Alexandru Tudor and Alexandru Zepciuc | After School / 2011

a dialectic of young love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexandru Tudor (screenplay), Alexandru Tudor and Alexandru Zepciuc (directors) After School / 2011 [36 minutes]

 

Adi’s mother (Liliana Pana) insists that her son (Cornelius Florin Suciu) sit down so that she can talk to him. She’s spoken to his head teacher and she needs him to answer some questions. But at the same time, she attempts to reassure him, she is not seeking punishment, but simply for him to speak fully and be totally honest with her.

      He has evidently kissed a boy in the school bathroom which was observed by others. She realizes that at his age young people experiment. But is one thing to masturbate, for example, but quite another thing to kiss another boy in school. There are responsibilities that one has, she argues. “I’m trying my best not to blame it your friend,” she explains, “before hearing it all from you, first.”

     However, she interrupts herself, she instinctually knows her son is not the most innocent person on earth. She insists that she will protect him. Even the interview now was her decision instead of letting her husband talk with Adi. He was most upset when she telephoned him, she remarks.

      “Who started it?”

     Adi explains that it grew out of being a game played with others of “Truth or Dare,” but then gradually they simply begin kissing one another and sometimes genitals. But then one boy suggested his friend, Victor, insisted he take off his clothes. Genital touching followed.       

     When the others began not showing up, and only Victor and Adi were left, “We kissed…nothing more.” When asked who suggested it, Adi responds that it was both of them.

      “Do you like Victor?” the mother asks. “Sexually speaking?”

     Adi cannot answer, which says everything. His mother takes off her glasses, tears welling in her eyes. “Adi if there’s one thing I couldn’t bear that’s knowing someone has taken advantage of you. That he had you doing something against your will. I told you, I understand the age you’re at…Yet it’s very hard for me to understand that my son, my only son, might be gay…. But I guess it’s not the right time for me to think like that. Nothing is certain at your age.” Her only hope, she argues, is that he make the best choices for himself. “It’s very important that you never lie to yourself.”

 

     This highly enlightened mother argues that life will whisper about the choices you have to make. “But she’ll always propose, not impose. It’s your choice to make. Choose only what’s good for you and those around you.”

      Her final observation is brilliant, “You’re just kids. At the right age for curiosities and experiments.”

       Adi finally as much as admits to their relationship, suggesting that despite the feelings of fear and worry his mother has, “But we feel good with who we are,” although he admits that the thing in the bathroom was really foolish.

       The film goes dark and begins over again, this time at the school. Students begin to exit their rooms at the end of a school day. A young man, Radu (Anghel Damian) meets up with his girlfriend, while another young man, Mirel (Catalin Lungu) is met by his friend who has been skipping from classes, Ionut (Razvan Popescu).

 

      Radu invites his girlfriend to go to a movie that evening, but she’s already read the book and is not sure she wants to see. He wants to read to book, which means he’ll have to accompany her home.

      Victor (Burcea Mihai) takes the subway home, greeting his mother, who also wants to attend the movie with him that evening.

      In the meantime, Mirel and Ionut have just robbed a man, and empty the wallet in an alley to discover if there’s anything of worth. They leave behind most of its contents, taking only a few dollars and a couple of cards which might contain his PIN number.

        Victor decides to take a bicycle ride during which he passes the alleyway where Mirel and Ionut have just left the wallet and its contents. Observing the cards and papers strewn in the alley, Victor gathers them, seeks out the man’s address and determines to return the contents to him.

       Radu’s girlfriend finally finds the book, as the two kiss and fall in a hug on her bed, the book falling to the floor.

       Mirel and Ionut are on the run, either the man they robbed or an undercover policeman on the chase.

