Saleh Saadi | Borekas / 2020

the reconciliation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Saleh Saadi (screenwriter and director) Borekas / 2020 [15 minutes]

 

A young son (Anan Abu-Jaber) has returned home for a visit in Palestine from where he now lives in Munich. The father (Yussuf Abu-Warda), a taxicab driver, is insistent on driving his son to the airport. On the way they stop for borekas (a puff pastry stuffed with cheese or potatoes) and croissants.

     But when they return to the car, it won’t start. The son is furious, claiming that he’ll call a taxi since he can’t dare be late and they always delay him at the airport. But his father reassures him he’ll call a mechanic friend who will immediately fix it.

 

     So begins what might appear to be a movie of father/son confrontation. As the reviewer from Film Carnage, writing simply as Rebecca, nicely puts it:

 

“Borekas hits upon a theme that any, and probably every, queer person can relate to, the struggle to come out. More specifically, worrying so much about what someone might think, or whether it will ruin your relationship, that it starts to create a distance on its own. How having that fear causes you to subconsciously push that person away to try and avoid conflict. It’s a sad truth and it’s dealt with in a subtle and graceful way here by Saleh Saadi.”

 

     Yet this short gem is not a coming out film, but a work of reconciliation, as the angry son, determined to get to the airport without his father, finally needs to come to terms with the fact that his father has suddenly, after two weeks of basically silence during his son’s visit, a desperate desire just to talk.

      When the mechanic can’t fix the car, a taxi from the company whom the father works for is called for. But in that short time, the father finally is able to admit that the anger and distance his son feels is not entirely of his son’s own making; and both apologize for their enforced distance.

     Amazingly gracefully for such a short film, the elder reveals that he has been surprised by a comment his son made at the dinner table, that he was moving into an apartment with his friend Christoph. Everyone else in the family seemed to know, but he was confused about the fact and later consulted is wife, who explained the situation—obviously that his son and Christoph are gay lovers. Moreover, the father has discovered that although his son seems only to like texting, his wife communicates with her son on Skype nearly every day.

 

    The implications are simply, but profound. He realizes that because of his own pride, inability to communicate, or whatever, he has lost touch with his child, and he wants him back into his life. In a short stand-off that resolves with both men holding back tears (along with the viewer, I might add), the father suggesting he too might communicate with him from time to time on Skype, and the son himself might wish every once in a while to call to his father.

       As the two wait for the taxi to arrive, they open up a range of emotional communications that have been refused by both of them for years. Nothing is said about the son’s sexuality. The father has frankly simply had to accept it. But it is now clear that over the borekas the two have reestablished a relationship that has been on hold for some long time.

       Although this is Palestine director Saleh Saadi’s first film, given the depth of acting and the various cinematic perspectives he is already a professional talent from whom we can hope to see further films.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Penelope Spheeris | I Don't Know / 1970

linda, jimmy, jennifer, and dana

by Douglas Messerli

 

Penelope Spheeris (screenwriter and director) I Don't Know / 1970

 

Lesbian Linda Spheeris, the director’s sister, has fallen in love with Jimmy Michael, who identifies mostly as a male, is attracted to men and has a penis, but also has breasts and suffers from menstrual cramps. Linda, who herself is somewhat sexually confused, as she puts it, feels that if she could have a relationship with Jimmy, a man, permitting them a more traditional relationship. It would solve both their problems, she argues, believing that they would be good for each other.

 

    And, in fact, the couple just walking, talking, bathing together, and hanging out do seem both to be full of life and are quite charismatic, particularly the self-deprecating Jimmy.

     At one point he actually talks about the possibility of going through with a complete sex change, but it’s also apparent that he enjoys sex with other men, describing himself as a screaming queen, implying that he identifies more as a transexual than being transgender. And the confusion causes real problems underlying his on-screen presence. At one point he admits to performing in a porno film as both a man and woman, the shock coming when he shows his “true nature.” But when Penelope asks what that true nature is he says he hasn’t figured that out yet.

     At several points in the past, he has attempted suicide. And the fact that Linda’s brother Andy highly dislikes him, describing him as a “flipped out faggot” doesn’t help the matter, particularly when Andy suggests that if he had Jimmy’s problems he’d surely take his own life.

     This is, after all, 1970, a time in which being transgender or simply somewhere in between was a lonely place in which to be. And it’s clear that for both Linda and Jimmy gender dysphoria is painful and disorienting. Soon, as Andy develops a quite violent hate for Jimmy, things between Linda and Jimmy become even more complicated as threats from both Andy and Jimmy spill over even into their shooting sessions.

     When asked if Jimmy would like to live with Linda like a married couple, he replies “Definitely not. …She just doesn’t have that touch. It’s quite a lot lacking.” Penelope asks him, “You want a man,” he answers, “Of course.” Yet he suggests they could live together if they had separate rooms,she having her girlfriends and he his boyfriends. A moment, when asked who’s his best friend, Jimmy quickly answers “Linda.”

