Raphaël Deslandes | Les maladies extravagantes (The Extravagant Illnesses) / 2022

the red pen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raphaël Deslandes (screenwriter and director) Les maladies extravagantes (The Extravagant Illnesses) / 2022 [24 minutes]

 

17-year-old Louis (Guillaume Lenain) spends time, so it appears, with his boyfriend Thibault (Martin Villlemonteix) on a small wooded island in the middle of a lake. But back at school things are different, where Thibault hardly even takes notice of Louis, except to recognize that he is constantly staring at him. It is clear that in the social reality of school Thibault is in love with a girl named Sophie (Alice Thillard).

 

    French director Raphaël Deslandes’ first film seems confusing in its overlay of fantasy and reality, often quite intentionally but at other times perhaps because it is not really clear of its own intentions. But one can argue than in general, the work reads more like a fable or fairy tale than a realist story. All we know is that one day as a classroom test ends, Thibault accidently leaves his pen behind on his desk. The romantic dreamer Louis picks it up and attempts to cast a magic spell with the seeming talisman, attempting to make Thibault love only him instead of Sophie.

      At a party both boys and Sophie attend the electricity suddenly goes off in the house, and Louis believing that perhaps the spell has worked, quickly grabs Sophie and kisses her. In his private mythology the act makes perfect sense in that he is both apologizing to her in some manner for her for having stolen her lover and perhaps also attempting to transfer Thibault’s kisses to his own lips. He rushes out in the confusion in the dark of night.

      But the lights come back on. It has only been a temporary outage, and for some reason, as Sophie later explains, Thibault, wondering where Louis has gone, asks after him.

       The next day Thibault disappears, no one knowing of where the missing boy has gone, the entire village fearful of what might have happened to him.

       Louis, of course, is convinced that he has retreated to their special island, and goes in search for him, finding Thibault just where he expected, the two greeting one another with pleasure.

       Back in town, Sophie talks to Louis, trying to find out if knows anything about Thibault’s disappearance. Even more startlingly, Sophie seems to know that they are a couple, that they have loved one another all along. Louis is justifiably amazed, hardly having been able to imagine that Thibault has spoken to her of him.

      Once again Louis visits his friend on the island. This time he complains of a red patch just about his heart. And Thibault reveals that he too has one, but assures him it will go away in time.

       Back on shore, Louis continues to reassure Sophie and others that Thibault will eventually return, and she grows closer to Louis in her former boyfriend’s absence, realizing that his love for him and belief in his return is all that she has left. She queries him how they met and fell in love, Louis explaining it quite vaguely, explaining that he felt Thibault’s warmth whenever he was near him, the power of his presence.

       For Sophie it was far simpler. Thibault gave her a look of interest which as a teenage girl she trained to ignore; but seeing her ugly pen, a tourist pen so she describes it, he asked if he might have it. Later, it became his “lucky charm,” she explains, which he took it everywhere with him.

      Louis now has that red pen, and is troubled by what she has told him. On his next visit to the island he apologizes for having stolen it. All we wanted, so he explains, was Thibault’s love. “And so you have it,” answers Thibault as the two finally, and evidently for the first time, kiss.

       Afterwards, Thibault, holding his hand to the spot just above his heart grows ill as a butterfly (symbol of rebirth and transformation and often represented as the soul or a sign of a visit from a dead one) flutters out of his mouth as he falls dead. Louis also grabs the same place above his heart and grows sick, but survives, now sitting utterly alone on his island, even Thibault’s body having magically disappeared.

      Back at home, Louis shows the red pen to Sophie, who angrily slaps his face, but soon turns back to hug and hold him, realizing finally that her lover has gone forever.

      The film’s audience must now separate out fact from fiction, willful imagination from what is left of realist truth. Did the boys truly have a relationship or was it just one of Louis’ many desires and delusions. Perhaps they truly visited the island together as friends, even behaving from time to time flirtatiously as they do in the very first scene. The kiss Thibault gives Louis is not a real kiss but a gentle tease.

