Mehrdad Hasani | Adjustment / 2022

a suddenly necessary change in life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Farzad Ahmadi (screenplay), Mehrdad Hasani (director) Adjustment / 2022 [16 minutes]

 

Filmed in Iran by Persian director Mehrdad Hasani, the short film Adjustment is a work amazing to even be made in today’s Iran, despite the wonderful film directors there who continue to challenge the political and social systems.  

 

   In this case the subject is a nine-year-old boy, Shakrokh (Moeid Asoudeh), a boy deemed effeminate for wearing nail polish and other items of female attire. A reactionary group has already descended upon the school, demanding they dismiss him, citing the contents of his backpack: lipstick and nail polish, insisting on his ouster from the school. The parents maintain that they will not continue to allow their children to attending the school unless he is dismissed.

       A female friend gathers up the items they have tossed out from his backpack, returns them to the container, and carefully plants them on the windowsill where inside the child looks on this group attack on his behavior with fear and incomprehension.

       His gentle teacher (Jamshid Bahadori) tries to console him, while explaining that he has created all this trouble really for nothing. “Don’t come to school for a few days,” he advises, “Then I’ll come and bring you back.”

      In a beautiful but terrifying scene, Shakrokh makes his way home through a stony and brush-filled incline, to find his mother attempting to comfort him with a warm shower, but his father, understandably give the cultural dilemmas he faces, angry even to see his shaking son’s knees as he stand naked. He demands to the boy come to him, entreating the boy with yet another version of the homophobia and, even worse, the transgender hostility that surrounds rural (and urban) cultures everywhere: “You want me to lose face in front the villagers?” But in the next moment he is shouting: “Why are you doing this to me? Can’t you hear me?” The mother intervenes in an attempt to remind her husband that he is just a child, his behavior is not an attack on the adult but something that comes from within, inexplicable to the confused parents. Comforting him she explains he should stay the night at his aunt’s home.

      And into the rainy and stormy night, as in a Dicken’s tale, the boy is sent, afraid even to knock on his Aunt’s door since she is entertaining friends. He makes his way into a barn where his female friend (Fatemeh Moradi), perhaps even younger than him, waits, advising him to come there anymore, that her father will be angry. “My mom says I shouldn’t talk to you because you are a bad boy,” while adding that she doesn’t believe he is truly bad.

      Shahrokh escapes back into the rain and mud, having nowhere to go, finally returning to the empty school itself where he attempts to sleep, but is chilled that he has no choice but to return to his classroom with his lantern and backpack, now nearly freezing. He takes off his coat and finally the map of the world which hangs on the school wall—symbol of all the places to which he might possibly escape from his painful predicament—and covers himself with it like it were a blanket.

 

    The next morning his school mates reencounter the boy who they define as a girl, once more mocking him, slowly, one by one painting his face with mud. It is one of the most terrifying instances of bullying ever put to film, even more horrifying in some respects than the martial violence of most US films, that end in a bloody lip, even a broken nose. This boy has become a figure of the earth, a product of the soil itself.

     The teacher returns to see the boys now literally fighting, Shakrokh vainly attempting to regain some sense of self-worth. Once more Shakrokh runs off, this time with absolutely nowhere to go.

    Suddenly he comes across a local clothes-line with the traditional dress of a female villager, and putting on the dress and traditional scarf of the Iranian village woman, he returns to the school, begging his teacher to seat him with the girls. The wise teacher immediately does so, and his lessons continue, this time without interruption. His female friend tears off a piece of paper so that he/she may now also participate in the school lessons.

 

   As Letterboxd commentator williamfaeleith notes, that since the Iranian government does not recognize sexual orientation, there are presumably no homosexuals in Iran, only heterosexuals who commit homosexual acts (for which they can be sentenced to life imprisonment or death. On the other hand, it does recognize gender dysphoria and permits sexual reassignment surgery, so our young heroine, Shakrokh, is protected under law as long as she accepts the “adjustment” this child has had to make in his/her life.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2024).

 

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger | Black Narcissus / 1947

the world comes thrusting in behind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (screenplay, based on the book by Rumer Godden and directors) Black Narcissus / 1947

 

The British were tired of seeing war pictures when Black Narcissus suddenly appeared upon the screen. And having just gone through the privations of the war, there seemed to be no better tonic than this larger than life, richly hued fable about the Himalayas, which coincided with Britain's leaving India and the recognition that the British Empire had finally crumbled.

