Harrison J. Bahe | The Favor 2 / 2012

the literalist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bogdan Korishev and Harrison J. Bahe (screenwriters), Harrison J. Bahe (director) The Favor 2 / 2012 [9 minutes]

 

In this, the second episode of Harrison Bahe’s short comic films—a series that seems like it could go on forever, Bogan is at it again.

      This time he awakens another friend—since the original character called Michael is played this time by another actor, Frank Prell, we’ll call him Frank—with a phone call, beginning his conversation: “Hey, wake up sleepyhead. 

     Understandably, Frank does not seem as open to Bog’s call as Michael was. “What’s up?” he queries, cautiously opening himself up to the challenge.

      “I was wondering if I could come over a little later.”

      “Yeah. For what?

      “Well, I don’t know. Maybe we can start off by rubbing each other down….. And afterwards we can lay together and relax. Just you and me.”

      Suddenly Bog has created some interest in the boy, Frank suggesting it truly sounds intriguing, but knowing his friend asks, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

      “I’ve always wanted to do this.” The time is now, he suggests.

      “What else are we going to do?”

      “Maybe we could get ourselves in some awkward positions and such. And I can strip.”

      “Well, that sounds nice.” Frank almost licks his lips in anticipation.

      “The time is now. What do you say?”

      “I say you better get your sweet little ass over here.”

      Hardly as Frank put on a shirt when there’s a knock at the door. Obviously, it’s Bogdan (played in this film by RJ Serra) as they move over to the couch. “I’ve got to say man, this is a little unexpected,” Frank begins. Even though Bogdan has arrived as promised, he still has his doubts.

       Bogdan touches Frank’s knee, but it’s only to pull off a bit of fluff.

       Frank can’t quite believe that it’s really happening.

     Bogdan puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and as suddenly pulls him up, “Come on let’s get started,” startling even the obvious horny and ready Frank.

      For a sexy few seconds after the blackout, we almost believe that something might be going on, as Frank looks up to the skies in a kind ecstasy while Bogdan lies beneath him. White liquid squirts out on Bogdan’s back.

      But the camera soon reveals that although Frank is certainly “rubbing” something, it’s merely suntan lotion on his friend’s back laying on a towel in the backyard.

      “Uhhh. When you said “rub each other down,” this isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Frank bemoans the situation yet again.

      “Whaaat?”

      “Nothing,” Frank dismisses the situation, fooled once more in to believing that Bogdan and him are speaking the same language.

       Afterwords, as Bogdan points out, the two indeed are laying down together on the grass.

     Frank tries to explain what he has thought Bogdan meant by his telephone comments, but to no avail. Once more the literalism of the Bog’s heterosexual adumbration has won out over gay double entendres. By this time, we already can guess that by “getting themselves into awkward positions,” Bog wasn’t imagining anything akin to Kama Sutra, but was referring to the game of twister, where they do indeed get into some very awkward positions which might only be relieved, this time, if Michael were to apply the literalism his foolish friend uses as a tease.

 

    Once more as they collapse onto the floor, Bogdan claims how much fun he had, as opposed to Franks’s complaints. We’ve almost forgotten Bog’s promise to strip.

       What Bogdan meant, of course, was strip poker, and it is Frank who loses his shirt once again, sitting naked with a friend who seems more engaged in winning at cards than observing his friends quite lean and shapely body.

       This time Frank more than angry, shouting out, “Are we going to fuck or something?”

       Bog is abashed, once again, to find that Frank might have somehow gotten the idea that is was gay. He’s not gay, he reiterates. “Why would you think that?”

       “O gee, I don’t know. Maybe because every time you get on the phone you sound like a desperate whore craving sex from everybody. Everybody thinks you’re gay.”

        “Well, I’m not gay.” He moves forward, “But I am curious. I’m curious about you.”

        Michael falls for it again. “Well, you know, I can help you with than,” he quietly adds, moving in even closer for what looks to be Bogdan’s first male kiss.

         But Bogdan stays true to his cluelessness: “Are you gay?”

