Ohm Phanphiroj | The First Conversation Between Frank and I / 2018

engaging the “other”

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ohm Phanphiroj (director) The First Conversation Between Frank and I / 2018 [13 minutes]

 

Thailand director Ohm Phanphiroj is perhaps primarily known for his photography collections, most notably, his series Underage of young male prostitutes in Thailand, which features eerily street-lit photos of the boys along with biographical facts (including their ages), their reasons for working on the streets, the average number of customers they have per week, and their aspirations. It is a troubling and revelatory work.

     Ohm was educated mostly in the US at the Rochester Institute of Technology (where he received an MFA), Georgia State University (MA), and the University of Northern Iowa (MA). He received his BA degree from Thammasat University in Bangkok.

    He has also made several films. In the 2018 short The First Conversation Between Frank and I, he focuses his camera almost entirely upon the face of a young straight soldier, Frank Cashio, who after four months of online communication with Ohm went AWOL to visit the filmmaker in New York city, with aspirations of becoming a model and an actor.

     Caressing the face of the apparently nude soldier (his lower body hidden from the camera), Ohm asks questions about and challenges this soldier’s insistence upon his heterosexual identity, asking sometimes probing questions about why the young soldier might allow himself to spend the time with the gay artist, while nude and maintaining his heteronormative position. What does he like about women? What does he feel about Ohm’s intense petting of him? And why has he even bothered to visit the gay artist, spend a night with him, and be pestered with his intrusions if he is truly straight?

    Frank, throughout, although continuing to permit the homoerotic / sometimes even directly homosexual aggression of his interviewer, expresses his discomfort and as the film progresses increasingly maintains his insistence that he really likes women, their bodies, their smell, their vaginas, etc. Whether or not, given the irony of the situation, he is believable depends upon the viewer’s perception. 

        Yet there is an uncomfortable feeling about Ohm’s verbal and physical probing, making it difficult at times to separate the seemingly objective questioning and the sexual behavior of the interviewer, making it appear often as a metaphoric if not an actual rape in which the victim is not quite sure whether or not to proceed. Yet some sexual activity is being enacted, and the soldier never grows violent, but seems also to rather enjoy the “flirtations”—verbal and physical—of his interviewer. Indeed, I might have changed the word in the title from “conversation” to “flirtation.” And the issue in that context becomes whether or not Frank is willing to proceed in the situation in which he has seemingly given his permission or for which he has even expressed a desire or whether he will determine it’s time to end the “conversation/flirtation” and bolt.  

      Throughout we hear Ohm’s voice, without ever seeing his image. I think it’s important, particularly in this instance, to see the face of the hand that’s caressing this sexually confused soldier. I might add, since the title describes this as the “first” conversation between the two, there were presumably follow ups, whether or not they involved physical contact is unclear.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).