Mansur Rashid | Dopis (House Call) / 2017

doctor, heal thyself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Massari (screenplay), Mansur Rashid (director) Dopis (House Call) / 2017 [10 minutes]

   

If at first we can’t quite determine the genre of this very emotionally moving and personal film, it is perhaps because it crosses the boundaries with which with we’ve become comfortable. Is it a film about a teacher encountering a student (in this case of former student), a genre which I’ve just discussed in connection with Everlasting Love (2014)—a dangerous territory these days for a film

to undertake? Is it about a guilty lover/father for not being able to accept his sexuality until he has torn apart his own family, an increasingly common theme in LGBTQ films from 1990 forward? Or is it the tale of a man still unable to deal with his long-closeted reality, desperate to move into new territory but tortured by the reality of the world which he now wishes to embrace?

     Obviously, House Call is all of the above, the “doctor” in this case being an ex-student prostitute whose “house call” is to have sex with the man whom he soon realizes was his former music professor, disturbs the teacher as well as his student. Recognizing the impossibility of the situation with which he is immediately confronted, Artur (Patrik Plešinger) pays the young man, David (Michael Goldschmid, whose real character’s name, he reveals, is Honza Porokný) to leave, determining instead to take out his young son Ivan (Tomáš Hraba) the movie theater that night, as his ex-wife has suggested.

      Evidently, he has never before revealed the reason for their divorce, and now writes a long letter about his sexuality to his wife (Klára Cibulková), handing it to her as he takes the boy off to the movies.

 

     Talk about queer cinema! One might suggest that the results of this act will not be well received. Surely any but the wisest of ex-wives will suddenly fear for their own child spending the evening out with a man whom she has just discovered in a homosexual; and surely her anger for the fact that he has hidden his sexual desires from her for all of these years will be there when he delivers the child home later that evening.

       But this film, centered upon the gay man, does not even bother to consider these important complications. The emotional concerns of Rashid’s film is entirely centered upon the ex-husband, who with his epistolary action literally and literarily “comes out” years after he might and should have. We can only imagine that his action, as the film intimates, will allow him to go forward without having to hire a “house call” physician to resolve his sexual desires in the future. But we still wonder how quickly he can envelope himself into the new world which to which he has just committed himself. Clearly this short needed more room in which to breathe.

      Director Mansur K. Rashid lived for in Singapore, Malaysia before moving to Dubai, where he lived for 10 years. He later became a citizen of Atlanta, Georgia graduating eventually from Howard University in Washington, D.C., before working in Prague, Czechia, where this film Dopis (House Call) was made.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).