Christian Edvard Halberg and Helle Rossing | Poz / 2016

running in the director from which everyone else is rushing off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christian Edvard Halberg (screenplay), Christian Edvard Halberg and Helle Rossing (directors) Poz / 2016 [24 minutes]

 

We all heard stories about young men in the 1980s and 90s who had lost so very many friends to AIDS that they actually intentionally sought unprotected sex so that—either of the guilt for have remained uninfected and because of a delusional attempt to rejoin their friends in death. It is difficult to those outside the gay communities to comprehend just how many young men died within gay communities leaving the already socially tight-knit gay bar, bath, and bed shifting members who had survived with a sense of utter powerless and an inability to deal with their despair. It wasn’t just a matter of having lost a lover or a close friend, a close family member or a distant relative as those outside of the gay community may have experienced the epidemic; it involved the deaths of dozens of close young and beautiful friends and acquaintances all within a matter of a few years. Subsets of the gay community such as those in the New York theater and dance worlds, as well as many other arts, felt it even more intensely. The survivors were, to put it simply, a psychological mess. A couple of my friends of that period in time told me that they were attending a funeral nearly every week.

 

     Danish writer and directors Christian Edvard Halberg and Helle Rossing’s fascinating film from 2016, takes up those issues but presents in an oddly twisted version of the syndrome of the survivor. We are now in the early years of the 2lst century in which a regimen of pills—despite their high cost and their possible physical side-effects—saves lives and return many who had thought they would surely die to return to someone regular lives. We now know the causes of HIV infection and AIDS and can protect ourselves from infection. We know gay men were not the only or even major carriers of the disease. If there is still no cure, there is the hope and confidence that the worst is over.

      But the “twunk,” the young hunk at the center of this movie, seems lost in time, a sort of horrific AIDS traveler who is running in the direction from which the previous generations have rushed off, seeking out to become positive not because he has lost dozens of friends and that he feels, as many did in the 1980s and 90s that the disease was inevitable given their desires and activities, but for far more selfish and confusing reasons. He appears to not be seeking death, but the disease itself to excuse his own selfish behavior. Or does he have a death wish? The movie, fortunately, never fully answers these questions, but focuses on Oliver’s (Max Raundahl) strange journey into a disease no one today would logically seek to contract.

   The film begins with a clinic calling Oliver to tell him the results have been completed. Meanwhile, we see him photographing himself for a Grindr-like computer site, featuring his ass, obviously advertising that he enjoys getting fucked.

     At the clinic they tell him that he’s HIV negative, a happy report for most young men. But Oliver is incredulous, not being able to believe he’s negative and demanding they do another blood test, with the nurse Britt (Ina-Miriam Rosenbaum) insisting that it is a credible test and that she can assure him that he’s safe from the disease.

     Oliver is clearly not happy with the results.

     We also get early views of his very close relationship with his sister, Cilie (co-director Rossing) who lives also in his building and who, apparently, is offering him free rent and support since Oliver seems to be without a job. One early morning he visits his sister while she is still in bed, awakening her, having not previously answered a phone call, but now insisting that he is ready to make breakfast for her.

     Cilie insists that he go home, but he teases her awake, pulling off her coverlet and forcing her to run after him in the nude, revealing how the close the two really are, Oliver being able to turn her most sour mood into a sense of play and laughter. Almost like a child, he tells her “I couldn’t sleep.” And after much horsing around between the two, he asks a question that reveals a great deal about the young man, so dependent upon older sister, “Would you take care of me, if I got sick?”

     There are certainly many reasons that he might not be able to sleep. He has evidently joined an on-line club for HIV-positive individuals, who gather privately to party and enjoy sex. Oliver shows up at Henrik’s (Morten Christensen) door one evening during one of these events, Henrik, a slightly older man, intrigued by the cute young man, most certainly ready to take him to bed. Oliver, obviously, lies about having tested positive.

 

    They are a sexy duo, and their foreplay is hot. But when Henrik attempts to put on a condom, Oliver suggests they might have better sex without the condom. Henrik argues that he won’t have unsafe sex even if they are both HIV-positive, and Oliver, angry over the matter, stalks out.

