Carol Reed | Our Man in Havana / 1959, USA 1960

inventing the enemy

by Douglas Messerli

Graham Greene (screenplay, based on his novel), Carol Reed (director) Our Man in Havana / 1959, USA 1960

 

Growing out of the late 1950s and early 1960s cold-war hysteria, Our Man in Havana takes a comic look at British intelligence and spy-laden intrigues of James Bond and other later incarnations. But, in some respects, Carol Reed's seemingly light satirical version, is far darker than the others simply because of the diffidence of the central character, James Wormold (Alec Guinness). A vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Havana, Wormold is having a hard time making a living. He has a pretty daughter (Jo Morrow) whose education and penchant for lavish spending demands deep pockets. In one of the earliest scenes, the selfish Milly has just bought herself a saddle and horse, along with a need for a place to ride it, to say nothing of its feed and care. Coincidently, Wormold is visited by a "secret" operative, Hawthorne (Noel Coward), who parades through the city—much like the mad Englishman of his famous song—dressed mid-day in natty attire while being followed, inevitably, by a gaggle of young boys; even in supposedly “straight” films, Coward was presented as a gay man, or at least as being pedophilic attractive. Pretending an interest in Wormold's vacuum cleaners, he sounds out the salesman about the possibility of serving as "our man in Havana," a man on the lookout for suspicious activities. If nothing else Hawthorne has perfect timing.

     Their later meeting in the bathroom of a nearby bar continues to mock Hawthorne's role as an operative, as he runs water in all the sinks and lures Wormold into a cubicle as if he was about to commit a sexual act instead of simply informing him that his code name will be 559200 strike 5. Coward's public homosexuality further makes ridiculous the notion of Hawthorne's ability to cover things up!

     Now suddenly Wormold has a regular income, is able to join the country club, and throw his daughter the kind of birthday party which will continue to spoil her. But what does a spy do? And how can he attain further operatives? Without a pang of regret, Wormold decides to simply make them up, using the names of club members and other slight acquaintances. The London service, headed by "C" (Ralph Richardson) is delighted with his success. When Wormold further thickens the stew with imaginary drawings—based mostly on his vacuum cleaner equipment—of supposed rocket-launchers and other dangerous machines, he is paid even greater sums, finally allowing himself and his daughter the life she demands.

     That she has also attracted the eye of the local Cuban chief of police, Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs)—known as a man who "beats his prisoners, but...never touches them"—further complicates things and draws even more attention to Wormold. The arrival of a secretary, Beatrice (Maureen O'Hara) and a radioman heats up the situation even further; Wormold now must work harder still to maintain his deceit. 

 

    Havana is played for all its tropical atmosphere, as a world of thick sweats, dark events, and strange goings-on. Wormold's best friend is a German, whom we later discover worships Bismarck in the way others had Hitler. When the friend is murdered, it seems that the weave of international intrigue is not simply something Wormold has "made up," but a mysterious reality that endangers his own life. Of course that is precisely the point, intrigue and paranoia only lead to further intrigue and paranoia; imaginary enemies eventually become real ones.

     Fearing for his life, Wormold is forced to reveal the truth of his situation, admitting the facts to Beatrice. Called to London, Wormold, together with "C" and Hawthorne, he agrees to fabricate yet one more tale: the missiles have been "dismantled," with honors bestowed upon Wormold, as he is awarded a London job—teaching espionage classes. Now he can send his daughter away to school in Switzerland and keep her out of the hands of Captain Segura.

     In short, having enemies, so it turns out, is beneficial to everyone. It is friends who are the dangerous folk. But then, US Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had already shown us that!

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2012).

David Fincher | The Curious Case of Benjamin Button / 2008

turning back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robin Swicord (screenplay, based on a screenplay story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord suggested by the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald), David Fincher (director) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button / 2008

 

As perceptive critics have noted (as opposed to those, such as Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan, who dismissed this film), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, very loosely based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a love tale, a fable of love moving in opposite directions. The hero, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), is born as a man of eighty -years old, who falls in love with a young girl named Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who, as she grows to a young teenager and, later, a young woman, continues to reenter and leave Benjamin's life until the moment when they are both nearly the same age and for a few precious years have a intense relationship, themselves bearing a child.

     The tragedy of this tale, however, is that before long Benjamin is doomed to grow too young to care for the child at the very moment when Daisy is becoming too old to care for them both. Accordingly, he leaves her, and she marries another man who is a good father to her young daughter. Benjamin disappears into youth, meeting Daisy only once for a brief sexual encounter, and reenters her life again as a young boy for whom she cares as he descends into infancy and, finally, as a baby, dies.

