Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau | Mila Caos / 2011

anticipation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fabián Suarez and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau (screenplay), Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau (director) Mila Caos / 2011 [18 minutes]

 

17-year-old Cuban teenager Sebastián (Yaniel Castillo) waits for a small jitney to pick him up on weekends, taking him off to an illegal drag show in the suburbs of Havana. There he has transformed from a poverty-stricken high-school boy into a beautiful femme fatale, a favorite of the patrons and his older fellow drag queens.

      It’s a dangerous form of entertainment, with regular police raids, which happens before we can even see his alter ego, Mila Caos’ performance. On the way to the station after their arrestment, accompanied by police in the van, the older drag queens describe their sexual encounters with the cops, proclaiming they are all sissies once they get them into bed. Sebastián’s mother Lucretía (Rebeca Aragón) takes time out of her busy duties to visit the police station in order to retrieve her son.

     The mother is an artist who paints portraits that appear to be a sort of mix between Mexican artist Frieda Kahlo and native Cuban portraiture to sell to the tourists. But even her work is currently out of popularity, and she has to visit street-stands throughout Havana to pick up a few sales. Sebastián keeps asking her to attend one of his drag shows, but she appears to express total indifference, her silence not necessarily a sign of her disapproval but simply of her exhaustion; perhaps she is even ill. When Sebastián demands to know the name of the painting she is working on, of a saucy prostitute friend Chichi (Paula Ali) with a cigar in her mouth, his mother replies “Cancer.”

     And despite her silence, the house seems an open space that allows the beautiful young man to express his own sensibilities, to music on TV and videos and creating new dances to them, to even show off to Chichi his cute body and ass.

 

     But clearly it hurts the boy that his mother never shows up his performances, and long portions of this short film by the Columbian and Cuban immigrant to Germany, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau, are devoted to Mila waiting outside the drag venue to see if her mother might arrive. It’s painful simply to watch such a lovely drag figure in long moments of anticipation for something that will never happen.

      Meanwhile, life goes on. It’s Sebastien’s birthday, and even his wish before blowing out the candles, has to do with his mother. There is no father in sight.

      Once more he begs Lucretía to attend, reminding her that the show starts at 10. But she answers only by repeating that when she arrives home, she is usually exhausted, reminding him that there is food in the oven.

      There is one long scene that demonstrates the problematics of both their lives. As Sebastián waits seemingly forever for someone from the drag venue to pick him up, his mother, having been told her “saints” no longer sell, sits in a Havana street pondering where to go and what to do next to sell her art and support her and her son’s lives. Both are artists of sorts, unable to find the audiences they most need and desire.

    In the dressing room, Mila’s friend Estrellita (Jaime Reyes Nomi) says that she visited her mother, but her mother didn’t recognize her, presumably suggesting that the mother now has Alzheimer’s, not that she was in drag. Mila asks if her mother ever came to watch her perform. Estrellita’s silence answers the question.

      Meanwhile, back in Sebastien’s house, the worn-out mother picks up the cassette, puts it on the player and watches her son perform a song, a smile creeping to her lips—perhaps the first in the film—before her face is taken over by an expression of complete amusement and joy.  

      The film ends with Mila at her usual spot of endless expectation before she turns back to go in for her performance.

  Paetau’s short work is a such a rich and colorful portrait of world of emptiness and desire that it brings tears to your eyes.

 

Los Angeles, May 5, 2023 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Natalia Escobar and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau | Aribada / 2022

the voice of the rustle

by Douglas Messerli

Friederike Hirz (writer), Natalia Escobar and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau (directors) Aribada / 2022 [30 minutes]

 

As Letterboxd commentator Stephen Gillespie has noted, Aribada might be best described as “a mood piece” on indigenous identity. Although it contains large elements of documentary, some concerns of fiction, and many elements of spiritual ceremony and costume design, none of these genres offer us a direct route in which to describe this multilayered work that at moments is utterly compelling as an entry into an indigenous cult and at other moments appears like a westernized aestheticization of the same hermetic group.