     Linda even attempts to keep him close by creating a motorbike in her own garage, which when she starts up, he jumps on as the rider.

     Eventually, Linda laments that Jimmy has returned to New York to be with his boyfriend who doesn’t treat him very well and sometimes breaks his nose. Love is tough to find for people like her and Jimmy, she observes. But she has new girlfriends and might get a job dancing at a topless bar. “Sometimes I wonder who I am. I’m beginning to realize that I don’t know.”  

    This 20-minute film ends oddly, with a female, Dana Reuben, who we’ve just previously spotted in the mirror into which Linda is staring. Dana, dressed in odd apparel that looks half Arabian, half Romani, has a face that features a large handle-bar moustache. She tells of how she took Jimmy to a friend, an arts patron who became very sad. “She couldn’t understand why Jimmy was the way he was, or is. And I tried to explain to her that well, it’s Jimmy’s choice of life, I mean, he’s a freak, you know? He kind of digs being a freak. And of course he has that choice. He can always be a girl or a boy. But, Jimmy is a freak and he tends to lose his friends. …He doesn’t have any friends. There’s no one. No one at all but me. I’m his friend.” Dana smiles broadly into the camera. And we can only wonder whether Dana might not be a new manifestation, or at least different manifestation of Linda.

 

    In 1972, Dana appeared in a new Spheeris film, Hats off to Hollywood, which explored Jimmy, now known as Jennifer, and Dana as a bickering couple. And we begin to ask how much of this work is actual documentary and how much is fiction.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Woody Allen | Annie Hall / 1977

needing the eggs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman (screenplay), Woody Allen (director) Annie Hall / 1977

 

Although Woody Allen had long played himself as a character in his stand-up comedian performances, Annie Hall was his first foray into a version of self-representation on screen that would continue throughout the rest of his directing career.

   In this film his self-based character—although Allen has long denied that the film was truly autobiographical—is named Alvy Singer. Alvy is a true “insider” New Yorker (born in Brooklyn who lived as a child under a Coney Island roller-coaster), who, yet, in his paranoia about being Jewish in a world of gentiles, feels as a permanent “outsider” in the world. Although one might easily perceive Annie Hall as a valentine to Manhattan, it is also portrayed as a raucously annoying world of imminent danger, wherein every query such as “Do you,” can be read as a racial baiting of the world “Jew.” People in movie lines pontificate on Bergman, Fellini, and Marshall McLuhan (the real man whom Alvy pulls from behind a nearby poster board to prove the loud smock behind him is mistaken in his views). And almost everyone he meets talks, endlessly talks. In short, it’s lot the family scenes that Allen portrays in Alvy’s childhood. Indeed, the movie was originally titled Anhedonia, from Greek word meaning the inability to experience joy.

      Yet Alvy, much like Allen, is often attracted to the “other,” something so very different from the world he has embraced. At the center of this film, which was to be devoted simply to the fragments of Alvy’s life, is Annie (perfectly personified by Diane Keaton, whose childhood name was Diane “Annie” Hall, and who had a romantic relationship with Allen), the polar opposite of Alvy. She is an insecure would-be singer, while he writes jokes and does stand-up comedian gigs; she is totally curious and committed to the new, while he is an opinionated pessimist fixated upon death—after all, as a child he has discovered that the universe is forever expanding, and human life is necessarily doomed.

 

    Most importantly, Annie and her family are near-Wasps whom Alvy imagines see him as a Hassid with Tallas and a tall Russian hat on his head.  The scene in which he dines with Annie’s family, replete with Annie’s Jew-hating “grammy,” her possibly suicidal brother Duane (Christopher Walken)—he confesses that he often has a desire to turn his car into the headlights of passing autos—and an over-inquisitive mother (Colleen Dewhurst), is certainly among one of the film’s best, reminding one a bit of scenes from Allen’s later Hannah and Her Sisters.

      Annie Hall, in its final version, centers upon Alvy’s attempt to comprehend why these two opposites have fallen out of love, but we discover almost immediately that, in fact, they were never truly compatible, he self-centered and determined to keep his space, she far more easy-going and emotionally responsive. Even their costumes, Annie dressed in casually chic male-female attire, he in standard shirt, kakis, and loafers. Is it any wonder that, by film’s end, Annie has drifted off to the antithesis of Alvy’s world, California? Perhaps the only thing these two do share is a fear of

multi-legged creatures, he of lobsters, she of spiders.

      Calling up the major events of their affair and his central character’s two previous marriages, Allen’s work is squarely in the romantic movie genre, lacking great experimentation. Yet he tricks his audience into believing that this work is someone adventurous by throwing in what later will would be described as postmodern tropes such as the scene described above with Marshall McLuhan, schoolroom children standing to announce in what professions they were later employed, direct and sudden questioning of passersby on the New York streets, split-screens portraying completely different realities, subtitles that express the real fears behind the characters’ everyday dialogue, cross-cuts that break the somewhat realist plotting, and, most importantly, the direct embracement of the audience-goers, which force us to feel that this movie is truly engaging us. Allen also employs the Robert Altman device of introducing real-life celebrities into his film, including McLuhan, Truman Capote, Paul Simon, and others.