     It's notable that Powell and Pressburger's interpretation of a Rumer Godden Indian romance is the polar opposite of Renoir's only four years later. For Renoir there was no choice but to film in India, creating, as I suggest elsewhere, almost a travelogue of that country. The River is all a bathe with golds and blues and greens, mostly natural colors. Powell and Pressburger, on the other hand, surprised their cinematographer and editors by announcing they would shoot their film entirely in England. The great landscapes of the film are paintings on glass, the palace into which the nuns move is a miniature. The exotic, hand-painted rooms are a product of the Pinewood Studios. The natives are played by local dock workers.

    Yet, for all that—perhaps because of it—one has the feeling after seeing Black Narcissus of having gone to one of the most isolated and exotic spots on the planet. Renoir's India, for all of its "truthfulness," seems far tamer and homier than the wind-ridden heights of Mopu into which five nuns, a young strutting male "peacock," a lusting teenage girl, a loony housekeeper, and the dashingly cynical agent Mr. Dean gather, sparking long-lost desires and simmering histrionics.

     A member of an Anglican order of nuns whose mission is primarily to teach and nurse girls and women, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is ordered to take four other nuns into the Palace of Mopu, previously used as a house for the local Indian General's wives, located on a Himalayan mountain top. The natives live below, unable to bear the strong winds and rains of the Palace, a fortress previously abandoned by an order of religious brothers. With little else but determination and gut, Sister Clodagh battles the prejudices of her own peers, the skeptical and often practical criticisms of Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the dizzying insanity of the harridan caretaker (May Hallatt), and the elements as she attempts to maintain order and spiritual values in a world that is literally and endlessly falling apart.

     Suffering from a malady described as Darjeeling tummy, with white sores appearing upon their arms, effected by mountain light-headedness, the nuns attempt to teach, nurse, garden, and pray with little effect. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) works as hard as she can, but falls prey to long-lost memories, culling up images she has supposed she has long ago buried. Instead of planting beans, potatoes, cabbage and other products that might sustain the order, she cannot resist filling the small patches of palace soil with numerous varieties of flowers. Already ailing before she has come to the order, the somewhat paranoid Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) becomes sicker, imagining that her fellow nuns, particularly Sister Clodagh, are plotting against her. The nurse, Sister Briony (Judith Furse) asks to be sent away to another convent.

 

     Even for the determined Mother Superior, Clodagh, the past—life before her vocation to God and the Church—comes creeping into her daily endeavors. As she later describes it to Mr. Dean, "the world comes thrusting in behind." Perhaps it is the air, the howling wind, the strangeness of the natives' lives, or just the sexual aroma of the sensual male body of Mr. Dean—dressed by the costumers in as little clothing as possible throughout the film—or a combination of all of these, it does not matter: the nuns are unable to regain their composure.

     Having fallen in love with Mr. Dean, Sister Ruth refuses to take her final vows, ordering the dress in which she suddenly appears in one of the film's last scenes. Rushing to Dean's small cottage, she enters just as he has gone out, she picking up personal apertures of his life (his pipe, etc.) to sniff in the aroma in which she hopes she will soon be enveloped. Upon returning, Dean assures her that he is not in love with her, is not, he insists, in love with anyone, suggesting she return to the palace or be accompanied to Darjeeling. Rejection by the only person she has thought cared about her can only result in madness.

     Returning to Mopu, she attempts to push Sister Clodagh over the wall into the valley below, but as in many such a melodrama, ends up falling to her own death.

    Throughout this overwrought psychological drama, cinematographer Jack Cardiff under the obviously careful direction of Powell, creates a series of scenes in which the shadows and patterns of windows, doorways, walls, fans, and other objects interfere with and color the audience's perceptions. Often using his youngest character, the translator Joseph Anthony (Eddie Whaley, Jr.), as the focus of observation, the director shuttles his adult figures about as they rush from room to room, dance, and stridently push forward. These are people who at every turn are struggling to embrace or, more often, to withhold, the tensions between their actions both with others and within themselves that spins Black Narcissus, almost like a top, into a whirlwind of acted out and subdued passions.

     Powell also uses Brian Easdale's music to great effect, playing out on horns and drums incessant rhythms that at times almost make the film's viewers think they might have gotten lost in an African jungle instead of the Indian Himalayas. Hokey, yes, but effective nonetheless. This is, after all, melodrama in the manner of what Douglas Sirk and Nicolas Ray would create in the US a few years later.

