Eldar Rapaport | Little Man / 2012

the neighbor above

by Douglas Messerli

 

Etgar Keret, Eldar Rapaport, and Dalit Ziv (screenplay, based on a story of Etgar Keret), Eldar Rapaport (director) Little Man / 2012 [23 minutes]

 

Elliot (Daniel Boys) is a hopeless romantic, so he claims, but as the first sex partner, Tim (Jamie Thompson) observes, he “likes to mess things up,” becoming distracted, for example, by noises coming from the apartment above while in the midst of sex. At almost 30, Elliott evidently has a history of very short-term relationships, despite his desire for something more long-lasting.    

 

     On top of Elliot’s own problems, his brother Ryan (David Hempstead) shows up at his doorstep, claiming his heterosexual relationship is over.

      The brothers together again, however, bring back some unpleasant memories about their father and his attempts to pit his two boys against each other that may reveal some of Elliot’s latent problems, and Ryan’s as well. Elliot, in fact, blames his father, imagining that he breaks up with guys on purpose just to feel pain.

       Yet Elliot is back to the bar again and picks up another handsome trick. But this time as they go at it in the taxi back home, he’s interrupted by the attentions of the cab driver who suddenly

engages him in a conversation that arouses his anger, ruining the meet-up once again. The cabbie has made the presumption that so many people have, that gay men willingly choose to go home with someone different every night.

       He gets out and leaves his cute date behind.

       Earlier when Tim left him, we noticed a Little Man (Darren Evans) quickly leave Elliot’s apartment building and get into a car. Now as Elliot returns home we notice the same well-dressed, younger version of Elliot also entering the car. Could he be the upstairs neighbor? The one who makes all the noise?

       Elliot determines just to check it out, knocking at the door before entering the apartment, 2A, only to discover a wall covered with pictures of his numerous temporary boyfriends, their voices lightly reverberating from the walls.

       Suddenly the Little Man returns, pasting up a picture of the newest date who Elliot’s just left in the taxi. Who is he, screams the tortured Elliot, some sort of stalker? The Little Man claims he’s just trying to help him, that he’s the one who gets him a date every night; they’re just not his sort. Elliot arguing that it’s he who’s fucking it all up. He beats him severely, blood pooling from his head, forcing Elliot to realize he has killed the “little man”—the childhood version of himself, forced to feel that no one is good for him, that he has no right for love.

       He wraps the body in a bag, throwing up in disgust of his act. He washes himself endlessly in the shower and tries to sleep.

    In the morning, while speaking with his brother, he hears noises the apartment above. Checking, he sees that movers are bringing in new boxes. For a moment, he is tempted to go up to 2A to check out who might have moved in this suddenly, but turns back to his flat.

     We see a handsome man open the door and deposit a box of the photos of Elliot’s old lovers outside the door, obviously to be thrown out.

     Has Elliot destroyed his past demons, truly laid them to rest. That is for another film to tell us. Or whatever our imaginations want to conjure up.

 

Los Angeles, May 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

Mikio Naruse | 山の音 (Yama no Oto) (Sound of the Mountain) / 1954

behind the mask

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoko Mizuki (screenplay, based on the novel by Yasunari Kawabata), Mikio Naruse (director)

 山の音 (Yama no Oto) (Sound of the Mountain) / 1954  

 

It is somewhat surprising that a Japanese film—based on a novel by Nobel-Prize winning Yasunari Kawabata—made in the early 1950s, seems almost ripped out of the contemporary headlines. If Naruse’s film, in some respects, seems superficially tame, almost slightly “embalmed,” as film-critic Keith Uhlich describes it, some of those reactions emanate simply from the style: the realist settings of the picture (Naruse filmed on sets built to look like Kawabata’s own neighborhood) and his use of almost post-card-like vignettes, each framed with a slightly slow fade-out that suggests a further sense of nostalgia, as in Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis.

