Friday, January 5, 2024

Pedro Almodóvar | La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) / 2011

the i who still breathes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenplay, based on a fiction by Thierry Jonquet), Pedro Almodóvar (director) La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) / 2011

 

Influenced to a certain degree by Georges Franju’s elegant horror film, Les yeux sans visage, Almodóvar’s langorous study of control over another being takes us into a secret world of a tortured Frankenstein who, with the advances of today’s science, can completely transform the human body. Much like Franju’s Doctor Génessier, Robert Ledgard, heading an isolated clinic and operating out of his house, has suffered the horror of seeing a wife severely burned in an automobile accident, evidently caused by his half-brother, the brutal and bestial Zeca, with whom she was having an affair. Through patient nursing and the attentions of her doctor-husband, the wife survives, but upon witnessing her burned shell of her body in the glass of a window, she leaps to her death.


     Robert (Antonio Banderas) is left with a daughter, Norma, who never quite recovers from the shock of her mother’s death and is unable to deal publicly with other people. As Robert and Zeca’s mother relays the news early on in the movie, Norma follows the route of her mother, falling from a high window of the institute where she had been committed.

     Although this information is summarized early on, we don’t actually see the events played out until after the director has introduced us to another, more mysterious figure, Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya), a beautiful woman kept locked up in Robert’s home. We see little evidence of any outward operations—and certainly none of the masks and late-night activities of Franju’s film. But we do know that, like the Dr. of that work, Robert has experimented on skin transplants, and we can only suspect that Vera has been at the center of his attention.

     He has, so it is hinted, made over the imprisoned girl somewhat in the image of his dead wife, a fact for which his mother, serving as the head of house and cook, despairs. Now that he has finished with her, she suggests, he should destroy her instead of keeping her locked away in a room where she reads, exercises, and, occasionally, writes upon the walls. She is a dangerous, trapped being.

     We recognize some of that potential danger when Zeca shows up at the house on carnival night, dressed, absurdly, as a tiger, demanding that his mother hide him for a few days since he has just been involved in a heist. The mother, Marilia (Marisa Paredes) is outraged and quickly rejects any such suggestion, and, accordingly, is tied up and gagged by her son. Glimpsing the young lookalike wife of Robert on a television monitor, Zeca—a bestial figure if there ever was one—frantically searches the house for the girl, and finding the room, rapes her, Vera, strangely enough, both accepting the brutal action and crying out in terrible pain.

     Robert, returning home mid-rape, rushes to the room to shoot his half-brother dead, while his mother below, screams out that he should kill them both.

     What follows is even stranger, as a sexual relationship suddenly develops between Robert and Vera. And after he has destroyed Zeca’s body, he returns to her bed. The implications are frightening: if she indeed looks like his wife, has Vera been created merely for his sexual gratification? We are never given an answer, but we sense something grandly amiss.

     Almodóvar—as the director of Women of the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and other comedies—has often been described as creating a frenetic or, at least, hectic pace in his works. But here he almost lugubriously takes us back in time, retelling some of his tale, and, in so doing, revealing new truths that are even more frightening than those we already suspect.

     Although she has had a difficult time with social relationships, Robert takes his daughter to a pre-wedding party, where the young Norma seems to be acclimating herself well to other young women her age. Suddenly, however, many of the younger generation seem to be missing, and following their tracks, Robert finds a group of them, boy and girls, in the middle of the woods, engaging in group sex. His daughter is nowhere in sight.

     We have already been introduced to a young man, Vicente, who works as a window dresser in his mother’s second-hand dress shop. He has asked for the young shop assistant to go with him to the party, but she turns him down, evidently being more interested in women than in men. When he suggests she put on a dress he is displaying, she disparagingly suggests he wear it himself. The suggestion is that he may be gay, but he scoffs at her suggestion.

