Andrzej Wajda | Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) / 1958

 

a stuporous dance of death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerzy Andrzejewski and Andrzej Wajda (screenplay), Andrzej Wajda (director) Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) / 1958

 

Wajda's masterwork, Ashes and Diamonds, begins in a seemingly bucolic world, with two men, Maciek Chelmicki (performed by the gifted actor Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski), lying on the ground near a small country chapel. A young girl is attempting to open the chapel door, and asks their help. Slowly the men, clearly exhausted, are roused, Maciek, in dark glasses, taking a long while to awaken. Suddenly another man signals them, a car is coming, and we recognize that we have misread the peaceful scene. The girl is sent off, and, as the car comes into view, Maciek and Andrzej ready their guns, brutally murdering driver and rider.

     It is, as we discover later, a botched murder; the two killed were factory workers, not the Communist party leader Szczuka, whom the assassins were ordered to kill. Entering the nearby provincial city on the last day of World War II, the two meet up with a local contact, the secretary to the city's mayor, who gives information, but refuses to participate in their activities. While reporting on their success, Maciek overhears of the arrival in small hotel of Szczuka, and realizes their mistake. There is no choice now but to finish the assignment, Maciek checking into a room next to Szczuka's.

     Szczuka is in town to celebrate his return from the Russian front and the appointment from the mayor to a ministry position. The banquet is to be held in the hotel itself. Maciek and Andrzej seek out the hotel bar, where Maciek discovers a beautiful barmaid, Krystna (Ewa Krzyzewska), and proceeds with a kind a crazed flirtation with her that in his behavior reminds one of a mix between the American actors James Dean (Cybulski was later described as the "Polish James Dean") and Marlon Brando. He is clearly toying with danger, daring the world about him, a world where he has daily had to face death.

     Both men have been part of the Polish underground, and now hope to defeat the rising Communist influence. Yet neither Andrzejewski's original novel, nor Wajda's film, sides with the partisans or the Communists. Although a formidable and bureaucratic-like figure (no match for the appealing Maciek), Szczuka has fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and later warns of the dangers of "having power."

    Andrzej is called away for further instructions, while Maciek determines the best moment to kill Szczuka is late at night, when the man has fallen asleep. In the meantime, he continues to woo Krystna, eventually seducing her into his room, where the couple celebrate their youth and sexuality at the very same moment that the banqueters celebrate their political futures and the townspeople the end of the war.

    Throughout the long night, we begin to see that nothing in this celebratory world is quite right. Through Wajda's brilliantly surreal imagery, we witness a wooden image of Christ hanging upside down in a bombed-out church, a white horse loosed upon the streets. While Maciek and Krystna discover love, the banqueters grow drunker and drunker, ultimately throwing over any remnants of respectability and civility.

   In this whirlwind of change, bringing both a corrupt new leadership and hopeful love, the young assassin is confused. He has never before disobeyed an order, but is now seemingly ready to give up his previous ways for the new possibilities of life—a life of young idealism he has never had the opportunity to experience.

    Yet the system in which he has been living will not permit escape. Andrzej returns to remind Maciek of his duty.

    As Szczuka awaits a car to take him to his son, arrested with a group of failed partisan rebels, Maciek shoots, killing Szczuka; the body falls forward into his own arms so that the two appear to be embracing death together, symbolizing the pact that the Polish people will ultimately make with the Communist forces.

     Inside the banquet hall, the participants, worn out and drunk, demand the orchestra play Chopin's Polonaise in A flat: while the tired musicians perform a rendition that is hardly recognizable, the celebrants enact what appears more like a stuporous dance of death than a spirited polka, a kind of dance that is played out years later in Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994).

    Attempting to escape the city, Maciek, spotted by troops, is shot. Stumbling forward he finally reaches the dump at the town's edge, collapsing and convulsing, little by little, into death. Krystna, the diamond of his world, is forced to join in the devil's dance.

     Wajda's great film may not openly take sides, but by comparing the death of the beautiful Maciek with the surreal Polonaise, we know that Poland's future will not be a thing of beauty, that the ashes of World War II will fall over anything that shines.

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2009).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).

