Marc Forster | Monster's Ball / 2001

when you feel like you can't breathe

by Douglas Messerli

 

Milo Addica and Will Rokos (screenplay), Marc Forster (director) Monster's Ball / 2001  

 

If for no other reason, Monster's Ball deserves our notice simply for devoting its first hour and a half to a series of nearly unbearable events, beginning with the execution of a penitentiary prisoner (played by Sean "P. Diddy" Combs), and followed soon after by a series of racist acts played out by the movie's major figure, Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton), a fight between Grotowski and his son, Sonny (Heath Ledger), Sonny's suicide, and the death, by a hit-and-run car, of the child of the executed prisoner. And that's only the beginning: the dead prisoner's widow's car breaks down, she (Halle Berry) loses her job and faces eviction from her apartment.

 

    While all these events are painfully riveting (tears rolled down my face for much of the film), the writers of this work, Milo Addica and Will Rokos, have embellished their characters with so many dilemmas, along with layers of guilt, silent suffering, and social and political injustices, that it is difficult, at moments, to see through to their humanity upon which the rest of the film depends.       

     Hank, still dominated his elderly father, has remained a tower of strength by refusing to face anything coming close to friendship or love. And like his father, he is a silent loner, choosing not even to face the prostitutes he fucks, rejecting any demonstration of love to his own son. He also ignores any of the strides of equality made by blacks in the South, and runs off any black who happens to take a shortcut across his father’s land. Leader of the correctional officers at the local State prison, he determinedly employs protocol as they prepare to execute their prisoner, urging his men, including his own son, to put all feeling behind them: "You can't think about what he did or anything else about him. It's our job."

 

   Yet, despite Sonny’s attempts obey Hank, through a meeting with the prisoner, his son and wife, and with the focus of the camera on the suffering prisoner (who, for a few dreadful moments, cannot catch his breath for fear of his approaching death), he very much does wonder about what the prisoner did to put him in such a situation and gets caught up with his life. One readily comprehends why, as they take the prisoner on his "walk of death," Sonny vomits; but it is for the other officers an unforgiveable act of personal expression.

 

    After the torturing series of electric shocks sent through the prisoner's body, Hank confronts his son, leading to an intense fight. The next morning, he orders him out of the house. The younger man threatens him with a gun, ending in the downstairs living room, where he challenges his father: "You hate me?" When Hank admits, "Yeh, I hate you. I really do," the son wails back, "Well, I always loved you," as he puts a bullet through his heart. When at the funeral the priest asks him if Hank should read a particular passage from the scriptures, the father vengefully replies: "All I want to have is that dirt hit that box."

 

    It may be a stretch for the viewer, accordingly, to understand why this martinet of a man suddenly quits his job, and soon after, develops a relationship with a Black waitress—the wife, it turns out, of the man who he has just executed—beginning with his decision to help her rush her dying son to the hospital and falling, a few frames later, into a frenzied sexual union in which the couple release their pent-up tension, anger, and hate.

     Upon discovering her identity through a photograph of her husband and a sheaf of drawings she shares with him, he, like his son, vomits out of sympathy and self-disgust. They both have experienced moments, as Hank suggests, when you feel like you can't breathe.

      Leticia visits her new lover's house, gift in hand, in response to which Hank's father attempts to displace his son's new companion with a racist comment. In reaction, Hank places the old man in an assisted living facility, inviting Leticia into his house and bed. They both, presumably, have been born again; yet we have a hard time understanding their transformations, for we are allowed to witness only the aftermath. Such miracles may indeed happen, but in order to sympathize with these new beings, we have to first comprehend them as humans instead of the typological characters to whom we have been introduced.

      It appears that even the filmmakers are not sure that their characters' sudden love will survive. As Hank goes to fetch ice cream in celebration of their new life together, Leticia wanders to the attic, where she discovers the drawings her husband has made of Hank and his son on the last night of his life. The secret history of her lover is suddenly revealed, and her passionate response is, understandably fury.