    When he shows up at the party he has already ingested—as have the other young people—a substantial number of drugs. Meeting the young Norma, he lures her into the out-of-doors, asking her what drugs she has taken. Innocently, she reports the numerous drugs she is being proscribed for her psychological condition, while he interprets it in his own way:

                        

                              Vicente: You are different. I am different as well.

                                 Norma: Are you in therapy, too?

 

She, he is convinced will be a willing participant in his experiment. As he takes off into the woods to have sex, she grows frightened, screaming out, to which he responds by trying to silence her, slapping her as he attempts to take her. She passes out, and he, horrified, quickly redresses her and disappears from the event. Robert comes upon her at that very moment, observing the boy on a motorcycle speeding away.

      After the attack, Norma’s condition worsens. Locked away in a sanatorium, she appears to grow sicker, hiding from her father upon each of his visits. She, at least, has associated the young rapist with her own father, and we must wonder if Robert has also sexually abused his daughter. He is asked to no longer visit her, and soon after, as Marilia has already told us, she jumps to her death.

 


    Only a few frames later, the young handsome Vicente is kidnapped and chained in a dark space for several days, fed only water and a little rice. We comprehend Robert’s sense of revenge, but why is he torturing the youth? What might possibly be gained?

     Perhaps his mother, has said it best when she observed: “The things for love a madman can do!”

     One of the most eerie scenes of the film occurs when we observe Robert spraying a hose over the filthy Vicente, the boy convinced he is about to be murdered. Gently and patiently, however, the handsome Robert almost lovingly shaves the young man who, we soon discover, is about to undergo an operation. We can only suspect the worst, but when the boy has awakened from the surgery, we discover something even beyond the expected castration. He has replaced the boy’s genitals with a vagina, producing various sizes of dildo’s with which the boy is ordered to practice in order to help heal the crevice.


   Without a few months, Robert has completed the sex change, as we witness the young beauty, now Vera, after the transformation. Against his will he has been made over by another from a man into a woman. At first, the patient lashes out in rebellion filling the walls with words and numbers, dates of changes on his body and the statement, over and over: “I breathe. I breathe. I breathe. I know I breathe,” as if his very respiration, sign of his survival, were a reiteration of the Decartesian principle, “I think, therefore, I am.”

     We already know what happens, but its meaning haunts us in a new way. Was Vicente truly gay all along, unknowingly seeking the very transformation that has been forced upon him? What kind of man is Robert, who must transform a boy into the woman of his desires? The implications, although Almodóvar does not explore them, are immense. Who are these men or women, including Robert’s terrifyingly collaborationist mother? Perhaps she has no other choice, but Vera now agrees to never run away. It is like a vow of marriage, which the strangely naïve Robert readily accepts.

     Vera-Vicente even makes a trip with Marilia into town, but when Robert and she attempt sex after her return, she insists that she has bought a lotion, which she briefly leaves the room to retrieve. Upon her return she has brought his gun, shooting him at close range near the heart. His almost poignant shock at the turn of events reveals his insanity:

 

                                Robert Ledgard: You promised not to run away.

                                   Vicente: I lied.

 

As Mirilia climbs the stairs, gun in hand, to check out the situation, she too is shot by the victim.

     If the final scene of Vera-Vicente’s return to his mother’s dress shop seems almost banal, it is simultaneously an expression of immense courage and resilience, as the young woman proclaims to his mother his true identity: Soy Vincente.

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2011

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (December 2011).

 

Mark Christopher | Heartland / 2007

lucky strike

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Christopher (screenwriter and director) Heartland / 2007 [12 minutes]

 

Heartland moves in a pattern that stands at the opposite end from Silver Road. HG Gudmanson (Corey Sorenson) is a cultural anthropological student at Columbia University and having “the time of his life.” Indeed, the opening credits show him partying in what appears to be several rather wild sex parties in New York City with a “kid in glasses” named Martin who the narrator describes as some kind of Kennedy—which kind he hasn’t told me because I wouldn’t believe it, just as I haven’t told him where I’m from either “because he wouldn’t believe it.” He reports, however, that his father was having business problems so he took weeks off and returned to another world.