     Finally, despite the over-bright daytime skies, Black Narcissus might be described as a film that is satiated in black and red. Although these nuns are dressed in white, their habits are often splattered with blood, their hems covered with mud, and their rooms haunted with dark shadows. One of the most powerful scenes of the film occurs after Sister Ruth has abandoned her vocation, while her adversary, Sister Clodagh offers to sit out the night with her in prayer and contemplation, Ruth dressed in her store-bought red dress, applying bright red lipstick to her previously pale lips. As the Mother Superior drifts off into sleep, so does her charge dart away in escape.

      When Ruth later returns to the Palace, she comes from the same room, her face now stripped of any makeup, looking paler than death itself, with the intent of murder on her mind. She is as good as dead already, the act simply following what the image has already revealed to us. And with that death, we comprehend that the convent must also die, the nuns—just as the British forces had—leaving India behind. As the caravan of survivors move forward, so, as Dean has predicted, the rains begin to fall, suggesting the release of pent-up sorrow for these women's thwarted lives.

      In short, Powell's and Pressburger's Black Narcissus is not that very different from their later movies The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffman, and even Powell’s final notorious masterpiece, Peeping Tom, incorporating movement, music, and image to convey larger-than-life psychological situations, conveying worlds in which what the characters say matters less than the movement of their bodies and the rhythms of their lives.

      Although a nun such as Sister Ruth insists upon conveying her sexual obsession to Mr. Dean, he himself is thoroughly invested in the male comradery he enjoys apart from the hot-house atmosphere of the nearby nunnery. Dean makes it clear, much like other figures in Powell’s and Pressburger's cinema creations that he prefers the company of men to that of women, despite his gentle attempts to help members of the religious order.

     Powell clearly made several films with gay characters with his long-time partner Emeric Pressburger, despite the fact that his own sexuality is still very open to question given his marriage and other affairs with actors Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron. Certainly, in his film-making he felt perfectly comfortable, like Alfred Hitchcock, to openly portray gay figures whose relationship with female figures was often suggestive and indeterminable, but who revealed themselves ultimately as queer, perhaps the only way they have been able to survive such hostile environments.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (April 2012).

 

Norman Jewison | Send Me No Flowers / 1964

choosing his wife’s husband

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julius J. Epstein (screenplay, based on a play by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore), Norman Jewison (director) Send Me No Flowers / 1964

 

If in Pillow Talk the writers and directors make somewhat discreet hints of their stars’ sexuality, in Send Me No Flowers writer Julius J. Epstein and director Norman Jewison almost shout it—albeit hiding their conceits within a heterosexual story. What better way to allow Rock Hudson to literally “cruise” the other men of the cast than by allowing him to play a hypochondriac husband to Doris Day, he mistakenly believing he is dying, who in order to protect his wife determines to select a proper husband for her.

 

    That device itself might be enough to nudge awake even the most somnolent of straight audiences, but the creators take it even further by allowing Hudson’s (George’s) next door neighbor Arnold (fellow gay actor Tony Randall), his wife conveniently “away,” to stroke, paw, and drunkenly lean upon the Rock in almost every scene in which they appear together. In fact, the “heterosexual” cover story is almost nonexistent in the film, and hardly matters in the plot. From the start the predictable comedy on the surface will require his wife, Judy, to begin to suspect something—in this case that George is having an affair with the recently separated Linda Bullard (Patricia Barry)—after which George will reveal his impending death, Judy discovering the truth that he is not dying, threatening to leave him, and, by film’s end, perceiving the “real truth,” allowing them to live happily ever after.

      In short, what this film “pretends” to be about is absolutely predictable and inconsequential, while its “secret” story, filled with puns and campy phrases, is far more entertaining and, given its somewhat forbidden daring, is quite a hoot.

      From the very first moment of this film, with George rolling alone in bed, obviously troubled (he is dreaming, apparently, about various maladies and medicines) we realize that he is not comfortable in his married life—although the movie pretends they have the perfect relationship. Before we can even assimilate what George’s problem is, his wife has been “accidentally” locked out of her own house, while George puts in a pair of ear plugs as he enters the shower, making certain that he will not be able to hear her complaints of being locked out.