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

Pedro Almodóvar | Dolor y Gloria (Pain and Glory) / 2019

ghosts of the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Dolor y Gloria (Pain and Glory) / 2019

 

Pedro Almodóvar’s 2019 film, Dolor y Gloria or, in English Pain and Glory, is just what its title proclaims, a work of great pain and great enjoyment. The usually rather private director in this case has suddenly and rather subtly “come out,” so to speak, about his past: his own illnesses, which include terrible back pain, headaches, and a continual problem in his tracheal passages which lead him to constantly choke. In the early scenes in this film it is almost like a conference between old people who cannot help but share their medical problems with one another: I’ve been there. In this case it’s somewhat comically (or not so comically, given your perspective) animated.

    When the director, the central character of this film Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) hooks up again with his former actor Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia)—with whom he previously broken up because of his drug habits and his inability to properly perform because of them—for a new showing of Crespo’s major acting role in Mallo’s  Sabor, he too quickly picks up the habit of smoking heroin.

     As the two hook up again, Mallo, in a somewhat sanguine mood, allows Crespo to take a small memory piece he has written for the stage. Quite by accident, Mallo’s former lover, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), now a married man with children having returned from Argentina to Spain. The former lover, in fact, bears a great resemblance to Banderas himself, the actor admitted that when he read the script for this film he was somewhat taken aback to realize that he, in fact, was one of the characters in the very movie in which he would star; presumably the reference to Argentina is to Bandera’s own move to the US where he played in the Argentina-based Evita.

     Touched by the autobiographical details recounted in the Crespo performance and recognizing himself in the one-man play, Federico also makes contact again with Mallo, the two of them spending a lovely flirtatious evening, with the director finally refusing to have yet one more fling with his former lover.

     In fact, this work, with its quick and unpredictable shifts between the director’s past and present, represents an unlocking of all the ghosts who haunt his present who have helped to make it impossible to create and who maybe are also behind many of his current illnesses. At one point, his mother, now an old woman (Julieta Serrano), not at all like the youthful version played by Almodóvar regular, Penelope Cruz, confronts him as not having been a very good son. He has, after all, abandoned her for a gay life in the city. Now her only wish is to return to the village to which they moved to follow her husband into a cave-like dwelling where she wants to die. Mallo promises her that he will make that possible, but his mother dies in a Madrid hospital before he can accomplish it.

     Some of the film’s most beautiful scenes, indeed, depict Mallo’s childhood, particularly concerning water. The women around him, including his mother, gather at the river to wash their sheets and clothing, drying them over the nearby shrubbery. It is the gentle streams, Almodóvar seems to suggest, that cleanses all the evils and imaginary fears of life.

    A local artist and day-laborer, whom the young intelligent boy has taught to read and write, working in the house, decides to strip down and bathe in the kitchen, causing Mallo, the child, to faint in a near-rapturous reaction to the man’s naked body. The adult is also clearly aware of the beautiful child, painting his picture on a cardboard scrap, which by the end of the film has mysteriously found its way to a local gallery, and which Mallo quickly purchases. 

     It is apparent that all of Mallo’s old loves have returned, like ghosts come out of the closet, to help him reclaim his life and lead him on, perhaps through the very past which he now shuns, to a new film about the mirrors of his past.

     The final scene of the film appears to again return to the past, with Cruz as the mother preparing with the young Mallo prepare to move on in new lives together. But this time the camera moves back to reveal a soundman, a photographer, and the director himself filming it as the movie it has now become. The specters of his youth have become larger-than-life figures of his now older and more nuanced old age projected to screen.

     Banderas reports that the rooms of Mallo’s cinematic house were very much like Almodóvar’s own home, and that some of the clothing he wore was actually shirts and pants from the director’s own closet. There is something both touching and haunting about this: a kind of open honesty and a somewhat frightening retreat to repetition in these facts. But then this is just what this completely revelatory piece of cinema is all about. Like some of his greatest films, All About My Mother and The Skin I Live In, this new film presents an all-too painful representation of desire and love, often a series of messy problems in real life. I believe this may be the great Spanish director’s best film to date.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2019).

André Téchiné | L'Homme qu'on aimait (In the Name of My Daughter) / 2014

the siren loses her voice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cédric Anger, Jean-Charles Le Roux, and André Téchiné (screenplay, based on Une femme face à la Mafia by Jean-Charles Le Roux and Renée Le Roux), André Téchiné (director) L'Homme qu'on aimait (In the Name of My Daughter) / 2014

 

French director André Téchiné, over the past few years, has become one of my favorite directors, and I have admired his several films with overtly, yet gentle gay and feminist themes expressed in his earlier works. Alas, in his 2014 work, L'Homme qu'on aimait (In the Name of My Daughter)—although he continues to remain interested in familial relationships—his particular slant on these plots seem much more traditional and almost Hollywood based.

