Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Jared Palomares and Andrew Perez | Hit Astray / 2023

the ghost of a possible lover

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jared Palomares (screenplay), Jared Palomares and Andrew Perez (directors) Hit Astray / 2023 [22 minutes]

 

Jared Palomares’ and Andrew Perez’ Hit Astray is a truly moving ghost story that has more relationship with The Ghost and Mrs. Muir than with any of the “haunting” tales that are released today.

     The film begins with four energetic and intelligent teens, Santi (Adrian Rodriguez-DiBella), Dylan (Aaron Guerrero), Natalie (Alondra Gonzalez), and Marco (Diego Garza) meeting up at a local small-town Texas skate-board park.   


      The group takes a long walk together, Natalie and Marco pairing up as do Dylan and Santi, good friends. Dylan moreover has just purchased tickets to a concert for a performance that Santi is absolutely jubilant about. In a moment alone with Dylan, Natalie questions her friend about when he plans to tell Santi how much he truly likes him, clearly suggesting, particularly given the cost of the expensive tickets, that she recognizes the love between them which both boys are obviously afraid to talk about—obfuscating instead with the existence of imaginary “other” girlfriends.

       Yet it is absolutely clear to the viewer that these two boys, perhaps not even comfortable with their own sexuality, are absolutely in love with each other.

        At different times in the day, in fact, they seem about to express their feelings, but each time interruptions get in their way, a call our from Marco that they are walking too slowly, a telephone message on one of their cellphones. And Santi returns home to his empty house—his mother is away on business in Tennessee—and only a few days later, it appears, finally hears again from his Dylan again, who calls to express his worry that he hasn’t heard from Natalie and Marco since their special day.

       Santi, busy cooking up something for his own dinner, attempts to reassure Dylan that everything is just fine. And when he mother calls shortly after, he tells her of Dylan’s call and worries.


        Evidently Santi has not been listening to the news, because his mother reports with some horror, that he couldn’t have been talking with Dylan, because he died three days earlier.

        Suddenly, as in works of such a genre, lights flicker and telephones ring, including an old land-line phone they still keep in the house. The call, of course, is from Dylan and Santi, at first, is absolutely terrified by the consequences.

        Yet he soon calms down, and finally answers the constant right of the old telephone, talking to his friend in a serious manner. Dylan does not know how he’s able to communicate with Santi, but in a long conversation he explains how he was short, soon after the group broke up, by a random series of gunshots. His body was found several days later.

        Most importantly, Santi is finally able to explain to the voice of the ghost how he loved him, and the ghost confirms his love as well. We realize that what Santi may be experiencing is simply a psychological breakdown, wherein he finally comes to terms with his own feelings and realizes what Dylan has also never been able to express to him.


         In a strange way, it is like coming out to the ghost of someone you loved, admitting to him what you could previously not have and in that admission coming to terms with oneself. If it is somewhat perverse, it nonetheless makes perfect psychological sense, a kind of projection of feeling in which the other cannot truly react. And in that respect, Palomares and Perez’ work is truly original, a new way of coming to terms with gay sexuality, no real negative responses permitted. In this world, you are freed from even admitting the truth to the other, only admitting it to yourself.

         The actors of this short film are truly likeable, and we would like to see a further continuation of their adventures, perhaps even developing a kind of Topper-like series wherein Santi is haunted by his former friend without being able to explain it to his family and friends, a gay love affair that continues even after death. Surely Carey Grant would have loved the idea.   

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Abram Cerda | Et tu cherches quoi de beau ici? (I Should Feed My Cat) / 2022

what are you looking for here?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abram Cerda, Andres Cifuentes, Marcela González, Daniela Herrera, Priscila Alegria Nunez, and Priscila Núñez (screenplay), Abram Cerda (director) Et tu cherches quoi de beau ici? (I Should Feed My Cat) / 2022 [17 minutes]

 

Stefan (Andres Cifuentes), a Mexican man* now living in rainy Brussels, is most definitely not happy, as he scrolls through his cellphone pictures of a man, married with a baby, who we might guess was once his lover or, perhaps, is his brother.

 

     On Grindr he’s faced with questions such as “What are you looking for here?” and “Do you want to drain my balls?” Nonetheless, he hooks up with one of the men to whom he’s been texting. Their relationship, however, seems more like a doctor’s appointment than a sexual encounter, after a few general questions, Stefan asking to see the man’s ass. His appointment, Loic (Emmanuel Amar) has already been waiting for him in his jockstrap.

