Paul Preston | Now You Know / 2017

a father comes out to his son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Preston (screenwriter and director) Now You Know / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

10-year-old Oliver (Jayden Louth) is getting the opportunity to spend the weekend with his rapper Dad (Jurrell Carter) during a new filming session. The boy asks his father if he can be in on the shoot, but his father promises him “next” time. Yet Oliver is puzzled by the fact that the cameraman Luke’s daughter Scarlet is performing in the musician’s song.

       Obviously, the divorce between Oliver’s mother and his father has been fairly recent, and he’s hasn’t been told any of the reasons. And it appears the precocious boy is a bit shy around the new people with whom he is expected to share his father. Luke’s daughter, Scarlet, moreover, seems to be slightly sulking and not at all that friendly.

     Given this film is only 12-minutes long, what Oliver rather quickly begins to perceive—and the viewer along with him—is that the relationship between his father and the cameraman is a bit more intense than he might have imagined. Rising up from a later afternoon nap, the boy peeks out the window to see his father at the dinner table kissing Luke.

      Later, he reports this to Scarlet, who does not at all seem surprised, although she’s never actually seen her father and Oliver’s kiss. The quick-thinking boy immediately confronts his father: “Dad, are you gay?” A question which those of my generation would surely not have known how to even ask of their fathers.

      That question results in an intense background argument between the two men, with the rapper making it quite clear that he’s not at all ready to explain the situation to his son. Luke scoops up his daughter and they leave in anger, clearly in disagreement with his lover’s inability to explain the situation to his son.

       The two, father and son, are left in the darkening trailer in almost a face-off, the father refusing to explain his consternation. On his hand computer the boy watches a scene from another video of the two men together who look very much in love and happy, and suddenly the entire situation becomes quite apparent. The child grabs the cellphone and runs from the trailer, calling up Luke and Scarlet before handing the phone back to his father.

      Obviously, he has forced his father to ask Luke and his daughter to return. Meanwhile, Oliver explains to the elder that he’s still his Dad and he continues to love him, what can only be described a reversal of the usual coming out situation. The two hug, just as Luke returns, a man who Oliver now accepts into his life, as Oliver’s father hugs his lover. Apparently both the kids are now in the video.

      British filmmaker’s Paul Preston short nicely hints at what is likely the positive shifts to LGBTQ acceptance between the younger and older generations. But it might have been more fascinating and complex as a short feature, in which we watch the boy come to the discover over a longer period of time, presenting his confusions, his fears, and misapprehensions before the sudden revelation. Children often perceive things quite quickly and are far more accepting to change, in many cases, than their parents. But the discovery of his father’s radical shift in sexuality in what appears to be a single day condensed into 12 minutes is simply too much to be believed. And this film leaves us wanting to know more. How long his Oliver’s father known he was gay? How did his wife discover it? How is she dealing with that revelation? And will this radical discovery affect the relationship between mother and son?

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2024 | reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson | Ost und West (East and West) (aka Good Luck) / 1923

the boxer becomes a married lady

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney M. Goldin and Eugen Preiß (screenplay), Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson (directors) Ost und West (East and West) (aka Good Luck) / 1923

 

This silent Austrian classic which appeared originally in Yiddish and German, according to The Women’s Jewish Center is the oldest surviving Yiddish film.

     The work centers around the return of Morris Brownstein (Sidney M. Goldin), known in the New World as Brown, and his daughter Mollie (Molly Picon) from their home in the US to the father’s native Galicia* to attend a family wedding.

     For most of the film, the young American female Mollie behaves like a roughhousing tomboy, causing havoc among the Galician family and the local yeshiva boys equally. On the holy Day of Atonement, where the family fasts while spending the entire day in the synagogue, Mollie, who has grown terribly hungry, sneaks out of the services, returns home, and eats almost the entire chicken and other ingredients that her uncle’s cook as pre-prepared for the evening’s breaking of the fast. Having left the others nothing to eat, she is severely spanked by her indulgent father.