      In his hypochondria, he soon discovers, George is the most selfish of men, hardly hearing anything his wife says, as he moans, seeking solace over a phantom pain in his chest. Although he has had a complete check-up only two weeks earlier, he is determined to visit the doctor again. The doctor (Edward Andrews), a friend, is apparently quite aware of George’s medical fears, and assures him that it is only indigestion. Yet George insists that he check him, readily unbuttoning his shirt and, even when the doctor suggests “You can button up,” leaving it open as if to show off his manly physique. Overhearing the doctor discussing another patient’s dire condition, he, again in self-centeredness, believes the patient to be himself.

       On the way home, meeting up with his friend Arnold, George asks “Can I take you into my confidence,” the way one might almost begin a sentence in admission one’s sexuality—he is, of course, about to reveal his medical news—and from that moment on almost everything the two discuss might be perceived on two levels, the commonplace and the sexual. In lines like “I might as well go all the way,” or their man-to-man discussion of a table: “It feels so good, [stroking his hands back and forth over the wood] you just run your hand over it. Every chance I get I’m gonna feel the table,” their metaphors skirt the edge, while other statements contain obvious puns. Helping out around the house, Arnold soon after quips, “I’ll be right here mowing your back lawn. I already mowed your front lawn,” playing with the concept of mowing as related to engaging in sex.

    

      At other times, the twosome simply talks in a language queerer than straight. On the look-out for a new husband, George comments on a golfer at the country club: “He’s reasonably good-looking,” to which Arnold responds, “Not as reasonable as you George.” And when Judy meets an old friend, Bert (the handsome Clint Walker) they invite him to join them not only in a drink but insist he join them at the club’s evening dance. A few minutes later, trying to send a message to George, Arnold suggests “I’ve got to powder my nose. George, yours could use a little powdering too.”

       Bert’s comment about Judy, who he knew as young woman, is perhaps one of the most audacious the movie has to offer. When Judy tells him that she’s married to George, Bert looks him briefly over before uttering, “But I thought she’d end up marrying someone like Cary Grant,” reminding us that Hudson is indeed someone like that dashing bi-sexual actor.

     Is it any surprise that before the film is over, George and Arnold end up in the same bed with a bottle of champagne, George commenting that Arnold sleeps on the same side of the bed as does Judy? Does it really matter that Judy returns home for the film’s “happy” ending? She has long been feeding her husband a sugar placebo to put him to sleep, so I guess the audience, if it desires, can continue sleeping as well.

     If this film seems more interesting than Pillow Talk, it is because it is more interested in signaling its actor’s gay sexuality than it is serious about its comic heterosexual story. My interest in pointing to these open puns, gestures, and phrases, accordingly, is not prurient as much as it is a necessary reading of what this film is primarily about. The winks, in-jokes, fondling, campy phrases and just plain queer bawdiness give this popular movie far more dimension than its strait-laced story of a hypochondriac husband who has a temporary misunderstanding with his wife.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2013).     

Francis Savel | Équation à un inconnu (Equation to an Unknown) / 1980

destructuring gay porn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Savel (screenwriter and director) Équation à un inconnu (Equation to an Unknown) / 1980

 

How do you explain something that is completely unknown, unpredictable, and impossible to define? In the science of physics an unknown value can be determined if we know the value of all but one of the unknowns. But what if all but one of signifiers are unable to be signified, are unable to be made real except by the one known quantity, in this film’s case, sex?

     Moreover, the title of this film does not describe itself—at least in English—as an equation for the unknown, in short something that works toward solving the riddle, but is linguistically represented as of, almost suggesting a kind of tribute to it, as in the case of “The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” And, in fact, that analogy is quite appropriate, since all of the sexually consumed “soldiers” of this film, had, by the time of the film’s 1980 release, died, most likely of AIDS.

      But before we can even begin to explore that issue, we need to determine just what kind of film this is. I truly believe that if I were to show a DVD of this work to almost anyone of the general public most anywhere on the planet they would, if they might allow themselves the pleasure of its full 99 minutes, immediately shout out “Oh, that’s a porn movie!” or “that’s an adult gay film.” And, for the most part, they would be right.

     Cinema aficionados and critics might soon after mention the innovative use of the camera, noting, for example, in one instance how the camera, stationed below the elegantly-banistered elliptical staircase follows the film’s “hero” (Gianfranco Longhi) as he climbs to the top, time and again temporarily moving out of the frame to reenter into view. Or they might point out how the three motorcyclists and one tag-along rider move in misty night through a small tunnel as they seek out a nearby shack in which to perform their sexual acts, remarking how they look somewhat like the beautiful vampires of Dracula. And they would certainly proclaim as filmmaker Yann Gonzalez—whose restoration of this film has allowed me and others to see it—this is “the most melancholic porn film I’ve ever seen.”

