Craig Johnson | The Skeleton Twins / 2014

the end

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Heyman and Craig Johnson (screenplay), Craig Johnson (director) The Skeleton Twins / 2014

 

The Skeleton twins, Maggie (Kristen Wiig) and Milo (Bill Hader), in Craig Johnson’s want-to-be likeable 2014 film of the same name, are both facing crises: early in the film we observe the two, on opposite ends of the US, contemplating suicide. Milo attempts to go through with it, by slitting his wrists in a bathtub of hot water; Maggie is saved from an overdose of pills by a phone call reporting that Milo, having survived, lies recuperating in a hospital. Although the two have, somewhat inexplicably, not spoken to one another for ten years, she flies to his side.

       The pair are not only unhappy in love, although Maggie is slow in admitting that fact, but they are fragile survivors. Their father has committed suicide when they were just 15, and their mother is revealed to be a ditzy New Age do-gooder who would prefer to attend a spiritual retreat than her own daughter’s wedding.

   Soon after, we begin to discover that Milo was the target of his schoolteacher’s sexual abuse in high school. Fortunately, Johnson does not make this a simple, black and white matter, suggesting that, in what is sometimes the truth, Milo not only sought out Rich, his English teacher’s (calmly but intensely performed by Ty Burrell) attentions, but enjoyed the elder’s attentions. And soon after he returns to his hometown, how under his sister’s loving protection, he seeks the man out once again. We sense the utter loneliness of Milo, who living in the wildly gay-friendly atmosphere of southern California, has apparently found no one with whom he could develop a relationship; and Milo’s ensuing pain, when Rich, understandably, is terrified that his former student has returned to cause further trouble—particularly given the facts that the former teacher, now a bookseller, remains closeted and has a 16-year-old son—helps to reveal the emptiness of the younger man’s life. The fact that Milo still seeks out his elder simply reiterates his isolation, and also helps to substantiate his feelings that, despite his visions he has had for his future, he is one of those who has peaked in high school, never able to find something later in life as meaningful. Although he has dreamt of a career in acting, he has not even been able to obtain an agent and survives by working as a waiter in a Hollywood tourist restaurant. Although the two, Rich and Milo, again begin a brief sexual relationship, Milo is soon after rejected again by Rich after he attempts to visit him at his home—to be greeted at the doorway by Rich’s son. After heavy drinking, Milo once again toys with suicidal thoughts, tossing the good luck charm of a whale (a reference to Melville’s Moby Dick, the book in which Rich had tried and failed to interest his young student) off the edge of a building, from where he himself, a seemingly doomed beast, could any moment fall.

   As the would-be healer of her beloved brother, Maggie puts up a great front, pretending to be in love with her witless, run-of-the-mill, if loveably straight-thinking husband, Lance (Luke Wilson). Yet we soon observe her courting disaster with an affair with a scuba-dive teacher. And she soon reveals, after a nitrous oxide laughing-high (she works as a dental hygienist) with her brother, that her current sexual escapade is just one of many, that she has had brief affairs with other teachers’  (similar in their roles if not their ages to the object of her brother’s first sexual encounter) of various hobbyist interests she has taken up to get her out of the house. While Lance proudly announces when he first meets Milo, that her husband and Maggie are attempting “to make a baby,” she now admits to Milo that she is secretly continuing to take pills to protect her from pregnancy. What’s worse, she suddenly discovers, is that she has forgotten to take a pill for one day, and may have missed her period.

      Although the twins’ new-found kinship begins, understandably, as a rather rocky one, it soon becomes clear that the two can charm and uplift one another in ways that no others can, demonstrated spectacularly in a scene in which, Maggie having just discovered that she may be pregnant, Milo, to cheer her up, breaks into a lip-synched song, “You Can Count on Me,” that, with Hader’s deliciously delivered up dance steps and spins might charm even a misanthropic cynic. Like nearly all the actors in this dark film, he is near perfect in his role.

