Pascal Mörchen | Semicolon / 2017

adding to the list

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pascal Mörchen (screenwriter and director) Semicolon / 2017 [26 minutes]

 

Like many a young high school student, Timo (Christoph Stuhlmann) is having a difficult time dealing with his gay sexuality while hanging out with his straight friends. He is in love with one of his friends, Chris (Philipp Wieser), but has been busy on the internet with a new contact named “Mr. Boy.”

 

    Although he’s popular with his group of friends, even they notice he is preoccupied with his cellphone and vague about questions they put to him. In particular, his female friend Sowie (Lisa Brockhoff) has been noticing his distraction from their group gatherings.

     When suddenly a fellow student, Lars (Lukas Prangenberg) announces to the entire class that he is gay, Timo feels that perhaps he too can come out. He first confesses that he’s gay to Sowie, and when his friends begin talking about Lars’ strange public “coming out,” Timo finally gets up the nerve to tell the group that he too is gay, adding it somewhat like a “semicolon,” linking himself to the boy he barely knows.

      Their reaction is not at all what he might have expected, particularly since Chris describes him as a fag and demeans the very idea while the others basically remain quiet. Timo races from the room with tears rolling down his eyes. By the time he reaches home, his mother calls him in, having observed some of their comments on his internet which he has forgotten to turn off. She too is highly distressed by the idea that her son is gay and by the time Timo’s father returns home and she reports the news, the boy can hear from his bedroom his father insisting that his son cannot be gay. No son of a heterosexual father can be gay, evidently, in the world of LGBTQ movies.

     Even worse, someone on the internet threatens to tell the entire class of his sexuality if he doesn’t meet him in the park at 9 pm. Why Timo does so is not explained. Perhaps he is simply curious or maybe he hopes it’s simply a hoax.  Surely he’s simply afraid to become an outcast from the entire world he once was part of. But whoever he meets in the park doesn’t give him the opportunity for discussion, instead slugging him in the nose and bloodying his face. 

    Seeing no way out and feeling particularly distraught by Chris’ rejection, like many a young male and female in his situation, Timo gathers together a large number of pills, goes to a park near a church nearby and, one by one, begins to swallow them down.

      Fortunately, this movie does not include yet another gay suicide of a queer victim, but its solution represents a far too easy denouement as Chris suddenly comes bicycling by, drops his bike and runs over to pull the pills out of Timo’s hands, admitting that he loves him, that he was the mysterious “Mr. Boy.” Timo responds in kind as the two kiss and all ends well as the credits roll.

    This short movie by German director Pascal Mörchen offers no solution for when this poor boy must return home to his homophobic parents, so his “coming out” still offers little dramatic solace. And what about the violent stalker? Surely by the morning he and perhaps Chris as well will become the school’s new version of Lars. And what, we can only ask, ever became of Lars? Why didn’t we learn more about him if his situation is so similar to the movie’s hero? Perhaps this film has left itself with far too many semicolons, additions to the syntax of the plot which it hasn’t fully explored. There is something dangerous, perhaps, in simply adding names and issues to a list. We need to comprehend each individual and situation separately, rather than as a collective.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Albert Lamorisse | Crin-Blanc (White Mane) / 1953

children, listen up!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albert Lamorisse (original scenario, adapted by Denys Colomb de Daunant with commentary by Lamorisse [in French] and James Agee [in English]), Albert Lamorisse (director) Crin-Blanc (White Mane) / 1953

 

Described most often as a children’s film, and certainly a film I would encourage any child to see, Albert Lamorisse’s gentle fable Crin-Blanc (White Mane) is a far deeper and darker work beyond its surface grace and beauty.

      A young fishing boy living near the marshes of Camargue, France where bands of wild horses run free, observes a group of local ranchers attempting to capture some of the horses, in particular a beautiful stallion, the Crin-Blanc of White Mane of the film’s title. The boy, Folco (Alain Emery), living with his grandfather, observes in silence as the magnificent horse outraces their attempts to capture him, although they eventually do so by entrapping him on all sides and bringing him into their corral with other horses.

      But soon after the stallion escapes, and the intensely interested boy, dressed all in white, like the stallion’s mane, watches again as the ranchers try to capture the beast.