     But before she’s even recovered from those pains in the ass, she is ready to box in the ears of the servants who reported her as the culprit. Mollie is a big fan of boxing and has brought along her own gloves.

      At an early pre-wedding celebration, the rabbi arrives with several yeshiva boys. Her father begs Mollie, as she proceeds into the room where the boys have gathered, don’t play rough, “these are nice boys” he pleads, knowing that she could easily out wrestle and corrupt the innocent students. But before any of the adults know what’s happened, Mollie has jumped upon a table top to teach the yeshiva boys, the cook, and the cook’s boyfriend how to dance Western style. Again she is spanked by a father who has evidently no success in controlling his spoiled American daughter.

      In another incident, Mollie is nowhere to be found, and the adults look everywhere in an attempt to stop whatever antics she may be up to. She is discovered dressed as a yeshiva boy, singing and drinking as one of their kind. 

      What no one realizes, meanwhile, is that the jeshiva bucher boy, Jacob (Jacob Kalich), a rabbinic student who lives in the house and, as a “freeloader” is maltreated by the cook and butler, has fallen in love with wild American Mollie.

 

      When Mollie sees the bride-to-be dressed in a trial run in her wedding dress, she begs to borrow the veil, pretending to be a bride herself. Everyone goes along with the idea, quickly creating a huppah and scooping up Jacob from the kitchen to participate in the mock wedding ceremony with Mollie as the imaginary bride. They go through the basic elements of the ceremony, ending with a ring which the bride-to-be loans her, the cook, the butler, and others egging Jacob on to put the ring on her finger. The yeshiva boys, however, try to warn him, but eventually after holding back for several moments, he drops the ring upon her finger.

      When the rabbi and adults finally appear, they are horrified by the fake ceremony, not just because of the mockery of a holy rite, but because by Jewish law once a man puts a ring on the finger of a young woman he is legally married to her.

     At this very moment, the film turns from a comic work centered upon the attempts of a wild Westerner to defy the fustian traditions and values of the East, to a far more serious exploration of the consequences of that attitude.

       Mollie and her father are horrified by the realization that she is now married to a traditional student of the Torah. The wild Western woman cannot imagine her life as a traditional Jewish bride. The rabbi insists that Jacob renounce his marriage so that they can divorce. But strangely, without giving his reasons, he defies the rabbi.

       Because he has gone against the authorities, Jacob is ousted from his school and sent away from the Galician Brownstein household. Living for a while with a loving, poverty-stricken couple, Jacob eventually takes up the offer of his wealthy Viennese uncle to come live with him, announcing to Mollie and her father that, if after five years she still does not wish to live with him, he will grant her a divorce.

       The Browns, Mollie and her father, are forced accordingly to travel throughout Europe, the father hoping to keep his daughter’s mind from the dreadful reality that she may be facing. After a continental tour, in which Brown is absent from his business responsibilities, they arrive in Vienna.

       Jacob, meanwhile, entering the city as an outsider himself, and being mocked for his traditional Talmudist garb, gradually becomes assimilated, like his uncle, into Viennese society just as had so very many thousands of others during the very same years. But Jacob is, after all, a truly brilliant young man and eventually becomes a noted writer under the name of Ben Ali.

      Hearing that his wife and her father are now in Vienna, he arranges that his uncle invite them to his reading at the Oriental Society, which at the same event awards Ben Ali an honorary membership.

     Taken with the now quite handsome man whom she vaguely recognizes as being familiar, Mollie quickly becomes one of his fans. And meeting him for dinner at his uncle’s house and other activities, she begins to fall in love with Ben Ali.

    The five years are now about to pass, the uncle and his wife inviting the Browns to a special breakfast. Suddenly, Jacob appears in his Talmudic garb saying that he will gladly divorce Mollie is she desires. 

     She is about to claim that right and sign the contract, but the boy suddenly pulls off his costume revealing that he is now Ben Ali, she finally coming to the realization that she is already married to the man who she truly loves.

