Asghar Farhadi | درباره الی‎, (Dar bāre-ye Elly) About Elly / 2009, US general release 2015

the lies we tell ourselves and others

by Douglas Messerli

 

Asghar Farhadi (screenplay and director) درباره الی‎, (Dar bāre-ye Elly) About Elly / 2009, US general release 2015

 

On the surface Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s 2009 film About Elly may, as many reviewers and critics have observed, seem to have relationships with the great Antonioni film L’Avventura; in this film; Farhadi’s film also involves a vacation trip to a seaside location—the Caspian sea, in this case, having replaced the warmer waters of the Mediterranean—during which suddenly, without explanation, a young woman goes missing. If these figures do not precisely parallel the wealthier celebrants of the Antonioni film, they nonetheless do represent an upper-middle class of Teheran life. And, like the Italians of L’Avventura, sexuality is certainly in the air—although in Farhadi’s film there is no suggestion of any actual sexual encounters; the men and women sleep in separate rooms, even though all but of two of the would-be partyers are already married and have children who accompany them on the trip.

 

   Yet the comparison with the ground-breaking art-house film also immediately breaks down after those few easy associations. For Farhadi’s film, as some critics have made clear, does not have roots so much inter-continental/international filmmaking, despite its highly artful direction, as it does with daily Iranian life. As Godfrey Cheshire has written, this director has no intention in his films of explaining Iran to Westerners, nor even pointing out the political difficulties of living in Iran—although he certainly does subtly point to them. No, this film is comfortable in its own milieu, just as are these young couples who have known each other for years, mostly through having gone to school together, feel at home with one another.

      At least in the beginning of the film, they speak so quickly in a Farsi argot that even with an excellent English translation finds it often difficult to comprehend them. It’s not that they are so much different, but actually so much like modern young US, Mexican, European, and Canadian couples that renders them so slightly incomprehensible. Yes, the women all wear headscarves (a requirement in Iranian films) and, every once in a while, the men break down in male-on-male dances unthinkable in the West, but these contemporary citizens of Iran are almost painfully too much like us. The men immediately bond like those in so many American comedic bromances, and the women, at first, are shuffled off into another group to busily clean up the seaside apartment they have had to accept after being told that the villa they had paid for is due for a visit from its owner. Yet, husbands and wives, even allowing for the gender separations, behave much like most such group vacationers throughout the world, sometimes grousing about their assignments, but sharing in complex relationships that reveal their marital situations. This might almost have been a Hollywood-made movie demonstrating the joys and difficulties of friends recoupling in paradise such as the same year’s release Couples Retreat.

     But beyond the first frames of this work, we already begin to perceive that here something is amiss in a kind of Hitchcockian way that will alter all of our expectations. First, there is the mix-up about the rooms they thought they had rented, and then the manager’s young son—who looks like a slightly menacing Pugsley right out of The Addams Family—sourly observes the group’s actions, even as he opens the gate to their more than filthy digs. With broken-out widows, they will surely be cold at night. And then there is the continuous roar of the sea which never lets up throughout the film.

     More importantly, into their tightly-knit group they have mistakenly woven two outsiders: their former friend Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), who has just returned from living in Germany after divorcing his German wife, and one of their daughter’s school-teacher Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), whom Sepidah (Golshifteh Farahani) has invited along with the particular intention of hooking him up with Ahmad.

     The beautiful Elly, attending to the children and shyly helping out in all the cleaning and cooking, is soon loved by all, and even the now unwedded Ahmad begins to warm up to her after the group intentionally sends them off on a car trip to pick up more supplies. Yet we can’t help but know something is wrong. In a cellphone call to her mother, Elly reassures the sickly woman that she shall be back by the next day, lying to her about where she is and contradicting the fact that the others have planned for a stay of a two days longer.

     When Elly insists that she be driven into town so that she might return home by bus, the would-be matchmaker Sepidah hides Elly’s traveling bag and refuses to allow the trip, insisting she, herself, will pick up the new needed provisions alone, demanding that Elly watch the children bathing in the sea.          Somewhat like the more recent film Roma, the crashing waves seem to be swallowing up these children instead of allowing them to plash in their waves. And Farhadi brilliantly plays out what we might have imagined as two of the children run back to the volley-ball playing men to report that the young boy Arash has disappeared. Basically, they ignore her until another child runs to them reporting the same information, sending them through a mad rush throughout the house before they realize Arash is lost a sea.

