Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Claude Chabrol | Les Cousins (The Cousins) / 1959

kissing cousins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Gégauff (screenplay, based on a story by Claude Chabrol), Claude Chabrol (director) Les Cousins (The Cousins) / 1959

 

Often described as being related to director Claude Chabrol’s first film, The Beau Serge, his 1959 feature The Cousins brings the country cousin, Charles (actor/director Gérard Blain) to the city and into the apartment of his decadent cousin, Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), who, with his thinly-trimmed beard, is even made up to look a bit like the devil he is.

       It is not merely that Paul’s hip apartment—filled with African masks, antique guns, and marine-related paintings, and at the center of which is a large, open hearth—is a location of nightly heavy drinking and sexual orgies, which in 1959 may have seemed particularly “morbid,” as The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther described them, but that Paul himself, apparently into sadomasochism, likes to put on Wagner and wear a Nazi gestapo hat, torturing both women and men with whom he is in love.


     His nasty friends, Clovis (Claude Cerval)—an ironic name, surely, given that King Clovis was the founder of France—and an Italian count (Carrado Guarducci) join him and his women friends in his nightly carousals. One of his favorite Wagner works is “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

     The handsome “mamma’s” boy, Charles, has little chance in such a debauched world, although he attempts to study day and night for his law exams and regularly writes long epistles home. But a single kiss by the woman these celebrants describe as “the slut,” since she has evidently slept with all of them, sends him into a spin, as he immediately falls in love with the girl, Florence (Juliette Mayniel).


      Clovis is particularly furious that Florence seems to be pretending something she is not and arranges for her to be found in Paul’s bed when Charles returns from his college classes—classes which, it’s evident, Paul never attends. 


      Charles’ discovery of the sexual “betrayal” sends him into an even deeper loop as he now finds it even more difficult to concentrate. But it is clear that something else here is going on in their relationship. As any psychoanalyst might explain, the sharing of a sexual partner can easily be perceived as an urge to share the other’s bed. Moreover, the Wagner record Paul also loves to play is Arturo Toscanini’s version of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, which suggests a far deeper “love-urge” going on in Charles’ internal thinking, an unrequited relationship with his attractive cousin himself; the sexual betrayal involving Florence is just the surface of an intensely more complex homoerotic relationship that neither Paul, Charles, nor the director dare too deeply explore.

     When Paul easily passes the law exams without doing any studying, and the hard-working Charles fails them, their unspoken love triggers a death-wish as deep as the two lovers in Wagner’s opera suffer. And it is only through death that their love can be consummated.

      Taking up one of Paul’s wall-hung handguns (can there be a better example of male-male expression?), Charles puts a single bullet into it, determining, in a kind of reverse Russian roulette, to let chance make the decision of whether or not his beloved cousin lives. As in everything else, Paul, it seems, is lucky, and survives. He appears to be indomitable.

      But the next morning, after hearing of his cousin’s “failure,”—the subject is his law exams but the subtext is Charles’ failure of being able to actually destroy his cousin—and attempting to reiterate their nonexistent comradery (apparently without even recognizing that Charles does share in his heterosexual revels—although we might ask whether they were, in fact, “celebrations,” but rather tortures of the opposite sex), and with Tristan and Isolde once again booming out from his record player, Paul picks up the pistol where Charles left it and, as yet another “prank,” releases the trigger while Charles stares back in horror.


      Chabrol does not even let us hear the gunshot; we see only a small puff of smoke. And Charles, at first, seems not even to have felt the bullet’s entry into his body as he stands a few seconds in utter disbelief before slowly falling to the floor (a kind of death that Fassbinder will later brilliantly exaggerate in his The American Soldier).

      Paul, obviously shocked by the turn of events, goes to his cousin to momentary stroke his forehead—with a wonderful visual mix of hands, feet, and heads—before retreating, as the doorbell rings, forcing him to face his tragic future.

      His fate was determined, we now recognize, from the moment he invited his loving cousin into his life.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2016).

 

 

Pedro Almodóvar | Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) / 2009

without blood

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) / 2009

 

For several years now I have followed the films of Pedro Almodóvar with great interest and, most often, enjoyment but I've also been a bit dismayed, particularly with his last few films, with Almodóvar's subtle shifts to a more and more self-conscious and highly referential film-making that detracts from the raw, sexual, and farcical energy of his earlier works. This director still makes beautiful, watchable, and even engaging films, but their conscious attentiveness to the art of the film—something I admittedly sought out in some of his first movies—has somewhat drained the passion from his work.

