Mansur Rashid | Dopis (House Call) / 2017

doctor, heal thyself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Massari (screenplay), Mansur Rashid (director) Dopis (House Call) / 2017 [10 minutes]

   

If at first we can’t quite determine the genre of this very emotionally moving and personal film, it is perhaps because it crosses the boundaries with which with we’ve become comfortable. Is it a film about a teacher encountering a student (in this case of former student), a genre which I’ve just discussed in connection with Everlasting Love (2014)—a dangerous territory these days for a film

to undertake? Is it about a guilty lover/father for not being able to accept his sexuality until he has torn apart his own family, an increasingly common theme in LGBTQ films from 1990 forward? Or is it the tale of a man still unable to deal with his long-closeted reality, desperate to move into new territory but tortured by the reality of the world which he now wishes to embrace?

     Obviously, House Call is all of the above, the “doctor” in this case being an ex-student prostitute whose “house call” is to have sex with the man whom he soon realizes was his former music professor, disturbs the teacher as well as his student. Recognizing the impossibility of the situation with which he is immediately confronted, Artur (Patrik Plešinger) pays the young man, David (Michael Goldschmid, whose real character’s name, he reveals, is Honza Porokný) to leave, determining instead to take out his young son Ivan (Tomáš Hraba) the movie theater that night, as his ex-wife has suggested.

      Evidently, he has never before revealed the reason for their divorce, and now writes a long letter about his sexuality to his wife (Klára Cibulková), handing it to her as he takes the boy off to the movies.

 

     Talk about queer cinema! One might suggest that the results of this act will not be well received. Surely any but the wisest of ex-wives will suddenly fear for their own child spending the evening out with a man whom she has just discovered in a homosexual; and surely her anger for the fact that he has hidden his sexual desires from her for all of these years will be there when he delivers the child home later that evening.

       But this film, centered upon the gay man, does not even bother to consider these important complications. The emotional concerns of Rashid’s film is entirely centered upon the ex-husband, who with his epistolary action literally and literarily “comes out” years after he might and should have. We can only imagine that his action, as the film intimates, will allow him to go forward without having to hire a “house call” physician to resolve his sexual desires in the future. But we still wonder how quickly he can envelope himself into the new world which to which he has just committed himself. Clearly this short needed more room in which to breathe.

      Director Mansur K. Rashid lived for in Singapore, Malaysia before moving to Dubai, where he lived for 10 years. He later became a citizen of Atlanta, Georgia graduating eventually from Howard University in Washington, D.C., before working in Prague, Czechia, where this film Dopis (House Call) was made.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Manu Roma | Los vírgenes (The Virgins) / 2022

pretending to be who they really are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manu Roma (screenwriter and director) Los vírgenes (The Virgins) / 2022 [13 minutes]

 

In the middle of the rehearsals for a film, The Virgins, one actor, Victór (Khalid Guessaid), reports in that he has just been in an accident while the other, Enzo (Miquel Ventura), attempting to perform the scene without him, quits in protest.

      The director, Marco Amor (Farran Grau) determines to take over the role himself, but where can he find the character to play his on-film lover? The boom operator, Eloi (Ayoub Ouardi) knows the role by heart, holding up his arm to tell the director when asked, and moves into a position that is far more than a starring part in the small film they are making.

      He continues to serve as the character in the film and as the sound man as he gets to know, little by little, the director, explaining his own emotional involvement in the role.

      The script appears to be ridiculous—even writer/director Marco recognizing it’s a bit over the top—but the two actors, director and sound man, develop a wonderful rapport that makes them both feel different as actors, lending the overwrought script something for more exceptional than it originally hinted at.

       If the script doesn’t properly say what they feel, the words they speak as they continue in their virginal experience as actors, says a great deal. And the questions the script refuses to ask become important issues with them personally.

       As they get ready to shoot the very last scene, no. 19, the love scene they’re both eager to realize, Victor returns with his arm in a sling and Ana, the producer whose name Marco has already forgotten, calls in, refusing to shoot without the original actors.

       Marco and Eloi are forced to watch as the two actors create a love scene enacted perhaps with more convincing passion but which is far less meaningful and real than the two figures who previously played their roles, now returned to their original positions as director and boom operator, whispering out the lines of the film that reveal their real love for one another.