     As an alternative, quick solution, Oliver seeks out totally unprotected sex in a public park, entirely missing his sister’s birthday party which he promised to attend.

    When Cilie accidently discovers a series of articles about being HIV-positive on her brother’s computer, she suddenly imagines the worse, that he has been diagnosed with AIDS. She attempts to confront him about her worries, trying to reassure him of her love and support.

      But in her very expression of perhaps what he was originally seeking, Oliver is totally offended, frustrated by the lack of reality behind the fabric of lies he has been attempting to make real, and completely rejects her sympathy—the very thing he may have originally been seeking.

      Again, he runs into the night, seeking out a random sex partner, whom he quickly finds, engaging in dangerous unprotected anal sex in the dark of night.

 

   I should pause here to explain that a great part of this film’s charm or semi-offensive soft porn subject matter, depending on one’s point of view, is devoted to Oliver’s sexual activity of being fucked, the camera moving in a soft out-of-focus blur, seemingly suggesting the experimental filmmaking of so many early independent films as well as later works with illicit sexual content. It’s beautifully sensual, but also frankly just this side of kitsch soft-porn movies which have left me cold. In this day and age, if you want to show two men fucking, particularly given the long open tradition of Danish gay filmmaking and photography, then show it, I’d argue, don’t dance around it with rhythmic swirls of color with a score of deep-breathing sighs.

      Yet, somehow this strangely retrograde sexploitation of events seems perfectly at home with the character’s ridiculous attempts to infect himself with an epidemic of a previous decade, as if he, having missed out in all the 1970s and early 1980s openly sexual “fun,” has been reduced to our own century’s rather puritan exploitation of the past.

       Finally, it becomes clear that this man is perhaps not simply seeking a disease his own generation fortunately hasn’t had to so utterly embrace, but the wild sense of total sexual freedom and ecstasy allowed that earlier tortured generation. There is a strange aspect of going back in time. If at first joining the HIV-positive men and women might be perceived as a device of survival for his own moment in life, it ultimately becomes a way of moving into the past when gay sexuality defined a life of a sexual revolution against the normality of delimited societal and governmental approved monogamous sex, a time not at all so devoid of the open sexual expression as we are unfortunately today, closeting it away in Grindr meet-ups and on-line porn films.

      Poz is both an irritating and yet somehow liberating movie, in which we can dismiss the character’s self-destructive desires at the very moment we recognize their essential validity.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

 

Budd Boetticher | The Tall T / 1957

in the middle of nowhere

by Douglas Messerli

 

Burt Kennedy (screenplay, based on a story by Elmore Leonard) Budd Boetticher (director) The Tall T / 1957

 

On his way into town to buy a bull, homesteader Pat Brennan (Randolph Scott) stops by the stagecoach waystation to visit his friend Hank Parker and his young son. In this early scene we already sense the dangers and tension in director Budd Boetticher’s vision of the frontier, as, observing someone riding his way, Parker immediately grabs his rifle. The boy, however, has better eyes than his father and recognizes the man immediately as their friend, ignoring the calls of his father warning him to remain still, instead running forward with anticipation. As Parker soon after tells Brennan, living “stuck out in the middle of nowhere, all by yourself, knowin’ nobody but stage drivers and shotguns,” “ain’t no fit life at all"; it is certainly not a life he wishes for his son.

    The child asks Brennan to bring him some candy back from town, a task to which the laconic and kindly farmer readily agrees. But once in town he is tricked by his former employer—a man who would like Brennan to return to work with him—to bet his horse against his ability to break a new bull, which if he succeeds he will receive for free. Tossed into a nearby watering trough, Brennan comically loses, forfeiting his horse. After a quick visit to the candy shop, he is forced to walk the several miles back to his farm. While on route, however, the stage, driven by his friend Ed Rintoon, passes him, and he hails a ride—over the protests of the couple who have hired it—back to his stead.