     Harry Caine (a name that calls up a series of Hollywood films from The Third Man, with its Harry Lime, creeping up into The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on a James M. Cain novel) is a writer and ex-filmmaker, now blind, who works on scripts with the help of his handsome young assistant, Diego (Tamar Novas). Caine (original name Mateo Blanco, played by Lluis Homar) establishes from the very first scene, where he quickly beds a young woman who helped him find his way home from the streets, that he is obviously still a kind of lecherous lover, reiterated by the arrival of his agent Judit Garcia (Blanca Portillo), who oversees the young woman's departure with silent disdain. She has a new offer for him to write a script.


     Diego and Caine, meanwhile toss out an idea of a new screenplay that Diego has imagined, a story about vampires who work in a blood bank, stealing the blood their customers provide without actually having to themselves embrace them for the necessary bite. Inevitably one vampire falls in love with one of the givers, and must resist the temptation to take the bloodletting to a new level. As the two joyfully toy with the story's erotic possibilities, we already suspect that the film ahead, although having nothing to do with Dona Sangre (Giving Blood)—will be more about temptation and resistance than all-out commitment.

    Enter the mysterious Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano), another man who has determined to become someone else, who wants to do a film with Harry. Harry turns him down; but when the stranger leaves Harry asks Diego to open a drawer and leaf through a series of photographs to see if the visitor appears in any of them. Ray, so we soon discover, is the gay son of the wealthy industrialist Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) who has died, so the papers announce, that very day.

     Bit by bit the story is revealed of how Caine (then Blanco), backed by Martel, once directed a film "Girls and Suitcases" (a work that calls up Almodóvar's own 1988 film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown)—a shift for Blanco from serious drama to farce. Searching for the correct actor for the starring role, Blanco-Caine finally decides on Martel's own mistress, who tired of being only a pampered lover, desires an acting career. Her photo-session, where Blanco dresses the mistress Lena (Penélope Cruz) alternatively as Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, convinces him she is the right woman for his film, and, in the process, of course, he falls in love.


     Martel, suspecting their affair, encourages his son to shoot a "filming-of-the-film" documentary, the sessions of which he reviews each night playing them over and over, while, with the help of a lip-reader, interpreting their secret communications. The gay son, the perverse use of film, the vengefully determined scorned lover all remind sophisticated filmgoers immediately of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. The rest of the story, as Diego and Harry attempt to restore the earlier film and Judit and he reveal the full history of that film and Caine/Blanco's love affair with Lena, takes us down the road of a Douglas Sirk-like tearjerker employing, along the way, several Hitchcockian tropes as well as reminding us of Almodóvar's own All About My Mother. The tale ends, as one might suspect, with a series of startling events, including a purposeful accident (the car that hits the couple was driven by Martel's gay son) which kills Lena and blinds Blanco. A final admission by Judit, presumably hidden from Harry, is that Diego is his and her son.

    Despite all of these highly emotional revelations, however, there is little real feeling evoked. The embraces, after all, have all been "broken" or were about to be, given Caine/Blanco's driven omnivorous sexuality. In his new identity Harry hides most of his past, even from himself. He lives, after all, primarily through his creations. And that is, it appears, Almodóvar's point: if this is a tale of passion, it is, as in Diego's and Harry's imaginary script, "bloodless."

     While I truly enjoyed Almodóvar's concoction, his emphasis on his cinematic influences and his own film history ultimately break the embrace of the audience and director necessary to sweep us up into an ecstatic movie experience. As sensual as his characters and sets seem, they remain only celluloid and light, shadows.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2010

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2010) and Reading Fictions: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

Kevin Rios | Made of Sugar / 2016

garden of eden

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kevin Rios (screenplay and director) Made of Sugar / 2016 [6 minutes]

 

This short film made by USA immigrant from Cuba, begins with home film documentation from the director’s own family movies, backed up with a narrative voice that declares “No one willingly left my country…Because the island was marvelous, a truly blessed land. It was gorgeous, bright, it was like the Garden of Eden!”


    The cut-out animated images, however, tell a slightly different story, as the butterflies and other insects, who evidently love sugar, eat away portions of the “Mom and Pop” story. We hear new reports of changes in US relationships with Cuba, and the fact that Cuban cigars will again be allowed to be imported.

      And then, a far different kind of telephone message: “Hi baby,” obviously a mother calling her son now in New York City. And almost immediately we see him and his friends, and the word Friday laid out on a table made up of cocaine, quickly snuffed up by the partyers, the other days following one by one.


