Arnaud Dufeys | Atomes (Atoms) / 2012

bending the rules

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnaud Dufeys (screenwriter and director) Atomes (Atoms) / 2012 [19 minutes]

 

This powerful short film by Belgium director Arnaud Dufeys begins with a student Jules (Benoît Cosaert) being accused by the principal of the boarding school he attends with having illegally entered a room for teachers only.

    We do not precisely know why Hugo has broken into the room, but it appears it has something to do with his teacher Hugo (Vincent Lecuyer), for whom he is retrieving some correspondence, a message, or something else that might incriminate him with regard to a sexual encounter he has had with the boy. Or he may have just entered it on his own accord, to see what might be hidden from his eyes; the important thing is that he has used his teacher Hugo’s key in order to get in.

 

    His sentence is relatively mild: he must stay in his room for the night.

    Not that that bothers Jules, who flaunts all rules and regulations. As he exits the verboten room, Hugo meets him to beg for the key back. But either Jules doesn’t have the key, the principal having taken it—he hints that the rectors suspect that it is Hugo’s key—or he simply refuses to return it.

     A short while later, he and other students have broken into a student room where they are playing loud dance music, smoking, and generally just hanging out. Hugo is forced to close down that room as well for the students’ refusal to heed his former warning. When Hugo mentions that the class bell rang six minutes earlier, Jules snaps back, “You want your dick sucked as well,” a dangerous thing to say, since we know there obviously has been something nefarious between

them. Is he threatening to go public?

    

     Hugo closes down the room and the other students leave, but he keeps Jules behind and again demands the key, Jules finally returning it.

     At another point, when Hugo is peeing in a private cubicle, Jules enters and refuses to leave, but despite Hugo’s pleas for him to leave, he refuses. From the sounds, they merely piss together, but suddenly there is a friendly rapport between them that testifies to a more intimate relationship. When Jules just as quickly leaves the cubicle and Hugo goes to wash his hands, Hugo laughs to himself for a moment at the absurdity of it all, before, seeing his image in the mirror, returning to a serious state of mind, perceiving the seriousness of the boy’s sexualized intrusions into his life.

     As the teacher makes his evening round during their lessons, the other boys seem to have finished their studies, but Jules calls him in, not able to comprehend in his chemistry lesson what makes the protons and neutrons turn around the atom’s nucleus. Hugo explains it as negative and positive energy, but Jules either still does not understand or refuses to. It is clear, however, that something like that energy relates to his and the teacher’s relationship, a negative-positive discharge between the two due to their sexual reactions to each other.

     Later, nearing bed time, Hugo attempts to herd his “boys” from the shower into their own rooms, as they play randy juvenile games with each other. Jules who has refused to take a public shower, begs Hugo, as he apparently has in the past, for a key to the faculty showers on another floor. 

     Hugo asks why Jules won’t share the public showers, but all the boy can answer is that he prefers to shower “quietly.” We suspect that he is not interested in sharing his peers’ roughhousing, and would prefer a real sexual encounter.

     After everyone else is in bed, we see Jules smoking outside, attempting for an instant to grab a peacock which evidently inhabits the school grounds. The peacock, obviously reminding us of his own strutting behavior, escapes into the surrounding woods, woods which not only express the isolation of the school, but the distance between the world of the school and the normality of homelife.

     Hugo reads for a while, puts down his book and walks toward the staircase where he finds his student, Jules, sitting. He suggests he return to his bed, an important conversation ensuing:

 

             “Listen Jules, It won’t happen again, I already told you.”

             “Why?”

             “Because it’s not….”

 

    In mid-sentence Jules grabs his teacher’s head, draws it to him, and kisses him, Hugo attempting to push him off a couple of times. Finally, the boy goes on run, Hugo grabbing him to calm him down. They sit a ways from each other in a kind of detente

     In a flashback, we realize what happened in that past instance. We see both Hugo and Jules in the faculty showers, laughing and playing together, the clear harbinger of the sexual incident we have long suspected occurred between them.

    In the final scene, we watch Hugo in a room, dressed in a coat, the teacher looking out the window. A young adolescent boy is observed walking toward the room and entering. The boy reports, “He asked me to tell you that he left and won’t come back. And also that he still doesn’t get the thing about his chemistry class.”

     Hugo slightly smiles and thanks the boy, apparently Jules’ younger brother or a relative.

   The room in which Hugo now sits is empty, as he shakes his head with seeming memories, surely regret.