 

        Victor bicycles a rather long distance to the address he’s found listed in the wallet. He goes to the apartment named on driver’s license, but is afraid to ring the buzzer and instead goes back down to the lobby to place it in the proper mailbox slot instead. As he begins to put the papers in the slot, he’s interrupted by Radu and his girlfriend on their way out to the movie, and pauses his actions, pretending to be working on his bike. When they leave, he finishes putting all the papers into the slot.

         Radu and his girlfriend agree that the boy was not working on his bike, she suggesting that they follow him, Radu refusing to. Yet they do pass by Mirel and Ionut, who they agree really do truly look suspicious.

         Victor arrives home, his mother declaring it’s too late for the cinema. Sitting on the couch, Victor takes out the same book from his backpack that Radu never read, and starts reading it.

       Two girls walking across an open field discuss love and then they lay down and speak of their own love for one another.

         Victor joins his mother at their small countertop for dinner.

       This short Romanian film by the Alexandrus Tudor and Zepciuc discusses young love, self-will, and individual decision-making in various manners. Obviously, the first third of the film quite lays out the problems and options in the gentle discussion of a mother with her son, while the later other incidents represent various forms of people making just such decisions, some of them such as Mirel making the wrong decision by allowing his friend Ionut to take advantage of him in involving him in the robbery.

       Even Radu, in a far milder way, is encouraged to demonstrate his love for his girlfriend by returning home with her and sharing the intimacy of her bed, all in the name of a book which he will never be able to read before attending the movie.

         The two lesbian women at least discuss their love openly, while still trying to influence each other in their decisions.

        Only Victor acts solely out of a selfless love for truth and honesty, making sure that a stranger who has been robbed is restored his wallet and its papers. Victor, it appears, is surely the perfect friend and companion for Adi, who has been equally honest with his mother and not found a way out of his situation by blaming Victor.

          Presenting a philosophical issue and exploring various actors engaging with similar issues may be an unusual form for a short gay movie, but it surely is an interesting one—resulting in more of a dialectic instead of a standard naturalist tale of young love. I’d like to see more of such intellectual engagements with the difficulties of young teenagers rather than yet another drama of confession and self-doubt. But then mothers like Adi’s are rare.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2024).

Bertrand Blier | Tenue de soirée (Ménage) / 1986

metamorphoses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bertrand Blier (screenwriter and director) Tenue de soirée (Ménage) / 1986

 

Bertrand Blier’s 1986 absurdist comedy is a satire. But what it is a satire of is still open to question. Since its unhappily married heterosexual couple, Antoine (Michel Blanc) and Monique (Miou-Miou), begin the film by loudly arguing at a public dance only to be picked up by a bisexual burglar, Bob (Gérard Depardieu) who quickly convinces them to give up their poverty-stricken romance to join him on a couple of heists and to jump in bed with him, perhaps Blier is satirizing the fragility of heterosexual marriage, this film being shot before queers who allowed the share the same state-and-church sanctioned “privilege.”

 

    Of course, in Antoine’s case the invitation to participate in male/male sex isn’t immediately accepted, and part of the fun of the early half of this film is watching to see how Bob slowly manipulates the nerdy looking Antoine into offering up his bottom to what Monique insists is Bob’s more-than-ample sized erection. Yet through offering them up regular stacks of cash beyond their imagination, a lot of compliments about Antoine’s quite ordinary appearance, Monique’s demand that her husband just play along, and Bob’s insistence that he has fallen madly in love with him, Antoine finally becomes curious and eventually breaks down, actually enjoying being fucked in the butt—only to be sold for a great deal of money to an elderly gentleman who is later described as Bob’s “protection.”

     Antoine, as you might expect, is outraged, but Bob reassures him by reminding him that is after all, a thief is not be trusted.

      With all this attention to her husband, it is only logical that Monique might be a bit jealous, despite all of the good times they have together breaking into mansions to which, in one case, a terribly bored couple return home in the midst of their robbery and attempt to the engage them, by gunpoint, in a mixed-gender orgy. 

