Christian Tafdrup | En forelskelse (Awakening) / 2008

i know how you feel

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christian Tafdrup (screenwriter, from an idea by Jonatan Spang, and director) En forelskelse (Awakening) / 2008 [39 minutes]

 

Christian Tafdrup’s En forelskelse (Awakening) creates an even more difficult situation for a young man who, after discovering his sexuality, is quite ready to enjoy its new possibilities. That is primarily because the man who accidentally reveals the young teenage boy Carsten’s (Allan Hyde)

same-sex desires is his girlfriend’s father Stig (Lars Brygmann).

      From the evidence of the film’s narrative, you would never know that Carsten is not a happy heterosexual making out with his girlfriend Melissa (Jule Grundtvig Wester). In the first scene of the film the two high schoolers have just come from a costume party, he dressed as Aladdin, she, perversely, as Hitler—which may say something about her rather domineering relationship with him—Carsten presumably in the process and dropping her off at her home. Melissa suggests he meet her parents, but the boy is rather embarrassed for his outfit. The clearly open-minded Stig and Birgitte, however, not only invite him in, but encourage him to stay overnight with his girlfriend in her bed. High school sex is obviously not a problem with this liberal couple, but the fact that the kids can hear the parents in the next room having sex poses some uncomfortableness for the youths.

      The next morning, when Carsten rises early he encounters Stig, who serves him breakfast, and taking him into another room, offers him a sweater to wear over his open Aladdin blazer on his way home. Spotting two stuffed ducks in the room, Carsten asks about their presence whereupon Stig describes the joys of duck-hunting which he sees primarily as a way of communing with nature while enjoying some quiet time alone. But we sense something else going on between the two that we cannot quite explain, but which even Melissa perceives when she later suggests that his parents liked him and have invited him and her to their summer house.

       Melissa apparently has no desire to take up their offer, but Carsten clearly wants to get together with Stig again and subtly manipulates his girlfriend into perceiving that it might give them time to be together alone, without the pressures of their high school activities and friends.

        Once more Carsten is greeted with friendliness, and Stig invites anyone who wants to join him on a duck hunting foray the next morning. The women immediately bow out, but one can see that Stig is ready to take him up on the offer, until Melissa refuses for him. Yet that morning, the boy rises early and seeing Stig packing up the car, carefully removes himself from his girlfriend’s embrace to join the father. They journey pleasantly to the spot, not saying anything of great importance, Stig realizing as they park that he may have left his duck-call device back at the house, leaning over the boy to find it in the glove compartment; the very next instant he suddenly plants a kiss on Carsten’s cheek.

       Carsten sits stock-still without registering either protest or even amazement as Stig repeats the kiss, this time head on, before apologizing for the clearly inappropriate action. Still in some shock, the boy watches Stig take his gun and kit out of the car and begin to walk off. Finally, hetoo leaves the car to follow Melissa’s father, who suddenly realizing the consequences of what has just happened suggests they call off the hunt, as they return home with vague explanations to the women of why they have so immediately returned.        

     Nothing is said, but that night as Carsten helps Stig by drying the dishes he is washing, the boy whispers an apology, as if somehow he were the one who has behaved badly. And perhaps he has, in his own thinking, for not having responded to the man’s kisses in kind. What is clear is that he no way found the kisses objectionable.

        A few days later as the boy and his girlfriend sit together, she again repeats how much his parents like him and it is obvious that he, in turn, enjoys their company. At first, he concurs. But when she repeats it once more he briefly loses his temper, wondering why she need reiterate the fact. Surprised by his reaction, she pulls away, as he apologizes, wondering when, given her busy racquet-ball schedule, they can again share some time alone. She lists a schedule of activity that will keep them apart for several days.

