Romain Roellet | Jean est tombé amoureux (Jean Fell in Love) / 2022

the terror of showering with a gay man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Romain Roellet (screenwriter and director) Jean est tombé amoureux (Jean Fell in Love) / 2022 [20 minutes]

 

Gay films about sports figures, alas, tend to repeat one another and are highly predictable. One of the star performers falls in love or, at least has some hankering for another guy on or off the team. The danger, of course, is that his team mates will discover his sexuality, mock and berate him and inevitably ban him from sports. All he has worked for most of his life will have gone for naught.

    And, of course, if discovered, he is certain to be bullied and threatened, with his teammates terrorized of sharing the same locker room and showering with him, even though they have spent years doing the same thing without even suspecting anything.

     Either he gradually converts them to his point of view or he leaves, realizing that love is far more important that playing on a team that is not really there for him in the end.

     A great part of these films generally are devoted to the athlete hiding the facts from his teammates, but in 20-30 minutes, the usual run-time of these short works, he can’t hide his sexuality for long, and eventually he has to come out to his colleagues for better or worse.

      Almost all of these standard tropes occur in the likeable French short, directed by Romain Roellet, Jean Fell in Love.

      Love comes quickly for Jean (Simon Rérolle). Playing against a rival ruby team, he’s tackled   by a young Arab player, Ayoub (Tristan Zanchi) who is new to the team and with whose beauty he’s immediately taken, the other player returning the glance.

      The shared eye contact between the two is so apparent that even Jean’s teammates notice it, warning him about the “Arab’s” queer intentions, Jean refusing to play along or even imagine “doing something about it,” as one of the toughs on his team argues should be his normal response.

       Jean, in fact, is so taken with Ayoub that soon after his shower he hooks up with fellow rugby layer at a tent bazaar, sharing a beer, several of his teammates rushing over immediately to separate the two. Yet somehow the young men make plans to meet the next day after practice.

       In the woods together, they get to know one another and before either of them even knows what’s happening, they kiss. Of course, his most homophobic teammate just happens to be passing at that moment, and in only a few days all his fellow teammates know about his homosexuality, not at all pleased with the situation, which ends in a slugging fest, Jean losing the struggle with a cut and black eye.

 

   One of the major issues in all such gay locker-room tales is the terror the straight boys seem to feel about simply sharing a shower with a homosexual, fearing suddenly that his eyes will be constantly trained on them, while perfectly willing previously to share their nakedness. It always strikes me as somehow being highly perverse that their bodies were safe in a non-sexual situation but suddenly when even a glimmer of sexuality is possible, all fears and doubts about the body come into play; are they afraid that they will be attractive to the gay eye or will be somehow be rejected? And if they convince they will naturally be attractive, are they afraid of the gaze or their own reactions to it? Might they get erections just imagining that they are being watched by a man who admires what he sees?

      As usual in such situations, Jean is cold to Ayoub when they meet up again and suggests he will not give up the game just in order to sustain their budding relationship.

      Returning to the locker room for a rematch with Ayoub’s team, he encounters his teammates who have since discussed the “problem.” Knowing they need Jean’s talent in order to win the game, they explain that they’re willing to ignore the fact that he’s queer if he remains discreet. But when he grabs one of their cellphones, he discovers that they have already been mocking him on-line to others in the community, and he finally decides he’s had enough and he bolts, his fellow “friends” running after him in terror, knowing that without him they are sure to lose the game.

      Jean finally turns on the one who has reported him to the others, accusing him of being queer himself, suggesting that his girlfriend is only a myth. The player gets so furious he goes into a near frenzy, players from both teams struggling to hold him off, as Jean escapes and reunites with Ayoub, kissing him long and hard in front of everyone, admitting to Ayoub that he was right: these men are not truly his “friends.”

     There is clearly nothing new here, and the story ends in a kind moralizing manner that offers no hope of change and even suggests that the only way to deal with such bullying behavior is to return the abuse with more its kind—surely not a valid solution for homophobia.

      The only thing this short has truly going for it are its actors, particularly Rérolle and Zanchi, who do make a highly appealing couple; and in general, the acting is excellent and believable. Now Roellet simply needs to get a better screenwriter.