      Or perhaps this is a satire about what homophobic heterosexuals believe is always at the back of all homosexual’s minds, the desire to convert every “normal” heterosexual male into being a fag. Having served time in prison, Bob seems to be a perfect example of a straight guy who, after learning the ropes, is dedicated to spreading the joys of anal sex to any man he meets.

    Maybe Blier simply wants to show how gay men are as chauvinistic and misogynistic as any heterosexual bro, as Bob and Antoine give up their thieving to live in a nice little cottage together with Monique who they treat like a slave, chastising her for her inability to get food on their plates on time for their arrival home from the bar, for failing to properly dust, and numerous other housewifery chores at which she has apparently failed, chiding her even for eating the chocolates they bring her as presents. Bob beats her (as he does several times in the movie) and finally pays a friend, Pedro (Michel Creton) to lure her away to his imaginary Spanish getaway where he enslaves her into prostitution.

  

    Antoine, meanwhile, attempts to take over the cooking and cleaning jobs, but  fails just as badly, Bob treating him not much better than Monique, although he does offer sex as a seeming reward for of Bob’s toiling. But when Bob, finally fed up, complains, Bob brings home several packages of what he describes as “gifts,” all containing women’s apparel and cosmetics, now requesting that Antoine obviously move on to a new identity of a transgender man.

      Perhaps this film is satirizing the very idea that transgender behavior can become an acquired taste based on someone’s else’s desires. If Antoine once more balks, he soon comes round, good sport that he has become regarding all of Bob’s requests for endless transformations.

      Dressed up quite successfully in drag, he attends a large dance with Bob that at first seems filled with young straight people, a highly unlikely place to take his new transgender girlfriend it seems. But suddenly in the middle of the event, as Bob announces he has to pee, everything appears to shift as Antoine spots his ex-wife dancing with another man, and one of the cute heterosexual dancers (Jean-Yves Berteloot) leaves his date behind to service Bob as a paid male prostitute who frequents the pissoir.

      Antoine meanwhile stalks Monique and her “beau,” which also leads to the bathroom where Antoine overhears who he now recognizes as her pimp berating her for failing to please one of her paid johns, who as Antoine attempts to intervene shoots him/her in the shoulder. Antoine responds by  grabbing the gun and killing him, before stumbling back upstairs to the dance floor only to realize what Bob has been up to.

      Having stolen the pimp’s gun, he now threatens Bob, demanding that he take him to the beach, where he may or may not decide to kill him. Finally stopping the car, Bob and Antoine battle it out, but seemingly with no resolution; but then we can’t at this point we can’t even imagine what either of them might be seeking.

    We might almost long for what seems, in comparison, as the pastoral and sane world of an Almodóvar soap opera such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

     The last scene shows the trio back together again, both Antoine and Bob this time in drag with Monique standing among other whores as they wait in the cold to pick up men—evidently without much success.

       Freezing, the three take a break, Bob and Monique choosing to sip on hot chocolate while Antoine orders up a beer, the three once more squabbling not very differently from how Monique and Antoine behaved in the film’s first sequence. Their squabbles cease, however, as the three join  together in a fantasy about Antoine’s son who attends a local school. They imagine him packing his backpack and entering the school, which brings tears to their eyes. It reminds me a bit of George and Martha’s imaginary son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

      As Bob and Monique return to the street, Antoine orders up another beer, obviously glad to be free of the two of them, and perhaps hinting at a new chapter in these ridiculously radical metamorphoses of socio-sexual worlds.

      If you’re seeking a resolution, I suggest you seek it in another director’s work. For in the end Blier’s Tenue de soirée (“Evening Dress”) seems mostly to be a satire of itself.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).

Gus Van Sant | Mala Noche / 1986

loving the best they can

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gus Van Sant (screenplay, based on Mala Noche: And Other "Illegal" Adventures by Walt Curtis, and director) Mala Noche / 1986

 

Instead of watching the annual National Dog Show on Thanksgiving morning, this year I viewed Gus Van Sant’s 1986 film Mala Noche, his first feature work, shot on a budget of only $25,000.

