Christian Edvard Halberg and Helle Rossing | Poz / 2016

running in the director from which everyone else is rushing off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christian Edvard Halberg (screenplay), Christian Edvard Halberg and Helle Rossing (directors) Poz / 2016 [24 minutes]

 

We all heard stories about young men in the 1980s and 90s who had lost so very many friends to AIDS that they actually intentionally sought unprotected sex so that—either of the guilt for have remained uninfected and because of a delusional attempt to rejoin their friends in death. It is difficult to those outside the gay communities to comprehend just how many young men died within gay communities leaving the already socially tight-knit gay bar, bath, and bed shifting members who had survived with a sense of utter powerless and an inability to deal with their despair. It wasn’t just a matter of having lost a lover or a close friend, a close family member or a distant relative as those outside of the gay community may have experienced the epidemic; it involved the deaths of dozens of close young and beautiful friends and acquaintances all within a matter of a few years. Subsets of the gay community such as those in the New York theater and dance worlds, as well as many other arts, felt it even more intensely. The survivors were, to put it simply, a psychological mess. A couple of my friends of that period in time told me that they were attending a funeral nearly every week.

 

     Danish writer and directors Christian Edvard Halberg and Helle Rossing’s fascinating film from 2016, takes up those issues but presents in an oddly twisted version of the syndrome of the survivor. We are now in the early years of the 2lst century in which a regimen of pills—despite their high cost and their possible physical side-effects—saves lives and return many who had thought they would surely die to return to someone regular lives. We now know the causes of HIV infection and AIDS and can protect ourselves from infection. We know gay men were not the only or even major carriers of the disease. If there is still no cure, there is the hope and confidence that the worst is over.

      But the “twunk,” the young hunk at the center of this movie, seems lost in time, a sort of horrific AIDS traveler who is running in the direction from which the previous generations have rushed off, seeking out to become positive not because he has lost dozens of friends and that he feels, as many did in the 1980s and 90s that the disease was inevitable given their desires and activities, but for far more selfish and confusing reasons. He appears to not be seeking death, but the disease itself to excuse his own selfish behavior. Or does he have a death wish? The movie, fortunately, never fully answers these questions, but focuses on Oliver’s (Max Raundahl) strange journey into a disease no one today would logically seek to contract.

   The film begins with a clinic calling Oliver to tell him the results have been completed. Meanwhile, we see him photographing himself for a Grindr-like computer site, featuring his ass, obviously advertising that he enjoys getting fucked.

     At the clinic they tell him that he’s HIV negative, a happy report for most young men. But Oliver is incredulous, not being able to believe he’s negative and demanding they do another blood test, with the nurse Britt (Ina-Miriam Rosenbaum) insisting that it is a credible test and that she can assure him that he’s safe from the disease.

     Oliver is clearly not happy with the results.

     We also get early views of his very close relationship with his sister, Cilie (co-director Rossing) who lives also in his building and who, apparently, is offering him free rent and support since Oliver seems to be without a job. One early morning he visits his sister while she is still in bed, awakening her, having not previously answered a phone call, but now insisting that he is ready to make breakfast for her.

     Cilie insists that he go home, but he teases her awake, pulling off her coverlet and forcing her to run after him in the nude, revealing how the close the two really are, Oliver being able to turn her most sour mood into a sense of play and laughter. Almost like a child, he tells her “I couldn’t sleep.” And after much horsing around between the two, he asks a question that reveals a great deal about the young man, so dependent upon older sister, “Would you take care of me, if I got sick?”

     There are certainly many reasons that he might not be able to sleep. He has evidently joined an on-line club for HIV-positive individuals, who gather privately to party and enjoy sex. Oliver shows up at Henrik’s (Morten Christensen) door one evening during one of these events, Henrik, a slightly older man, intrigued by the cute young man, most certainly ready to take him to bed. Oliver, obviously, lies about having tested positive.

 

    They are a sexy duo, and their foreplay is hot. But when Henrik attempts to put on a condom, Oliver suggests they might have better sex without the condom. Henrik argues that he won’t have unsafe sex even if they are both HIV-positive, and Oliver, angry over the matter, stalks out.

     As an alternative, quick solution, Oliver seeks out totally unprotected sex in a public park, entirely missing his sister’s birthday party which he promised to attend.

    When Cilie accidently discovers a series of articles about being HIV-positive on her brother’s computer, she suddenly imagines the worse, that he has been diagnosed with AIDS. She attempts to confront him about her worries, trying to reassure him of her love and support.

      But in her very expression of perhaps what he was originally seeking, Oliver is totally offended, frustrated by the lack of reality behind the fabric of lies he has been attempting to make real, and completely rejects her sympathy—the very thing he may have originally been seeking.

      Again, he runs into the night, seeking out a random sex partner, whom he quickly finds, engaging in dangerous unprotected anal sex in the dark of night.

 

   I should pause here to explain that a great part of this film’s charm or semi-offensive soft porn subject matter, depending on one’s point of view, is devoted to Oliver’s sexual activity of being fucked, the camera moving in a soft out-of-focus blur, seemingly suggesting the experimental filmmaking of so many early independent films as well as later works with illicit sexual content. It’s beautifully sensual, but also frankly just this side of kitsch soft-porn movies which have left me cold. In this day and age, if you want to show two men fucking, particularly given the long open tradition of Danish gay filmmaking and photography, then show it, I’d argue, don’t dance around it with rhythmic swirls of color with a score of deep-breathing sighs.

      Yet, somehow this strangely retrograde sexploitation of events seems perfectly at home with the character’s ridiculous attempts to infect himself with an epidemic of a previous decade, as if he, having missed out in all the 1970s and early 1980s openly sexual “fun,” has been reduced to our own century’s rather puritan exploitation of the past.

       Finally, it becomes clear that this man is perhaps not simply seeking a disease his own generation fortunately hasn’t had to so utterly embrace, but the wild sense of total sexual freedom and ecstasy allowed that earlier tortured generation. There is a strange aspect of going back in time. If at first joining the HIV-positive men and women might be perceived as a device of survival for his own moment in life, it ultimately becomes a way of moving into the past when gay sexuality defined a life of a sexual revolution against the normality of delimited societal and governmental approved monogamous sex, a time not at all so devoid of the open sexual expression as we are unfortunately today, closeting it away in Grindr meet-ups and on-line porn films.

      Poz is both an irritating and yet somehow liberating movie, in which we can dismiss the character’s self-destructive desires at the very moment we recognize their essential validity.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).