     When he returns, however, and she is invited to join him on the porch, she says nothing about her discovery, as he quietly speculates: "I think we're going to be all right." Perhaps history, in a world such as the one these two beings have inhabited, is best forgotten. But for how long can you tamp down the truth? Neither of these figures has been very successful at lying to themselves in the past.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2001

Reprinted from Green Integer Review (December 2001).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).      

Max Ophūls | Madame de… (The Earrings of Madame de…) / 1953

on the periphery

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcel Achard, Max Ophūls, and Wademant (screemplay, based on the novel Madame de by Louise de Vilmorin), Max Ophūls (director) Madame de… (The Earrings of Madame de…) / 1953

 

 The Comtesse Louise de… is represented in the first moments of Max Ophūls' Madame de… (The Earrings of Madame de…) by only her hand and arm—a fragmented and disembodied being—at home with the objects which she is apparently reviewing, the boxes of jewels and her closets of elaborate gowns and furs. We soon discover that she is choosing from among these precious objects something to sell—and as her entire body slowly comes into perspective, we comprehend that she is attempting to raise money to pay outstanding debts.

    She is, so Ophūls tells us, a pampered and frivolous woman, who might have continued her life in such isolated luxury had she not selected to sell a pair of diamond earrings, given to her by her husband. Among her cherished gems and clothes, the earrings are, apparently, her least favorite thing—also an indication, perhaps, of her position regarding her husband. Apparently, she has had neither the courage nor the trust to tell him of her financial situation, even though it soon becomes clear that he would have quickly resolved the problem and overlooked her financial indiscretions.

     Once we have glimpsed Louise we see the beautiful woman so attached to these things. Indeed, throughout the film, Ophūls shows off Danielle Darrieux’s beauty through her exquisite gowns and jewels in the manner almost reminiscent of today’s “fashion” films such as the recently issued The Duchess (2008). Ophūls has been neglected, in part, precisely because of the elegance of his films; particularly in the 1950s atmosphere of abstract expressionism and discordant 12-tone music, Ophūls’ highly narratively framed histories of sexual indiscretion and innuendo seemed old-fashioned and out of place. Even in his otherwise positive review of this film, Roger Ebert summarizes one standard view of Ophūls’ world: The Earrings of Madame de… “…is one of the most mannered and contrived love movies ever filmed.” As the reader of my essays on film will recall, I am a great admirer of theatrical filmmaking. But I would argue that, except for the Macguffin, the reappearing earrings, the love story Ophūls tells, in terms of the great romances of fiction, is not nearly so contrived and mannered as it may seem.

      One must also recall, of course, that any focus on women in 1953 might have been seen, in the testosterone-smoke-filled rooms of journalism, as simply uninteresting. Critic Molly Haskell summarizes that position best in Richard Roud’s comments: “What are Ophūls' subjects? The simplest answer is: women. More specifically, women in love. Most often, women who are unhappily in love, or to whom love brings misfortune of one kind or another.”

      Obviously things have changed some since those evaluations, and Ophūls' work, and, thanks to intelligent analyses by critics such as Andrew Sarris, his wife, Molly Haskell, and Pauline Kael, The Earrings of Madame de… is now recognized as a masterwork, even though, as Haskell notes, it “never seems to attain the universal accolade of ‘greatness,’ automatically granted to movies like The Godfather or Citizen Kane.”

       Ophūls clearly loved Louise de Vilmorin’s 1951 novel because of the recurring theme of the earrings. It provided him with a structure against which the “real” story, the love between Madame de… and Baron Fabrizio Donati (handsomely played by film director Vittorio De Sica), develops. But in order to even comprehend this structural device, we need to attend not only to the seemingly isolated and pampered world of Louise, but the society of the male characters, represented in an almost dichotomous manner by Louise’s husband, Général André de… (Charles Boyer), a military figure who seems to have stepped right out of a book by Ophūls’ favorite writer Arthur Schnitzler, and the romantically-inclined ambassador Baron.