Phillip J. Bartell | L.T.R. / 2002

making mistakes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phillip J. Bartell (screenwriter and director) L.T.R. / 2002 [16 minutes]

 

If one learns nothing else from Phillip J. Bartell’s L.T.R.—an anagram for the words “long-term relationship”—it is that no beginning couple should ever attempt to describe themselves in such a relationship and, above all, never allow a highly skeptical documentary filmmaker to stick a camera into one’s everyday affairs.

      When I met my companion and spent every day of the first week in each other’s apartments and beds, moving in together at the end of that period, neither of us ever quite imagined that we would become a permanent couple—now in a marriage lasting 53 years. We fought like dogs for the first two years, and although we made up all sorts of rules regarding our sexual fealty, we fortunately did not completely obey our own strictures. A relationship is a process that is difficult to evaluate while establishing the definitions and boundaries of what one means to the other.

     But these two boys, Michael (Cole Williams) and Riley (West Mueller), both immature and clearly inexperienced are convinced that they have found true love and share numerous values, as well has feeling that they are engaging in spectacular sex. First love has a way of exaggerating such feelings. A day seems like a month, a month like forever.

        In this mockumentary the couple hardly get through the third week before they discover what should have been obvious on the very first night, particularly given that Michael, the elder (21), likes to party at the clubs, while Riley (20) prefers to remain at home with a bong for a companion. Michael wants to get “gay” rings, each of which is number so that the community might determine how many gay men there are, while Riley sees the whole thing as being something like being, if nothing else, “creepy.”

       Riley suggests that they both want kids—“that’s something we have in common”—without bothering to perceive that neither of them, together or alone, is even slightly capable of being a parent. An invitation to each of their best friends, Caitlan (Aimee Garcia) and Tobias (Michael Azria), ends disastrously, with Michael only speaking with Caitlan, while Riley and Tobias roll about the floor giggling in a drug high. The evening ends with them wondering if they can continue with such different behaviors.

     When Michael invites the documentarian over to watch him making up with Riley, he finds his friend unreachable by phone, as the camera catches the wan look upon his face. (The phone from 2002 is almost comical in its a cigarette carton-size, one of the earliest versions of a portable phone).

      In his car delivering pizzas, Riley tells the camera that he doesn’t know what’s going on, that they’re both into this “thing of not calling one another.” “I just need someone more mature,” the most child-like and self-infatuated person in this film intones. He turns to the filmmaker, “Like how old are you?” The documentary maker says, “30,” and Riley pauses as if considering the matter.

       Michael is sadly contemplating why just a couple of things bring down an otherwise nearly perfect relationship. When asked what those two things are, he answers that he thinks they like to party differently—an obvious conclusion since Michael appears to enjoy the company of others, while Riley removes himself into a world of his own confused head—and they have different “energies,” an idea which remains vague, although we sense that the commitment of the relationship was perhaps mostly Michael’s enthusiasm.

       Soon after, we see Riley in bed, topless, talking, as he explains to the documentary maker, to Michael. He wants us to get together, the cameraman hissing that he thinks it’s a bad idea. He then suggests Riley should do whatever it is he wants to do.

       We can only suspect what gets revealed in the next scene with Michael and Riley attempting to enjoy a reconciliation dinner, the camera whirling away as they sit silently face to face. This isn’t working Michael finally speaks out, Riley reacting that he thinks it might be because he slept with John.

       Suddenly turning on the cameraman, apparently the “John” they are talking about, the flabbergasted Michael shouts out, “We haven’t even officially broken up yet….” He runs angrily into the bedroom and locks the door, Riley pounding for him to let him in, shouting “It didn’t mean anything.” From the other end of the room we hear the filmmaker asking “What do you mean it didn’t mean anything?”

      When Michael opens the door to let Riley in, he forces the camera and its operator out, and for two weeks, reports the documentarian, he didn’t hear from either of them. “But then Riley called to tell me that they’d broken up again.”

       Michael finally calls John again for a meeting, asking how things are with him and Riley. The relationship between them is also over. Michael wants to report that he’s fine, no longer even pissed. From this relationship, he argues, he has learned nothing—“except not to go out with immature freaks, but everybody knows that. And not to trust documentary filmmakers.”