      Despite the great presence of Catherine Deneuve (who plays Renée Le Roux, a wealthy Casino owner), who in the first many scenes dominates the film while utterly entrancing us, loses her presence and her plot-driven “grip” on the casino activities when her clearly diffident daughter, Agnès Le Roux, returns to Nice for reasons not completely comprehendible—perhaps simply to serve temporarily to reclaim her position on the board of her mother’s now money-losing business.

     Mostly she swims, isolating herself from the grips of her highly alluring mother; but it is also clear that she has long resented her mother’s dominant presence in all aspects of her life. She soon determines, using some of the money owed her from her father’s will, to open a kind of chic bookstore/gallery—not what anyone might imagine is a possible money-making venture, but simply something that allows her to escape her mother’s powerful tentacles. In her slow-moving watery encounters, she appears like a highly lethargic mermaid, hardly able to look after herself on land.

       Enter her mother’s lawyer and advisor Maurice Agnelet (Guillaume Canet), a recently-divorced man who pretends disinterest in his employer’s daughter. He is a kind of Jared Kushner-like figure, always handsomely dressed, most often in suit and tie, and seemingly an almost puritanical being, who doesn’t drink, doesn’t swim, doesn’t have any vices—except the fact that a woman with whom he is currently having an affair attempts to warn the young, and obviously inexperienced Agnès that, despite his polite, almost stand-offish demeanor, he is a significant womanizer. 

        Truth be told, Agnelet is worse than that. Despite the gentle hugs his gives his young son, his real love is money, and through sex and more perverse activities he convinces the rebellious Agnès to vote against her mother so that the mafia-connected Jean-Dominique Fratoni might be able to take over Madame Le Roux’s Palais de la Méditerranée, ending her long career.

      Unfortunately, once the single-minded Agnelet has gotten his hands on the extremely passive Agnès, Téchiné’s otherwise well-directed film losses air like a balloon whose helium has suddenly been expelled, as the daughter inexplicably (or perhaps given the greedy demands of Agnelet, not so very inexplicably) disappears. Obviously, she has been killed, evidently thrown to sharks into the very waters in which previously immersed herself with such abandonment. All of her monies have been transferred to Agnelet’s accounts.

      A more agèd Deneuve attempts to restore this movie’s energy, taking on a 20-some year attempts to prove that Maurice killed her daughter. Alas, we can hardly comprehend why Madame Le Roux might even want to undertake these trials “in the name of her daughter,” given the fact that she could only bring herself to visit Agnès’ new enterprise once only, and that concerning her own business concerns.

      In any event, she loses the trial, despite the fact that the “other” woman with whom he was having an affair testifies against him. Maurice’s son, now an adult, is evidently able to convince the court of his father’s innocence. Only a credit title card informs us that later Maurice was found guilty of Agnès’ death and is sentenced to twenty years in prison. But by that time, we hardly care; the hardly likeable Agnès by this time has almost left our memories. And we only sympathize with the now frail and lost former casino operator, wishing almost nostalgically that we might be able, once more, to enter her Palais de la Méditerranée domain.

      She, we suddenly recall, dressed in beautiful golden gowns knew her customers and greeted them as true nobility. Hers was a truly a palace of impossible possibilities; and, evidently, her customers often, too often perhaps, won fortunes within her golden halls. If she might not be a great business woman, she truly was a remarkably forceable siren who drew people into her casino lair, a world as shown in so many other French films by the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, as well as the British director Alfred Hitchcock. Perhaps Téchiné’s movie is interesting only because it represents the total decay of those grand-elegant halls of utter deception.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2019).

 

Noah Baumbach | The Squid and the Whale / 2005

amnesia in the cinema palace

by Douglas Messerli

 

Noah Baumbach (screenwriter and director) The Squid and the Whale / 2005

 

Strange to say, I saw Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale in 2005, when it was originally released; yet the other day when I watched this film once again, partly in tribute to Noah’s father, Jonathan, who died in March of this year, I perceived that I had recalled only one single incident of it, the very last scene showing the diorama depicting the film’s title at American Museum of Natural History.

