perverse nonsense
by Douglas Messerli
Dennis Hensley (screenplay, based on
the novel by James Robert Baker), David Moreton (director) Testosterone / 2003
I rather liked David Moreton’s first
film, Edge of Seventeen, a work about
a young high school teen coming to terms with his gay sexuality at a difficult
time for anyone, made even more problematic when you have hardly any control
over your private life.
On the basis of that movie, I determined to see Moreton’s more recent
works, and ordered up his 2013 film, Testosterone
from Netflix. I’m sorry to report that it was a big mistake.
I suppose the first few moments of the film, particularly given Marco
D’Ambrosio’s charming, tango-inspired score—which continues to enchant
throughout the film—and the cartoon drawings that provide us with the main
character’s back story might be described as rather engaging. It might have
worked better to actually get to know the flesh-and-blood characters before the
work teetered off into a Grand Guignol comedy, but since the central character,
Dean Seagrave (David Sutcliffe) is a successful graphic book artist, author of I was a Teenage Speed Freak, at least
the credits made sense.
That fact, however, might have alerted me that this 30-some year old,
living in Los Angeles, was not exactly the brightest bulb in the universe. To
give him credit, he does very much love his gay lover, Pablo Alesandro (Antonio
Sabato, Jr.), and evidently has been in a monogamous relationship since the two
met. Indeed, we quickly discover Dean is obsessed with Pablo, although we never
do perceive what this intense love is really about—which is made even more mysterious
by the fact that Sabato’s face is hardly ever again flashed across the screen;
perhaps Moreton chose that option over letting the heavily-accented former
model try to act.
Besides, already by the first scene of the film, we discover that Dean’s
passionate and devoted companion has simply walked away from their
relationship, disappearing on his way to
Before you can even say “gorgon,” the creature which the beautiful
Pablo’s mean-spirited mother most represents, Dean has man-handled her and
offended the gallery’s art-dealer to whom his agent has long been attempting to
introduce to her client. Already I suspected something about Dean and this film
as amiss.
And before you could say “What’s wrong with this picture?” you discover
that the evidently rich-boy Angelino has hopped on a plane for Argentina and is
knocking on the wealthy Alesandro’s door, only to be once again brushed like a
flea by the monstrous momma, as he almost gets arrested by the police.
Seemingly by coincidence, Dean eventually meets up with a local coffee bar owner next to the Alesandro’s digs. The young beauty, Sofia (Celina Font) at first sends him away, but soon sends out clues in English that she not only knows the language but knows the true whereabouts of the elusive Pablo. Again by coincidence, so it appears, Dean also encounters Pablo’s former lover, Marcos (Leonardo Brzezicki), who also tries to bed Dean, with no success, but does manage to fuck the bellboy.
Turns out Marcos is Sofia’s brother and that he has apparently been sent
to kill Dean. O my, I suppose we’re expected to respond; perhaps this is a kind
of noir mystery, particularly after Sofia promises to take Dean to Pablo’s
country home, but drops him off at her own small villa for a nightly stay-over
instead. By the next morning, demanding to be taken to Pablo’s home, he
discovers it’s all been a ruse, that Pablo is still back in town. When finally,
Marcos does lure the reluctant lover into his bed, the morning after firing his
gun into his own head instead of the intended victim, we no longer care.
Dean is no Bogart or even Mitchum, and by the time he determines, after another attempted break-in to the Alessandro mansion, “to do something about it,” we don’t give a hoot that this obsessed narcissist gay boy now plans to take a machete to his callous rich-boy lover’s head and plant it into a cooler he has also just purchased.
Again through a promise from Sofia, Dean plans to meet Pablo for lunch,
but that lunch turns out to be an after-wedding party celebrating the marriage
of Pablo to Sophia. Already at the party, the apparently always randy Pablo has
moved off to another room to screw a male guest. And Dean follows, drawing his
large machete out of thin air, which hovers, in the penultimate scene of this
confused dark comedy film, over his former lover to either sever his one-time
lover’s head or, if we wish to imagine a less violent scene, to detach his
penis.
The last scene shows Dean in a taxi, back in Los Angeles, the cooler
stowed intimately beside him, a bit like the last scene of the Coens’ Barton Fink. As in that movie, it is a
cheap trick, clearly a Pandora’s box with nothing inside. In real life, had
Dean accomplished such an act, given the immediacy of the police and goons who
protect the Alessandro family, he would be in an Argentine prison. And, of
course, had he anything in that cooler he’d have certainly been caught at the
customs line. Yet, evidently, Dean has now found the “closure” he desperately
sought, and maybe even a new subject for his next graphic novel. Quite frankly,
apparently like the director and his writer, the audience no longer cares.
Los Angeles, April 28, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2017).
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