       But finally, he perceives a truth about finding love. “I look at you, and it’s all clear. I’m going to make the same mistakes over and over again, like you are until I get it right. No, not right; just lucky.” He looks up and over to another table, adding, “That boy’s cute.” He stands and begins walking over to the cute boy, turning back for a moment to the camera, “Interview’s over.”

        If much of this film is coy and simply silly, there is an underlying sense of sadness which emanates from the realization of just how difficult any relationship is, and how even more complex and problematic it is for gay men who not only have fewer choices even in large urban areas, but are pulled still by different societal rewards and pressures that historically isolated them from long-term relationships and encouraged them to seek out sexual fulfillment over the responsibilities of family and monogamy. Sexual attraction may indeed bring gay lovers together, but it is not what primarily makes their relationship adhere. Only by letting time reveal who the other is, can lovers determine whether they might be able to remain with the other over the years.

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

 

Larry LaFond | Gaydar / 2002

fantasy is better than reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry LaFond and Terry Ray (screenplay), Larry LaFond (director) Gaydar / 2002 [20 minutes]

 

US director Larry LaFond’s Gaydar is a comic movie of the old school that nonetheless is absolutely charming because of its unassuming narrative and simple intentions of entertainment as opposed to probing deeper subjects.

      Randy (Terry Ray) and Frankalina (Jennifer Echols) share nearby office cubicles, both of them on the watch for the Tom Cruise-like beauty who works in their office, Jack (Bryan Dattilo).

     Randy, a slightly effeminate male, believes that Jack might possibly be gay, and from the language the movie puts into his mouth and the hand he delivers up to Randy’s shoulder when he communicates, it might well be that he is. But unlike the many gay men—myself included—who believe they have the power of determining such things on the basis of gestures and language, Randy claims no special powers of “gaydar.” Besides Frankalina is convinced that his beautiful behind is a pair of cupcakes ready to be delivered right up to straight women like herself.

 

    Together they watch Jack’s coming and goings with a mixture of awe and perspiration, at one point when Jack seems to be particular friendly, Randy almost passing out in sexual anticipation.

      Randy is also the type of gay man who simply can’t pass up a yard sale, and during the weekend he stops for just such a sale by a gay man (Jim J. Bullock) whose lover has announced his intentions to break off their relation by packing up all of his partner’s possessions in boxes, so that when he returns home he has no choice but to sell them off quick at very lowest price.

       Deep within one of the boxes is a contraption titled “Gaydar,” a noisy machine that supposedly identifies any to whom the pointer is aimed as gay or straight. Randy immediately tries it out, the meter identifying the hunky man also shopping for trinkets at the yard sale as straight—surely a sign that the machine doesn’t really function, he presumes, until a woman, presumably his wife soon after joins him. Pointing it at Maurice’s distraught lover, the yard-salesman, the meter reads definitely gay.

       Excitedly, Randy buys the machine and takes it home, trying it out further on photos in his tabloid magazines. According to the machine, Elton John is gay, Brad Pitt is not. Melissa Elthridge, yes. But when he is about to “check out” Tom Cruise, his cat hisses so strongly that he becomes distracted, finally pointing it at the cat herself, who turns out to be a lesbian which, as he declares, “explains so much!”

      Randy becomes so distracted that when his uncle Vincent (Charles Nelson Reilly in his last film role) arrives for his weekly movie-watching evening with a Doris Day film in hand, he’s forgotten completely all about it, and bows out by saying that he’s planning on going out to a disco—something that according to Vincent he has never done before.

      Obviously, he becomes determined to check out Jack at the office, but when he attempts to do so in the parking lot he encounters a fellow employee, Dewayne (Thomas Cagle), a true nuisance who’s about to marry another employee, Marlene. As Randy attempts to train his device on Jack, Dewayne gets in his way and—much to his surprise, if not the audience’s—Dewayne registers as gay.

      Once inside the office, Randy is still determined to discover the truth, but after he shares his intentions with Frankalina, she suddenly rushes after him in an attempt to dissuade him, ending in a bodily confrontation with Jack who drops all his files, forced to bend over continually in order to pick them revealing for both what Frankalina has described as his Cinnamonbuns.

      When she finally gets an opportunity to talk with the much flustered Randy, she explains that if he settles the issue for once and for all, he will most certainly remove the joyfully imagined possibilities for the other, destroying at least one of their daily pleasures. Fantasy, she proclaims, is so much better than reality.