       The long sequence in which they search for him, the camera roving back and forth over the landscape and waves before they finally find the boy, bringing him in and successfully resuscitating him, is an exciting piece of cinema that reveals Farhadi’s brilliance as a director.

       But soon they discover another, maybe even more serious problem. Elly is also missing. Had she attempted to save the child and drowned? Had she simply abandoned the children to return to Teheran? Why is her bag missing? As Sepidah’s husband Amir (Mani Haghighi) begins to interrogate her, his wife reveals that she has hidden Elly’s bag, and that, in fact, Elly was engaged to another man, Alireza, and that she has pressured the young teacher to join them on their vacation trip nonetheless.

 

     When the men call Alireza, who breathlessly arrives at their retreat, they explain what has happened, the fiancé grows violent, attacking Ahmad, and demands to talk to Sepidah. Encouraged by Amir to not tell the whole truth, she explains, much to his distress, that Elly went willingly with them.

     Implicit, obviously, is the fact that in this male-dominated culture, her choice suggests she was willing to abandon her relationship with him. And, in this sense, the director is hinting, if of nothing else that the gender relationships available to his countrymen are very unfair and delimited.

      Yet, given that knowledge, Sepidah’s actions and her final lie are even more detestable, and she is obviously renounced through her actions by her friends, even if Amir tenders forgiveness for her acts.

      The final nail in her coffin comes when the police discover Ally’s body, which has suddenly washed up on a nearby shore. Called to the morgue by the police to identify his fiancée, Alireza breaks down, crying uncontrollably. Did Ally deliberately drown herself for her shame in having left him? Had she desired to leave him long ago? Was she, perhaps, attempting to save Arash? No answers are given. The movie doesn’t need them. What began as a loving domestic comedy has turned into a tragic outing that has forced them to all to realize the lies they have told to each other and themselves.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2019).

 

Asghar Farhadi | جدایی نادر از سیمین‎ Jodaí-e Nadér az Simín (A Separation) / 2011

out of the circle, out of the square

by Douglas Messerli

 

Asghar Farhadi (screenwriter and director) جدایی نادر از سیمین‎ Jodaí-e Nadér az Simín (A Separation) / 2011

 

Asghar Farhadi’s 2011 film, A Separation has so very much on its mind that it’s somewhat difficult to know where to begin in describing it. In many respects it is a cultural statement of the oppositions and strains of contemporary Iranian life.

      After all, the central conceit of the film is that a forward-looking wife Simin (Leila Hatami), displeased with the situation in Iran, wants to immigrate with her daughter, Termah (Sarina Farhadi) and husband Nader (Peyman Moaadi) in order to escape the increasingly harsh restrictions her world imposes. One of those very restrictions is that husbands, by law, have rule over their wives, and since he refuses to leave, Simin must file a divorce decree in order to proceed. It’s not that she doesn’t love her husband, but simply that she desires a better life for her teenage daughter.

       Yet, since Nader refuses, the Iranian judge cannot allow her to gain custody over her daughter, which negates even her logic for the separation. In short, the inequality of the sexes in this culture reifies her desires quite early in this film.

      Nader’s reason for his inability to leave is, outwardly, a seemingly logical one: his father (played by Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) has advanced Alzheimer’s desire, and he refuses to abandon him.

Although Farhadi makes it quite apparent that Nader is totally devoted to his father, however, it is also a rather false excuse, since he works all day and is seldom there to actually care for the man to whom he is so devoted.

     Indeed, once Simin leaves Nader to move in with her mother—when the separation is actually effected—the couple are forced to hire a worker to care for the elderly man. The woman they choose, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), who must travel a long distance each day from a poor suburb, could not have been a worse candidate. First, she is deeply religious, which makes it difficult to even touch, let alone clean up a man who has lost the control of his bowels. Furthermore, she has not received the permission, a requirement of her beliefs, from her hot-headed husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), who currently is without a job and temporarily incarcerated. Razieh must take her young daughter with her to work. Most importantly, she is not only unequipped to cope with her new responsibilities, but she is pregnant, and in her condition unable to care for a man who falls, needs cannisters of oxygen in order to breath, and cannot even eat by himself.

     At one point, Razieh enters his room to discover that he has escaped the apartment and is forced to run after him in the streets, almost—or perhaps actually being—hit by a passing automobile.