      Within the coach sits a cowardly bookkeeper, Willard Mims, and his new bride, a severely plain woman (Maureen O’Sullivan) who is the daughter of a wealthy copper miner. Clearly, the bookkeeper has married for money, and although the daughter may look plain, we see her through the eyes of Brennan as a quietly beautiful woman (she was after all Tarzan’s beloved Jane). Thus far, accordingly, Boetticher has set up the structure of a seemingly typical Western. We know love will blossom between the lonely Brennan and the miner’s daughter; it is just a question of when or how.

     But Boetticher’s Westerns are not usually what they seem, and a few seconds later we enter an entirely different world, where simple black and white values suddenly disappear. When the stage reaches Parker’s station house, we’re shown that it has been taken over by three men, Frank Usher (Richard Boone) and his quick-to-draw partners Chink and Billy Jack. Parker and his son are nowhere to be seen, and we suddenly perceive that what we are about to witness in the next hour is a terribly dark vision of western life when Chink shoots the coach driver dead and, upon Brennan’s inquiry into the whereabouts of Parker and his son, he is told that their bodies have been tossed into the well where a few hours earlier Brennan had watered his horse.

      Before we can even catch our breath from this horrific announcement, Usher orders Mims’s wife to the house to cook, while Mims quickly strikes a bargain to leave his wife behind while he goes back to demand a ransom payment from her father. Accompanied by Usher, Mims speeds away, while the nearly speechless Brennan—the only one of the group who recognizes it may be best to hold his tongue—and Doretta Mims are cornered into a small cave-like shack from which any attempt to exit is met with gunshots.

     Mims and Usher return with the news that the miner will be sending ransom by the next day; but if there is question of possible salvation in that fact, one of Usher’s men quickly shoots Mims dead. While Brennan has hidden the fact from the wife that Mims has offered her up for ransom, Usher and his boys now make it clear just how disgusting his role has been, and Doretta beaks down into fearful sobs. Later, Brennan, trying to help her regain her equilibrium, discusses the ridiculousness of her marriage:

 

pat brennen: Did you love him?

doretta mims: I married him.

brennen: That’s not what I asked.

doretta: Yes! Yes, I did.

brennen: Mrs. Mims, you’re a liar. You didn’t love him, and never for one minute thought he loved you. That’s true, isn’t it?

doretta: Do you know what it’s like to be alone in a camp full of roughneck miners, and a father who holds a quiet hatred for you because you’re not the son he’s always wanted? Yes, I married Willard Mims because I couldn’t stand being alone anymore. I knew all the time he didn’t love me, but I didn’t care. I thought I’d make him love me….by the time he asked me to marry him, I’d told myself inside for so long that I believed it was me he cared for and not the money.

 

    Such language seems to belong more to the psychological stage dramas of the day—works by William Inge and Tennessee Williams—rather than the adventure genre of Western movies.

     Soon after, moreover, Boetticher’s screenplay writer, Burt Kennedy, takes the drama even further into new territory as the cruel murderer Usher reveals in a conversation with Brennan that he hopes one day to get himself a place, “something to belong to,” and settle down. Usher goes so far as to insult the two men with whom he rides as “nothin’ but animals.” Brennan sees through the murderer’s self-delusions, however, reminding Usher, “You run with ‘em.” “Nothin’ you can do with ‘em,” Usher replies. “Nobody ever tried,” rejoins Brennan.

    Indeed, there is something almost homoerotic about Usher’s controlling and manipulative relationship with the two younger villains. And in this fact, there is also a quality in Usher—in his inability to control his own apparent instincts despite his ideals—that makes him oddly likeable, as if given half a chance he might have turned into a man more like Brennan than the despicable “animal” he too has become, unable to give up the company of the young, roughly good-looking Chink and Billy Jack.

      We know however, despite Brennan’s absurd assurances to Mrs. Mims, (“Come on now. It’s gonna be a nice day”) that if he does not act quickly they too will be destroyed. As Usher rides off to collect the ransom, Brennan tricks Chink into believing that Usher intends to leave without them, and the young man quickly rides after Usher, to make sure that they get share of the ransom. But there is something deeper in Chink’s quick chase after Usher, almost as if he has been jolted by a lover.

     If money is at the heart of the desperate greediness of these western villains, Boetticher’s movie makes clear that their desire for love and sex also push them into the violence that defines their existence.