 

     Proud, loyal, and outwardly loving of his wife, André is, nonetheless, a man of action. Although he appears to easily forgive his wife’s indiscretions, he can do so only because he believes all women inferior to rational beings. They are to be petted and forgiven, never openly chastised. Like Louise’s jewelry and furs, they are not worthy of the passion of anger; they are, rather, possessions, like a military decoration one wears on one’s lapel. It is strange that, although most critics make a great fuss about Louise’s relationship (apparently a love affair that is never sexually consummated) with the Baron, they speak little of André’s mistress, Lola (described in de Vilmorin’s original book simply as “a Spanish lady”). In the French society of the day (perhaps still today) men are expected to have mistresses, but women are to be shamed by behaving similarly.

     If Louise is insensitive about her husband’s expensive gift of the earrings, so too is he to his wife—once he has repurchased them from the jeweler to whom Louise has sold them—by presenting them as a parting present to his mistress. Ophūls’ revealing scene of Louise’s and the Général’s living arrangements, each bedded in adjoining rooms into which they shout their bed-time messages, demonstrates that, although André may be a man of valor, he is most definitely not a man of passion. As we discover later in the film, he does not even believe in emotions: “Unhappiness,” he declares, “is an invented thing.”

     Is it any wonder then that all of Louise’s friends, the society world into which she is cocooned, wish her a better companion: the Baron Fabrizio Donati, a man whose life is devoted to social skills. Ophūls literally whirls the couple into a relationship as he employs Strauss’s dizzying waltzes as the modus operandi of their romance. Warned never to hope—the Madame is known for leaving all of her hopeful suitors in the lurch—the Baron insinuates himself into Louise’s world less as a male intruder than as an expert thief of the heart.

     How different is Louise’s reaction to his gift of the same diamond earrings compared with the gift from her husband. Now, it appears, the earrings—which he has purchased in Constantinople, where Lola has given them up to pay a gambling debt—are among Louise’s most cherished things; she sees them with different eyes.

     Pretending to rediscover them in the confines of one of her gloves, Louise proudly wears the earrings to a ball, only to have them snatched away again, this time by her husband, who recognizes in his wife’s sudden admiration of them, how deeply she has fallen for the Baron. His insistence that she give them up to her baby-bearing niece helps us to realize just how out-of-touch the Madame is with everyday life. Tormented in the loss of her jewels, Louise bends briefly to coddle the new baby as she breaks into tears. But the tears, quite clearly, have nothing to do with the child, but with the loss of her baubles. For Louise is herself still a child, and will never be able to share the fulfillment of motherhood and adult love.

      The Baron may be an expert romancer, but he is, after all, still a diplomat, and with Louise’s various indiscretions—her white lies to him, her husband, and even to herself—he has little choice but to break off their relationship. Suddenly the object of so much love and attention is utterly abandoned, without even an escape from the life she was destined to live out. In the beginning of the film Louise declares that she wishes her mother were still living to help her in her decisions. Now she is left only with La Nourrice, her loving and protective nursemaid who would draw her into a darker and even more isolated world of tarot and magic. The violence and anger, lurking just below the surface of André’s seemingly calm demeanor, explode as he challenges the Baron to a duel—a duel which says nothing of his wife, but is superficially based on the Baron’s opposition to the military.

      Against love and diplomacy violence often wins out. Louise, attempting to halt the duel, remains on the periphery of the action—outside of history and event—as she has been all her life, unable to catch her breath. For one of the first times in her existence, her fainting spell is real, as she suffers what most of Ophuls’ heroines ultimately suffer, a heart-attack, a breaking of the heart!

Los Angeles, September 24, 2008

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (October 2008).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).

David Moreton | Testosterone / 2003

perverse nonsense

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dennis Hensley (screenplay, based on the novel by James Robert Baker), David Moreton (director) Testosterone / 2003

 

I rather liked David Moreton’s first film, Edge of Seventeen, a work about a young high school teen coming to terms with his gay sexuality at a difficult time for anyone, made even more problematic when you have hardly any control over your private life.

