Vladimir Durán | Soy tan Feliz (I Am So Happy) / 2011

boundaries

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vladimir Durán (screenwriter and director) Soy tan Feliz (I Am So Happy) / 2011 [14 minutes]

 

The plot, what there is of it, is so very fragmentary in Columbian-born director’s I Am So Happy (a short filmed in Argentina) that it is difficult to actually determine the real relationship of the figures it portrays. The standard description of film, evidently released with the film itself, reads:

 

“Fragments of a Saturday winter day. The Vittenzein brothers are alone at their family house. Mateo stops by to pick up Bruno and Camilo and drive them to the country house where their mother awaits. A sudden break slam brings them into the intimacy of a waste land.”

     But this film obviously intimates more complex relationships. The first scene, in fact, concerns the handsome Mateo, accompanied by his cousin Bruno, in a unisex barber, where in a rather mysterious series of comments Mateo (Lautaro Noriega) asks whether or not Bruno (Iair Said) has ever used gel on his curly mop of hair. Bruno insists that he hasn’t except once, demonstrating how it changed his look. The question seems meaningless, but it also appears perhaps as a suggestion, a hint of the possibility of improving his looks. Even the barber picks up on the comment, asking whether Mateo wants to put gel on his hair, but, in fact, Mateo’s curly locks are to be completely shorn by the barber who gives him a military-style haircut.

    Bruno looks on admiringly, but when he takes out a cigarette to smoke and refuses to put it away, Mateo sends him outside the shop where he continues to stare back in at his cousin, with pictures in the window demonstrating beautiful male hairstyles, while Mateo’s locks are shaved off.

     We already suspect, by the strange focus on gender (Bruno asks if this is a unisex hair salon) and by the very look of desire in Bruno’s eyes, that something far more than what is being spoken is occurring in this scene. And we also begin to suspect that perhaps Bruno is slightly mentally challenged, a teenager behaving more like a child.

      Back in Bruno’s home where he lives with his brother, the 10-year-old Camilo (Tomás Wicz) and their sister Andrea (Mariel Fernández), the younger brother evidently having invited over his friend Eduardo. We now see Bruno washing his face off in the kitchen sink while nearby Andrea has been drawing a tattoo on Camilo’s friend Eduardo, “like the ones from prison.” Bruno asks if he’s going to prison, Andrea joking, he has already been there. 

      Almost immediately after, we see Eduardo, Camilo, and Andrea sitting by the pool as Mateo arrives, Camilo particularly happy to see him. Bruno looks down upon the group from a small window of his bathroom upstairs. Inexplicably, but perhaps as a dare from Mateo, he and his young cousin lay down and dip their heads into the small pool, Camilo crying out since his hair is now dripping wet, Andrea insisting that he cannot use his jacket to dry off.

 

      Bruno, meanwhile, stares at himself in the mirror, checking out his underarms, his torso, and particularly his hair as he takes up a scissors and begins to cut it in the manner of his cousin’s new buzzcut. Once more, it is clear that he is attempting to immolate Mateo, that he somehow not only wants to be like him but to be him, or least become him. The love between the two is clearly intense.

      What follows are a series of in-house activities between Mateo and the two boys, as he plays games with them and watches them do a rather remarkable tap-dance routine together. Andrea attempts to show Camilo how to put toe-nail polish on her feet, but he fails to do it successfully. Mateo finally lays down on the floor for a nap with Camilo. 

    What these scenes in the house together add up to is a representation of an intensely loving family, who enjoy living together and particularly a pleased for the presence of their cousin Mateo, Camilo in a quieter way demonstration almost as much love for him as does Bruno. Their two major activities, painting his sister’s nails and tap-dancing with his friend also suggest issues of breaking down gender, dancing even today often seen as an unmanly activity as certainly it might be thought to learn how to paint one’s toenails a scarlet red.

       Of the three major settings of this film, the last car trip is the most important. Here, the subject shifts to issues of death as Mateo, the driver, comments on the insects who are dying on the car window as the auto speeds along. Bruno, sharing the front seat with Mateo asks Camilo to hand a water bottle from the back seat and in the process spills some of the water, claiming he is now all wet. Laughing, the two only men begin slapping at one another.