     The very first day of her service as a nurse, after her patient has pissed his pants, Razieh must call a phone hot-line just to determine whether it is permissible for her to clean him up. We see, accordingly, exactly why Simin wants to remove herself and daughter from such an environment without her having to say a word. When a culture is not even allowed to fulfill their duties, to help others in great need, and to live out their desires, we recognize that something is terribly amiss. Who wouldn’t want to escape such a world?

      And it gets even worse, when one day, returning home early, Nader finds his father almost comatose, one of his hands tied to the bed. We discover later that Razieh has needed to visit the doctor and was simply attempting to prevent another escape of the man for whom she was caring. When Nader also discovers that some of his money is missing, he blames the nurse, along with declaring her abuse of his father.

     We don’t truly see whether he pushes her literally out the door as he fires her; Farhadi is too subtle a director to show the actual actions; yet that is what Hodjat and his lawyers claim has caused his wife’s miscarriage. Did Nadet not know of her pregnancy?

      No one in this drama gets spared from the cruelties of the draconian system. If found guilty Nader will be imprisoned for years. Even the absent Simin, separated from the events, must return to protect her husband, whom it appears did know that Razieh was expecting (he admits as much to his daughter), but who also rightfully questions whether his hired nurse might have been abused by her husband. She even hints that perhaps the automobile incident might have been the cause of her miscarriage. In this society blame is heaped upon nearly everyone involved. It was Simin, we later perceive, who took the money to help pay moving expenses, not Nader’s new hire.

      In such a patriarchal world, perhaps a “separation” is the only choice women can make, and ultimately Termah, the couple’s daughter is asked to make the same choice: does she wish to go with her father or mother? We never hear her final decision. She asks that both her parents leave the courtroom so that she might reveal her choice to the judge alone. And, given her father’s confessions, we cannot be sure whether or not she will be able to choose rightly. Both of her parents have selected intractable routes, which lead in entirely opposite directions.

 

    Yet, Farhadi does reveal a truly essential fact: as difficult as it is, Simin has chosen to move ahead into the future, while Nader has preferred to turn to the past to care for a man who no longer even knows his name or who he is. At the expense of his current family, Nader has clung to the memory of his childhood to care of the incognizant man who nurtured and cared for him. No one, of course, should be forced to decide between these alternatives. Yet, we can be sure, that these impossible choices are not limited to Iran. In this film, the director simply heightens the tensions and pulls that many individuals and couples around the world are subject to. And that, in turn, helps to lift this wonderful film out of a cultural battle of religious beliefs in Iran to a film of universal value.

     As I grow into role of an elderly man—without having any of the family protections that even Nader’s father had—I fear, obviously, what might happen to me if I might fall into dementia or Alzheimer’s. Both my mother and her sister suffered, in the end, these diseases. But I can assure you that I would hope no young person should have to choose to alter their lives, their movement forward or away, in order to nurse me. As painful as it is to say this: Nader and Simin should have simply moved off—particularly in the world in which they were entrapped—to leave the unknowing old man behind to die. Perhaps this entire society (I do not mean simply the Iranian world) that has entrenched itself in the past for far too long in order to allow its younger participants  room to breathe. I can only hope that Termah suddenly comes to perceive that her mother’s choice was the only viable one.

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2019).

   

Jehane Noufaim | El Midan (The Square) / 2013

i’ve decided to walk down the middle of the street

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jehane Noufaim (director) El Midan (The Square) / 2013

 

I was delighted to come upon the 2013 film about the attempted Egyptian Revolution of 2011 at Tahrir Square, a documentary that I had never seen and had almost forgotten about. Netflix be praised.

      Directed by Jehane Noujaim, with a score by H. Scott Salinas, and a large cast of young Egyptian men and women who were involved in the taking of that square (Ahmed Hassan, Dina Abdullah, Magdy Ashour, Sherif Boray, and Aida El-Kashef among them), this moving film recounts some of the events leading up to the idealistic revolution in which, as one participants notes, “the relationships [between the participants] are becoming very strong,” and, finally, that “There was no such thing as a Muslim or a Christian….We were all equal.”

      You can see their caring determination in their faces, or, as one of the speakers declares: “We were looking for a conscience.” As they gather in Fahir Square, putting up tents, and declaring their presence, they declare that they will not leave until their demands are met.

      There is a kind of electric energy that brings tears to one’s eyes as they make quite evident what historian Niall Ferguson has described in his work The Square and the Tower, the effects of networks against hierarchal governmental and other such structures.