     Usually, when I revisit a film, the images immediately help to recall my original perceptions, or at the very least, my emotional reactions to the first experience of the movie. But this time, except for the fact that I had found it a likeable if not totally loveable work, was all that I could call forward from the not-so-distant past. It was as if I were seeing the work for the very first time.

     Perhaps there are a few reasons for the temporary amnesia. My first serious lover was a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and, more importantly, as a long-time distributor of the Fiction Collective (publisher of several of their authors), I had known—I am sorry to say not very favorably—Noah’s father, who is at the very center of this film, Jonathan Baumbach. It is not that I disliked him for I didn’t know him well, and he was one of the few Fiction Collective writers who I never read.

     I knew the works of Fanny Howe, Marianne Hauser, Russell Banks, Curtis White—all of whom I would later publish on my Sun & Moon Press—inside out. I’d read all their contributions, but nothing by Baumbach. Perhaps, I can now assume, it is because he was perhaps too close to being the egocentric writer of his son’s somewhat admiring film. And just maybe I found him a bit too much like me: dismissive of un-adventuresome narratives, prickly about those who did not admire film, art, music, fiction, poetry, dance, theater, and other such activities, and caught up in my own world of creation.

     I have always loved children and have longed wish that may husband Howard and I might have adopted a daughter or son. I have imagined that I might have been a very loving father. Yet perhaps I might have been a father not so very unlike the younger Baumbach’s paternal character, Bernard Berkman (an excellent Jeff Daniels), basically ignoring my imaginary child, while immersing myself in my “more serious” activities.

     The very fact that Bernard (as did Jonathan) writes so many fictions, teaches, and in Noah’s father’s case regularly reviewed film suggests he didn’t spend so very many hours in the home with his children on his lap.

      Jonathan was married two times (the first was annulled) before he married Noah’s (in the film named Walt, played by Jesse Eisenberg) and his son Frank’s (Owen Kline) mother, here named Joan (Laura Linney).

     Joan, having clearly long ago fallen out of the love with the dashing younger writer, has herself had several affairs. She, also a writer, has found important journals willing to publish her fictions, and the great commercial publisher Knopf has just accepted her full novel, while her husband’s experimental “metafictions” are rejected again and again.

      The film, accordingly, begins with the always unpleasant occasion when parents have to sit down for a discussion with their children to explain that they are seeking a divorce. Noah, fortunately, a very deft writer—obviously inheriting both his mother’s more straight-forward skills and some of his father’s more experimental techniques—is able to balance the tragedy of the situation with the comical absurdity of it. As they try nicely to explain that they both love the boys, and have determined to share joint custody, it sounds increasing more transactional, as they attempt to even up a 7-day week, by 3 and 3, sharing the final day by alternate weeks, while not at all being able to even imagine how this back-and-forth series of travels might affect their kids, who now, since their father will live across Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in a much run-down home since he can no longer afford the Park Slope’s expensive rents. And they haven’t even contemplated who gets the cat or factored in Frank’s beloved turtles. Bernard purchases a cheap school chair for Frank to use as a desk, without even perceiving that the chair is for a left-handed person. The walls of his new abode scaling while he attempts to pretend it is a mirror-image of their other (mother’s) home.

 

    The jokes move on, except in the author/director’s telling there are always tears behind them. As often happens in such situations, the boys choose sides, Walt eliding with his supposedly “intellectual” father, while Frank simply wants to return to what he perceives as his “cast off” mother.

      But even that doesn’t work very well for them. Although Walt finds a lovely girlfriend, Sophie Greenberg (Halley Feiffer) and even seems to nicely charm her family, he treats her as selfishly as his father has treated his wives. Frank begins to masturbate in the school library, smearing his cum across the library books. Walt sings a lovely song with guitar, "Hey You," at a high school musical contest, which he easily wins—failing to tell them that the piece, which he claims to have written, is actually by Pink Floyd.

     Who can blame them for acting out their anger? At home, Frank’s mother is now bedding down with his tennis teacher, the dorky Ivan (William Baldwin), while Walt’s beloved father is screwing his bad-writing “feminist” student, Lili (Anna Paquin), who has moved into their decrepit house. The children have been betrayed by their parents. As one of Walt’s school-friends tells him “joint custody sucks.” The parents each declare that it is “their time,” as if the feelings of their boys do not matter in the least.