 

Los Angeles, April 5, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

Alf Sjöberg | Fröken Julie (Miss Julie) / 1951

out of the kitchen, into the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alf Sjöberg (screenplay, based on the play by August Strindberg, and director) Fröken Julie (Miss Julie) / 1951

 

When I first read August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, I tried to imagine how this play might be staged. To me it still seems more like a stilted dialogue between figures  standing for opposite levels of class positions than a believable interchange and affair between two individuals who happen to come from the opposite ends of the social strata of 19th century Swedish culture.

      I would have loved to have seen Sjöberg’s original stage production, which obviously kept closer to Strindberg’s original, just to see how he achieved credibility. But his choices in the cinema version make it clear that he, too, must have seen the limitations of the original. For in his film he opens up the previously claustrophobic space of the kitchen, adds large swaths of additional dialogue, and plays out the celebrations of estate peasants on Midsummer’s Eve.

 

     Yes, I know that Strindberg surely meant his play to be claustrophobic; that is why the “crazy” Julie wants out. But by confining the play to one room, the author merely accentuates his heavy-handed thematic. We do need to see Julie in her natural element, and in Sjöberg’s evocation of her among her natural surroundings, she (Anita Björk) is a beautiful woman to behold. Without a horse and carriage to drive, her father’s valet, Jean (Ulf Palme) has no real identity; as he admits near the end of their brief affair, he is, after all, still a servant, despite his clever talk and grand ideas of opening up a hotel in Switzerland.

      Moreover, Sjöberg gifts these characters with rich if difficult pasts, and, in so doing, transforms Strindberg’s seemingly naturalistic play (one of the earliest of  kitchen-sink dramas) into one that resembles the playwright’s “memory” or “dream” plays, permitting characters from present and past to intermingle within the same frame, and introducing a slightly surrealist air to the original.

 

     I’m not sure we need to be told the whole history of Countess Berta, Julie's mother (Lissi Alandh), but in doing so, Sjöberg both questions and reifies Strindberg’s famed misogyny by presenting her as an early feminist who even goes so far as to force all the males of the estate to work at tasks usually assigned to women, demanding that the women take over the male roles. As the narration makes clear, however, this leads to disaster. That does help to explain, moreover, Julie’s toying with men like Jean and her temporary ecstasy in her one-night stand. It is clearly apparent in Sjöberg’s version that despite her control over men, Julie has managed to remain a virgin.  

      If nothing else, her detailed upbringing completely explains her suicide after any dreams she and Jean might have had for escaping this bleak paradise when the count returns and Jean goes back into his reliable servant mode.

      Given her upbringing, we realize at work’s end that Miss Julie was destined to either be a bitter old maid or to destroy herself. She surely might never have served as a companion for a man like her accountant-fiancé (Kurt-Olof Sundström).

     Perhaps, if Jean had not caved in, they might have lived out their lives as a  kind of early version of Edward Albee’s George and Martha; Julie’s mother, after all, was a kind of ur-Rebecca, burning down her own house instead of willing the deed to her obedient servant, a figure like Mrs. Danvers in the Hitchcock telling.

      One has to think of Sjöberg’s filmed Miss Julie as a kind of reinterpretation of Strindberg’s play, a work that ultimately questions not only the original construction but its logic. If nothing else, the director, who clearly loved Strindberg, challenges the playwright’s didacticism, opening up at least other possibilities that the stage-bound characters have no room to explore. The beautiful scenes of love and lust on the day in which the sun never sets, remind one, more than anything else, of Bergman’s magnificent Smiles of a Summer Night, made only four years later. That’s good enough for me! (When I wrote this, I had not yet read Peter Matthews essay for the Criterion film version, which points out this same possibility of influence upon Bergman).

      And the judges at the Cannes Film Festival voted this (with a tie for De Sica’s Miracle in Milan) as the best film of 1951.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018).

Jean-Pierre Melville | Le deuxième souffle / 1966

stalking death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Pierre Melville (screenplay, adapted from a novel by José Giovanni, and director) Le deuxième souffle (Second Wind) / 1966

 

Anyone who has seen a film by Jean-Pierre Melville knows that the director is fascinated with crime and the societal outsider. Several of his films not only attend to the plans for robberies and heists but focus on the often brutal elements of such events. In the hands of a lesser gifted director one would perhaps not be able to feel any empathy for these outsider villains, their lovers, and families. Yet in Melville’s works, if we do not exactly root for the murderers and thieves, we are nonetheless fascinated by their mindsets and the dangers they undergo.