      These same cinematic observers might also categorize the director, Francis Savel (as listed in the credits as Dietrich de Velsa), as working as Diego Semerebe actually has commented in his essay in the on-line cinema journal Slant, in a cinematic form in which the “closest example to this type of cinematic communion between pornography and poetry is perhaps James Bidgood’s Pierre-et-Gilles-esque extravaganza Pink Narcissus from 1971, or Fassbinder’s slightly less cartoonish Querelle from 1982.” 

      Owner of the early transvestite cabaret in Paris, La Grande Eugène, and an artist (an Alain Delon-narrated short about the creation of one of Savel’s paintings is included as an extra on the DVD of Equation), historians would assuredly remind us that Savel collaborated with Joseph Losey on Mr. Klein and Don Giovanni.

       Despite the film’s severe melancholia, Gonzalez, I remind, still describes it as a “porn film” and goes on in an interview with Jordon Cronk in Film Comment, agreeing with Cronk’s statement that the film was “an effort to lovingly represent what was the last gasp before the AIDS crisis,” added,

 

       “There is an attitude in those protagonists of the ‘70s—in the faces, in the bodies, you see in those porn films that they enjoy giving mutual pleasure to one another. There’s an innocence, a naïveté, in those films. They were the pioneers of the porno genre in a way because those were the very first porno images and there was a joy in the fact of pioneering a movement, of making joyful love, having sex in front of a camera.”

 

       Similarly, Semerebe almost rhapsodizes:

 

      “What’s so unusual about Savel’s film isn’t only the way it rediscovers queer bliss in the unvarnished aura of the everyday, but how devoid of anxiety its world is. Gay sex is depicted as immune to guilt and fear. If strangers catch two lovers having sex, it’s either to watch them as voyeurs or to join in. This isn’t the same logic of cheap sexual voracity that tends to govern traditional porn, but a logic of absolute openness. In the film, sex is a ceaseless flow comprised of an always welcome amalgamation of visitors—that is, sex angels that promptly turn up at door thresholds or just out of the blue to ensure pleasure lasts.

     “Group sex in Equation to an Unknown never amounts to a spectacle of pragmatic transactions. Pissing and rimming are portrayed as inherently tender, even poetic, activities. Orgies aren’t staged so much as they unfold spontaneously, bathed in delicate lighting and quixotic piano notes, as if each body merged with other bodies magnetically so they could form some sort of multi-tentacled organism. There’s no time for characters to reason or filter their impulses. They simply act in what feels like seamless reciprocity, or a kind of solidarity aimed at collective harmony through boundless sexual satisfaction.”

 

     While I would hardly describe the activities this film portrays as representing the gay world of all of the 1970s (by mid-decade AIDS cases had begun to show up in almost all metropolitan areas), the beautiful, muscular and slim white young boys draped in denim, most of whom had little desire to hide their bodies in leather gear or other such “costumes”—in this film’s throwback to the racial restrictions of the time there is only one Arab boy, no blacks, Hispanics, or other ethnicities, who along with older men hovering close by who are not permitted entry into the sexual participants’ look-alike league—is the world of the late 1960s and early 1970s I experienced in New York City and elsewhere. Except for an occasional police raid, in the bars and their backrooms I visited (Stonewall, with its mix of gays, lesbians, and transsexuals was more regularly invaded) as well as in parks, alleys, cars, and even at times on isolated side-streets, sex was open, fun, predictable, and, if one so desired, nearly endless, just as Savel’s film depicts it. As Gonzalez almost declares it to be, it was a kind of homosexual paradise in which youth was deified.

      Reviewer Jason Arment gives us a slightly different bent bemoaning that when he sat down to the double feature of Gonzalez’ Knife+Heart and Equation at Denver’s Sie Film Center, “we found out minutes before the show started that it [the latter] was pornography,” and going on to quite dismiss the work:

 

“The problems with Equation to an Unknown isn’t the acting, which is adequate considering, nor the production value, which is on point, instead it’s the lack of sex and musical score which debilitate the film. Sure, there are ultra-explicit sex scenes, but nothing special. The lack of music was especially problematic as my friend snored through stretches of boredom.”

