Li Cheng | José / 2018

finding freedom

by Douglas Messerli

 

Li Cheng and George F. Roberson (screenplay), Li Cheng (director) José / 2018

 

Godfrey Cheshire, writing on the Roger Ebert film site, describes Li Cheng’s film set in Guatemala as “ethno-fictional” hybrid in the manner of the early 20th century films of Robert Flaherty and the more contemporary work of Ulrike Ottinger and Chloe Zhao, in part because of its presentation of the landscape and culture of the Central American country, and because, the director and his crew began with research even before filming of Guatemalan life.

      Cheshire describes the film as being divided in three basic locales:

“Locale one, home, is a poor but tidy apartment where the boy [the central character José, performed by Enrique Salanic] lives with his mom (Ana Cecilia Mota), a religious woman who worries about her son. Locale two, work, is a restaurant where Jose solicits and delivers curbside meals, working alongside a gruff boss and a young couple who are romantically involved. Locale three, which we might call hookup-land, is his solitary practice of seeking sex using a dating app. The way this Cheng introduces this story element is typically casual and understated. In one scene, José’s on the street looking at his phone. In the next, he’s in an apartment with another naked guy, wiping up after sex and lying to his mom on the phone about why he’s running late.”

 

      While, I don’t necessarily disagree with Cheshire’s assessment, he forgets that perhaps the most important locale is later in film, when José visits his grandmother in the country, and where he truly visits famous Guatemalan sites outside of the capitol city.

      Moreover, the director never abandons his story for the purpose of further exploring the culture or landscape. In this film they are one and the same. José is a product of his culture, in love with his own country, and resists even his lover’s attempt to lure him outside of Guatemala City, where he has grown up.

     Li Cheng, who received his PhD in cancer research at Rutgers before turning to filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, is now a US citizen, and as a “world nomad,” may be an outsider to Guatemalan culture, but you could hardly describe him as a tourist or even a cultural anthropologist. His presentation of his characters and the culture are as intensely intertwined as a native might perceive them; and at heart, it is his character José’s own conservative love of mother and home which causes him to suffer.

      Unable to afford his higher education, José works throughout most of this film as restaurant procurer—something we don’t generally have in the US. He stands outside the restaurant, soliciting cars to stop and park nearby, running back and forth to the kitchen to serve them almost as in an old-fashioned root-beer stand, curbside. The hours are long and arduous.

      José is also gay, and in the conservative and quite dangerous world in which he lives, there is absolutely no way to bring home a date or run out nights to the local bars. His only opportunity for sex is at slack moments in the day, when he sneaks away for an hour or two from his job, and with the help of a dating app, meets up with other men in the apartments and cheap sex hotels that Cheshire has mentioned above.

       Although, he gets dressed down by his boss for taking off time, it’s also clear that he works hard and effectively most of the day, and is a necessary employee, getting on with all the others.

     That is until something totally unexpected happens. Meeting up with a young construction worker, Luis (Manolo Herrera), José not only finds himself totally enjoying their sex, but after a brief conversation with Luis, he discovers they have a lot in common; before he knows it they are visiting taco stands together, watching religious processions, enjoying fireworks, and, most importantly, as Luis shows up with a motorbike, taking a day-trip into the surround woods, which ends with both young men, without knowing it, falling desperately in love.

    That growing love might have been enough for José to help him redeem his seemingly empty life and to quell the quiet control over him that his lonely and needy mother daily employs. The day he mysteriously runs off with Luis to the country, for example, she worries for her son after witnessing him being carried away by young man, and prays endlessly to God until he returns late that night.

      She too works hard, selling home-made sandwiches on street corners for as long as she can before the police brutally move off all such street vendors. And it’s clear that she truly feels vulnerable, with no one else to turn to, even though she does also have married daughters. Her demands on her son are seemingly justifiable, which makes it even more difficult for José to pull away from his mother’s deep worry and love for him.

       Yet, that is precisely what Luis now demands. He wants them both to move away from the city into the country where he insists he will build them a new house and where he can still work on construction crews. Increasingly, in the brief but highly intense meetings, Luis changes the scenario from a desire to a demand, finally insisting he will leave José if he will not join him.