    If this had been the entire focus of the film, and if Swicord and Roth had let the piece remain, as it is in Fitzgerald's original, as more of a fable than a veristic story, the film might have had a sort of bittersweet charm that could have swept audiences up its myth. But the authors and director David Fincher have added numerous unrelated adventures, setting the story in a New Orleans about to undergo Hurricane Kathrina and propelling Button and other characters to the bitter cold of Minsk and into heroic adventures of World War II, all the while alternating these highly realistically- portrayed events with a kind of moralistic essay on the superior humanity of the film's Black figures and the gentle wisdom of its old. Although the movie skirts general sentimentality, it toys with it in its simplistic messages centered around carpe diem.

 

     Fortunately, this film is saved by another, more subtle theme, which I believe gives it an epic weight that justifies its length. While Benjamin moves solidly through the film backwards in time, the other characters moving forward are forced in their encounters with him to rethink their lives and face up to their failures in the past. This results in a kind of "turning back," a decision to change the errors of their past, and in that sense, leads for a kind of redeeming of life for each of them.

      Benjamin's father, Thomas, faced with the horrific specter of an eighty-year-old infant, a child moreover that has ended in his wife's death, has cruelly abandoned the child on the steps of boarding house over which a black woman, Queenie presides. Upon discovering the child, Queenie readily adopts it, allowing it to grow up old in a house of old people. Yet Thomas, upon encountering the child years later, at a time when Benjamin is closer to 50, invites him to dinner and further encounters, ending, as the father grows old, in his revelation to Benjamin that he is his son. At first, Benjamin is outraged by the fact of the abandonment as opposed to the continued kindnesses of his Black mother. But Benjamin, in some senses, is presented as a blank slate, and ultimately a reunion between the two, however shaky, is accomplished, and he nurses his father into death.

      Similarly, the older woman, Elizabeth Abbott (wonderfully played by Tilda Swinton) with whom Benjamin has an affair in Minsk, is encouraged in his gentle love to look back upon her failed marriage and her own lack of initiative. Once a great swimmer who attempted, unsuccessfully, to swim the English Channel, she has done little since except suffer the empty relationship of her marriage. By film's end, and at the unlikely age of 62, she successfully achieves the goal she had previously abandoned.

   So too does the heavy-drinking captain Mike of a New Orleans-based tugboat shift, upon encountering Benjamin, from braggadocio and whoring to heroic accomplishments as his small craft rams a German U-boat that has destroyed a large Allied warship.

      Daisy, intrigued throughout the story by Benjamin, rejects his proffered love simply because he will not go bed with her the one night she is in town. Later, upon his visit to her in New York, she resists his love because of an affair with another dancer; and finally, suffering from an automobile accident that has robbed her of the possibility of ever again being able to dance, she demands he leave her bedside. Months later, however, she too "turns back," returning to him in New Orleans where they have their intense if brief love affair.

      Despite her anger over Benjamin's decision to leave her and their daughter, she gradually recognizes that it has been for the better, and as he descends into boyhood and, ultimately, infancy, she takes over the role of his mother, nursing him back into the metaphorical womb.

       Her own daughter, Caroline, has clearly been distanced from her mother, but in the framework of the narrative, has returned to New Orleans to her hospital deathbed during the advance of Hurricane Katrina. She too, accordingly, has turned back, coming to the aide of her mother, as her mother, turning back one more time, insists Caroline read the autobiography of Benjamin Button which reveals the girl's own parentage.

       In short, each of the major figures, faced with a being moving in the opposite direction of the flow of life, are encouraged to reexamine their own forward rush into death. The result is a redemption far deeper than the easy lessons on the surface of Fincher's interesting but deeply flawed film.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2009

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (January 2009).

Ohm Phanphiroj | The Deaf Boy's Disease / 2018

the fever

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bowen Astrop and Ohm Phanphiroj (screenplay), Ohm Phanphiroj (director) The Deaf Boy's Disease / 2018 [14 minutes]

 

Ant (Arthur Andersen) learns a lot in his summer of coming-of-age. First of all, through an arrangement between a neighboring woman and Ant’s own mother, Early (Beck Nolan) comes to stay at Ant’s house, the two boys gradually growing very close.

   Early is basically deaf and, consequently, has some difficult in speaking. But quite quickly Ant learns that, despite what seems, at times to be a stuttering invert, is basically a normal kid who rumor has it is gay. It doesn’t take Ant long to realize that he himself is attracted to Early, and the two boys, living in a rural community, quickly establish a close relationship with nature and their own selves, designating their friendship with, at least on one occasion, a kiss.