     Seeing her logic, Randy gives up his attempt, but she borrows the machine, nonetheless, just to check out another employee who is about, she tells him, to marry her good friend, Marlene. The film ends with Randy muttering to himself, “and I was so looking forward to giving him away,” which can be read either of two ways, as serving as a best man or friend, giving him “away” in marriage or, of course, “outing him,” letting everyone know what he already does, that Dewayne is most certainly gay.

      Nothing serious here, just good campy fun. The film, accordingly, has appeared in over 120 gay film festivals.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

 

Jonathan M. Guttman | Miles Apart / 2002

the days of wine and daisies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keith Humphrey (screenplay), Jonathan M. Guttman (director) Miles Apart / 2002 [19 minutes]

 

Miles (Brad Schmidt) agrees to return home with his lover Jeffrey (Craig Burke) for Jeffrey’s sister’s wedding. But he clearly does so with deep feelings of trepidation given his past encounters with Jeffrey’s waspy bitch of a mom, Darleen (Kathleen O’Neel Toleedo)

     As they are met at the station, he hands Darleen a small bunch of white daises he has brought her, recalling that daisies are her favorite. She dismisses them—it is only yellow daises she likes—and utterly ignores his presence, focusing all of her attention on her beloved son, while leaving the luggage to Miles as if he were some sort of servant.

     In her son’s room they will sleep in bunk beds in a room she has conveniently made so unbearably hot that they will have to sleep with the door open.

     Basically, she goes out of her way to ignore her son’s companion, the two in a relationship, it appears, of several years.

     The dinner was to have included Jeffrey’s sister Kathleen (Megan Hamaker) and her fiancée Steve, who not only finds a way to escape that dinner, but actually never appears in the movie, even at his own wedding—which I presume is an exaggerated in-joke about just how much he has needed to escape the presence of his mother-in-law.

      Before Darleen joins them, Jeffrey and his sister chat, she admitting that in some remarkable manner she has managed to escape revealing the fact that she and her future husband have been living together for years. Fortunately, Miles and Jeffrey concur, they are lucky to live in another state.

      Dinner being served, Darleen suggests that the atheist Miles say the evening prayer. He readily agrees to do so, thanking God not only for the blessing of Jeffrey’s family and the upcoming wedding of Kathleen and Steve whose love is as pure as Jeffrey’s and his own—immediately and rudely interrupted by the mother who declares an end to all such conversations, even if heaven-sent. “This is not the time and place to bring your life-style to the dinner table.”

     For the first time Jeffrey reacts, leaving the table with Miles, and later even rejecting his mother’s statement that she will forgive her son for his behavior. Jeffrey argues it is she who needs to ask for forgiveness. And soon after, through the necessary open door, Darleen hears the conversation between her son and his lover, as Jeffrey finally opens up about his years of resentment for his mother’s inability to accept him and the man he loves.

     Miles wisely explains that it is not he who she is rejecting as much as it is the truth of her son being gay. People are expendable for her, but deviations in her wasp notion of reality are absolutely intolerable, so the film suggests.

     A few glasses of wine later and a stroll through memory lane through a childhood scrapbook seems to set Darleen straight—or perhaps we should say, leads down a different curving road.

   At the wedding, we see Jeffrey dancing with his mother, still unable to forgive her continued dismissal of the man he loves, and Miles—the man, as always, forced to be remain apart from Jeffrey in his mother’s presence—dances with the bride, who admits that her mother is a genius at pushing all the right buttons to make everyone hate her.

      But suddenly Darleen asks if she might cut in. We wonder whether, if she dances off with Miles, she might be plotting another series of rude rejections, but it is her daughter with she dances, leaving Jeffrey to dance with Miles in their first real moments together since their visit to hell. We notice that the yellow daises have been filled in now with a few white daisies. Suddenly we see Darleen, all in smiles, with a white daisy in her hair and she compliments her son on making a “smart move.”