       Spanish director Manu Roma’s short film is not totally convincing given the banality of the film-within-the-film, but the narrative conception is rather charming, reminding the viewer of a thousand movies wherein the play or film which is at the center of an otherwise enjoyable work is rather embarrassing to watch: check out, for example, almost any Broadway-set film of the 1930s where if you truly listened to the dialogue of the play itself, or even watched the musical numbers with any sense of seriousness, you’d be out of the theater in a minute. You stay because the film surrounding it is far more fun that the drama pretending be theater itself.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Marçal Forés | Amor eterno (Everlasting Love) / 2014

refusing to learn a foreign language

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marçal Forés and Vicente de la Torre (screenplay), Marçal Forés (director) Amor eterno (Everlasting Love) / 2014

 

As a university professor for several years, I basically succeeded in separating my personal sexual actions from my interaction with students, although that is terribly difficult being an openly gay professor where sometimes desperately confused and sexual needy young male students go out of their way to make clear they are searching for an adult sexual partner through their language, gestures, and attire.

     Even teenage college students often can be quite successful in their seductions, a fact I know from my own behavior at 17 and 18 when I willingly had sex with at least two and perhaps more teachers—sometimes the boundaries, when they were graduate assistants teaching courses being hard to determine. At least on one occasion, after a few weeks of sexual activity with one full professor, he felt it necessary to remind me that we was not seeking a relationship, I quickly putting his mind to rest by responding that neither was I. We became fast friends and continued over the years to have occasional sex.

    But in Spanish director’s Marçal Forés 2014 film Everlasting Love, the middle-aged professor of Chinese, Carlos (Joan Bentallé) evidently has few qualms as he nightly cruises the local woods of Barcelona about hooking up with one of his students, in this case a seemingly very shy teen from his class, Toni (Aimar Vega).

      One of my favorite critics, Justin Chang, at the time writing for Variety, nicely sets up the situation: 

 

“As he wanders through the shadowy undergrowth — which, as we see, is frequented by not only gay men, but also lesbian couples, suspicious-looking teenagers and the occasional innocent passerby — Carlos is recognized from afar by shy teenager Toni (Aimar Vega), who happens to be a student in the language class he teaches. Emboldened and aroused, Toni pays his stern, grizzled professor a visit after hours, and a hot-and-heavy tryst ensues in Carlos’ car, framed in a lengthy single take that prioritizes real-time duration over nighttime visibility.”

     Like the professor of my early youth, Carlos clearly regrets his sexual encounter with his student, and attempts to immediately cut him off. But 2014 is clearly a very different time from the late 1960s of my own youth. Toni does not see the break in their relationship with the clear eye of a desirous, sexually active teen I was, but rather, as Letterboxd commentator Patricio Cámara Rubio suggested, is a member of a gang of “lovesick hooligans that revenge on their own terms.” For today’s youth, the desperately seeking Carlos is simply a “predatory older man who had it coming.”

    What “is coming” is made clear earlier when another predator, this of a woman, is found dead in the park, leaving it rather empty for a few days, despite the fact that Carlos returns only to find the young Toni still there to seek him out. Now, of course, we have to question who is the actual predator, and is Toni involved, as he seems to be, with the gang behind the other death. And if so, to what extent? His love with Carlos seems to be quite genuine as the two, despite Carlos’ previous rejection, meet up again.

    All of this is presented, as Chang and other critics argue, in a stylish horror film style that might remind one of Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 far more powerful flick, Stranger by the Lake, which punishes a man simply because he is seeking out gay sex in the woods around a French nude beach.

     If I am horrified by the stranger’s horrific attacks on the basically innocent beachgoer just seeking sexual satisfaction, I can still accept it an open subject for a horror film; even as a youth I was warned of homophobic responses, being locked up by anonymous sexual partners, and even told stories of young men who “never came back” from where they ventured to fulfill their sexual desires.  

      And while we’re on the subject, I could even comprehend the far more terrifying behavior of the Mexican street boys who year after year were lured in by the female flesh flashed before them, even by a older, child-devouring mother, only to be paid off to suck the lovely Sebastien Venable’s cock or being sodomized in Suddenly Last Summer (1959).

     Yet I truly found it morally reprehensible for a bunch of disappointed love crazy college kids to slice up and sup on the blood and marrow of their professors and others simply because they couldn’t get the sexual attention they thought they deserved. Frankly, it reminds me of what I hear today happening in the classroom itself.

