Michèle Flury | Waking Up in Vegas / 2023

new possibilities

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michèle Flury (screenwriter and director) Waking Up in Vegas / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

As in so very many loving gay films there is a point in puberty where two boys, having grown up and played together quite innocently, but who are also secretly in love, begin to part ways.

     Yael (Finnigan Inan), a young Turkish boy in Swiss German Michèle Flury’s film is suddenly increasingly in admiration of his physically fit brother Silas (Ayan Eranil) and is gradually pulling away for his longtime friend, Swiss-born Aaron (Fritz Rudolph), who is now increasingly demonstrating gay tendencies, including painting his nails. Working on his own body to imitate his brother, Yael moves away from his friend, particularly when in an imaginary soccer game Aaron kisses him on the forehead upon winning the goal as “Messi,” the legendary Argentine soccer hero.

     And there are other signs of separation. On a trip to their local swimming hole, Yael now refuses to strip off his clothes as Aaron has. Aaron’s comment that he thinks his friend is beautiful equally upsets him.

      His brother’s notion of virility haunts the young teenager as he struggles through what is clearly a separation between his childhood love of Aaron and his own growing adult expectations. “Why do you paint your nails?” he asks his friend, who answers in a completely guileless way, “Because I like it.” But suddenly for Yael it has become a different issue: “You don’t think it’s gay?"

     But Aaron is also beginning to challenge him. In a game of “either or,” he asks a quite ground-breaking question, “Sex with your sister or a man?” a question Yael finds simply disgusting. But it is indeed the deepest question these two adolescents can ask. How deep is your love for the other sex? If it embraces even incest then, Aaron perceives, there is no hope for him any longer in his best friend’s heart.

      But Yael, in turn, imitates his sister’s sexual orgasm with a boyfriend, while grabbing hold of Aaron, which also frightens the not yet-quite sexually aware boy. The tensions between them grow as each explores just how intense their own love is for one another.

     Yet Yael is willing to explore what it’s like to kiss, since his sister first explored it with her girlfriend, by kissing Aaron. The boys kiss, but as Yael complains his friend always overdoes it, being clearly ready to engage subconsciously in just such a boyhood kissing session. Aaron, in fact, is angry about what he himself describes his friend’s macho behavior in imitation of his brother.

     The boys separate in anger. Yet Yael, back home, obviously feels as he later puts it, “bored,” and bicycles back to Aaron’s house, breaking in through his bedroom window. Tentatively and somewhat fearfully he asks if Aaron if he will paint his nails.

      When Aaron does, it admits he likes it, and there seems to be a break-through as the boys curl up in bed together.

       This, as the sexist leader of Casablanca, Captain Louis Renault announces in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, might be the beginning of “beautiful friendship,” something other than Yael’s brother Silas has ever imagined.

       At the very least, Yael has been willing to explore a world he imagines outside of this brother’s heterosexual posing on Instagram and move into a private world apart from macho heteronormative behavior for at least one night. If we can’t totally comprehend what Vegas means in this film, we can imagine that it might represent a flamboyant possibility not currently available in either of the boy’s organized Swiss lives.

      Director Flury, educated as a psychologist, has been working on films that explore other possibilities of sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).