 

     Soon after, we get a glimpse of the twins’ childhood explorations of identity, when, for Halloween, Milo dresses as a kind of fairy princess while Maggie plays at being a cowboy. Their momentary return to the past, when they lived out their lives as beings they might like to be instead of admitting who they are, begins almost with an aura of enchantment, the duo dancing with one another in a beautifully filmed scene which invokes not only their mutual support, but their intense, implicitly incestuous connection. Twins, after all, are often intimately close: two identical twin friends of mine warned their wives that they would always be closer to one another than to their lovers; my own niece’s fraternal twins often accused one another, as small children, of stealing one another’s words.

     But that very moment in this often-sensitive film also represents the final coming-to-terms of their highly emotionally-fraught lives. When by accident, Maggie discovers through Milo’s cellphone that he has been seeing Rich, she grows furious, as we soon discover that it is her reporting of the incident years before that has not only ended the predatory abuse, an action that forced Rich to resign from his job. She sees it still as a duty she had to protect her brother, and now feels betrayed by what she sees anew as her brother’s truly deviant behavior. The two fight, perhaps with Milo truly comprehending for the first time just how involved his sister had been in the break-up of his only fulfilling relationship. The interchange of cutting remarks ends with her suggestion that, perhaps, in his suicide attempts he had not cut deep enough!

     When Lance admits to his house guest that he is fearful that he may be infertile, Milo suggests that Maggie has always been highly secretive and that, perhaps she is on some sort medication that might explain her behavior or even her inability to get pregnant. Even if only subconsciously, he is plotting what she will later call an act of “revenge.” Yet we know, no matter how innocent Lance may be, in his utter cluelessness, he is also not the right man for Maggie; and we recognize that Milo is now only doing for Maggie what she had done for him years before. Faced with Lance’s discovery of her birth-control pills, Maggie has no choice but to admit her bizarre sexual behavior to her husband, resulting—as she predicted—with the end of her marriage.

    Perhaps only now do we truly comprehend why these two have not communicated for ten long years! For not only have the Skeleton twins’ father and mother twisted their perceptions of life, but the siblings themselves have helped to bring down one another by destroying each other’s doomed romances. As Milo takes a bus out of town, Maggie enacts her suicide by drowning, tying herself down with barbells as she jumps into the local pool.  

     It hardly matters that Milo, in response to her suicide note in the form of a cellphone message, quite unbelievably rushes back in time to save her just in time from drowning. She might as well have drowned; he might as well have disappeared into the California surf.  The last scene of the film shows them facing out at the audience as a smiling couple, staring at a tank of fish, a loving gift from Maggie to the fish-loving Milo, but we know their lives are spiritually over, which no amount of their mother’s attempts at “cleansing” can ever restore.

    My companion Howard argues that the film ends with the simple hope that they will now each find the right companions, discover people who might be intelligent enough to deal with the dark and quirky currents of their lives.

    Although I wish I could agree, I can’t envision any other future for them. They are not only too tightly intertwined as twins, alas, but are doomed beings, destined to live out their lives with each other—despite occasional forays, perhaps, to seek out sexual fulfillment—side by side. Certainly, there is no one else in this film who has revealed any of the complexity of fullness of life they both desire. Rich, as he describes himself, is a “pussy,” a man afraid even to admit his own sexual proclivities. A high school friend, whom Maggie encounters, reveals the horrors of married life with children she herself describes as “shits.” These two beings can belong only to one another; specters of the past; trapped in the skeletons of their own bodies by childhood events, they have no future. Their frozen stares into our eyes signify what the movie indicates, “The End.”

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2014

Reprinted from Nth Position [England], October 2014.

Benjamín Cardona | Más que el agua (Thicker than Water) / 2014

the recurring pattern

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamín Cardona (screenwriter and director) Más que el agua (Thicker than Water) / 2014

 

Joaquín Benjamin Cardona) is an out gay Puerto Rican and has finally left his parent’s home, with the help of his grandmother, to live on his own. He has had short-lived gay relationships. But to say that he still have difficulties with his sexuality is an understatement. With his life-time best friend, Carol (Isabel Arraiza)—herself a confused and unhappy heterosexual photographer—the only bars he seems willing to visit are straight ones and then only accompanied by Carol. It’s at just such a bar, while he waits for Carol to show up, that he meets Xavier (Ronald Torres), perhaps the perfect man for him, a man, in the brief time we see them together, who gently challenges Joaquín layers of reservations and fears.

