Peter Yates | The Hot Rock / 1972

afghanistan banana stand

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Goldman (screenplay, based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake), Peter Yates (director) The Hot Rock / 1972

 

Peter Yates' comedic heist caper is a successful film, despite being pulled at every moment in two directions. The first few scenes of the film reveal its slightly schizophrenic nature as the always handsome Robert Redford, playing Westlake's Dortmunder, is slowly taken through the various stations of release before being freed from prison. There is something serious about his demeanor, as if this prisoner has learned his lesson from time in inside, and is about to go straight. Meeting the warden at the last door just before his release, however, Dortmunder summarizes the problem. Warned that this will be his last chance to abandon his life of crime, Dortmunder sweetly mutters, "My heart wouldn't be in it."

     A few minutes later we seem to be in another movie, as his brother-in-law, Kelp (George Segal), ineptly tries to chase him down with a stolen car to return him to the city. Clearly Kelp is hardly able to drive and Dortmunder is terrified of being involved again. At his sister's house, however, it is a presumed fact by all, including the complaisant sister, that he will be swept up into a new caper, the robbery from a museum of a precious diamond claimed by warring African countries. Kelp has already made contact with a United Nations spokesman from a mythical African nation, Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn), who is willing to pay $100,000, $25,000 for each person involved in retrieving the "hot rock." A quick visit to the museum to scout out the viability of the robbery reveals Dortmunder's philosophical proclivities as opposed to the ineptitude of Kelp:

 

Dortmunder: It's good, and it's bad. There's a guaranteed return, and that's good. But the guarantor is Amusa, and Amusa's a rookie, and that's bad. But it's an easily transportable object, and that's good. Only it's in a rotten position in the museum, 30 steps to the quickest exit, and that's bad. And the glass over the stone, that's bad too, because that's glass with metal mixed in it, bulletproof, shatterproof. But the locks don't look impossible, 3, maybe 5 tumblers. But there's no alarm system, and that's the worst, because that means no one's going to get lazy watching, knowing the alarm will pick up their mistakes. Which means the whole thing has got to be a diversion job, and that's good and that's bad, because if the diversion's too big, it'll draw pedestrians, and if the diversion's not big enough, it won't draw that watchman.

Kelp: Dortmunder, I don't know where the hell you are, or what the hell you're saying. Just tell me, will you plan the job?

Dortmunder: [pauses, then smiles] It's what I do.

       A few hours later the two have contacted an explosives expert, Greenberg (Paul Sand) and a driver, Murch (Ron Leibman), and the heist is on.

   Yet, it would just as reasonable to refuse to describe this film as having much to do with a "hot rock" heist. The comic diversionary tactics of Murch alternate with the intense lock-breaking scenes. Kelp's self-doubt interrupt Dortmunder's cool caution, and Greenberg's inability to snatch the diamond once they have struggled to lift the glass, almost bungles the whole job. Although they get their diamond—or Greenberg grabs it, at least—the carrier is arrested, forced to swallow the rock.

     The rest of the film follows their improbable adventures as they try to reclaim their glittering booty by: 1. breaking into a state prison to free Greenberg; 2. breaking into a New York police station via helicopter (at one moment flying over the South Tower, under construction, of the former World Trade Center) where Greenberg claims to have hidden the jewel after it has proceeded through his digestive tract; 3. breaking into the bank vault of Greenberg's father, Abe (Zero Mostel), a slimy lawyer who has stolen it from his own son. Needless to say, Paul Sand’s brilliant portrayal of Greenberg is quite essential to this film.

 

    Each time Dortmunder's precisely complex machinations succeed only to fail—all except the most ridiculous of procedures: hypnotizing the vault banker to plant in his mind the code "Afghanistan Banana stand," in order to trigger the man's hypnotic state, allowing Dortmunder access into Abe's safe box. This is not so much a movie about a robbery as it is about a habitual crime. As Dr. Amusa quips: "I've heard of the habitual criminal, of course. But I never dreamed I'd become involved with the habitual CRIME."