     The mother’s voice claims to know why he’s not calling: he has a girlfriend. We see Tuesday also spelled out in cocaine that disappears up the nose just as quickly. The son, we observe, is engaged in modern dance movements. And another figure of this film, puts lipstick upon his lips. Clearly things are very different in New York from wherever the mother is calling from, the Cuban community in Miami we presume. “It’s hard,” she concludes, but I know I have to let you live your life.”

       In a series of quick frames, we see actors Victor Borbolla, Stephen Chacon, Andrew Herbert, and others, kiss, engage in a drag show, and snort more cocaine.


       The final scene consists of a long telephone call, the central figure’s call-back to his mother, on an answering machine, where he explains that he’s taken several dance classes and he’s now working a real dancing jobs, while insisting that it hasn’t had any effect on his other classes or his graduating on time. As she works in her garden, puts clothes on the line, etc., with hear his further comments that he’s met a lot of nice people who accept him for who he is.

      No, he doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he has met someone he thinks she might very much like. He hopes she’s no longer smoking (we see an ashtray filled with butts), and he states emphatically that he misses her and the dogs, and can’t wait to see her.

      The clever emblems of family and life, meanwhile, get crunched up by consumer insects, but blossom again into flowers and other representations of family, sharing, and life.


     Both mother and son know there is no real way they can return to the same world they once shared, but still hold one another in deep love, affection, and respect. But the ravines between them are larger perhaps than the Appalachian Mountain Range that runs from North to South from Newfoundland, Canada to Alabama, separating the far eastern cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. from the cities on the western edge of the range such as Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Nashville, far longer that the few nautical miles from Miami to Cuba.

     The son with whom this Cuban-born mother will eventually share a reunion is now fully a gay     American—whatever that possibly means these days.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (August 2024).

 



Mario Prizek | South / 1959 [TV drama]

hurling oneself against a stone wall

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gerald Savory (TV adaptation, based on the play Sud by Julien Green), Mario Prizek (director) South / 1959 [in the British television series “Play of the Week”]

 

On November 24, 1959 British LGBTQ history was made with the TV broadcast of the first known gay drama in England. Based on French gay author Julien’s Green’s play Sud—which producers had hoped to present as a theatrical production in 1955 until was banned by the Lord Chamberlain—openly gay director Mario Prizek cast the closeted gay actor Peter Wyngarde in the lead role in what was to become a milestone of gay history.

      The tape of the production was long thought to have lost, rediscovered in 2013 by curators at the British Film Institute, shocking most commentators who had not even remembered its existence, believing that the first representation of a gay man on film and TV was Dirk Bogarde’s character in Basil Dearden’s The Victim (1961).

 

    Green’s play presents a rather hothouse environment of the days in the South of the United States leading up to the Civil War not unlike something Tennessee Williams might have created, but with a far less poetic language. Nonetheless, Green is able to create a more complex view of Southern sympathies and diversity of behavior than most US films have been able to.

     Plantation owner Edward Broderick (Alan Gifford) has already freed several of his slaves, some of whom have returned of their own accord, and moreover he is currently housing a young Union soldier stationed at Fort Sumter in North Carolina, Jan Wicziewsky (Peter Wyngarde) who he treats like a son, although their actual relationship remains vague having something to do with the young Jan’s father, a Polish man killed presumably during what sounds like a Jewish pogrom. All of it remains vague, however, and it is clear that Broderick would like the young man to stay on at the plantation in a role that resembles that of an older son to Broderick’s far younger boy, Jimmy (Karl Lanchbury).

     The plantation also houses another Northerner, Regina (Helena Hughes) who is evidently related by one of her parents to the Brodericks, and has come to live with them after their death. She is clearly not happy in the South and threatens throughout the play to leave and return North, which Broderick is perfectly happy to allow her to do. Yet we gradually discover she is actually in love with Jan, the two of them left alone on a Sunday morning as the two, Jan and Regina, of the non-churchgoing kind, remain behind.

     In this first scene, and actually throughout the rest of the play, the two play a kind of brutal game of trying to have a conversation without ever saying what’s on their minds. The far better player, Jan keeps trying to corner Miss Regina into telling him the truth about her love for him, but which she continues to resist knowing that he will not—and more important cannot reciprocate. Moreover, their quibbling often forces him to speak in a metaphorical language that no one else on the plantation, and perhaps few other normal men in the community, speak, further adding to her frustrations. His is a logic-ridden language without the proper niceties and a different kind of concealments of most of the other Southerners in this work.