      But almost immediately Loic receives a phone call and begins texting in response. Stefan stands up, goes over to him, and takes out his cock to regain his attention. Loic sucks him but the Chilean can’t ejaculate and the situation ends in frustration, the other man attempting to calm his stress. Stefan, however, refuses to stay insisting that he should feed his cat, although we’ve seen no evidence of such a pet in his apartment. Although eventually he is convinced to stay, there is certainly not much intimacy. And we observe no sexuality, only a shot on the bed where Loic has fallen to sleep, with Stefan gently stoking the older man’s head.

 

       As Stefan leaves the man’s apartment, he blocks the user on his cellphone.

     Later that evening, Stefan runs into an old friend, Fabián (Rubén Cabrera), who clearly he hasn’t seen in a long while, since he announces he’s now finished his Master’s degree and is working on numerous projects. Evidently, he’s an architect, unlike Stefan, a man ready to conquer life.

     He friend also invites him for a drink, but once more Stefan argues that he needs to feed his cat, a sign that any true commitment is almost impossible for him to make. He takes a selfie with his friend to send to his mother, who obviously also knew him when these men were younger.

     We can only wonder what has happened to Stefan that has made him no passive and non-committal to life? The only clues we have are those early snapshots of his cellphone. Were they pictures of his lover or his brother, about whom he admitted to Loic that he took drugs (“chems”).


      Yet in the very last scene we see Stefan chopping up masses of potatoes. He calls Fabián to ask him if he might like to come over for dinner since he’s made way too much, and his friend immediately agrees. And we finally get a glimpse of his cat, clinging to his shoulder. “Yes, kitty, it’s ok. Yes my love.” Perhaps things have finally changed for the morose Stefan, as he seems to recall better days, as the credits roll, of the past when he and another man, perhaps Fabián, where mocking exaggerated queer posing positions. 

     Unfortunately, US born director Abram Cerda (working on this film in Belgium) has not given us much to construct an explanatory narrative, nor even provided a reason why we might wish to given the general dourness of his central figure. I have to agree with the Letterboxd critic “CinemaSerf,” who argues “There’s not really much substance to this story for the viewer. Perhaps it was a labour of love for one (or more) of the half dozen writers, but this all comes across as rather an empty story on the screen.”

     Perhaps the original French title better catches the cynicism of the unhappy central figure: “And what is it that you’re looking for here that’s so beautiful?”—echoing the early Grindr query: “What are you looking for here?” Often immigrants don’t find in their new worlds the joys, wealth, or simple pleasures they imagined they might.

 

*When queried by Loic, Stefan describes himself as Mexican, although in all the media material about this film it describes him as Chilean. Perhaps a publicist simply got it wrong, or, quite inexplicably, Stefan is simply lying or obfuscating about his birthplace.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

 

Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton | One Week / 1920

the honeymoon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton (screenwriters and directors) One Week / 1920

 

 In the first film released by Keaton’s Comique Film Corporation that he took over when Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle moved to Paramount, the noted comedian tackled the tricky subject of a new married couple attempting to build a house. Upon leaving the wedding chapel, the Groom (Buster Keaton) and Bride (Sybil Seely) take a rather horrifying drive home with the Bride’s former suitor, who every time the couple attempts a kiss, turns back to them, frustrating their attempts at intimacy. At one point, evidently out of her frustration, the Bride leaves the car to enter a passing automobile, with the Groom attempting, soon after, to join her. He, however, is trapped between the vehicles, his legs outstretched as a motorcycle race between the two cars, carrying him away with it. After a fall from the cycle, the Groom, knocking out a traffic cop, quickly replaces him, as he directs his wife’s car toward another path and joins her, free, at last, of the unwanted intruder.



      This first series of events gives us a glimpse of the honeymoon problems this couple will face, as they quickly discover that it is nearly impossible to get rid of the jealous former suitor. As a wedding present the couple has been sent by the Groom’s uncle a build-it-yourself house, with the materials gathered into bundles and numbered, a set of instructions on top of the first batch. The Bride sets up a sort of outdoor kitchen, while the Groom goes to work on the 9th number on their list, planning, as the instructions promise, to finish the new abode within the week.

     The Groom, it soon becomes obvious, is not a natural carpenter, sawing himself off of beams while walls of the partially constructed house, come crashing to the ground. He is saved by his accidental location, which matches the position of an open window. But even further havoc is caused by the former suitor, who renumbers the packages, so that as the building slowly comes into existence, we see it developing with a series of surrealist-like angles, a roof too small for the structure, a porch leaning in triangulate corners, and windows slanting in opposing directions. Walls flip from inside to out, rooms lead to nowhere. The final result, indeed, looks something like a Frank Gehry creation, without any of the great architect’s grace.

