon joins in and Lindsay becomes more assured, and ends up singing quite splendidly.

      He finishes and almost dazed walks back to the bar. Jorge comes out of the kitchen, walks over the bar, and pours Lindsay and gin and tonic. He then walks around the bar, Lindsay assuring him he doesn’t go through with it, and puts a long deep kiss on Lindsay’s lips. The older man is astonished, almost out of breath as Bruce quips, “You realize from here it’s all downhill.”

      The two say goodbye, and Lindsay walks slowly off with a little swagger in his step.

     Certainly, there’s nothing profound in his little film, but it’s sense of realism and depiction of the importance this slightly sleazy Australian bar has in these older men’s lives provides it with a sense of humor and gravitas missing in so many short films with far more complex and consequential subjects. Although the comparison seems absurd, I might suggest that there is something even Joycean about this work in the way the great writer’s Dubliner stories manage to genuinely move us through the everyday talk of people in pubs and dining with their families.  

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).  

Maryam Touzani | أزرق القفطان (Le Bleu du caftan) (The Blue Caftan) / 2022, general release 2023

a ballet of fingers, hands, and eyes

by Douglas Messerli     

 

Maryam Touzani and Nabil Ayouch (screenplay), Maryam Touzani (director) أزرق القفطان (Le Bleu du caftan) (The Blue Caftan) / 2022, general release 2023

Maryam Touzani’s Moroccan Arabic-language film The Blue Caftan is a gentle tale about a closeted gay tailor, Halim (Saleh Bakri) who with his wife runs a caftan shop in the medina of Salé, Morocco. However, as Wendy Ide, writing in The Guardian notes:

 

“Halim…is more than a tailor. At the traditional shop in a Moroccan medina that he runs with his ailing wife Mina (Lubna Azabal), he works lovingly and painstakingly, hand-embroidering silks so exquisitely fine they are like wearing air. And in a way, this delicate, precise, time-consuming approach is mirrored in director Maryam Touzani’s film-making, with its focus on tiny details, the fleeting glance, an almost imperceptible brush of skin against skin.”

 

   Halim, working only by hand in the manner of the old masters, is a remnant of the past who, simply because of the long periods it takes him to properly embroider a caftan are frustrating to his impatient modern customers, who are often seeking his costumes for special occasions such as weddings and birthdays with specific deadlines. Yet, Halim the craftsman refuses to take up a sewing machine and work more hurriedly, perhaps missing or skipping his careful stitches. And Touzani’s film, not only mirrors his approach, but incorporates it into her film in its narrative rhythms.

     All moves slowly in The Blue Caftan as Halim carefully folds and cuts the startingly ultramarine blue piece of cloth, as he and his new assistant Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) unspool and weave the gold threads into it, and as they carefully lock eyes over long periods of time, their obvious desire resulting in no movement except for the next careful stitch. This slow pace might do-in most films, but in this case such indolence represents its very essence, a tenuous ballet of the fingers, hands, and eyes that create an almost operatic tension worthy of Tristan and Isolde.

      As she carefully watches over the front desk of the shop, Mina first appears almost as a kind of gorgon, a strong-willed woman keeping a close eye of her husband even if she inwardly knows that his regular trips to the hamman include male sexual activity.

       When the young Youssef shows up early one morning, dressing and showering in the shop, we watch with her how Halim eyes nearly devour the young man’s body, she immediately warning the young man to properly dress and shower at home. At another point, purposely hiding a bolt of fabric, she insists Youssef has stolen it and attempts to fire him. Denying the theft, he challenges her to take it from his already paltry wages.

        For Halim’s part, like so many men locked in cultures in which homosexual desire is forbidden and shamed, the husband has nonetheless come to love his wife, his only sexual transgressions apparently being in the public baths. At one point near the middle of the film, when the two men are almost overpowered by longing, the younger man hugs the elder close for a moment, Halim pausing just long enough to joyfully take in the embrace before demanding that Youssef pick up a thread from the floor.

        We are not in the least surprised when Youssef walks out, too frustrated to continue as his apprentice. He, perhaps like certain members of the audience, cannot any longer abide the slow-boil of their interrelationships.

       Yet it is perhaps at this very moment when we begin to observe that, despite her seemingly cold demeanor and the pain she daily suffers, that there is an entirely different dimension to Mina. At one point, she demands, unlike other women of the community, that Halim take her to a public café, where she too smokes a hookah and yells for the local football team when they make a goal, somewhat amusing Halim while shocking the other men in attendance.

 

       And we also recognize, particularly after Youssef returns to work, that Mina realizes how good the young man might be for her husband after her death, gradually incorporating him into their dinners and their daily activities, as Ide puts it, “weaving” Youssef into the “fabric” of their lives.

         Finally, a gentle love blooms before the two men, as they move into the realm of touch that I described earlier. Youssef, moreover, witnessing Mina’s open sacrifice in almost gifting him her husband, develops a love and respect for her. Strangely, one might almost describe the last days of Mina’s life as representing, without such a word being spoken or even hinted at, a polyamorous affair. If nothing else, they have, without speaking the name, transformed into a kind of family,

each admiring and loving the other as they daily share their lives.

