Dimitris Georgiev | So Close Away / 2020

 love where you least expect it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mariy Rosen and Dimitris Georgiev (screenplay), Dimitris Georgiev (director) So Close Away / 2020 (30 minutes)

 

In this Bulgarian film, two prisoners escape from the Sofia Central Prison, one of them is a hardened criminal, Victor Stefanov (Dimitar Ivanov), the other his cell-mate, Theodor Panaytov (Stoyan Doychey), the latter hardly believing in their quick escape, mostly achieved through their intense shouting as the run for they lives. A car awaits them, but is speeding away almost before Theodor can get inside. In this world, just like the prison, we quickly realize there is no forgiveness.

     We quickly learn from the news media that Victor is a habitual offender with a 34-year sentence for kidnapping, rape, and double murder. Theodor has been sentenced for 26 years for murder and attempted murder. These are not the usual heroes of a gay story. Yet we almost immediately feel an attraction to Theodor, who obviously feels confused, “spooked and crooked” in the entire process of the escape.

       They race to a cabin, which was clearly been pre-arranged through the friend, “The Gipsy” (Borislav Chouchkov), a cold place in which there is only one blanket, Theodor complaining of the thieves who might have stolen the others. He comments the desperateness of the petty criminals, wondering “Do they eat them the blankets or steal them?” In the darkness, he suggests they share, cuddling up, fully clothed, with his prison buddy.

 

      In a sudden flash into the past, we now recognize that one of Theodor’s crimes was a murder of another gay man who attempted to have sex with him, terribly ironic since we now see his complete sexual involvement with this prison companion. We realize that the homophobic past suffered by Theodor has radically changed in prison, that he is now desperately in love with the violent Victor. The situation has obviously radical changed through prison-life itself. And, although Georgiev’s powerful film doesn’t openly express that difference, it is this short cinema’s central focus.

       The appearance the next morning of a man (Petko Kameov) and his son gives rise to an entirely new perception of this odd couple. Although it appears that the man has arrived to help in their continued escape, the very fact that his young son seems to recognize them forces Victor to immediately demand that they reject their help and move on, with a subtle possibility of otherwise having to kill them as he insists Theodor move on without looking back. “Don’t turn around,” he insists of his naïve prison companion, “the kid recognized us.”

       A tire failure of the car in which they are attempting to escape reveals the further ridiculous inability and total innocence of Theodor, who can’t even imagine how they might continue on their voyage, while the far more desperate and crueler Victor quickly fixes their flat tire. Clearly they have agreed upon Victor’s plan, which has not yet been revealed to us.

       So after, they visit a friend of Victor’s, Borislav or “Bobby” (Anthony Penev), whose wife is not at all pleased by their sudden arrival and overtaking of their apartment. To Theodor’s dismay, she insists that her husband immediately kick them out. She openly demands that they leave, but recognizing that he has laid out a gun on the table, she cannot continue in her demands, particularly given that fact that her husband evidently owes something to her criminally engage husband, financial or otherwise. The far more innocent Theodor, we now begin to realize, has no knowledge of his lover’s control over others, and suffers deeply, particularly when he spies his friend fucking Bobby’s wife.

 

    From the TV reports we discover that Victor had been previously imprisoned for assault and robbery of older people in Sofia. He is not at all a nice man, and clearly did not react as Theodor has in a moment of passionate rejection of sexual activity, even if it is hard to forgive Theodor for his homophobic acts. We now recognize that, inexplicably, Theodor has gone along in the prison escape simply out of his love of his prison mate.

     Meanwhile, the “Gipsy,” going about his life, seems totally unafraid of Victor and his previous connection to him. Besides, he’s not alone. He has what he believes is his “protection.” Theodor’s father speaks on TV about how he let his son down, not being there for long periods. There is no logic in this world of guilt and insinuation which doesn’t want to deal full with the real causes of criminal behavior and murder, and no distinctions are made between the two criminals. Theodor’s father mistakenly claims his own guilt as being: “I wasn’t at home…a lot…and so…you lose your child.” In this culture you can’t discuss your own or cultural values which might lead to a child’s dissociation and violence. The crime becomes personal rather than cultural.

