Unknown filmmaker | How Long Can You Keep a Secret? / 2018 [commercial advertisement]

a scent

by Douglas Messerli

 

Director unknown How Long Can You Keep a Secret? / 2018 [2.12 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

Having featured in 2015 a series of ads titled “Love of All Kinds,” the Philippine clothing company Bench, which also had its own line of perfumes, released an ad in 2018 that featured a father, son, and the boy’s would-be high school popular "straight" boyfriend.

     The ad begins with the father dropping off his son at school, the cute boy immediately spraying himself profusely with Bench’s “So in Love” body perfume (an ungendered perfume). As JR parades down the school hallway with his female best friend and another outsider boy, the school hottie comes toward him, greeting him by name and saying “You smell good.”

     When the son returns home at the end of the day, even his father notes that he smells “Like you have a girl.” The closeted queer kid suggests it’s just some girls at school getting friendly.

     The next day the school jock goes even further, the two actually sharing a bench, JR telling him “You smell good,” the cutie responding, “You smell better.” That evening his father teases him, “So is she your girlfriend yet?”

   The next day as JR is checking a class list on the wall, the school hot boy joins him, even putting his hand on his shoulder. The father’s evening response: “Someone smells like a winner.”

      But when JR goes to spray on “So in Love” the next morning, he discovers that the bottle’s run out. This time as JR walks down the hall, the cute boy is waving not at home but at the girl next to him, who greats the school charmer with a hug, JR slinking past them with the feeling that the possible relationship between them is now over.

      That night home his dear dad immediately inquires, “Hey, what happened? No more? When are you going to tell me about it?”

      His son brushes him off, afraid to say anything about his brief school romance.

     In his room, however, the boy finds a fresh bottle of “So in Love,” along with note. “Son, I know your secret. Love you.”

      This is another commercial advertisement which I can’t imagine being aired in the US. Can you imagine an American father providing his son a sissy perfume whose fragrance turns on a straight jock?

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2024 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

 

Ira Sachs | Little Men / 2016

losing it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias (screenplay), Ira Sachs (director) Little Men / 2016

 

Through the past decade Ira Sachs has made a movie about every 2 years (with the exception of five years between Married Life and Keep the Lights On), each one better, or at least as good, as the one before it. Little Men seems to me to the apotheosis of his thematic concerns and his quiet, melodramatic style—and I mean that in the best sense of that word, in the way that one can describe the films of Douglas Sirk as melodramas, dramas of human feeling.

     The specific issue here, as many critics have noted, is loss, in particular urban loss. What is being lost in vibrant cities as they become overwhelmingly a space for the young, predominantly white rich, is the question behind his last two films, along with the social and personal losses that come along with those changes. Although Sachs has generally been focused on New York, this new film and his last, Love Is Strange, might easily have been filmed in San Francisco, Seattle, or even the more culturally diverse Los Angeles.

      Clearly Brian Jardine (Greg Kinnear) has had his share of losses: his father has just died as the movie opens, and as an actor with a once promising career has gone nowhere; he hardly makes enough money to pay the bills. Although he cannot quite bring himself to admit it, he is embarrassed by relying on his wife Kathy (Jennifer Ehle), a psychotherapist, for his small family’s survival. And he probably has visited his father so little during his life because of that very fact— we later discover that his father had refused to attend family events because they were paid for by Kathy, not his son. Sachs reveals all of this in a few seconds when, taking down the garbage after a low-keyed memorial gathering in their father’s Brooklyn brownstone, Brian breaks down into sobs. What’s more, he must face the fact that, as we see in his portrayal of Trigorin in Chekhov’s The Seagull in an off-off Broadway theater, that he is simply not a great actor.

     Kathy, as the breadwinner, has lost her youth, and is now losing customers. In short, the Jardines are in financial duress, and are delighted to leave Manhattan by moving into the dead father’s brownstone.

     The building also contains a rent-paying dress shop, run by a former Chilean seamstress, Leonor Calvelli (Paulina García). However, the rent she pays is incredibly low given the recent gentrification of the neighborhood. Brian’s father, knowing that her business brought in very little, kept the rent low, and sought out the strong-willed woman as a friend and confident. Leonor’s husband is seemingly on a permanent trip to Angola, where we never discover what he is doing—except as Leonor’s son Tony (Michael Barbieri) imaginatively speculates, he is on an endless safari. He too, has lost his father, which he admits at first hurt him, but the fact of which he has now assimilated.