 

        Knowing that she will not be home, the next day Carsten stands before her parent’s doorway. He is about to turn and leave when Stig finally appears. He asks the question he already knows about Melissa being home, but has another excuse ready by returning her father’s sweater. Stig invites him in, and the two begin a totally meaningless conversation about how the two teenagers make the perfect couple. Almost mid-sentence, Carsten breaks down into tears, expressing what perhaps he has never even carefully thought out, let alone previously spoken:

 

                     I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t understand.

 

    Stig hugs him close in an attempt to calm him, repeating that he knows what he feels. Inevitably, the two find their hands slipping down into each other’s pants, both attempting to salve their frustrations with a moment of grabbed love.

      Before they can continue, they hear the entry of Melissa and her mother returned home since the court was overbooked, Melissa’s racquetball contest cancelled. The men quickly tuck in their shirts and re-buckle their belts, as Carsten is led up to Melissa’s room.

      They kiss but she senses something is amiss when he breaks away, finally admitting that he has “met someone” who he’s “been with” presumably meaning sexually.

      Steeling herself, Melissa asks: “Who is she?”

      His answer is so honest that even the viewer is a bit startled: “It’s not a she. It’s a guy.”

     Furiously she commands him to leave, which he does, returning to the living room to whisper to Stig that he and his daughter have just broken up. Stig is obviously shaken by the news, but when Carsten asks him if the two of them might get together again, he responds as we know he would and must: they can never again meet, there is now no way to see one another ever. Stig opens the door, Carsten starting out, once more apologizing but nonetheless stating that it has been a pleasure to know him. Stig agrees that that knowing him has been special, briefly hugging him before the boy leaves the house forever.

      It is interesting that because Stig remains locked in a lie, living a closeted life, it is Carsten who must suffer. If Stig also suffers—as we know he does—it is of his own making. Carsten will quite obviously meet someone else. But the adults of the films of this genre, just as Stig, have little recourse to experience other such “precious moments” with the youths who in their straightforwardness have broken the chain of living hidden lives.

      We know nothing of Carsten’s home situation, yet we can assume that the elder male could not offer them anything more than the first kiss and other attendant sexual activities, serving merely as the sought-out agent of the younger boys’ successful coming out.

      This Danish film of 2008 is one of the most open and accepting films that explores how young boys sometimes need the help of an older mentor/lover to bring them into sexual realization, an issue not readily discussed in contemporary US cinema.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2021

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

Rachel Ward | The Big House /2000

dropping the soap

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rachel Ward (screenwriter and director) The Big House / 2000 [24 minutes]

 

Among a very long list of male prison love stories including William Dieterle’s 1928 masterwork Sex in Chains, Jean Genet’s Un chant d'amour (1950), Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), Harvey Hart’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1971), Wolfgang Peterson’s The Consequence (1977), Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978), Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s I Love You Phillip Morris (2009), Sebastián Muñoz’s The Prince (2019), Josza Anjembe’s Freed (2019), and Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom (2021)—these representing but a handful—Australian director Rachel Ward’s 2000 short The Big House is not insignificant and is visually much tougher. Filmed in the real Maitland Goal of Australia, the work dares to truly reveal the prison conditions and activities. A short, however, as both Anjembe’s film and Ward’s work are reveals the form as perhaps not the best medium for a subject in which the dominant motif is about serving what seems like an endless period of one’s life. Indeed, in both these works there is a sense that the prisoner about to be released might wish, given his love interest, to stay a while longer—which, in fact, is the theme of both Freed and Great Freedom.

     In Ward’s work new prisoner Sonny (Kick Gurry) is almost immediately saved by his own good looks and long-term prisoner Williams’ interest in him; Williams evidently has permission of the entry guards to pick his new roommates. And he has a reputation, apparently, of choosing well, given the general chaos that occurs when he passes with pretty boy Sonny the caged prisoners suddenly appear to behave like excited gorillas, hooting, masturbating, and showing off their bums. Ward creates a palpable tension by refusing to show Sonny to the audience until we finally catch a glimpse of him in Williams’ cell mirror.

