Saturday, August 24, 2024

Amanda Kramer | Please Baby Please / 2022

anybody can desire change

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amanda Kramer and Noel David Taylor (screenplay), Amanda Kramer (director) Please Baby Please / 2022

 

As the Wikipedia entry for writer/director Amanda Kramer’s crazy and joyous romp through issues of gender in her semi-musical Please Baby Please reveals, to play along with the film’s sometimes poetic aphorisms: “sometimes plot is not where you want to go, sucking you into its pure rot of the flow of a tale you might not really want to fully follow or finally know.” I have now seen this 95-minute spectacle two times, and even then I could not comprehend what that Wiki encyclopedic entry was really talking about. Forget it, join me in a quick walk-through of this play on queer identity row.


   Of course, there is a story. Even abstract films have a story to tell. But here, it hardly matters. Much like Brad Majors and Janet Weiss in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, newlyweds Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling) happen upon a campy 2022 version of a 1950s greaser gang whose brutal murder of a seemingly innocent couple which they are forced to witness, absolutely startles them. Their mouths drop open in wonderment. As the gang finally turns their eyes upon this other set of innocents, there is something so engaging and compelling about them that they let them go, demanding only the information of the number of the apartment in which this soon-to-be-transformed bohemian couple live, 2B, to where they are allowed to return, living out their lives of normalcy—well given Hamlet’s own self-doubts, maybe not for long.

     At a gathering of their friends, the couple express their new-found beliefs after having gone through the shocking experience. As Tara Brady, writing in the Irish Times summarizes it:

 

“From the get-go, newlyweds Suze (Riseborough) and Arthur (Melling) are struggling with his passivity (“I will not be terrorised into acting like a savage just because I was born male”) and his attraction to Teddy, the psychopathic head of local hoodlums the Young Gents. Suze responds with equal and opposite nonconformity, morphing slowly into a dangerous, unpredictable bad girl, liable to growl and start fights in bars. Various ne’er-do-wells exchange thoughts on gender and witticisms….”


    In fact, these witticisms are at the heart of this movie. I’ll share only a few, which out of context lose their punch, most of them expressed by a suddenly snarling Suze who has evidently discovered her inner Alla Nazimova through which to express her deepest dominant female, somewhat lesbian longings and newly discovered aphorisms:

 

“We are the fantasy. We like to get off. We don’t like to mince or whimper or hop around. I sure want a more important job than making Arthur happy.”

 

    Her friend Ida (Alisa Torres), also transformed by her friend, flashes back: “Your importance to Arthur has far more to do with how much you can hurt him than how happy you can make him.”

    “What is our marriage then, a strange sort of friendship that started out with a few sexual privileges?” Suze retorts. “Yeah. That’s marriage.”

    For his part, after encountering the pretty boy head of the Young Gents, Arthur, seems to have found a new attitude with regard to his expected male authority: “I am a man. But I don’t feel to need to need to act male. It’s hard to believe I was even born male. I’ve never been enough of a genuine man to suggest I am one so maybe I’m not one. Boy, what a kick!”

     When their friends, Ida, Baker, and Les leave, a strange mesmerizing dance occurs between the couple wherein, taking up a bottle of wine to use as a penis, Suze becomes a man to her prostrating man, now on the floor. Roles are clearly been switched.

    As Arthur takes the trash out he finds a blood-stained matchbook from The Blue Angel Club, a gang gay bar, to which Arthur now marches off, obviously obsessed by the gang leader Teddy.


    Suze meanwhile encounters an apartment house neighbor who she’s never before met, Maureen (a fabulous Demi Moore), asking for help with her grocery bags, and, as Irish Times critic Baker rightfully rhapsodizes, is dress in a leopard print, “rasping, ‘These are the slums, and I’m a slum starlet,’ [who] seems to have wandered in from John Waters’s enduring Pink Flamingos.” When Suze describes her experience with the Young Gents, Maureen herself takes ups her own lament on the nature on men, only to be interrupted by her lover Billy (an early glimmering of the endless talents of Cole Escola) who can’t find the apartment keys Maureen hides in various spots around the entrance. Finally realizing that she herself has the only keys left, and that she is about to leave for Europe, Maureen hands over the treasures to Suze to watch her apartment in her absence.