     During that same summer Ant realizes in explaining the fact that his father simply one day left their family, is faced with a memory of his father having sex with another man—the explanation for, which he’s evidently never before come to realize, his father’s exit.

      At the end of the summer, with Early gone, Ant once again encounters his close friend Tremor (Nic Caruccio), who’s been away at camp all summer. When Ant reveals that he’s become friends with Early, Tremor reacts in the manner that apparently the whole community for a long while has, that Early is queer and that even kissing him leads to the disease of homosexuality. He mocks his stutter and represents him as a kind of communal outcast.

      Tremor’s comments both disturb and irritate Ant, who knowing that he and Early have indeed kissed and become good friends, is angry at the prejudices and wives’ tales his friends evidently believe. In bits and pieces, director Ohm Phanphiroj reveals Ant re-living his summer and coming to all the realizations I just recounted, forcing him to challenge his best friend’s beliefs. After all, Early has opened him up to a totally new world of love, and acceptance of his father, and a recognition of how the community outcast can truly be someone you come to love.

      At one moment it almost leads to a fight before the two older friends as they descend back into more serious conversation, Ant wondering whether or not Tremor really believes that homosexuality can be caught by kissing. More sincerely, he wonders whether if he were queer Tremor would still remain his friend.

     As the two boys lie head-to-head in deep discussion of these important issues, Ant rises, turns to his friend and gives him a kiss, which is greeted in turn with Tremor’s own kiss. The presumption that Phanphiroj’s film ends with is that indeed love is something that is truly infectious. Ant can only look to his own family history, Early, himself, and now Tremor to realize perhaps that a kiss is more than a kiss.

    A disease? You won’t be able to convince these boys that it is anything else. But the fever’s sensations put them into a world of near bliss.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Yoan Clauzel | Ramené par les vagues (Carried by the Waves) 2022

crossed wires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoan Clauzel (screenwriter and director) Ramené par les vagues (Carried by the Waves) 2022 [11 minutes]

 

Here we have all the elements of a heterosexual romantic comedy, a moony young man, Loïs (Victor Snegas)—who wakes up at the beach after a drunken night, if we are to believe the flashbacks, of his attempts mostly to sexually hit on a woman other than his girlfriend—and a passing jogger Killian (Valentin Champion), who we are told is aged 20 (as opposed to Loïs’s 22 years), “Falls for him at first sight.”

    That isn’t very evident in the story, when the stranded Loïs begs first for the use of Killian’s cellphone to call his girlfriend, and then asks if the jogger might give him a ride back to civilization, something to which Killian insists he can’t devote his time.

     Yet Killian, on his way back from running, still offers Loïs a ride, which ends in them inexplicably eating at a fast-food joint and eventually returning together to Loïs’s girlfriend’s abode, actually the young man’s own hovel into which he finally lures Killian, admitting he is now desperately in love with the stranger.

     I don’t know, but it appears to me that Yoan Clauzel might have confused genres. This happens regularly in heterosexual films where a sloppy, somewhat cute male seduces a female back to his place, who, after much ado and corrective criticism of her seducer’s behavior—precisely what occurs in this short film—she admits she’s already fallen for him, the two embracing, kissing, and demonstrating that they are eternally in love—none of which, fortunately, Clauzel bothers to repeat. This short film’s gay couple’s relationship is established by a close-to-the-credits scene of Loïs attempting, quite unsuccessfully, to follow Killian on his morning jog.

    Nonetheless, it’s the same rom-com claptrap, which in recent days has snuck its way into queer cinema, as if somehow that’s the way, after all, gay boys also fall in love, waiting around drunken on a beach to find their true white knights.

      Sorry, boys and girls, I don’t think the transformation works. I’ve never even imagined myself as a gay boy, after a night of trying to prove to himself I was totally straight, hanging out on the beach to catch sight of the first passing male jogger. It simply doesn’t register on my gaydar. Some wires have evidently been crossed. And even if, by some far-fetched possibility of cinema magic, a jock like Killian (despite his long hair tied back in a man-bun) were tempted to fall for a cutesy fuck-up like Loïs, I’d immediately, as his best sissy friend, warn him away. The tide pool into which Loïs isn’t deep enough for even a good romantic dog-paddle.