      Abe, who has now joined forces with Dr. Amusa, arrives at the bank just as Dortmunder joins his companions in a waiting car, the diamond finally is safe his pocket.

      What they plan to do with the diamond remains vague, since both Amusa and Abe knows who they are. Presumably they have no choice but to claim the $100,000 payment Dr. Amusa has promised, leaving Abe in the lurch. But this hardly matters because we are almost certain the cool deep-thinking Dortmunder will have to once more face the comic incompetence of Kelp, Murch, and Greenberg, exploding all his well-thought plans. But for the moment, at least, his crime has, at last, paid off. The heist movie and comedy have finally been married.

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2012).

 

 

Elia Kazan | A Face in the Crowd / 1957

the courage of his ignorance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Budd Schulberg (screenplay, based on his own story), Elia Kazan (director) A Face in the Crowd / 1957

 

Over the years, as a former “southernist” (definition: a writer about the literature of the American South) I have developed a late-in-life admiration for country-western music and for the kind “Grand Ole Opry” ballads which for years I couldn’t abide. I was also never a true fan of Andy Griffith’s kind of mild, down-home philosophizing, and, although I saw Griffith early-on in No Time for Sergeants and, with family surrounding (it would have taken a revolution in my house to have asked for different TV fare), I endured numerous episodes of the Griffith stories in Mayberry, replete with his hometown, cornball flavored miniatures. My father loved it; he was a great believer in the common man, with whom he felt throughout his life he had ties despite his having reached an educational plateau and position of educational power that made him skeptical of their values.

 

     I should have been prepared, accordingly, for Schulberg’s and Kazan’s vicious satire of just such a world. For at one time, I might have even shared their moral disgust. But this time round (my second or third viewing of A Face in the Crowd) the utterly appealing “Lonesome Rhodes,” Griffiths larger than life portrayal of a post-Will Rogers’s figure unearthed by the journalist-cum-anthropologist Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), I have to admit, was coarsely appealing “honest”—at least in terms of the character, if not the writer and director—in his appraisals of the ruling class. His down home, off-the-cuff, singing and statements say everything about his manipulators such as Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa), Mell Miller (Walter Matthau) (who quips, observing Lonesome’s on-line tirades: “I’ll say one thing for him, he’s got the courage of his ignorance.”) and, later, Senator Worthington Fuller (Marshall Neilan), as he dishes out their dirty water through homespun colloquialisms. That might have made for a kind of wonderful, satiric movie in its own terms, a more sophisticated version of No Time for Sergeants or even a slightly more complex version of Capra’s sadly overlooked study of the same issue in Meet John Doe, which, at least, treats the corn-shuck honesty with disguised and confused respect. But Schulberg and Kazan have another drum to beat, and have little room for an emphatic or even curious evaluation of Lonesome Rhodes and what he might possibly have represented.

      This Lonesome Rhodes is, from the get-go, a fraud, a man of the people perfectly willing to use his audience as a tool, not only for easy profits, but, most importantly, power. For Lonesome, his whole community is “just my flock of sheep!”

 

                       Lonesome: Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-

                       pickers—everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows

                       the whistle. They don’t know it yet, but they’re gonna be “fighters

                       for Fuller’ [the rightist politician who has paid enough money for his

                       support]. They’re mine! I own ‘em, Marcia, you just wait and see.

                       I’m gonna be the power behind the president—and you’ll be the

                       power behind me!