     And for a short while, director Cardona’s complex film reveals their idyllic first days of love. Indeed, it appears that finally Joaquín has found his perfect mate, and in the process he breaks all communication with Carol, perhaps recognizing that their symbiotic relationship is part of his problem, that their dependence upon one another is centered upon their inevitable failures in love.

     But Más que el agua, we quickly discover, is not a film about a relationship between two gay men, but about the difficulties of one man attempting to come to terms with his life and, most particularly, his own homosexuality, something many men and women have never fully been able to embrace in themselves. For the thousands of LGBTQ individuals who proudly declare their joy for existing in the world where they might be accepted by others, there perhaps as many who have never fully been able to come to terms with love outside of the borders of the heteronormative worlds in which they exist, hating both worlds for the pitch struggles they feel within.

     Instead of following Joaquín’s new love, the director begins moving back and forth through other episodes in the young man’s life, which include the attempts of a fellow worker to arrange dates for him, other instances of temporary love, and Joaquín’s utter and almost inexplicable rudeness, at one point, to a slightly flirtatious young man who might have compatible as a companion or just friend.

      Most importantly, these disjunctive peregrinations into his past reveal his few returns home where he meets up with a friendly father but a monstrous mother Sarah (Jacqueline Duprey) who, if she even bothers to speak to him it is with total disgust and abuse of both Joaquín and Carol whom, in one instance, he has brought as a date.

      Although from her religious point of view, she cannot accept her son, they have accepted the fact that his sister is having a baby out of wedlock and that the couple has been living together, although even that fact infuriates her. But heterosexuality after all is preferable.

      At another point his mother even orders Joaquín out of the house forever, insisting that the only part of him that will remain is the photograph she keeps near the door of him as a young boy. One can well perceive that Joaquín has not had a strong familial base on which support his own sexual differences.

     On the other hand, his relationship with his grandmother is warm and friendly, she, also having rejected the conservative religiosity of her daughter, is equally unable to deal with his mother. And during one visit to his grandmother before her death, Joaquín openly admits to a pattern of self-destruction when it comes to love, reinforced by his fears and inabilities to commit to his own sexual existence.

     Gradually we begin to perceive those long-time patterns of his life, engaging with individuals deeply as he has with Xavier, before suddenly pulling away and leaving, basically to return to the equally confused and unhappy Carol who together support one another by pretending that they themselves have been the victims of others.

      This time when Joaquín returns to Carol, having left Xavier, she is angry for his having not only cut her temporarily out of his life but for just this continuing pattern. Carol asks why he has finally returned to her, already knowing the answer. “I just want an explanation. I waited for you for a long time, you know. I knew you’d get tired of him.”

       “What makes you so sure of that.”

       “Because that’s how it is. That’s what you do. You let people walk into your life, and when you get tired of them or feel like they are suffocating you, you disappear.”

       “At least I know what I want.”

       “I don’t think so. Don’t be so sure of that.”

       In this case, Joaquín truly does regret his having left Xavier, and returns to him hoping they might start over again or even continue where they left off. But Xavier, it is clear, cannot begin over or continue a relationship with a person so unsettled as Joaquín. And this time the rejection is devastating to the young man because he knows that it is entirely his fault, that Carol has been right. The problem is his, as he has discussed with his grandmother: how to forgive himself, and if he cannot, then how to go on living.

 

     The last scene repeats the first one and, indeed, may be simply a continuation of that conversation where they sit looking out over the harbor, trying to rally their forces by declaring that “Things aren’t as bad as you think.” “You have the freedom to do as you please.” And, the commonplace mantra, “we have one another.”