      A lonely gay professor seeking sex in a forest doesn’t deserve such a fate. Yes, he should have left the boy alone and gone after the other unattractive bears roaming the woods; but can you blame him for trying out a cute sensitive boy who doesn’t want to be bothered learning the language which he has been trying to teach?

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Urban Gad | Zapatas Bande (Zapata's Gang) / 1914

pretend to shoot and stab me quick before you kiss!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Urban Gad (screenwriter and director) Zapatas Bande (Zapata’s Gang) / 1914

 

Danish director Urban Gad’s 1914 German-produced film is a rarity in early silent film-making. With its hand-tinted frames—blue, yellow, red, and brown—Gad’s leading lady, his wife, the silent film star Asta Nielsen joins up with a band of fellow Danish and German actors (Fred Immler, Hans Lanser-Rudolf, Carl Dibbern, Max Agerty, Ernst Körner, and others) to portray members of a Scandinavian film company, Nordland, transported to northern Italy where they hope to make a movie about the real Zapata’s roadside gang of robbers.

 

    Everything in this remarkable comedy gets off to a wrong start. The company members, who cannot speak a word of Italian, pay an Italian “translator” to hire a group of actors who will play the travelers on a coach which Nielsen and others will pretend to “hold up” on camera. The translator keeps the money without bothering to hire others.

     Meanwhile, the actors travel to a deserted spot outside of the town in which they’re staying, partying by celebrating a kind of impromptu picnic before setting up temporary outdoor dressing cubicles and donning their costumes, leaving their own clothes behind as they wander down to the road like a merry band of performers out of a Shakespeare comedy. They hide behind a crevice of the nearby mountain and await the arrival of the coach which they intend rob on camera. As the girl bandit, Nielsen is wonderfully attired in a short mid-riff tattered garment exposing one naked leg, a hand-woven blanket tossed over her shoulder, with a full black hat and boots at top and bottom.

 

    Despite warnings that Zapata’s gang may be in the neighborhood, Countess Bellafiore decides to accompany her daughter Elena on an outing that very day. And it is their coach that comes around the bend at the very moment the actors await the hired extras to appear.

     When the Bellafiore coach appears, the acting bandits jump out demanding the women disembark, men threatening both the elder and younger. Suddenly Nielsen jumps in between Elena and her fellow bandit ready, so it appears, to rape the girl. Pulling a gun, she demands her cohort “unhand” the damsel and awards the clearly excitable girl with a kiss, Elena almost swooning in the process. Soon after, they disperse, the two women reboarding and returning home, Elena unable to forget the event and her romantically-inclined savior.

       While the film has been shooting, as we might have feared, the real Zapata gang has made their way to the glen where the actors have left their clothes, gathering them up and whisking them away. When the actors return after their shoot they find no sign of their clothes nor, evidently, any method of returning to their hotel. When they try to make their way to a nearby village to find new clothing and a mode of transportation back to the city, the villagers, perceiving them as the Zapata gang, greet them with volleys of gun fire, and they are forced to retreat.

     Since the actors have gone missing, their manager, fearful that they might have been abducted by Zapata’s bandits, calls in the gendarmes to search for them, and they too now are scouting the wilds to which the actors have been forced to retire. After a cold, sleepless night in open fields, Nielsen suggests that they have no alternative if they want to eat but to themselves become bandits, robbing chickens and other produce from the local inhabitants.

      Any viewer can perceive where this marvelous 42-minute film is heading. Already, like the several early works, such as those portraying scenes from The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charles Chaplin’s Behind the Screen, silent filmmakers were beginning to recognize that since their moving pictures were so closely related to photography and the depiction of “real” life that cinema narrative was inherently related to issues of the relationship of art and reality. There was the potential, writers, directors, and actors quickly perceived, that what was put on celluloid might be easily confused with everyday life experiences, that the characters created on film might simply be misunderstood as representations of real-life beings. And that obfuscation of identity could easily spill over to a confusion between desire and sex equally, since the stories the films represented were like dreams of desire representing as they often did figures of great sexual appeal.

      Elena’s sudden desire for her female savior—borne out of the romantic tales read by young women of the late 18th and throughout the 19th century—is just such an example. Elena has not only confused fiction with reality, but misperceived cinematic narrative as real-life action. Her condition is not unlike the situation in Vincente Minelli’s 1948 film, The Pirate, portraying a young girl in love with the legendary Caribbean pirate, “Mack the Black”—who has become the older, obese man named Don Pedro to whom she has been promised in marriage—becomes “confused” by the attentions of an equally romantic circus actor and singer, Serafin, who attempts to steal her heart from both her fictional conception of romance and its real-life representation. In the end, the actor wins her heart. And, of course, the entire audience falls in love with the cinematic representations of these characters played Walter Slezak, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly.

