Alex Mello | Außerhalb des Aquariums (Outside the Aquarium) / 2021

 the definition of prejudice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alex Mello and Fabio Brandi Torres (screenplay), Alex Mello (director) Außerhalb des Aquariums (Outside the Aquarium) / 2021 [25 minutes]

 

The aquarium, in the case, is the encased and separated world in which Jonas (writer and director Mello) is forced to perform in the German society which he has totally embraced and whose language he speaks fluently. Jonas, a seemingly assimilated German artist just happens also to be a black from Brazil who is beloved by his gay agent and by others in a society in which, nonetheless, he is fetishized by those around him as a black man with supposed sexual powers that have absolutely nothing to do with who he truly is.

    Working on a new exhibit of paintings he recalls how he was taken to a bar by his agent Felix (Johannes Langolf), kissed with Felix’s blue-painted lips and left behind. He goes home with the bartender, Felix (Johannes Langolf), who admits it’s his first time—with a black man that is—with whom he’s rather excited about the possibility of a fuck, particularly with the large imagined penis he stereotypically expects.

 

      Having carefully clean himself, he explains, he pulls down his pants and puts his ass out to be fucked as if somehow expecting an exotic experience created the by German white imagination.

     Jonas, disgusted by the situation, quickly puts on his coat and attempts to leave, but finds himself locked in and is told that if he insists on leaving or calling the police, as he threatens, that he’ll be arrested by the police for having stolen Felix’s wallet. What choice does a black outsider have in such a situation? And his anger is more than justifiable. The Germans around him see him, obviously, as some sort of special specimen, definitely not one of "them."

     Fortunately, we perceive that since this terrifying memory, he has met his new neighbor, Lukas (Julius Dombrink), another black man who himself feels in his adopted culture the same tensions. And the two have developed a loving relationship. The two, celebrating an anniversary, are now in a loving relationship, which Lukas wants to take to a new level by adopting a child, something Jonas is not at all certain he is ready to do.

     But in his newest painting, there appears a new figure between the images of the two of men, suggesting that he’s reading to move out of the “Aquarium,” the title of his new art exhibit.

      This film is quite fascinating and is an important statement of societal prejudice. My only wish is that the art it portrays was more significant than the cartoonish-like figures it portrays of Jonas’ artistic contributions.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).