     Victor soon makes clear that he has only let Theo join him out of pity, and that his real goal is to get revenge of “the gipsy.” There is no love there to be found, despite Theodor’s desires. In desperation Theo contacts his father who helps him escape to another country.

      In the meantime, Victor has reconnected with “the Gipsy,” and apparently, in a piss break after which he still might attempt to fuck him, is shot, killing him, while his Gipsy is also shot and killed—by whom is not certain, perhaps by Theodor himself.

      We flashback to a scene when Theodor is first fucked by Victor, an evidently quite pleasurable experience.  

       In the final sequence we see Theo, having arrived evidently in Italy sitting at the edge of the Tivoli Fountain, pulling out a sandwich packed into his backpack, and eating it as a romantic song is sung. Through love, even if it his violent, he has escaped into a new life.

        This short film is a wonderful contribution to the LGBTQ community from where you also may least expect in the form of a prison escape drama from Bulgaria.

 

Los Angeles, March 4, 2024

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (March 2024).

Andrei Tarkvosky | Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan's Childhood) / 1962

the star at the bottom of the well

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vladimir Bogomolov, Andrei Konchalovsky, Mikhail Papava, and Andrei Tarkovsky (screenplay, based on a story by Vladimir Bogomolov), Andrei Tarkovsky (director) Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan's Childhood) / 1962

 

In one of the most astounding film directorial debuts since Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Andrei Tarkovsky startled the cinematic world with his first feature film, Ivan's Childhood, which won the 1962 Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival.

     As critics have pointed out, in this film we can already see many of the elements of Tarkovsky's later works: a detailed attention to nature, long focuses on isolate elements of a scene which generate a feeling of abstraction, and scenarios suffused with visual images that generate emotional and psychological reactions drawing the viewer into the frame or—as Bazin might argue—pushing the film from the screen into the real world.

     From the very first frame of this movie we already recognize its young hero as a ghost, a figure of another time, who has lost his way—along with his soul and sanity—in a cruel world from which he can no longer escape. Only in his fleeting dreams, or brief pauses to catch his breath in his run from German territory, does Ivan (soulfully played by Nikolai Burlyayev) get any respite from the realities of war and hate.

     One of the earliest flashbacks in a film that one might describe as one long rear-ended telescopic view into a series of fragmented worlds, is a scene where Ivan and his mother stare down a well. The light emanating from the bottom, clearly the reflection of the sun, they concur, which becomes a star at the bottom of the well. Despite the dark terror of the deep waters for Ivan, whom we witness in the opening shot trekking through the swampy waters of the Dnepr, water represents a living force, almost his natural element. At several points in his memories, Ivan is seen drinking from a bucket borne by his mother. Regularly the child calmly endures pouring rainfall. When he is finally brought to Lt. Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov) by Russian soldiers, Ivan's face is almost a shrine to moisture, he himself having been transformed into something close to a star at the bottom of a well, a face shining through the water.

 

    Galtsev is about to dismiss the urchin, but with a determined insolence, Ivan insists that he call Headquarters, Number 51, and report that he has arrived. The man at the other end of the line, Lt-Colonel Gryaznov (Nikolai Grinko) demands that Galtsev give the boy a pencil and paper so that he can make his report. Galtsev orders hot water, tells the boy to strip, and helps to bathe him in a scene that  quickly becomes almost pedophilic, as it becomes quite clear the Lieutenant becomes psychologically and sexually engaged with the beautiful boy. The child, refusing food, finishes his report, chews a few bits of bread and falls asleep. Galtsev carefully tucks a cover around the child. Within just a few minutes he has clearly fallen in love with the waif.

     Like Billy Budd, Ivan is outwardly a sign of beauty and innocence, naturally drawing people to him; within, however, and unlike Billy, he has become a machine of hate.

    We soon discover how this monster was created: his mother and sister have been killed by the Germans, and Ivan, joining the partisans, saw his new friends trapped and murdered. He has also seen, so he declares, the Maly Trostenets extermination camp.