       The first long portion of this film clearly reveals Picon’s character as a dangerous outsider, perhaps even a young woman with more masculine behavior than female traits. And in some respects, this work is even more rowdy and truly sexually transgressive than her later Yiddle with a Fiddle (1936), where she is dressed for most of the film in male drag. Here she appears in drag only for a few moments, but her behavior throughout serves basically as a mockery of the paternal and male-centered Yiddish and Jewish traditions, something almost unthinkable in 1923. It is only when she is accidentally married and comes to be controlled by circumstances, turning from a tomboy in a mature woman that redeems her behavior and likely permitted her audiences to perceive her previous behavior as simply an example of childlike Western mischief. 

      But in a sense, both Mollie in Galicia and Jacob in Vienna share a deep kinship in being outsiders in worlds they inherently disrespect. In both instances, Picon’s and Kalich’s characters come to terms with those new worlds in which they have relocated by assimilating and learning to respect values and individuals different from their own selves.

     The film, accordingly, becomes almost a primer for both the new and old worlds to find a way to marry and embrace both the laws and traditions of the past and the rapidly changing and ultimately totally altering world of the present. Like the works of Sholem Aleichem such as Tevye and His Daughters (טבֿיה דער מילכיקער, the source of Fiddler of the Roof) which appeared in 1894, one might argue that Ost und West served an important educational role for Jewish assimilation while the later Yiddle and His Fiddle worked more as a nostalgic view of what was already nearly lost and would fully disappear in only a few years.

 

*Considered the poorest region of the former Austria-Hungarian empire, Galicia was located between Poland and Hungary, with its major city being Lviv; it is now part of both Ukraine and Poland.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

 

George Clooney | Good Night, and Good Luck / 2005

applause, applause

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Clooney and Grant Heslov (screenwriters), George Clooney (director), Good Night, and Good Luck / 2005

 

Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s and Grant Heslov’s movie about Edward R. Murrow, is the kind of film that audiences always applaud. My companion, Howard, attended the movie twice before I took in a showing on a weekday afternoon, and at each performance, we concurred, the audience so responded.

      Certainly the focus of this film—Edward R. Murrow’s head-on attack of then-Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Senate Committee for UnAmerican Activities, an act of great bravery on Murrow’s and CBS’s part—is worthy of audience appreciation. Murrow’s reporting, his incisive appeal to his viewers that Americans ought to be able to encounter ideas that threatened their system without censorship or arrest, and his outright disdain for McCarthy’s methods of innuendo and lies is well documented and in this film is represented through a noir-like dramatization of real events interspersed with actual television and film footage of the period. The world McCarthy and his committee had created is brilliantly presented by Clooney and cinematographer Robert Elswit in cinematic terms through extensive use of rack-focus camera shots and a blurring of the background in many scenes, along with jumpy, held-hand camera effects that recreate the sense of early television and suggest the psychological condition of people involved in a time when it was sometimes difficult to clearly see the broader picture of world politics and where even the tiniest of questionable political behavior might jeopardize one’s career. W. H. Auden and others described the period as “The Age of Anxiety”;  certainly it was a time when one nervous to do anything out of the ordinary—all of which Clooney and Heslov reiterate through several dramatic episodes, particularly in scenes revealing the hidden marriage of Joe and Shirley Wershba (played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) [studio executives did not permit employees to be married] and the continual need for self-evaluation of personal sympathies or even relationships with those who might have had Communist connections [CBS news announcer Don Hollenbeck (played by Ray Wise) is attacked by newspaper columnists for having “pinko” associations, a slur which brings on his suicide; and, when Murrow (brilliantly played by David Strathairn) and Fred Friendly (played by Clooney himself) demand their staff tell them of any possible communist connections, one staff member suggests he should leave the team for having previously been married to a woman who had attended Communist Party meetings before he met her]. In short, it was a time of deep paranoia that affected everyone.