     The delivery of his wife’s piano causes further difficulties as, upon its arrival, it falls upon the Groom, trapping him beneath. The piano mover lifts it only so that the Groom can sign for its delivery, dropping it upon him again. Now the problem is to get the piano into the house. The Groom rigs up a series of metal links which he attaches to a chandelier while the Bride drapes them around the instrument. As he pulls on the links, the ceiling sags at the very place where the former suitor, “helper,” sits upstairs, he sinking along with the floor. Suddenly realizing what is happening, the Groom lets loose of his pulley, the former suitor being propelled through the roof as the floor returns to place. The Groom must use the porch railing as a ladder to free his arch enemy, while accidentally delivering justice by hitting him on the head with a metal pipe.


      The couple is delighted at the end of the week by the house’s completion and, despite the absurd look of the house, invite in friends to celebrate. But as they begin a tour of the home, a windy storm whips through the countryside, pouring its rainy contents through the open spaces of the roof. Umbrella in hand, the Groom climbs to the outside to check it out, while the house, caught up in the wind, begins, at first slowly, then faster and faster, to spin, he attempting to reenter it and save his rolling wife and her guests, but unable to gain enough velocity to enter. The scene is one of the most amazing sight gags of all time, particularly when one realizes that the house was a real construction against which Keaton is pushed and pulled time after time.


      Even when the rain subsides, there are more troubles ahead, as the couple is told that they have built the house on the wrong side of the tracks. A car attempts to pull the house to the other side, but it becomes stuck on the tracks as a train speeds toward it. Fortunately, the train passes by on another set of tracks, but a second later another train—it, on the “right” set of tracks—crashes through, demolishing the monster do-it-yourself-project.

     The couple escapes from the debacle just in time, the Groom, returning with the equanimity he has shown throughout all the film’s disasters, to post a “For Sale” sign. Having survived this terrible first week of their relationship, it is clear this couple can survive anything that might come their way in their future.

 

Los Angeles, January 1, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (January 2012).

Roman Polanski | The Ghost Writer / 2010

beginnings and endings

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Harris and Roman Polanski (screenplay, after the novel by Robert Harris), Roman Polanski (director) The Ghost Writer / 2010

 

Just when it appeared that Roman Polanski had disappeared from an active film career—after a five-year hiatus in directing a full-length feature film and imprisonment in a Swiss prison for his crimes in the USA in 1977—the noted Polish director has appeared to have outdone Houdini, recovering his art in an elegantly complex political thriller, The Ghost Writer, a work at once visually stunning, excitingly scripted, and heighted by a well-crafted score with near perfect sound.

     It is hard to imagine that Polanski was forced to edit this film in prison, but he has always battled adversity in his work, and it is apparent that when he is cornered, he pours his life into his art.

 


    A man (Ewan McGregor), named throughout the film only as The Ghost, has been hired, with much resistance on his part, to replace the former Ghostwriter to the British ex-Prime Minister, Adam Lang. Lang refers to him only as "Man."

     The previous Ghostwriter has been mysteriously killed, having evidently fallen overboard on a ferry trip between Martha's Vineyard, where Lang (mischievously played by Pierce Brosnan) has a home, and the mainland. The Ghost, who lives in Great Britain, must make the transcontinental trip to the island to meet with Lang and rewrite the memoir in just a few weeks.

     Although Lang's lovely home is as moderne as they come, it might as well be a creepy Victorian mansion the way Polanski infuses it with dark intrigue. Lang's wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) screams out at someone upstairs, while Lang's blonde secretary (Kim Cattrall) cheerily organizes and protects her employer while simultaneously oozing sexuality. Even the cook and driver seem suspicious. The Ghost is permitted to read Lang's original version of his memoir only in one room, and is unable to take any of its pages from the house, where it is locked away in a code-protected cabinet. An attempt to download the manuscript on his own computer sets the house afire with warning bells. As The Ghost proclaims this haunted tomb-like domicile is "Shangri-La in reverse"; "I'm aging."

 

    No sooner has The Ghost met Lang and begun the arduous task of uncovering the man's past, than the former politician is being attacked in the press for having been involved in the torture of prisoners in the Iraqi war. Clearly based on Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, the Langs are an odd couple to whom Adam serves as likeable performer of Ruth's deep intellectual insights.