     At the Blue Angel Club, meanwhile, Arthur cruises the floor, staring longingly at Teddy, as the gang leader flirts with the leather-boy bartender. The new boy Arthur daringly follows Teddy into the bathroom where Teddy and the bartender have escaped, obviously for a sexual rendezvous.


     Their encounter does not at all end up with the sexual engagement one might have expected, Arthur being still far too “uptight” to allow that Teddy’s murders and his plans for yet another “big fight” are permissible. But it’s clear as Teddy merely smiles before grabbing Arthur’s chin that there is another meeting in store between the two of them.

      Alone in Maureen’s apartment, Suze now has a musical fantasy about the Young Gents who, while she dressed in underwear while they appear in fetish gear, she challenges them to do whatever it is they might do.

      But she and Arthur are, after all, only bohemians, not Jets or Sharks out of some West Side Story fantasy concoction, let alone confused transsexual “anybody’s, and both are moved by Les’ (Yedoye Travis) poetry, read with Baker (Marquis Rodriguez) accompanying him on drums. One of the audience members, Dickie (Ryan Simpkins) is also highly affected by the insipid beat poetry, while Joanne (Jaz Sinclair) openly howls in laughter. An argument regarding their various forms of behavior soon interrupts the reading, upon which Les asks them both to leave, while Baker, given Suze’s previous description, recognizes Dickie as the lesbian member of the Young Gents gang. While Suze hurls bottles at Dickie, Arthur turns away unable to look the Young Gents in the face after having established such a close relationship with Teddy. The gang, apparently, has already entered Suze and Arthur’s own beatnik turf.

      After the reading, Suze and Ida walk down their “dangerous” neighborhood streets, Ida muttering on about the nature of women, marriage, and female friendship, while Suze fantasizes what she might do if she were a man. There, in one of the most resplendent moments of this film, they encounter Billy, in full drag, crying into a payphone while stuffed into the brightly-lit booth he begs his lover to let him come back. Suze is emotionally moved.


   As the Young Gents becomes more and more aggressive to the couple in 2B, Arthur and Suze discuss the changes in each of them, trying to analyze their own love and wondering if they are still truly “in love.” As his own clarinet is tossed through their bedroom window by the noisy gang members below, Arthur can assure her only that his love is only “for now.”

     But even their “moment” has disappeared when, as Arthur goes to close the door, a stranger opens a nearby closet to reveal Teddy, severely bloodied and beaten, who now hangs on to Arthur to beg him to allow the Young Gents to hide out in his and Suze’s apartment.

     The rest of the movie, in fact, turns into a kind of fantasy world wherein both Arthur and Suze move off toward their increasingly “other” realities which they realize they’ve long desired, consisting of various “altercations” as they seek out their new identities.

      Once more in the Blue Angel Club where Suze sits with Arthur, he attracts a male’s attention, in this case Billy’s, who flirts with Arthur, describing a theory of life which, he insists, he’ll share with Arthur “some blue night.” Suze insists that he share it “now,” apparently terrified by any “blue night” in the future, Billy merely smirking in mockery, declaring that they both are acting “queer,” leaving Suze in a furious rage as she screams, flips over the table, and grabs Arthur’s hand to pull him away from the evil den of sexual depravity.

     Yet when they soon after come upon the Young Gents, busy stripping Joanne’s father’s car, they are involved with yet another murderous incident. Joanne, playing a kind of ghost version of “Truth or Dare,” challenges the gang members to a contest where they will reveal their most vulnerable feelings. Teddy quickly volunteers, a bit like Arthur expressing his resentment of the pressures of being compared to other men. Joanne is moved by his revelation, but as she expresses her feelings, the gang member Lon (Jake Choi) puts a knife into her neck, killing her. Arthur screams in horror, Teddy coming to his rescue, warning him that the Young Gents are now targeting them, and that he is now no longer permitted to return the keys to their apartment.

     The forceful Suze immediately agrees to trade their owns keys for Maureen’s, arguing they that can steal her stuff instead. Affectionately responding to Arthur, he promises he will try to make a deal.

     In several further “fantasies,” and imaginary encounters, Suze finally gets to hear Billy’s “theory of life,” that all humans are living on a dying planet “full of impossible obstacles,” without quite realizing that she herself has become one of the greatest obstacles, at least as far as Arthur is concerned, and perhaps working against her own better welfare.