      Has Hugo been asked to leave, with Jules leaving as a result? Or, has Hugo simply discovered Jules’ room empty? In a sense, it doesn’t matter, both have hit up against or perhaps crashed into the impossible: a teacher-student relationship that should not have occurred and can only end in disaster.

     An unnamed commentator on IMDb has written one of the most perceptive of such movie comments:

 

“Benoît Cosaert as Jules was perfect as the manipulative teen older than his years, a poignant mix of child and adult feeling the power he holds. Vincent Lecuyer as Hugo was excellent as the teacher who had made a mistake and was now not only regretting it but paying for it.

     The film spoke to a truism. Sexual abuse from a position of power is never acceptable but it's often the younger victim that has made the running and is not traumatised. And as the film shows, has the power and uses it.”

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queen Cinema blog (April 2024). 

  

Isabel Steuble-Johnson | Cursive / 2023

linking things up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joe Borg (screenplay), Isabel Steuble-Johnson (director) Cursive / 2023 [10 minutes]

 

A young lesbian woman, Dot (Adaya Monique Henry), in a relationship with Bea (Holly Hawgood), begins to sense their relationship is falling apart. Dot feels that it is a result, in part, of her not feeling comfortable of joining in the games played by their mutual friends, which all involve writing. Dot can only print and has never learned the simple art of cursive, although these days with touchphones and computers one wonders why these women simply don’t communicate in that manner, inside of writing their game cards, thank you cards, and invitations by hand.

 

  In any event, Dot fears that her intelligent and socially skillful friend is about to leave her, in part, because of her lack of such simple abilities. And it has made her, as her lover argues, serious and introspective, no longer someone who wants to participate in social occasions, particularly their game playing.

     Having stolen a hand-made card at a party, Dot at first attempts to imitate the beautiful hand-written script of the card, which simply becomes a jumble of marks. Finally, she emails the maker of the card, Angela (Marie Johnson), seeking help in learning cursive. As she writes (in an e-mail message), “I’m reaching out because I hate my handwriting and wonder if you could help. No matter how hard I try, it’s just not good enough. I feel like it’s just not in line with who I am anymore and might be holding me back.”

      Angela agrees to help her over several weeks, Dot at first trying to copy others’ handwriting, until Angela explains that she must find her own signature style, since handwriting, she explains, “Is a reflection of your innermost thoughts and feelings.”

      Over the next several weeks Dot practices for several hours each day in her little white notebook, hiding her new efforts from her lover. Eventually, she sees results, beginning to leave little notes wherever she goes, even handing one to Bea: “Maybe enough is enough. But I wish you nothing but love. (a heart) Dot xx.” And given the smile on Dot’s face, we presume that her effort was “enough” to alter the situation and their relationship is back on track.

 

     What British writer Joe Borg and director Steuble-Johnson are attempting to say about lesbian love in the British Empire is beyond me. I might imagine that Dot’s real problem is that she has hooked up with a woman in Bea and her social set that spend their days writing frivolous notes back and forth to one another in a manner that reminds me of another century. My friends, for example, all now use e-mail, Facebook, Instagram, and other media services to communicate with me, and I often read now in the newspapers that cursive is no longer even being taught in several schools.

      I gather that this director wanted to show how disturbing that fact was, and how such a trend might restrict how she and her friends interact. This little film certainly seems a bit reactionary, a little like the current British monarch railing against contemporary architecture—both the film and his royal displeasure having very little effect.

       I suppose, however, that such a dismissive attitude as mine only goes to prove how course and crude Americans truly are, not even able to send off birthday tidings and thank you notes for all the pleasant afternoons of wine and games of word association by their first letter. At least Dot can now join in without feeling uncomfortable for her scrawny disconnected characters, clearly a metaphor of her former inner self. She has now “gotten herself together” and “linked things up.”

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

Marcel L'Herbier | L'Homme du large (The Man of the Sea) / 1920

return to sender

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcel L'Herbier (scenario, based on a story by Honoré de Balzac, and director) L'Homme du large (The Man of the Sea) / 1920

 

Despite the fact that Gaumont issued a restored DVD of Marcel L’Herbier’s L'Homme du large (Man of the Sea) in 2009, the film is still quite difficult to obtain in a home US regional DVD version or on the internet.

      A couple of years back I was fortunate enough to see a video of a live broadcast of the film from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on-line, and since then I have studied several briefer video summaries of the film which has allowed me to capture some vital images from the film. However, I still must rely on several other sources to fully describe the story and significance of events.