       Might Thibault, however, have truly loved Louis but was afraid to leave the safety of his heteronormative relationship with Sophie? Perhaps he was secretly torn between the two. If so, that might explain his decision to leave.

       That Louis met up with his friend again on the island, however, seems to be pure desire on his part, a fantasy that keeps his would-be love alive and protected, a being who remains just for him alone. The imaginary illnesses perhaps are simply the heartbreak of two lovers, the reality always threatening to take hold of the body as it finally does, when reality comes crashing down upon Louis with his realization that Thibault, wherever he is, will never be coming back.

        For Sophie and Louis both, all they have left of the boy they loved is one another.

        The quality of this freshman tale shares elements of Charles Perreault and other French fabulists such as Jean la Fontaine and even the 20th century filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Were it only as beautifully told.

 

Los Angeles, May 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

        

Daniel Castillo Reynoso | Fractal / 2011

licking it up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Castillo Reynoso (director) Fractal / 2011 [6 minutes]

 

According to commentator Noel Alejandro, Mexican director Daniel Castillo Reynoso’s Fractal, made for Anal Magazine represents a trend in gay pornography toward experimentation while still featuring the body as a sexually fetishized object.

     In this short film I’m now sure how “experimental” the work actually is, but I can assure you it the threesome of the thin male models in this work, Karl Forest, Jorge Lozano, and Erevank Argel, behave more like cute Hallmark card boys with an anal fetish than any gay porn movie I’ve witnessed.

     Forest is alone in his tiny swimming shorts for most of the movie, playing a video game, resting in the sun of his backyard, waking about the city and the nearby woods, attempting (not very successfully) to learn how to skate board, and, most importantly, pouring milk down his head and letting drip down his entire body before sitting on the floor where his dog gladly licks it up, resulting in a great deal of pleasurable giggles. The dog and I finally got bored with it.

      Otherwise, he wrestles his buddies, let’s his friends draw doodles upon his chest, arms, abs, and necks, and joins them on the bed for an entwined body spread. Now and then the camera seems to fantasize that instead of wearing his tiny swimsuit, he’s gone naked, revealing his cute ass.

     But nothing that wouldn’t be fit for a 10-year old to watch in this porn flick!

 

Los Angeles, May 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

Louis Thines | Août (August) / 2017

placid and passive

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Thines (screenwriter and director) Août (August) / 2017 [15 minutes]

 

I have now watched French director Louis Thines’ short film August three times, the first two viewings dating back to a couple of years ago. And I am still perplexed as to what the purpose of this film might be, or for that matter, what is even the subject of the film.

     A young man, Louis (Thines) and his long time best female friend Roxane (Roxane Hérault) travel to the south of France on vacation, renting or using a family summer house. The very evening they arrive, they throw a party for what appear to be most Roxane’s friends.

     The party itself, like so many movie parties, seems absolutely boring, and is assuredly not way cinematically engaging unless you enjoy watching lithe young bodies clumsily move about in purple light with an occasional flash of the required neon just to make it interesting.

       At the party, however, Louis catches the glance of an older youth, Jeremy (Jeremy Papallardo), a blond-headed cutie who catches not only his eye but apparently Louis’ attention, particularly when the next morning—some of the partyers have evidently stayed the night—Jeremy invites the manchild Louis over to his house, which is nearby.

       The boys strip to their swimwear and take to lounges near the pool, simply reading. At one point, it appears, Louis has returned home since we see him sunbathing at the pool with Roxane and later watching TV with her. But obviously he returns to Jeremy’s the next morning, as the routine begins all over.

       But this time, apparently, Jeremy is tired of the boyish flirtations and, as Louis enters the house, grabs him, quietly remarking “I know you want it,” as he begins to kiss the kid, while the thin Louis stands like an inert light pole without responding, presumably it being his first experience with another gay man and his inability to decide whether he wants to give in to his emotions or not. Perhaps he has no sexual desires, is simply asexual. But we have never been given the opportunity to know anything about Louis or about his would-be aggressor, since Jeremy quickly sends the cute cipher on his way.