 


    Throughout this short movie, in fact, Martin talks about himself and the events surrounding him in the voice of HG Gudmanson, the cultural anthropologist, objectifying his own being as if somehow he wasn’t involved in the events he is narrating.

     That other world, it turns out, is Goldfield, Iowa, where he grew up on farm homesteaded by his great-great grandfather, a fact that his father, Thor Gudmanson (Martin Naftal) will never let him forget.

     Almost immediately we meet the hired hand, Kevin McGonagle (Tyler Tooley), who, as HG tells us, was “kinda white trash from town. My dad hired out of pity though. McGonagle was minus two parents plus a bunch of little siblings. Don and I used to joke that the littlest one was his own kid. “He must of hooked up with a hundred girls since junior high.” At least we know that the now citified HG hasn’t lost his small-town gossipy meanness.

      It turns out that HG’s father is an alcoholic, and when the next morning he doesn’t show up for chores, the two boys talk a little about town affairs. The only one from school who HG evidently keeps in touch is a girl named Dawn, with whom evidently Kevin has now hooked up. He asks HG whether he minds. Kevin’s own friends think he’s a loser for working on the farm, but he’s still proud that he’s taking care of his family. The boys take off their shirts before they get to work in the hot sun, both taking furtive looks at one another’s physique.

      Kevin tells us briefly about his high school sweetheart Dawn Olson (Taylor Gwinn), whom he describes in terms of an utter contradiction, an intelligent evangelical. They went out, last night, to the local bar Mary’s where he had a beer and she a coke; he had another beer and she another coke. The dating game came up, and he came out to her, he tells us, but she did not take it well. “In fact, she screamed, ‘You can’t be gay!’” And we know now that soon the whole town will be talking.

      HG’s narrative returns for a moment to Martin. “When Martin came out he was 11. In fact, his mother made him a party. ...He cannot understand this strange tribe I come from.”

      Meanwhile, the narrator’s worst fears come true as the whole talk is talking about him, and his father has grabbed and bottle of whisky and retired to bed. “That was three days ago.” The last time he did it was after his mother left; “it lasted a year, and we almost went broke.” Tyler assures him that at least he will be there.

       Working hard, he reads the finances again and again without, as he tells Kevin, seeing “a way out.” Kevin answers rather profoundly, “Maybe that’s the problem.” “What?” “Maybe it’s about finding a way into it.”



        HD asks Tyler how it feels to take care of his family, the latter asking, “who was that Greek guy pushing that rock up the hill?” “Sisyphus?” “It always feels like the rock I’m pushing is gonna win.”

        He then turns and asks the question that our so-called hero has not wanted to hear: “What are you gonna do if he doesn’t get out of bed?”

       There is no answer, and its apparent that HD has been visiting home now for more than two weeks. Kevin’s brother is arrested for driving a car across a football field—during a game, HD’s voice tells us. And his father is still in bed. So he has missed his bus to the airport and his long trip home to New York.

      Sexually frustrated, HG finally visits the Lucky Strike, “the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere,” what appears to be an empty road where he waits in his car in the dark, strumming a song about going home, by which he obviously means New York City.

      He cites a report by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead about a tribe where every spring the adolescent boys who have come of age are asked to make a sacrifice for the survival of the tribe. “Last night I accepted the fact that I was a member of that tribe.”

       “So, here I am,” he reports, “at the Lucky Strike.” And time, delayed after the earlier scene, picks up once more to where the film left off, in the middle of nowhere. There he meets Kevin, who joins him in his automobile, the two discussing their predicaments, Kevin afraid that social services may take his brothers and sisters away from him. For the first time HD offers his help, suggesting that if Kevin needs anything, he’s there for him.