 

    This film begins with Gustave “Gu” Minda (Lino Ventura) making a daring prison escape with two others. The youngest and most handsome of the trio easily jumps from a tower across empty space to a wall to which he attaches a rope. The second follows allowing the first to, presumably, to make his way down on the other side. Finally, it is Gu’s turn, but seeing already how dangerous it was even for these younger, thinner men, we truly wonder whether Gu is up to the leap, and it appears he too has second thoughts. He almost does fall, but is pulled up by his friend to safety, and both scramble down the rope, at the bottom of which they discover the first man dead, evidently having fallen on his way down or during the arrival of the second. Suddenly, we perceive this elder, the “hero” of our story, has, in fact, gotten his second breath, with the opportunity of now creating a new life.

     But we soon discover just how impossible that will be, again expressed visually when Gu, following his cohort, can just barely leap on the slowly moving train that will carry the two survivors away.

     Clearly Gu has been a quite successful thief, since his sister in Paris, Manouche (Christine Fabréga), who runs a rather expensive small restaurant, lives in a rather luxurious mansion. And it is clear, since she maintains a bodyguard, Alban (Michel Constantin), that she too has been involved in the so-called family “business.”

 

     Melville does not use dialogue to tell us any of these things. In fact, there is not word spoken for the first several scenes of the film. But in his attention to detail we are told a story far richer that any dialogue might have revealed. We are not even surprised when Manouche later confirms our suspicions that she is also a kind of thief, and is ready to run off with her brother, with whom, —again without language—we recognize, that she has an incestuous-like relationship.

      The first real sentence of this film is a date and time, evidently when a bar-keeper in Marseilles, Jo Ricci (Marcel Bozzuffi) is planning his own heist. Ricci, we soon discover (again without verbal confirmation) must have been crossed by Gu, since his henchman and two goons soon show up to Manouche’s restaurant, killing her manager and lover, Jacques. Alban, who also works as the bartender, quickly pulls out a gun and shoots down the henchman, with the other two soon after showing up at Manouche’s house, evidently attempting to force her to pay a great deal of money for her survival. Gu, who has come there to seek asylum, saves the day; taking both the goons for a country drive in which he shoots them to death, his signature method of killing.

       Nearly everyone in this “underworld” is almost mute, even Ricci's dancers, long cigarette holders in their mouths sing nothing, although you can almost hear them counting out their routine maneuvers under their breaths.

       It is only the police, in particular Commissaire Blot (Paul Meurisse), who speak in full paragraphs. Arriving at the scene of the murder Blot questions Manouche, Alban, and the other workers (the patrons having all run off), and when they refuse to speak ends up giving each them sarcastic alibis. It’s clear he knows these criminals far too well.

      The plot, which is always complex in Melville films, hardly needs repeating; we know from the start in the film that it will involve a three-way showdown between Gu, Blot, and Ricci; and that there will be the inevitable heist, in this case to tide over Gu and his sister upon their escape to another country.

      We hardly need the heavy-handed summaries of the various policemen to piece together the intricacies of story. The director simply counts down the hours through intertitles with the month and day, as we move from the late October of the first scenes through the end of the year and into January, when Gu, now involved somewhat inexplicably with Ricci’s brother, plans to rob a truck filled with platinum bars.

      Ultimately, of course, the police do hunt down the two leaders, Paul Ricci (Jo's brother), physically torturing and manipulating Gu into a vague admission.

       In a kind of “third” breath, Gu escapes from a hospital to capture the Marseilles inspector and his assistant, forcing them to write out a letter of expunction before doing away with them in his usual manner.

      By the time Commissaire Blot has arrived from Paris, there has been a final shootout between the robbers and their associate, Orloff, resulting in all their deaths. Discovering the letter confessing that Gu had no hand in their betrayals, the world-weary police head simply tosses it at the feet of a nearby journalist, as if it might stand as another kind of silent testament to the murderous criminal.