 

     Even the general description of this film on IMDb, Mubi, and elsewhere abruptly confuses the senses: “In the middle of the Colombian coffee region, Aribada, the resurrected monster, meets Las Traviesas, a group of indigenous transwomen from the Emberá tribes. The magical, the dreamlike and the performative coexist in their unique world.”

      Who is Aribada, and why has he come to this group of transwomen (that is, women who were assigned male gender at birth but identified as women) from the Emberá tribes? And why do such a large number (the film focuses on six women, Andrea Nembareyama, Bella Wuasorna, Beroniga Tascon, Emilce Aizama, Katy Tuave, and Zamanta Enevia, but the community is quite obviously larger) of these tribal individuals identify as transsexual?

     Even when we are permitted, in one small segment, to listen into a conversation that might enlighten us about this group, as Andrea speaks to an apparently new member of the community, Bella, her comments seem somewhat contradictory: although she makes clear that in their community any dress one chooses is appropriate, and observes that the trans community of Las Traviesas is mocked and often attacked by locals and former tribesmen, she still advises:  “Daughter, do not leave our culture behind, we can still fight for our own identity…we can still fight for our own identity…We can’t leave our culture behind even when wearing flip flops. I don’t mind walking barefoot even if white people gossip bad things about us.” It seems like an extraordinarily conservative piece of advice to give to a young trans girl who loves, as she tells Bella, to wear short dresses and show off her legs.

     Certainly, in Andrea’s comments we come to understand these women’s training in weaving and other tribal arts as being important to their community as not only a way to decoratively costume themselves, as does the shaman, but also to sell their goods to the outside world for the money on which they survive.

      Yet they seem to be financed mostly by the younger members, dressed in everyday female garments hiring out as laborers to pick coffee beans, corn, and other crops, some of which they keep for themselves.

       Las Traviesas also seem to own their own bar at which they entertain and themselves dance.  

     And then there is the ceremonial dance of the shaman who plays out the myth of the dangerous mythical jaguar who, rouses from his sleep through the shaking of the forest trees, and returns to community seeming to both threaten and protect its members, perhaps even entering their spirits. The film begins with just such a series of sudden shaking of trees, which one by one seem to become possessed of their own momentary motion which then dies down leaving another the possibility of tossing its fronds into the air rushing up from beneath. It seems as if the forest itself were alive, not just beings within it, but the trees themselves coming to life one by one before falling back into rest; somewhat poetically speaking: this shaking of each individual tree comes and leaves as if each itself were possessed with its own sense of difference from its sisters and brothers, expressing itself in the voice of its own rustle.

      Finally, we have no way of knowing just how much of the short film by the outsiders Paetau and Escoba is fact or fiction. At times, the directors appear more interested in presenting the shaman and other figures in slowly moving tableaux vivants (very much in the manner of filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov) than in presenting the figures within the context of an actively functioning community.

      Commenting on the directors’ juxtaposition of cinematic approaches, Gillespie suggests that it perhaps conveys the community’s juxtaposed existence, apart from their original tribe in so many ways and yet necessarily working alongside and sometimes within the surrounding society and the traditions of their tribal society. Yet, he continues, “One can analyse it well but the actual text doesn’t sell this as eloquently as it could. It feels associate more than cohesive. A clear case of throwing in every idea and approach.” 

      He admits, however, with which I certainly agree, that the work nonetheless “brims with vitality, expression, creativity and originality. Important voices say important things here, and they won’t flatten them out for a broader audience.”

        Perhaps the solution is just to sit back and let the films narrative (such as it is) and images wash over you before you return to this short (30 minutes) work and re-read it to explain its many open interstices. Even if such a community did not truly exist, it not only should but it must. Unlike the vast stretches of transgender behavior in places like the US between drag queens and trans women working every day within the normative society, there remains a gap for just such communities where trans women might gather together to support and sustain one another through work and ceremony, as in the end of this film bringing light to one another and by extension the world at large.