      The last scene shows Louis laying out by a pool, presumably at the house he and Roxane are sharing. Is he regretting his lack of action? Does he even care that he has been rejected? Behind those dark sunglasses, does he even know that he has himself emanated a sense of desire that his

been thwarted with his own inability to act?

      The character is not presented fully enough to know anything about him, let alone to help us to care about whether or not he is even thinking. He has simply failed to respond, the reason apparently not even mattering enough for the character, actor, writer, and director himself to want to pursue an answer.

      In this case, the third time was not the charm.

 

Los Angeles, May 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

 

Sven Gade and Heinz Schall | Hamlet / 1921

hamlet, the transgender hero

by Douglas Messerli

 

Erwin Gepard (screenplay, based on the book by Edward P. Vining), Sven Gade and Heinz Schall (directors) Hamlet / 1921

 

Possibly one of the greats of the silent cinema and, most certainly, one of the most important of early LGBTQ films, Svend Gade and Heinz Schall’s German production of Hamlet in 1921 almost defies all expectations.

     First of all, if you are expecting William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this film immediately asks you the leave that notion behind. The work begins with a brief listing of notable attacks on the Shakespeare play by Voltaire (who, the subtitles claim, called it “a tasteless hodgepodge of caprice and nonsense”), Herder (who described Hamlet as a “habitual conniver”), and Goethe who simply rejected the drama in “the harshest terms,” (describing the central figure as a “castrated ram”). This drama posits its existence on the literary theories of Edward P. Vining's book The Mystery of Hamlet (1881), wherein he argues that the secret of Shakespeare’s plays is that “‘he’ is really a ‘she,’” explaining, presumably, why Hamlet is unable to immediately act with firm decision.

     Accordingly, we must comprehend that the fascinating film that follows is based on the utter nonsense of Vining’s chauvinist viewpoint that males are inherently beings of action while females are passive and unable to engage with the aggressive evils of the world. Apparently the great writers the introduction names, Vining, and this film—the latter not yet having seemingly encountered Freudian psychology—cannot seem to comprehend a male plagued by conscience, doubt, fears, and love combined in a way that prevents him from the revenge he might accomplished had he simply testosterone enough to enact his feelings. Were not Vining so misogynistic he might have turned Hamlet into a gay man, unable to act because he was simply “unmanly.”

     Fortunately, Asta Nielsen doesn’t present us with an entirely passive woman either, and in approaching her character as a transgender being, an individual born as a female but dressed in male clothing throughout her life and required to identify as a male, she reveals a new complex and quite positive vision of Hamlet that, even without Shakespeare’s glorious language and its representation of what we now describe as the “modern” man, is utterly fascinating and significant today for how it deals with LGBTQ issues that weren’t thoroughly delineated in her day.

     Nielsen’s Hamlet is torn not only between duty and rational doubt, but lives in what appears to him as a kind of nether world of his mother’s making—the mother being the true villain of this version—in which, as he later describes herself, he “is no man,” and “can’t be a woman,” as if he were “a toy someone forgot to put a heart into.”

     Yet, the truth is that this Hamlet is all too much a being of heart, of deep feeling, particularly in his love for his father, the King (Paul Conradi) and his Wittenberg University colleague, Horatio (Heinz Stieda).

     Hamlet was born to Gertrude (Mathilde Brandt) as a daughter while her father and his Danish army was fighting the Norwegians, led by Prince Fortinbras (Fritz Achterberg). The Norwegians were defeated, but the King was gravely wounded in the fighting and was not expected to live. Hearing of her husband’s condition, the Queen determines to tell the public that she has borne a son, hoping to keep the Kingdom in her child’s name and thus allowing herself to continue to rule.

     So it is that Hamlet is secretly raised as a male by his parents, particularly beloved by his father, who when the boy comes of age, sends him off to Copenhagen for a proper education at the University. There he not only encounters and develops a deep friendship with Horatio, but meets Fortinbras whom he also befriends, and watches his fellow countryman Laertes (Anton De Verdier) frivol away his money and education as a womanizer.

      His friendship with Horatio becomes so close that when Hamlet is summoned home upon his father’s sudden death, Horatio joins him on his voyage back to Elsinore.   