      When the ranchers near his grandfather’s humble shack, he asks them if he has the white horse. The tease him with a reply of “Yes,” adding “but first you have to catch him, but your fish will grow wings before you can manage that.”

     Their dismissal hardly effects the young boy who, we observe, loves animals, and now dreams of being able to stroke and groom the grand white horse.

       At one point the boy encounters the horse again, and gets quite near him before Crin-Blanc races off. The boy gets near once more and attempts to rope him, the stallion galloping off with the boy still at the other end of the rope, dragging him for a long while through the marshes unto a dry beach where the boy is left, having almost been killed in the process. Yet here White Mane stops and approaches the boy, nuzzling him back to life, and allowing the boy to stroke him, as if in reward for the child’s valiant efforts.

 

     The boy rides the horse for a short while until seeing a wild hare which will provide dinner jumps off the horse in chase of the rabbit. The moment Crin-Blanc again hears the hooves the rancher’s horses he is off.

      Once again the horse is captured by the ranchers. In his absence he has been replaced as the lead of the pack by another horse. The two engage in a long, terrifying dual for dominance in which they brutally kick, bite, and stomp at one another, the white maned stallion losing the battle before he again escapes, returning to the boy, who washes and mends his damaged hoof and feeds him.

 

      This time the ranchers, from a distance can see that boy has captured the horse, but nonetheless race toward him determined to make the horse their own. Crin-Blanc speeds away, hiding in the marsh weeds. In order to force him out, the adults set a fire in the brush. Seeing the smoke from far off, Folco rushes to the distant bushes, jumping upon the horses back and leading him out of the fires as the ranchers chase them over beaches of a nearby river.

        With Folco on his back, White Mane rides into the sea, the men yelling for the boy and his horse to return to shore. The film ends as the narrator states that White Mane took Folco to an island where horses and children can be friends forever.

        Certainly, children can interpret than as a storied wonderland, but realize given the final imagines of the boy’s head bobbing in the deep waters that the voyage will mean their literal death.

 

       In the end I share the sentiments of the Washington Post critic of the day, Philip Kennicot, that, as Stephen Sondheim might have put it, “children will listen” to a much darker message embedded in this movie: “A boy and his horse are hunted down by adult ranchers — while a narrator makes vague promises of a better world to come. The beautiful imagery of [the film] is deployed in support of a moral system — a blunt promise of rewards for good behavior — not much more sophisticated than that of Santa and the Easter Bunny. Ah, the time-honored tradition of adults indoctrinating kids in a world-view that will lead only to bitter disappointment, unless the kids refuse to grow up.”

      Yet, there are even deeper messages in this film that won’t be obvious to most adults, but will to the children “who listen.” Folco is in love with a beast with whom he should not be, and in the process he has become an outsider to the dominant and most certainly heterosexual normative society surrounding him. The gentle love he has for an animal might as well be for another of his own species, male or female, who is unaccepted by normative society. This is not gay film specifically, but it certainly is a queer one, the boy loving something he’s not permitted to, and punished for that love, ostracized, bullied, even made subject to possible death for his innate love.

      Horses have often represented alternate sexual possibilities for young women, usually connecting them to the lesbian world. But so too have they been connected to young males such as in this film and the later Equus (1977), wherein a young boy associates a beautiful man to whom he was attracted and the horse he rode, turning all horses in his mind into god-like beings who can see his sexual attraction to them and, subconsciously, to the men who ride them. Here, White Mane stands for an alternate world to the macho possibilities that the youth must face which include the taming and controlling of all sexual passions, just as in Equus or in an even later film, Carroll Ballard’s Black Stallion (1979). Crin-Blanc represents a kind of uncontrollable passion, a love that is not part of the heteronormative world in which the boy exists. Obviously, I am an adult pruriently reading into an children’s fable.

      A child doesn’t to be told or even possibly comprehend this, he feels it through his body, his heart, his inner essence. No need to analyze this young man’s love of the white-maned horse and the free male world he represents. But children understand when one desperately needs something they’re told that they cannot possibly ever have. Love expresses itself in many guises. Just ask Zeus and all the other Greek gods. Even a balloon can serve as an object of outsider love—although I won’t go there, at least in this essay. Let us just say that Lamorisse’s children’s fables mean something to adults because of the magic relationship to the world that as a child is so intense to be almost sexual that they have lost. Even Martin, the psychologist of Equus knew that if he explained it to the boy, it would be tragically gone from his life forever.