     Even more importantly, in this male-dominated Japanese cultural moment, the major figure of the film, Kikuko Ogata (Setsuko Hara), who has evidently replaced the maid in her in-law’s household, seems ecstatic as she goes about her daily duties of shopping, cooking, and cleaning while in near-servitude to her family. The slightly hidden incestuous-like relationship with her kind and caring father-in-law, Shingo Ogata (Sō Yamamura), also dampens some of the emotional resonance of the movie. How can this woman be so seemingly joyful in her situation, we can only ask?

     Yet this is hardly a valentine to the central Japanese values of the day. Shingo’s daughter Fusako (Chieko Nakakita) soon returns home with her two children unhappy with her relationship with her husband, and later, after returning to her marriage, escaping it once more to live temporarily with others before again returning to her mother and father. Fusako’s timid daughter seems emotionally scarred.

      Even more disturbingly, Shingo’s main ally, Kikuko—his wife is a rather sharp-tongued complainer, who noisily snores each night—is equally unhappy in her own marriage to his son Shuuichi (Ken Uehara), a kind of spoiled drunk who works for his father, and is witnessed by the older man as meeting several nights each week with his secretary. When he does return home, late most evenings, he is drunk and dismissive of his wife, continually referring to her as childish and ignoring any attempts she devotedly makes to please him.

      What Naruse, working outside of many Hollywood conventions, doesn’t reveal is that inside her emotions are, as Uhlich characterizes them, “roiling and bubbling,” as if a volcano might lie within the mountain of the title, emotions sensed by Shingo, particularly since he is now confronted with his past disinterest in his daughter’s marriage, and discovers from a secretary that his son is also having another extra-marital affair—this, it is hinted, with a singer who has a lesbian relationship with her roommate, the two of whom in their evenings with Shuuichi, alternate musical interludes, hinting that they both share in his sexual activities. Welcome to the Kanagawa Prefecture of the late 1940s!

      Ultimately, Shingo attempts to visit his son’s “other” lovers, but, at the last moment, refuses to encounter them. After all, when he was young, so he excuses his own lack of action, he too apparently had had affairs, as if that might justify his own and his son’s behavior.

 

    At one point Shingo momentarily dons a Noh mask (ko-omote), which, as scholar of Asian cinema Earl Jackson wrote, “is absolutely breathtaking,” a terrifying moment when we recognize how he has attempted transform all the women around him (and even himself) into objectified beings who represented reality more than people who truly were alive.

      We are not surprised, ultimately, when Kikuko’s leaves her husband.

     Only occasionally did Hollywood films of this period attempt such intensive analyses of a family life that has fallen apart. One must recall that Eugene O’Neill’s tragic family drama did not premiere until 1956, and that was in Sweden. This 1954 film, based on the great Yasunari Kawabata’s novel serialized from 1949 to 1954, deals with issues that might be seen as already sympathetic with our current #MeToo movement and the continued debates of Roe vs. Wade. Patriarchal society is deeply questioned, and, even though neither father-in-law nor his son’s wife act on their emotions, they have a deeper love and respect for one another than they do for the others by whom they are surrounded; throughout he brings Kikuko home small presents of fish and flowers, almost as if he might be courting her.

       If Naruse’s film might appear, at first sight, a little tame, by the time we reach the last frame that safe world has been completely upended, and we are thrust into a world of different values. The characters, in various ways, reveal what might be described in those days as engaging in unnatural sex, struggles for dominance and parental neglect. O’Neill’s family seems almost Victorian given the goings-on in the Ogata family. It’s little wonder that Naruse himself described this work as one of his favorites.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

 

Leos Carax | Holy Motors / 2012

life is a drag

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leos Carax (screenwriter and director) Holy Motors / 2012

 

So many critics have found Leos Carax’ perplexing and have described it as utterly surreal that I’m not certain the film, sent to me by Netflix yesterday, was the same one they saw. Yes, there certainly are many strange moments in Holy Motors. Limousines speak to each other, one of the limo’s drivers returns home with a complete plastic face mass, and the activities of the film’s hero (Denis Lavant) at times are almost inexplicable.

