Mina Hoffman | Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Furtive Festivity / 2018

the case of the hidden key

by Douglas Messerli

 

Caroline Duessel (screenwriter, based on the characters by Arthur Conan Doyle), Mina Hoffman (director) Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Furtive Festivity / 2018 [12 minutes]

 

I am sure that nearly every LGBTQ individual, at one time or another, has pondered the sexual relationship of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and his dear friend Dr. John Watson. In this short film, writer Caroline Duessel and director Mina Hoffman have taken matters into their hands, and quite thoroughly make clear that the two men were Victorian lovers.

    Watson tells us that his favorite moments with Sherlock Holmes have not been the exciting adventures with the criminal world, but his own domestic times with Holmes that are far too private to write about. But on this day he is going celebrate a surprise birthday party for his dear friend, hoping that the master sleuth has “rubbed off on me in more ways than one,” as he attempts to conceal his party plans.

      But hardly can the couple enjoy their tea together snuggled up in bed than Mrs. Hudson (Hazel Leroy) calls out that they have a visitor, which leads Watson to suggest that they really must leave London for a while, just “too many interruptions.”

     The entire day, in fact, is filled with surprise visits. Their first guest, Inspector Lestrade (Bryan Gannon), hopes he hasn’t come at a bad moment. Lestrade begins to tell Holmes of another break in, but interrupts to wish Holmes a happy birthday, Watson quickly hurrying him out of the room before he can finish his words. Watson reminds him of the surprise birthday party, while Lestrade, who clearly know about their relationship suggests: “How about I let you and Holmes nick my handcuffs for the night?” Watson sends him on his way.

       Holmes wants to know why Watson sent him off.

     Soon after, while Watson checks on the invitations, Holmes sneaks up behind him to give him a good hug, his assistant quickly throwing a hat over what he has been spying on. Suddenly, without any warning, Mary Watson (Allison Beauregard), John’s former wife, shows up, quite shocking Mrs. Hudson, but apparently not Holmes or Watson himself. Holmes quickly sticks himself in the finger with a pin, suggesting he may have poisoned, which, of course, requires Watson to suck out the blood, at which he most sensually succeeds. Scolded by Mary, Holmes suddenly points to his neck, arguing the same thing has happened again, forcing his lover switch to suck, vampire like, on vein in his neck, sending the now exasperated Mary out of the house.

       The moment she’s left, however, Watson races after her to ask whether or not she’s still planning on attending their party. “I suppose so,” she answers as she makes her way down the street. Obviously, Mary’s visits are simply a small irritant joke she plays on the man she has lost to Sherlock.

       When Mrs. Hudson herself now appears with balloons and a birthday message, Watson rushes to pull it out of her hand, but Holmes now himself playing along, suggests it must be a message from his evil brother Moriarty, come back from the dead.

        As Mrs. Hudson attempts to refill the balloon with air, Holmes grabs it from her, screaming that the air of the balloon is surely poisoned, sending Mrs. Hudson to her room where the air will be pure and demanding Watson take the balloons off.

      While he’s out, suggests his friend, perhaps Holmes, who after all has already had a hard day, might partake of his secret vice, as Holmes nicely puts it, “celebratory cocaine.”

      But almost as soon, Sherlock discovers a suspicious package at the door, looking very much like a small birthday cake, convincing him that indeed Moriarty has returned. He also grabs up the package that Inspector Lestrade is carrying, having just returned to the house for the surprise party.

       Lestrade gathers all the packages up and moves on into Holmes drawing room where the clever sleuth fears that he might die.  Watson calms him down with a kiss proclaiming that he is perfectly happy to spend the rest of his life with Holmes hiding out from Moriarty in the little Sussex cottage that they keep talking about. Holmes, however, pulls the sliding door open to see what Watson has been hiding only to find Mrs. Hudson, Mary, and Lestrade all waiting with an announcement for which we’ve all been waiting.

 

      The cake, which Watson claims was meant to represent a microscope looks very much like balls and cock. When Mary digs in with a knife, both men lean over in mock pain.

        Lestrade quietly asks Holmes if Watson has in fact surprised him, the devilish smart Holmes suggesting that he knew Watson had sent the invitations out last week and has been making things purposely difficult for his lover all day.

      In a final birthday box which Watson presents him he finds a new deerstalker hat and under a key—which seems to be a true surprise for the detective—to the Sussex cottage about which they have so long spoken.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Luchino Visconti | Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) / 1960

love, death, and transfiguration

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi d’Maico, and Vasco Pratolini, with Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, and Enrico Medioli (writers), Luchino Visconti (director) Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) / 1960

 

In Luchino Visconti’s 1960 melodramatic film, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers)—a work I saw for the first time the other day—the first scene portrays the arrival of Rosaria Parondi and four of her sons from the south of Italy to Milan, where they suddenly intrude upon the celebration of Rosaria’s fifth son, Vincenzo, and his fiancée, Ginetta, at her family’s home. Despite Rosaria’s insistence throughout the film that she is concerned only for her boys, it is quite clear that she has no compunction for destroying Vincenzo’s marriage plans and in demanding that he become the sole supporter of her and his brothers.