      Once he arrives home Hamlet is told of the fact that the family is not only celebrating the funeral but is simultaneously planning the marriage of Hamlet’s mother to his uncle, Claudius (Eduard von Winterstein). In this Hamlet story there is no ghost to greet him, only his own haunted feelings for his father; and upon a visit to the spot where his father was found discovers he that his father has died—not as in Shakespeare through a poisonous potion poured into his ear—but, so the gardener suspects, through the bite of a poisonous viper who had escaped from the palace dungeons. When Hamlet himself visits the viper pit he discovers Claudius’ dagger on the ledge, his first real clue, other than inappropriately timed celebrations and his evident eagerness to wear his brother’s crown.

      The shock of these events and the return to this highly dysfunctional family would trouble any returned son, but Hamlet is now also faced by palace protocol wherein he is expected not only to play the obedient son to the monstrously incestuous couple but to woo and marry their foolish advisor Polonius’ daughter Ophelia (Lilly Jacobson). Is it any wonder that he openly determines, as he tells Horatio, to play a madman?

 

      While Shakespeare’s prince is so suicidal that we are somewhat uncertain at moments whether his madness is related to depression or intentionally feigned, this Hamlet rationally plays a madman in an already mad world just as does Edgar to Shakespeare’s King Lear. In his madness, moreover, like the Bard’s Hamlet, he can truly mock and undermine Polonius, while resisting the attentions of his daughter.

       If Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in his moody shifts of love and dismissal is unkind to Ophelia, Nielsen’s Hamlet is far crueler, as he plots out his tactics against her. It is important, however, to recognize, given the fact that in this case Hamlet is also female, that he inevitably sees her as a foolish woman whose only goal in life is to obey his utterly ridiculous father in seeking out and marrying the Prince. More importantly, since her beauty also attracts Horatio, for this Hamlet Ophelia is a rival, even if he knows that a true love affair with Horatio is not possible. In order for such a relationship to occur Hamlet would need to “come out” in a way never before or since seen on film, a future King admitting to his friend that he was not just another male in love with him but was sexually a being whom he might actually have fallen in love without all the national and personal lies he has been made to suffer. Imagine having the villain of Werner Rainer Fassbinder’s Anton Saitz in the director’s film In a Year with Fourteen Moons actually coming to terms with the sacrifices of Elvira/Elvin, and declaring his love for the now transgendered female—surely another impossible scenario given the laws of conventional cinema logic.

       The “lesbian” scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia in the film, accordingly, are humorous and poignant both, particularly since we recognize that it will soon end in Ophelia’s suicide.

       When the passing theatrical performers are called to court and given a scenario to perform by Hamlet there is absolutely no doubt in this version that Hamlet is seeking for the final proof—along with the circumstantial evidence of Claudius’ dagger—by “pricking the conscience” of the King. In this silent film version, with its highly gestural actions, Nielsen’s Hamlet crawls nearer and nearer to his uncle as Horatio stares him down while the actors play out something so close to the reality of the murder of his brother that both Claudius and the Queen hold one another tight in horror recognizing that they have most certainly been found out.

    Yes, this Hamlet also, speaking out as he finally has and reprimanded by his mother for having nearly revealed their deep secret, is almost suicidal. But, unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nielsen’s prince is now ready to carry out the revenge. But being a rational and loving being he cannot bring himself to kill Claudius while feigning piety or perhaps praying out of faith and repentance at the chapel alter. And when he does finally act, believing his has caught his uncle spying behind his mother’s bedroom arras, he kills Polonius instead, which along with Ophelia’s suicide has the consequences of bringing Laertes home with the goal of killing him.

     Claudius, perceiving that Hamlet’s sword was really meant for him, now also recognizes the danger of keeping his foster son near, and with help of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—unnamed in this instance—sends this son with them to Norway bearing a secret message to Fortinbras to kill Hamlet immediately upon arrival.

      Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nielsen’s Prince also outwits them—ordering them to be killed in his stead— and conspires with his friend Fortinbras to take over the throne of Denmark.