      Once the author and director have established their likable figure as such a sham, there isn’t much more to say. There are wonderful moments of betrayal, DePalma’s sleazy interferences, Jeffries’ displaced love for her Frankenstein, and Betty Lou Fleckum’s (Lee Remick’s) flashy, baton twirling entwinement of herself with the errant lover (Jeffries: “Betty Lou is your public, all wrapped up with yellow ribbons into one cute little package. She’s the logical culmination of the great 20^th-century love affair between Lonesome Rhodes and his mass audience.”)—but none of these can save the film from its dreadful tumble into misanthropy. Lonesome Rhodes, so the film proclaims—again and again and again—is a manipulator, a country hokum manufacturer of pure vulgar ignorance, worthy of the on-line betrayal by Jeffries of her would-be lover, turning up the volume (oh how many political figures have been just so betrayed by open mikes and evil-minded engineers) to reveal his description of his admirers as “idiots, morons, and guinea pigs.”

      In the case of this film, however, the evil-minded engineers have been its creators all along, smugly determined that its hick hero gets his due, without them comprehending any of his natural appeal. As I said, I have never been a great admirer of Andy Griffith, but in this role he certainly deserved better. And, in that context, it saddened me to hear of Griffith's death on July 3 at the age of 86.

      In his role as a liberal agitator of American political causes, Kazan has always had a problem of credibility, particularly after he named names to the McCarthy committee; but here we have to recognize that he is also basically intolerant of a large swath of American folk culture, dismissing it with the slap-down petulance of a homegrown American fascist, a role which he has, perhaps mistakenly, deflected upon his far a more innocent hero. The fears the author and director project about the rising American TV industry, have also been realized in the very film they have created—despite the film’s National Film Registry acclimation.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2012).     

Gary Halvorson and Robert Lepage | L' Amour de loin / 2016

love across space: the poet as hero

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kaija Saariaho (composer), Amin Maalouf (libretto), Robert Lepage (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) L’Amour de loin / 2016 [The Metropolitan Opera Live-HD production] 

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin is only the second work ever by a woman at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a sad statement made even worse by the fact that the last woman-composed opera was 1903, and shared the credit with a male composer. In conductor Susanna Mälkki, another Finn— who will soon be coming to Los Angeles as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic—Peter Gelb and the MET have made yet further history; there have been only a small handful of women conductors at the Lincoln Center shrine.

      Thankfully this lovely opera with just three characters and chorus will likely mean more out-reach by the MET to find contemporary women and male composers who can combine interesting narratives with exploratory music; and with the enlightened direction of Mälkki, perhaps other women will rise up to replace maestro James Levine.

      That is not to say that Saaiaho’s music is highly experimental: she is no Iannis Xenakis or even John Cage. Her work lies closer to Philip Glass, but with a highly shimmering quality that can be traced back to Debussy and Messiaen, a quality she shares with younger contemporary American composers such as Missy Mazzoli. Yet, as Deborah Voigt commented in introducing yesterday’s performance, Saariaho’s work is very much her own voice.

      After his seemingly maniacal and almost menacing use of a vast stage machine in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung a few years ago, Robert Lepage, working with Michael Curry, has here created a sea of thousands of small LED lights strung at various heights, and which, in their luminescent flickers, quite match the musical score.

 

     The central figures, the 12th century Aquitaine troubadour poet, Jaufré Rudel, Prince of Blaye (Eric Owens) and Clémance (Susanna Phillips) spend most of the opera on a fork-lift kind of machine that moves, like the MET’s own HD camera, in numerous directions, representing the outcrops of land that meet up with the endless sea upon which the Pilgrim (Tamara Mumford) voyages back and forth between Aquitaine and Tripoli.

       Tired of years of joyful singing and partying, Rudel, at the opening of this opera, is ready to explore a new kind of life, a love that, much like Wagner’s representation of love in Tristan and Isolde, is pure—love for someone beautifully exotic and, even more importantly, far off. It is, in fact, the kind of love many Westerner’s developed with Asia and Arabic countries throughout history, a love of something the lover imagines as representing strange ecstasy (not so dissimilar from the Isabelle Eberhart as portrayed in Mizzoli’s opera, Song from the Uproar, or, in literature, the Bowles’ devotion to Morocco).