       Pat Mullen, writing in Point of View magazine, seems to best summarize the attempts of this community to “conjure a new and inclusive community and forge their place by fire,” describing the film as “an entrancing fever dream with touches of magical realism and traces of drag, all of which firmly celebrate the culture that Las Traviesas call their own while creating something refreshingly new.”

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

 

Shane Aaron | Floating Novelties / 2018

it’s that kind of movie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shane Aaron (screenwriter and director) Floating Novelties / 2018 [27 minutes]

 

In order to attempt to restore their relationship—after Miller (Milly) (Jonathan Wilson) has caught his boyfriend Ben (Thayne Caldwell) having sex in their bed with another man—the two boys head out to camp in the woods, only to discover that the space they rented is still inhabited by two girls who suggest they share the space.

     It’s the perfect solution, of course, of which any heteronormative mother and father might approve; when gay marriage fails, send the boys back to bootcamp to toughen them up and throw in some good-looking girls, even if they happen to be lesbians.

 

     The girls, catching on immediately that these are two gay boys, immediately take them on an “awesome” hike where they discover a large flat waterfall and take in the joys of nature, after which the boys go into the nearby town for a shopping trip, you know, glass trinkets, yards of various colored and patterned bolts of batik—a literal representation of the “floating novelties” of the title.

    As such earlier freshman movies such as this one have carefully taught director Shane Aaron, the boys push at one another, splash water into each other’s faces, and sit around a late-night campfire with the girls in order to help bring their relationship back into shape. As Ben admits, during the three years of their relationship “it’s been a journey.”

       Jess (Payton Astin) and Tessa (Ashlyn Talcott), the girls, have regularly been coming to this spot, sent by their parents at an early age to help make Jessie’s life more normal since she’s had cancer since she was 4 years old. And so “normality” creeps in the story once more.

       The next day, they all get dressed up and head to the nearest gelato bar, laughing and socializing like the young adults they supposedly are, except that Ben stands up, and goes over to the boy in which we saw him in bed in the very first scene and gives him a big kiss—oh, sorry, that was Milly’s dream. He’s clearly not over the “situation” and is still pouting when the sun comes up.

      On the way to the lake—a necessary location shot for such teen boy and girl films, unless there’s a closer ocean—Miller admits to Jess that he caught Ben “cheating,” which is why he hasn’t talked to him since they’ve staked their tent. As the two girls and Ben toss each other in and out of the water, Milly stays on shore pondering fonder times, particularly remembering a smaller swimming pool where the two boys first met. But still, back in the tent, Milly can’t accept Ben’s hugs, and goes out for a middle-of-the-night wonder about their camp.

     There he encounters Jess, the cancer survivor smoking and in tears. She’s heard word that she’s had a return of her cancer, three masses which the doctors don’t feel they can treat. And she hasn’t told Tessa, not wanting to ruin the rest of their time together. So obviously she’s now become the one who can properly tell Miller that he has to stop stringing his lover along. “In life you can’t choose what happens, but we can choose how you react. And all these ideas of what the perfect life is is just “floating novelties” up in the air. …You can’t keep waiting idly by wishing for a miracle to happen. …You need to let go,” she concludes, the two hugging, as Miller appears to recognize the actions he now must take.

      This is a perfectly pleasant moment in what is a rather hackneyed and cliché-ridden short movie, and I wish the movie could have ended with that good advice and let us all go home to fuck life up. For as I’ve indicated in several previous reviews, I have little patience with gay boys who maintain all the conventional notions of heterosexual monogamy. Of course, it hurts to think that one might be losing his lover to someone else, but the best solution, I’d argue, is to find out why—if there’s a reason other than the sexual desire momentarily got the best of him—and to get over it quick if you want to keep living with the guy.

      But this pouting boy doesn’t seem to be much better in the morning, and meanwhile Tessa has overheard Jess and Miller’s conversation in the night and is angry that her lover hasn’t told her the truth.