 

     After L’Herbier’s success with Le Carnaval des vérités (1920), Léon Gaumont and his studio provided the director with far greater resources for his next film, and in the spring of 1920 L’Herbier penned a scenario loosely based on the story of Honoré de Balzac “Un drame au bord de la mer,” which like his previous movie would be shot against the backdrop of the sea of Brittany, which itself would become a protagonist in the film. Naming the work L'Homme du large, he added the subtitle “Marine,” or “seascape.”

      The scenario L’Herbier created is rather simple and straight-forward but his images speak an entirely different language.

       The devout, pertinacious Breton fisherman Nolff (Roger Karl), has taken a vow of silence, now living the life a hermit beside the sea. The only person with whom he has contact is a white costumed novice who brings him his meals.

       Years ago, with disregard for his fellow men and life on the land, Nolff had built his house on a remote cliff, devoting his life to fishing and caring for his wife (Claire Prélia) and two children, his hard-working and obedient daughter Djenna (Marcelle Pradot), and his son Michel (Jaque Catelain), who as his male heir, he adored in patriarchal manner, determined to bring him up as “a free man, a sailor.”

 

     Michel however is weak and spoiled, taking advantage of his father’s affection for him. L’Herbier’s images show him continually imitating the worst of human traits—at one point stealing his father’s pipe and smoking it as a child, with his father misinterpreting it as an attempt to be a strong male figure like himself. L’Herbier, however, presents the young Michel as a kind of sissy, as when his father first attempts to take him on his fishing boat, the boy holds back in terror, preferring to lay and play on the sand.

      As he grows somewhat older Michel also becomes addicted to the attractions of the town upon which his father has turned his back, and is lured into further bad behavior by his friend Gueen-la-Taupe (Charles Boyer).

      Easter is the only time of the year when Nolff and his family join in the festivities of the townspeople. But on this particular holiday, Nolff’s wife becomes ill, her husband returning home with her.

      Michel, meanwhile, escapes to the town bar to consort with the dancer Lia (Suzanne Doris). But once more L’Herbier presents a far more complex set of representations of Michel’s bar life, showing us a scene of wild open love-making, rowdy behavior, lesbian liaisons and other activities which we might imagine in a Berlin club of the period instead of a French coastal village.

     The mother becomes so ill that Djenna is sent to bring him home to his mother’s bedside. Michel, however, slips away and returns to the bar. While she calls out to him in a fever from her bed, we see, in one episode, the boy’s best friend turning toward him as if about to plant a kiss upon his lips.

 

       Later at the bar Michel gets into a fight with Lia’s protecting lover and stabs him. Locked away in jail, Michel is finally released when Nolff arrives with a payment; by the time they return home they discover the mother has died.

         In order to further attract Lia, Michel feels he needs more money and steals the savings his mother had put away for Djenna for a future without the support of her father or other men. Nolff catches him in the act and vows to “return him to God,” tying Michael down in the haul of an open boat and pushing it out to sea.

         It is for these reasons that Nolff has become a hermit.

         Djenna, meanwhile has entered a convent, where she receives a letter from Michel, who has clearly survived and is now working as a sailor, having become a changed man. When Nolff hears that his son now wants to return home, he cries to the sea in remorse for his inhuman judgment against the boy.

         What is truly remarkable in this film is L’Herbier’s cinematographic effects and his original use of intertitles, showing them in conjunction with the action rather than presenting them before her after, and presenting them in different typestyles that helped to convey the characters of which they spoke. In an essay written in conjunction with the San Francisco Silent Cinema Festival, Chris Edwards nicely summarizes some of these effects:

 

 “An early intertitle describes Nolff in a typeface recalling carved stone. Intertitles concerning Marcel feature a swirling background, while those about Djenna depict tidy gardens. L’Herbier’s dramatic wipes, irises in and out, and masking techniques emphasize certain characters or their actions, or draw from already powerful landscapes something more precise. In one early scene he masks a cliffside into the shape of a cross, surrounding it with words, making it both shot and intertitle. Later he masks the rocks into a “V,” while, at the top of the screen we see a woman strolling. It’s almost as though she’s headed for a steep-sided pit. To see these effects on screen is a reminder that they could be seen nowhere else.”

 

      The scenes were also tinted in various colors, once again representing the emotional states of the work’s major characters, white for the early austere scenes of Nolff’s hermit-like existence, blue for nearly all sea-side scenes, and yellow and red for the interiors of the riotous town bar.

      The 85-minute film was a great public success and led to further collaborations with the studio. French censors protested the film’s lesbian scenes, forcing L’Herbier to cut them out; but he quickly returned them to the film soon after.