 

    On that fateful night in 1954, Murrow’s “See It Now” broadcast crowned a series of events that would lead to the downfall of McCarthy and his years of destructive effects on the American psyche, effects that still have consequence in today’s battles between the political left and far right. But if Murrow won the proverbial battle, he lost the “war,” so to speak. A short year after that brave journalistic act (the movie unfortunately portrays it coming almost immediately after the McCarthy broadcast) CBS and its head William Paley (played here by Frank Langella) cancelled this regular news program, moving its diminished series of five shows to Sunday nights. And it is this fact that, it seems to me, is really the issue of this motion picture. Clooney and Heslov document the McCarthy attack effectively, but they have another, perhaps more far-reaching theme to present: the general decline of American journalism, and the rise of MTV-entertainment television and newspaper coverage. The movie begins and ends a few years after Murrow’s famed show with a lecture he made to the American press about the ever-increasing lack of serious news coverage.

     Accordingly, Clooney’s film, although presented as a kind of realist drama, is more than that. It is a film of political commentary that continues to have important significance today. It is unfortunate that the film only suggests these issues—albeit quite forcibly. When one thinks about the declining coverage of serious events on US television, where local news stations now spend most of their time—at least in my city of Los Angeles—on car chases and disasters; when one perceives that even the half-hour of national news coverage reveals little about major international events; when one recognizes that journalists today often do not seem interested in pressing for the truth behind political statements and presidential edicts that are often promoted by implanted journalists, or that when they do question the issues, like Judith Miller, they connive and fabricate the truth; when one understands that most book sections across the country have been severely limited or suspended, or that as with the New York Times Book Review and The Los Angeles Times Book Review the book review editors have chosen, when it comes to literature, to refocus their attentions on more popular genres and best-selling publications; when one puts all of this and more into the context of Murrow’s impassioned plea for more serious and complex reporting, one is perhaps made “nervous” again.

    Do we as a populace know now when we’re being lied to? Do we even recognize today that our news is incomplete—or worse—simply nonexistent? I am always depressed when I return home to my family in Iowa, where in the thin pages of the Cedar Rapids Gazette—just as in most smaller cities—the entire news coverage is presented in brief Associated Press notices? Yet my mother is convinced that she knows everything that’s happening of importance in the world; “I keep up with the news,” she proudly says.

      Finally, it comes down to a societal and institutional disdain for Americans themselves, a feeling by a few who believe they hold knowledge (and often have no better grasp of it than anyone else) that the general populace cannot and will not assimilate complex information. A few years ago I had lunch with then-editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review Sonja Bolle. When asked what books I was soon to publish on my Sun & Moon Press label, I replied that we had just published a translation by the French Oulipo writer, Raymond Queneau. “O, I love Queneau,” she gushed, much to my surprise. “He’s a wonderful writer. But, of course, we couldn’t possibly do a review of his work!” “Why not?” I naively responded. “Oh, our readers couldn’t understand a review about his literature. You know, most newspaper readers read at the sixth grade level.”

     I was appalled, not so much by the journalistic cliché we have all heard many times, but by the absolute misunderstanding, it seemed to me then and does yet today, of who her audience was. “Do you think,” I asked, “that it is the least literate part of your audience who reads the book section? Why even have a book section if that’s the case?” Inwardly I continued my argument: “We live in a very diverse time where readers seek out many different subjects and issues. And furthermore, I don’t believe that any reader of a newspaper is a complete idiot. Don’t you owe readers something more than your disdain?” I would have been talking to the wall.

     Accordingly, I wonder, when those many audiences applaud Clooney’s excellent film, just what it is that they are applauding: Murrow’s bravery for attacking a bigot? Murrow’s advocacy of a more serious journalism? Clooney’s presentation of these issues? Or perhaps it is for all these reasons and more. I would like to think that in applauding Good Night, and Good Luck these audiences are simply asking to be treated as Murrow treated his, as intelligent adults.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2005

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 1 (January-February 2006)