      Despite his irresolvable pulls, José finally decides to pack up his bag and meet Luis to move off from his beloved hometown and the intensity of family life, such as it is. But Luis never shows up, and a feeling of total despair and depression creeps over José’s previously quite joyous life. Yet even now, he looks after his mother and serves as an open ear for one of the girls at the restaurant where he works, whose boyfriend has just run off without her after she discovered she’s pregnant. “I’m scared,” she pleads. But in this world, nearly everyone is, José included. Will he be forced to live the rest of his life without love?

       Arriving home late one evening from a venue where the police have yet again turned street vendors away, José’s mother is attacked by thugs, her purse stolen, and her own aging body shoved to the ground. She says nothing about the attack to her son, but it is yet another burden he innately feels as the coils of his mother continue to enwrap him in repetition.

       One slightly older man, who has managed to purchase one of the new apartments that Luis and his crew have been building, meets up with José for a quick sexual interlude and tries to convince José to move in with him, even promising to help send him back to the university as an art student, which José evidently once dreamt of being. But it’s clear there is no love there, and there is still a mother to look after.

       In a strange twist of events, José’s mother insists that he must make a voyage to the country to visit his grandmother, which finally allows the young man to escape for at least a short while. In the country, he works hard daily but spends quiet nights with his grandmother who admits, for the first time, that his grandfather just disappeared one day, when José’s mother was still a child—probably at the hands of militants or the local military police. They rounded up every male, she reports. She searched for him for months, without success.   

   Traveling to the largest nearby village, José himself, with picture-in-hand attempts to trace the whereabouts of his former lover, Luis. But no one recognizes him. Finally, José moves on to visit the famed Mayan stelae carvings at Quiriguá, studying them as if they were clues to his quite desolate life.

       Afterwords, we see him lost in a suburb, searching out the nearest bus station. He stops to ask a young man standing near his motorcycle where the station is, his response being that it is about 5 kilometers away, a long walk. But almost immediately he asks José if he wants a ride, to which the young man readily agrees. And in one of the strangest endings to a film I have seen in a long while, José simply gets on the bike and they drive off. Might his new friend also be gay? Will they develop some sort of relationship? Those possibilities are not even hinted at.

 

    But it is somewhat apparent, that José is not truly ready to return to Guatemala City, that perhaps his horizons, his dreams, and plans have all shifted, although even that is opaque. Whereas, José’s life previously was something we might describe by rote, so patterned was his behavior as he moved the tripartite spaces of his existence, from home to work to an afternoon rendezvous to home again, his existence in the country seems to be utterly random as he moves off in several different directions.

      He has perhaps totally lost his way, or, to look at it another way, he has apparently found something else that is far more important, a freedom and spontaneity that he was never previously permitted. Where he goes from here is anyone’s guess.

      This is a brave and beautiful film which expresses itself simply until things grow so complex that there is no longer any explanation.

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

 

Luis Buñuel | Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty) / 1974

sick of symmetry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière (screenplay), Luis Buñuel (director) Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty) / 1974

 

Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, his penultimate film, is both horrific and hilarious at the same time. This non-narrative narrative (and it is after all a series of interconnected stories), clearly sums up Buñuel’s dismissal of normative values and his deep embracement of human interactions. His characters in this highly surrealistic but also basically humanist tale are not so much studies of complex human beings but represent the perversity of life, the nonsensical aspects of it, and the ridiculousness of our societal demands to correct it or, worse yet, simply to normalize it.

      As a character comments to himself as he moves about objects on his mantel: “I am sick of symmetry.” So too are the director and his long-time collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière. But yet this film has a kind natural symmetry from scene to scene that as, Buñuel himself described it, “opens a door,” or, as I would argue, presents us with numerous opening doors, many of them quite perverse, but in this film’s imagination telling are all also very funny.

      A young high school boy enters a small rural hotel to have an incestuous sexual liaison with his aunt. At the last moment she becomes wary, and will not allow him to touch her even though she clearly is in love with him and is willing to show him her quite youngish nude body. The eager boy nearly suffocates her with a pillow in an attempt to make love to her before regaining his senses.

 

     The moment he leaves the room, however, he is lured in by another guest in the hotel for a late-night drink in his room. There the boy discovers another good-looking woman, while the same man insists that several monks, also staying in the hotel, join him. They have been previously playing poker with holy relics in lieu of money. While they sip their port, the woman slips into the bathroom to redress herself in a leather skirt and whip in order to perform the role of a dominatrix, the man soon following her to dress in a pair of pants open at the back to show his ass, the couple soon after begin performing their act, while the monks and the young man flee the room.