     But then, there are apparently no sissies allowed on the beach of French director Clauzel’s Ramené par les vagues. And why for god’s sake are we told in the IMDb description their precise ages? Do two years really matter? Doesn’t mean a thing in gay years, but might very well establish the perfect sense of male age-dominance in a heterosexual rom-com.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Walerian Borowczyk | Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne), aka Bloodbath of Dr. Jekyll / 1981

the colors of pleasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walerian Borowczyk (screenplay and director, based on “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” by Robert Louis Stevenson) Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne), aka Bloodbath of Dr. Jekyll / 1981

 

Since Docteur Jekyll et les femmes was never shown commercially in the United States nor in Britain where it played at only one cinema theater for a week, it is not surprising that this film is basically unknown in the English-speaking world. Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, who began his career as an animator, when he moved to film features focused on films of adultery and illicit love, came quickly be described, particularly in the US, as Margalit Fox quipped, as “a genius who also happened to be a pornographer.”

      Beloved in France and other European countries Borowczyk’s films are still likely to be banned in many US and British theaters, although several of his works have been brought to DVD and there is currently even an English-dubbed version in with Dutch subtitles on YouTube of Docteur Jekyll.

 

     Frankly, if this work is typical of his films, his images of sexuality are far less transgressive that many an LGBTQ film that has been brought into the “ordinary” cannon (i.e. consisting of works that emphasize artistic content over pure pornography) by directors as various as Peter de Rome, Radley Metzger, Wakefield Poole, or even Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose works incorporate far more full nudity and sexual action.   

   The basic tenant of Borowczyk’s work is that after killing the young female child in his neighborhood, Dr. Jekyll’s other self, Edward Hyde (Gérard Zalcberg) has no need to roam the London streets. Dr. Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier) simply invites his doctor friend Dr. Lanyon (Howard Vernon), his personal friends Mr. Utterson (Jean Mylonas) and Mr. Enfield (Eugene Braun Munk), along with the family minister Reverend Guest (Clément Harari), family friend General Carew (Patrick Magee), his mother, and his mother-in-law to be, along with their families, Carew’s daughter and a young girl who dances to celebrate his engagement to Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro) over to his house for a ghoulish celebration.

     By simply jumping into his bathtub with a vial of the important formula sprinkled into the tub water, Jekyll through a pleasurable plashing and a far more visually interesting thrashing, as opposed to swilling down of a mixed chemical drink, turns himself in Hyde time and again so that he can encounter everyone at the party in his own time, delving them out their just desserts.

     It’s absolutely brilliant since it saves poor Jekyll all those trips back and forth to seedy cafés and rooming houses with the police hot on his heels, and gets almost immediately to the heart of the matter of maiming and killing all Jekyll’s hypocritical friends such as Utterson, Carew, and Guest, allowing him, moreover, to brutally fuck all the pretty girls and boys he wants, in this case sometimes doing them in simply because this Edward Hyde is possessed of an enormously enlarged cock.

     People bring gifts, books, from the General, a shaft of poison Amazon tribal arrows, and a painting in the case of his mother-in-law by Vermeer. And the women dress up so very beautifully that we know they’re all ready for whatever the unknown guest might mete out to them.

 

   It also permits Stevenson’s story to reveal the supporting characters’ hypocrisies more readily, as we observe both the general and Reverend flirting with Fanny, their mothers as boring matriarchs demonstrating a commitment to the arts through money and in Jekyll’s own case by pretending to be an accomplished pianist when she can hardly hit the right notes.

     Just as in their private conversations in Stevenson’s tale, this film shows the conservatism and small-mindedness of his dinner guests in a grand dinner party first introduced in the 1920 version and repeated thereafter. Jekyll is a good sport about Lanyon’s and Reverend Guest’s grand pronunciamientos about the doctor’s experiments concerning the good and evil elements within each of us, but Hyde has no such reservations about destroying them for their limited abilities to comprehend the “transcendental” or just for the smug beings they truly are. Each time Hyde appears, in fact, he begins like a small schoolboy by tossing over sacred books and paintings, scrawling upon them, or even burning them, as if he were still trapped as a student in Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduit of 1933.

     He has no time for such cultural accretions. Hyde is pure pleasure whether he be stomping someone he doesn’t like to death like the young seemingly innocent child of the very first scene, or breaking Jekyll’s mother legs after having demanded she play the piano until her fingers are almost bleeding, acts obviously motivated by Jekyll’s years of unbearable patience, a patience with which Hyde isn’t blessed, being in fact a totally damned being.

     The evening “fun” gets underway with Hyde attacking one of the guest’s teenage daughters who has just performed a dance dressed in what is supposed to look like a ballerina’s tutu, but appears to be more like undergarments and panties. She excites all the men, but Hyde gets to break her hymen so powerfully that the young sleeping virgin expires in the sexual act. 