       Soon they pass a burned-out car, Mateo commenting someone left it there, Bruno adding it was a stolen car, Mateo observing “They set them on fire.” The wide-eyed Camilo takes in all that they are staying with great interest, as soon after they pass a small roadside shrine with a Madonna and other religious relics, perhaps the site of a local death. But almost immediately after, Mateo quickly breaks the car, jumping from it as he shouts out “Bruno, no,” demanding he stand still.

       Clearly Bruno has, again explicably, jumped from the car, Camilo watching from the backseat as Mateo chases after him. Finally, Bruno stumbles and falls into the grass, near him. Calling him a dumbass, Mateo insists that next time he tell him. What he is to be told is not established: his cousin’s sudden urge to jump, the fact that he scratched himself, just way to return the attention to himself? Nothing is explained except perhaps cinematically, as the two men begin to wrestle, and then loving poke at one another, Bruno taking out a metal flask of liquor and drinks.

     Camilo, having left the car, watches from the distance, at moments almost turning away in some pain and confusion as eventually the heavyset Bruno sits of Mateo’s ass and refuses to budge, in fact moving up higher onto Mateo’s back, even near to his head. Camilo has wandered back to the roadside shrine observing the third major symbol of death, after the windshield insects and the burned-out car. A phone begins to ring from the car, and Camilo hurries back, digging through their luggage to find the cellphone. He answers, saying very little after his original Hello. It turns out to be his and Bruno’s mother calling to know where they are.

        The men, in the meantime, continue to gently hit one another. Until finally Bruno declares “It’s hot,” an snuggles his head on Mateo’s chest. “It’s really hot,” Bruno continues and he rolls over once again onto Mateo’s body. Mateo reports that he looks like a bald baby with his newly shaved head.

 

      Camilo, having hung up, again exits the car and shouts out to Bruno that it’s their mother. Bruno moves his head down from Mateo’s head slowly to his cock, as Mateo politely protests, “No, Bruno.” Bruno continues, as Mateo rises, “Hey boundaries,” moving away as Bruno rolls inconsolably on the ground rolling back forth as if in deep sorrow. Mateo walks slowly back to the car and Camilo watches the entire scene. The end.

         Why are they heading to Bruno’s and Camilo’s mother’s country house, and why has Mateo been called drive them there? Questions are not answered, only hinted at. Why has Mateo shaved his hair: he off to prison, hinted at by Andrea’s sketch of prison tattoo on Eduardo’s arm? Is Mateo perhaps on his way to join the military?

        All we truly know is that Bruno is totally in love with his cousin, desperate to have sex with him; and perhaps Camilo, as critic David Ranghelli has proposed in his fascinating and the only reading of this film, is just as engaged in a kind of triangle of love as he watches his brother with Mateo. Has the mother suggested the trip of the trio, knowing of their deep love for one another, but also calling, as Ranghelli wonders, to declare an end to their incestuous gay relationship, or as I would add, to finally set up her own boundaries with regard to love? Ranghelli writes:

 

“Why a call from mother? Adults have been absent from the film so far. Mother as absence? What functions does the call serve? Perhaps it is part of a humorous juxtaposition of the Virgin with the

homoerotic tussle playing out in the field, interrupted by a mother’s intervention? Mother as authority figure: “playtime” is over for the boys?”

 

        What we do sense, it that, after their symbolic baptisms—Bruno’s washing off his face in the kitchen and Mateo and Camilo dipping their heads into the pool—and the radical shifts of their physical aspects, something has changed forever, and that when they reach the mother in her country house, any further idolatry and sexual engagement will be over, their love cut off and forced to die. Her sons may perhaps never see Mateo again.

        This film is more of a poetic coronach or lamentation than it is a plotted narrative work. Things have happened, are happening, and will happen for this family that no outsider can fully comprehend.

        Durán’s short film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival competition.   

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024). 