 

     It is while rummaging for food that Nielsen accidentally re-encounters Elena, who is absolutely delighted to find her hero has entered her bedroom while she slept. Just to make it safe for her once again to lose her heart—a prelude one might imagine to losing her virginity—she demands that the bandit once more take out her/his gun, aiming it at her. Accordingly, she hugs and kisses her hero, while Nielsen attempts to explain to her in pigeon-Italian that what she and her gang most need at the moment is not love but food.

      Elena quickly brings back a large basket of bread and other food stuffs, but will release it to Nielsen only if she promises that she may also join the gang.

      Almost immediately upon meeting up with another of the actor’s gang, Elena demands that he take out his sword to protect her from being ravaged by Nielsen, a scenario he rather confusingly plays out, permitting her to go with him while still allowing Nielsen to take the girl in hand and lead her to the others.

      It’s evident that this apparently bi-sexual young girl—perhaps the first such figure introduced to cinema—can permit herself to be seduced only through violence, perhaps another filmmaking first given its sado-masochist implications. The film gets even stranger when, as they join up with the gang, Nielsen demands they change costumes, she dressing in Elena’s gown while Elena becomes Nielsen’s cinematic version of a bandit. In some respects, she suddenly takes the role of the company’s director.

     To confuse matters more, finding her daughter gone, Countess Bellafiore also summons the police who go on search of her daughter, believing she too has been kidnapped by the Zapata group, bringing the final tally of those out to capture the actor bandits, accordingly, to two sets of police authorities, to say nothing of the “real” gang itself.

    Fortunately, dressed in civilian attire, Nielsen makes her way to the Scandinavian consul, the only man who might be able to understand her now complex story in its original language (one might also interpret this work to be about the problem of translation given that the Danish speaking Gad and Nielsen were working on a German-language film company in Italy) convincing him to follow her into the wilds to settle the situation just as the various forces have descended upon the gang of players to do them in.

     The movie actors and their crews quickly pack up and return home with no film in the can, but with, so the movie tells us, a great many “new experiences” which we might describe as insights into the minds and hearts of their fellow beings.

 

Los Angeles, May 11, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).

Sidney Drew | A Florida Enchantment / 1914

the seed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marguerite Bertsch and Eugene Mullin (screenplay, based on the novel and play by Fergus Redmond and Archibald Clavering Gunter), Sidney Drew (director) A Florida Enchantment / 1914

 

Perhaps one of the strangest of silent films ever made, Sidney Drew’s 1914 movie, A Florida Enchantment combines a series of mind-bending sexual transformations as first a young wealthy woman, Lillian Travers (Edith Storey)—about to marry her young male lover Fred (played by the director)—inexplicably swallows a seed which has apparently been sent to her by mail.

 

    Almost immediately Lillian is transformed into a lesbian, showing utterly no interest in her fiancée at an evening ball, and dancing off instead with a young woman who attracts her.

      Strangely, these women’s male partners also join up for a dance, only to be broken up by a man who appears to be the ball’s host.

      Lillian soon changes her name to Lawrence and begins dressing in male attire, assisted by a man in blackface—also appearing to be in drag.

      Fred, it turns out is a doctor and is highly intrigued by Lillian/Lawrence’s sudden shift, in what today we might describe as a transgender alteration. He, aided by his own attendant in blackface, decides to test the “seed” as well and suddenly turns gay, kissing a friend of his before making the same transgender shift, soon after dressing-up in a woman’s gown, an act for which a local mob chases him as he drops into a nearby body of water.

     Whatever this “seed” possesses, it is suggested, enchants the recipients with the ability to immediately release whatever hidden sexual desires they might have long repressed, whether it be gay or lesbian sexuality, bisexuality, or transgender affinities.

     In this short, we get no sense at all of the characters’ psychological makeup, no indication that they have or have not been long repressing their sexual lives. The “seed”—a clue that reveals it was perhaps something they were born with—is enough to trigger their radical shifts in gender identity. And, in that sense, Drew’s film says something far deeper than many later LGBTQ films say over the next several decades. 