     Meanwhile, suggesting to Billy Jack that he “look in on the woman,” Brennan captures the boy’s gun and kills him. When Usher and Chink return, Brennan shoots them dead, walking off into the sunset with Doretta Mims. Brennan, at least, will no longer be alone in “the middle of nowhere.”

     There is something so darkly cynical and grandly absurd about this work that one recognizes its influence upon the work of a contemporary, postmodern dramatists such as Sam Shepard and the mock, “ridiculous” westerns of Ronald Tavel.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2001

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2001)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Das Kleine Chaos (A Little Chaos) / 1966

going nowhere

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Das Kleine Chaos (A Little Chaos) / 1966 

 

If Fassbinder’s short, also of 1966, A City Tramp is about an outsider who is abused by others, A Little Chaos is about outsiders who abuse the society itself, the two shorts almost bookending each other as polar opposites.

     The latter work is very much influenced by Godard and Truffaut and The New Wave in the transgressive behavior of its three major figures, Theo (Christoph Roser), Marite (Marite Greiselis), and Franz (Fassbinder) who make even attempting to sell subscriptions to a magazine service seem like a kind of accostment. 

      The work, in fact, shares a great deal of energy with Fassbinder’s 1969 feature, Love Is Colder than Death with a similar trio of two males and a female, evidently living together in a kind of sexual threesome, going on a robbery like it were simply an adolescent spree.

      In this case, when the trio runs out of money, they simply hit up on a middle-aged woman (Greta Rehfeld), Franz putting her through a Nazi-like interrogation about where she hides her money while also physically threatening her with a gun and even, for a few moments, hints at possible sexual abuse without actually carrying it out.

       Unlike Love Is Colder, however, there is no deep homoerotic attachment to or interplay between Theo and Franz, Marite being the center of both their rather meaningly sexual activities, consisting simply of kisses.

        The humor of this work exists in its final scene, after they have found the money and are busy splitting it up between them, each of them sharing how they plan to spend it—Marite announcing that she will “buy a dress and makeup and so on,” Theo hoping to buy a teddy bear for his boy, and Franz, given that his played by Fassbinder, predictably planning “to go to the movies.”—the most ordinary and bourgeoise choices they could possibly make.

        In fact, these choices mirror the very first scene, where like all consumer-crazed city dwellers, the three of them jump into their small Volkswagen to drive a few more yards down the street, as they could possibly walk that short distance or had any real place to go.

        Presumably, after the money is spent from this robbery, they simply have to hit up on some other poor woman or older man a little bit further down the street.

      

Los Angeles, January 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Yasujirō Ozu | 東京の宿 (Tōkyō no yado) (An Inn in Tokyo) / 1935

a dare to the world that offers no future

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yasujirō Ozu, Masao Arata, and Tadao Ikeda (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 東京の宿 (Tōkyō no yado) (An Inn in Tokyo) / 1935

 

Yasujirō Ozu’s 1935 silent film An Inn in Tokyo—long after most other countries had switched to talking pictures—is a fascinating film for several reasons, most notably because, unlike his later tatami-based films, this one is almost all vertically filmed. Images of urban smoke-stacks, electric generators, water tanks, and telephone poles dominate this early work, truly contradicting the notions that Ozu was primarily interested in a Japanese past, based on domestic relationships that no longer existed.

      Moreover, although this movie is centered on a father and his two young sons, it is primarily a social-political statement. Although Italian directors such as Roberto Rosselli, Vittorio De Sica, and Cesare Zavattini are generally perceived as the creators of neo-realism, decades before their creations Ozu’s An Inn in Tokyo presents itself as a far tougher vision than the later cinematic movement characterized by De Sica’s more sentimental and less believable The Bicycle Thief, to which this film is often compared by critics.

     This “on the road” drama is a near-devastating trudge of a man, Kihachi (the wonderful Takeshi Sakamoto), who, in the Japanese version of the Great Depression, wanders the barren Koto district of Tokyo in search of a job, being turned away again and again by doormen. So worn out from his sojourn is Kihachi that he has hardly the energy to argue with their decisions, let alone boast of any abilities he might possess. With their few remaining provisions in a backpack strapped to his youngest boy, Zenko’s (Tokkan Kozo) back, they walk forward, as one critic put it, as if they were on a conveyor belt going in the other direction.