        Kevin, taking a swig, makes a jump into what we now recognize is a possible future. “It’s not so bad here. When you got friends.” HD looks at him with a wide smile. They toast with their beer bottles.



     Slowly they gaze at each other, unsure, terrified, but suddenly moving toward one another embracing in a in a deep kiss. We can now be certain that they will be there for one another in more ways than just putting in hard hours on feeding the cattle, plowing the land, and harvesting the corn and hay.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Billy Taylor | Silver Road / 2006

there are some good boys in toronto

by Douglas Messerli

 

Billy Taylor (screenwriter and director) Silver Road / 2006 [13 minutes]

 

Taylor’s film is about as simple as a coming out tale can get. As in most works of this genre, there is usually an incident which triggers the sudden enactment of long-restrained homosexual action, and in this case it is a common one. A young man Danny (Andrew Hachey) is going away soon to college and has just returned from his summer “camp.” His first visit upon returning home evidently is the neighbor’s farm where his good friend Mark (Jonathan Keltz) lives and works. And already before the credits we know that they truly enjoy one another’s company just by the smile that lights up on Mark’s face as he sees his friend on his way to visit.

 


     Mark eulogizes his summer work on the farm with his dad, who claims it’s been the best season ever, Mark being able to save enough cash to buy the pickup. He enjoys farming and is planning on staying on at the farm hoping to make enough money to get on while his friend is soon moving away and on.

       Their deep friendship, accordingly, is colored with regret and sadness, both emanating from what they know will soon be a kind of end of their relationship which doesn’t truly need to be defined and within which they easily share their still virgin sexual status with one another. These boys obviously feel completely free and comfortable around the other in a way they might not feel with other acquaintances and family.      


     They’re also good looking and affable, and if you’ve seen even 2 or 3 LGBTQ coming out shorts you know what that means. Yet, like all close friends, it’s also clear that if they have any internal desires, they’re so used to keeping them hidden that it seems nearly impossible, given their friendship, they will ever be expressed. And in this sense, this Canadian film also shares with the sub-genre of coming out films which I discuss in my essay “How to Lose Your Best Friend.”

       Mark admits he’s never done it with his girlfriend Marianne because “She found Jesus,” to which Danny replies, “That guy’s no fun.” But we also know that there’s something far more complex and inexpressible that delays their full sexual maturation.

       Silence reigns over much of the rest of this movie as, when the sun sets, the friends venture out in Mark’s pickup for a ride through the country—one of the major activities of lonely farm boys who live in such a vast space that there’s often nowhere particular to go except for the nearest small town which allows for no privacy and proffers numerous other dangers created by their already outside status—outsiders for the town folk who simply don’t comprehend the structures and strictures of their lives. The activity is defined by Mark who, when Danny asks, “Where we going?” answers, “Well we’re just driving around,” sentences which also sum up both of their future perspectives.

       Driving down the already dark country roads, Mark is shocked when Danny suddenly reaches over and switches off the pickup headlights. He demands to know what Danny’s doing and is afraid of “busting up his truck,” but his friend declares he should relax, he knows the road. It’s clear he actually doesn’t, at least the road he intends to take. After they reach a stop-light, he moves forward a half-mile or so further, with Danny admitting that he’s going to miss Mark, who repeats the sentiment. At that moment, he suddenly lunges over and attempts to kiss his friend, Mark pushing him away and driving off into a cornfield where the pickup is now stuck in the wet earth.


      Danny leaps from the vehicle rushing off to hide among the dry stalks, with Mark pounding the dashboard shouting “fuck, fuck!” His profanity clearly is not directed at the fact that his belove pickup is now caught, but against the fact that their deep friendship has now suddenly come to a stop, an admission of love coming forth that he was not able to respond to, and his frustration for not having been able to accept the feelings which may also share.

    Standing atop the truck he calls out Danny’s name again and again, but the boy is too embarrassed and afraid to answer, to show himself. “Danny get the hell out of there!”