 

     So unhappy was this viewer and his friend that one has to wonder if they were possibly heterosexual or perhaps had just seen to many gay porno films in the past. 

    Yet, as we shall see, he has a point. If this is simple, if beautifully filmed, pornography, it does indeed represent all of the standard tropes of gay porn movies.

     It is now time to apologize to any delicate readers for my use below of some rather crude gay sexual terminology, but that is the only way I can present the facts of Savel’s representation of gay sexual practices in their order of bodily involvement. Please absolve me with the possibility that you may simply allow my words as representing a kind of urban dictionary of gay slang.

     Let me add that along the way the director also catalogs these so-called deviant sexual practices within the context of various activities and avocations that were widely featured in gay flicks of this time. The central character, La figure principale (Longhi) is a well-dressed motorcyclist, whose major attire, other than his short shirt and faded denims, consists of gloves, yellow goggles, a white cotton scarf and a white cycle-helmet framed in red.

    For the first sexual scene he arrives at a soccer scrimmage between youths, standing against a net to watch, with another cute boy at the other end and an older man between, who, as the younger men engage in covert glances, gives up and retires. One of the stars of the soccer players, Le footballeur brun (Jean-Jacques Loupmon) is hurt—perhaps not so very accidentally—becoming dependent upon his friend, Le footballeur blond (Reinhard Montz) to help him limp back to the showers. While the other players perform the typical jock shower routines of towel slapping, penis-grabbing, and general rough-housing, blond takes brun (it may be the other way around, but it doesn’t matter) into a nearby cubicle for a massage—or for those in the know, a pretense of massaging—his friend’s hurt groin, his hand gradually moving toward his cock before quickly escalating into the supine player rimming the would-be medic while the latter begins seriously to suck him off.  Meanwhile, La figure principale shows up as voyeur to the action, staring through the cubicle window for a long while before taking out his own cock, which eventually the other cute boy begins to jack off. Blink an eye, and the two voyeurs enter the soccerboy’s room and join in on the fun, all of them cumming in heavy streams of sperm across the face of the principale.

      For readers who have not seen a gay film or only a couple such movies, I can assure you that there are hundreds pornos that play out something like this scene. Soccerboys are important in gay filmmaking.

 

     As are friends, such as the next-door neighbor (or the boy who perhaps shares his flat)—in this case his childhood friend, François—who pops in through a window just in time to masturbate the naked principale now laying coverless in his bed.

      The next scene is another gay porn standard: several boys are standing around a pinball machine watching Le joueur de flipper (Dominique Delattre), who apparently has not yet mastered the game and, accordingly is joined—with penis rubbing against the ass and hands embracing the young pinball player’s hands—by Le jeune Arabe presumably to teach him how to better master the game.

 

     Meanwhile, our principale has chosen this little hot spot to have a drink at the bar with a snack. An older patron sits a table nearby busy drinking harder liquor since we will surely not be included in any of these boy’s games. When the young Arab decides to go to the loo, the pinball player soon joins him to be sucked off before the flipper proceeds to fuck him.    

       Soon after the pinball player returns to the bar the principale determines to join the fun, but just as he is beginning to enjoy himself, the probably pissed-off Le patron de bistrot (Jean-Claude Patrick) enters, pushing our “hero” out of the way before taking out his cock and releasing his urine all over the willing-to-do-anything Arab boy.

     That’s lunch. Now our hero boy takes again to the streets via the motorbike for a late night snack, first with a worker holding on tight to the principale’s pants before he picks up a half un-zipped uniformed Le pompiste (Tony Weber), who, conveniently finished for day with pumping gas, goes for a ride of the central figure’s bike, his cold hands stuffed into the driver’s pants pockets.

      They stop for a moment on a narrow side path to have sex on the seat of the bike, the gas-station attendant sucking off the driver before snowballing the cum he has just acquired into the principale’s mouth with a kiss, the excess semen running down our hero’s chin.

 

    At that very moment two other cyclists drive up to join them, asking the local pompiste where they find a more private place to do their business. He knows of a local shack up ahead, and they move through the dark tunnel I previously mentioned, to have a nice foursome, the two cyclists pairing up, while our “hero” does it again with the cute gas-station attendant, while this time also serving as a voyeur to the one cyclist who is fucking the other. The scene ends with all the cyclists speeding off, Le pompiste walking home along a country road with cum dripping from his mouth.

