autumn rituals
by Douglas Messerli
Till Kleinert (screenwriter and director) Cowboy
/ 2008 [35 minutes]
If I had to choose one of the films in this
longer essay as representing the most outstanding aspects of LGBTQ filmmaking,
it would be German director Till Kleinert’s chilling horror and love film, Cowboy
(2008). In this work the writer/director combines the terrifying wit of someone
like US writer Shirley Jackson with the fabulist surrealness of writers such as
the Algerian-French poet, storyteller, and novelist Mohammed Dib and the
US-Moroccan author Paul Bowles before him.
The plot begins with a rather typical outsider blundering into forbidden
territory that might be almost humorous until it no longer is possible to even
crack a smile. A German real estate agent Christian (Oliver Scherz), on the
prowl for new land and properties is visiting a backroad farmland with field
after field gone empty of crops and a large, sprawling farm compound that is so
derelict that to sell it the buildings might have to be torn down. He drives in
his expensive borrowed car down the dirt roads and up into the property itself
without encountering a soul. Exiting the car, he gently wipes away the dust.
The quietude of the place itself is somewhat unsettling, and there are a few
unpleasant visions for a city man, a rabbit caught within the claws of a large
metal trap, bits of old farm machinery rusting in the overgrown grass. Christian
takes photos of the outbuildings and major farmhouse as any realtor might,
walking down another lane where suddenly he hears the sound of hammering.
Glimmering in sunlight suddenly stands a huge early 20th-century combine
atop of which works a shirtless young man, probably in his late teens, whose
pants are nearly falling from his thin frame. Blond haired he shimmers in the
sun like a god, the camera, even if we can’t be sure of the eyes of our
bespectacled intruder, focusing in on the beauty.
The
seemingly taciturn boy, which the film somewhat inexplicably has named “Cowboy”
(Pit Bukowski) responds very slowly to his questions about who owns the
property and whether or not they might be interested in selling the land and
buildings; but it’s apparent that, as the young man assures him, they’re all
away and they probably wouldn’t be interested in any event.
When Christian finally gets him to come a bit closer he gets little more
information, accept the permission to explore the place. He wanders a bit
inside a darkened room before almost reflexively aiming his camera out a window
to take a picture of the young Adonis, who noticing the glint of the camera in
the sun poses for the shot.
The
boy soon calls him out to help him lift down and move a large machine part,
which, after removing his suit coat, Christian accomplishes but not without a
bit of heavy breathing. The young mechanic replaces it with a harrower, starts
the engine up and moves the mammoth machine slowly forward while Christian sits
in his car, the door open, smoking a cigarette while watching with pleasure the
success of the boy’s work.
Eventually, Cowboy joins him, asking if he has a have a cig and then, as
he leans his sweaty torso toward him, if he might have a light. Without warning,
the boy asks if Christian has a girl, a question that the realtor openly
rebuffs, to which the boy affably admits that he fucked every girl in town.
Christian opens his billfold and hands him a photograph from within of his own
girlfriend, to which the boy nods in proper deference. So presumably these men
have both now established their heterosexuality.
But a moment later, Cowboy signals his desire to join him in the car to
listen to the radio, the realtor realizing just how isolated and out of touch
this kid is. Where, we pause to imagine, is the “nearest town?”
As
Christian steps out of the car for a moment, the boy suddenly slides into the
driver’s seat and speeds off with the car, the businessman cursing his
stupidity, now forced to sit it out in the middle of nowhere to see if the car
might ever be returned to him.
Eventually Cowboy drives back into the pullup, congratulating Christian
on the machine; but almost as quickly the realtor pulls the boy out of the
front seat jumps in and drives off. A bit later on the road he telephones his
girlfriend explaining that he has been delayed but will probably be back soon.
His girlfriend (performed by the voice of Isabelle Höpfner) senses something is
amiss and asks him about it. But Christian cannot quite explain, expressing
that he has never experienced anything quite like this, and we perceive that he
is a bit terrified of its consequences.
We
don’t hear the end of his muddled conversation, but we see that in the
dark he has returned to the lonely farm, and is soon knocking at the door,
Cowboy arriving to let him in as he demands the picture of his girlfriend back.
It is quite clearly a rouse, and Cowboy recognizes it as being just that,
suggesting he can’t remember where he put it while, at almost the very same
moment, pulling it out of a drawer and playing a game of cat and mouse with it
as Christian chases him around the room,
up and down chairs and tables—that is until Christian suddenly grabs the boy
pulls him toward him and kisses him, Cowboy soon following, while both strip
off their clothing, the boy laying down upon a bed on his back and lifting his
legs and positioning his ass into position as Christian seriously fucks him.
Unlike so very many 21st century LGBTQ sex scenes, this one if absolutely
honest and sexy, without even an erect penis in sight.
It is as if these two have been waiting all
their lives to violently crash into each other’s bodies, gay men without ever
having imagined such desire. Rain pours from the skies, on cue, outside the
rude room in which now Cowboy brings Christian a plate of plain home cooked
meat and potatoes, probably rabbit—“women cook for me, I be the father of their
children,” Cowboy mutters—while Christian unknowingly blathers on about how
lucky the boy is to be where he is. When the two return to more tender touches,
he notices a black ring around the boy’s ankle, Cowboy pulling back when he
attempts to touch it.
Later,
the boy admits that once he attempted to leave the farm to explore other towns
nearby, towns that didn’t much interest him. “I think they feared that I might
never come back. They punished me so that I would never dare to leave again.”
Obviously, they have been holding him on a chain since that occasion in his
early youth. In gentler ministrations nothing much else is spoken except for
Cowboy to mention, almost as in passing, “I don’t think my people will be happy
if you’re here tomorrow.”
That may be the understatement of all cinema dialogue. When Christian
readies to leave the next morning, he spots Cowboy standing upon the tall weeds
in the near distance. He moves towards him, presumably to say goodbye, but
suddenly Cowboy has apparently lowered himself to the ground as Christian moves
forward his foot suddenly stung by the sharp metal jaw of a rabbit trap, as he
too falls to the ground seeing the boy a foot in front of him.
Somehow Christian frees his foot from the trap but, in deep pain, can
only drag himself, sometimes in a prone position, forward a few feet at a time.
The realtor tries to run, but is held back by pain and the deflating circle of
the mad-faced community to which Cowboy is a slave.
Eventually, the boy throws a stone at the combine driver, knocking him
out as the combine veers suddenly toward the community members, blood squirting
through the air where apparently it has hit upon the flesh of one or two of
them.
Distracted, they run from the machine, as Cowboy breaks loose from his
own chain and leaps upon it to drive it after them, Christian making a break to
his car which looks, to all appearance, as if it has been partially stripped, tires
laying nearby. But apparently it still functions, and he speeds off down the
road finally discovering Cowboy waiting beside it, his entire body streaked with
blood.
Christian pauses, clearly suggesting that he cannot dare to let a citizen of this mad
community back into his life, but, after hesitating, he unlocks the door, as
Cowboy joins him in the next seat, the two driving off we pray to the safety of
urban life.
We can only wonder, however, how Cowboy might adapt to his new
environment, and Christian to his old world from which he has apparently
completely now severed himself. Perhaps the two will survive only as a pair.
Cowboy
won the esteemed Iris Prize for an LGBTQ movie in 2008.
Los Angeles, October 15, 2021
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (October 2021).
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