Magnus Stifter | Das Liebes-ABC (The ABC of Love) / 1916

how to be a man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martin Jørgensen and Louis Levy (screenplay), Magnus Stifter (director) Das Liebes-ABC (The ABC of Love) / 1916

 

By the time Asta Nielsen made the German film, Das Liebes-ABC (The ABC of Love) she had already starred in some of her greatest films—including a couple I have reviewed in these pages, Jugend und Tollheit and Zapata’s Gang—many others of which have been lost. She had already ceased working with her director husband Urban Gad and would divorce him in 1919. And she was now an international superstar with a salary of $80,000 per film, this work being financed primarily by family money through Freddy Wingardh, whom she would marry in 1919.

 

     Like so many of her films, in which she played a gender fluid individual, the script by Martin Jørgensen and Louis Levy required her to appear in two different drag roles, involving other characters in drag as well. But more important than simple crossdressing, this film asked serious questions about male and female roles in courtship and in marriage, and questioned the notion of male superiority.

      Nielsen’s character Lis is a somewhat spoiled daughter of a wealthy Danish businessman, who evidently has arranged her marriage with another well-to-do family, the von Dobberns, represented by two elderly sisters who equally dote on their beloved charge, Philip.

      Philip, however—played by Ludwig Trautmann, a man whom critic Pamelia Hutchinson describes as and openly “gay German film star and matinee idol”—although eager to meet Lis, is timid and terribly proper in his manners. If nothing else is the antithesis of what the romantically inclined Lis—who has gleaned many of her notions of love through the pictures of a dance publication—imagines in a fiancée. He arrives at her house draped in a riding blanket and two large scarves as if to protect himself not only from the cold, but from any waft of a sweet scent that might reach his obviously allergic nose.

      Although outwardly she is polite, when he’s looking in the other direction, she comically sticks out her tongue at him, grimaces, cringes, and inwardly groans. How could her father (played by director Magnus Stifter) have chosen such a man for her? While she is passionate and impetuous—intensely kissing her dog and soldier doll when not putting her mouth to the lips of her picture book images of the dancing males—Philip, put simply, is a good-looking priss, if not a sissy.

      She begins, with simple tasks, to make him over, teaching him first how to smoke a cigarette and, a bit more coyly but no less insistent, how to kiss. To demonstrate how very backward this young man is, the first time she gives him permission to kiss her, he grabs her hand. Immediately, she shows him to her lips!

       She further determines to indoctrinate through a more careful schooling process. She takes him to Paris, secretly ordering up a shared train carriage—not something a young unmarried girl could be imagined to do, and which almost scandalizes Philip—and more nefariously arranges for them to have adjoining hotel suites. His passivity is the only thing that allows this unthinkable behavior to proceed.

       And just as quickly, she orders up a male formal tuxedo which she intends to wear, with the help of her servant, who is forced to explain how to put the articles of clothing on, one by one. Evidently, she feels that if she can take him on the town as a male companion, she can put him at ease and demonstrate how the male of her dreams should behave.

      But before that even, she plops a woman’s bonnet on her fiancé’s head and proceeds to play the male role, providing him in lessons in how to attract a woman, how to flirt, and even seduce her, Philip almost giggling in the pleasure of being able to play the bashful woman who is the recipient of the attentions paid.

      Even more interesting is the sense of his immediate delight when he first sees her as the male counterpoint of himself. First of all, Nielsen, as she has made clear previously and will again in her Hamlet, presents herself as an absolutely stunningly beautiful male. But we also sense, in Trautmann’s smiles and sudden openness, that he much happier to be able to accompany a male to dinner and opera than a female.

       Within moments of their arrival, something even more startling happens as Lis entrances two females in the next box so successfully that they suddenly are enthused to join their neighbors for drinks, both women quickly choosing to sit on Lis’ knees as opposed to Philip’s. She is more successful as a male than he could ever be, and he perceives it, as does she, quickly asking one of the women to attend to her friend. She does so, but comes back quickly to join her friend on Lis’ lap.

        One of these women is apparently spoken for, a man arriving to reclaim his girlfriend or even wife, and inviting Philip to join them as the other woman’s partner. For a moment Lis is left alone. And she realizes that now she is, in fact, quite drunk; and that she hasn’t actually enjoyed the role-playing she’s taken on. For all of her excellent lessons, she is the one now left alone. Somehow, she stumbles back to the hotel.