     This tiny family of two suffers the loss of income which might help them to survive. And now that there is a new landlord, Leonor sniffs out the future like a lioness determined to protect the only things she has left in her life: her hard work and her love for her talented son.

     At the center of this tale, however, are the “little men,” the two boys, the Jardines’ son, Jake (Theo Taplitz)—an introverted, almost speechless young man who wants to be a visual artist—and Tony, a rather fearless boy who wishes to become an actor in the vein of Al Pacino or Robert De Niro. They are both 13, and they bond almost immediately upon encountering one another.

     Sachs is careful not to describe their relationship as having anything to do with sex or real love, but we only have to watch the soulful stares of Jake upon his new-found friend, or to see the boys racing through the Brooklyn streets together, Tony on a foot-scooter and Jake rollerblade skating slightly behind or aside him, to know that these kids share something special together. If they are opposites, together they reinforce one another as yin and yang. Both want to be able to attend the arts school Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School. And both immediately are beloved by each other’s parents allowing them to share meals and weekly sleepovers.

    If the fast-talking Tony (in one wonderful scene he even talks down his acting teacher in a theater exercise) also plays sports and is attracted to a girl, we know that the shy Jake is focused only on Tony and his own art. Sachs says nothing else about the sexual interests, but knowing boys at their age, it should come of no surprise, if they might also be exploring one another’s bodies. If nothing else, their friendship is, at this moment, at the center of their lives. And when a fellow school mate hints at Jake’s possible homosexuality (“he wears dresses at home,” taunts the boy), Tony slugs him, receiving a beating in return. These little men might have become friends for life—if it weren’t for the insensitivity and class differences of their parents.

     Prodded by both his wife and his obviously greedy sister (Talia Balsam) (“What am I getting out of this?” she laments), Brian determines to triple Leonor’s rent, a sum she simply cannot pay. She, in turn, battles him back, refusing to even read his new rental agreement and goading him with stories from his father’s mouth. She even advertises for new help. As film critic Sheila O’Malley writes: “She's terrifying. She's terrified. When she crushes her cigarette out on the sidewalk, you can picture Brian and Kathy's faces underneath her shoe. She is not a villain. She is fighting for her life.”

     When the little men awaken from their rapture to realize what is happening, they determine to enact a kind of passive aggression, both refusing to speak to their parents. But when it becomes clear that Leonor will be evicted, losing her only possibility of income, Jake breaks his silence beseeching his parents to change their tactics.

       It is too late, and regret is all any of these figures have left. In the last scene we see the painful isolation, once again, of Jake, now sporting a ponytail, on a visit to an art museum where he is sketching a painting, the traditional way in which artists hone their own craft. Across the way, he suddenly spots Tony with a group of other students viewing the art. For a moment he rises to get a better glimpse, but as Tony moves away with the others, Jake returns to his floor-bound location, focusing on the only thing he now has left, his art.

      The terrible feeling at the bottom of our stomachs as we leave the theater is that both boys may have lost, in the severing of their bond, almost everything except their personal imaginative desires. Will they, like Leonor and Brian, similarly be failures in their chosen endeavors? That, we can never know. We can only hope not. Or let me say, we can only believe that they may find the happiness that has so eluded the bigger men and women around them.

       The acting in this film is as excellent as the direction, and the music by Dickon Hinchliffe is a delightful counterpoint to the sadness of the film’s subject. This is a movie I might like to own to be able to see it again and again.

     

Los Angeles, October 4, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2016

 

 

 

 

Shirley Clarke | The Connection / 1961

waiting for the cowboy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Gelber (screenplay, based on his stage play), Shirley Clarke (director) The Connection / 1961, general release 1962

 

Yesterday afternoon I finally got an opportunity to watch Shirley Clarke’s 1961 film, The Connection. Milestone re-released this UCLA restoration back in 2012, but their price was somewhat prohibitive, and Netflix never picked it up for their library. I finally found it on Filmstruck.

       Based on the 1959 play by brilliant off-Broadway writer, Jack Gelber (see my piece in My Year 2003), Clarke’s film uses the characters who are supposedly filming  the men waiting in a run-down apartment for their next fix, creating a sense of watching a documentary about a documentary, particularly when the unseen cameraman (with the voice of Roscoe Lee Brown) refuses to turn off his camera while the director (William Redfield) coaxes the addicts to “just be themselves” and adjusts the various lights and microphones strategically positioned throughout the room.