      After another encounter with François, this time the principal, perhaps intrigued what he observed the evening before, demands that he fuck his friend with a hint that he wishes he might be the only one he loves.

 

     As if to immediately disprove that, the busy hero, now floating upon what appears to be a waterbed, popular in all sex flicks of the period, is gradually joined by six or seven of the boys, now lined up against a wall in the next room, with whom he has previously had sex, for the necessary orgy, each of them joining him one by one for whatever kind of sex one might imagine.

       The last scene of the film returns us to the first, the two, “the principal player” and François, years younger, joy-riding upon a single bicycle down a street.

     I don’t think I’ve ever described in such detail a gay porn film, but if nothing else, this should establish that Savel’s work, at least superficially, represents adult gay entertainment. But, as Peggy Lee has many a time asked, “Is that all there is?” My answer is most definitely “no.”

      First of all, not only is the central figure a complete blur, without a name, a job, any family members or friends other than the nebulous if constant interloper François (who, incidentally, is employed), but he has utterly no interests in life other than sex. Throughout, he barely eats and never seems to sleep. This may certainly help to explain why he is a bit morose.

     But, more importantly, it is nearly impossible to make sense of his sexual excursions. Savel interrupts his first sexual encounter with the soccerboys, continuing its grand finale only after Le principale motors home and falls into bed, soon after, to be jacked-off by François. Not only is the hiatus confusing, but it suggests that what we see as the actual sexual culmination as simply being a fantasy.

      This certainly helps to explain how our hero can ejaculate throughout the film almost non-stop, sometimes minutes apart from his last sexual interlude.

       In the incident at the bar with the pinball players, moreover, his sexual diversion is interrupted by the patron/barman. And his first encounter with the gas-station attendant on the motorcycle seat might similarly be seen as interrupted by the arrival of the other two cyclistes.

       Even their shacking up for sex seems fantastical when the director immediately after plants the hero upon his bed having sex, yet again, with François, followed, more strangely still, by him suddenly being rolled out on a huge waterbed that could not possibly have fit into the small room in which he have just seen him.

       The men from his past sexual encounters seem not all to be there “spontaneously” as Semerebe describes it, but as part of a seemingly planned event wherein each of them has been invited to what might be described as a kind of theatrical event. And one by one they come forward, as the “hero” motions to them, with almost balletic-like movements, as if they were performing at a version of a theater try-out. In fact, the entire orgy is accompanied by off-screen laughter of a man and a woman (the only heterosexual voices that this film presents, certainly the only female voice).

       Throughout this work, windows appear where we previously saw none, spaces suddenly enlarge and contract. People with whom Le principale is consorting suddenly disappear into thin air.

       Except for the sex he (the first time somewhat reluctantly) has with François, it appears that our sexual non-entity is living in a rather predictable gay porno-film of his own making, all the pretty boys, their large penises and tight asses, being a product of his own imagination. It is, in some senses, like a nightmare world in which the central, unnamed figure” “can’t get no satisfaction.” Certainly, that terrible lust for totally predictable illusion of endless pleasure might explain his and all the others’ melancholia.

     Without being able to ever touch the fantasies you’ve conjured up for yourself—or worse yet, what others have conjured up for you—joy is impossibly out of reach. The only joy we recognize in this film derives not from his present escapades but from the hero’s past on that bicycle with François. In this film we have to wonder if even François, who makes his first appearance from a window not shown in the previous scene, truly exists except as a loving memory.

      Living only in future fantasies, with a past that cannot again enter the present, our unknown figure is himself already dead, a nonentity. I don’t know precisely when Savel filmed this movie, but by the date of its release, AIDS had already killed thousands. Accordingly, even what Gonzalez imagines is a beautifully hedonistic portrayal of sex in the past, is not real, but another fantasy itself, with the author showing the viewer just how fantasies are brought into being—and most importantly, how the dreamer himself is destroyed by them. The pattern is clear: take two people, four, numerous of them, put them in a room and rub their bodies together. The juices that run from orifices is called pleasure. But whether or not they can create a fire, something to sustain them throughout life is dubious.

      Let us restate the “equation,” E (the imaginative energy of the dreamer) equals m (the mass or time put into the effort) both unknown, but add + c to the second power (the speed of light, the source of any film put upon screen, results when multiplied in this scientific formula in an atomic reaction) where all is totally destroyed. The soldier is now thrown back into his unknown grave.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2020).