     On the basis of that movie, I determined to see Moreton’s more recent works, and ordered up his 2013 film, Testosterone from Netflix. I’m sorry to report that it was a big mistake.

     I suppose the first few moments of the film, particularly given Marco D’Ambrosio’s charming, tango-inspired score—which continues to enchant throughout the film—and the cartoon drawings that provide us with the main character’s back story might be described as rather engaging. It might have worked better to actually get to know the flesh-and-blood characters before the work teetered off into a Grand Guignol comedy, but since the central character, Dean Seagrave (David Sutcliffe) is a successful graphic book artist, author of I was a Teenage Speed Freak, at least the credits made sense.

      That fact, however, might have alerted me that this 30-some year old, living in Los Angeles, was not exactly the brightest bulb in the universe. To give him credit, he does very much love his gay lover, Pablo Alesandro (Antonio Sabato, Jr.), and evidently has been in a monogamous relationship since the two met. Indeed, we quickly discover Dean is obsessed with Pablo, although we never do perceive what this intense love is really about—which is made even more mysterious by the fact that Sabato’s face is hardly ever again flashed across the screen; perhaps Moreton chose that option over letting the heavily-accented former model try to act.

     Besides, already by the first scene of the film, we discover that Dean’s passionate and devoted companion has simply walked away from their relationship, disappearing on his way to get some cigarettes. In this same first scene, at an art gallery displaying the same kind of graphic work that Dean does, we begin to suspect our “hero” truly is a jerk. Crying on the shoulder of his less than attentive agent (Jennifer Coolidge), Dean mostly throws out glib one-liners, particularly after he spots Pablo’s mother (Sonia Braga) among the attendees (why a wealthy Argentine woman would be attending such a trashy show is never explained).

     Before you can even say “gorgon,” the creature which the beautiful Pablo’s mean-spirited mother most represents, Dean has man-handled her and offended the gallery’s art-dealer to whom his agent has long been attempting to introduce to her client. Already I suspected something about Dean and this film as amiss.

     And before you could say “What’s wrong with this picture?” you discover that the evidently rich-boy Angelino has hopped on a plane for Argentina and is knocking on the wealthy Alesandro’s door, only to be once again brushed like a flea by the monstrous momma, as he almost gets arrested by the police.

     Lonely and completely alienated, this poor lover boy mopes through the streets of Buenos Aires without knowing, so it appears, a single word of Spanish. How he has managed to live with Pablo for such a long time without even acquiring a single syllable to the most spoken language of Los Angeles is never explained. He needs a horny gay bellboy to translate the message on the Alesandro’s answering service clearly reporting that no one is at home. Dean does manage to convey to the same bellboy that he’d like some pot, which the boy gladly provides.

    Seemingly by coincidence, Dean eventually meets up with a local coffee bar owner next to the Alesandro’s digs. The young beauty, Sofia (Celina Font) at first sends him away, but soon sends out clues in English that she not only knows the language but knows the true whereabouts of the elusive Pablo. Again by coincidence, so it appears, Dean also encounters Pablo’s former lover, Marcos (Leonardo Brzezicki), who also tries to bed Dean, with no success, but does manage to fuck the bellboy.

      Turns out Marcos is Sofia’s brother and that he has apparently been sent to kill Dean. O my, I suppose we’re expected to respond; perhaps this is a kind of noir mystery, particularly after Sofia promises to take Dean to Pablo’s country home, but drops him off at her own small villa for a nightly stay-over instead. By the next morning, demanding to be taken to Pablo’s home, he discovers it’s all been a ruse, that Pablo is still back in town. When finally, Marcos does lure the reluctant lover into his bed, the morning after firing his gun into his own head instead of the intended victim, we no longer care. 