     Yet we perceive that they are all interconnected, the boy hiding his own incestuous desires—which he soon consummates upon returning to his aunt’s room—and the monk’s gambling away the church treasures and who knows what else as they shuffle back and forth into each other’s rooms.

       In another scene, two young girls are approached on a playground by a man we perceive to be a pedophile, handing the children several postcards which we can only imagine contain pornographic images. When the children tell their mother what has happened and show her the postcards she is shocked by what she sees, yet allows her daughters to keep the cards, which are later revealed by the camera to contain nothing more than tourist-like scenes of French villages.

      As critic Gwendolyn Audrey Foster observed:

   

                    This is hilarious, yes, but it also should be noted that it

                    carefully challenges the definition of what is considered

                    prurient and immoral and who upholds those rules.

                    We are directly implicated because of our knee-jerk

                    reactionary response to the man and his supposedly

                    immoral postcards.

 

      In yet another sequence, a young poet suddenly takes out a gun and shoots several individuals on a street. Tried for murder, he quickly becomes a hero from whom everyone demands a photograph, as he is permitted to leave by the judge with any imprisonment.

     One of the most disgusting scenes is perhaps the funniest and family and friends gather around a beautifully-set dinner while sitting upon toilet stools. Not very different, indeed, from Petronius’ feasts, where the guests come and go throughout the meal to the vomitoriums.  

      In fact, I might suggest that Buñuel’s film, in its structure, is very much like the Menippean Satire—sans the autodidact—of which Petronius’ Satyricon is a major example. Here perhaps the director and co-writer are themselves the pedants telling us what we can’t ourselves otherwise see.

    Although some critics have argued that The Phantom of Liberty was a departure from Buñuel’s previous films, I’d argue, along with Foster, that The Exterminating Angel and films that followed share a great deal with this work, presenting people who cannot see their own prejudices and social stupidities due to their moral blindness.

     My favorite sequence, in fact, concerns just this issue. A seemingly happily married couple suddenly realize that their young daughter has gone missing, quickly reporting it to the police. Yet the daughter is there, in the flesh, with them all along their wailing travails. The chief detective even interviews her about her own disappearance. The child speaks but her parents and other authorities simply cannot hear her. The young girl patiently, time and again, attempts to explain that she hasn’t gone anywhere. But her pleas remain unheard. Isn’t that precisely how parents often treat children, never bothering to listen to their own voices and complaints? Given the chaotic world that this director presents about adults, mightn’t it be to our advantage to listen to the young. The recent horrific treatment of the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg reiterates these very concerns. If as, Stephen Sondheim argues in Into the Woods we should be careful what we say because children “will listen,” perhaps it might be even more important that we listen to them.

     For Buñuel, himself, this film was a working out of his belief that “Chance governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later.”

     Given my constant observations of how much coincidence and chance have played a role in my own life, how could I not love this film.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2019).   

Miguel Arteta | Chuck & Buck / 2000

fun, fun, fun!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike White (writer), Miguel Arteta (director) Chuck & Buck / 2000

 

The death of actress Lupe Ontiveros this week led me to again watch the 2000 film, Chuck & Buck, in which she plays the savvy and salty theater manager and director Beverly Franco, a role very much at the center of this unusual film. And, although I had already written a brief paragraph or two about Mike White’s script in my 2007 essay on “The Unordinary Obsessions of Ordinary Lives,” I felt that the film also fit nicely with the movies about Los Angeles I have gathered under the rubric of “Rebels without a Home.”

      It is, however, difficult to describe the central figure of the film, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), as a rebel. Perhaps this 27-year-old man who acts more like a 14-year-old boy might be more likened to a slightly retarded stalker. But he is most definitely, like many of the figures in my observation of this growing film “genre,” an outsider, someone who arrives in Los Angeles without the slightest ability to comprehend and fit into whatever one might perceive as Angeleno “normality,” and, accordingly, he and the city are a perfect fit.