     If this little film of the horrors about conservative values posing as the dismissive affectations of class-structure lacks all credibility by its “feel-good” ending, we can’t help but liking it nonetheless for purportedly teaching the society bitch how to become a real human being by accepting her son’s sexual identity. It’s remarkable what a few glasses of wine can do after a long-deserved upbraiding by your beloved son you’ve accidentally overheard describing your dreadful behavior.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Jordon Firstman | The Disgustings / 2014

stand off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Drew Droege and Jordan Firstman (screenplay), Jordon Firstman (director) The Disgustings / 2014 [13 minutes]

 

Evidently Jordon Firstman’s directorial debut—not mentioned in his Wikipedia entry—The Disgustings represents a type, both heterosexual and gay, but much nastier in the gay queen rendition of character which we all know, even if in real life I’ve met no one quite like it.

      Both Daryl (Drew Drogege) and Pierce (Jordan Firstman) are the kind of best friends who believe themselves to be so superior that no one on earth can possibly come close to their intellectual, aesthetic, and social superiority with lines such as “Anyone who is comfortable with his shirt off can’t be trusted,” and “I’m about to yell because their coffee tastes likes pasta.” At one point Pierce cannot even believe that the unshirted boyfriend of a female friend “actually introduced himself to me.” Eyes constantly rolling in response to the insignificance of all others, they even take pleasure in their own nasty quips for being both “strange and specific.”

 

   Throughout the short 13-minute film the couple puts down a waitress (Erin Rye), who has evidently delayed in getting them a drink of water (“You know I don’t come to brunch to be ignored and then judged for being ignored.”) and, later, a friendly Yoga Girl (Linsay Nyman) who is so sweet and willing to communicate that she doesn’t even quite recognize their utter put-down of her when then command her to get lost. As Daryl summarizes, “You know I feel like as a nation insecurity is our biggest disease. It’s like a fucking epidemic. You know it’s like why do you fucking hate yourself so much that you can’t spend 24 hours without someone around you? I mean like I’m always alone and I’m always fine. Ask, always, almost anyone.”

     Even at the gay bar when a stranger approaches Pierce, telling him he really likes his outfit, wondering where he works out, he turns on the strange willing to buy him a drink, suggesting that he doesn’t recognize the face, and even asking his friend Daryl whether he knows “this person.”

For a moment, Pierce actually pauses—hinting at a possible crack in his dismissive foundation—to ask whether or not he might let the “person” buy him a drink. But Daryl quickly convinces him to say “No,” which does, bidding the cute guy goodbye, and pointing out the fact that both of them have full drinks. “Leave this world,” they command him, as if they were a solar system of their own which no other star dare to tread.

     The moment the boy walks away, Daryl turns to his friend with a hissy whisper, “Oh my God, disgusting. Some people have no tack.” “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” Daryl commiserates. Pierce suggests that he feels totally shaken up—as well he might since no one dares to intrude upon the nasty duo. “It’s so weird. He was so aggressive. Did you notice how aggressive he was?”

      And with that, the two create a magnificent melodrama about what might be seen by most as their lucky moment, ending with a cute boy to go home with: “I mean I feel like I was basically just raped.”

      “Yah, he did.”

      “He did rape me!”

      “I just watched a rape. I almost watched a rape. Which is worse than rape.”

      The two leave, returning to their own apartments and beds, neither of them being able to sleep at night. Which explains, perhaps, the regimen of pills we have seen on the countertops of their bathrooms and on tables near their beds. Neither of these two men, who cannot even be described as active gay men, might ever discover someone of their mental, aesthetic, and social acuity since they are impregnable in their narcissistic haze.

      If it’s funny to watch them, it also hurts, since even if such types don’t really exist, we are fearful that they just might, and we have all experienced people who feel intellectually and socially superior to us who we can imagine having just such ridiculous conversations. We want to stay away from such individuals, and they want us, fortunately, to stand off, fearing the possibility that someone might possibly break through the walls they have erected so as never to have deal with real life.

 

Los Angeles, August 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024)

Alexandra T. Steele | Like a Brother / 2002

hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Thell (screenplay), Alexandra T. Steele (director) Like a Brother / 2002 [12 minutes]

 

Alexandra T. Steele’s short film of 2002 Like a Brother seems torn about which direction it wants to move. On the one hand there is Nate Christy (Damien Midkiff), a skinny, pimpled young teenager who is quite obviously awed by his next door neighbor and sometimes friend, the school basketball player Andy Thomas (Ryan Honey). But then there are the problems at home as in the very first scene of the film we overhear what appears to be a violent fight between the Christys, with Nate’s father storming out—apparently permanently, since Nate later tells his neighbor that his parents are getting a divorce.