       Endlessly traveling, the Pilgrim (herself a kind of androgynous figure who links these two worlds and brings a quite sensuous story-telling to Aquitaine) tells Rudel that there is indeed such a woman, who lives in Tripoli; and the poet, touched by the Pilgrim’s descriptions, quickly sets about writing songs to his new idealized love, beautiful pieces which the Pilgrim conveys—despite Rudel’s displeasure—to Clémance as well.

      For her part, Clémance is not sure that she can at all live up to the stranger’s visions of her, yet she is touched by this totally abstract love, yet also wishing that she might see her distant lover as he declares such passionate and pure thoughts.

      Of course, opera divas throughout history have been wooed through their lover’s ballads, but few operas have put poetry and the poet himself in such a lofty position. And I laughed inwardly at the thought of a “Poet as Hero” in a world such as ours, in which the poet is seen more as an effete fool.

 

      But Rudel might also be described as a kind of effete fool, who, after hearing of the faraway lover’s enjoyment of the Pilgrim’s summary of his “perfect” poems, suddenly begins to long for actually seeing Clémance and possibly consummating his now encompassing love.

    Unfortunately, traveling across the shimmering waters, which change color from moment to moment, he grows ill, and by the time he and the Pilgrim arrive in Tripoli, he is near death.

       Despite that, men carry him on a palette to her home, and briefly revived, he sings of his love for Clémance, and she for him. In the last throes of dying, he praises his fortune for simply having been able to hold her near him and accept a kiss.

 

      Clémance, now truly in love with this pure soul, prays to God for his survival; and when he soon dies, she curses Christ for not saving the hero, arousing the wrath of her local community fearing that her blasphemy might result on the wrath of God.

        Gradually, the now chastised Clémance, determined to enter a convent, begins to perceive that her new relationship with the distant God is analogous to the faraway love she has had previously with Rudel. She is, as all religious novitiates must become, now ready to “marry” God and to serve him from “afar.”

       The singing by all three leads and the chorus was quite glorious, and despite some slow moments, the music seldom failed to create a sense of wonderment.

       By the end of this beautiful opera, it became clear that Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf’s libretto was not only about love from afar, but about imagination and perception, about a love of something and someone outside of one’s own experiences, a love of the other and difference—important reminders in this time of increasing demand for the likeness and sameness of our culture and lives.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2016).

François Girard | Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould / 1993

intellectual exercises

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Girard and Don McKellar (screenplay), François Girard (director) Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould / 1993

 

Basing his structure upon that of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations, one of Glenn Gould's most renowned recordings, Canadian film director François Girard has created a polymorphous work that challenges the notion of a single coherent being, perhaps the only way one might logically present the life of this conflicted artist. As Girard makes clear through his Arias, the numerous titled "filmlets" and the final "End Credits," Gould (performed by Colm Feore) was a complex being. The virtuoso pianist, as legend has it, began playing in his mother's womb, responding to the music she listened to daily, and already at the age of 12 had graduated with the high marks from The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Although many found his interpretations of Bach and the numerous other Baroque, Pre-Baroque and contemporary artists to be merely eccentric—Gould sat in a low chair, especially built for him by his father, pulling the keys with his fingers as opposed to striking them from above, and swaying with the rhythms of the music, groaning and humming as he proceeded—the artist was beloved by many in and outside the music community, and during the years in which he professionally performed quickly gained an international reputation.

      Gould, declaring the concert hall to be similar to a sports arena, ended his performing career eighteen years before his death, announcing after a concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles in 1964, that he would never perform again. The film that portrays this momentous decision shows a composed and friendly Gould, asking a stage hand how many years he had worked and willingly signing a program for his wife. Throughout much of his performing career, Gould had not been so affable, and was known for cancelling concerts or simply not showing up. Just before a concert with the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein announced to his audience, "Don't be frightened, Mr. Gould is here and will appear in a moment."