    Dean is no Bogart or even Mitchum, and by the time he determines, after another attempted break-in to the Alessandro mansion, “to do something about it,” we don’t give a hoot that this obsessed narcissist gay boy now plans to take a machete to his callous rich-boy lover’s head and plant it into a cooler he has also just purchased.

     Again through a promise from Sofia, Dean plans to meet Pablo for lunch, but that lunch turns out to be an after-wedding party celebrating the marriage of Pablo to Sophia. Already at the party, the apparently always randy Pablo has moved off to another room to screw a male guest. And Dean follows, drawing his large machete out of thin air, which hovers, in the penultimate scene of this confused dark comedy film, over his former lover to either sever his one-time lover’s head or, if we wish to imagine a less violent scene, to detach his penis.

      The last scene shows Dean in a taxi, back in Los Angeles, the cooler stowed intimately beside him, a bit like the last scene of the Coens’ Barton Fink. As in that movie, it is a cheap trick, clearly a Pandora’s box with nothing inside. In real life, had Dean accomplished such an act, given the immediacy of the police and goons who protect the Alessandro family, he would be in an Argentine prison. And, of course, had he anything in that cooler he’d have certainly been caught at the customs line. Yet, evidently, Dean has now found the “closure” he desperately sought, and maybe even a new subject for his next graphic novel. Quite frankly, apparently like the director and his writer, the audience no longer cares.   

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2017).

Marlon T. Riggs | Anthem / 1991

confirming the new world coming

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marlon T. Riggs (director) Anthem / 1991

 

In 1991, after having recently been diagnosed with AIDS, African-American filmmaker Marlon T. Riggs composed a 9-minute experimental music-video to celebrate black gay America. Using a collage of images such as the US flag, the Pan-African, black, red, and green striped flag, the pink triangle symbolizing ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a rose, a studded cock-ring, and a short clip of two nude African-American men kissing among other evocative symbols, Riggs creates a landscape that parallels the musical and poetic phrases he has chosen to argue for the potency of the black homosexual experience.

      The director begins with lines from Colin Robinson’s “Epiphany” arguing that gay blacks must “Parade it proudly” and “Pervert the language”—lines repeated several times—to which, when the recurring image of the men kissing, alternates with a Donald Woods quotation from his “What Do I Do About You?: “Every time we kiss”; followed by Robinson’s “Thrust worn, gritty fingers in my mouth.”

      The repeated scenes of an open rose petal, a cross, and the metal cock ring finally give way to rows of memorial candles, as a voice asks, “Are you scared,” “Are you safe?”

      At the heart of the work is Washington, D.C. poet Essex Hemphill, who died of AIDS four years after this short work, reading his entire poem “American Wedding,” the first stanza of which sings:

 

In america,

I place my ring

on your cock

where it belongs.

No horsemen

bearing terror,

no soldiers of doom

will swoop in

and sweep us apart.

They're too busy

looting the land

to watch us.

They don't know

we need each other

critically.

They expect us to call in sick,

watch television all night,

die by our own hands.

They don't know

we are becoming powerful.

Every time we kiss

we confirm the new world coming.

   

 The poem in its entirely is followed by image of an unfurling US flag, with the artist Blackberri singing "America the Beautiful," followed by a voice quoting Langston Hughes’ line: “I, too, sing America.”

     The images coalesce, break apart, and reconstruct, with bits and pieces of poems by not only Hemphill, Robinson, and Woods, but Reginald Jackson and Steve Langley.

     While in some respects the work as a whole is a proud statement to the entire nation of black gay sexuality, but it is also a plea for the black nationalist groups to stop excluding homosexuals of color. Riggs had long attacked the basically heterosexually-aligned Black Power groups as not only ignoring black gays and lesbians, but of employing caricatures of queer black figures that had their roots in images of Uncle Tom and other white minstrel figures. Instead of the notion of gay and lesbian figures representing brute passion, Riggs movingly argues in this document for the perception of black non-normative sexual men and women as representing the macho masculine and feminine African warriors, represented through brief clips of Africans dancing in traditional costumes and the use of the music based on traditional African drummers.