      Sent to a school therapist, Walt jauntily dismisses the therapist’s probing’s until he is asked to remember anything joyful about his mother. Suddenly, he recalls their trips to the American Museum of Natural History with her, and his terror of “The Squid and the Whale,” which he could view only through his fingers covering over his eyes.

      Symbolically, of course, and far, far better written than Bernard’s female student, it represents the already festering fear of the gigantic being swallowing up and devouring the crafty multi-armed other being: the father and the mother. And in that image, Walt realizes that most of his cultural activities were really the result of the multi-tasking squid, rather than the constantly devouring ego of the other.

      I must remind myself and my audience that this film is not an actual picture of that family. It is a fictionalized one, with a great deal of joy shining through the bleaker realities.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

Jean-Marie Straub | Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht (Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules) / 1965

violence does not stop violence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (screenplay, from Heinrich Böll’s novel Billard’s at Half-Past Nine), Jean-Marie Straub (director) Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht (Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules) / 1965

 

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s 1965 film Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules is a fairly close adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s 1959 novel, Billiards at Half Past Nine. As in the book, Straub and Huillet tell the story the from the beginning of the century through the two major wars of the Cologne-based Fähmel family, from Heinrich (Heinrich Hargesheimer) an architect who has built one of the city’s major cathedrals, his son Joseph (Joachim Weiler), and Heinrich’s grandson, Robert, a demolition expert who has blown up his own grandfather’s cathedral during World War II. They meet after the war, re-living their long history in a single visit, although Straub presents these memories in such discrete entities that a first-time viewer might have difficulty in piecing them together and even in recognizing how these family members and their individual histories are inter-related.

   As film critic David Heslin wrote of this film in 2017, the movie, with its varying rhythms of leisurely scenes and quick shifts in time and space feels “like a film that is simultaneously fast and slow,” seemingly alternating, at moments, as I would describe it, with an almost epic-like narrative within a series of tightly aesthetic cuts that reveal continuities and shifts within and outside of this family who lived through two of most dreadful wars of the last century, mostly as “lambs” or pacifists—although Robert’s involvement in the Nazi period is somewhat ambiguous—as opposed to the surrounding “buffaloes” such as the Robert’s former schoolmates: Schrella (Ulrich von Thüla), a left-wing activist; and Nettlinger (Heiner Braun), a ruthless Nazi enforcer of authority.

      Yet neither the director nor Böll draw distinct lines, for the lambs, it is clear, have helped the buffaloes to survive, living amongst them for all these years, in their pacifism refusing to properly speak out against what has in German culture been happening since the very beginning of the century continuing into the post-War period in which they now exist.

      As this film’s title suggests, even as the post-War politicians try to bring together the right and the left, there is yet to be a full “reconciliation.” Even though the terrible Nettlinger has attempted to arrange for his childhood enemy Schrella to be pardoned for his assignation plot, Schrella stalks out of the restaurant in contempt, refusing to help relieve Nettlinger’s guilt for his war-time behavior.

 

     The most shocking moment is when Robert’s well-dressed mother, Johanna (Martha Ständner), politely asks the family maid whether the gardener is working that day. When told he is not, she quietly but forcefully walks into the garden shed, opening a drawer where, evidently, the gardener keeps a pistol. Taking it with her, she leaves, enters the balcony of the hotel where she is to celebrate her husband’s reconstruction of the cathedral, and calmly shoots at a neighboring politician breakfasting on his own balcony nearby. Just as Schrella’s assignation attempt resulted in only a few injuries, so too does her shot miss its target, suggesting either that such acts of violence are meaningless or within such a truly militaristic society have utterly no effect. If nothing else, we are forced to perceive that Brecht (from whom the subtitle has been appropriated) violence does not help rid us of violence. Guns do not stop guns.

      What we see in this mid-1960s film—during a period in which very few German-based film directors were bringing these issues to the forefront (Heslin mentions Alexander Kluge as an exception), these two French-born figures were tackling the difficult issues which later would be the subject matter of the New German Cinema makers such as Wenders, Schlöndorff, and, of course, Fassbinder, whose great The Marriage of Maria Braun of a decade later deals with some of these very concerns.

       If nothing else, this Huillet/Straub film made me go out to buy a copy of the Böll fiction, which I had never previously read, and I again appreciated his early post-war perceptions—far more than Grass’ more fantastical and sanctimonious ones. And I will also be attending to more of Huillet and Straub’s films in the future.

 

Los Angeles, June 9, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2019).