 

      These youths, however, describe the “tower” of Ferguson’s work instead as a “circle.” As one young man insists, before the revolution “The same circle, the same regime” ruled. “People went home, and nothing happened.” “At some point,” suggests one young protestor, “I’m going to explode!”

      And explode they did, taking over the square as their own territory, their “due” in the society from which they have been locked out. For them, their acts were not merely a revolutionary position, it represented their own histories. “The square means we’ll tell our stories.”

      Another warrior summarizes Tahir Square:

 

                  They want to suffocate us. The square was tough. The square was not

                  normal…It was war.

     

      Yet, of course, like so many such revolutions, as profound as they might be for the protestors, Tahir Square ended in violence and dissolution.

      “It was too much. Too many bullets.”

      As one participant in the square laments, as if he were shouting the news in a telegraphic message of defeat: “2011 Square taken again. The Muslim Brotherhood take over the square, having negotiated with the army. The Brotherhood left us alone to be arrested.”

      In utter defiance of new laws, he insists “I’ve decided to walk down the middle of street,” certain death in busy Cairo.

      At another moment a revolutionary summarizes the situation: “You think you can do whatever you want? The members were beaten up…the square is empty.”

      However, as A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote of this powerful work, "The Square, while it records the gruesome collision of utopian aspirations with cold political realities, is not a despairing film. It concludes on a note of resolve grounded in the acknowledgment that historical change can be a long, slow process."

      As the same young person insists: “I’m going to continue to expose them.”

     Whether or not that is truly possible, only time will tell. And will these then youths, ever be able to see the changes they fought for within their lifetimes?

   Yet these young people who for a moment changed the history of their nation, still have their memories of those moments, and surely will, in telling their histories to others, instill hope for future changes.

      Noujaim’s straightforward telling of this tale is part of that history. His subjects are the true focus of this work; I have seldom seen a documentary truly proclaim its own generic possibilities: the ability to “document” (to present a “lesson,” “example,” or “proof”) as in this film. There is no veneer of fiction here. Through this work’s images and voices, we see both the excitement and horror of the events, reminding me a bit of the kind fervor many of those in my generation felt when we took to the streets to speak out against our government and the Viet Nam War. We too marched around a square—in Madison, Wisconsin the State Capitol was surrounded by four streets that spanned the Capitol Square. And we too were chased and attacked by police, a few of us, as in Bowling Green actually losing their lives. 

    Yet, of course, most of us personally had not suffered for all of our lives, and except for those killed, we were not tortured or electrocuted, even if a few went temporarily to jail. In a sense, the comparisons are frail. For these young men and women challenged a powerful tower of a regime. Calling attention to the square, they shook that tower to its core, it responding with an even more terrifyingly hierarchal punishment from which Egypt has yet to be released.

   Perhaps Noufaim’s El-Midan should be required viewing in any political science course in universities across our country so that we too might perceive what it means to walk down the middle of the street.

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

Jamie Travis | The Armoire / 2009

children’s games

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamie Travis (screenwriter and director) The Armoire / 2009 [22 minutes]

 

The young adolescent Aaron (William Cuddy) has met up after school with his best friend Tony (Ricardo Hoyos) and together with him gone to his house. There he asks Tony if he wants to play hide-and-seek, Tony saying simply that he didn’t want to, but nonetheless agreeing to it when his friend pleads with him to do so.

      Aaron closes his eyes and counts, but when he goes on the search for Tony, he cannot find him anywhere in the house, his mother calling later to report he’s missing and wondering if Aaron has seen him, so goes the boy’s simply, but mysterious rendition of events, turning eventually from a personal accounting, to a police report, and finally into national TV news.

       But in Canadian director Jaimie Travis’ remarkable film—the third in his “The Saddest Children in the World” trilogy*—the story doesn’t stop there. Inexplicably, Aaron keeps looking at his bedroom Armoire, one of the places he first checked out in his search for his friend, and eventually begins crawling into it to sleep at night.

       His caring parents (Tammy Isbell and David Keeley) are worried, and tell him that they surely can understand if he might want to stay home from school, but Aaron assures them that he is fine. The film, however, tells us that he’s not just fine, with the picture of his choirboy friend Tony appearing on the front page of the local newspaper, the camera zeroing in on the picture while the music whirls up a few darker chords.