      This film won the Palme d’Or for a short film, and Lamorisse’s short of three years later, The Red Balloon (1956) was awarded the Palme d'Or du court métrage as well as the prize for Best Screenwriting from Academy Awards in 1957. The director when on to make 3 feature films and 3 documentaries. Working on a fourth documentary in Iran, Le Vent des amoureux (The Lovers' Wind) he died in a helicopter crash in 1978 at the age of 48.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

Pradipta Ray | Guy Next Door / 2015

when a gay ghost gets horny

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pradipta Ray (screenwriter and director) Guy Next Door / 2015 [9 minutes]

 

Indian director Pradipta Ray’s 2015 short film Guy Next Door is rather a meaningless ghost story in which evidently through the help of the internet the virtual becomes the actual, a least for a few moments, Grindr-like monikers such as “Guy Next Door” suddenly appearing at the door willing and ready for sex.

 

     Ray might have been able to take this trope and develop into a whole series of hunk-like figures called up through the click of the keyboard. Certainly, that what seems to happen to the lazy hero of this film Aditya (Aditya Joshi) who lays on the floor reading a book and drinking a beer when his computer calls out to him. Finally getting enough energy to check it out, he finds that the “Guy Next Door,” after evidently months of on-line chatter before a long silence (had he “ghosted” is correspondent), is ready to come or “cum” immediately, and appears at Aditya’s door in seconds after making his request. All Aditya had to do was close his eyes and count to ten.

       Aditya—hardly what you might describe as a handsome man—is delighted with his hairy-chested guest with dark glasses which he refuses to remove. For me the chucky guy also leaves something to be desired, but Aditya seems overjoyed and he quickly texts his friend that he’s found a “hottie.”

       They do indeed seem to have intense sex, with Aditya having his next-door friend’s hand print planted, like a Xeroxed hickey on his chest. We see, however, only the shadow of all this.

        And before we know it, the couple are through, the visitor visiting the bathroom. Aditya is overjoyed, particularly when it appears from new messages on his computer that the “guy next door” is ready for a second round. Even he is amazed by his fortitude and goes to the bathroom to tell him so; but there is no one there. No one in the bedroom. No one in his kitchen. Where has his phantom lover gone to?

        The hand-print is still there, so it couldn’t have been merely his imagination, but…. Don’t worry, Ray provides no answers. Virtual or real, Aditya has certainly enjoyed his Sunday afternoon.

        Now if only the couple had both been beautiful, and the camera had politely focused on their sexual activities. This could have been the start of something big, with the mysterious interloper popping up and over whenever either of them got an urge. Or maybe other computer monikers knocking at Aditya’s door, just itching to enjoy what he had to offer. A new ghost popping in for pleasure every week. With chance of AIDS, Covid or any other disease, it’s sure to be a hit!

         As it is, the artifact upon the screen of my computer had very little to offer.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Mau Couti | Tunel Russo (Russian Tunnel) / 2008

a kiss in the dark

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mau Couti (screenwriter and director) Tunel Russo (Russian Tunnel) / 2008 [19 minutes]

 

An a18-year-old boy (Renan Fragale) returns home disoriented and perhaps a little inebriated at 5:30 in the morning to be interrogated by his mother (Suzana Saldanha) who accuses him of all sorts of things such as “drinking pot,” becoming a drug addict, and his bad behavior in general. He has to be in school the next day, his father insisting that he study to get into law-school.

     Growing more and more hysterical as her son refuses to explain his behavior, the mother turns to her favorite drug, whiskey, attempting to get him to explain himself. He refuses, insisting that she doesn’t want to hear what he might say, which only further excites her, now realizing that there is something he might tell her. 

     Our suspicions seem to be confirmed in the next scene where we see him in bed with his lover (the writer and director of this work, Mau Couti) where the two make love and smoke a joint. So, we might reason, this Brazilian short film is going to be yet another “coming out” work.

   The boy’s slightly older lover attempts to convince him to move in with him, but the younger man argues that even though they have been together for around two years both have had other lovers and he wants to continue to explore the gay world before settling down. Besides, he reminds his elder friend that he hasn’t exactly been “faithful,” and that perhaps monogamy is not what either of them truly seek. 

