Till Kleinert | Boys Village / 2011

kissed by a ghost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Till Kleinert (screenwriter and director) Boys Village / 2011 [22 minutes]

 

Till Kleinert is one of the most provocative the 21st Century filmmakers who embrace gay themes. His works, such as the brilliant Cowboy (2008), often involve horror and adventure genres, but they are much more poetic and suggestive than the standard works in these forms.

    Boys Village was a village-style holiday camp in West Aberthaw, in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. Opening in 1925, it catered to sons of coalminer’s families of South Wales, offering them a place to play and freedom from difficult homelives and pollution.

     Founded by David Davies, the philanthropist president of the Ocean Coal Company and his Welfare Officer Captain J. Glynn Jones, the village consisted of a dining hall, dormitories, a gym, swimming pool, workshops, and a church.

      During the war it used for military use, but returned to civilian use in 1946, and in 1962 was somewhat refurbished to include a youth hostel and facilities to teaching work-related skills. With the increasingly ability for coalminers for inexpensive trips abroad and the general decline in Welsh valley coalmining in general, it was finally closed in 1990 by the Boys’ Clubs of Wales which was responsible for running the camp.

      For a while after its closure it was used for a short while as a residential place for Bible studies, and then in 2000 it was sold to a new order who rented it out to a family who lived in the caretaker’s cottage, using the yards for farm storage.

      When they moved out, airsoft enthusiasts, people who use replica firearms that shoot non-metallic pellets to simulate military combats. But without any security, the site, as we witness in this film, became a place for metal theft, gang vandalism, and arson. In 2008, due to extensive fire damage the dormitories were demolished, and after, when the swimming pool roof collapsed, it too was removed.

     In June of 2011, the date of this film’s release, the area was cut off with gates and fences, along with boulders and rubble to deter vehicles from entering. According to a “Derelictmisc. Organization” report of 2012, rumors and myths still remain the nearby area about the village being haunted or plagued by a troubled past, which may, in fact, have been stimulated by Kleinert’s own film, shown on BBC in 2011.

     In short, it’s the perfect place for Kleinert to have filmed is semi-ghost story where a young boy of another decade, Kevin (Benjamin Thorne) seemingly has been left behind in the Village, if not quite literally, certainly spiritually and because a possible relationship with another childhood boy. What happened to the original Kevin we can’t know. He seems to still be waiting for his parents to return, all these years or even decades later, perhaps even from the 1930s, but possibly as late as the 1950s.

      Wandering the now derelict Village day after day, he rights the chairs and tables, prays at the old Church alter, and puts flowers in the doorstep of one of the burnt-out dormitories, recreating his childhood straw-and-fabric doll “friends,” endlessly waiting. Did this 12-year-old child’s mother and father never return for him? Did he die in the Village? Was he punished for young-boy love? Or was what he describes himself to be, “a beautiful boy,” an encouragement to be abused there by a teacher or priest? Did he perhaps lose his mental wellbeing rather than his physical life in the experience of living in the Boys Village?

      Kleinert is a far too clever director to definitively answer those questions. But perhaps is equally far too clever in imagining an encounter between the 12-year-old ghost and one of the teens who each day come to the place to spray-paint and further wreck havoc upon whatever is left, including the lost boy’s dolls, rock chimes, and tiny rock-memorials he daily creates. One of the teenagers, Alex (Andrew McQueen), vaguely notices the existence of the young boy, especially when the young ghost throws a few tiny rocks at him to simply get his attention. For Alex, unlike this thug-like beer drinking friends, is into drugs and has a beauty unlike any of his peers.

     When one night Alex sneaks back to the Village with his would-be girlfriend, Brenda (Hannah-Rose Jones), he hands her Kevin’s dolls claiming he has created them for her. She is not impressed, and certainly not at all interested in a date who dismisses her own fears and apparently is not ready to properly snuggle up to her with love and kisses.

     She leaves in a huff, and it appears that Alex has his own ghosts. Perhaps he also attended the Boys Village as a child. If nothing else he is probably a gay boy attempting to lay to rest his who fears. The ghost, necessarily, is attracted to him, particularly when, now alone, he attempts to masturbate.  

    The interruption leads him on a wild chase to find the “young perv” who he perceives has been watching him. And in a wonderful scene of magical drama, helped along by the film’s eerie score by Conrad Oleak, Alex goes on the chase.

      But we soon discover that he can’t truly even see the ghost by the light of his cell-phone, and only vaguely hears the murmurs of his voice. He too seems to be trying to trace remnants of a fraught gay childhood. And when Kevin finally bends over to kiss him on cheek, his world collapses as a brick wall knocks him to the floor, soon after killing him.

      His death perhaps releases the other boy’s own childhood memories, since his parents now come to pick him and take back into their own darker realities.

       But even here, Kleinert won’t entirely permit us to see his work simply as metaphor. The tractors to tear down the camp’s remnants appear, one of the workers discovering, in the realistic setting, the body of the beautiful high school vandal. Being gay seems always, in one way or another, to demand society’s vengeance. In fact, perhaps the newer generation offers even less permission and acceptance for queer transgression than those of the earlier decades. The brutally macho world in which Alex lives evidently offers even less protection than the heterosexually-dominated romantic one in which Kevin existed.

     

Los Angeles, October 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).