     At the age of 11, he and a neighbor boy, Charlie “Chuck” Sitter (Chris Weitz) shared a close friendship that included, as some adolescent boys’ lives do, a deeply sexual component of rhyming words with their childhood monikers, the kind of homosexual kinship in which some children participate in order to prepare themselves for their later heterosexual lives. Personally, I did not experiment in that male-bonding frenzy, having, as I joke, been absent from “male-bonding” 101 and, also, perhaps fearful that if I had so acted out my inclinations, it would be evident that they were not a temporary “aberration.”

     Something like that clearly has been the case with Buck, since Chuck eventually moved away and is at film’s beginning a “normalized” LA heterosexual record-producing executive, who has shacked up with his girlfriend, Carlyn (Beth Colt). His kindness of accepting the invitation to funeral of his childhood friend’s mother is rewarded with an attempt by Buck to continue the childhood “suck and fuck” games. Like too many stereotyped views of gay figures, Buck has been clearly a “mamma’s boy” who has refused to grow up, his childhood toys and music surrounding him (including a song whose major chorus includes the words “Fun, Fun, Fun’), along with his presumably mother-induced hypochondriac conditions, one of which demands he sleep with a vaporizer. Buck is, in short, an absolutely clueless man-child who behaves so strangely that only his mother could have loved him. Chuck, who has now rechristened himself Charlie, although sympathetic with the situation of the mother’s death, is quite obviously shocked and repelled by the Buck’s sexual come-on, and immediately determines to leave. Carlyn behaves like any civilized and double-talking adult, inviting Buck to come see them sometime in LA.

     The problem is that Buck has had no lessons in social double-talk, taking them at their word, soon after withdrawing $10,000 from the money left to him by his mother to make the trip to Los  Angeles. After several phone brush-offs, he begins to stalk his boyhood lover’s office and house, finally pretending to be a delivery boy to reencounter Charlie, forcing him to an uncomfortable picture opportunity and, ultimately, getting himself invited to a party at their house, where, in comically uncomfortable interchanges with Charlie’s sophisticated friends, the film reveals some insightful comments about the record executive’s current life:

 

                    Party guest: How was he like in his former life?

                    Buck: Oh he was fun!  

 

     At another moment we find evidence of Charlie’s retreat from a life of “fun, fun, fun: “Charlie is not a very sentimental guy.” When Buck reveals that their relationship was very special, one guest comments: “Charlie hasn’t changed. He’s still very exclusive.”

    The intrusion upon his former friend moves Buck even further from any possibility of communicating with him ever again, polite invitations being postponed in a way that Angelenos have of distancing themselves from those with whom they feel they need distancing—an easy disappearing act in a city so vast.

     Having failed through direct contact, and having already created the “hypothetical” possibility through the local theater manager, Beverly, in a playhouse across the street of Charlie’s office, Buck determines to write a play that will reveal the truth: that Carlyn is a kind of witch who has come between the men’s relationship, in the play named Hank and Frank. Hiring Beverly to direct the play at $25 an hour, renting out the theater for one night, Buck oversees the casting, insisting that they hire a third rate actor (as Beverly puts it, “He was the worst thing we saw today”) simply because he, Sam (Paul Weitz, Chris Weitz’s real-life brother) shares the darkly handsome look of Charlie.

     Eventually Buck even moves in across the hall from Sam’s apartment and, upon one occasion, attempts to replace Sam with Charlie as a lover. Once again, Buck is rejected, but Sam, who admits he is himself a little “weird,” forgives Buck and the two remain friends.

      The play is an obvious disaster. Of Buck, Beverly comments, “I think you have something weird about women. I think you have something weird about men.” Of the play, she observes:

 

                           Beverly:  I see it as a love story between Hank and Frank.

                           Buck: You do?

                           Beverly: It’s like a homoerotic misogynistic love story.

                           Buck:  Well, it is what it is.

 

     The important thing for Buck is that he has been able to lure Charlie to see the play!  Charlie’s reaction suggests the end of any possible further communication.

     Yet, White’s ever-shifting script throws another curve ball, as Buck confronts Chuck once again, this time at a late night dinner meeting with clients at a bar, making his own “deal,” so to speak, by suggesting that if Charlie is willing to have sex with him one more time, he will never bother him again. To our surprise, Charlie accepts, even admitting during their sexual encounter that he does remember the childhood events:

 

                            Buck: Do you remember me?

                            Chuck: I remember everything.