       The other continues to pressure him, while the 18-year-old pleads with him to stop pressuring him just as had his mother. The last time we spoke about this if you remember—mentioning it almost as if it were just another event—we had a fight which didn’t end well.

       The remainder of the film, in fact, is about that event, not at all what we might have imagined.

The two young men leave a bar, and as the one goes up briefly to talk with the doorman, the younger turns to another boy, making the elder jealous. A physical fight ensures, perhaps since the character played by Couti is quite drunk, and the younger boy walks off after the doorman breaks it up.

       Couti’s character runs to catch up with him, trying to get him to stop, and finally reminding the boy that he loves him with a deep long kiss. The two continue in their public display of affection which is suddenly broken up by the appearance of two policemen. And we quickly realize that this is not at all a story about coming out or even parents, but violent homophobia.

       Although it is not illegal to be kissing on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, these to policemen mock them and challenge their behavior, the younger one simply arguing that they are on their way. But the older boy, because of his drunkenness begins to argue that what they were doing is not illegal and their intrusion is unwelcome.

        Things become more problematic as they continue to mock him, spit on him, and finally attempt to constrain him. Soon they become even more threatening, one of them (Rick Yates) pulling out a gun and suggesting that it is time to take the elder into the Russian Tunnel, he will probably even like it. Both young men are now terrified, not even comprehending what the Russian Tunnel might be, but it soon becomes apparent when the cop demands he pull down his pants.

 

        The older boy demands they stop as the other policeman (Alexandre Hulkinho) holds his friend, both presuming that the first policeman is getting ready to fuck him. But soon they realize it is even worse, as he pulls out his gun, empties all but one of its chambers and rolls the chamber as in Russian roulette. He then proceeds to stick the barrel into the boy’s ass. As the young man pleads with him, suggesting that he probably has too small of a cock to fuck him in reality, hoping, of course, to shift the situation from possible murder simply to rape.

         But the policeman is not to be stopped, pulling the trigger which fortunately does not have the bullet in the chamber.

         Suddenly the younger boy grabs the watching policeman’s gun and puts it to the second policeman’s head insisting he will shoot if they both don’t stop and let them go. When the other, calling his bluff, begins to roll the chamber yet again, the 18-year-old shoots the second policeman in the head, killing him.

         The major attacker immediately goes down to see if he can help his friend, while the boy grabs the first policeman’s gun, sticks it into his mouth, and demands he suck it like a cock. Meanwhile, the younger boy’s friend is still on the ground in complete shock, crying and muttering, and when the younger turns to see how he is, the policeman attempts to escape, the boy immediately pulling the trigger which this time carries the bullet into his mouth, killing him.

         The boys stagger away, stunned by the events and wondering what they have done, as we in the audience are appalled. It’s clearly after that terrible night that the boy has returned home to his mother. And we now realize the horror of it all.

         This is a powerful short LGBTQ film, one of the best of the decade. And it’s clear that these two gay boys, given the violent and torturous situation, perhaps had no other choices in order to survive. But the lack of consequences and the nonchalant attitude the couple expresses in the second scene of the movie seem inconsistent with the emotional turmoil through which they and the audience have just been put.

         Although there might be no obvious connection between these two boys and the deaths of the policeman, investigators might surely have connected it to the nearby gay club, and questions, if nothing else, might have been asked.

         At one point during her interview, moreover, the 18-year-old has promised to explain his difficulties to his mother the next day. Obviously, he cannot ever come out to her now, or at least can never tell his parents what has happened to him and his lover. And these inconsistencies in the film’s tone weaken what otherwise is a remarkably horrifying work. But still Russian Tunnel is among the best works of the first decade.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Edmund Goulding | Dark Victory / 1939

directing details

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casey Robinson (screenplay, based on the stage play by George Emerson Brewer, Jr. and Bertram Bloch), Edmund Goulding (director) Dark Victory / 1939

 

Every time I write a review of a film by Edmund Goulding I fear, given my own cinematic predilections and theatrical tastes that I will not do his works justice. For Goulding did superb melodramas long before the 1950s works of Nicolas Ray and Douglas Sirk would again make that genre popular. And even when he wasn’t doing melodrama, Goulding’s plots and characters were often so over-dramatized that today they seem as absolutely unbelievable as the kind of pop epic productions that appeal to younger film-going audiences today.