     A fight inevitably breaks out between the more urbanized (and more cultured) Milanese family and the outsider Parondis, as Vincenzo’s relationship with Ginetta is permanently damaged and temporarily put on hold. It is only the first indication we have of how difficult any expression of love will become for all of the Parondi children as Vincenzo sneaks away to have sex with Ginetta in abandoned structures, Simone, the second eldest, falls in love with Nadia, a prostitute, and, later, Rocco—in love with the same woman—is forced to meet her nightly in an isolated, outdoor spot. Only the second youngest brother, Ciro, seems to have any healthy relationship with a woman, visiting her family. Love in this mean Milanese landscape is necessarily hidden and experienced on-the-run.

     As several critics have noted, the structure of the film, devoting sections to each of the Parondi sons—Vincenzo, Simone, Rocco, Ciro, and Luca—expresses each of their different ways of coming to terms with the foreign culture into which they have been thrust. But, in some cases, there is a great similarity between them: all but Rocco and his impressionable baby brother Luca want to be assimilated into the new culture. Vincenzo, who has preceded the others, has escaped what he has recognized was a world of closed and limited possibilities, eventually finding a job as a construction worker and, when Ginetta becomes pregnant, marrying her. So too does Ciro desire to find his place in the new society, taking a job at a local automobile factory. Simone (Renato Salvatori), who with Rocco is at the center of this film, has similar aspirations, only in his brutal and ignorant rendering of reality, he has no patience for ordinary work, striving—primarily upon the suggestion of Nadia—to become a successful and, more importantly, rich boxer; but even that seemingly quick path to the good life seems to involve too much time and effort, as he begins, first, to steal, then to gamble and, ultimately, to commit murder. Of these young men, only Rocco (a young and beautiful Alain Delon) has no desire to “fit in,” hoping instead to return to the South back to a rural life.

     Strangely enough, perhaps because of his near complete passivity—he is often told by women throughout the film to “wake up,” as if he is dreaming away the time he spends with them—Rocco is truly successful in this world, if only through a series of unfortunate events. Perhaps his early job at the laundry is the most pleasurable of his brother’s avocations—at least that is what Simone suggests. But when Simone engages in sex with the owner of the establishment and steals her brooch, which he gives Nadia, who returns it, Rocco is fired. Thus, begins a series of saintly gestures he endures for the sake of Simone and the others of his family.

     In the military, he sends nearly all his paycheck home—his mother having pled for him to do so, despite the jobs of her other sons. Having served out his duty, he reencounters Nadia, recently released from prison. Placid in demeanor and accepting of nearly anything in life, he alone refuses to judge Nadia, convincing her instead that she is still young and has great possibility, that she should embrace faith instead of the fear in which she has been living her life.

     Their relationship is one of near innocence, despite her past, as she seems to be transformed by Rocco and his belief in her. We have already seen, however, that in this bleak urban setting, love has little room to grow, particularly for a blinded cupid. Simone, whose boxing career has taken a downturn, has joined up with ruffian friends, who play Iago to Simone’s Othello, egging him on to do something about Rocco’s and Nadia’s illicit meetings. In one of the most brutal battles between brothers ever staged, Simone intrudes upon that couple’s lovemaking, beating Rocco and raping Nadia in front of him to deter any further fraternal engagement with what he evidently perceives as his whore.

     Once again, Rocco, despite a developing hate for his brother—a hate he ultimately displaces by agreeing to enter the boxing ring—forgives Simone, convinced that his brother desperately needs Nadia to help him better his life. His abandonment of her has fatal consequences, she returning to alcohol and prostitution, Simone to his brutal pattern of abuse and petty thievery.

     The tender-hearted Rocco, who had previously refused to fight, now achieves the success as a boxer that his brother had failed to, which merely increases Simone’s jealousy of Rocco and of all his siblings. Simone’s desperation leads him also to male prostitution, as he agrees to accept the sexual attentions of the boxing impresario Cecchi, ultimately stealing money even from him.

     As Cecchi threatens legal action, Rocco once more gives up any normal future by indenturing himself, against the protestations of his two other brothers, to a boxing career for at least ten more years. In a sense, Rocco, in his selflessness, prostitutes himself at a level even greater than Simone and Nadia.

