Julian Dieterich | Hedon / 2019

long night’s journey into pleasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julian Dieterich (screenwriter and director) Hedon / 2019 [20 minutes]

 

For a student film, German director Julian Dieterich’s Hedon is a truly audacious work, going places that surely no young US student filmmaker might have imagined exploring.

    Fynn (Saladin Dellers) works at the local swimming pool as the kind a janitor who, except for his good looks, one might never notice. We see him in the early scenes of the movie wiping down the lockers late in the afternoon, presumably after everyone has left the pool, where an automatic pool cleaner is also moving back and forth under the waters.

     When he finishes work, he seems to be returning home to his apartment, a motel-like balconied structure, whose apartment doorways open onto the shared walkway. There, at the other end, he observes a young man, whose name we later discover is Tom (David Hugo Schmitz) arguing with his mother about his intent on going out for the night. He walks away from him and storms by Fynn, as the two have quickly make eye contact.

     Fynn now knocks on the door in front of which he stands, met by a long-haired tattooed figure, David (Tanju Bilir) who queries his intentions, but eventually lets him in. In that apartment Fynn engages in sex with David and other young man, an act that strangely appears to have been previously televised, the other boy seemingly watching the tape, as if playing an imaginary video with its images of their past sexual encounters.

     Has Fynn previously visited the same sexual den with which their sexual acts have been filmed? If so, it simply ads another level of excitement to their soon-to-be sexual engagement, as if they were, all three, narcissi looking at themselves in the mirror of their own past to further arouse themselves into an erotic present.

   The hot threesome ends with them in bed, the other boy and David passed out, as Fynn removes David’s arm stretched across his chest, dresses and drives off for yet another sexual adventure.

 

     Despite the raw sex Fynn has just experienced, he seems to be seeking some sort of sensualist experience he has not yet found. As he drives, almost drugged in his sexual frenzy, he almost hits a group of teenagers, braking just a few feet from where they stand in the middle of street. Angry about his almost hitting him, they shake his car and toss grenades of water and filth across it. Yet he notices, briefly, that the beautiful Tom is among them, smiling at the coincidence of meeting up again with the mysterious Fynn.

      This time, in what we now realize is a mad hedonistic search for pleasure, Fynn has met up with a handsome middle-aged man Gregor (Peter Kotthaus), whose central living room features a tank of Siamese Fighting Fish, which transfix Fynn before he settles into an equally violent biting and fucking frenzy with Gregor, after which the man himself suggests that Fynn immediately leave.

 

     As Fynn leaves Gregor to return to his car, he discovers Tom standing next to it in wait. Tom asks him, in one the few spoken lines of this film, “Are you always nearly running people over?” But even this line dialogue is a joke. As Fynn goes to get into his car, Tom joins him.

       Tom lays his head upon his lap, and finally turning over begins to engage in fellatio with Fynn, but quickly pulls away, clearly wanting more from him. The two move into a kissing clinch, but this time Fynn pulls away, exhausted, one might imagine, from his other encounters, but also in an attempt to release the younger boy from his unsatiated passions. He orders Tom out of the car, and Tom, after a long pause, finally does open the door and gets out. Tears fall from Fynn’s eyes, an expression of his own loss and suffering or perhaps for his inability to express anything else to the beautiful boy but through sex.

       Immediately, however, Tom pulls off his shirt, and gets into the back seat, Fynn soon joining him for a truly hot fuck which seems to end with both of them ejaculating.

     Just as suddenly, Fynn begins fucking the boy again, this with his hands in a strangulation hold, what is described as autoerotic asphyxiation, but coming so very close to actually chocking the boy as Fynn yet again ejaculates, that Tom can only grab at the door to open it in order to regain his breath. Sex and death have finally almost become one and the same in this sexual moment.

 

      The final scene is the automatic pool cleaner, Fynn obviously having stumbled back to work in the early morning light.

       One troubled commentator reprimanded the director for not explaining why Fynn has undertaken his night voyage to find what all the Mubi, IMDb, and other listings describe as a “long lost emotion.” To me that is not an issue. Fynn, at least for this endlessly long night, is a pure hedonist, desperately in the pursuit of self-indulgent pleasure, a world of the night that lies outside of his endlessly meaningless job and related life.

       My question is simply how? Even in my younger days, when I visited the bars nearly every night, engaging in sex sometimes twice a day, I never in one night ejaculated four times, which is what Fynn appears to accomplish. As realistically as this sensual fuck fest is portrayed, it seems more of a sexual fantasy than a real-life experience. It appears as if the janitor were attempting to even abandon his own body in his search of a satisfaction he can either never attain or maintain long enough for him to fully recognize it as pleasure. It is an act of dangerous self-destruction, putting himself and others in harm’s way for the purpose of simply feeling a sensation he’s never before experienced. And in this respect, Dieterich’s 20-minute fantasy is almost an abridged gay version of Nagisa Ōshima’s 1965 primarily heterosexual film, Pleasures of the Flesh.

     I truly wonder what the reaction was to this film by Dieterich’s teachers at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg in Potsdam. Did they see beyond its radical thematic just how beautiful of a work of art it was?

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).