       The apartment, belonging to Leach (Warren Finnerty), is filled with Ernie (Garry Goodrow), a former saxophonist who has sold his instrument to purchase drugs, Solly (Jerome Raphel), Harry (Henry Proach), and members of a jazz quartet, Freddie Redd, Jackie McLean, Michael Mattos, and Larry Ritchie, who perform throughout the long wait.

        The angriest of these is Ernie, who challenges and taunts the director, Dunn, and, along with others, insists that if he is going to watch them shoot up, then he also—pretend hipster that he is—should take a dose of heroin. And later, Dunn does just that, immediately growing sick even as he continues “capturing” the events.

       Perhaps the oddest of this group is Solly, who is highly educated, speaks two languages, we are told, and, apparently, since we see him leafing through the pages of a male magazine, is gay. Leach is described as a closet queer.

       Each of these figures gets a chance to talk, just as the jazz musicians all get an opportunity to show off their musical talents before Cowboy (Carl Lee) arrives, surprisingly along with an elderly woman called Sister Salvation, who might, we first might imagine, be hooked as well, but whom, we soon perceive, is completely unable to even grasp what is going on—which merely emphasizes the strangeness of a group of men all gathered together in a small room, pacing in anticipation. Dunn, evidently, has paid for this fix.

     The amazing thing about Gelber’s play and Clarke’s brilliant filming of it, is that none of these social outcasts is chastised or punished for their drug habit; even though Leach, who obviously has been on drugs for years, almost dies when he demands more heroin; Cowboy temporarily saves his life. But none of them truly regret their habit, nor are they expected to. The police never show up—although at one point, Redd plays a joke on his cast members by asking a real policeman to knock on the door of the set. Their only anger comes from having to suffer one another’s company and spend their day waiting, a bit like Beckett’s characters, for their version of Godot.

      It is hard to imagine in 1961 (and even earlier at The Living Theatre in 1959) that such a no-nonsense approach to drugs would be even possible. Clarke’s gritty film however was banned after just two performances, not because of its subject but by of the use (about 12 times) of the word “shit,” referencing the drug not its bodily meaning. Yet, of course, it is in the bathroom where each of them gets their shot by Cowboy, and their degradation in that act is apparent.

      Clarke appealed the court decision, and eventually won, but by that time the film has lost its underground appeal. And it was reviewed badly in The New York Times, despite having garnered acclaim in its original showing at Cannes. 

      Today, we might almost be witnessing an historical encounter that thousands of middle-class people now intact, in cars, shopping centers and restaurant bathrooms, and at home, apparently, every day. But in 1961 most Americans had never before even imagined such a scenario, let alone seen it played out in a film or on a stage.

      A strange note: in the original production, which included some audience involvement, actor Martin Sheen played “the man in the audience.”

      I’d love to have seen that play, and I wish I might have included it in Mac Wellman and my anthology, A New American Drama: 1960-1995; Mac had wanted to include The Connection, but I stubbornly held to our arbitrary 1960 date. Today I cannot imagine a better production than Clarke’s, whose black-and-white rendering parallels Sidney Lumet’s film of Long Day’s Journey into Night, an even earlier tale of drug addiction, of the very next year.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017).

Mel Brooks | Young Frankenstein / 1974

a roll in the hay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks (screenplay), Mel Brooks (director) Young Frankenstein / 1974

 

I seldom complain about writing a review after seeing a film. Writing gathers my thoughts and helps me to better evaluate the work I’ve just seen, generally allowing me to enjoy the film more than I might have without thinking about it so carefully. But no matter what I have to say about Mel Brooks’ and Gene Wilders’ comic spoof of the Frankenstein movies—scenes from Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, and Ghost of Frankenstein were all brought together in his and nostalgic satire—it’s already been said by the movie itself.

    The quick-witted parody toys with everything from slapstick and vaudeville quips to bawdy innuendos and a loving tribute to Whale’s and others’ directorial styles. Brooks even used Kenneth Strickfaden’s original laboratory props from Frankenstein and dressed the hilarious Madeline Kahn in the same kind of fright wig that Elsa Lanchester wore in Bride of Frankenstein.