 

    In his very first shower, Sonny is almost raped by four burly men headed by William’s competitor, Jacko, as he plays the game based on the long-held myth of dropping the soap in a prison shower, used here as a purposeful in-joke, if you can describe an actual attempt at rape as being something of humor.

     Williams not only picks his cellmates carefully, however, but protects them, saving their virginity for his own more gentle techniques which begin as a long massage and a night of cuddling before he fucks his new boys.

 

     Recognizing that he is better off under Williams’ mentorship—if you can describe it as that—than the brutal lust of Jacko, Sonny quickly comes to accept his situation, just as the young man did in The Prince. And gradually he not only grows to love his cellmate, if it can be described as  such, but extends his own form of protection by teaching his illiterate roomy how to read. Over his 9 months of imprisonment, indeed, the two form a kind of bond that might be described as love, Sonny in particular getting to know the man who has fathered his own son who may now be just a little younger than Sonny.

     If Ward smooths some of the prison violence over, there is still plenty of occasion for potential rape and Williams’ needed protection, and her vision of a prison is a lot more realistic that Hart’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, with its witty transvestite repartee or Requa and Ficarra’s comic prison love affair in I Love You Phillip Morris, and she wisely delimits the sexual longings that characterize the works by Genet or Peterson’s man/boy love affair of The Consequence. If Sonny develops a love for Williams, it is no deep affair of a lusting heart, but simply a respect and admiration for the man who fucks him in return for his protection, perhaps not so very different from Muñoz’s far more complex The Prince.

     After hugging his lover goodbye upon his release, Williams wastes no time at all in picking out an even younger boy, Shay, for his next cellmate, a boy that might indeed be the very same age of his son. We wonder if it might, in fact, be the boy whose photo he has kept so long on his wall. And when the newbie asks who the other boy is, Williams quickly tears up the photo Sonny has left behind.

     Ward’s work may be somewhat simplistic, but then it does more in its 24 minutes than some of the dozens of prison films do regarding male-on-male sex over hours.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

 

Alain Hain | Curious Thing / 2009

anorexia of the heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Mills (screenplay), Alain Hain (director) Curious Thing / 2009 [8 minutes]

 

This is a story about closeted gay boys and straight friends who nonetheless fall for one another. What to do, where to draw the lines, and how to resolve the conflicts that come into their relationships are the central issue in Alain Hain’s 8-minute film.  

     Jared (Danny Bernardy) is a closeted gay man who, as he himself puts it, is on the brink of coming out. He is currently dating a girl, Becky (Rebecca Pappa), who he truly likes and through whom he might imagine he might be able to retreat into a heteronormative life. That is until he meets straight boy Sam (Matthew Wilkas) to whom he is immediately attracted just as Sam is to him. 

     The two get on so wonderfully that even Becky perceives their relationship as threatening, arguing that Jared has been simply “leading her on.” What she doesn’t realize is that his attraction to Sam is just as startling to him as it is to Sam. It is not simply a physical response but some sort of inexplicable bonding as Jared describes it, a relationship that seems to suggest a normative possibility for the closeted young man that is somehow more tangible than his relationships with women.

      Hain bases this rather fascinating scenario on his interviews, over the course of three nights, with six gay men who talk about their close relationships, sexual and non-sexual, with straight men.

      What he reveals is that straight men and unsure gay men sometimes have a great deal in common their sexual identities, unsure of where they are with regard to their emotional base. The bonding and intimacy they feel with males sometimes trumps their desire for female company, and that often spills over to their sexual identities.

     Straight men, one of the interviewees argues, often like the attention of the gay gaze. And gays often form sexual crushes on straight men as an attempt to allay and perhaps simply to delay their own homosexual identification.

        What they all stress is their youth, their confusion about sex, and their inabilities to focus on issues of gender, what any psychoanalyst might be easily able to explain except that for youth actually going through that experience there is no explanation and given the societal mores, there is a great deal more of disapproval.