       Moreover, at school, while a local policeman talks to the students, yet again, about the dangers of riding with strangers and the need for a “buddy system,” Aaron begins to have visions: two hands appear under his desk with a pencil inserted into a pencil sharpener, a whispered voice following. Aaron asks to be excused to go to the bathroom and there hears a voice speaking to him through the drain of one of the urinals.

      Back in the now empty classroom, Aaron opens his pants and sits down at his desk, apparently planning to masturbate or urinate, an act interrupted by the schoolteacher’s return. His parents attempt to comprehend why he has committed such an act, his father beginning a sentence, “You know you can come to us if you have any problems….” interrupted by the boy declaring information which we have not previously known, “You’re not even my real father.”

    The milk carton announces on one of its panels, accompanied by a picture of Tony, that the child has been missing since May 30, 1991. Aaron punches a hole in the mouth of the boy in the picture, permitting the milk to pour out over him, dropping from the table onto the region of his penis.

    My best Freudian guess is that Aaron and Tony have been playing games involving their penises, confusing the joys they feel and perhaps even what they have begun to ejaculate with urine, the only recognition of young children of what issues from the region of their bodies. Have they also been injecting their “pencils” into other orifices?  Or, of course, it could also be all Aaron’s precocious imagination, a sublimated desire never acted upon.

      In the very next scene, Aaron is sitting across from a gentle female psychiatrist (Maggie Huculak), suggesting that she is going to ask him some questions and prevailing upon him to answer as honestly as he can.

 

     He talks about visits to Disneyland and Disneyworld in Orlando with his very best friend Tony, about many sleepovers, mostly in his house because he has bunkbeds, wherein Tony would sleep on the top while he would always get stuck on the bottom. One morning Tony woke him up to show him, through a crack in the door, Aaron’s step-dad doing sit ups, an image that can only be described, in terms of the way it is shown in the movie, as homoerotic, and surely being precisely what to these adolescent boys, curious about the male body, would be attracted to. Aaron reports, Tony thought it was “funny,” a child’s word for “strange,” an oddity not about the behavior of the adult but in relationship to his feelings concerning it. The language in this film represents truly a child’s language and imagination, which needs to be translated into adult jargon. Sleeping on top, for example, might suggest the dominance of the other boy which might later in their lives define itself into a sexual position. We can only guess that Aaron preferred more normative games, while Tony might have been exploring more complex issues.

      Certainly, the vision of his step-father revealed to him by Tony has an enormous effect on Aaron as he begins to see his father always as being naked. He didn’t want to see him that way, he explains, but he simply couldn’t help it. “But then one day I just stopped picturing him that way.”

      He has a similar problem with a substitute teacher who wanted his students to just call him Mike, presumably the use of a common name suggesting to the precocious child a more casual relationship that called up sexual possibilities along with it.

     At this point, the psychiatrist is, quite humorously, already a bit troubled by the child’s sexual imagination, interrupting the child’s open conversation to speak to his mother, presumably to warn her about the troubling things she has observed, given that it is still early in the 1990s, only two decades after the American Psychiatric Association had stopped seeing homosexual behavior as a mental aberration.

     Throughout this scene the director has carefully placed on the wall behind the confessing child, children’s colorful paintings of rainbows, symbol, obviously, of the LGBTQ+ community.

      In the very next scene, with an ice-cream cone dripping down across Aaron’s fingers, we see the boy hearing the TV news about the discovery of his friend’s body behind the elementary school he had attended.

      Aaron is delighted to have become the new soloist with the choir. The choir director announces that Tony would be proud.

      But in the very next frame the psychiatrist is hypnotizing the boy, obviously in an attempt to further dig deeper into his memories. In reverse order (one of the many formalist devices used by Travis throughout) we now observe Aaron looking for his friend in their hide-and-seek game, beginning in the kitchen under the sink, moving to the garage—a ping pong ball which had fallen to the floor, now leaping up back to the table from whence it fell—moving the shower curtain away to see if Tony his hiding there, and finally returning to the armoire in his own room, before he returns to the couch, his hands over his eyes as he counts.

       Now, however, he backs out the door alone, backs down a wooded path and can be seen putting soil over a shallow hole before he drags a wrapped body…not into the whole but up the stairs of his house, a living boy seemingly writhing with, the covering rolling up neatly to become an extra blanket as we end up with Tony on his bedroom floor, Aaron sitting in his armoire. Asked what he’s seeing, he replies, “Nothing. I see nothing.”