    Lawrence and his/her previous doctor friend Fred might as well have been consumed up in Cole Porter’s 1928 song “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” which suggests simply that sex is at the central issue in animal life. Only, Drew’s film goes even further, for a few seconds, suggesting that the seed implanted within us knows no bounds with regard to gender. “Falling in Love” has little to do with it; it’s simply a kind of primal drive that cannot be resisted.

     It would have been interesting if the film might have further explored this issue and attempted to explain its strange relationship to “pretend” black sexuality. Unfortunately, the film returns to the conventionality with which it begins, Lillian attempting to explain to her arriving prince, Fred, that she has just had a horrible dream.

     Nonetheless, that dream is important in what it reveals about her and his doubts about the marriage in which they are about to engage. Based on a novel and lost play by Fergus Redmond and Archibald Clavering Gunter, the latter of whom is known mostly for his popularizing of the terrible poem, “Casey at the Bat,” this work is a mischievous take on what any “one” sexuality may actually mean.

     Ultimately, we cannot feel easy with their reunification after what we have just witnessed, and must doubt either Lillian’s or Fred’s sexual intentions. In this 63-minute work, the director has suddenly shaken up all of our standard notions of sexual behavior, forcing us to imagine what else might be available.

     What has been “seeded” to each of us through birth? How might we be able to resist those forces? Should we even desire to?

 

Los Angeles, January 14, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).

Urban Gad | Jugend und Tollheit (Lady Madcap’s Way) / 1913 [Lost film]

the young boy willing to kiss a woman in order to keep his man

by Douglas Messserli

 

Urban Gad (screenwriter and director) Jugend und Tollheit (Lady Madcap’s Way) / 1913 | lost film

 

One of the great actresses of the silent era, Asta Nielsen, not only represented herself as a feminist, but starred in several of her Danish filmmaker husband’s works in cross-dressing roles, including the remarkable 1921 film version of Hamlet. Before Garbo, Nielsen was the most recognized cinematic “diva” of film art. And her husband Urban Gad (born Peter Urban Bruun Gad), filming in both Denmark and Germany, was one of the great film directors of era.

      In comparison with her important suffragette film of the same year 1913, A Militant Suffragette, her comic cross-dressing soap-opera, Jugend und Tollheit (horrifically titled Lady Madcap’s Way in English) seems almost insignificant, particularly since it is now described as a lost film.

      Yet the story recounts yet another adventure where the actor took on a male role in to maintain her rights, in this case regarding the love she feels for Peter von Prangen (Hans Mierendorff, evidently named Peter Shanley in the English language version). The film begins with Peter receiving a note from his uncle requesting that his nephew marry Nora, the daughter of Schmidt, a wealthy banker. We later discover that the banker has threatened to ruin his uncle’s career if the marriage does not take place, but from the description we do not know whether or not Peter has realized this from the start.

       In any event, he feels compelled to obey his uncle’s wish, despite the fact that he is in love with Florence Ward (Jesta Müller in the German version, played by Nielsen). When Jesta/Florence hears of the situation, she determines that she must personally take on the challenge, and donning boy’s clothes accompanies Peter to his uncle’s home, presenting herself as Howard Long, a young man who, as one of Peter’s party is forced to participate in the male activities of the others. This includes smoking cigars, getting a barber-shop shave (both incidents of which are reprised in Reinhold Schümzel’s Viktor and Viktoria of 1933), and sharing the same bed chamber with her lover. Somehow, after a series of evidently amusing incidents, she manages to spend the night on the drawing-room lounge.

       The following morning, they travel to Schmidt’s estate. There, as Howard Long, Jesta/Florence does everything possible to hinder the meetings of Peter with Nora, including flirting with the girl. Apparently, Howard’s flirtations succeed, since the other guests witness the shadow on a window shade of Nora and a man kissing.

        Schmidt, immediately jumping to the conclusion that Peter and Nora have fallen in love, announces their engagement. But Jesta/Florence, having obtained the $10,000 note with which Schmidt has threated Peter’s uncle, eventually announces that it was she, not Peter, kissing Nora! Obviously, Howard must simultaneously have revealed his true gender, for the synopsis ends with Peter and Jesta/Florence being united, all the guests celebrating the fact.

        This early film quite obviously sets up a far more complex situation than the standard cross-dressing tales of the time generally expressed. The pattern of this film will be repeated over and over again throughout the century whenever a woman needed to alter a series of events of which the opposite gender was simply incapable, proving that women were far more flexible and cleverer than men.

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).