   Thus begins an evening wherein the men suddenly all grow hysterical in the demand of their patrimonial control, ordering the women to the bedrooms, Dr. Lanyon secretly providing them with morphine to help them sleep through their ordeals. The General gets out his gun and begins shooting at everyone who suddenly appears out of the corners of his eyes, accidently shooting and killing Mrs. Osbourne’s coachman, to which Jekyll, suddenly returned to their midst, is sent out to see what he can do for him. The man, Jekyll later reports, suffered interminably for 20 minutes before he died.

      With Hyde now back, he takes on the General’s buxom daughter, who seems quite delighted in the fact that she is about to be raped, bending over to reveal her bare bottom as she leans forward hugging a sewing machine, symbol of what might have been her future. Hyde has already tied up her father so that he must witness, as a voyeur, the act, revealing to us for the first time just how endowed this monster is.

       Unfortunately for both Hyde and Miss Carew, they are interrupted. But even after being “saved,” the daughter is frightened about untying and loosening the ropes around her father, terrified of the inevitable “punishment.” He assures her that he will not punish her, but he lies, slapping, striking, and spanking her in what his clearly the old man’s Sadist pleasures.

      It is clear by this time that like Gore Vidal’s 1955 Jekyll, the good, kind doctor actually enjoys himself as Mr. Hyde, and as in that TV version, he demands that Lanyon provide him, for the very last time, with the antidote through which he is transformed back to Jekyll, in part, just to force this closeted figure to realize what is on the other side. More than any beating or sexual abuse, Lanyon falls in a faint and perhaps into a mental breakdown simply by realizing the truth.

      Meanwhile, lest you think this Hyde is simply a womanizer, he attacks the blond, curly-headed young merchant boy who has joined the party, sodomizing him, again his tool causing the cute kid to bleed in his abdomen, although he evidently survives.

      Having refused to drink the morphine potion provided by Dr. Lanyon, Fanny finally makes her way back to Jekyll’s private room and watches him, while hiding, thrash through his transformative bath, wide-eyed with wonder.

      But when she meets up with Hyde, who has already done in his mother and, despite, the ready arms of Carew’s daughter, has shot them both with poisoned arrows, he seems to be unable to recognize Jekyll’s fiancée, thrusting an arrow into her arm as well.

      Drinking Lanyon’s solution, he returns to being Jekyll, horrified of having hurt his beloved Fanny, although apparently regretting none of Hyde’s other acts. But it is here, as critic Glenn Kenny observes, that the work “turns genuinely subversive.”

     “Shot throughout with diffused light that gives the whole thing a feverish, half-remembered quality, the movie builds inexorably to a (to lift a phrase from Ed Wood) nightmare of ecstasy, a truly Sadean paroxysm. The film indulges a subversive impulse that’s genuinely in the realm of the capital-S Surreal. I was reminded of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1930 mini-feature L’age d’Or, whose focus was on a couple in the most extreme stages of mutual “amour fou”—the viewer first sees them trying to have sex in a mud puddle—who are constantly separated and thwarted by societal pressures. ‘What joy to have murdered our children’ goes a rapturous voice-over in a garden scene just as the couple is about to be reunited in eye-rolling erotic squalor. Borowczyk’s film is like the Buñuel and Dali vision suddenly awarded a “happy” ending. Fanny does not physically transform in Jekyll’s chemical bath, but as the Rolling Stones put it, the change has come. But rather than operate under the oppressive weight of Hyde’s appendage, Fanny becomes an equal partner. Bounding a carriage to who-knows-where at the end, the now fully-compatible couple draw each other’s blood.”   

 

     What I have not yet expressed about Borowczyk’s work of cinema is the spellbinding beauty of the whole. Much of the time we feel, given the dark shadows that pervade this Victorian world, that, as in Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, we are viewing Hyde’s and Jekyll’s acts through a peephole in which as “through a glass darkly” we are witnessing these heinous but yet so-delicious “crimes against society and nature”—as we have forewarned by the dinner guests. But when we do glimpse the rooms, the baths, the nude bodies, the burning books and slashed Vermeer, even the gore of the vampirish blood, the colors of the images are so rich and sensuous that they can hardly be resisted, reminding one of the cinematic worlds of Gregory Markopoulos, Werner Schroeter, or Luchino Visconti, three gay artists who entice us into their frames through their blues, reds, greens, purples, and yellows. We patiently wait for the dark to be briefly lifted so that we, like Hyde, might take our pleasures as voyeurs to the destruction of Jekyll’s universe.

      I suspect that had Robert Louis Stevenson seen this film, he would have been astounded and outraged. Yet I feel that it comes closer to his original story than any of the other cinematic tellings I have witnessed.

 

Los Angeles, August 5, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).