Raphaël Balboni and Ann Sirot | Avec Thelma (With Thelma) / 2017

doomed to straightness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raphaël Balboni and Ann Sirot (screenwriter and directors) Avec Thelma (With Thelma) / 2017 [14 minutes]

 

Jean (Jean Le Peltier) and Vincent (Vincent Lecuyer), a gay couple suddenly receive a call from Jean’s brother, who with his wife has been traveling in the US. Now suddenly, given the major Icelandic volcano, they are trapped by flight patterns in Chicago, and they cannot get back home to meet up with their young daughter, being cared for by a woman who must now abandon their daughter’s care. She’ll be left at the Brussels train station the very next day.

    So begins the short comedic film, one actually of many of this genre (think of the 1987 US film starring Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson, Three Men and a Baby, itself based on a 1985 French Trois hommes et un couffin [Three Men and a Cradle]), as the two queer guys must accommodate a tiny, loveable female monster into their lives.

     It begins innocently enough with them unpacking her suitcase which contains all of her stuffed animals, a panda, a dog, and even her strawberry toothpaste. But it quickly grows serious as the two delightful gay men, Jean and Vincent attempt to give in to Thelma’s every whim.  

     Suddenly, in the middle of the night, they can’t hear her breathing, and rush into her room to check on her. Is a second blanket necessary? Is she sleeping on her back?

     An attempt to make a video with her while pretending she’s a monkey to assure her parents of her well being is a disaster, as the child is not at all accommodating.

      The gay boys argue over the “cheesy” voice the one is using to deal with the child, a sort of adult “speaking down” to a young girl that he finds quite disagreeable It is the voice at the end of sentences, the   double-syllables that so many adults deal out to children that it might normally be unrecognizable, but now becomes an issue between them.

      They try to teach her gestures to her innocent little song. And before we can even wipe away the tears they are tearing out Paste-It messages in an attempt to determine they regular daily encounters with their new beloved adoptive daughter. The nightly cries from their new charge parallel every straight couple’s pleading for the other to get up and deal with her calls for attention.

      But on Sunday a babysitter Jill will arrive to give them a break. They are disturbed, most perversely for a gay couple, that Jill turns out to be Gilles (Gilles Remiche), a male. If they at first resist, they too must reverse their sexual gender notions, the babysitter knowing just how to deal with a recalcitrant young girl in his care. Like all parents, as they slip into the night the remind the babysitter of how to call them and protect their child while their phones are on mute.

      The lovely last scene where they dance with her on screen is a near masterpiece of fatherly daughter love. These two have truly bonded with the child in a way, perhaps, that her parents might never have imagined.

      The last scene, as the pack up her bag to return home to her parents is a truly sad one as they pull her dressed out of their drawers, making sure that they’re properly folded, that he life is what her parents might have imagined was her life with them before. The boys are now left only with their cat.

      But now, via Skype and other internet connection they communicate with Thelma, using a forgotten toothbrush in an attempt to call up the crazy interactive life they led with the now doomed-to-straightness Thelma.

 

Los Angeles, July 10,2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blot (July 2024)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Victor Schertzinger | Boy of Flanders / 1924 [Difficult to obtain]

overlooked talent

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walter Anthony and Marion Jackson (screenplay, based on the story by Ouida), Victor Schertzinger (director) Boy of Flanders / 1924 [Difficult to obtain]

 

Victor Schertzinger’s 1924 film Boy of Flanders is based on the Ouida classic story A Dog of Flanders, the title changed presumably to put more emphasis on the young actor Jackie Coogan who plays the boy, Nello. Coogan had already become a known talent from his appearance in Charles Chaplin’s The Kid in 1921. The dog of the story, Petrasche, is played the famed Mac Sennett canine, Teddy.

      Although a copy of this film still exists at the Gosfilmofond in Russia, the difficulty in viewing it requires that I rely on the few plot summaries of the film that exist.