       Yet, what it clear is that this film is about making movies, about how to entertain an audience that from the first scene of this 2012 film has basically fallen asleep when it comes to serious filmmaking. When the sleeper of the first scene, nicely ensconced in bed with his dog, rises, he

encounters a long hallway wallpapered with a black-and-white forest scene, through which, after unlocking a panel, he enters the theater with the sleeping audience of the first scene seems to represent a judgment of his onscreen events.

     The rest of his day, after leaving his loving family, is spent in his portrayals of various figures assigned to him, as if he were accepting a series of roles doled out in the old TV series Mission Impossible.

      As in that series, we see him—in the limo driven by a beautiful and taciturn woman Céline (Édith Scob)—carefully applying facial attachments, false mustaches, beards, wigs, and other applications in order to play out the various roles which throughout the day he is assigned: in one he is an old beggar women; in another—dressed in a tightly-fitted latex costume, festooned with  lights, he plays out a kind of Kung Fu hero, who through back-lit scenes and a running treadmill, fights out endless battles with nonexistent enemies before having metaphoric sex with a latex-covered female; in another scene he becomes a kind of madman, literally chewing up the scenery (in this case flowers from the famed Paris cemetery Père Lachaise strewn on gravestones that instead of naming the buried ask us to visit their websites). In this scene he also kidnaps a beautiful photo model, rushing her off into a cave-like room where he rearranges her gown to represent a Muslim woman before undressing himself and revealing a total erection. Gently, she puts his head to her breast before he falls asleep on her lap, as if she were saving her life like Scheherazade confronting her sultan. 

    One might pun on the situation, given the numerous roles he’s asked to play, that life as an actor is experienced both as and in (a) drag. The poor actor never gets a moment to be what he might describe, if he could, himself.

      In the midst of these mad-like maneuvers the always-on-call actor, Monsieur Oscar (obviously a punch at the US film awards) performs, with other musicians, a rather delightful accordion concert in a church, before moving on to become a father picking up his shy and unhappy daughter from a party during which she has mostly hidden out in the bathroom.

     Soon after he dresses as a scarred gangster, violently slashing his enemy in the throat before scarring the other man’s face to look like his own.

      He shoots a banker and is killed by that man’s bodyguards. He is an old man visited by a niece, Léa (Élise L'Homeau), and dies, only to arise again to meet a fellow thespian, who sings a song suggesting that the two once had a child together.

     She, in turn, has her own “assignment,” in which as an airline stewardess she meets her partner only for them both to leap to their deaths from a high-rise building.

      If the audience is asleep, so too is Oscar getting tired, yet, as he explains, he loves the roles and acting itself, even if Carax makes it quite clear that the genre pieces in which he performs have utterly no meaning or coherence. The camera, having completely become invisible, is only the director’s camera. Filmmaking for Oscar has become a kind of life wherein he goes without meals and is definitely “getting tired.”

      By film’s end even the several limos used by the various actors who inhabit them know that their time is limited. Who’s interested the glamor of filmmaking today they seem to cynically ask?

  

     Carax’s quite brilliant film, to me, was not a surrealist mish-mash as so many otherwise sane reviewers described it, but a quite funny satire of the industry, particularly the world of actors who day in and out must take their assignments, turning their lives inside-out to become people other than who they really are. Love is on run. In the end, even the seemingly caring limo driver, who from moment to moment advises her rider of his next appointments and worries for his not having eaten anything, all before she returns to her own domestic situation also in a mask, obviously pretending someone she is truly not. After all, that actress (Scob) played just such a figure in Eyes without a Face.

      In this film it is not the motors who are truly holy in their long drives across the cityscape, but the actors who have given up their lives to often utterly absurd and meaningless pretense.

