Frank Krom | Spelen of sterven (To Play or to Die) / 1990

play to die

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Krom and Anne van de Putte (screenplay, based on a story by Anna Blaman), Frank Krom (director) Spelen of sterven (To Play or to Die) / 1990

 

Dutch director Frank Krom’s To Play or to Die is the kind of hothouse psycho-drama that you simply couldn’t and wouldn’t want to make these days. As even its title suggests the gay hero has to die unless we wants to play being someone else than who he truly is. And the young brilliant high school student Kees (Geert Hunaerts) is certainly unable to be anything other than an immensely organized, well dressed, good looking young man who seems to be brilliant in every subject, yet maltreated by his teachers apparently almost as much as his fellow students of his all-male school.

     His teachers clearly witness the taunting of this boy, sometimes even seeming to encourage it as at moments when, if they truly looked out beyond the haze of their lessons or took a stroll down one of the aisles of the boy’s desk, they might notice if they could open their eyes even a little that it is not that Kees who has forgotten his homework or his needed texts, but that the boy sitting next him, the handsome athlete Charel (Tjebbo Gerritsma) has pulled them over in order to be able to copy word for word Kees’ perfect answers to the home assignments.

      Even if Kees dares to go the bathroom, Charel and his minions might lock him in, forcing to scream for help or struggle out one of the windows. Seemingly only the athletic teacher demands any punishment for what the others have done to the boy, but even here the Physical Education teacher doesn’t attempt to stop further retributions only to symbolically mock or demand a couple of more runs around the track. Having stripped off Kees’ underpants, leaving him naked, Charel is asked to put trousers on his head and sing silly Dutch folksongs, which so entertain the others that he comes off nearly as a hero.

      The saddest thing is that Kees permits Charel to steal his homework and doesn’t report him as one of the boys who locked him in the john. For Kees is desperately in love with his tyrant.

       Early on in the film, as his parents head out to a two-day wedding affair, Kees, who is to stay with his aunt, demands a key to the house, announcing that he intends to invite a friend over after school. Since the shy boy appears to have no friends at all, how can the parents deny him his request? And we suspect—having seen enough post 90s gay films that the tormentors of queers often get their comeuppance—that the boy is planning to invite the bully over to enact some clever sort of revenge.

       But as I said in the first paragraph, this is a 1990 film that simply, like it’s tortured hero, could not imagine such a  payoff. Suspiciously Charel agrees to the visit, while Kees stands at the head of the long stairway to his room dressed even more properly in a tweed jacket, before attempting to show him around the house.

       When Charel sees his study book all laid out, Kees simply invites him to copy out the work now so that won’t have to crib it in the classroom. While Charel writes out the assignment, Kees circles him as if looking for the right moment. But actually, we realize, he is simply studying him, trying to see his Adonis from every angle. At the very most, he is like a wild animal in heat, trying to discover the best way to ingratiate himself with his would-be lover.

 

      When they finally reach the room and we see the metal rings hanging from the ceiling upon which Kees has been hoisting himself like a gymnastics champion in the early frames of the film, we suspect that the boy may have planned some evil joke on the school athlete. After Kees takes to the rings and does a complete pull-over, an amazing feat for such a slim kid without a lot of muscle, Charel boasts that he could easily do that, and taking to the rings nearly falls.

       But, of course, of recognizing that in fact it takes a great deal of athletic ability to undertake gymnastic activities, he boasts that it’s just a sissy sport, the real sport being boxing. He beings a punching routine that forces his peer to finally engage, and this time with the fury that he’s been bottling up, pulling on Charel’s lovely mane of hair and nearly knocking the bigger boy to the floor. That is until Charel lashes out his slugs posted to Kees’ fine framed face, giving him not only a black eye but a bloody nose.

      He might have beaten him even further had he not suddenly come to his senses, shouting out that Kees even fights like as sissy and goes storming out of the room and…presumably out of the house.

 

     Why has Kees invited him to his house, we can only wonder? An ox can never perceive the beauty of youthful black-haired stallion. And Kees couldn’t truly be described as a stallion in his nascent athletic abilities. He’s just a beautiful thin-framed boy who has practiced gymnastics alone in his room until he has almost got it right. Did he hope that his personally developed prowess might impress his friend? Was he so desperate to reach out and touch the other boy that even a battle which ends in bloody wounds is sexually arousing, the way it might be for those who in engage in Sadomasochistic activities? It certainly is not surprising that after Charel leaves Kees sits down to the living room table and masturbates. Even the pummels from his beloved friend have excited him.

      But Kees is a brilliant young man, and immediately after he clearly realizes the perversity of it all. There is no way he can bully the handsome into a homoerotic situation that might fulfill his fantasies—even if he might recognize that Charel’s bullying of him possibly has its roots in the abuser’s guilt for his attraction. If Charel might have suspected the truth, he might not have stopped slugging his classmate and left immediately. But he too, unknowingly, is trapped in a relationship that he cannot accept or tolerate.

     It appears that the impossible situation with which Kees is left, a lonely life without any possibility of either relieving his sexual tensions or of stopping the endless abuse almost makes him lose his sense of reality as he begins to wonder, hearing someone playing soccer in the street—a sport which earlier Charel had mocked him for never playing. Is Charel still in the house or returned to the street to further mock him. Many an abused 16- or 17-year-old has felt so tortured by their high school lives that they have gone somewhat mad and committed suicide.

      When the phone rings, his mother reports that they are planning to stay on for a few more hours at the wedding party, Kees begging them to return home immediately, suggesting he is in danger. They promise to leave the party and come straight home.

      By this time, however, Kees is so terrorized by what he sees as the situation facing him—a world in which he cannot “play” like the others, and accordingly has no meaningful existence or sense of self—that he seems totally crazed.

      When a soccer ball comes crashing through the front window of his parent’s living room, he moves toward the stairs, apparently falling headfirst in the process—or perhaps intentionally leaping in his rush to escape from where he feels so trapped—landing face up dead. 

     As melodramatic and preposterous as Krom’s film is, To Play or to Die is one of the best short LGBTQ films of the 1990s, and certainly one of the most significant films of school bullying ever made. With its rich depth of color—reminding us at moments of Vermeer’s interiors—its stunning sense of composition, and its excellent, homoerotic-handsome actors engaging in the kind of game Harold Pinter served up in Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1961), this film does not pretend to be realistic, but takes us through a psycho-drama that speaks to the fears of all young men and women who feel the only alternatives they have is to  play a game they are incapable of playing or leave the very field upon which the game of their lives is being held. Fortunately, most youths on the outside looking in soon begin to realize that the game that is being played isn’t really on their field and truly isn’t worth playing.

     But then, one does still wonder. Perhaps Kees has played the game better that we have imagined, managing to make it appear as if he has been killed by Charel. There is the wound on his face, and Charel cannot deny having struck him several times. The evidence that Charel has been there will surely be supported by what they discover in his colleague’s own notebook, the lesson copied out precisely from Kees’ which still lies on the table. His parents have been told that he is inviting a boy from school to visit. He has hinted at his fears in their phone call. He has even told Charel of the diary he keeps, where surely he has registered the daily abuse Charel and others have spent on him, perhaps even outlined his intentions of inviting Charel for the afternoon. How can the police not find Charel to be guilty of the boy’s death, intentionally or not? Surely, that way the boy’s life will forever become intertwined with that of the young man he so desperately loved. Perhaps Kees has discovered a way to play by dying.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).