      Joaquín asks a serious question: “What’s going to happen to us?”

    Carol answers it, probably as she always has, in a meaningless way that substantiates the true emptiness of their friendship: “Nothing. Nothing’s going to happen. You’ll be okay.”

      The fact that he is not “okay,” and that their relationship, in fact, represents nearly “nothing” is the true problem that neither of them can fully face, that what they seek is something other than “the thicker than water” friendship that so falsely walls them off from what they truly want.

 

Los Angeles, October 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Leandro Wenceslau | Enquanto Ainda é Tempo (While There Is Still Time) / 2014

say goodbye

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leandro Wenceslau (screenwriter and director) Enquanto Ainda é Tempo (While There Is Still Time) / 2014 [14 minutes]

 

In Brazilian director Leandro Wenceslau’s short film While There Is Still Time, longtime friends discover that they are also in love with one another when Caio (Thiago Aguiar) announces to his friend Lucas (Filipe Morais) that his father has received a scholarship in Germany, and that he and his family will soon be moving there.

      Lucas first senses it as a kind of betrayal. Why hasn’t his friend told him immediately, he wants to know. He backs away for a short while from their intense relationship, the kind of friendship where, at any moment, you expect the two to come together in a kiss.

 

     But gradually the two high school boys do return to some sense of normalcy. And just as we might have imagined, at a point when Lucas asks Caio to help him put on a necklace, the two boys suddenly find themselves in the middle of a deep kissing session, realizing, perhaps too late, that they have truly loved one another all along.

      Unfortunately, the film has not established any of their previous relationship, and at no point do we see either of these boys engage with their families, who seem well-attuned to their son’s friendship and not particularly homophobic—although Caio does comment that his father is committed to the entire family staying together, even though they have long ago gone their separate ways.

      Accordingly, we are simply told that these two boys are in love without providing us with any previous evidence, even if we can see it in the eyes and gestures from the first moment that they communicate with one another in the film.

      Before either the boys and their audience realizes it, Lucas is rushing to the airport to say goodbye, perhaps forever, to the boy he now realizes he loves. He presents him with a new necklace, a cross, as a sign of his love.

       So the film might have ended had not Wenceslau created a strange melodramatic ending right out of a telenovela, a form so popular in South America. As Lucas begins to leave the airport longue, he appears to be hit by a car, people gathering around him to photograph the event. Almost at the same moment, Caio suddenly appears, presumably having miraculously convinced his family that he must stay on in Brazil. Lucas comes round, and the two embrace, suggesting a very happy ending. Or is it, we must wonder, simply the last image that Lucas imagines before dying? There’s no way of knowing, and we feel cheated, either way, by the implausible ending.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

 

Rémi Bigot | Dans les yeux (In the Eyes) / 2014

when later is too late

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Peyroux and Rémi Bigot (screenplay), Rémi Bigot (director) Dans les yeux (In the Eyes) / 2014 [8 minutes]

 

French director Rémi Bigot’s short drama in Russian recounts the story of two boys, sons of families of the Russian Orthodox community in France. The film centers on a Sunday celebration of that community before and after mass. It is at these moments when the two boys, Victor (Pierre Andrau) and Alexandre (Léo Pochat) meet up to express their gay love for one another.

 

    Evidently some time has passed since their last gathering as Alex’s mother describes their vacation in Spain where, she proclaims, there were more Russians than in Russia.    

     The boys meet for a few seconds apart from the gathering, giving each other a deep kiss. But they are soon seen again at the mass and at the celebratory luncheon after, with traditional Russian foods. At all such religious gatherings, the young children run in joy meeting up with others of their age, while the parents, long involved in their religious gatherings, chat. Clearly, to attempt to explain to such a tight-knit community about their love would be nearly impossible, and the two 17-year-olds are still not out to their parents.

 

    At this particular event, however, Alex’s mother announces a great piece of news: her son has been selected at an American university, which all the members of the community toast. That is, except the shyer Victor who suddenly feels deeply betrayed, something we can clearly see in not only his eyes, but in his entire mien. He obviously has not been told of the inevitable separation.