      If, as Roger Ebert argued about the film: “It's not tame. Some audience members are going to grow very restless,” at least, unlike the audience we see at the beginning of this energetic film, it might waken them out from their sleep just in order to comprehend what’s happening on that screen.

  

Los Angeles, July 7, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2019).

Agnès Varda | Oncle Yanco (Uncle Yanco) / 1967

redemptions of matter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agnès Varda (screenwriter and director) Oncle Yanco (Uncle Yanco) / 1967

 

During Agnès Varda’s and Jacques Demy’s time in California, Varda made several films, but the first of them, Uncle Yanco, a documentary on her artist first cousin, Jean Varda, is one of the most charming, while not the most profound. In a sense it’s simply a kind of love letter to her distant relative, a first cousin, then living in the Sausalito boat community of the late 1960s—a group of boat-dwellers who had rejected the increasingly heavy rents of the San Francisco Bay community in preference to the rocking rhythms of the water over more solid brick and mortar homes and apartments.

       Varda had never met “Uncle Yanco,” a title she gave him given their vast differences in age; and she evidently first came to know of his existence through her fried Tom Luddy. With her crew and daughter, costume designer Rosalie, Agnès determines to visit her long-lost Greek-French relative on his re-designed ferryboat in the San Francisco Bay.

       Varda’s film is a picture of an eccentric collage artist, a good cook, a man of many maxims and seemingly wise sayings (“The world is too transparent.” “Life is steeped in death” “How do we know that life isn’t death and that death isn’t life?”), and a kind of elderly guru to the large Bay-area hippie community, who each weekend he invites in a kind of flotilla of younger neighbors to cavort on his somewhat ridiculously decorated former ferry.

  

     One might almost describe her brief documentary as a kind of celebration to the old man’s love of life. Certainly, given the Uncle Yanco buttons she and her crew wear and the plastic heart overlays she imposes over the camera as she films him, Varda quickly became immensely fond of her relative. And the movie, overall, is a sort of love-poem to the slightly curmudgeonly satyr-like cousin, who dislikes when people describe his art works as collage, preferring to describe them as “redemptions of matter.”

       It all makes for great fun, and her work is primarily a celebration of life—one of her many such pieces.

       Yet, how much richer this work might have been had she done a little research and given us a bit more context about the man she has just discovered. After all, this Varda, was not simply an old man in love with the California sun and the plashes of the Pacific Ocean. As a young man in Athens he was considered a kind of art prodigy, abandoning traditional art at the age of 19 when he moved to Paris.

       During World War I he moved to London, becoming a ballet dancer and actor and making friends there with most of the British avant-garde.

      But after the war he returned to Paris, where he befriended Picasso, Braque, Derain, Ernst, and many others. He held regular salons, and became, through his glass-colored mosaics, a rather sought-after artist.

       In the 1920s he spent much of his time Cassis, in southern France, sharing artist Roland Penrose’s home, the Villa les Mimosas, where together they celebrated noted artists and other guests.

      In the 1940s he moved to Big Sur, California and later to Monterey, where in 1943 he persuaded Henry Miller to join him. Again, he opened his home to regular salons, at one of which Miller met Anaïs Nin, whose novel Collages portrayed the male Varda fictionally.

     In the late 1940s Varda taught a summer institute course at Black Mountain College and, later, at the California Institute of Arts.

       For years Jean Varda lived on his jerrybuilt floating home with artist Gordon Onslow Ford before Zen Buddhist popularizer Alan Watts took over his studio.

     So, our dear “oncle” was a rather remarkable figure and perhaps deserves a somewhat more historical perspective. But if nothing else we see this fun-loving being through the eyes of his younger cousin enjoying him simply through her unknowing eyes.

 

Los Angeles, April 15, 2019

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2019).