      What L’Herbier helped to create in this film was a work that moved away from the restrictions of theater (and all its forms including dance, music hall, vaudeville, and burlesque) and fiction with which movies had been so closely linked. Perceiving L’Herbier as an early French Cinema Impressionist, English film critic Charles Drazin wrote “What they had in common was a desire to forge a ‘pure cinema’ observing its own rules, free from the undermining conventions of the theatre.” And clearly with this work, L’Herbier took cinema further in that direction, while also creating with new liberty a work that involved what we now recognize as basically a gay hero, an outsider to his own family, disowned, and forced to become a man with his own identity.

     Sailors, after all, can be either God-believing fisherman settled in small, isolated villages throughout the world such as Nolff or be world travelers, like Herman Melville or Jean Genet’s Querelle, who through their travels come to recognize the wider possibilities of social and sexual life. By film’s end Michel has possibly become the latter.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Robert Duvall | The Apostle / 1997

yellin’ at the lord

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Duvall (screenwriter and director) The Apostle / 1997

 

What’s a popular Pentecostal preacher like Sonny Dewey (Robert Duvall) to do when his beloved wife, Jessie (Farrah Fawcett) becomes romantically involved with another man? And then how is expected to behave when she uses his own churches bylaws to oust him from his ministry? Euliss F “Sonny” Dewey, growing up in Texas has been indoctrinated into church theology by his mother (June Carter Cash) at the early age of 10, and he lives his religion the way many in the South still do today, like it was equivalent to breathing and out.

    Sonny, moreover, is a gifted religious “performer,” a natural in the pulpit with a way of embracing each member of his congregation, no matter what be their racial background, as if each was a treasured friend. Yet like many in his environment where guns and manhood are insistently conjoined, he is a violent being within, particularly when it comes to the opposite sex. After a night of “yellin’ at the Lord,” the former preacher gets drunk, visits his sons’ Little League baseball game, and, in a moment of pure passion, picks up a baseball bat and hits his wife’s lover, the Little League coach, over the head, putting him into a coma from which later dies.

      Sonny runs, driving his car into a lake and re-baptizing himself as “The Apostle E. F” (apparently in honor of the first to initials of his given name), and taking up a new life in a small bayou community in Louisiana. He begins as a mechanic and works at another job as a kitchen cook. But his real calling remains, as he puts it again and again throughout this sensitive and honest picture, in the hands of God. Hearing of a local preacher, Brother C. Charles Blackwell (John Beasley) who has retired from a now-closed country church, Sonny insinuates himself, convincing the former preacher to return to work as co-pastor of his former church Sonny renames “The One-Way Road to Heaven.”

     Through Duvall’s consummate acting and writing we perceive that Sonny is the real thing, but like many a cinematic charlatan such as Elmer Gantry, Marjoe, and others, he also knows how to establish and promote his Godly credentials, paying to have his sermons broadcast on a local radio station and purchasing and fixing up a broken-down bus so that he might promise prospective parishioners that he will personally drive them to church on Sundays. At the radio station he also meets a beautiful studio receptionist, Toosie (Miranda Richardson) who is having difficulties with her husband, and asks her out for a date.

     You can almost smell Sonny’s lust, in the sweaty Bayou evening, for female flesh, but, once again, Duvall gently pinpoints the problems of Sonny’s culture as the man tries to make clear his desires without scarring the woman off. Like a clumsy schoolboy he asks her outright “how he’s doing”; after correcting him for his forwardness, she assures him that she comprehends his emotions. Yet she, herself, remains standoffish and uncommitted and, a short while later, when Sonny observes that she has possibly reconciled with her husband by joining him and her children at a dinner in the restaurant where Sonny works, the apostle again reacts impetuously, storming out of this place of employment, insisting he will never return.

     Fortunately, his uncontrollable fits of behavior have been converted into impassioned performances of word, song, and dance within his personal tabernacle, which wins him converts within weeks. He has focused his impetuous anger into a refined give-and-take of spiritual ecstasy which uplifts and excites even the most stolid of doubters, including a racist determined to destroy his re-constructed, bi-racial temple of God.

     But even within his clearly committed religious fervor, Sonny evidently sees no contradiction in his activities in a radio campaign wherein he promises to personally bless the scarves—which customers can put under their pillows to “sleep more peacefully at night”—he sells to support his religious activities and, likely, his daily survival. This believer clearly can see no gap between his Godly belief and old-fashioned American commercialism. For Sonny, in other words, truth and mendacity, believing and sinning are part of the same continuum, like yelling at Jesus. Faith is an utterly human thing.