     In yet another imaginary playing out of usurped male empowerment, Teddy and the lesbian Dickie kiss and stroke Suze as the other Young Gents dance around her, she shouting out the film’s title, “Please, baby, please,” while accepting the pain of her own iron as they brand her ass.



   Having stolen a theatre ticket stub from Teddy’s leather jacket pocket, Suze heads out for a performance in what turns out to be a gay porn theater, as she enters the dreamland world where she is asked if Teddy is her husband, while she laments that she has no way to satisfy him.

     But once more, even in such fantasies, Suze learns nothing through the information they convey, seeking even now a traditional moral compass of normalcy as she encounters a cop at the back of the theater, about to bust the place which he describes if filled with “criminal queers.” Telling here to leave, she does.

     Arthur’s own fantasy, perhaps, is that while looking for Suze he runs instead into Teddy, who asks him if he ever has desired before to “lose control” and if he’s ever even thought about other men before him. Arthur admits he has, and Teddy hints that he could become his “favorite.” As they embrace, however, a wedding party exits their celebratory hall, the groom banging into Arthur, the macho married man expressing condescending remarks about Arthur with Teddy, who promptly beats him up, as Arthur watches, both frightened and sexually aroused.

     But clearly the two cannot continue to leave in both worlds. As the two entertain, once more, their friends Ida, Baker, and Les, with Suze dancing as a figure of bohemian allurement, the Young Gents break in, holding all of them hostage. The former outsider Gene goes off to rob Maureen’s apartment, insisting that Teddy, Dickie, and Lon watch the hostages. When Lon mocks Arthur for marrying Suze, the woman who has long been seeking to use her male powers, stabs him to death, demanding like one of the furies that her friends immediately leave, while reminding the edgy Dickie that it was Lon who killed Joanne, and that it’s only fair justice.

     Dickie brings the real back into the film by punching her in the eye.

     Teddy runs off, declaring that he will soon return to take care of Lon’s body.


    When Suze goes to Maureen's apartment she finds the remaining Young Gents, as well as Billy and Maureen's husband all dead with Maureen is stroking her husband’s head. Suze, her fingers still covered in blood, puts up a blood-soaked cigarette to her mouth, Maureen remarking that she's now "nobody's wife,”

     Queerly, so it first appears, normalcy has won the day, as much later Arthur conducts an orchestra while images of Suze and Teddy appear upon a split screen. On one side, Suze, now sporting a sort haircut (with still her black eye from presumably her encounter with Dickie—or perhaps not), dresses up in something approximating Teddy’s leathers. On the other side, as in many an MGM musical, Arthur dances his way home, jumping literally across the sides of the building’s roof in his joyful hoofing his way back to happiness.

 


    The screen opens up, however, as he enters his flat, where we see Teddy waiting, whom Arthur now fully engages in a series of deep kisses, the drag version of Teddy, Suze, hugging his butt as if ready to fuck the man she once called her husband. Evidently they have all found their place in the 50s society just in time to enter the 1960s newfound sexual liberations.

     Even in 2022, some critics still couldn’t get it, the fact that feminist aspirations and gay self-acceptance worked utterly hand-in-hand, although I will say they are quite strangely represented in this film given that the solution, evidently, is becoming a butch dyke—a choice certainly Betty Freidan, who by the mid-1960s had purged lesbians from the feminist movement in her role as leader of the National Organization for Women (NOW), would have most certainly have disapproved.  Writing in The Wrap, for example, Lena Wilson makes some interesting points:

 

“At least Arthur’s motivations make sense—it must be destabilizing to be in a heterosexual marriage in the 1950s and suddenly feel homosexual attraction. Suze is more of a puzzler. After seeing the Young Gents murder two civilians, she asks Arthur to be less “precious” with her and tells him she wants to be “beneath” him. Her upstairs neighbor Maureen fascinates her with questions of female empowerment and submission.

     Suze grapples with her role as a wife, unsure how to please her husband in this brave new world. “How do I give it to him the way he wants to get it?” she asks a random butch (Mary Lynn Rajskub) in a movie theater.