     That decision obviously created a flurry of reactions, which the Gould character spoofs in the short piece, "Gould Meets Gould," where he plays the role of a critical interviewer to whom he responds in like. In another short piece violinist Yehudi Menuhin, agrees that performing is often difficult, the sound of each hall varying, the temperatures radically differing, etc., but notes that, unlike Gould, who treated his playing as an "intellectual exercise," that Menuhin craves and enjoys the company of his audiences.

     With the end of his performing career, Gould, far from retiring, devoted his time to recordings, using many of the new technological developments to enhance his performances. One of the most humorous of Girard's short takes on Gould portrays one such recording session, where in one room Gould listens to the tape of what he has apparently just played, while behind the glass partition the technicians speak loudly about various unrelated topics, including food.

     In another jocular piece, we see Gould in a Hamburg hotel, speaking on the phone while a German cleaning woman works around him. She is about to leave, when he requests that she remain. Hanging up the phone, he puts on a record of one of his recordings, motioning her to sit. Reluctantly she does so, but as he lurches around the room one can detect her discomfort and fear for what he might want with her. But gradually, as the music proceeds, a smile comes over her face as she delights in the music. At work's end, she lifts the album cover to see who has played the work, discovering that she has been invited to listen and react to the performer himself.

      As Girard makes clear, Gould was often neurotic. Throughout most of his life we wore a coat and gloves, no matter what the temperature, and demanded rooms be highly heated. He complained of a number of ailments, few of which were detected in the autopsy upon his death. As the film reveals, he took a wide range of prescription medicines, however, as he proclaims, "not all at one time." Driving across the country, he listened to top-ten music, despite averring a dislike of popular music. His major method of communication with others was the telephone, which he would use to suddenly call family and friends to speak for hours at a time or call to report, as he does in one short film, that he has had a dream about Arnold Schoenberg.

     Gould also wrote numerous articles about music and other subjects, and performed on Canadian radio. A selection from his radio documentary, "The Idea of North," is represented, as he gathers voices much in the way one might tonal registers of music. Similarly, Girard shows us one of his trips to Gould's favorite diner, Fran's Restaurant, where he simultaneously listens into the conversations of several different customers as he eats his regular, scrambled eggs and catsup.

     Clearly Gould himself was aware of his numerous eccentricities, both mocking them and celebrating them. In the short "Ad" he jokingly puts himself forward as one might in a "lonely hearts" advertisement:

 

                  Wanted: friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable,

                  alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously unzealous,

                  spiritually intense, minimally turquoise, maximally ecstatic moon,

                  seeks moth or moths with similar qualities for purposes of telephonic

                  seduction, Tristanesque trip-taking, and permanent flame-fluttering,

                  no photos required, financial status immaterial, all ages and

                  non-competitive vocations considered, applicants should furnish

                  sets of sample conversation with notarized certification of

                  marital disinclination, references re: low decibel vocal consistency,

                  itinerary and sample receipts from previous successfully completed

                  out-of-town moth flights, all submissions treated confidentially...

 

 Because of his seemingly "puritan-like" behavior and his own statements of his being "The Last Puritan," some had suspected that Gould was homosexual, but some years after this film, Cornelia Foss, wife of artist Lukas Foss, revealed that she had a four-and-a-half-year relationship with him, assuring others that "he was an extremely heterosexual man."

     Of course, that is based on the presumption that we are all binary individuals, either one thing or another, and as Girard has made quite clear in the very structure of his film, Gould was simultaneously many things, a devotee of the past who was obsessed with new techniques, a man who loved to be around "regular folk," but who also isolated himself while still communing with Canadian intellectuals of his time such as Marshall McLuhan and Northrup Frye. While he devoted most of his life to the works of Baroque musicians, he also embraced some 20th century composers and was proud to have had his music included in the Voyager space ships "destined to reach the edge of our galaxy." Gould was utterly intellectual and yet self-deprecating and, as this film shows us, was often very witty. In short, Glenn Gould existed as a series of self-reflecting and sometimes opposing personalities who might never be perceived in a more traditional biopic.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2012).