     With the attacks in the press and television come new responsibilities for The Ghost, as he is drafted to write a press release about the incidents, and, soon after, told to leave his hotel. Lang, in danger of being arrested if he returns to England (in a situation that Polanski must have devilishly relished in the script Lang is forced to remain in the USA, while Polanski continues to be trapped in France and other European countries) is trotted off to meet with US officials, while The Ghost broods over the entire change of events and particularly the increasing attentions of Ruth.

      Like any good story by Hitchcock—a mentor who Polanski revealed as far back as Rosemary's Baby—the already deteriorating situation grows even more murky when The Ghost discovers in his room, the former Ghost Writer's room as well, hidden photographs of Lang and other figures taken from their Cambridge University (Blair went to Oxford) college days, when he was involved in the theater. One date on these photographs stands out: Lang had met his wife some years before he claims he met her in his book. The name and address of another figure intrigues the writer, and a telephone number scrawled across this material turns out to belong to the man, a former aid, who has leaked the information about Lang's war crimes.

     Curious about the former Ghost Writer, The Ghost takes a bicycle trip around the island, uncovering an old man (Eli Wallach) who reveals the body was found too far away to have washed up from the ferry and reports that a woman living near the beach had seen flashlights on the night of his death. Mysteriously, she fell in her home soon after and remains in a coma.

     Although The Ghost may now be haunting the Langs, he is, strangely enough, completely innocent and therefore doomed to repeat the pattern of his predecessor. Worried about his absence, Ruth comes to bring him home, whereupon he tells her all that he has discovered. She, it is clear, is highly troubled by the news, and, after a long walk in the rain, returns home to crawl into The Ghost's bed.

     Determined to leave the house and his now demanding clients, The Ghost discovers that the car, loaned to him by the chauffeur, has been programmed to take someone via the ferry to a house in the mainland. The house turns out to belong to one of the figures in the pictures of Adam and his friends, Paul Emmett (icily played by Tim Wilkinson), who poses as a professor but, in actuality—we soon learn—works for the CIA. As The Ghost begins his return back to the island, he is chased by a car, and it is clear that he is nearly doomed, like the first Ghost Writer, to drown. He escapes by leaping from the ferry just as it pulls away.

     But again his innocence betrays him. He calls the mysterious telephone number once more, and Sidney Kroll (Timothy Hutton), the man behind Lang's downfall, answers, soon after rushing to the terminal hotel where The Ghost is hiding out. It is now apparent, he declares, that Lang has been a CIA operator, explaining why all Lang's political decisions have paralleled those of the US.

     It is suddenly clear that The Ghost is "in the gap," caught between both sides, even if those perimeters are not yet clear. Having now told both Ruth Lang and Kroll everything, The Ghost has little chance to survive.

     But the scriptwriters still have some tricks hidden away, as an angry Lang, returning by airplane, picks up the straying Ghost and lectures him for his stupidity. As they arrive back on the Vineyard, Lang is shot and killed by a purportedly angry father of a fallen soldier, while the other figures scatter in fear and horror. Although determined to erase himself from what remains, The Ghost has no choice, perhaps, but to finish what he started, and the film ends with Lang's memoir being published.

     Secretly invited to a book-launching party by Lang's former secretary, The Ghost hides in the crowd while Lang's wife champions her late husband. The Ghost has brought the original manuscript as a present to the woman who once so carefully locked it away each evening. After all, he muses, she had been so attentive to it, perhaps it should belong to her. Oh, it wasn't me, she demurs. They were afraid there might be some incriminating information in it, something about the "beginnings."

   

     Suddenly the truth becomes apparent in The Ghost's formerly confused mind. Escaping to another room, The Ghost takes the first lines of the early chapters—chapters which he edited out—piecing them together to reveal that it was Ruth, not Lang himself, who had joined the CIA early on. Her advice to her husband was informed by the Americans throughout Lang's life. Was this hidden puzzle Lang's secret attempt to redeem himself or an embedded admission?

     Despite all he now understands, The Ghost is still a fool, as he writes the phrases he has discovered on a piece of paper and passes it forward through the crowd to Ruth. She now knows that he knows. But surely it does not matter. The Ghost was dead before the story began. And this Ghost, it is apparent, living only in the shadows of others, was never, as Ruth taunted him, able to do anything of his own.