     As the afternoon winds down, the boys surreptitiously meet again, Alex lightly kissing Victor, the latter of who says nothing but does fully respond. Alex suggests, “We’ll talk about it later,” but Victor reacts with colder recognition that it’s already time to go. But as his friend turns, Victor grabs him and kisses him with true passion, the other pushing and pulling away before he goes on the run.

     In the last frieze of the film, Victor stands sadly in the doorway, his sister joining him and, perhaps sensing her brother’s sadness, coming up to him, standing close by. He picks up and hoists her upon his shoulders as he looks emptily out into space, knowing apparently that the secret love he has between Alex is now over, as it he has just been hit with a fist.

     The shifting times of the transition between high school and college has often been the subject of gay love stories, the inevitable breaking up a relationship occurring for young gay men just as it does for high school heterosexual couples. But given the demands and limitations put upon these young men by their religious society, it is even harder to imagine where Victor might now turn in his search for new love unless he too breaks with his family and moves on to a new life.

     This film does not fully deal with the subject it evokes, but it remains a beautifully filmed portrait of a loving community that simultaneously destroys love that does fit its definitions of normative behavior. Bigot catches, time and again, Victor peeking out from corners, representing the boy’s feelings as he is locked away in a community which demands his full commitment but in which he feels clearly out of place and somewhat terrified by that fact.

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

 

Shai Blanc | אין דלתות נעולות (No Locked Doors) / 2014

a film of gradual revelations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shai Blanc (screenwriter and director) אין דלתות נעולות (No Locked Doors) / 2014 [12 minutes]

 

Israeli director Shai Blac’s No Locked Doors is a film of gradual revelations. It begins simply enough, with an older brother Lior (Aviad Shai) assigned to the task of looking after his younger brother, Ben (Ariel Shilo), who is sick at home. No explanation is given why the parents are not there to care for their youngest and his elder sibling; perhaps they are simply at work or away on a visit.

     It is apparent, however, that his parents’ absence is assured enough that Lior has invited—we later learn somewhat hesitantly—his gay lover, Nir (Joseph Alon), for a visit. Indeed, since Nir is currently serving his required military duty, the visit represents his last hours of freedom on a leave.

      Both older boys are excited about the possibility of enjoying their last sexual contact before at least a month or more of absence. But what to do about Ben, like most young boys a charmingly inquisitive kid, who obviously looks up to his brother and, despite his illness, wants his brother to play basketball and other games with him?

      Lior, we discover, is a good brother, willing to care for Ben and involved with teaching him things young boys need to learn in order to get on in the world, such as being able to balance a basketball on your head.

      Given the precious time Nir has left, he has no patience for his lover’s little brother. When the two first retreat to Lior’s bedroom, soon after Ben becomes bored, and wants to know what military maneuvers his brother’s friend is supposedly teaching him, opens the bedroom door (in a house where it has been determined that no one locks any door) and sees them in a very strange position, one straddling atop the other, fortunately not fully sexual yet and without them having yet entirely undressed.

      Curious about the military maneuver, and anxious to show his brother how he has almost learned how to balance the ball on his forehead, Ben refuses to budge until suddenly he remembers it’s time for his medicine. As Lior takes him into the living room, and soon after reaches into the cabinet for the bottle, Nir appears almost naked in the hall, suggesting that Lior needn’t worry: “You know how kids are with medicine.”

      It appears, we suddenly realize, that he is suggesting that perhaps Lior might just add a little more of the mild narcotic to his tablespoon in order to put Ben into a deeper sleep. But Lior, without saying anything, makes it clear that he will do not do any such thing, and puts the bottle back into the cabinet, telling his brother that he will prepare his medicine later. Fortunately, Ben falls to sleep of his own accord.

      The two older boys now decide to engage in sex in the bathroom, a place Ben won’t perhaps intrude and surely wouldn’t imagine as a location to which they had both retreated. This time they do undress and begin some serious military maneuvers.