       Philip soon returns to reclaim Lis, the others with him trying to pull him back into their cultural orb. Seeing her gone, however, he cries out, “Where is my fiancée?” not only confusing his new friends but convincing them that their friend is not quite well, confused most certainly, calling another man his fiancée like that. They comfort him and try to calm him down.

       Finding her back in the room, he is relieved and finally is able to proffer her some advice about how to rid herself of a hangover. But before they can even accommodate to the new shift in their relationship, they receive a message that her father is in town, planning to immediately make a visit. How can she explain the fact that they are sharing a hotel room? It would be more than a scandal and would certainly result in a cancellation of their marriage plans.

        Quick thinking Lis demands that Philip receive her father, telling him that she has gone for a visit with her aunts. She quickly sends out for another male garb, a wig and different clothes in order become Philip’s male friend staying in the next room on a visit.

 

       At first, the crossdressing Lis convinces even her father. But because of his dog’s attention to the young man’s room, as if he knows his beloved Lis is within, and through subtle clues, her father begins to suspect something, entering into the young man’s chamber and peeking into the bedroom to see his own daughter rearranging her male clothing for her next encounter with him and Philip.

        Demanding an explanation, and perceiving how his daughter has arranged everything, the father now plans to take Philip under his wing and show him how to properly train a woman to behave. He demands Philip write a letter pretending that he will be meeting another woman in the restaurant that evening in a private booth. Dropping in on the floor where Lis will surely see it, the two await her reaction.

        She is now angered, hurt, and more than a little distressed. Dressing up this time as a waiter, she plans to catch Philip in his dinner tête-à-tête. Philip and her father, meanwhile, dress up the butler as the woman Philip will meet. With some glitches, this new plan works perfectly, Lis growing angry and scolding Philip in his female companion’s presence before coming to her father in tears and despair—a situation easily corrected when Philip’s female friend pulls off his wig. 

       Philip and Lis are married, and this time on their honeymoon get-away he takes back his male priority by purchasing the train tickets himself and booking the hotel room, making sure they are both to be double occupancy.

        The numerous crossdressing incidents and the farce-like moments of this comic work, particularly given Nielsen’s energized performance, are wonderful. Those who have seen Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man of a couple of years later, moreover, will recognize the influence of Danish director Stifter’s work.

        But Lubitsch’s film is far more radical and profound in the fact that it does end with the normative paternal lesson to females who attempt to question their gender roles and marital relationships, and even more importantly, truly explores not only gender pretense but the possibility of same-sex love, just as previously Nielsen’s Zapata’s Band had.

 

Los Angeles, May 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Clarence G. Badger | The Danger Girl / 1916

going off track

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clarence G. Badger (director) The Danger Girl / 1916

 

 The Mack Sennett-produced silent film The Danger Girl of 1916 is of interest to the LGBTQ community primarily because it contains incidents of cross-dressing. But in this case, the film directed by Clarence G Badger is a little bit more interesting because Gloria (Swanson) dons male attire not simply to confuse others or escape her female identity but to change the lives of both her and her newfound boyfriends by forcing them to recognize that the dangerous woman to whom seem to be attracted is a heartless vamp who will give them up the moment a more attractive man enters her orbit.

      Her decision also requires that “the danger girl” (Helen Bray) fall in love with her while she is in male attire, resulting, at one point, in a kiss, bringing the incident far closer to lesbian desire than in most of the comedic films before it.

      The problem with this film’s rather interesting and complex plot is that moving at the speed of a Sennett comedy, particularly given the fuzzy quality of the images we have today, it’s sometimes nearly impossible to differentiate the characters, particularly since the relationships seem so frivolously determined that they might as well be out of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutti, also a work in which characters dress up as someone other than themselves and ends, accordingly, without our truly knowing to which of the men the two women have ended up being wed.

       As the regular contributor to The Century Project, a site devoted to silent films, who goes by the computer handle of popegrutch summarizes:

 

“This movie is a bit hard to keep up with, in part because the prints I was able to find were of poor quality, so it’s hard to tell actors apart, but in part because the characters don’t have enough personality or back story to identify with. The danger girl is distinctive, and once Gloria’s in her masculine attire, she’s easy to track, but the others seem quite interchangeable. I’m still not 100% sure I kept the division between Myrtle and Gloria straight before the “drag” sequence, and I gave up even trying to tell Reggie from Last Year’s Suitor, although Bobby Vernon is generally recognizable.”

