Dennis Alink | Out / 2024

the connection

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dennis Alink and Thomas van der Gronde (screenplay), Dennis Alink (director) Out / 2024

 

The word “out” doesn’t quite have the same meaning in the context in which Dutch Dennis Alink’s feature 2024 film places it as it does in the hundreds of “coming out” movies over the years. Both Tom (Bas Keizer) and Ajani (Jefferson Yaw Frempong-Manson) are sexually “out” in their small conservative Dutch village, although feeling the same isolation and repression of many closeted youths. Both have been long making home movies and wish to attend film school in Amsterdam, which would not only allow them to artistically express themselves but to escape into a world in which they might live more sexually in the open.

      As this feature begins, Ajani has been accepted and Tom awaits a letter, which when it finally arrives tells him that he too has been awarded the coveted entry to the film program, met with mutual joy. But if their new lives in the liberated world of the capitol city begins with pleasurable games such as “Never Have I Ever,” wild limo rides, and bathhouse visits, it quickly turns into a darker experience.

      Ajani almost immediately assimilates, joining in on the nights of drugs and increasingly dangerous visits to a world of wild gay nightclubs with classmates, while the wide-eyed Tom is determined to make it good. Yet none of his colleagues, as Tom explains to the school administrators who confront him about is unwillingness to work with others—so very necessary in filmmaking—even know about his cinematic mentors such as Ingmar Bergman. All they seem to talk about is the newest Richard Linklater movie, he complains. In short, Tom is seemingly engaged in what his peers perceive as a kind of time-warp, alienating him in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the small-town narrow-mindedness he has left behind.

      As his lover moves deeper and deeper into what we eventually perceive is a dark S&M world, Tom continues his positive and seemingly naïve behavior. While Ajani is invited to move into an apartment in the center of the city, Tom is left to the meaner outer quarters. And finally, his school advisors dismiss him as an outsider. “You are not connecting,” they insist, without questioning what or who they truly want him to connect to and with.

      Alink’s black-and-white film captures both the sensuous wonderment of Tom’s more archaic vision of filmmaking and Ajani’s movement into the darker aspects of Amsterdam gay life.

     During one long night, Tom attempts to become assimilated, joining up with Ajani on a voyage through various drugs—one of which almost kills him—and into the S&M world of the private club called “the Church,” a dingy and dark maze of thugs where is eventually he discovers himself in a sling being fucked by Ajani and numerous other men.

      Recovering, Tom recognizes that the world into which his former lover has moved is not one in which he might easily survive. Tom takes a quick side-trip to Berlin to actually shoot a film, while presumably Ajani moves even deeper into the wild scene in which he has embraced.

      Tom eventually gains some attention for the film that results from the German trip, where he has finally had to learn about how to work with a photographer. But at film’s end, he has returned to his former community, as Alink’s work morphs into a muted color film where Tom, now visited by Ajani and some of his friends, seems to have found fulfillment working on his films, while Ajani appears to still be searching for the career and vision he has never fully embraced.

      Alink doesn’t moralize, and doesn’t diminish the sexual freedom that Ajani has uncovered, but it is clear Tom has more fully come to terms with who he truly is and has embraced his own vision of the world, even if he might appear superficially far less adventuresome. Being fully “out” obviously means different things to those who come to terms with themselves.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).