       But Ben, awakening and retrieving his own medicine, follows their noise to the bathroom, putting his to the door, and finally opening it to see them naked in a deep embrace. He will take his own medicine, he declares, if Lior will just make sure he puts the right amount on the spoon. And incidentally, he asks his brother in passing, “Are you gay?”

       Furious with the further intrusion, Nir sulks off and gets dressed while Lior, somewhat nervously now but with brotherly love, attends to Ben.

       Nir is now ready to leave, and Lior reminds him that he had told him there might difficulties with meeting up at his place. Nir growls that there will now be problems in getting together at his place as well, suggesting that when he returns for his next leave, Lior might not be so very welcome.

       When Nir exits, Lior returns to playing backyard basketball with his little brother, pausing just long enough to ask Ben what does he know about being gay. The boy responds, as one might expect, that he’s seen it on television.

       So ends what might seem to be a fairly uneventful short movie, if were not that we have learned that Lior is a young man of high morals and deep love, that Nir is not all such a moral being and is obviously not the right mate for Lior, and that perhaps it is time that Lior tells his family of his sexual desires before his brother nonchalantly mentions the fact. Lior hopefully has realized just what his audience has perceived and will act accordingly. Since the film slowly brightens in light as it progresses, we presume that Lior has indeed gotten the message.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

 

Gary Halvorson and Richard Eyre | Le notte di Figaro / 2014 [The Metropolitan live-HD broadcast production]

terrifying twists

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composer) Lorenzo da Ponte (libretto, after the comedy by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais), Richard Eyre (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Le nozze di Figaro / 2014 [The Metropolitan live-HD broadcast production]

 

Like many an opera buffa, Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is filled with would-be lovers jumping in and out of beds; late night romantic assignations; flirtations and sexual encounters between maid(s) and master, mistress, and godson (or male servant(s), or any visiting admirer); intriguing switches of amative attentions; startling revelations of heritage and birthright; as well as, quite often, temporary alterations of sex—all undertaken beneath the nose of a highly suspicious husband or another such authoritative figure who is usually the greatest transgressor of the lot.

 

    As anyone who has seen this “follow up” to Rossini’s just as character-leaden and plot-stuffed precursor Il barbiere di Siviglia knows, Mozart’s work offers all of the above in great proliferation. Between Count Almaviva’s (Peter Mattei) attempts to bed nearly all of his housekeepers, and his maid Susanna’s (wonderfully elucidated by Marlis Petersen) and her soon-to-be husband Figaro’s (Ildar Abdrazakov) attempts to get even (or in Figaro’s case, to get revenge) for the master’s unwelcome attentions of the lively “flower of the household,” there is hardly a moment in this heady elixir of amour and feudal abuse that isn’t jam-packed with new plot twists.

     “Twist,” indeed, is the perfect word for the constant story fluctuations, which the Saturday HD broadcast host, Renée Fleming (who has performed in her share of Figaro productions) characterized as “a perpetual turning of the tables.” So many epistles have been written and posted through the pockets of Figaro that, at one point, when cornered by the Count, he admits that even he cannot keep track of the would-be comings and goings of figures, as three notes of assignation simultaneously fall from his pockets. Fortuitously, Rob Howell’s well-oiled swing of the settings and Sir Richard Eyre’s precisely-timed fluidity of direction keep the production moving, even if, at moments, the audience and characters lag behind in comprehension.

     But the “twists” of this busy-bee work lay not only in the turning down of bedsheets by the Count, but in the twisted relationships of various characters, most notably Marcellina (the housekeeper to the pompous Dr. Bartolo) who hankering after Figaro, has long-ago loaned him money attached to a contract stating that if he does not pay her back, he must marry her. Bartolo, who like the much younger Count, at one time has clearly employed house staff in roles beyond their job descriptions, is more than delighted to now have the opportunity to get rid of his “old cow,” while simultaneously revenging himself for Figaro’s involvement in preventing him (incidents represented in Rossini’s operatic version) from obtaining Rosina, now the Count’s lovely wife.