      The basic story is simple. Nello’s mother and grandfather die, leaving him alone on the streets in the small Dutch village of St. Agneten. No one is willing to befriend him except the young girl Alois (Jean Carpenter), the daughter of Bass Cogez (Lionel Belmore), the richest man in the village. Cognez, however, is upset by his daughter’s involvement with a pauper and drives him off his property.

      When soon after Cogez’s barn burns to the ground, Nello is blamed, and is about to be sent off to an orphanage. A famed artist, Jan Van Dullen (Josef Swickard) arrives in town, however, offering a prize for the best sketch made by a child. Nello, who has artistic talents, eagerly enters the competition, but his drawing his overlooked, and another child wins the prize.

     At about the same time, a huge snowstorm covers the village and it is discovered that Nello has been lost in the storm. Finding Nello’s wonderful drawing as an overlooked entry, Van Dullen himself goes on the search for the boy along with Nello’s beloved Petrasche, who helps him find the boy, now near death.

     As the boy recovers, even Cogez comes to credit the boy for his talent, and Van Dullen adopts him.

      At one point in the story Nello, perhaps just out of hunger, dresses up as Dutch girl in white lace cap, ruffled white blouse, full skirted peasant's dress, and apron so that he might attend an all-girl’s party. But after stuffing himself with desserts, he becomes sick and is perceived as the boy he truly is. Surely this is one of the few instances in the 1920s of a child dressing up in drag, although there were a few films such as The Hoodlum in which young indigent girls dressed as boys.

     Coogan’s talent allowed this film to be marketed worldwide, but already at the age of 10 he had developed melodramatic gestures and expressions of silent film acting. As a critic of day wrote: "Jackie does just what you might expect a small-time vaudevillian to do under given circumstances. There are many points of wistful appeal in the tale of the little Dutch orphan, persecuted by the narrow village as a tiny vagabond, who wins a prize and recognition with his drawing just as the snow mounts higher and higher around his ragged clothes. He shows his amazingly facile versatility by running through all emotions, by doing a clog dance and even by doing a Julian Eltinge in girl's clothes. But his inimitable naturalness and naivete are being crowded out by stereotyped gestures and muggings, such as no small boy does except at an amateur entertainment."

     In the original Ouida story, the ending, it should be noted, is far bleaker. Nello and Patrasche on Christmas Eve go to Antwerp to find the door to the Cathedral left open. The next morning they are found frozen to death in front of the Ruben's triptych.

 

Los Angeles, May 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

Shaz Bennett | Alaska Is a Drag / 2012

northern stars

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shaz Bennett (screenwriter and director) Alaska Is a Drag / 2012 [14 minutes]

 

This 2012 short by Shaz Bennett now reads almost as a trailer for the director’s 2017 full feature of the same work.

     But there is something terribly charming about the abbreviated version simply because we have hardly any logical explanation for what happens. Why, for example does the newbie Alaska boy, Declan (Spencer Broschard) immediately take up with young black worker Leo (Martin L. Washington Jr.) who most nights plays out his fantasies at the local bar as a wannabe drag queen?

     Why is his former friend Kyle (Barret Lewis) so determined, other than his seeming endless flow of homophobia, to daily beat up his fellow worker? Can you really learn Bruce Lee-like kicks and judo maneuvers from watching TV?  

   In this short, nothing is truly answered. There is little attempt to explain anything other than why these two lost young men are trapped in a hostile Alaska: in both cases it is the fault of their daddies, determined to make quick money by working in the legendary Alaska fishing and canning industry—by the time they arrive having basically gone bust.

     This is a world that is perfect for dreams, the boys living isolated and hostile lives under the northern lights as if they were a glitter dance ball in a drag revue.

      Not much happens in this short version of Alaska Is a Drag except for the momentary wonderment of performer Washington and the cute, inexplicable awe of Broschard. But the two are good enough actors to convince you that something might possibly happen between these two boys even if Declan has never heard of Eartha Kitt and we have no idea whether or not he is even gay.

      The only flesh this film reveals is in the guts of the fish cut out in the cannery and the pounding thud of fists against bodies. In the end one has to wonder is it even worth being a “faggot” in such a relentless world of punishment? What’s love got to do with it? Or even sex for that matter?

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).