        This short work even posits the idea that the straight boy can grow jealous of the gay boy’s attempt to define himself as straight through dating women. The complexities of the feelings only reveals how flexible we might all be to sexual responses if only we had not been societally trained to delimit out sexual identities. And ultimately this short work brings up, once more, the possibility that many of us, male and female, are born with sexually ambiguous desires which are delimited by the normative among us, who demand we chose sexual paths that may or may not be suitable to our own youthful propensities.

         It’s not at all a “curious thing” that thousands of young gay men have at one time or another in their lives been seriously attracted to men who describe themselves as straight, and those straight men have been equally attracted to their gay or just “coming out” brethren. Throughout these pages I have perhaps too often drawn a line between the heterosexual and homosexual, when, in fact, that line is fairly often a tenuous link between boys and girls seeking out their sexual identities as young beings.

       More than we want to recognize, the feelings between the two “break through,” as one of the interviewed figures describes it, into sexual action, most often rejected in the aftermath. As he quite intelligently argues, “I think it’s one thing to be confused as a gay man coming out of the closet as opposed to a confusion of a straight man. One is a confusion that is actually starting to make sense, and the other one’s a confusion that you can’t really explain.”

       In the growing context of the basic fluidity of all sexual feelings, that lack of explanation, of course, has just begun to change. But it is uncertain how quickly our culture or any other may begin to actually accept that fluidity, to see that love is not something at all necessarily to do with gender, let alone that even gender itself is absolutely fluid.

      Meanwhile, movies such as Hain’s, written by Jason Mills, begin to poke holes in the theory of straight vs. gay, allowing us to begin to comprehend that sexuality is something we still know very little about or, to put it another way, is something we have never truly permitted ourselves to fully embrace and enjoy.

      Too often, as this film reveals, the so-called “straight” boy simply declares, after the fact, that “he just couldn’t,” meaning he can’t continue to explore what his desire—or his hormones—has led him to. That’s a rather remarkable statement when you carefully think about it since what the person is expressing is a sentiment saying that what he or she has been taught and learned through societal behavior has just cut off what the body is calling out for him or her to fulfill its needs—which, metaphorically speaking, represents a kind of anorexia of the heart.

 

Los Angeles, February 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Andrew Haigh | All of Us Strangers / 2023

ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Haigh (screenwriter, based on Strangers by Taichi Yamada, and director) All of Us Strangers / 2023

 

I loved Andrew Haigh’s first gay film, Weekend of 2011 and very much appreciated his next two movies, 45 Years (2015) and Lean on Pete (2017), neither of which were LBGBQ oriented; so I very much looked forward to seeing his 2023 movie, All of Us Strangers, which along with his TV series Looking, brought him back to gay themes.

     In this new film, two men alone seem to inhabited the towers of a new London high rise, a tower block—not so very different from the isolated world in which the hero of Weekend lived. But here, instead of regular tenants or even friends who might possibly surround him, the central figure, Adam (Andrew Scott) has no one to console him in his more than morose condition. He meets, quite by accident, the only other renter in the empty towers, Harry (Paul Mescal) who recognizes Adam as a possible sexual friend who approaches him, a bottle of tequila in hand, to suggest they might get together, if for no other reason than to escape the utter emptiness of the new apartment buildings and, metaphorically, of course, the emptiness of both of their lives.

 

    Adam, although clearly interested, basically shuts him out, preferring instead, at this strange juncture of his life—and it is clear is a juncture, a long-awaited moment in which he has suddenly discovered himself—wherein in this utter loneliness he is ready to confront his childhood and his painful past.

      Although viewers might immediately recognize Adam is making a big mistake, the movie moves on to focus on this handsome young man’s attempt—why at this moment is never explained—to delve into his deep childhood trauma which emanates from the fact that at twelve years of age he experienced the death of both of his parents in a car accident. His father died immediately. After his mother suffered a long dying, the child Adam was at the time was sent off to live with his aunt, not evidently a totally pleasant experience.

