Douglas Messerli | Learning How To Speak About Love: A Trilogy by Søren Green [essay]

learning how to speak about love: a trilogy by søren green

by Douglas Messerli

 

What I have seen of the talented Danish film director Søren Green—I haven’t yet visited his recent 2024 feature, B.O.Y.—is concerned primarily with the early adolescent experiences regarding love, just prior usually to a full coming out.

     These films are filled with empty spaces as the young boys, in his most famed trilogy named Mathias and Frederik (the wonderful child actors Ulrik Windfeldt-Schmidt and Jacob Ottensten), don’t have the language of desire and sexual fulfillment that they are seeking. They talk mostly on the internet or cellphones in short phrases, querying one another and friends about emotions that they still can’t define. And that is their major problem: they haven’t yet had time to fully think out the gay sexuality to which their hormones are leading them.

      In some respects, Green’s works share a close kinship with fellow Danish director Lasse Nielsen. But then everything is different for the boys of Nielsen’s works of the 1970s, who grow up in at atmosphere of open hostility to the bourgeois worlds which they are attempting to escape. The boys of Nielsen’s works, beautifully long-haired and wildly open to same-sex relationships, perceive their adolescence as a liberating, hippie-like world of wine and roses, or even the kind of adolescent communities hinted at in William’s Golding’s earlier work, Lord of the Flies. Nielsen’s boys, even in his works of the Millenium, are much sexier and dangerous. Preteens crawl into the beds of teenagers, and they openly defy and attempt to escape the heteronormative worlds of their parent’s generation.

      Green’s boys struggle through a far more conservative era with the universal doubts of young boys coming out that, even with the greater acceptance of queer behavior in the general society, makes it all the harder to accept their sexual desires. In Green’s works there is a general confusion about how to feel, how to represent oneself in the society, and how simply to survive the years in which the boys find themselves. Although they openly gossip with their best female friends about gay sexuality, actually expressing that sexuality is often terrifying and frustrating, or at least something which still confuses them.

      Particularly in the trio of films made from 2014-2020, as well as his 2018 film October Boy, young teens such as Mathias and Frederik spend most of their time trying to gauge the feelings of one another and their reactions to their attenuated desires. No one is telling them that gay sex is wrong, they just sense that their actions go against the grain of the society in general and fear the consequences. Perhaps if they spent less time on line and spoke to one another in longer and full sentences, an older person like me can only imagine, they might resolve so much of the tension they feel.

      But Green’s children are basically loners who are unsure how to relate and mix into a society of language, art, literature, and cinema, etc. These boys come together as virgins, not just sexually but socially as well, and must make their way through a language in which they are not fluent in order to express their own emotions. The gentle touches of Mathias and Frederik in Green’s and his co-writer Tomas Lagermand Lundme’s boylove doesn’t always fully resolve these boys’ needs to speak up and out. They have no language of love, and even if they might perceive as do Nielsen’s characters that they “are not alone,” (the name of Nielsens’ most famous work is You Are Not Alone (1978)—they remain locked away in their computers and cellphones, uncertain how to openly speak to one another.

       Below I discuss the three films of Green’s trilogy, An Afternoon, An Evening, and A Night, which of course also call up the famed Richard Linklater trilogy: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013).*

 

*In making this comment, I almost howled with laughter having just seen Dutch director Dennis Alink’s Out, in which a young would-be filmmaker from the provinces is invited to attend an august film school in Amsterdam. His major cinematic influences are figures such as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini whereas all of his peers can only speak of Richard Linklater. He is dismissed from the school and he moves on to make his own movies, beginning in Berlin.

But ironically, of course, Linklater’s characters do nothing but speak to one another about love and everything else on their sometimes empty minds.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October 2024).