 

 

      At the beginning of Badger’s film Myrtle (Myrtle Lind) is Bobby’s (Bobby Vernon) sweetheart, but before we can even get to know them they have a fight, and she tosses him out of her suite.

       Naturally, at that very moment the worldly Helen (Bray) shows up in riding attire, about to take a horse ride into the countryside. Bobby grabs the nearest horse, evidently not a very trusty nag, and joins her, she happy to have the handsome young man at her side having just given up the character titled Last Season’s Suitor (A. Edward Sutherland), who throughout this film attempts to woo her back.

       Off they go, with the skilled horsewoman Helen, naturally, taking the lead as Bobby’s horse not only lags behind but soon loses its shoe and can go no further.

       By chance on the same road, Reggie, better known as Honey Boy for reasons unexplained, is taking his sister Gloria (Swanson), who is at wheel of his sporty motor car, on a visit to her old school-chum Myrtle. He’s written ahead to Helen to tell her the news since he, like everyone else, can’t wait to meet up with her.

       Like Reggie’s horse the car goes off track, sending Reggie and his suitcase hurling into space, soon after resulting in a flat tire. Evidently cars have the very same problem in this world as do horses.

       Suddenly Helen rides into view, and Reggie hopes that he might reunite and even catch a ride with her back to the hotel where everyone is staying; but having quickly changed her interest to Bobby, she gives him a chilly greeting and rides off without him, forcing him to walk to the hotel.         

       Bobby, horse by the rope, discovers the car in middle of the road a short way ahead. By this time Gloria has thrown on a pair of overalls over clothes and is proceeding to change the tire. Bobby ties up the reins to the front of the car and attempts to help the “damsel in distress,” but finds she has everything in hand, almost driving away with the horse leading. She backs up, discovering her brother trying to create a spark of friendliness from the cold Helen. He throws his suitcase into the car and off Gloria drives.

        Clearly she has taken an immediate liking to Bobby, despite the fact he still has eyes for the Thea Bara vamp. Like Reggie, he is forced to walk back to the Beverly Hotel, but he has won the heart evidently of “the danger woman.”

       In any event, they make it back, Gloria and Myrtle meeting up and Reggie finally being introduced to her best friend. Myrtle, having noticed Bobby going off with Helen who is still in a fragile state of mind; but meeting up with the Honey Boy at least distracts her from her sorrow.

       Having also heard of the siren she immediately determines to do something about it. At a societal event being thrown at the hotel, she dresses in a tuxedo like most of the other men, and gains the vamp’s attention just long enough to keep Bobby and Last Year’s Suitor away from the bench in which she quite successfully courts Helen while playing a male suitor.  

        When Bobby complains and is about to shove her off—the method apparently appropriate in this film for the male species to get rid of competing suitors—she draws him as an old comrade into the nearby bar, where she has to undergo some of the spirited and drunken camaraderie of other male-on-male behavior, a difficult task for the more “refined” sex, just as Viktoria learned in Reinhold Schümzel’s Viktor und Viktoria (1933).

         Still on the chase for the wrong women, however, Reggie and Bobby must face off in the local Café. But Last Year’s Suitor is still ready to fight off any male who gets close to Helen, and Bobbie and Gloria in drag are his least favorite people at the moment. At the café he attempts to duke it out with Gloria until, with Bobby’s help, she locks him for a while in a telephone booth. But it takes Reggie aboard a bus which he crashes through the restaurant window in order to square things up, Bobby attempting to do battle with the manly Gloria until her hair comes pouring out from under her cap and he realizes finally that he is in love with the female under disguise. Reggie equally discovers he really loves Myrtle.

     At least I think that’s the way it ends. But Gloria suddenly appears to have Myrtle’s long hair, so I can’t be certain. And perhaps Reggie is still on the loose, since we never actually see him hook up with Myrtle. The only thing of which I’m certain is that “the danger woman” has flown the coup, running anywhere she might never again encounter her Last Year’s Suitor, who appears to be still on the chase.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 20021

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