     Throughout most of this film, Adam imaginatively, so we presume, revisits his parents, now almost their own age, returning to a world of the 1970s and 1980s to his truly loving young folks who, at first, readily greet him back into their lives, happy to have him return and explain what has happened in since their deaths—perhaps to even explain their own deaths and possible suffering of which they have no knowledge.

       The parents, amazingly, are a lovely 1970s couple, open to his emotional needs, and as time progresses even able to assimilate his announcement of his gay sexuality, his mother primarily worried about the loneliness it might result in, Adam assuring her things have changed. His father basically able to accept it even apologizes for any bullying his son must have suffered through his friends and his own attitudes.

        What Adam, in his attempt to explain how things have changed, doesn’t reveal is that he is indeed very lonely. He has not assimilated fully to the contemporary gay world available to him, and he is totally caught up with a past that could never have been.

        The movie, meanwhile, proceeds as if he is living in the contemporary world, as he finally meets up with Harry, joining him at a gay bar where they share drugs before joining one another in bed and developing a relationship. That relationship, however, seems rather one-sided, with Harry providing the friendship while Adam continues in his visits of his childhood home where his parents still reside (actually the childhood home of director Haigh), and at one point a kind of breakdown, which Harry attempts to resolve.

          The visits into the past suggest something different: a man obsessed with his difficult past that doesn’t permit him escape from it. Even his parents—particularly when he crawls into bed with them, a full adult still attempting to resolve his suffering through their deaths—insist that it is time he leaves them, arguing that he should return to the “Harry” guy whom they, as ghosts, encounter when Adam attempts to take Harry on one of his returns “home”—this time Adam

discovering the doors locked, the windows frosted over. But even then Harry, his living spectre, seems to catch a glimpse of the past to which Adam is committed. And when Adam communicates for the last time with his ghostly parents, they admit to having seen Harry and insist that their son attend to him instead of themselves and the past.

 

         Even Adam’s subconscious, in short, tries to tell him that he must return to the living, finally ridding himself of his ghosts. But we already suspect that he cannot. And we gradually realize his numerous sexual encounters with Harry are also imaginary.

         When he finally does settle with his own past, and visits Harry at his apartment, the smell of death is overpowering. As Adam enters the room he discovers his “imaginary” lover dead, the bottle of Tequila he had in had on the first night, some weeks ago, still in hand.

          He is now confronted with a new ghost, who tells him that the night they first met he desperately needed a friend, Adam perhaps finally realizing that he has failed him in the present, busy as he was with his own past.

         But hardly a beat goes on before Adam embraces his dead love, taking him back to his own room to gently assure him he will now never be alone. Clearly, Adam is used to living with dead folks, able to embrace them in a love which he can never properly direct to anyone living. Indeed, by film’s end we have to wonder whether Adam is himself a ghost.

         Haigh’s emotionally powerful film ultimately is not about human beings expressing their deep feelings of love, but about the dead, and how the living imagine they might possibly have provided them what they were missing. I can hardly imagine any LGBTQ person not confronting a dead parent in their attempt to once more explain their lives, to help their parents, their loved

ones understand how they came to be who they are and to reassure them that their choices were not only the right ones but the only choices they could have made. But most of us know that is pointless, a fantasy we cannot fully embrace.

        It is difficult, accordingly, to watch a human being who encounters even a living human being desperately needing love whom he rejects because they were too busy focusing on an exculpatory world of the past. This is Narcissus, looking into the frozen rivers of ice, not a welcoming being who pretends to invite the lover into his dark bed. Ghosts are not a comfort for those who need love in order to survive.

       And in that sense, I was not comforted by the “strangers” of Haigh’s new movie. As film critic Donald Melville Wingrove commented, despite its excellent reception, “I was underwhelmed by this film”

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).