     Another winning bout transforms him into a local hero, which the family celebrates—reminding us of that first scene. In a sense, he is now wed, like Vincenzo—to a violent career, however, instead of to a beautiful woman. While the family toasts one another and their neighbors, Simone has discovered the whereabouts of Nadia, seeking her out with the hope that she may return to him. But she, having fallen to the lowest levels of existence and facing, she believes, reimprisonment, reiterates what Rocco has previously called Simone: a “disgusting” beast. Simone is completely undone, stabbing his lover over and over as she pleads for her life.

     His return home during his family’s celebrations, his clothes smeared with her blood, is one of the most poignant and horrific moments of filmmaking, shifting what has been high melodrama

into tragedy. As Simone admits to Nadia’s murder, Rocco, lying on the bed as he holds him, howls in pain, suggesting an almost sexual dance of death derived from a near-incestual love that embraces all the sorrow and anger that the family has endured. While Rocco wants only to attempt to hide his brother, covering up the family shame, Ciro, realizing his civic responsibility, rushes off, Rocco and Luca trying to stop him, to report the murder to the police.

     Some critics have maintained that Visconti allowed, in these last scenes, for his film to be pulled in two directions: while obviously arguing for the rational assimilation of these figures into the society in which they now live, in his sensitive portrayal of Rocco he presents a seemingly conflicted representation of a nostalgic love for an impossible past. Yet Ciro’s last conversation with his younger brother, Luca, I would argue, makes it clear that if this family is to have any future, it must embrace the new world, rejecting the familial and sexual gender-based priorities of the South. Luca’s insistence that his brother return home represents a spiritual awakening in this family, a simultaneous acceptance of both Rocco’s spiritually inspired nostalgia* and Ciro’s more socially oriented pragmatism.

 

*It is interesting to note that Rocco tells Nadia of his plans to abandon her for his brother’s sake, a nearly saintly act, upon the parapets of the Duomo di Milano, that city’s major cathedral.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2002

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2008).

 

Max Emerson | Hooked / 2017

impulsive jack

by Douglas Messerli

 

Max Emerson (screenwriter and director) Hooked / 2017

 

There’s something so important about the themes writer/director Max Emerson explores in his 2017 TV film Hooked, and its central characters, Jack (Conor Donnally) and Tom (Sean Ormond) are so likeable that despite the film’s many flaws I found it totally watchable, even if it finally becomes painful to view a character like Jack who is so self-destructive.

  

   Jack is a prostitute, but unlike those portrayed in so many films, does not deny his gay sexuality and is happily ensconced in a solid relationship with Tom, a younger youth who aspires to be a photographer and who is attempting to escape his father who threatens, when he finds him, to lock him up until he’s of age or, even worse, to ship him off to a conversion camp. Jack, far brighter than his behavior suggests, apparently suffers some form of “attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD), and is severely maltreated by most of clients. Yet for all that he seems absolutely happy in his role of Tom’s lover/protector, their only source of income. Together they share a bed in a Manhattan youth hostel in a room with a supposedly straight boy, Matt (Jared Sandler) while trying to save enough money to live a better life together.

      Tom seems to be the far more stable individual, who attempts to control the wilder impulses of his friend; but he after all just a kid, and it’s difficult to contain his good-natured lover who insists they make raids on unsuspecting straights with tubes of mustard and catsup, spraying their spiffy business clothes with the condiments.

       Although some of Jack’s clients move close to violence and one horrific female forces him into a play role as a baby who sucks her sagging tits, the real other dangers such as infection of HIV-AIDS or the problems most young male prostitutes have with their pimps are basically glossed over. Tom demands Jack wear a condom. And Jack seems quite able to find his own clients through his cellphone and ads on Craigslist.

       Indeed, this film, if it continued in the manner in which it begins, might almost have been a comedy; but we know there’s far too much that’s being withheld or that Emerson just doesn’t know how to fully develop the cute caricatures he’s created.

       One of the major questions that is never answered is how did this odd couple first hook up, and what keeps them together other than the frailties of their situation. Spencer Cole, writing in Film Inquiry brings up these very questions:

 

“Emerson doesn’t provide us with much in the way of context regarding Jack and Tom’s relationship—instead, we are left with the task of making sense of their past. We know that both come from broken homes, but how did they meet? How long have they been together? They speak vaguely of the future, but what exactly are they looking for?

     It’s not necessarily the filmmaker’s responsibility to spell all of this information out for the audience. That said, the two characters are like puzzle pieces that do not fully come together. And because of this, there is little to grasp onto in the story. We are given very limited time to feel a connection to these characters….”