 

Sam McConnell | Twoyoungmen, UT. / 2009

a trip of lies on the way to truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nicholas Citton (screenplay, based on a story by Sam McConnell), Sam McConnell (director) Twoyoungmen, UT. / 2009 [17 minutes]

 

Throughout the first decade of the 21st century there were a number of very intelligent, well-crafted, and beautifully filmed short movies produced by students or independent directors. Twoyoungmen, UT. is most certainly one of them.

     Filmed mostly on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, this film begins with a young man on the phone to his mother. Evidently, he has returned back home to Salt Lake City before his family, and is attempting to assure his mother that the house is fine and he will pick her up at the airport in the morning, while lying to her about his whereabouts as, immediately after hanging up, he walks into a corrugated building from which the sound of a drag queen shouting out “Judy Garland,” emanates, revealing the place to be gay bar.

      As we shall soon discover, the lives of the two young men from Utah in this film are centered upon lies, large and small, as they face the religious and cultural hostility of the world into which they were born.

     The drunken drag singer (her act seems to center around bad renditions of Carol Channing singing from Hello, Dolly!) wants to buy the new kid a drink, and the bar owner George commands Eli (Art Gager) to give him one. First checking his ID, Eli wonders what it feels like to be a 38-year-old Columbian named Raimundo Gomez? “Awesome, actually,” replies the boy, Will Oberlain (George Loomis). He orders up a beer.

      Eli, a boy of almost the same age, leans over and asks if Will wants to “get out of here” and join him in one of the parties out on the Salt Flats. Will is incredulous that such events actually happen, but Eli, now with the car Will drives at his disposal, is ready to check them out.

      Will, not even of drinking age in Utah (where the age is 21)—he is probably 16—is a true innocent in this localized “on the road” movie, passive to the seemingly older and more-knowing Eli. And we also immediately sense the danger in that fact.

       They hardly get outside the bar door when they observe two men in automobile checking them out with car lights bright and clearly ready for violence. Will immediately makes for his auto, trying to ignore them, while Eli challenges them, taking down his pants and mooning them, “Come on, you want this, be a man!” They turn off the car lights and drive off.

       Will is disturbed, particularly as Eli makes light of the situation. “Why so shy, Raimundo?” he asks, telling him he shouldn’t so disturbed by guys like that.

        Immediately, Eli pulls out the car ownership out of the dashboard, confirming the car belongs to the boy’s mother Lorraine, and in the process, summing up Will’s life. He suggests she must be cool paying for Will’s private school, which at first the boy denies he attends, but then admits only to discover that Eli is also a high school student at the local public West High. How did he get a job at the bar? Eli suggests he just fills in from time to time.

       Just as suddenly Eli turns the conversation back to the subject of Will. “So I don’t get it. Lorraine must be smart, liberal, gnostic, went to a good school, meaning you got to go to a good school, meaning you’re supposed to be studying for AP calculus right now”—Will interrupting to explain it’s “biology”—So why hasn’t she figured out Raimundo’s a ‘pole smoker’” (a street term for someone who likes to suck cock.)

 

     A few moments later Eli observes—Will having stopped the car fearing he hit something—that Will’s either “real trusting or real stupid,” driving out there with a stranger. Eli takes a piss a few feet from the car.  He names the terrible things he could be.

      But Will, moving toward him, suggests it’s fine with him, Eli incredulous given the fact that there’s no one out there to even hear him scream. Will moves toward him, Eli turning around immediately in reaction and accidently pissing on the boy’s feet. After a moment’s pause, Eli declares: “I’m not gay.”

       Suddenly, the film has shifted from Eli’s easy assumptions about who Will is, to the far more complex and mysterious aspects of Eli himself, who not only keeps the short narrative constantly in motion as we follow the quick leaps of his mind, but is the real subject of the film, being the individual who keeps us wondering where he’s really planning to take his new friend Raimundo and himself.