        The major threat of outside forces—except for a strange encounter one day with local police, who demand to see their passports and marriage documents as they return home from an outing together—are their customers, impatient for their finished caftans and seemingly ignorant of the difference between the artful creations of Halim and Youssef compared with those stitched up on sewing machines. What is clear is that the days of the artisan are limited.

        The blue caftan, obviously, has taken far too much time for the woman who has ordered it. And it is an almost revolutionary act that when the two finish it, Mina dying almost at that moment, that Halim dresses his wife in the caftan before they put her on a bier and carry her grandly dressed body together to the cemetery. There is certainly no one more worthy of such a beautiful gown.

        As The New York Times critic Devika Girish nicely summarizes this work: “Touzani’s film becomes an ode to the many kinds of love that persist, even in an unforgiving world.”

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2023).

D. W. Griffith | Billy's Stratagem / 1912

playing indians

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Hennessy (screenplay), D. W. Griffith (director) Billy's Stratagem / 1912

 

This film, the final work I could find available in which Edna Foster played a young boy, we return to the character name of “Billy”; and Billy once again becomes an adventurous and witting young man who saves the day as he did in The Adventures of Bill, A Country Cupid, and A Terrible Discovery.

     This time, he’s the son of frontier settlers, once more nameless, played by Wilfred Lucas and Claire McDowell. Billy also has a younger sister played by Ynez Seabury, another wonderful child actor, important in this work seen mostly through the children’s eyes.

     Indeed, this film might have been one of Griffith’s most exiting movies of the early period did it not share the common racist views of indigenous people of the day. And even then, had its writer George Hennessy and Griffith concocted a myth of a serious Native American Indian tribe who in righteous opposition to the settlers, struck out to destroy them, Billy’s Stratagem might at least have a veneer of horror in the manner of John Ford’s powerful early scenes of The Searchers (1956). From the children’s point of view in this short film, in fact, the Indian attack is every bit as real as the deadly raid in Ford’s movie.

      The Native American Tribe near this family seem to be basically peaceful until after their exchange of a few pelts for brandy, when they become drunk, and go on a fraternity-like hoot. We don’t know what the intentions are of these Indians or whether they actually intend to harm the children they attack, but Griffith’s presentation of them as drunken wild men on the search apparently for more booze is truly disgusting to watch.

 

     The film begins with a seemingly normal frontier family, the two children playing games, although Billy seems to be armed with a real rifle, near their wooden cabin. The father, rather inexplicably has just traded white men some furs for two large kegs of gunpowder. Whether that suggests that he needs to use it for self-protection or simply for hunting is not established. In any event, the mother calls in the children and their grandfather for dinner and, after serving them, leaves the grandfather in charge as she takes up another dinner to deliver to her husband who is felling a tree in the nearby woods.

      The grandfather allows the children out of the compound as long as their stay nearby. Griffith’s busy camera, however, moves in the indigenous tribesmen, portrayed by regulars of the Biograph company (including J. Jiquel Lanoe, Christy Cabanne, Charles Hill Mailes, W. C. Robinson, and Alfred Paget), who are simply looking for their Saturday night fix. They quickly find it, get drunk, and run off to make trouble.

      When they first spot the children at play, they seem as shy and tentative as are Billy and his sister who suddenly stop their play and ponder their situation. Billy, clearly terrified, grabs up his sister and runs to the wooden fence fortress build around the cabin, awakening his grandfather who in the sudden terror of it all has what appears to be struck by a heart attack and dies.

      The fortress wall is not strong enough to hold the invaders, so the children have choice but to run indoors and pull down the large wooden lock. Billy probably further agitates the natives by shooting at them through a crack in walls, apparently killing or wounding one. Almost immediately the Indians, perhaps just for the challenge of it or angered by the boy’s violence, begin to attempt to break the door down, 

 

     Inside, the wide-eyed brother and sister contemplate their possibilities, retreating to yet another space. Spotting the kegs of gunpowder, but unable to move them by himself, Billy turns over one of them, and sprinkles a trail of wood shavings and paper to work as a wick, and lights it, as he and his sister escape out a back wall open space, evidently put there for just such a reason. As the children run off, the Indians break through the door, entering the cabin at the very moment that fire reaches the powder, blowing up their cabin and setting everything on fire.

      In cartoon-like representation, it appears that most of Indians survive the blast, running out the cabin and into the surrounding area just as the parents and other settlers, hearing the explosion rush back to check on their children. Obviously, the find the clever Billy and his sister safe; but clearly they will now have to rebuild their cabin and bury the granddad. And perhaps they will now face truly hostile battles with the local tribe.

     This film seems to be the last of the so-called “Billy” movies, although Foster appears again as a boy in D. W. Griffith’s The Misappropriated Turkey of 1913 as a “striker’s son” in danger of being blown up in another explosion, this one involved with in a turkey delivered to the wrong house. In the remainder of her films listed on Wikipedia, she plays girls or acts in very minor roles.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).