     Although Riggs’ uses some hip-hop music in his video, he had in the past also criticized some rap artists as perpetuating gay black stereotypes.

     On April 5, 1994, just 3 years after making Anthem, the director of the transformative film Tongues Untied died of AIDS at the age of 37. 

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

Frank Krom | Spelen of sterven (To Play or to Die) / 1990

play to die

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Krom and Anne van de Putte (screenplay, based on a story by Anna Blaman), Frank Krom (director) Spelen of sterven (To Play or to Die) / 1990

 

Dutch director Frank Krom’s To Play or to Die is the kind of hothouse psycho-drama that you simply couldn’t and wouldn’t want to make these days. As even its title suggests the gay hero has to die unless we wants to play being someone else than who he truly is. And the young brilliant high school student Kees (Geert Hunaerts) is certainly unable to be anything other than an immensely organized, well dressed, good looking young man who seems to be brilliant in every subject, yet maltreated by his teachers apparently almost as much as his fellow students of his all-male school.

     His teachers clearly witness the taunting of this boy, sometimes even seeming to encourage it as at moments when, if they truly looked out beyond the haze of their lessons or took a stroll down one of the aisles of the boy’s desk, they might notice if they could open their eyes even a little that it is not that Kees who has forgotten his homework or his needed texts, but that the boy sitting next him, the handsome athlete Charel (Tjebbo Gerritsma) has pulled them over in order to be able to copy word for word Kees’ perfect answers to the home assignments.

      Even if Kees dares to go the bathroom, Charel and his minions might lock him in, forcing to scream for help or struggle out one of the windows. Seemingly only the athletic teacher demands any punishment for what the others have done to the boy, but even here the Physical Education teacher doesn’t attempt to stop further retributions only to symbolically mock or demand a couple of more runs around the track. Having stripped off Kees’ underpants, leaving him naked, Charel is asked to put trousers on his head and sing silly Dutch folksongs, which so entertain the others that he comes off nearly as a hero.

      The saddest thing is that Kees permits Charel to steal his homework and doesn’t report him as one of the boys who locked him in the john. For Kees is desperately in love with his tyrant.

       Early on in the film, as his parents head out to a two-day wedding affair, Kees, who is to stay with his aunt, demands a key to the house, announcing that he intends to invite a friend over after school. Since the shy boy appears to have no friends at all, how can the parents deny him his request? And we suspect—having seen enough post 90s gay films that the tormentors of queers often get their comeuppance—that the boy is planning to invite the bully over to enact some clever sort of revenge.

       But as I said in the first paragraph, this is a 1990 film that simply, like it’s tortured hero, could not imagine such a  payoff. Suspiciously Charel agrees to the visit, while Kees stands at the head of the long stairway to his room dressed even more properly in a tweed jacket, before attempting to show him around the house.

       When Charel sees his study book all laid out, Kees simply invites him to copy out the work now so that won’t have to crib it in the classroom. While Charel writes out the assignment, Kees circles him as if looking for the right moment. But actually, we realize, he is simply studying him, trying to see his Adonis from every angle. At the very most, he is like a wild animal in heat, trying to discover the best way to ingratiate himself with his would-be lover.

 

      When they finally reach the room and we see the metal rings hanging from the ceiling upon which Kees has been hoisting himself like a gymnastics champion in the early frames of the film, we suspect that the boy may have planned some evil joke on the school athlete. After Kees takes to the rings and does a complete pull-over, an amazing feat for such a slim kid without a lot of muscle, Charel boasts that he could easily do that, and taking to the rings nearly falls.

       But, of course, of recognizing that in fact it takes a great deal of athletic ability to undertake gymnastic activities, he boasts that it’s just a sissy sport, the real sport being boxing. He beings a punching routine that forces his peer to finally engage, and this time with the fury that he’s been bottling up, pulling on Charel’s lovely mane of hair and nearly knocking the bigger boy to the floor. That is until Charel lashes out his slugs posted to Kees’ fine framed face, giving him not only a black eye but a bloody nose.