     In opposition to these realities, presented mostly in Ivan's dreams, are paradisical memories, a ride on the back of a truck filled with apples, which, falling to the beach are joyfully gobbled up by horses. His sister and others innocently play hide-and-seek; Ivan thrillingly races across the beach.

     Gryaznov and others try to convince Ivan to attend a military school away from the line of action, but he refuses, threatening to return to the partisans, and Galtsev and his soldiers are forced to take on the care and strategic use of the child.

     Planning a surprise bombing of the German camp, Captain Kholin, Lt. Galtsev, and Ivan slowly retrace Ivan's former path of escape, the men at one point leaving Ivan to go forward on his own, while they return, bringing with them two gruesomely hanged bodies of their men as they pass.

      Perhaps the worst thing about being at the front line is the intense silences. In the middle of the film, Kholin and the camp nurse, Masha, play out a game of sexual advancement and retreat within a frighteningly still beech woods, the very silence of that place hinting at the danger in their game. Now, the silence Kholin and Galtsev encounter as they quietly return to their bunkers represents the failure of Ivan's grenades to have exploded. Despite their denials, they know, and we suspect, Ivan has been caught.

     The last scene of Tarkovsky's painful love letter to a lost past and the boy that symbolizes that world takes place in Berlin at War's end. Together Galtsev and another of Ivan's former military friends peruse the scattered files of those caught and executed by the Germans. On the floor they miraculously discover Ivan's file, noting he has been hung. Like so many of Tarkovsky's beautifully scared heroes, Ivan is a victim of borders, being a child without a childhood, a man without manhood, an innocent filled with hate, a lovely being killed before he could come into full existence.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2010).

 

Atom Egoyan | Krapp's Last Tape / 2000

be again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett (text), Atom Egoyan (director) Krapp's Last Tape (part of the project Beckett on Film, presenting 19 Beckett texts on film, conceived my Michael Colgan) / 2000, DVD release 2002

 

Actor John Hurt's portrayal of Krapp in Beckett's 1958 play put to film is absolutely brilliant, despite he and director's Egoyan's small changes to Beckett's text. The realist setting of the play, with the spots of bright white light, gives a grand theatricality to Krapp's world, a world in which, under the light, he feels safe while being surrounded by darkness wherein, as Beckett himself described it, "Old Nick" or death awaits.  On his sixty-ninth birthday Krapp, yet again, forces himself to interact with a younger incarnation.

     Krapp clearly has a fixation with his former selves. For years he has recorded tapes describing his life's events, most of them quite meaningless, but some of them of great poetry and sensibility. The tape Krapp chooses on this particular rainy night, is "Box 3, Spool 5," the day Krapp turned 39.

     Yet Egoyan reveals that what leads up to his playing the tape is as important in some senses as what is actually on the tape itself. The ritualistic acts, Krapp's continual checking of the time, his strange way of eating a banana—he puts the entire banana into his mouth holding it there for a while before biting it off, clearly a bow to the fruit's sexual suggestions—and several of his other actions, including his nearly falling on the banana peel he has tossed into the dark, reveal him as a kind of eccentric fool—in short, the typical Beckett figure. As his name suggests, he is "full of shit."

     Hurt presents Krapp with a kind of valor despite his obvious distancing of himself from the human race. Clearly Krapp's mother has been a monster, living for years in a world of "vidiuity"—the condition of being or remaining a widow. The small things he describes are both comical and life-affirming: playing ball with a dog as his mother dies, awarding the ball to the dog as he hears of his mother's death; attending a vesper service as a child, falling off the pew.

     Krapp is an everyday man with romantic aspirations, or at least he was, it is apparent, at age 39, the time when we are all have arrived in the prime of life. Krapp at 39 is both a smug bore.

 

                Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that

                memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the

                howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the

                whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly

                to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done

                and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the

                miracle that . . . (hesitates) . . . for the fire that set it alight.

                What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going

                on all my life, namely—(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape

                forward, switches on again).