Michael Morgenstern | Shabbat Dinner / 2012

hooking up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Morgenstern (screenwriter and director) Shabbat Dinner / 2012 [14 minutes]

 

Michael Morgenstein’s Shabbat Dinner doesn’t truly belong with the films I am discussing relating to the tear between close heterosexual and homosexual friends. The young man who declares “I’m not gay” in this film does truly appear to be gay in this case, and, if nothing else, is quite willing to explore the issue. Yet, given what he hear going on in the nearby dining and living rooms between William Shore’s (Chris London) parents and those of their visiting Shabbat dinner friends, the Bernstein-Cohens who have traveled in from Queens to Manhattan for the evening, it seems highly likely that William, virtually on the edge of coming out in the few moments he shares in his bedroom with Virgo Bernstein-Cohen (Dan Shaked), will soon grow up to be one of the boys who utterly denies his gay sexuality.

 

    It is in this very possibility, moreover, that makes Morgenstern’s comic tribute to the children’s experience of Shabbat dinner so much more profound than perhaps it even intended to be.

      Rebecca Shore (Eva Kaminsky) is the kind of activist Jewish woman who goes about constantly seeking out new causes to help. And she has found one in David Bernstein-Cohen’s liberal Jewish seminary, which through David’s wife, the very open-minded Susan (Dawn Yanek), Rebecca has discovered and evidently contributed money.

     To celebrate their new relationship, Rebecca has invited the Bernstein-Cohens over for Shabbat dinner, an event that displeases her habitually displeased lawyer husband, Arnold (Michael Wikes).

      The early part of the dinner, as so many such evenings generally do, consists primarily of the parents expressing their bragging rights over their son’s intellectual and athletic abilities. Arnold insists that his son William is about to be made captain of his lacrosse team, explaining that he didn’t even like lacrosse when he started, but “I said buck up kind. You need to do what you got to do to get into college.”

     The Bernstein-Cohens briefly mention that their son, whose birthday it is today (Arnold leans over to say to the gangly teenager, “Happy birthday little guy”), that Virgo likes soccer.

    When the boys join up in William’s bedroom soon after, both make it clear how much they hate sports.

       When asked if he has any video games they might share, William has to admit that not only is he not allowed any such games, but that his mother doesn’t even let him watch television. He does demonstrate to his new acquaintance a small Morse Code machine that he’s created in his science class, carefully placing Virgo’s fingers on the small board as he explains the differentiations between letters of the alphabet.

       With little else to occupy them, the boys are forced to talk, Virgo asking if William has a girlfriend (William has broken up with his former female friend Dora), and Virgo admitting after several such queries by the curious William, that he not only has no girlfriend but, prefacing the comment with, “Promise you won’t be upset,” admitting that he’s gay.

       William’s response is a clumsy admission of his fascination: “That’s cool. I mean, I never met a gay guy before.”

        After being asked whether he or not he’s told anyone else, Virgo moves forward into even more dangerous territory, admitting that he has told a friend with whom he has “hooked up.”

         Even more startled by the fact that Virgo has actually “hooked up with a guy,” he rightfully asks, “Why did you tell me?”

         The answer is somewhat evident, but Virgo cannot explain perhaps even to himself, admitting that he also told his parents “yesterday.”

         Even more startled by that news, William is amazed by their responses: “My mom cried but she’s pretty crazy. My dad said God creates everyone equally.”

         “It’s so cool that you’re gay,” responds William. “I mean, I’m not. But it’s so cool that you have the balls to say it.”

  

       As if we need to further explore the differences between these two boys, the author/director takes us back to the dining room to a discussion between their parents.

        The adults have evidently been also discussing their children’s dating habits, the Bernstein-Cohens proffering that they don’t probe into their son’s personal relationships. Rebecca, however, cannot resist mentioning that “William is a serial dater. He just broke up with his girlfriend. She wasn’t Jewish.”