     In some ways, it’s a subversive question, as 1950s housewives were hardly encouraged to “give it” to their husbands. But Suze is still focused on how best to be a pleasing wife. While Arthur has a rendezvous with his leather-clad love, Suze remains steadfast in her marriage. If her new love of leather is meant to signify some latent lesbianism—the theatergoer calls her a “butchie”; a gay man calls her a “dyke”—she certainly never walks the walk.”

 

      I presume, however, that after embracing and perhaps even penetrating, with an attachement, her husband’s thin buttocks dressed up in her leather duds, that Suze will move out soon after to new territory where she might find better places in which to “give it” to anyone who might seek out her love. We can only hope her pleas of “Baby, please,” eventually reach the right ears. Actually, Dickie might have been the perfect candidate, presumably the only “Young Gents” other than Teddy who survived their local genocide.

      And the point still has been made. The male coming out was and will be always a holler for the female to move out of the kitchen into the greater world at large, just as the movement of women into the work force and general society was a call out for gay men to leave their closets for the daylight.

 

Los Angeles, August 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Chris Hunt | Oklahoma! [Royal National Theatre, London / 1998, a televised version with a slightly different cast presented on US PBS stations in 2003]

 allegiances

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Hunt (film director), Trevor Nunn (stage director), Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics, based on the play by Lynn Riggs), Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma! [Royal National Theatre, London / 1998, a televised version with a slightly different cast presented on US PBS stations in 2003]

 




















In the few weeks since I wrote about the film Oklahoma! I watched a version of the British 1998 revival on television. That production, a generally fine one—with particularly good performances by Hugh Jackman and Josefina Gabrielle, but with weaker secondary character actors than the movie and what I felt was uninspired choreography by Susan Stroman (the good territory folks were even more gestural and less exuberant in her version)—basically supported my feelings about the dark elements of this fable.

     Even though the Trevor Nunn production attempted to portray Jud in a more balanced manner, and actor Shuler Hensley succeeded (compared to the film portrayal by Rod Steiger) in making Jud more likeable, the dangerous aspects of the culture he represents remained embedded in his behavior. Indeed, in this production it became even more apparent that Laurey had chosen to go with him to the social because he was a farmer, and, accordingly, someone more familiar than the self-assured cowboy Curley. 

     What the film had not revealed to me quite as clearly as the play was that, upon asking Laurey to marry him, Curley “converts,” so to speak, promising to become a farmer. The two warring factions—farmer and cowman—demand alliances, it appears, almost like the family kinships of Romeo and Juliet. And the musical even more pointedly reveals that Aunt Eller and friends are ready to break the law—or at least, as she puts it, “bends it a little”—in order to speed love on its course.

 

Los Angeles, November 2003

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2003).

Akira Kurosawa | Ikiru (To Live) / 1952

the mummy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shinobu Hashimoto, Akira Kurosawa, and Hideo Oguni (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director) Ikiru (To Live) / 1952

 

It may seem strange that on Christmas Eve I sit writing about a film in which the major character, Kanji Watanabi (Takashi Shimura) discovers that he has stomach cancer and is about to die. In fact, the film ends in his death and funeral and much of the movie is concerned with Kanji's learning how to die. It some respects, however, I cannot imagine a more appropriate work to mull over on the holiday, for Kurosawa's moving and brilliantly conceived film is really about a rebirth, about a man who suddenly comes to life.


     As his female assistant, Toyo (Miki Odagiri) tells Kanji later in the film— after admitting that she has created imaginary names for each of her co-workers—she has dubbed her boss, "The Mummy." Through voiceover and brief snippets of past history, the director lets us know that Kanji, who works at a government agency, may have begun his life with the energy and belief of possible change, but after his wife died, gradually let himself fall into the bureaucratic mindset of nearly all the post-World War II governmental agencies of Japan. Partly, in an attempt to support and educate his beloved son, he has allowed himself to become one of the living dead.