     Outwardly, they talk about the inevitability or impossibility of Civil War, of her determination to return to the North, his intent to simply follow his orders even if it means joining in a battle against Broderick and others like him. In the gaps of those words are insinuations and revelations that soon after lead Regina to publicly announce her detestation of Jan and that he is an evil man of which the household should be wary.

     While the others are at church, we also witness an older black man on the plantation, Uncle John (John Harrison) now blind requesting a young boy (Randolph McKenzie) guide him to Mr. Broderick to warn him of imminent danger of he has heard directly from God which will destroy his house.


      Interrupting Regina’s and Jan’s conversation is the return of what might be described as the truly Southern contingent of the Broderick household, Broderick’s sister who rules the household like a Southern mistress who spends most of her day resting and changing outfits for evening affair, her flighty young daughter Angelina (Karal Gardner), and the young Jimmy.

     Jan appears to be the one to whom all the elders confide their secrets and to whom the younger generation keep their secrets from. For the sister, asking him to rock her in her chair, reveals that for the evening dinner she has invited a young man, Eric MacLure (Graydon Gould) with whom she would like to link up either Regina or the young Angelina.

     The two girls, meanwhile discuss the men, Angelina making up a false tale of receiving a love letter from Eric. Regina warns her against the evil Jan, probing yet again why Broderick is so very fond of him, before she finally admits that despite what she sees as his disdain of her, she is secretly in love with him—clearly the reason why her emotional responses to him shift 180 degrees in a manner of a few seconds.

      In the meantime, Jimmy slaps an elderly black man in the stable who delays in setting up his saddle, an act when he is forced to confess, terribly angers his father who assigns the job of punishing the boy to Jan, who is perhaps the boy’s best friend and, as Regina warns, should never be trusted with their son alone.

      By this time, given Regina’s constantly shifting behavior regarding Jan, the gossip of some of the servants, and the very oddness of his own comments we sense that there something about him—as well as Regina and perhaps even Edward Broderick’s relationship to him—that we are not being told. But then no one actually “tells” anyone the truth about anything in this drama.

      The women insist war will not possibly be permitted while the men, amongst themselves, fear its inevitability, keeping their feelings from the female sex. The men all seem to have a rather benevolent attitude toward their slaves while the women attempt to keep them in the place, Broderick’s sister warning one of them of daring to run away now that war may be imminent. The black kitchen servant is convinced that she is really so light-colored that she might pass for white.

       It is not Faulkner’s wisteria that wafts through these rooms but what Tennessee Williams’ Big Daddy (of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) describes as the “powerful odour of mendacity.”


     Jan’s self-delusions immediately come to an when the evening’s special guest Eric MacClure arrives, suddenly coming face to face with Jan on the plantation porch. It is as if Jan has been struck by lightning, the young man reminding him of someone he knows, perhaps a fellow soldier he has met at a military dance (hinting that perhaps Jan has had previous gay experiences). When Eric immediately denies it, Jan comes to but still behaves most strangely, obviously struck full in the heart by the pernicious arrow of cupid.

     From that moment on, Jan is in a world of his own, behaving like a ghost at a table of women, some of whom talk about the possibility of war with the greatest of delight, others terrified by even its mention. We discover that Eric has long ago freed all of his slaves, does not believe in the institution, and has reasonable views in this household of extremists.

       Some of the guests wonder if Jan’s silence and incommunicability is to do the fact that he has just been ordered to return to his post, but he assures them the war and his position in it has absolutely nothing to do with his behavior. After dinner, alone with him for a moment, Broderick tries to get his would-be son to talk, even suggesting that perhaps he too has had some experience with such feelings and might, accordingly, be able to advise him. And we begin to wonder whether one of the reasons Broderick keeps Jan so near perhaps has something to do with his own love for the young man.

       Jan, however, refuses to speak about it, instead asking for Angelina’s hand in marriage, which Broderick immediately denies him, telling him to his face that it will not solve the problem he is facing, and leading to what will perhaps be the last words between the two men who so much admired one another.

       Jan speaks of hurling himself upon the source of the problem who will not even recognize itself as being the cause of his emotional distress. But a moment later he rushes into Regina’s room and begs her forgiveness, praying she might take his hand to convey that she forgives him for his continued abuse. But she proudly denies him.


