Jannik Gensler | Mir Selbst So Fremd (A Stranger to Myself) / 2017

compulsive sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jannik Gensler (screenwriter and director) Mir Selbst So Fremd (A Stranger to Myself) / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

Ben (Fabian Lichottka) is a compulsive sex addict in German director Jannik Gensler’s sexy and sensuous 12-minute film A Stranger to Myself. From the first scene when he waits in a parking lot by his car for a stranger (Alexander Chico-Bonet) to arrive, to the two men he fucks in a local toilet (Michael Gaschler and Maximilian Krüger), except for the length of their hair and other facial clues, he can hardly discern any difference. They are beautiful young men who Ben grabs hold of and immediately begins to have passionate and quick sex, obviously enjoying the sex without any recognition that they are actually human beings. They might well as be beautiful life-like dolls who give him pleasure.

     Similarly, as he awaits a cellphone hookup, Alexander (Thomas Hospes), the only one of his conquests with a name in this short near-porno piece, he doesn’t bother to get up and open the door, telling the man standing on the other side that the door is open. The beautiful Alexander enters, going straight to the bedroom where Ben just as quickly grabs him in a clinch, strips him naked and wrestles into bed for a fuck.

    Afterwards, he sits on the one side of bed looking off distractedly at the floor, while Alexander sits on the other side, occasionally turning back to see if they might not be some verbal communication, but finally gives up, dresses and leaves. Ben is a love ‘em and leave ‘em, all sex being with seemingly nothing to communicate even to himself.

      When Alexander leaves, Ben strips off the bed of the sheets, quickly replacing them as rashly as he has engaged in sex. He brushes his teeth, swirls a mouthful of Listerine and spits only to repeat the act, and showers, soaping up as if to remove any scent or sensation of the man with whom he has just engaged with sex.

      He returns to sit on the clean sheets just as comatose as he has in the very first frames of the film. But now he spots a billfold that has slipped out of Alexander’s pocket. He opens it only to pull out a picture of Alexander with a young girl behind him. Is it his sister, his daughter? Might Alexander secretly be married? This is seemingly the first contact with anything but the penis and mouth he has made with another human being.

      He texts Alexander to tell him that he has left his billfold behind and wonders whether he might come over to pick it up. He then returns to his “thinker” position, with evidently no ideas coming into his head in the process.

       This time he actually goes to the door, speaking his first word of the film, “Hi,” in response to Alexander’s greeting. They go into the bedroom where Ben hands the handsome young man his missing billfold. But instead of turning to leave, Alexander sits down beside him, perceiving some great problem is facing the strange being, and putting his hand gently on Ben’s arm asks in a friendly manner, “Is everything okay?”

        Ben struggles to speak, finally uttering a single word, “I,” Alexander now putting his arm around his shoulder as if to reassure him. The screen goes dark.

        We can’t imagine why Ben has arrived to such a state. Has he lost a lover or just lost himself— or perhaps both. Obviously, he has chosen his sexual trysts as a replacement for whatever he is missing, and it will take a great deal of time and love from someone if he can be salvaged from the depths of his isolation, an desolation even of the self.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).