 

He is a man who will not regret any decision of his life, yet an individual who has amazingly come alive through the love of a woman whom he describes in a scene where the two lay in a small punt as it floats into shore through the reeds.

      The older Krapp, who realizes that his younger self could not imagine the loneliness and emptiness of the life ahead, has no patience at times with his past. His new tape, which he begins after impatiently winding the older tape ahead to escape his previous self's blindness, is filled with bitterness and anger for a failed life:

 

                Nothing to say, not a squeak. What's a year now? The sour cud and

                the iron stool. (Pause.) Reveled in the word spool. (With relish.)

                Spooool! Happiest moment of the past half million. (Pause.) Seventeen

                copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries

                beyond the seas. Getting known. (Pause.)

 

     He has failed, obviously, even in his writing career. Unlike his younger self, so unregretful of his past, the old Krapp is filled with the detritus of his life, all those materials left over from his disintegration. If the younger Krapp declares himself as only moving forward, the elder would "Be again!"

 

                Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the

                red-berried. (Pause.) Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning,

                in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. (Pause.)

                And so on. (Pause.) Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old

                misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you. (Pause.)

                Lie down across her.

 

      He gives up this, his last tape (or perhaps simply his latest) to listen again to his former self describing his sexual moment with the woman in the punt.

     Director Egoyan represents these last scenes, nearly twenty minutes in length, with a full shot, where the viewer cannot escape the shaft of reality penetrating the darkness around Krapp. Hurt so painfully suffers and loves his former self that one can almost hear his heart crack.

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2011

Both essays reprinted from Green Integer Blog (January 2011).

Neil Jordan | Not I / 2000

mouth on fire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett (text), Neil Jordan (director) Not I (part of the project Beckett on Film, presenting 19 Beckett texts on film, conceived my Michael Colgan) / 2000

 

Neil Jordan begins his short film Not I, based on the 1972 dramatic text by Samuel Beckett, with a view of a young woman (Julienne Moore) entering to sit upon a chair. Perhaps he just couldn’t resist showing off his actor, but this clearly works against Beckett’s instructions, wherein he writes:

 

                     Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8 feet

                     above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face

                     in shadow. Invisible microphone.

      The auditor, covered head to foot in a loose black djellaba, is missing from Jordan's film.

     From here on, however, Jordan follows the author’s suggestions, turning the rest of the work into a film of the mouth.

      The mouth—or the voice—is, in fact, the subject of this work, which concerns an older woman (seventy years of age, we later discover) whose parents, having died or disappeared shortly after her birth, was brought up without love and basic human communication. Throughout much of her life she has seldom spoke, grocery-shopping, for example, by bringing a black bag and a shopping list to the store, and quietly waiting until the clerk puts the articles into the bag.

     But suddenly, one April morning, upon hearing the larks she falls face-first into the grass and, accompanied by an interminable buzz she hears all about her, she begins to talk without stop. The speech she releases into the world seems to be often incomprehensible to her friends, but, despite the constant interruptions between words, the tumble of language she uses to describe herself in the third person, we do gradually come to comprehend her “story.” It is as if all the silence she has previously lived has been let loose as a roar of suffering, a suffering she has not previously felt. In fact, she has felt little, apparently, throughout her life, unable even by the end of her scree to identify herself as single entity. Like a character in a fiction, she describes herself as a figure “out there,” a “not I” with no inward being.

     One might read Beckett’s short work as a kind of statement of the writer’s art, the writer being a silent entity until he is forced, “once or twice a year,” to express himself, often without being properly comprehended. And when those words pour out or the mouth opens to speak, it cannot stop, swallowing up everything, including the self, in the buzz of a created reality.

      Moore credibly plays the interruptive mouth, but it is somewhat difficult to watch this mouth in action—despite the three different views the director presents—in such extreme proximity of the camera. In some ways, the busy lips almost become abstract, so focused is the camera upon them. In the theater, where an unspeaking Auditor also stands in the shadows, there is more to distract the audience, even if it is hidden in the shadows. While I was watching this DVD, the movie was appropriately accompanied by a buzzing, a saw in my neighbor’s apartment from their attempts at renovation.