      Suddenly in act III we discover that the man Marcellina truly desires to marry is, without her knowledge, her long-lost son, Rafello, fathered by her employer, Bartolo. In short, she, who the Count was determined just minutes before to declare to be Figaro’s wife, would lure Rafello into a horrific coupling, like Oedipus and Jocasta, of mother and son. In the context of Mozart’s pre-Freudian world, such a marriage does not represent a psychological condition but rather serves as a hovering omen about the machinations of the Count, threatening to transform at any moment the comic “pranks” of Lorenzo da Ponte’s and Mozart’s work into a tragedy of epic proportions like Oedipus Rex. The potential parallel between the Count’s and Bartolo’s actions cannot be missed by the man who has just sung a song (Vedrò, mentr'io sospiro) expressing his jealousy of his own servant.

   Similarly, throughout their opera da Ponte and Mozart feature a newly created figure not in the original Beaumarchais play, Cherubino—who the great Kierkegaard described as a figure “drunk with love”—who twists and turns his way throughout this play in a sexual stupor that would dizzy even the most sure-footed angel. Yes, Cherubino, obviously, is a kind of angel, a man so beautiful that—as the writers insist in their script—he must be played always by a beautiful young woman (in this case, the lovely and musically gifted Isabel Leonard). But Cherubino is also a sort of shadow to the Count, a being who aspires to the same status as his master, which also explains why, discovering the young sex-fiend wherever he goes, the Count can only seek his destruction. For Cherubino also has significant qualities that the Count is missing: beauty and youth. Accordingly, like a twisted, fun-house looking glass, the stare of Cherubino, which the Count seems to encounter everywhere, can only remind him that he will soon be an old and ugly fornicator, like Bartolo, who also once challenged him for his wife! 

      Unlike the often clumsy and blundering Almaviva (a long-living soul who actually learns through the long-time experiences of life), who serves always behind his nemesis, the cherub can literally “fly,” as he proves through his escape from the balcony window of his godmother’s bedroom. In short, he can move about in near absolute freedom, not only in space but within his own body, as he constantly shifts gender. Using the former castrati role as a tranvesti character to perfect effect, Mozart and his librettist require that not only every woman in the play be sexually charmed by the young man but must attempt to make every man equally so enchanted.  

    Except for perhaps Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, opera has never before used transvestitism to such wonderful effects. Not only do the Countess and Susanna spend long moments in joyfully dressing up their youthful lothario as a lovely woman whom they hope will satisfy the sexual longings of the Count, but another of the Count’s conquests, Barbarina hides him, when Cherubino has deserted from his military service, by dressing him up as a provincial beauty. Time and again, the woman turn-the-tables, so to speak, on this would-be molester by rendering him neuter, by turning him into one of their own kind.

     Still, the rapscallion Cherubino nearly destroys the day for the penultimate “twist” of the story, wherein the Countess, having transformed herself into Susanna through her costume—while at the same time Susanna hides her eager desire to be embraced by Figaro by wearing the Countesses’ gown—prepares to receive her unrepentant husband. Cherubino’s unwanted attentions reiterate not only the pains the Countess has had to suffer for his husband’s philandering, but those that Barbarina may have to suffer through her Cherubino.

     For the moment, however, the day is saved, and, the final “twist” is played out in all its grand ironic display, the Count unconsciously playing lover to his own wife.

 

    Suddenly realizing that he has become the fool in front of everyone, the Count, at least momentarily, is forced to realize the errors of his way, asking for forgiveness not just from his wife (“Contessa perdono!), but from everyone in hearing range, including the audience whom he has so entertained. The Countess’ proclamation that she is kinder than her husband in forgiving him, results in a beautiful choral work that expresses joy while reminding everyone of the “terrible twists” of reality that they all have almost accidentally escaped. As I whispered to Howard a few moments later: “That is the saddest aria to a happily-ending opera that I have ever witnessed.”

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (October 2014).