       Yet this film, with its rich black and whites, its jazz-influenced cinematic rhythms, and its excellent lead actor, Tim Streeter, playing the handsome, comfortably gay grocer, Walt Curtis, the film does not at all have the look of a cheap budget piece—in part because it is mostly filmed on site in Portland’s Skid Row, a seedy area of town where Curtis sells candy, chips, cigarettes and liquor to the homeless and drunks when they can get together enough money to buy anything. His best friend, Betty (Nyla McCarthy) is a female stripper.

     Perhaps the real reason Curtis has chosen to hang out in this part of town is his addiction to young homeless Mexican boys, and as the movie starts he’s fallen for a long-haired, thick-lipped boy named Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), who has just hopped a freight train with his friend Roberto Pepper (Ray Monge). The two boys seem to have somewhat close relationship, which may or may not be sexual. But what is clear, once Curtis begins to move in on Johnny, is that the boy will have nothing to do with putos (faggots).

      Refusing to give up, Curtis, with the help of Betty, invites the two boys to her house for dinner so that Curtis might have a chance to seduce Johnny, if not through his quite apparent personal and sexual charm, simply by paying him all he has ($15) to spend the night. Johnny demands $25, but Curtis is only a little better off financially than the boys, although we recognizes that his age, sex, race, language and having even some money gives him all the advantage over the two lost boys, who say they are 18, but as Curtis notes to another, are probably closer to 16.

 

    In short, he recognizes himself as a kind of predator, but simply cannot help himself. And, although these issues are certainly at play in Van Sant’s film, the director portrays Curtis (in real life, the writer of this work, who performs a small role as a poet named George) as so likeable and accepting of his role in life, that we might almost forgive his preying on these boys and others before them.

      Unable to bed Johnny, Curtis offers Roberto (who has been accidentally locked out of the cheap dormitory where he lives with Johnny), a place to stay for the rainy Portland night, allowing the boy to fuck him and settling for what he regards as “second best.”

      But even the recognition that Johnny will probably never accept his love doesn’t stop him for continuing to try to convince the pouting and volatile young boy of his love for him, sometimes with very comical results. And the rest of the film is spent in the three of them circling each other, as Curtis gradually begins to play a kind of likeable father figure, taking the boys on drives in the country in his beat-up car, teaching and allowing them to drive—sometimes with dangerous consequences—and slipping them extra money or providing free food, even allowing them on occasion to rob him.

    When Johnny suddenly disappears, Curtis is devastated, and Roberto is stranded without any place to go, finally accepting Curtis’ invitation to live with him. Even then, Roberto is conventionally macho, refusing to have sex at any time but night, and forcefully resisting Curtis' daytime advances. He is brutal, insists Curtis, but “I guess he can’t help it, growing up as he has,” revealing some of his own racial biases.

       Johnny finally shows up again, after having been arrested, deported, and swimming the Rio Grande to get back to Portland. We might even wonder if he hasn’t returned to be with both his buddy and Curtis.

     But in the interim—in one of the “bad nights” of the film’s title—police have been called to Curtis’ apartment building because a neighbor has spotted a strange intruder. They cautiously enter, terrifying the young runaway Roberto who, grabbing a gun, tries to make a run for it, only to be shot and killed by the cops. Curtis, returning home from work, discovers the dying boy and holds him in a position that is similar to a pietà, actualizing the young man’s Christ-like innocence.

     Upon his return, Johnny now seems willing to spend time with Curtis, but hearing of his friend’s death, accuses Curtis of lying and, after carving the word “puto” into his door, runs off, never to return, despite Curtis’ continued pleas and his open invitation to come by. It is clear, after Johnny speaks to a young male prostitute, that he also will be forced into that dark world.