     Although I like the theatricality of the moving lips, with the gasps, pursings, and poutings of them against the actor’s white teeth, I often felt the need to turn away briefly to relieve myself of the apparent pain they express.

 

Los Angeles, January 26, 2011 

 

Edwin Carewe | The Snowbird / 1916

call of the wild

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mary Rider and June Mathis (screenplay), Edwin Carewe (director) The Snowbird / 1916

 

Edwin Carewe’s The Snowbird of 1916 is a rather sophisticated feature film whose heroine is what today would be perceived as a feminist—despite her privileged and sometimes frivolous upbringing.

     The movie, in fact, begins with Lois Wheeler (Mabel Taliaferro) on the tennis court, frustrated by the futile efforts of her current courtier Bruce Mitchell (James Cruze) to properly play the game. As she jokes, next time she will bring her knitting so that he might engage is something in which he is more apt. 

 

    But the wealthy young man of high society, just on the verge of being a “sissy,” doesn’t easily give up in his attempts to win Lois’ favor. She easily pushes him away, however, as often as he makes his moves to overcome her. And in a scene soon after, as she pilots her speed boat over to friends for a get-together of her posh playmates, Bruce is confined to sitting out the voyage in terror of the speed, fearful that she will kill the both of them.

      Surprised that she has shown up with Bruce, the males all attempt to discover how he’s won her over, while the females question Lois. Later told that he has described himself as “a lion tamer,” she shoves him into a small fountain, embarrassing him front of his social set.

      Although, his attempt to marry her plays an important role, of far more importance to this basically heterosexual story are the financial woes of Lois’ father, John Wheeler (Warren Cook), who in order to remain solvent, involves Bruce in a financial deal, selling his extensive Canadian lumber land so that he might reinvest in a profit-making deal with a fellow trader who will no longer advance him money.

      The deal evidently pays off—the fact of which we discover only because he is, soon after, able to offer to buy the property back from Bruce. But the real matter lies in the problems of Wheeler to provide the deed for the property to Bruce. It appears that the copy of the agreement with the former owner, Corteau, held in the local Canadian Magistrate’s office has been burned up in a fire. Henri Corteau (Edwin Carewe), the son of the man who sold the property to Wheeler, also has a copy, but refuses to give it up, falsely claiming that he still owns the land on which he lives.

      When Lois refuses to marry Bruce, accordingly, the petulant wealthy boy claims that Wheeler has tricked him in the financial deal, threatening to send him to jail if he doesn’t convince his daughter to marry him.

      So begins the real focus of this movie which can’t truly be described as an LGBTQ work despite its hints of gender fluidity and obvious representations of female empowerment.

     When she hears of Bruce Mitchell’s demands, the strong-minded Lois packs up her bags and, without telling her father except through a letter, heads off to the Canadian wilds hoping to convince Corteau junior to give up the proof of her father’s ownership, thus freeing her of the terrible consequences of marriage to Bruce.

       Arriving in small Quebec frontier village of Chalet, she is immediately told of Corteau’s hatred of women and apprised of his intractability and outward violence. Observing him in the local saloon as he pretends to court the frontier female bartender is enough to convince her that is a true brute, and she perceives the only way she might gain entry to his cabin, a long dogsled ride out of the village, is to dress as a boy.

       Hiring the dogsled driver to take to Corteau’s cabin, she, now a boy, covers herself with snow, cries out for help, and pretends to be lost and near death, luring out the mean loner to discover “him.” The ruse works, and Corteau, pulling him into the cabin where the boy, when he finally comes to, claims he has been abandoned by his fellow lumberjacks. Inspecting his find, Corteau almost waxes romantic, as he declaims: “Like a wounded snowbird you have dropped from the sky to share my loneliness—here you’ll be safe to stay and be my boy!”