       The boys, at least, finally have a talk, Ben begging for an answer about their relationship, and Miller still insisting he needs more time to work it out. “I made this trip for you,” insists Ben, pointing out that Milly hasn’t even touched him or even looked at him the whole darn time. “Show me how I can fix it!” Miller gets up and runs off, the solution of most conventional cowards.

     And even when Ben goes after him, apologizes, admits he fucked up and that it will never happen again—the words I’d argue that should never have to be spoken in a fully honest gay relationship since anyone with a tinniest bit a sense knows that in any relationship both of the couples continually will “fuck up” despite their best of intentions—Milly still pouts, cries, but, of course, finally puts his head on Ben’s shoulder and admits his love. It’s that kind of movie, sealed with a kiss.

      The two girls also come into frame and kiss just to remind us and themselves how much they too are still in love. And the boys head off to the lake for a dark swim where, once again, they splash water on one another and kiss. The end?

      Sorry, this little well-meaning movie still has one more thing on its hetero-normative little head: in the morning, as the boys pack up to leave, Ben gets down on one knee and proposes marriage to Miller, planting a ring on his finger. It’s that kind of movie.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Jerry Tai | Diffidence / 2010

the broken pencil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Tai (screenwriter and director) Diffidence / 2010 [7 minutes]

 

So diffident was the Canadian writer and filmmaker Jerry Tai with regard to establishing his character and explaining his central figure Darrel’s (Ryan Erwin) motives that it is nearly impossible to write coherently about the movie.

     Apparently Darrel has been long working on a screenplay or some writing assignment and is late in completing the work. The Producer (Aurora Buchanan) is ready to fire him, but a friend, Ryan (Dan Dumsha) to whom they’ve turned to help finish the script has evidently begged for them to keep Darrel on the project.

      The anger and bitterness Darrel displays can be summarized in the only fairly transparent scene of the film when, after Darrel storms out of the meeting, Ryan looks for him, commenting, “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” to which Darrel replies, “Go fuck yourself!” And with cigarette hand, he storms off.

     Evidently, from the repeated image of Darrel attempting to write, the pencil breaking on the paper pad, we glean the fact that it is not merely writer’s block that is preventing him from finishing the project. And when the two do meet up again, from the interwoven frames of the two making love, it appears that Darrel and Ryan were once lovers, the feelings still remaining despite the apparent breakup.

     Beyond that, however, we learn nothing. The film’s basic theme seems to be uttered in Ryan’s line: “I’m not a stranger to what you’re hiding right now. And maybe I still have feelings for you.”

     The rest of the short work is a kind of interrogation with seemingly no results by Ryan in his attempts to discover why Darrel is still so resistant to admit his homosexual feelings, which are apparently also holding back his creative ideas. The central enquiry of the film seems to be, despite some success that Darrel has achieved, Ryan’s query: “Are you happy?”

     Darrel responds that nearly all of his decisions, to get his college degree and even to seek out a career in writing have been to make his parents happy. And he has, apparently, no intentions of now disappointing them. He sees his decision to pretend he’s still heterosexual as part of his “responsibilities” in return for his parents work of 20 years in raising him.

      By this short film’s end, Darrel is still stuck in rut of determination to please the world of his past. Being happy evidently has no part in it.

      Why this film is titled “diffidence” is rather inexplicable. Darrel, in his blind commitment to family and past is anything but modest and shy, although he is most certainly unconfident about himself. He seems proud of his own ability to wipe away his own identity for the sake of family ties. But frankly, by this time, I suggest the audience has so tired of this 20-some-year-old’s inability to question his own motives, despite Ryan’s rather simplistic challenges, that we truly don’t care any longer whether he finishes the damn script or not. His life is already a broken pencil, something that can longer carry him forward with the story he might create for himself. Besides, Ryan has already done a rewrite.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2022 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Juanma Carrillo | Muro (Wall) / 2010

record of lost love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juanma Carrillo (director) Muro (Wall) / 2010 [6 minutes]

 

In the middle of a noisy urban center, with construction work going on nearby, a handsome young man (Juanma Carrillo) leans against a wall to wait. We don’t know precisely what he’s waiting for, but the stance and the look of the man suggest he is gay and may even be waiting for a pick up.