     What is so remarkable about Van Sant’s film is not only the editing and beautiful cinematography by John Campbell, but the director’s absolute embracement of his characters despite their vagaries and flaws. As several critics have pointed out, Van Sant not only is totally nonchalant about their sexuality but refuses to judge them for their often-outrageous behaviors. This is not simply a “gay” film, a work about a gay man, but a work that helped lay the foundation for what was later described as New Queer Cinema, rejecting the idea of societally normative attitudes of sexuality and behavior. There are neither saints nor even true sinners in Mala Noche, but simply individuals who try their best to get through many a bad day and night, often succeeding as much as they fail by loving the only ways they know how.

         

Los Angeles, November 24, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2017).

 

David Weissman | Beauties Without a Cause / 1986

beauty rebels

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Weissman (screenwriter and director) Beauties Without a Cause / 1986

 

David Weissman’s Beauties Without a Cause is pure low camp (if you agree with Christopher Isherwood’s hierarchy) in a manner that is not quite available today, given that we now exist in an age where far too often what is described as “camp” is itself a second-hand reference to something that originally played to a camp cult who already had complete knowledge of the language and images available.

     In 1986, a director like Weissman was still exploring tropes of the genre introduced by Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs, Andy Warhol, Ronald Tavel, The Cockettes, John Waters, and simultaneously in theater, through the works of Tavel and Charles Ludlam.

 

    When Weissman made Beauties Without a Cause it was still a developing genre, available to only a few, and exploring territory still fresh. Today such a film, in the context of the popularity of camp sensibility, can only appear as an intentional overstatement, an exaggerated travesty. But in 1986 it seemed a ridiculously silly, in the best sense of the word, performance aligned with drag the drag sensibility.

     The drag performers in this film include Lulu who stands near an electronic bank teller just waiting for Silvana Nova to finish her seafood dinner and stop by the teller for her carefully wrapped golden bag of cash which the machine delivers up. Lulu slugs out Silvana, gets into her own white Cadillac and speeds off.

      Her first stop is to pick up Theresa McGinley, who works as a pizza waitress, fed up with Silvana’s endless indetermination of what to order from the menu. When Lulu honks, Theresa delivers up a pizza to Silvana’s head, grabs the jug of wine on the table, and hurries off to join her friend, who waves the stolen money and tosses some of it up into the air for the sheer joy of having had it.

 

     Meanwhile Teena Rosen, cutting Silvana’s stringy, spaghetti-covered hair and is only too happy, when she hears Lulu’s honk, to have the opportunity to sprinkle bleach upon her customer's and race off to join her friends.

      More money is tossed into the air, as Theresa readily shares her wine.  

    Again Lulu floors it, as the Cad speeds off, the girls thrilled with the wind blowing against their bodies.

      Good girl, Tommy Pace is attending her porcelain Mary and Christ at her personal shrine when Lulu drives up and calls her out with a honk. Crossing herself, with a cheerleader pom-pom in one hand and a crucifix in the other, she becomes the fourth of the “four beauties.” More money is tossed into the air as Lulu once again heads off down the highway.

     But suddenly the car is forced to come to a stop as they meet up with the now thoroughly disgruntled Silvana suffering a black eye and now blonde hair still entwined with spaghetti, while holding in her hands a fresh bag of groceries. Lulu points the car in her direction and guns the pedal for a direct hit, Silvana trying to warn them off without success. They now share the groceries, Lulu, a bit like John Waters’ Divine might have done, biting into an entire head of celery stalks.

      Just as suddenly, the cops are on their tail, Tommy taking up her tommy gun and shooting it at the cops while straddling Teena almost as if engaged in mad lesbian sex.

     Alas, a moment later the team comes to what can only be described as a Thelma & Louise-like ending (one wonders whether Ridley Scott ever saw this little gem before making his 1991 movie), crashing into the black emptiness of the end of this charmingly silly movie.  

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).