        It appears that this film is taking a very fascinating direction, as Corteau expects his boy to share in his daily chores, teaching him how to hitch up the dogs, forcing him out into the cold for water, and expecting his snowbird to help in kitchen duties—all activities from which the formerly spoiled girl was protected. The boy now resents Corteau’s demands and, after a few early protestations, finally refuses to continue to do his share of the work. As a consequence, Corteau takes out a whip and prepares to use it, just as his rough handling of Lois undoes her hidden hairdo, revealing the boy to be the woman she is. 

       From there on, alas, the movie moves toward true conventionality, as the two slowly fall in love, Corteau presenting her with is mother’s wedding dress. When Lois later discovers the deed and places it near her bosom, Corteau, discovering the document’s absence, is ready to cast her out, revealing his previous hatred of women as having to do with a terrible public scene in which a woman whom he loved publicly mocked him—a scene not so very different, in fact, from what Lois has done to Bruce. But eventually the two make up and continue, long before the Hays Code days, to live together, perhaps—as one intertitle suggests—giving way to “the primitive call.”

      Meanwhile, Wheeler, accompanied by Bruce, have followed on Lois’ trail, reaching Chalet and inquiring after her whereabouts. The dogsledder admits he has taken her to Corteau’s cabin, lying to Bruce, however, about Corteau’s reaction to discovering her, suggesting that the boy and Corteau had immediately begun kissing.

      That’s enough to set Bruce off, as he also hires the dogsledder’s services, and orders the town Magistrate to keep Wheeler locked up as he goes in search of his would-be wife. Finding her in the cabin, he demands she immediately leave with him. When she refuses, a battle between the two men ensues, with both of them ending up wounded by knives. By the time Lois escapes from the room into which she has been locked, she discovers, that although he is weak and in pain, Corteau has survived. Bruce has wandered back outside only to discover that his dogsledder, upon hearing the struggles between the two, has left him behind. And now Bruce has nowhere to turn but into the snow-covered wilds where eventually he falls from a butte and dies.

      Corteau tells Lois that she must hurry off to town with the document to save her father, and she hooks up the dogs and begins her voyage only to realize that her now-lover may be more seriously hurt than she imagined. Turning back, she rushes into his arms, staying in the cabin to nurse him back to health.

      Observing the return of the dogsledder without Bruce, the father makes use of his services to rush to the cabin, where the couple reveal their situation and his daughter awards him the deed. All is saved, and they return to “civilization” to marry. But almost immediately after, Corteau feels the call of the wild and the independent-minded Lois suggests they hurry back to the world they have left behind, proving herself to be a kind of frontier woman worthy of the truly educated and manly Corteau.

     Although most sources simply credit screenwriter Mary Rider for the script, film historians now argue that it was co-written by June Mathis, for whom it would have been one of her earliest works. Later, she became known as the discoverer and promoter of Rudolph Valentino, scripting his movies The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), and Blood and Sand (1922). It was Mathis who gathered up enough money to bail him out of jail after he was arrested for his bigamous marriage to Natacha Rambova without finalizing his Mexican divorce of Jean Acker. As Nita Naldo, who worked with her on Blood and Sand, reported, “She mother to Rudy, and my dear she worshiped him and he worshiped her.” Valentino himself observed to Louella Parsons, “She discovered me, anything I have accomplished I owe to her, to her judgment, to her advice and to her unfailing patience and confidence in me.”

     In the 1920s Mathis became one of the most powerful women in motion pictures after Mary Pickford and Norma Talmadge. She attempted (and failed) to save Erich von Stroheim’s 10-hour masterpiece Greed—editing it herself down to 6 hours—from the final 4 ½ hours cut by studio hacks. And it was Mathis’ determination to film the original Ben Hur in Italy, which proved disastrous for both the film and director Charles Brabin, replaced by Fred Niblo.

     Earlier in her career, Mathis performed in theater with the highly popular female impersonator Julian Eltinge.

     James Cruze, who here played the semi-villain Bruce, later directed several notable films, including The Covered Wagon (1923), Beggar on Horseback (1925), and I Cover the Waterfront (1933).

 

Los Angeles, June 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).