     As he exits the bookstore, manuscript still in hand, a car speeds forward. In a brilliant cinematographic decision, Polanski does not show the man being hit, but focuses the camera in the opposite direction as the pages of the manuscript, one by one, blow down the street, ensuring that that truth will never come to knowledge. As in Polanski's Chinatown—as in so many of his films—evil easily wins.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2010

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (May 2010) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

Corneliu Porumboiu | Politist, adj. (Police, adjective) / 2009

a matter of conscience

by Douglas Messerli

 

Corneliu Porumboiu (screenwriter and director) Politist, adj. (Police, adjective) / 2009

 

On the surface of Porumboiu's Police, adjective (meaning, literally, in one Romanian definition, "a novel or film about criminal happenings"), not much seems to occur, yet a great many stories get told in its "cracks," what the director refers to as its necessary silences.

     Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a policeman (the English language equivalent of Politist, adj.) in Vaslui, Romania, has been assigned a case in which a young stool pigeon (whom he refers to as the Squealer) has reported that a high school friend has provided him with hashish, a criminal act. Indeed, through shadowing the high school student, Cristi, he observes the boy sharing a cigarette with his friends, Alex and a girl several times between classes; the tested cigarettes prove positive for hashish. In short, the case is settled nearly before it has begun.


     Yet Cristi continues to follow the two boys in an attempt to find the source, whom he believes to be either the brother of the provider or the brother of the young girl, who travels out of the country frequently and has been involved in a drunken accident. Perhaps, as he begins to suspect, the real "criminal" is the Squealer himself.

     His superiors are understandably pressuring Cristi to finish up this small case by staging a sting against the three students, and hoping to get them to talk. Yet the crime for smoking drugs in Romania is three years or more in prison. Cristi, who has traveled to other European countries where small amounts of pot and hashish are not a criminal offense, is unwilling to ruin the life of a young boy because he has simply done a stupid thing. Besides, the government may change the law. It is a matter of conscience, he maintains, an act that would only bring him a lifetime of regret. In short, he is a moral man.

 


     This is not everyone's kind of movie. My movie-going companion felt it was boring and obvious. For in an attempt to uncover the "truth" about the matter, Cristi must do what he does every day: stand around waiting for things to "happen," for the three to gather, the girl to visit her friend, the father and mother to drive off to work and to return home each evening. For long periods in his film, the director focuses his camera on Cristi's body beside a pillar of white-sprayed concrete and attached yellow wood, alternating between this central figure and the gate of the house he watches. At other times we simply follow the policeman through the streets of this deteriorating small city. Indeed, the camera tracks him several times as he returns to his warren of an office and to his small home, which he shares with his newlywed wife, Anca, a school teacher. For seemingly endless minutes, we witness Cristi eating, hear his wife play an obnoxious song on her computer (after which the two discuss whether its lyrics are images or symbols), observe neighbors and their pets going in and out of a small grocery store, and suffer a secretary busily clacking away on her computer. In several instances these clearly represent acts of absurdity, but they also function in other ways.

     What struck me about this intense focus on the ordinary, in a film of straight-forward realism, was just how experimental and fresh those slow-moving scenes were. Porumboiu, in his beautiful camera positions and images, often posting the action just outside of the camera's range, creates a world of people and objects as rich as John Cage's musical silences. The crumbling sides of buildings, the crunch of stale bread, graffiti painted across a wall say more about the society in which Cristi functions than a police chase or exchange of gunfire might ever reveal. Major emotional events are caught in a single glance or a seemingly offhand remark such as that Anca makes: "I don't think things are working out between us."

     As A. O. Scott intelligently commented in his review of this film in The New York Times: "The more you look, the more you see: a movie about a marriage, about a career in crisis, about a society riven by unstated class antagonism and hobbled by ancient authoritarian habits."

          The biggest "action" occurs when Cristi desperately attempts to search out information on the families of the two boys and girl, trying to force his bureaucratic fellow workers to do the very research for which they were hired. Cristi is in a rush to uncover information before he is ordered to arrest.

  

     When the final showdown comes, it is, strangely, not in the form of a shouting match, but in a humiliating putdown with regard to the meaning of certain words. When Cristi refuses to order a sting, insisting it is an issue of conscience, the Chief of Police determinedly forces him to read the dictionary definitions of "conscience," "morality," "law," and "police," all of which, in his Romanian dictionary, seem to push away from the simple English-language definition of an individual's "faculty or power" of "feeling to do right or be good." For Police Chief Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) conscience is linked to the morality of laws enforced by the police, and is never open to personal exceptions. The decision for Cristi is whether he wants to remain a man or a policeman, part of an adjectival force as in a "police state" or an individual out of a job.

     The final scene reveals what we knew all along. Living in the world we have just witnessed, it is impossible not to have regrets.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2009

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (February 2010) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

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

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