 

     In short, there is a haunting edginess about this film that hints that male heterosexual’s childhood same-sex encounters have a deeper effect upon their lives than is generally admitted. And there is another issue at which White has been hinting all along: the sense of joy of youth is somehow changed in the adult male-female interrelationships. When Charlie tells Buck, “You have to grow up,” Buck responds—reminding me a bit of Peter Pan—“Like you?”

       The one-night sexual slip, it is clear, is never revealed to Charlie’s lover, whom he soon marries. And Buck, with the now successful Beverly having become the theater’s director, has found a place in the company in her former job. A chance encounter between Charlie and Carlyn with Buck at a local restaurant, results in what is merely a gulp of deep wistfulness on Buck’s part, as he remains in quiet discussions with his theater peers. He apparently has grown up to be comfortable in his own identity, which, after all, is what the difficult city offers anyone who lasts it out.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2015)

Jacques Tati | Mon Oncle / 1958

the click of heels

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Lagrange, Jean L'Hôte, and Jacques Tati (writers), Jacques Tati (director) Mon Oncle / 1958

 

Although filmed in muted Technicolor, Jacques Tati’s wonderful Mon Oncle might as well be a silent film in black-and-white. Well, not really, its satire about modernism, the upper-class pretensions, and consumerism in general needs the lusciousness of its 1958 color treatment. After all the lovely presentation of the modernist, gadget-ridden Villa Arpel requires all the color it involves, with its highly uncomfortably forbidding chairs, constantly-shifting tables, umbrellas, and endlessly unable to follow stone and shrubbery-ridden paths, along with its spitting fish fountain all demand the lens of Technicolor, with a capital T, surely.

     If it is a bit difficult to imagine Mr. Hulot (Tati), the uncle of this tech-savy family, being a hero, particularly to his nephew Gérard Arpel (the likeable Alain Bécourt), well, we might simply chalk it up to Hulot’s passivity or his simple inability to behave like the bourgeois adult world which keeps attempting to embrace him. He too is a child, in his own way as disruptive as the schoolboys in the Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct. These kids cause adults to blame one another for implausible car accidents and force street lovers into streetlights—all perhaps innocent mischievous actions, yet sometimes dangerous nonetheless. 

    If Hulot may somehow encourage the behavior of the young Arpel, he seems totally innocent of his involvement, or even the permission he allows his beloved nephew.

    In fact, he is more destructive than the child, clipping the carefully designed hedging’s outside the Arpel gate, automatically designed to allow entry, puncturing the water system so that the participants in a grand lunch which his sister and brother-law hope to introduce him to their native-American dressed neighbor, whom they first perceive as a rug-merchant, are continually drenched in the water system’s sudden surges.

 

    In his sister’s entirely automated kitchen, he causes near chaos simply attempting to boil a pot of water.

     The naughty boy Gérard, rightfully, loves all of this; yet Hulot himself, bumbling through his life, has no idea of what he has accomplished.

     The incredible thing about Tati’s direction is the movement of his figures through space, moving the camera to watch them carefully through a series of windows in the scenes at Hulot’s Paris apartment, where he lives on the top of a series of interconnected rooms, the workplace scenes of his brother-in-law’s equally modernistic, almost Chaplinesque-like factory Plastac. Throughout this work the women’s heels clack over the landscape with a sad insistence of gender-defining roles. They clatter through the territory created by their male counterparts, desperately attempting to catch up to the acclaimed “accomplishments” of their male companions, but in their click attempting to define, perhaps unsuccessfully, their own territory. They, and their husbands, are equally ineffectual in a world that does not allow anyone to sit down in a comfortable chair and truly communicate.

    Tati, correctly, makes their endless chatter almost incommunicable. They are not truly saying anything worth hearing, we quickly realize. Hulot says hardly a word, but he delivers up his nephew into a world of action and childhood speech. The more the metallic fish-fountain pours its mechanized waters into the air, the more Hulot’s silences speak to the mountains of echoing protest.

     Hulot even turns the plastic products of his brother-in-law in a simulacrum of sausages. He is about living: a young girl who receives his tender finger kiss, awards him with sweet candies every day, something which the Arpel’s might never have imagined sitting on their metallic-structured chairs as they attempt to stare into a sunset they cannot even perceive.

     Like Vigo, Tati suggests it’s only the “bad boys” who will allow society to regenerate itself.

 

Los Angeles, October 20, 2109

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2019).