Chris Derek Van and David van Ehrlicher | Bookend / 2023

beauty, passion, lust, and bliss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Derek Van (screenplay) Chris Derek Van and David van Ehrlicher (directors) Bookend / 2023 [20.45 minutes]

 

    Bookend is a far tamer, morose, and reminiscent version of Van’s 2004 film Fear and Desire. This begins with a scene when the Chicago beach was a made nude beach in the 1970s, where the same figure, Giorgio, was evidently approached and aroused by a young teenage boy. Whether they had sex or not is never made clear. But the flirtatiousness of the boy in red (Chris Derek Van, whose head we see only for a second or two) dominates the early part of 20-minute movie.

      Most of this work takes place in 2023, however, until 1995 there was a nude beach in Chicago, at least for late night swimming at Oak Street Beach on Lake Michigan until police patrols closed it. Evidently, at least in the seemingly vintage photos of this film, it also featured some daylight nudity. Currently, the closest nude beach appears to be Mazo Beach in Wisconsin.

     Certainly by 2023, the time when Giorgio sits on the same beach fondly remembering his youthful experiences, it was no longer nude, although clearly still popular with as a gay gathering place.

     In any event Giorgio (the voice of David van Ehrlicher) remembers spotting the boy “whose legs were olive and glistening in sun.”

     The voyeur notices both the hesitation and the invitation in the boy’s stride as he walks away. “By the time he reached the water, I knew that he wanted me to join him.” Giorgio claims that the feelings of the entire crowd might be summarized in the following words: “Beauty, Passion, Lust, and Bliss.”

    Unfortunately, on the 2023 beach where we are now sitting, on which see strut by mostly overweight and beefy gay men, with an occasional younger gay couple hugging or even kissing, there is clearly very little “beauty, passion, lust, and bliss” left, particularly for long passages where Van repeats the haunting strains of Garfunkel and Simon’s 1966 hit, “Are You Going to Scarborough Fair?”

     This work is, after all a kind sentimental lament, a Kaddish or Memorial Prayer for a gay world now dead. Is the older man carefully maneuvering the beach with a pair of boots in hand now Giorgio, the possibly nude sunbather in the 1970s. 

    To Chopin’s "Nocturne No. 20 in C Sharp,” Giorgio laments that when he was young he took love for granted. Times have changed and these days the beaches are empty. “I lost him long ago. The color in my life has gone.” 

    So far, we don’t know whether or not Giorgio had an affair with the boy, who died early, or whether he means this, as one suspects, in a far more metaphoric sense, perhaps the he didn’t even follow the boy into the water but sat where he was in the sand, preferring to play the voyeur. To Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor,” the movie ends with a brief abstraction of footprints in the sand as the screen goes black.

      Giorgio ends his lament with a sad complaint that he is now forced to sit quietly in his old age, finding it hard to even see and harder to move. He knows that this will probably be the very last time that he visits the beach.

      But in the midst of saying his goodbyes to waves, the sun, the sky the sand and grass, to “passion, love, lust, and bliss,” he also says his goodbye to “My Theodore,” making it clear that he did, in fact, join the boy in the water and established a relationship back in those long-ago days.

      Most of this film, incidentally, was shot live in Lincoln Park on Lake Michigan, to my knowledge never a nude beach.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).