Benjamin Kramme | Kälber mit zwei Köpfen (Two-Headed Calves) 2022

how to ruin a wedding

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jennifer Sabel, Andreas Hammer, and Benjamin Kramme (screenplay), Benjamin Kramme (director) Kälber mit zwei Köpfen (Two-Headed Calves) 2022 [27 minutes]

 

German director Benjamin Kramme’s Two-Headed Calves is a serious satire against particularly religious communities such as the one in which Johannes (Andreas Hammer) and Marie (Jennifer Sabel) live and have grown up in, where homosexuality is still seen as such a perversion that the the community looks the other way while assigning their gay men and women to quack therapy doctors, in this case a man who has not only practice the standard conversion methods, but has provided his patient, Johannes, with drugs and two exorcisms, resulting he declares the devil rushing off as a black snake in one case and a puff of smoke in another.

      Today, however, is supposed to be the happy day, when fully cured Johannes is getting married to Marie. The wedding dinner is planned to be an outside affair, but since it is heavily raining the caterers have moved everything to inside the church community center.

      This short film satirizes the standard wedding subjects, a nasty mother of the bride, who looks like a crone, is delighted to finally get her 39-year-old daughter off her hands, but still complains that at her age her chromosomes have probably gone bad and she will be unable to bear a normal baby.

     Johannes’ parents are unspeakably happy that their gay boy has finally married into heterosexual bliss despite that fact that Marie is more than a little plain, and older than Johannes.

    His mother, however, is outraged that a handsome Pakistani boy is one of the catering servers: how dare a Muslim enter their little closed-off community!

      Yet things seem to be going a nicely as possible. That is, until Marie gets up to sing a song of love to her new hubby in a voice that is frail to say the least, with a tuneless melody and clumsy lyrics obviously written by her. In the middle of the song, Johannes suddenly gets up and leaves the room, his therapist following him into the bathroom where the groom insists he cannot go through with the marriage, his homosexual desires having returned.

 

       Marie, moreover, and followed and overheard their conversation, now demanding to know what this is all about. Johannes finally explains that he is gay—or at least he was, but is now cured and is ready to rejoin the congregation, particularly after the therapist demand he take another pill and quickly provide another exorcism in which he speaks in an exotic babble of made-up words.

      His new wife, however, is now quite troubled and begins downing entire magnums of champagne straight from the bottle. And in the midst of everything, she finally explodes at the numerous questions her mother and others pose in explanation of her behavior, loudly singing out, there will be no wedding night because “He’s gay!”

      At that very moment, three male can-can dancers enter and perform in rustic can-can dresses and white tight undershorts.

     The entire congregation is aghast, each with a different homophobic reaction, the Pakistani boy trying to tell the roomful of heathen bigots how wrong they are, as Johannes runs off, now ready to jump from the nearby church steeple, Marie running after him and climbing up to save him. And they hunker down nearby, he tells the story of how at 18 he had a boyfriend named Adrian, who he brought home, introducing him to the family as his “best friend.” Yet he felt terrible for lying in front his friend, his family, and God.” Soon after, his mother entered his bedroom to which the two boys had retreated, finding them in each other’s arms. She wanted to kill herself, notes Johannes, and “my father wanted to kill me.”

      They return to the party to announce they’re getting a divorce and that no one should be forced to be someone who they are not. The Pakistani boy kisses Johannes, and a couple of men come forward to kiss Marie and one another. The entire congregation seems simultaneously to come out, women kissing women, men kissing their male colleagues.

    In the right hands, however, this could have been much more humorous. As it is, it straddles the sour expressions of the churchgoers and the joy of Johannes final dismissal of their homophobic fears. It doesn’t help, of course, to know that in real life, such pious church-goers would have merely hunkered down for heaps of further hate, running poor Johannes right out of their godly temple, and probably his parents as well for keeping his “condition” secret.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).