     This is not a “castrated ram” nor a mere “conniver,” but a man (actually an amazon-like woman) who has thought out an organized a coup despite its various impediments. Hardly has Hamlet returned, but he drinks his uncle under the table and sets the celebratory room—another instance in which Claudius celebrates “death,” this occasion being Ophelia’s funeral—on fire, killing the King through what appears to be smoke inhalation.

      Both Laertes and Horatio fall into Ophelia’s grave with grief, and when Hamlet appears to help his friend back to level earth, Laertes challenges him to a duel. As we know from Shakespeare, this duel is not a fair one since the Queen has tipped Laertes’ sword with poison and, should that fail to work, puts out a poisoned goblet to present to her son in reward for his survival. Hamlet does win the first go, and is stabbed only because, having herself accidently drunk from the poisoned goblet, his mother cries out as she dies, he turning toward her in commiseration.

       As in the original, Fortinbras and his soldiers arrive too late, just as Horatio running to his dying friend’s side discovers that Hamlet has breasts and is a female, kissing his dying friend as he might a true lover.

      Certainly, without the soaring refrains of Shakespeare’s singular language, Gade and Schall’s work often appears far too literal in its story-telling, but through its introduction of actual lesbian and what appears to be a gay love relationship it provides us complex situations never imagined in Shakespeare’s Hamlet while simultaneously exploring the possible queer corners of classic literature through a near-epic lens. There has never been another movie quite like it.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2021

Reprinted from My World Cinema (July 2021).

Scott Pembroke and Joe Rock | Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde / 1925

mr. pyckle and mr. pryde

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tay Garnett (screenplay), Scott Pembroke and Joe Rock (screenwriters and directors) Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde / 1925

 

Pembroke and Rock’s 1925 21-minute short riff on the John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seems today more like either a 1970s film routine from the Carol Burnett Show or a skit from Saturday Night Live which is alternately quite funny and a trivial piece of satire. Like the Barrymore Jekyll, Pyckle determines to better mankind by separating out the good and evil inside individuals, using himself as a guinea pig. After going through the jerky athletics as director John S. Robertson puts Barrymore through in his transformation into a hairy beast, Stan Laurel is suddenly made over with a wig and face putty into the kind of figure that might easily have been played by Tim Conway or Dana Carvey.

     A mad man on the loose, Pryde quickly grabs an ice cream cone from an unsuspecting young boy, and shoots two other teenage boys playing in the street with a peashooter. Quickly, the police gather and a gang of righteous fathers and mothers gathers to trace the fiend’s footsteps back to Pyckle’s medical laboratory, only to find the proper Doctor Pyckle within having seen neither hide or hair of the monster.

 

    His enamored, gum-chewing female housekeeper attempts to enter, but Pyckle is quickly engaged in drinking down his second transformative cocktail, ready to go on the street once more to terrorize everyday citizens.

     This time he knocks on a woman’s door, only to blow a party-puffer in her face and, soon after, pop a paper bag at the back of a strolling shopper’s head. In his race to escape the police, he places a brick under a bowler hat which when discovered, the cop kicks, accidentally hitting Pryde in the head, but perhaps doing damage also to the copper’s toe.

     Finally, he demands a passing stranger put one finger and then the other in a Chinese finger trap, the kind of child’s toy consisting of a small cylinder of woven bamboo into which the forefingers are placed, end to end, resulting in the impossibility of pulling them out.

      For these crimes against human nature, Pryde is again chased back into Pyckle’s studio. But this time, without sufficient amounts of one of the ingredients, Pyckle cannot fully come back, leaving him only with Pryde, while nonetheless being able to convince the neighbors that no one by Pyckle is within.

    His housekeeper struggles to enter the laboratory, worried for the man she loves, Pyckle, Pryde finally allowing her to enter obviously with evil intentions. She is shocked when she sees him, but when he comes near her, she simply takes up a large vase and knocks him over the head, the crowd rushing back on account of her scream of surprise.

    Presumably this film finds Hyde’s early actions to be basically not as terrifying as the film makes them out to be.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2022