      Words, in short, are nearly meaningless in this world. And that is the problem. When these men think, they do not speak, do not attempt reason out their ideas through language, but simply act, immediately and impulsively, sometimes simply circling in their actions as when Gu, prepared to make a hit on Gucci’s place, tells Alban to circle three times before he finally determines that something is not right.

     Death, accordingly is always a step ahead or behind them since they have no concept of talking themselves out of inevitability. If the cliché of death being the “silent stalker” makes any sense, one might argue that in Melville’s film these men are the silent stalkers of death. And in their mute dance with death there is a strange kind of nobility.

       We are asked not to judge the actions of either the criminals of this film nor those who mete out the justice. This is, as Melville makes clear, simply a fiction. Yet, I would argue, in his deep attention to details, it is a fiction to which we can only give credence.

 

Los Angeles, October 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2018).

Hiroshi Teshigahara | おとし穴 Otoshiana (Pitfall) / 1962

the man in white

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kōbō Abe (screenplay), Hiroshi Teshigahara (director) おとし穴 Otoshiana (Pitfall) / 1962

 

Increasingly through the years, as I have watched the films of Hiroshi Teshigahara based on writings by Kōbō Abe, I have come to see him as one of the most innovative of Japanese film directors. In even his first feature film, Pitfall, which I saw the other day, I discovered a breathtaking work that brought politics into a kind of surrealist world, as an iterant miner and his young son get involved in Japanese union politics simply because Otsuka (Hisashi Igawa) is a dead-ringer for the union boss, representing Union 2, who has dared to defy the more dominant union boss from Union 1.

 

      The lookalike Otsuka is stalked and later killed by a man in a white suit (Kunie Tanaka) when he returns to an abandoned mine surrounded by a strange ghost-like mining town which now has only one woman shopkeeper (Sumie Sasaki) who seems to sell only candy and trinkets to the ghosts, like Otsuka, who occasionally appear at her doorstep.

     The odd mix-up of politics and ghost-stories is heightened by the modernist music of Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yuji Takahashi, and the sets, which present such a deep desolation that one might imagine himself suddenly transported into an ancient gold-mining town of the old West in the US. Here everything is gray and totally washed out, while the man in white and Otsuka’s son (Kazuo Miyahara)—murderer and hidden observer of all events, stand out in this ghostly landscape, the one because of his costume and determination, the other by his innocent beauty.

       The only other witness to the crime is the shopkeeper who is paid by the man in white to tell a false story, further incriminating the lookalike union leader and his opposing union head—even though, in reality, these two have worked carefully together to restrain any worker resentment.

      A bit like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, it is the reporters (particularly Kei Satō) who stir up events, suggesting to both union leaders that each other has plotted against one another.

       When the two union bosses determine to visit the old mine for evidence, they come across the body of the shopkeeper, who has now also been killed by the man in white, after being raped by a local policeman. These men blame one another, eventually moving into a battle, which ends in both their deaths, while the ghosts of Otsuka and the shopkeeper look on, Otsuka desperately attempting to discover why he and the shopkeeper have both been killed.

       As an older ghost warns, there will be no easy answers and what he might discover will be even more disturbing than the facts—truths they gradually discover as the man in white jumps onto his motorcycle, suggesting that everything has worked out precisely as planned, before he rides off into the sunset.

      Perhaps the real “pitfall” here has not been a death in the dangerous mines, but Otsuka’s belief, despite his own nefarious attempts to make a living by operating in off-zone territories, that there is a single “truth.” At heart, he is an honest man, demanding that when his son steals a piece of candy from the shopkeeper that he pay for it.

     Strangely, it is only the son who might be able to tell the whole story, although he is too young to speak it or to even assimilate the events he has seen.

       And how might we account for the accidental “doublings” of appearance between Otuska and the Union 2 boss? Are they simply aspects of one another, a kind of earlier apparition of what the second Union boss was as a younger man? Clearly, they are twins of some sort, their lives intertwined in the mining world present and past. And why has the shopkeeper stayed on to serve a community which no longer exists. Both figures were ghosts even before they died.