      The Christy family and their neighbors the Thomas’ evidently join one another on a lakeside trip every Labor Day, which in the film is the very next day—coincidentally only two days away from when I watched and am now writing about this movie. Despite the tragedy now facing his mother, Nate still begs for her permission to join the Thomas’ in their Labor Day celebration, clearly because of his obsession with Andy.

  

      She agrees, and the celebration seems to be going well, with the two boys joyfully fishing out on the lake, the far more mature Andy, with shirt removed and suntan lotion spread across his well-developed chest and back suggesting that his friend join him to get a little sun. Having been working on sit-ups to develop himself—which apparently have had little if any effect—Nate is shy about removing his shirt, but does no nonetheless. Andy, like many a teenage boy talks about the size of his own cock and those of the basketball players with whom he showers, marveling at one of their penis’ which he describes as being like a snake. Obviously devoted to his body, he spends long moments admiring his own pectoral development, showing of his chest and back muscles as he rubs on the lotion.

        When the two determine to go back, the anchor seems stuck, and Andy leans into Nate’s backside as together they attempt to pull it up. In the process, Andy’s face comes near to Nate’s and for a moment it looks almost as if he about to kiss him, Nate immediately and eagerly responding with an attempted kiss as Andy pulls away, Nate still caught up in the moment shouting out, “I love you.”

      After a pause, Andy attempts to resolve the situation by adding “…You mean like a brother.”

      At first Nate, stunned by the shifting of the situation is speechless, but when Andy repeats the words, agrees, yes, “I love you like a brother.”

      And so ends the event except the quietude of both boys on the trip back home. Obviously something has happened that Andy cannot quite forgive and Nate cannot forget.

      The next day at school Andy stands in the hall with a couple of his athletic mates talking when Nate suddenly sees them and comes directly up to Andy, asking how he is. The boys glance away, obviously wondering how Andy even knows the dork, and Andy greets Nate coldly. When Nate turns away to leave, one them can be heard saying “He’s a little faggot,” Andy responding, “I’ll set you up man.”

         Nate turns back to confront these bullies, asking the one, “Do you want a date?” There is a moment of silence until Andy’s friend says, “Fuck off you little faggot.”

         Nate argues the way all gay boys have attempted to explain themselves since such school ground battles first came into existence, “I’m not a fag, tell them Andy, you know!” evidently presuming his “brother” will now defend him.

         “Tell them what?” replies the coward.

         Andy’s friend turns to him incredulous, “What do you know?”

        Andy’s reply is the ultimate in denial: “I dunno, he’s just some stupid neighbor kid.” He even stands further against his “brother,” commanding Nate to go home.

       Surprisingly Nate, enraged by the situation, calls Andy “the faggot” beginning to repeat the litany of “Greg’s pecs” and “Russ’s cock,” etc. The result is that Andy begins to beat him, and even when Nate’s down on the ground continues to kick him, harder and harder as if possessed, until the two other boys attempt several times to pull him off.

       Blood running from his mouth, Nate mutters “I hate you,” Andy suddenly totally broken by what he has just done, hitting his own fists upon the metal lockers, as Nate continues, “I hate you.”

       So Steele’s movie ends, with utterly no resolution and little hope that any reconciliation can take place. It appears Nate has lost a “brother,” a friend, and a father all within a few days. But what do the two have to do with the other we have to ask? We might feel more sympathetic with Nate given the terrible realities he now must face alone. But we certainly didn’t need yet another tragedy in is life to feel that. And we don’t know Nate well enough as a character to even imagine what his reaction to these terrible hurts will now be.

       This film leaves us only with the pain of denial and feelings on the part of both boys of self-hate. And, of course, we might add Andy’s own denials not only of Nate but of his own possible sexual feelings to which we won’t admit to himself.

        Dozens of films previous to this have made it clear that behind bullying often is the peer pressure to confirm to homophobia. But where does this film, having made that fact evident yet again, want to take us? Apparently, there’s nowhere else to go when you’ve reached hate.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).