      And then, the film has the major asset of Diane Keaton, who, if she isn’t truly Annie Hall, is, even today, completely comfortable in embracing that role. While Alvy/Allen is constantly whining, she, in the old-fashioned meaning of the world, is constantly gay, “La-de-da,” being her most common phrase. Clearly the sunshine she has brought into the mostly gray skies of Alvy’s beloved New York not only charms us but warms Allen’s diatribe against life with a kind a golden glow that he would return to in later films such as Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Midnight in Paris, and Café Society.

      And, in the end, it moderates Alvy’s incessant howling with a warmer view of life and love. As one of the women he queries in the street replies to his question about love: “It’s never something you do. That’s how people are. Love fades.”

      Or, as Alvy himself perceives by film’s end:

 

Alvy Singer: [narrating] After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I... I realized what a terrific person she was, and... and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I... I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this... this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us... need the eggs.

 

     Yes, this film too reminds us of just how much Allen, throughout his career, has portrayed himself as a proliferate womanizer, and as a man who used others to get what he wanted, in most cases sexual satisfaction. But history is filled with such sad stories. And the Gods themselves, in nearly every mythology, suffered such desires. I know, given how much women suffered in such pillages, it’s now very difficult to forgive such actions. I do think men have to alter their ways forever. There’s something even slightly slimy about some of Allen’s films, particularly his next, Manhattan. But I think Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman’s simple admiration for the Keaton character says a lot. If nothing else, this film, dominated by Keaton’s version of “Seems Like Old Times,” demonstrates that Allen, at heart, is a nostalgist, dedicated to a past that perhaps never truly existed, a world which might wash away his innumerable sins.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2018). 

Kon Ichikawa | Otōto (Her Brother) 1960

a kind of nun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aya Koda and Yōko Mizuki (screenplay), Kon Ichikawa (director) Otōto (Her Brother) 1960

 

Most people in Gen’s situation—with a penurious father (Masayuki Mori) who spends most of his life separated from the other family members as he writes hidden away in his home office, a rheumatoid mother-in-law (Kinuyo Tanaka) who does little housekeeping, yet has plenty of time to gossip each day with her fellow religiously-inclined friend, and a younger brother,  Hekiro (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) who shoplifts before going on the racking up debts in the local billiard hall and riding a horse to its death—would have left this dysfunctional family at the very first opportunity. Instead, Gen (Keiko Kishi), a beautiful high-school student, is forced to return home each day to clean house and cook meals, and spends the rest of her little free time caring for her almost criminal brother, paying off his debts and attempting to parent him in the absence of any help from her father, who dotes on his son, and the ineffectually complaining mother. Throughout the film she is forced to travel from police station, to gambling halls, to a horse rental service, testifying to her brother’s best intentions while he mostly teases and mocks her devotion.

      Gen must even fend off the attentions of a parole officer who uses Hekiro’s bad-boy behavior as a way to attempt to seduce the young woman. The only man who shows her any real signs of love, a poor local factory workman, is scared off by Hekiro and his gang.

      In Her Brother the great Japanese director, Kon Ichikawa, is not so much interested in the “story” of this family’s life as he is in studying their dynamics, where, in the patriarchal system of the day, everything centers around the youngest boy’s well-being and his father’s solitude.

 

    Ichikawa’s greatest films have to do with large moral battles, and even his later domestic drama, The Makioka Sisters, is epic in the complexity of the sisters’ family life and their importance in the culture in which they live.

     Her Brother, however, is a far more tepid expression of family life, focusing, as it does, on Gen’s near-saintliness, and family healing after the young center of their attentions, Hekiro, slowly dies of tuberculosis. By the time of the boy’s death, Gen has seemingly lost her youthful beauty, having had to transform herself into the unappreciated third parent, willing even to share Hekiro’s dishware which might likely lead to her own infection with TB.

     Yes, Ichikawa’s beautifully filmed work, subtly expresses the difficulties of being a woman in this period of Japanese society, but Gen is hardly represented as a model of any rebellion against that world. And, finally, we can only suggest that in her meek obedience she has brought the tragedy of her life upon herself.

 

    Only in a few instances do we see that she has a spark of self-recognition that might carry her away from the smothering world in which she lives: a moment when she triumphantly hits the  billiard balls, blushes at the attentions of the young factory worker, or rails against Hekiro’s lecherous parole officer.

      Most of the time, however, like the last hours of Hekiro’s life in which she ties a ribbon between his arm and hers so that he might awaken her to “celebrate” for one last time, she willingly ties herself to his life. If we are saddened by this would-be juvenile delinquent’s death, we also celebrate it, while doubting that Gen will ever be able to discover a more fruitful way of living. As her religiously obsessed mother-in-law might have wished, she has already become a kind of nun.

      It is hard to imagine why this film was remade in 2010 by Yoji Yamada, even though it was seen as a celebration of Ichikawa himself.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).