     Despite their near-starvation, the boys often pretend not to be suffering—although you can almost see them swallowing their lies as if it were bitter rice. The boys, who capture stray dogs who may be or become infected with rabies, are the only source of this ragtag family’s ability to sleep in local inns or eat their limited meals.

    But these, of course, are children who, at times admitting their deep hunger, also desire things they cannot afford. The elder son Masako wastes one of their dog-catching payments on a soldier’s hat, which he grudgingly shares with his younger brother—perhaps an early warning of Japan’s soon-to-be militarism; but when Zenko is commanded to again pick up the back-pack, he refuses to do so, the two momentarily fighting before together they leave all they have in the world behind. It is almost a dare to a world that offers them no future, and little possibility of ever again filling their bellies.

     To divert their despair, in one instance Kihachi plays a childhood game with them, asking each to imagine what they would most desire. Critic Allan Fish describes the scene beautifully:

 

                There’s one truly shattering sequence where poor Kihachi plays

                along with his children’s pretend games, pretending to drink

                sake as if dining like royalty, rather than slumped in the dry

                grass on the roadside. It’s one of the most emotional sequences

                Ozu ever shot, and certainly the most emotional sequence in the film,

                though the finale, as Kihachi rushes off and leaves the children out

                of necessity is also hard to watch, and the control which Ozu

                displays throughout is truly awe-inspiring.  No over-emoting, just

                natural real emotions conveyed with both understatement

                and subtlety.

 

      Soon after, the trio arrives at an inn where they must make the decision whether to use the small sum of money they have left on food or a bed. The boys quickly chose the food; when you’re starved a comfortable bed must seem like an unnecessary luxury.  

      Perhaps the only unbelievable moment in this movie is when Kihachi suddenly discovers that the inn is owned by an old friend, Otsune (Choko Iida), who not only allows Kihachi and his boys a free room for the night, but helps him find a job and offers him cheap housing.

     Yet this version of Chaplin’s tramp is equally unlucky in his choices. Meeting a similarly suffering woman, Otaka (Yoshiko Okada) and her daughter Kimiko (Kazuko Ojima), he attempts to help her as well, with a suggestion of budding love.

    When Kihachi brings her to the inn for dinner, Otsune helps find Otaka a job in a nearby Sake bar. But when her daughter develops dysentery, she admits to Kihachi that she cannot pay the hospital bills. After he unsuccessfully attempts to get a loan for Otaka’s care from his old friend, the desperate Kihachi steals the needed money, entrusting it to his sons to deliver it up to Otaka.

     Admitting his crime to Otsune, the almost damned Kihachi finally entrusts his children to his friend as he determinedly heads off to the police to report his guilt.

      We might possibly imagine some lenience; but we also recognize that it is highly unlikely. The man who had nothing except his sons is now without anything or anyone, a sad ending as deeply profound as Steinbeck’s far more overwrought family saga, The Grapes of Wrath.

 

Los Angeles, January 8, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).

 

David Sheehan | Pippin / 1981 [TV production]

the finale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Schwartz (music and lyrics), Roger O Hirson (libretto, with contributions by Bob Fosse), David Sheehan (director) Pippin / 1981 [TV production]

 

I never saw Pippin on Broadway and had no inclination to listen to an original cast recording, particularly since Stephen Schwartz—despite his great successes with Godspell and Wicked, the latter of which I listened to simply because I was trapped on an airplane—does not particularly impress as a composer or lyricist. May the tourists keep the show open for years, but I’ll never visit it.

      I very much like the dancer/singer Ben Vereen, but from the few clips I’d seen of Pippin it seemed to be more like a circus than a serious musical. And I must admit, I’ve never been a deep admirer of circuses.

 

     The other day, however, I noticed that a Canadian television version of the musical was available on my HDBroadway site, and decided to give it a chance. I’m glad I did.

      And yes, there is a kind rowdy circus atmosphere to much of the show, particularly with those who guide the confused young Pippin (William Katt), son of the conqueror Charlemagne, through his search for a meaningful life.