     Almost perversely, Jan confesses most openly to his friend Jimmy while telling him his nightly bedtime story. "You know, Jimmy, odd times, freedom of will is a crushing weight and it's not always possible to choose. I'm in love Jimmy, as no human being was ever in love before," he says to the bewildered boy. When asked by the boy what he’s going to do, he suggests, “I going to hold myself against fate as you hurl yourself against a stone wall,” adding when the boy confesses his confusion, "It's better not to know what men are thinking, it's almost always sad or shameful. I'm not ashamed, but I am alone. Hopelessly alone."

       Although Jan has begged Broderick not to let him and Eric be alone together, he now faces Eric in an empty drawing room from which the others have all escaped. Jan attempts to tell him of his “problem,” about his love for someone to whom he dare not speak it, and Eric in a wave a youthful empathy seems to finally appreciate Jan, responding that he too knows what that feels like since he also has failed to tell another whom he loves because of current “situation.”

       For a moment, in a brilliant Shakespearian aside, Jan expresses a desire to himself that he might be able to stop the conversation there, imagining at least that the “love” of whom Eric is speaking might be himself. But, of course, Eric, a blind young man disturbed only because he has been unable to tell Angelina that he loves her, must express the truth—he in his utterly awful innocence being the only real truthteller in this world—leaving Jan in a rage for his imagining a youthful failure to express a love that is probably equally felt by the other, can possibly have anything to do with his own desperate impossibilities.


       Going to him, he grabs him by the head and holds him to look into the mirror, an action witnessed by Broderick returning to the room, who demands to know what is going on. Jan reports that he is insulting the guest in his presence, that he is calling him a coward and slaps him across his check, the shocked young man having no choice but to admit that he has indeed been inexplicably attacked. Jan tosses out a handkerchief and the young romantic has no other idea of what to do but accept the challenge.

       Broderick refuses to be involved, and will not stand as a second for Jan, as Jan calls for another, the two preparing for a duel.

     Suddenly, like it was a sports event, Broderick’s sister becomes absolutely delighted by the situation, calling for the slaves to bring out water and unguents for whoever might be hurt, and almost giggling with delight at the situation. Angelina is horrified, fearful that Eric might be hurt, while Regina races to the spot in the woods they have chosen for the duel in an attempt to stop it.

      Standing near, Broderick once more attempts to force the young men to stop the nonsense which he perceives Jan has created for no logical purpose but perhaps his own death.

      And indeed, before Regina can reach the spot, Eric has stabbed his opponent as Jan almost runs into the sword before falling to the ground dead. He has chosen to die from his lover’s own hand.

     As Eric attempts to explain that it looked like Jan almost opened himself to his thrust, Broderick interrupts him to shame him for trying to justify murder. And we realize in his sentiments that he well understands what Jan has done to resolve the problem of his love that cannot be spoken, that he has literally died for love.

      Regina, arriving, not only forgives Jan for being unable to tell her what she already knew, but to hold him in her arms with the love she feels for him nonetheless.

       In short, both Regina and Broderick have indeed known of Jan’s sufferings, of his homosexuality and his inability with the confines of their own society to speak of it.

      One can argue, of course, that this televised film is simply another work in a long line of gay-oriented dramas in which the queer must die. But Green explains to us that in such a mendacious world there is no other possibility. Even the truthtellers in such a world cannot recognize the full truth.

    And course some of the critics of day chose to continue lying to themselves, describing homosexuality as a terrible sickness that needed to be expunged from the world: The 1959 reporter of the Daily Sketch was typical of this response:

 

"I do NOT see anything attractive in the agonies and ecstasies of a pervert, especially in close-up in my sitting room. This is not prudishness. There are some indecencies in life that are best left covered up."

 

     On the other hand, the review from The Stage, argued that "Green's dialogue was so full of compassion, understanding and tenderness that his subject didn't seem distasteful, and Mario Prizek, a new Canadian director, toned down his production so much that it kept perfect pace with the script.” He goes on to note, “Peter Wyngarde as Jan, the man who couldn’t talk of his life like other men, gave a stunningly brilliant performance, controlled and delicately pitched.” As numerous critics have pointed out, Wyngarde was brave indeed to have performed this role with such honest intensity, particularly given what we now know, that he was in was in a long-term relationship with actor Alan Bates, which might have outed then both and perhaps even led to their arrestment.

      Mark Brown, writing in The Guardian, adds: “None of that was known at the time, with Wyngarde going on to be a star and housewives' favorite from 1969 as Jason King, an agent in the secretive Department S. With his handlebar moustache, enormous hair and largely unbuttoned shirt, King was the ultimate ladies' man and was one of the inspirations for Mike Myers's Austin Powers nearly 30 years later.”

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

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 ...