 

      A fuller knowledge of the central characters matters because almost as soon as we meet Jack and Tom, we’re also introduced to an older man, Ken (Terrance Murphy) who represents an even more complex stereotype. The wealthy Ken, who we first encounter on a high-end shopping spree, seems to have made all the right decisions in his life, particularly when it comes to his career, his marriage, and his beautiful son. Except that he forgot to take into account his latent homosexual urges and is now trapped in the world which he created perhaps to escape those very desires. Trying desperately to control himself for so very long, he is now at that age when he can no longer resist the beautiful youths around him, and when he spots the impulsive Jack—and is bathed in mustard for even noticing him—he can no longer resist the pull. Meeting up with the prostitute in a pricey restaurant ready to throw the boy out the moment he enters, Ken attempts to explain to him his situation. But even here Jack cannot resist mocking both the waiter and customers, which perhaps is what makes him even more desirable to Ken.

      Jack agrees to travel to Miami for a week with Ken, but is wary of Ken’s seemingly almost selfless motives. And Ken lies about his relationship, making it seem that he has long ago divorced, a fact that later makes Jack feel betrayed despite Ken’s generosity. Ken not only takes the virtually homeless Jack on a shopping trip for new clothes, puts him up in his expensive Miami condominium, and suggests he will not require sex from the young hunk. Ken, in fact, is impossible for even the film’s viewer to believe, to say nothing the doubts it rises in his own wife’s mind and even Jack’s, who also refuses to take any money for his “services,” while providing the desperately trapped married man a few smooches and a bedroom interlude for free.

      Unable to contain himself for his amazing luck, Jack further complicates things but secretly inviting Tom to Miami, presumably to demand that Ken put up his own lover. Both man and boy, however, haven’t though out their vacation escape very carefully.

      But then, once again Emerson has not so very carefully thought out his story. As Gary Goldstein comments in his review in the Los Angeles Times—much in the manner of Cole’s questions I quoted above:

 

“What exactly Jack expects from Ken is a bit fuzzy. Less clear is why the confused, self-hating Ken (he wishes a pill could remove his “urges”) takes the bratty and volatile Jack under his wing so quickly, wholly and expensively.”

 

       Ken’s wife, Jess (Katie McClellan) quickly discovers that her husband has traveled to their Florida home not just for business but that there is a boy involved, and much like the wronged wife of Arthur Hiller’s 1982 film Making Love is utterly devastated by the fact that her husband has virtually abandoned his family, determining to meet up her competition and her husband head-on.

       When Jack discovers the truth of the situation, that he not truly someone special in Ken’s life but is merely a route of escape for a married, middle-aged man, he stupidly takes off, refusing the money Ken offers once again, while stealing his would-be client’s gun. Although he permits Ken to put him up at a hotel, Jack is still faced with the fact that he doesn’t even have money to eat, let alone take in any the joys of the magical city he’s witnessed from Ken’s high rise. 

 

    It doesn’t take much time for a greedy pimp to bring him into his control by first offering him a job to masturbate on film and then assigning Jack a man so notorious that even his other “boys”

won’t go near him. Jack takes him on simply because of the possible $600 that he may be paid; besides, having “fucked up” yet again, he’s now nearly suicidal, at one point taking up Ken’s gun and momentarily directing it to his face.

       By this time, moreover, Ken has been served divorce papers by his wife, and may even be denied permission to regularly see his own son. What’s more Tom, after having been nearly raped by his roommate, is now on a plane to Miami, which again inexplicably, Ken has agreed to meet.

      Jack’s encounter is with a truly violent man who loves to beat-up his tricks. And when Jack reacts and even threatens him with a gun, he goes truly mad and begins to beat the boy to a pulp which will surely end soon in his death.

      Somehow on the plane Tom has been contacted by Jack signaling him of his desperate situation and demands Ken take him immediately to the hotel room in which Jack is being beaten. He arrives with the punk bent over his lover, and grabbing the gun up from the floor where Jack has previously dropped it, shoots the brute dead, ironically saving the boy who believed Tom needed his protection.

      Ken, perhaps just by instinct, tries to imagine a way to cover up the situation. But Jack refuses, demanding Tom and Ken leave as he himself calls downstairs for the police.

      A letter from Jack tells Tom that the police knew all too well the rap-sheet of the murderer and have even high-fived him for having ended the monster’s life. He imagines that he won’t have to spend too much prison time. But then Jack is not known for his level-headed thinking.

      What becomes of Tom or even Ken, if we still care enough to wonder about the latter, Emerson fails to explain. Too bad, because this freshman writer and director (a former model and social media star) has brought up two or even three important issues that truly need further exploration: gay homelessness, prostitution, and the almost always sad late coming out of an older gay man—all problems that no matter how vast LGBTQ+ acceptance grows, still plague the queer community.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).