       About the only thing one can “evaluate,” other than to say that overall the movie is great fun, is to talk about the cast; but then nearly all the work’s actors—Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein  (pronounced throughout the early part of the film as "Fronkensteen" in an attempt to dissociate himself from his lunatic father); Marty Feldman as Igor (pronounced “Eye-gor,” he claims, in reaction to Frederick’s pronunciation); Madeline Kahn as the well dressed and groomed Elizabeth; Cloris Leachman as pained Frau Blücher (whose very name alarms the horses; despite the rumor, the word does not mean “glue” in German); Teri Garr as Frederick’s pretty but empty-headed assistant, Inga; Kenneth Mars as Inspector Kemp; Gene Hackman as the blind hermit; and Peter Boyle as the dancing monster—are all so perfect in their roles that again there’s little to be said. Mars’ rendition of Inspector Kemp is a spot-on imitation of Lionel Atwill’s character, Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein. And Kahn’s Elizabeth, particularly in the early scenes, nicely parodies Basil Rathbone’s well-dressed wife, Elsa, in the same earlier movie. My only very slight complaint is that, at moments, Wilder seems to go a bit over the top in his displays of fear and hysteria.

       The puns and language gaffs are certainly corny, but they’re still funny, including Inga’s reaction to a howl: “Werewolf!” and Igor’s answers “There wolf; there castle”; the adolescent joke as Frederick reacts to the large door handles “What knockers,” and Inga’s answer, “Oh thank you doctor.”; Igor’s spotting to light switches, the first of which, when switched on, early electrocutes Frederick, who responds “Damn your eyes!” and to which the pop-eyed Igor responds “Too late.”

     The numerous sight gags are equally silly but hilarious: Frau Blücher’s insistence that Frederick and Inga stand close to her unlit candles because of treacherous staircase; the young girl whose attempt to play seesaw with monster hurls her into her own bed and into the safe arms of  relieved parents; the clumsy efforts of the blind hermit to serve soup, wine, and light up the monster’s cigar, after he pleads with the monster to stay, “I was going to make espresso”; and Elizabeth’s transformation, after six and seven “quickies” with the monster, into the “Bride”—all work every time I’ve seen this film, which is now dozens of times.

     The most brilliant scene, however, is closer to the late New York “performance” of King Kong and his capturer than to any event in the Frankenstein films. Like the public display of Kong, so does Frederick attempt to show off his “monster” by ridiculously dancing with him in a rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

       John Morris’ score not merely evokes Franz Waxman’s lush score in Bride of Frankenstein, but improves on it.  

      In the end all the slapstick and satire they demonstrate cannot hide the genuine love and caring that Brooks and Wilder show to the original movies and their importance to American filmmaking. If anything, the originals were far campier than are the puns and jokes of the 1974 reimagination.

       To say anything more would truly be, I realize, “Abby Normal.”

 

Los Angeles, Thanksgiving Day, 2016

(Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).

 

 

 

Alain Resnais | Hiroshima mon amour (二十四時間の情事) Nijūyojikan'nojōji / 1959

war and peace

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marguerite Duras (screenplay), Alain Resnais (director) Hiroshima mon amour (二十四時間の情事) Nijūyojikan'nojōji / 1959

 

What was to have been a documentary about the US bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, in the manner of Resnais’ previous work about the Holocaust, his 1955 film Night and Fog, became something quite different. The producers, Samy Halfon and Anatole Dauman had already raised the money, in conjunction with Japanese supporters, to present a tale of the suffering after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But after working with filmmaker Chris Marker, who quickly left the project, and contemplating how he might make a film about the subject, Resnais—at that point still a short feature documentarian—could simply not imagine how to contemplate the issues beyond the very excellent documentaries, many of them Japanese, that had already been done.

     He was ready to abandon the project, until the producers suggested that he link up with French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Françoise Sagan. When she also turned down the project, Resnais was prepared to abandon it. However, an editor and friend of his from Night and Fog, who knew Marguerite Duras, suggested he meet with her, and, after the coincidence of a long tea, the two plotted how they might turn the documentary into a fictional film that would speak far more deeply upon the subject.

      Indeed, the final film is presented as a kind of documentary embedded in a story about the filming of just such a documentary, nested, far more profoundly, within a love story between a former Japanese military officer (Eiji Okada)—whose family died in Hiroshima—who has fallen in love with a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva), come to the city to act in a documentary on “peace.”