       Yet, there is something so well-crafted about Goulding’s careful direction and his attentiveness to his stars that, as The New York Times critic Fred Nugent wrote of Goulding’s 1939 film, Dark Victory:

 

 “A completely cynical appraisal would dismiss it all as emotional flim-flam, a heartless play upon tender hearts by a playwright and company well versed in the dramatic uses of going blind and improvising on Camille. But it is impossible to be that cynical about it. The mood is too poignant, the performances too honest, the craftsmanship too expert.”

 

     Of course, some of that craftsmanship is due to the fine acting of Bette Davis as the suffering socialite Judith Traherne, the aw-shucks humility of her gentle stable-hand, Michael O’Leary (Humphrey Bogart), the gallant concerns of her doctor and soon-to-be lover, Dr. Frederick Steele (George Brent), and her deep-friend secretary Ann King (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who was hired to do all the weeping for her employer’s incurable brain disease.

     The bisexual, multi-talented director-composer-writer-singer-performer Goulding was already known at the time of Dark Victory as a “woman’s director,” a kind of sexist dig that hinted that gay-oriented directors such as George Cukor, Mitchell Leisen, and others were better with women because they could spiritually sympathize with them. Cukor and Goulding were equally known for their house-based orgies (Cukor’s were boy-only affairs, while Goulding’s were sexually mixed).

     And by the time of Davis’ award-nominated performance, the director had already helped establish the careers of Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo (who both performed in his Grand Hotel), and had worked well also with Nancy Carroll, Fay Bainter, and Gloria Swanson. But, of course, that label—which seriously delimited Goulding’s career—ignored all of his wonderful male-centered characters, including in this work, Bogart, and in other films, Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, and, later, Tyrone Powers and Robert Young.

      Ronald Reagan, a quite inept drunk in Dark Victory, hated him, as did most of the major studio directors who, between films, had to cover for sexual innuendos directed against him. Also an alcoholic, Goulding didn’t make it easy in the period of intense prurient attention to the film industry. Throughout the making of Dark Victory, moreover, Davis was having an affair with her leading man, Brent. The film was made in the same year, one must remember, when Clark Gable got Cukor fired from directing Gone with the Wind, some say because Cukor knew Gable’s former career as a gay hustler.  

     Much like her role in William Wyler’s Jezebel, Davis gets the opportunity in this work to play what she does best: a strong-headed, fool-hardy sensualist, who redeems herself in the end with noble deeds and an acceptance of her fate. But Goulding—far more interested in the details of character then in cinematography—often rewrote his scripts, in this case adding the sympathetic character played by Fitzgerald.

     Since I’ve never read the original play by George Emerson Brewer, Jr. and Bertram Bloch (a work that lasted for 51 performances with Tallulah Bankhead in 1934), I can’t truly know, for example, who actually wrote the lines, as the doctor tests Traherne for knee coordination taps, when the Judith replies that she always giggles during these tests, allowing Davis to let out a few bars of her always infectious laugh. Or, when he asks her to take off her coat, and she is forced to reply that it is actually her dress. After her brain operation, the same figure asks whether the doctor has found anything there that might suggest she could live a more sensible life. These small and almost meaningless details add nothing to the story but help immensely to create a real figure behind its melodramatic events, and somehow they seem unlikely to have been spoken on stage.

      Many of the quips of the script, moreover, help catapult the Davis figure from a frightened horse-loving spoiled child into the kind of figure who she would later play in films like the wittily evil All About Eve:

 

               Judith: Confidentially, darling, this is more than a hangover.

 

And later as she drinks down glass after glass of her favorite aperitif:

 

               Judith: I think I'll have a large order of prognosis negative!

 

These minor character details and scripted witticisms all help to make Goulding’s Dark Victory a far deeper film than simply a story about a woman bravely standing up to her own eminent death. Davis plays Judith with a large palette of emotions: imperial dismissals, sardonicism, true black humor, and real pathos that demonstrate her acting chops and helps elevate this film from a simple melodrama to a truly moving study in the intellectual development of a young, vivacious woman, who is saved by the very thing that kills her.

      Despite the wonderful biography by Matthew Kennedy, Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory, it is time for more revaluations of this fascinating film director, who in retrospect made this film a masterpiece.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2017).