      He might have beaten him even further had he not suddenly come to his senses, shouting out that Kees even fights like as sissy and goes storming out of the room and…presumably out of the house.

 

     Why has Kees invited him to his house, we can only wonder? An ox can never perceive the beauty of youthful black-haired stallion. And Kees couldn’t truly be described as a stallion in his nascent athletic abilities. He’s just a beautiful thin-framed boy who has practiced gymnastics alone in his room until he has almost got it right. Did he hope that his personally developed prowess might impress his friend? Was he so desperate to reach out and touch the other boy that even a battle which ends in bloody wounds is sexually arousing, the way it might be for those who in engage in Sadomasochistic activities? It certainly is not surprising that after Charel leaves Kees sits down to the living room table and masturbates. Even the pummels from his beloved friend have excited him.

      But Kees is a brilliant young man, and immediately after he clearly realizes the perversity of it all. There is no way he can bully the handsome into a homoerotic situation that might fulfill his fantasies—even if he might recognize that Charel’s bullying of him possibly has its roots in the abuser’s guilt for his attraction. If Charel might have suspected the truth, he might not have stopped slugging his classmate and left immediately. But he too, unknowingly, is trapped in a relationship that he cannot accept or tolerate.

     It appears that the impossible situation with which Kees is left, a lonely life without any possibility of either relieving his sexual tensions or of stopping the endless abuse almost makes him lose his sense of reality as he begins to wonder, hearing someone playing soccer in the street—a sport which earlier Charel had mocked him for never playing. Is Charel still in the house or returned to the street to further mock him. Many an abused 16- or 17-year-old has felt so tortured by their high school lives that they have gone somewhat mad and committed suicide.

      When the phone rings, his mother reports that they are planning to stay on for a few more hours at the wedding party, Kees begging them to return home immediately, suggesting he is in danger. They promise to leave the party and come straight home.

      By this time, however, Kees is so terrorized by what he sees as the situation facing him—a world in which he cannot “play” like the others, and accordingly has no meaningful existence or sense of self—that he seems totally crazed.

      When a soccer ball comes crashing through the front window of his parent’s living room, he moves toward the stairs, apparently falling headfirst in the process—or perhaps intentionally leaping in his rush to escape from where he feels so trapped—landing face up dead. 

     As melodramatic and preposterous as Krom’s film is, To Play or to Die is one of the best short LGBTQ films of the 1990s, and certainly one of the most significant films of school bullying ever made. With its rich depth of color—reminding us at moments of Vermeer’s interiors—its stunning sense of composition, and its excellent, homoerotic-handsome actors engaging in the kind of game Harold Pinter served up in Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1961), this film does not pretend to be realistic, but takes us through a psycho-drama that speaks to the fears of all young men and women who feel the only alternatives they have is to  play a game they are incapable of playing or leave the very field upon which the game of their lives is being held. Fortunately, most youths on the outside looking in soon begin to realize that the game that is being played isn’t really on their field and truly isn’t worth playing.

     But then, one does still wonder. Perhaps Kees has played the game better that we have imagined, managing to make it appear as if he has been killed by Charel. There is the wound on his face, and Charel cannot deny having struck him several times. The evidence that Charel has been there will surely be supported by what they discover in his colleague’s own notebook, the lesson copied out precisely from Kees’ which still lies on the table. His parents have been told that he is inviting a boy from school to visit. He has hinted at his fears in their phone call. He has even told Charel of the diary he keeps, where surely he has registered the daily abuse Charel and others have spent on him, perhaps even outlined his intentions of inviting Charel for the afternoon. How can the police not find Charel to be guilty of the boy’s death, intentionally or not? Surely, that way the boy’s life will forever become intertwined with that of the young man he so desperately loved. Perhaps Kees has discovered a way to play by dying.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).