     And it is his character’s humanity, finally, that helps to make Duvall’s film so poignant and original. If Sonny is momentarily larger than life, he is also a small, tired, and lonely man unable to escape his own human failings. His success in the Bayou, broadcast across the region through the radio, helps his wife and police to track him down, and by film’s end a battalion of cops has gathered round his proud little Kingdom to take him away to prison. Finally faced with the inevitable, Sonny preaches up a gentle storm of emotional ravage, a belief whipped up the chaos of the world around him, which simultaneously helps to establish actor and writer Duvall as an astonishing artist.

     In the final scene, we observe Sonny at work on the chain gang whose members have apparently already been converted by the charismatic apostle, as they perform their assigned duties in time to the rhythmic antiphon of spiritual music and black dialogic rhetoric.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2016).

 

Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlote Zwerin | Salesman / 1969

transactions with faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin (directors) Salesman / 1969

 

If, at moments, the Maysles’ documentary Salesman reads a bit like a Eugene O’Neill drama, it is no accident. David Mayles described their filming of the four Bible salesman from The Mid-American Bible Company, as potentially just such a character study: “We were looking for salesmen who would be interesting, who would be on the road, who would be sort of O’Neill type of characters.”

     How much of the dramatic quality of their work depended upon editor Charlotte Zwerin is unknowable. But it’s clear, if nothing else, that in the worn-out, slightly cynical, Irish-brogue- imitating Paul Brennan they had found their hero.

     Meanwhile, Zwerin, as Daniel Eagan has argued in his essay in America’s Film Legacy, surely helped determine their underlying theme, as she edited the travels of the Bible salesmen through the Boston streets and into the maze of ridiculously titled Middle Eastern streets of Opa-Locka, Florida, as a kind of intimidating contest between the sellers, threatened on the national level with possible firing for not coming in with enough new sales.

     The longer sales pitches are utterly fascinating in how they reveal the gullibility of the poor, Catholic parishioners they visit and the cut-throat tactics of the salesmen, who use—like almost all-American pitchmen—faith, family, and cultural edification to seal the deal. Many of their poor Irish and, in Florida, Spanish-speaking “customers,” don’t even have the extra $10 a month to pay for the “lavishly displayed” Bibles they’re hawking. But clearly we recognize that the complete objectification the directors claim—what the brothers described as “cinema direct” (“There’s nothing between us and the subject”)—is impossible. Although they manage to keep the camera “out of the picture,” so to speak, it is clearly an intimidating and influencing tool, as some of the customers give into the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) intimidations, forking over money they don’t have, while others preen and perform as amateur actors on the screen. Obviously, several of the sales would have been made whether or not the camera were there to record it; and, what is even more revelatory, is that, despite the camera’s presence, most of Brennan’s customers just can’t be convinced, even if it might mean staying in the picture or not.

     Brennan is a natural charmer who, over the years, has grown into a kind long-suffering, thick-skinned David Mamet-like figure: a man who may once have loved his profession, but now hates the job and himself, while intentionally mocking the very people on whose innocence—or sometimes even stupidity—he depends. In short, he has lost his touch, at times using argumentation and intimidation to turn the deal. “The Bull” and “the Rabbitt”—although far less likable as cohorts—still have what it takes, white “the Badger” has apparently lost it. Even Brennan’s call home to his wife is a listless affair, wherein the two chat more about how fast he should drive than sharing any relevant information. At other moments, such as his humming “If I Were a Rich Man” on his way to fleece poor Catholic believers, Brennan appears almost as a bigot. But then, he too, is being watched by the unforgiving camera, playing up to it, giving the directors most of what they want—all problems that would become apparent in their later efforts, particularly in their notable Grey Gardens, where Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little Edie” perform with even more vigor and to better effect.

     And it’s clear in hind-site that the brothers loved “characters” far better than situations, which their work on Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, and the Beatles (as well as Albert’s work with Martin Scorsese on the Rolling Stones). Yet, to say that doesn’t take away from the genuine truths the Maysles’ films reveal, and, in Salesman particularly, the combination of the “pure faith” expected from and sometimes even displayed by both sellers and customers, and the chicanery, prodding, bullying tactics of these false prophets point to the absurdist realities of the world presented in Flannery O’Connor’s stories (see My Year 2009). The ridiculous give and take of belief—both spiritual and commercial—is at the core of what these charlatans are all about; and, if it takes away the hard-earned cash of their customers, it ultimately steals the hearts and minds of these hard-working salesmen as well.

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2015).