     The psychiatrist snaps him out of his hypnotic condition, with the boy repeating “Nothing.” If the narrative is accurate, it appears he has embedded the boy in the blanket, dragged him to and deposited him into the shallow grave behind the school before returning home to play the game of hide-and-seek alone. Of course, this could also be entirely in his imagination, the product of guilt or sorrow, filling in the imaginary details that accord with what he has heard about his friend’s death. True or not, it is disturbing, a truth he has not revealed to the doctor. The emphatic nothing is either a lie or the actual truth.

       The armoire in his bedroom is now missing. He asks his parents where it’s disappeared to? “It’s in the garage,” answers his mother. “It’s not normal to sleep in a wardrobe,” his step-father pontificates.

 

      In the garage, we see the boy open the armoire, crawl inside, and close the doors behind him. The boy clearly has chosen the abnormal, outside of his parents' attempts to protect him.    

    In the very next frame we see the armoire, back in his bedroom, the door suddenly opening from within as we observe the two boys having been together inside the closet, Tony now sitting with his legs dangling from it, Aaron still more deeply embedded inside.

 

    It is clear that their games with their bodies have been played out within the wardrobe, a hidden space, a kind of closet just as surely as the metaphoric one where gay men often hid themselves during the same period.

    In the angelic voice of a boy soprano, Tony begins to sing, but eventually interrupts himself, responding not to anything Aaron has said, but simply to his curious movement of his eyes with the word “What?” Aaron says the very same words he had previously spoken to his doctor, “Nothing.” Tony dares his friend to go back in the armoire, which Aaron does, crawling back into its depths. Tony quickly shuts the doors, locking it with a fork.

     Aaron begs to be let out, Tony answering “Not until you say you’re sorry.” “What for?” “I’m not going to play your games.” “Let me out, Tony, I can’t breathe” “You liked it in there before, didn’t you?”

     Aaron shakes the doors, “Please Tony.” “Not until you say you’re sorry.” …”Count to one hundred and I’ll let you out.”

     As Aaron slowly counts, Tony sits on the bed, finishing his bagel with cream cheese.

     When Aaron finally reaches 100, Tony pulls away the fork, the doors opening. He moves back to the bed, learning up against it, to speak the words: “Your turn.”

      It’s evident that whatever went on in the armoire is something that Tony will not accept as his fault, blaming it on his friend, as if any sexual activity between the two were not a mutual act. It’s also seems apparent that Tony is basically torturing his loving friend, attempting to instill guilt for their sexual explorations.

      “Truth or dare?” Aaron asks, seemingly recovered from his temporary imprisonment.

      “Dare,” answers Tony.

      Aaron points to a wall socket: “I dare you to stick your fork in that outlet.”

      Tony bends down to the outlet, pulling out the night light and turning back with a look at Aaron of deep recrimination.

  

      We now know what must have truly happened, a terrible accident on account of their almost saddo-masochistic childhood versions of truth and dare.

      But strangely, Travis’ film, despite its tragic events, ends in a rather surrealist ray of hope. Travis, in an interview in 2012 with James McNally, himself argues that in making The Armoire he felt he “couldn’t have my sad child films end in such a dark way. With The Armoire, there is a light at the end of the tunnel of adolescence.”

      Aaron suddenly exits from his residence in the garage Armoire, walks firmly into the room where his parents sit and marches upstairs. He climbs into the top bank, explaining that he is ready. Below him his friend Tony moves his feet up into the air, slightly tilting the top mattress and turns on a tape recorder with music as Aaron sings in a lovely high soprano voice a song about “sailing away despite the crashes of the ocean,” “take my hand, let us both make our way, let us both make our way.” Together they reach a new world, a time beyond the difficult voyage they have just encountered, a song written and performed by Alfredo Santa Ana entitled “Floating Down the Stream.”

      Despite his actions, despite the horror of their games, Aaron remains an innocent who will pass through this dark episode into a continued life of new possibilities, a world outside the armoire. Yet, I doubt an easy resolution as he grows older and realizes his culpability for what happened. If he need not have felt guilt for their sexual games, he will surely feel it for their aftermath. The sadness, in this case, may exist mostly in the future.

      This truly awesome short work reminds me, in several respects, of Travis’ fellow Canadian director John Greyson, with their surprising intersections of various genre and music.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2024).