     It is only the discovery that he has stomach cancer with a short time to live that suddenly wakes him up and forces him to face his previously empty life. This very subject, obviously, could be played out with lugubrious pathos, allowing the audience immense pity and sorrow. There is certainly, at least for this viewer, plenty of room for tears, but Kurosawa punctuates his fable with humor, which only adds to the poignancy of events. Even the way Kanji discovers his illness shares something with black comedy, as another patient, eager to gossip about doctors, reveals that when a patient has just a short time to live, they will announce that he only has an ulcer, and send him on his way without really declaring his condition. The nasty patient goes on, however, to list the symptoms of stomach cancer, as we observe, one by one, Kanji ticking them off. By the time he enters the doctor's office, to be told precisely what his fellow patient has predicted, Kanji has been able to self-diagnose: one year to live at most.    Falling into despair (he later describes the experience as like the feeling of "being drowned"), Kanji returns home, refusing even to turn on the lights. His son and his wife return, confused to find the house open and no lights on, presuming that the father has forgotten to lock up and is unexpectedly late from the office. Their discussion, that of any young couple, is about the future, particularly her desire to be able to move into a modern house, away from her father-in-law. The son reveals that soon his father will be retiring and they can draw on his pension and the money he has saved. When they discover the father in the house the whole time, obviously overhearing their greedy conversation, the two are a bit chastened, but still resolved.

    So, it becomes clear, after all his sacrifices—years of simple, repetitive existence—he does not even matter, so it appears, to his loved ones. That discovery and Kanji's inability to sleep send him onto a wild night trip that might be described as the Japanese version of Stephen Dedalus' Nighttown journey. If nothing else, it is as breathtaking and hallucinatory as Joyce's fiction.


     Meeting a young novelist (Yûnosuke Itō) in a bar, Kanji tells his story. The sympathetic writer, who recognizes "How tragic that man can never realize how beautiful life is until he is face to face with death," becomes determined to take his new-found friend on an all-night spree through Tokyo.

     The journey includes numerous seedy, red-light neighborhoods, some filled with geisha, others with Western-style prostitutes, and a number of clubs, some obviously gay (Kurasawa’s recognition in 1952 that such bars even existed being the reason why I have included it in this volume), others simple strip-clubs or pick up bars. The dizzying night trip sickens and yet enlivens Kanji, who has been completely unaware of the existence of such an incredible world. At a bar where more traditional Japanese songs are sung, Kanji sings an older song of carpe diem:

 

                              Life is so short

                              Fall in love, dear maiden

                              While your lips are still red

                              And before you are cold.

                              For there will be no tomorrow.

 

One might describe this as the film's theme song, it’s true memento mori.


     The fact that he has not returned to his office, after years of not missing a single day, and that he has returned home with new, white, hat, distresses both his family and employees. One young woman, Toyo, bored with her job, wants to move on to another, but needs Kanji's stamp of approval before she can do so. She seeks him out on the street, determining that she get his stamp of approval, he taking her into his home to sign the documents. Her appearance in the house, and a later friendship between them, convinces Kanji's children that he has, shockingly, taken up with a mistress who is siphoning money from Kanji's account.

     Even that innocent friendship is stolen away from him, as the young girl, unable to explain Kanji's attentions, demands her freedom.

     Slowly, Kanji becomes aware of a group of neighborhood women seeking to have a nearby lot filled with sewage water cleaned up and turned into a children's playground. Kanji's own office, when approached earlier, had shuffled the woman to another office, who, in turn, did the same, each office following the same pattern. Well experienced with the system in which he has worked, Kanji takes on their cause, patiently waiting outside the various government offices through which the plea must pass, cajoling officials, refusing to be sent away.

     The accomplishment of the park might have been a joyful ending to Kurasowa's otherwise bleak work. But here again, the director shifts the tale to another perspective, where we must move beyond Kanji's death. The funeral party for Kanji is attended even by high government figures, who boast of their achievements in creating the local park. But as they leave, the lower officials begin to discuss the strange series of events leading up to Kanji's death and his own advocacy of the park, allowing both the family and the viewers to recognize that it has been Kanji, alone, who is responsible for this now important public facility, that for the first time in years Kanji ceased being passive and forcibly made something come into existence.


     We never know whether the family, son and daughter-in-law and Kanji's brother, truly come to perceive their father and brother's achievement, but we do comprehend the grace in Kanji's end: observed swinging through the night on a children's swing in the new park, Kanji sings, as the snow falls, his song of "seizing the day." In the morning he is discovered frozen to death.

 

Los Angeles, December 24, 2011

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (December 2011). 

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...