      A long pause. “Come on, Danny.” Still no response.

     The film loops back to the earlier scene at the red and yellow blinking stop-lights at the corner they passed a while back. And eventually, of course, Danny appears, his face covered with mud. He helps Mark push the truck out of the rut, and they are back on the road as silent as they were before, but this time intentionally so. Finally, Danny announces as they come to a stop, “I’m going to go,” making the move to leave his friend perhaps forever.

        “You got some dirt on your face,” Mark finally speaks.

        After another pause, he continues, “I just thought you were a pussy.”  Another pause. “I won’t tell anyone.”

        “Thanks.” Another pause. “Okay, I guess I’ll see you.”

        “Hey, there are some good guys in Toronto.”

        Danny manages a smile. “Even the nastiest girls love Jesus.”

        “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving.” Mark turns his head away.

        “Yeh.” He gets out.

         Both boys look dreadfully sad. Obviously something has ended, even as their lives move on.

        If nothing else they now know where they both stand: Danny moving away into a new world in more ways than one, and Mark remaining where he is, possibly happy, perhaps trapped. If this film is a simple story, its significance has been eloquently expressed, helped along by Jonathan Goldsmith’s lovely musical score.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Pascal-Alex Vincent | Far West / 2003

grandpa’s hired hand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Olivier Nicklaus, Paul Raoux and Pascal-Alex Vincent (screenwriters), Pascal-Alex Vincent (director) Far West / 2003 [17 minutes] (TV film)

 

Ricky (Julien Gauthier), rehearsing with his dancer his friends, Mika (Gilles Guillain) and Koko (Tony Granger) in Paris, is depressed. Having for years refused to see his grandfather, his parents have insisted that he visit the farmer in what Ricky describes as the “far West,” in the Beauce region of France, a major producer of wheat, rapeseed, potatoes, mustard, and other agricultural products.

 

   Not only is Ricky frustrated for not being able to be with his dancing friends, but is certain to feel utterly isolated in rural France where he feels he will be the only gay boy for miles around.

     His taciturn grandfather (Jean Haas) doesn’t make it any easier; nor, the local girl Julie (Chloé Berthier) who would clearly like to become a closer friend of the handsome young man who Ricky, formerly named Éric, has become, and who invites the transformed boy into town for Bingo night along with his grandfather who, she reports, has stayed away from the games for so long now that people are beginning to talk.

 


     The most pleasant aspect of rural life for Ricky is the new hired hand, Jean-Didier, a peasant beauty who helps Ricky get to sleep at night simply by calling up his image. Ricky tries to help out with chores, if for no reason than to get a better view of Jean-Didier; but he is not far from being utterly incompetent. And even most disconcerting for Ricky is the fact that his friends Mika and Koko suddenly show up, having traveled into the “far West” in commiseration with Ricky’s loneliness.



      They are great friends for Paris, but in the rural setting where Ricky now resides, they’re shockingly out of place, effeminate, outrageously campy, appearing even in their daily attire to be almost in drag. What’s more, in their attempts to help, they destroy the farm tractor. Ricky is suddenly put in the odd position of feeling embarrassed for the friends who in Paris helped to define his own existence.

    In the most astonishing scene of the film, Ricky and his friends are scattered around the yard sunbathing when Jean-Didier parades past them stark naked as he makes his way to the washing basin and hose where he turns on the shower and proceeds to clean his beautiful body for their greedy eyes. And Ricky is possessive about the farmhand who he now claims to his friends, is his alone to worship.


 


   The busy duo, however, check out the farm, on one occasion coming across an open door in the barn where they notice Grandpa and Jean-Didier are busily enjoying themselves with each other’s bodies. They don’t bother to tell Ricky.

     Finally able to bring his grandfather to town, the old man reveals the fact that he has now been able to face up to the narrower attitudes of his local community due to the influences of Jean-Didier, making it clear to his grandson also just how things stand.