      Pippin, who has been well educated—perhaps in the manner of Candide by Dr. Pangloss—believes that he destined for an identity that defines his being. As he sings in “Corner of the Sky”:

 

[pippin]

Everything has its season

Everything has its time

Show me a reason and I'll soon show you a rhyme

Cats fit on the windowsill

Children fit in the snow

Why do I feel I don't fit in anywhere I go?

 

Rivers belong where they can ramble

Eagles belong where they can fly

I've got to be where my spirit can run free

Got to find my corner of the sky

 

     To find how he might fit into the world the young Pippin first explores war with his violent half-brother, whom even Charlemagne (Benjamin Rayson) calls an idiot. War is clearly not the gentle Pippin’s destiny.

     The troupe—who through Bob Fosse’s choreography and directorial additions look more like figures out of Cabaret than a traveling circus band—next proffer up to Pippin a magical landscape of sexual possibilities: lesbian, gay, and heterosexual. The educated young man clearly does not perceive any these as his “corner of the sky.”

    Hearing the protests of the peasants against the harshness of his father, however, turns the son suddenly, and with a little help by Vereen, into a revolutionary. As his father goes to pray at Arles, Pippin meets him there and attempts to change Charlemagne’s ways without success. The only way to rule is through power, dominating your subjects, argues the King. The musical suddenly speaks to us in Trumpian terms.

     Charlemagne argues that if Pippin thinks he can do better he should kill him, which Pippin quickly does by stabbing him in the back.

 

    Immediately crowned King, Pippin is suddenly met head on with numerous conundrums, none of which he can solve. Begging for release from his newly attained position, Pippin begs for his father’s return. The Leading Player (Ben Vereen) suddenly brings Charlemagne back to life, Pippin stalking off in search of his true destiny once more.

     All along this musical has also been a sort of statement about theater itself. And there is no better evidence of this in the next adventure along Pippin’s path when he meets a wealthy widow who is smitten by the arch of Pippin’s foot.

     Taking him back to her home, she nurses him back to health, and encourages him to become one of her hired hands to plant her gardens and fix up any areas of the estate that need carpentry.

     Pippin, inevitably, grows tired of this as well, and she finally invites him into her home to sit at her table, possibly becoming her new husband. The two have sex, the first time a disaster, but the second time a success. As she pleads with Pippin to sit at the head of the table, The Leading Player suddenly reappears to criticize her acting, demanding that she do the scene over, scolding instead of speaking pleasantly.

      This time Pippin is almost tempted to take on the new role, but still believing he is of special worth cannot be bothered with such a closed-off destiny, he sadly leaves the widow.

     The Leading Player and his troop try to cheer him up with their finale, which does include magic tricks, including one figure who seemingly immolates himself. Pippin scoffs, knowing it was a trick. “But it won’t be when you perform it,” argues The Leading Player.

     In short, they demand for the finale of the show that the always searching Pippin end his quest by allowing himself to be burned up alive.

      If Pippin utterly rejects the idea, they cajole him on how perfect it would be, the audience going home teary eyed for the death of the always unhappy hero.

      Suddenly Pippin determines that he is better off with the widow and her child than being dead, and determines to return to her.

      Angry with the course of events The Leading Player and his troupe suddenly take away all the theatrical elements of this work, halting the orchestra’s instruments, stripping the stage of curtains, lights, and other elements of the set. We witness a stage the way it might appear before any theatrical sleight-of-hand.

       The widow, Pippin, and her son now stand, almost naked in theatrical terms, on a devastated stage, but sure of their futures and, finally for Pippin, of his own true identity. It is the story of Candide one again. They almost sing “Make Our Garden Grow.”

       One commentator complained that the Canadian production “truncated” the original, primarily it seems, by dropping two words and cutting one song, “I Guess I’ll Miss the Man.” But any production that also brought in three Broadway legends: Vereen, Chita Rivera as Charlemagne’s sexy and plotting wife (“I’m just and ordinary housewife,” she declares), and Martha Raye as Berthe, Pippin’s grandmother (who demands that the audience sing along with her until last chorus, when she takes over), is just fine with me.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2020).