      One can only imagine that perhaps the man in white is the future itself, a kind of Rod Serling-like figure who imposes the demands of the future upon the world of the past. If nothing else, with the murders of Otsuka and the shopkeeper the Old Union mine is now only a city of ghosts. No one is there any longer to even care for it—except, we presume, in the later memories of Otsuka’s wide-eyed son. We might even suggest that this haunting film might be his own story.

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

Thomas Raoul | Bonhomme / 2020

playing the game

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thomas Raoul (screenwriter and director) Bonhomme / 2020 [19 minutes]

 

If you believe in the reality of short gay films, you surely will be convinced that most gay boys, whether aware yet of their sexuality or not, have close girlfriends and perhaps a straight friend or two with whom they constantly play “Truth or Dare,” not matter which country in which they live.

    In Fance Anthony (Hugo Manchon), a stunning, drop-dead hunk of a rugby player, and his friends Chloe (Camille Bechone) and Louis (François Chatbi) play the game, the boys having dared Chloe that if they win their rugby game, she must lift up her blouse and show her ample tits to the entire team.

 

   They win; she reveals. And they all go for a drink. This time it’s Anthony’s turn to be dared to do something the others are sure he won’t be able to go act on. Observing how attentive the new waiter, Clément (Vinicius Timmerman) is to the beautiful Anthony, and how Anthony’s eyes seem to also return the admiration, Chloe dares Anthony to kiss the waiter.

 

     Anthony uses a silly compliment of the man’s bracelet as a warm-up maneuver; obviously he’s nervous. But, as they are about to leave, returns to attempt to fulfill the dare, which they’re convince he will never be able to do. Amazingly, he accomplishes the task, the waiter seemingly not at all taken aback and certainly not offended about the event.

 

    Afterwards, however, Anthony seems somewhat troubled as the other two, making dinner, chatter and laugh. And the next morning he goes to the café, presumably to apologize, but actually makes a date with Clément for the next day.

      The two go to Clément’s place, have a drink or two, and passionately come together for a kiss,  Anthony admitting he’s never “done it, not even with a girl." Clément fucks him.

 

      Not only does Anthony, as he later admits to his friends, enjoy it, but he has fallen in love at the very same moment of discovering that he must be gay.

        Raoul’s film doesn’t even attempt to take in all the emotional impact of the self-revelation of one’s sexual difference, the joy of sex, and coming out to friends at the very same moment, which I should imagine would be nearly impossible for any one person to easily assimilate, but focuses instead on the issue of “first love.”

      In this case, in trying to meet up with Clément again the next day, our lovely young hero discovers that his new lover has a girlfriend—the owner of the bar—and is not at all interested in continuing a gay relationship with a young suddenly love-smitten rugby player. He nicely apologies, but obviously for Anthony, totally crestfallen and emotionally distraught, that isn’t sufficient.

     Fortunately, so the director rather cavalierly argues, he has his friends who quickly help him to laugh it off.

 

  Surely, however, this film isn’t being honest with the issues it has brought up. What will his relationship now be with his friends, Louis being a solid straight boy, and with his fellow rugby players. Will Anthony shake it off as a kind of one-time experience, determined now that he is no longer a virgin to go straight? Or will he now have an urge to visit the nearest gay bar? If bisexual men treat others as he was treated, how might gay men treat him? Will he be able to find someone again who can recreate the marvel of that first time? In short, who is the “good-natured” man, the bisexual waiter who seeing the kid was seeking out gay sex, gladly obliged. Or will it be Anthony, able to quickly put his hurt behind him and move ahead in his search for others to love.

    But even if Anthony is the “bonhomme,” we know he has some hard knocks again, surely some locker room teasing or even bullying. Surely, Anthony will soon discover that if it is difficult sometimes for his friend Louis to pick up women, it will be even more difficult, despite his great beauty, to find gay men given that there are far fewer homosexuals in the world that heterosexual women. Sorry, Chloe kissing a boy is not at all as simple has showing off one’s boobs. The last words out of Anthony’s mouth recognize the stakes: “I quite the game.” And despite the cute charm of this film, the reality behind it will certainly throw some viewers for a loop. As one Letterboxd commentator, named Andy, railed: “I feel hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hoodwinked, led astray…Fuck the ending; Fuck the other guy.”

 

Los Angeles, April 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).