    Éric-Ricky must finally come terms with the false dichotomies he’s created in his life. Being yourself gradually helps to make you comfortable wherever it is you choose to be.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 5, 2024).

 

Kalil Haddad | Farm Boy / 2019

paradise lost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kalil Haddad (screenwriter and director) Farm Boy / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

Mostly without dialogue, Canadian director Kalil Haddad explores gay desire and regret in his 2019 film Farm Boy, a work which also focuses on the beauty of the rural landscape in which it is filmed.


      The short begins with one of the two major characters of this film, played by Hayden Gallagher, sits in a car waiting for a few moments as the rain pours down around it. We soon see the cute 20-some year old looking over at someone else and, after some pause, stripping of his shirt, and unzipping his pants. The camera moves back to reveal an older, bald-headed man (Chris Glesason), not at all the kind of individual with whom we might have expected the younger to be having gay sex. 

     This beginning, it soon becomes evident, comes after the series of somewhat paradisical interchanges between Gallagher’s character and a his then young teenage friend played by Cairns Nolan. Like many a film about gay teenage love, these two boys wander through the fields and woods, often quite aimlessly, unable to even fully communicate with one another. They seem to be studying the world around them in an attempt through most of the film in order to better comprehend their growing feelings for one another.



      There is a would-be moment of their close bodies as they sit together in the grass, one eventually laying down flat, the other joining him. But nothing happens. They simply lay beside one another in a deep bonding of desire.

      Their major sexual encounter is that typical of teenage boys when they sneak into a shed attached to the barn to mutually masturbate. It begins with the two of them jacking of while standing rather far apart. But slowly they begin to move a bit closer to one another, and yet closer until they are finally touching, Gallagher’s head on Nolan’s shoulder. A moment later they are holding one another’s cocks.


 

     They cum and Nolan leaves, Gallagher looking out the window already in longing for that special moment.

       Although they twice are seen dancing at what may or may not be a gay bar—it probably is just the local dance club open to all sexes—there are no other indications of how their gay relationship has developed or whether or not it truly has progressed. The only thing we know is that Gallagher sits in his bed nights ready to grab his cock, presumably thinking of his special relationship with Nolan.

 

      As the mentioned at the beginning of this essay, however, time is fluid in this work, expanded seemingly endlessly at moments while compacted in the next. All we know is that there was evidently a break, a traumatic incident represented in the work by an almost extra-terrestrial force of white light that draws the young Gallagher to his window in wonderment and fear. What caused it or even what happened between the two is never explained.

        All that we know is that in the very next frame on the darkened dance floor of the club the boys visit they seem to be dancing together, the noise of the music drowning out all other sounds, in its pounding domination almost creating a void. Suddenly a young girl’s face appears as she sips on a cocktail, hinting that perhaps the Nolan character has spotted her, causing a rupture in the boys’ intense relationship.

        Yet it is after that event when the two boys masturbate together, so we do not know which came first in time. Yet immediately after that scene, we are back on the dance floor so it may indeed have been Gallagher’s memory at the traumatic moment when the female enters the plot.

        In fact, it is a much later time, Gallagher alone at the bar since an unseen and unheard voice speaks the words, written out across the screen in yellow: “I heard he’s married now.” And an answer “That’s how it is. They’re always curious…till they’re not.” “It’s hard,” and an answer, “I know.” Another voice asks “What is?” The response this time is unexpected, “Aging.”



        Now we see an older man’s face on the screen, presumably Gallagher’s, but it could be Nolan’s. In a sense it doesn’t matter. The older man speaks: “He would have loved me.”

        The film ends with the young Gallagher experiencing the white light, and a scene in which Nolan is walking off through the beautiful landscape, away from his friend.

        Whoever remains has deep regrets for having lost of the love of his youthful paradise.

        In rural Canada, it is clear from that first scene, there are very few others to take its place.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...