       Somewhat taken aback by that comment, Susan asks, “But surely she wouldn’t have to be Jewish?”

    The least open-minded of the little gathering, Arnold, marches right into the conversation to demonstrate clearly why his son is so amazed by Virgo’s honesty: “Oh Jesus. No, I would not let my kid marry a goy. Our people have been persecuted for centuries. We finally have a state of Israel. If we intermarried there would be none of us left.”

     It takes Susan a few attempts to get up the nerve to express her sentiments, but eventually she challenges the unthinking bigot of the group: “I think… I think that’s racist.”

        Like a metronome, Rebecca follow the very next beat: “Who wants dessert?”

       But Arnold cannot be stopped, declaring that he and his wife keep kosher because “I’m a good Jew. Marrying only within the faith means the same thing.”

      Contrarily, David Bernstein-Cohen argues that being a good Jew is about respect and tolerance, “For some people it’s more spiritual.”

         “I’m a lawyer. You respect the law. Religion is a set of rules to live by,” intrudes the idealogue.

         Back in the bedroom, the boys decide to play Trivia, but are just as quickly distracted by the world they have just been discussing.

          William: “How did you know you were gay?”

          Virgo: “I dunno. I just knew. I mean, you don’t always know. I looked at guys and thought I was interested. I kissed girls and wasn’t. It’s all on a spectrum, you know? Haven’t you ever looked at a guy and thought about him sexually?

          William admits, “Yeh, a few times.” After a long pause, he asks, “How does it feel to kiss a guy?”

         “Can I ask you something?” [Beat] “You wanna hookup.”

        “Dude, you’ve got balls to ask that. What if I kicked your ass?” He continues, in a far more genuine tone.  “I can’t. I’m sorry.” 

          To me, this says everything, a response which finally has met up with his entire familial situation and the learned behavior that necessarily goes with it. Whether is will ever be able to resist those words, his sorrow for being unable to truly be himself sexually will determine whether or not he will become the heterosexual monsters with whom gay boys always fall in love.

        And Virgo’s response is precisely what he will find himself saying to such monsters time and again: “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

         William seems to have already joined the band: “And I’m not gay.”

        But then, something interesting happens, as it generally does. The totally straight boy shakingly moves toward Virgo and kisses him.

          The two are truly startled, Virgo answering “That was so cool.”

         For a moment, the camera cannot resist shifting back into the adult conversation, wherein Rebecca Shore gushes to Susan Bernstein-Cohen: “Your son seems like such a nice boy. Maybe it will rub off on William.” It’s a cheap joke, but almost worth it, particularly when the camera quickly shifts back into the bedroom where we observe William sucking off Virgo, he responding “This is so cool!”

           A call out to the boys that the Bernstein-Cohens are leaving, put an end to everything as they rush to redress.

            “Look man, I’m not gay,” insists William.

            Virgo kisses him. At that very moment, Arnold enters the still darkened room.

            William whispers: “Write down your number!”

            At the front door, Rebecca concludes the evening, as her guests say goodbye, “Well that was lovely.”

            The date of this event, we are visually told at the beginning of the film, was long ago in the past, 1999, which forces all the more to wonder, whatever happened to William? Virgo is certain to have gone onto college and met a cute guy and perhaps even married him a few years after this film was made, particularly if he didn’t contract AIDS along the way.

            But William is the one who interests me here. Morgenstern argues in a brief introductory note that his story is about “the coming out of…two boys.” But since the film ends without any evidence, it is just as likely that in his need to please and emulate his forceful father, little Bill went onto law school, married properly into the Jewish faith, and himself became a lawyer or a found another profession that made his parents proud—while himself proudly declaring to every gay boy who found themselves falling for him: “I’m not gay, but write down your number just in case,” having long since learning that “hooking up” does not necessarily involve being “hooked.”

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).