      The revelations begin with Eli’s first admission. He doesn’t work at the bar. The bartender George is his dad. Will is truly frustrated with the truth, now caught up for night in the middle of nowhere with a boy who whom he can’t even sexually engage. As Eli suggests he doesn’t need to keep his frustration inside since there’s no one to hear them, as for the first time also we encounter another side of Will, howling out a prolonged “Fuck!”

      Eli suggests they get some breakfast.

     Over the next half of the film we discover that Eli, who at first denies it, is Mormon, and that his father left his mother two years ago—“Turns out he wasn’t flyfishing with cousin Richie every month”—moving west. Now Eli has a place to drink for free, making him really popular at school.

       At the restaurant Eli jokingly tries to hook up Will, through the intercession of the clueless waitress, with some of the male Puerto Rican workers, which angers the boy. And outside the diner, as they continue their argument, someone suddenly calls out, “Will.” 

       It’s four of his school friends, who ask him if he’s going to join the soccer team for his senior year. Eli again intrudes with seemingly jocular remarks. When asked where they’re going, Will answers that even they don’t quite know, but Eli quickly injects, putting his arm around Will’s shoulder, “We’re going to fuck. We’re going to go find a quiet place and I’m going to do gay sex with him.” Eli begins to laugh, Will quickly joining in, as the four friends gradually accept the joke which it’s clear they don’t find to be that funny.

       Will is still offended, declaring they’re his friends to which Eli immediately argues, “No they’re not. They’re people you know right now. In five years, they’ll be dead to you.” 

       The mix of Eli’s constantly dangerous humor and his wisdom is disconcerting, the fuel on which McConnell’s cinema relies for its continual perplexing engagement.

     Frustrated, Will finally asks where he should drop Eli off, clearly no longer interested in the promised party. When Eli insists he can’t go home, Will drives off. He quickly returns, however, demanding that Eli give him his wallet. Eli responds, just drop me off at the party, and I’ll give you your wallet back.

      Now as they drive off into the darkness, it’s Will’s turn to seriously ask the questions. He doesn’t understand, he insists. Two weeks before he saw Eli take a guy with a baseball cap into the back room for sex. Eli hints that it was just to shake him down, and Will wonders is that what he determined to do to him this evening. Will finally speaks his piece: “Guys like you are such fucking joke. You think you have everyone figured out, but you don’t. The world shits on you a bit more than it does on the rest of us, but it doesn’t matter because you won’t do anything about it. You’ll be stuck here with everyone you hate. And you’ll be just as lost as you are right now, just this second.”

       Suddenly Eli gets a phone call, asking Will to stop the car so he can hear the conversation. Will continues to intrude upon the call, suggesting it’s his turn to become Raimundo.

       It turns out to have been Eli’s mother. Having found out that Eli went to see his father, she has kicked him out of her home. Almost he tears, Eli explains: “She kicked me out. She just told me not to come back.” Will admits that Eli has been right, there is absolutely no one out there in case he wants to scream.

       They stop by a small house surrounded by hogs who have evidently just killed a bird or a cat. Eli goes up to the door, but doesn’t even try to enter, turning to see the sick look of Will’s face. We don’t know what horrific world we have now entered. Is this Eli’s father’s place? The home in which he has now to look forward to living?

       No answer is given as, in the morning light we now observe Eli driving Will’s car as they have actually reached the Flats, many young girls and boys wandering along the road. Eli stops to ask what’s going on, and is told that they have to park two miles back so that the cops don’t find the site.

       “It’s the party. You guys are here to party, right?

       Eli answers, “No we’re not here to party.” He drives on, the boys looking toward one another as a rain storm is suddenly upon them.

       It’s unlikely that Will can make to the airport to pick up his mother or that Eli has anywhere else to go. Suddenly they only have one another. And Eli’s seemingly humorous foretelling of where they might be heading expressed to Will’s friends back in the diner has become, for the first time in this film, words of truth.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).