     By embedding the absolutely painful photos and films of the nuclear destruction of the Japanese city within a larger story of woman who falls in love with a Japanese survivor—while she herself has previously survived being branded as a traitor in her home city of Nevers, France for having fallen in love with a German soldier during World War II—Resnais and Duras have created tale that tells us not just about the horror of the US bombing, but of the horrors of war itself, while presenting us in very specific terms the lasting scars war has on all of its survivors, let alone the people it has brutally destroyed.

   Resnais, in short, combined genres, film documentation and narrative story-telling, to create something that in 1959 no one might quite expect, using images of horror and lovemaking simultaneously to interlink death with love, terror with pleasure.

      Yet, this couple is already doomed, even before they meet. Both are happily married, despite their morally “dubious” pasts, and both have lived their lives through the only way they know how, by lying or simply not admitting to their own atrocities, which, after all, was based on their own needs for love or, as the Riva character admits, a “dime-store” notion of love. Isn’t heroic commitment to one’s country also a “dime-store” notion of patriotism?

       Suddenly, in the sequence of a single evening, and then a drunken traipse through the haunted city in a second, last evening, the two figures—discovering in each other a confidante to whom they can admit their errors—suffer a tortured love. Despite her early declarations that she, too, knew the horrors of Hiroshima, he mocks her: she knows nothing about Hiroshima, he declaring; “You are not endowed with memory.” But later he discovers, as she reveals her story—perhaps telling it again for the very first time, of her love for the young German soldier—that she has, in fact, suffered a fate not entirely different from those bombed by the Americans to end the War. And her empathy for the residents of his own city is not without some deep feeling. By the time they have completed their night and day confessionals, both realize that they share the same shell of emptiness that, despite their “happy” marriages (of which we get to know very little), they have suffered in order to hide the facts of their own lives.

      The Japanese man with whom the Riva character (“She” to his “He”) falls in love, is also a World War II “enemy,” just as was her German lover; and the fact that she has “slipped” again in enemy territory makes her a traitor once more; yet in that fact Resnais and Duras again reveal that love knows no boundary, and that the lines of war are opposed to those of the heart. This is, after all, a movie—as the nurse character Riva plays in her “mock” film—about peace.

       Most importantly Resnais reveals what might have been a slightly melodramatic story not with narrative pathos, but with disparate images, easily eliding the ancient city of Nevers (and even playing, without saying it, on the English-language reading of that city’s name) with the contemporary Hiroshima, which despite its horrors, has seemingly survived. Through a beautiful musical score by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, and departmentalized cinematography by Michio Takahashi (for the Japanese settings) and Sacha Vierny (for the French), the film is a truly interlinked production, which helps us to understand these two disparate beings as individuals caught, temporarily, under the same umbrella—despite the fact that they both are rained upon.

       Given the director’s own commitment to the remembrance (and ultimate forgetting) of the past, these characters also recognize in their love for one another that they themselves are, in their relationship, both remembering and trying to forget one another. Everything in this beautiful film is about dualities: “You’re destroying me,” muses “She,” before saying, “You’re good for me.” The “He” figure recognizes that he will “remember her as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness.” As if to seal their fates, they drop into a Hiroshima bar named Casablanca, calling up the famed Rick’s American Café of World War II Morocco, which ends in the lover flying away with another.

      Both know that their two-day fling can only result in opening old wounds that will further complicate their lives. But they cannot resist themselves, each exposing the other to the immense pains which they have had to suffer, and telling stories which will perhaps help to erase their pasts—or maybe even imbue their personal memories.

       I first saw this movie as a teenager, probably at the University of Wisconsin, but I am certain I could not possibly have comprehended it. I recall only the early images of the Hiroshima horrors. But it is the love story that truly matters, and, even more importantly, the characters’ own loves—man and country—that defines them, issues that we discover are of importance only with age. Or, perhaps, we realize they are not as important, as old people, as we once might have thought them to have been.

      That the great director Resnais was able to say all of this at age 37 is astounding. And seeing the movie, after all these years, again today, I was startled by the importance of this 1959 film, of which Eric Rohmer wrote:  "I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” 57 years later, I think we can safely say that, if it was not the most important, it was certainly one of the most significant films of its time, and one that has clearly held up as a masterwork over all these years.

 

Los Angeles, January 28, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).