     Finally another good-looking you man (Tadeo Dietz) comes along. The two quickly kiss, the first running his hands along the lean body of is friend as if hinting that he has grown too thin. They kiss again, but the second man soon pulls away to answer a phone call, moving away from the other in several directions has the other impatiently waits.

     Off the phone, he returns to the first man who once again embraces him and attempts a kiss, but this time the second man slightly pulls away. The first attempts the maneuvers again, quickly kissing, this time being met with a full kiss from the other, and even a second kiss. The first man runs his hands down the side of his lover. But the second again pulls away. The first tries a third time, and in quick speed-ups of the frame director Juanma Carrillo replays the attempts to reestablish their love. But now each time, the second man pulls away further, refusing the gestures.

   In frustration the second man finally takes out a piece of chalk to write on the wall: “Ya no takiero” (“I don’t love you anymore”) and leaves. The first man, obviously emotionally suffering, moves back against the wall for a moment and bends over in tears. He stands, but repeats his emotional collapse.

     Eventually he stands and writes on the wall: “XQ erres 1 cobarde” (“Because you are a coward.”) And the film ends.

     Given the first man’s response, it appears that the reason they are breaking up is not that the second man has fallen in love with someone else, but hints that he is afraid to continue the relationship with the first man because of the fact that it is gay. Cowardice is the cause, apparently, not the fact that someone else has caught his eye, and when that word comes between two male lovers it hovers over the scene like a cloud from hundreds of such films where one of a couple pulls out a gay relationship for fear of being discovered and perceived as being a gay man by family and friends.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Dominic Leclerc | Protect Me from What I Want / 2009

hall of mirrors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominic Leclerc (screenwriter and director) Protect Me from What I Want / 2009 [14 minutes]

 

British director Dominic Leclerc’s Protect Me from What I Want might almost be re-imagined as the first encounter between the Paki boy Omar Ali, living in South London in 1981 and the street punk Johnny of Stephen Frears’ 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette. Nothing much has changed except Margaret Thatcher is long dead and the Tory vision of a cultural melting pot has evaporated into thin air.

    Still, the same issues exist. Saleem (Naveed Choundhry) is as devoted to his Pakistani roots as was Omar, and the pulls of his gay sexual desire towards just such a boy as Johnny, in this case Daz (Eliott Tittensor), are as powerful and compelling as they have ever been.

     The couple first meets up in what is evidently a dark street and alley gay meeting place, where Daz attempts to put a truly terrified Saleem at ease without success. But he’s a pro, giving the boy his number and reassuring him of his good intentions despite the cultural split that that leaves either boy on the other side of a cliff that is seemingly not to be breached by their differences, both societal and those of sexual openness.

      Daz runs back home, only to see his cultural world—not so very differently from the equally terrified and culturally closeted filmmaker Terence Davies—from outside the family window. Saleem realizes that he cannot possibly reenter his own past life, despite the fact that he’s terrified and sickened by that very realization.

       He calls up Daz, the “Johnny” of his dreams, who is able to provide him with an evening even more sexually fulfilling and visually compelling than Stephen Frears could conjure up in 1985. This is one of the sexiest short films ever made, as the two fuck and fuck again, enjoying sex in a manner than surely Saleem realizes will never truly ever again protect him from what he wants. He’s wanted it, he’s gotten it, and there’s no way to go back despite his utter hysteria, his quick exit, and his determination to utterly forget what has just transpired.

      Daz, a pro evidently at bringing out young disconcerted boys, watches from his balcony as Saleem pretends to trudge back into his Pakistani home life and its values. He keeps silently pleading with the determined young man to just turn around, like the mythical Orpheus, and look back at his tough natured dryad. Saleem does so with a smile, but unlike the myth, not so very different from the Britain of 2009, it’s clear Saleem will be back, smile intact.

     Sex is just too powerful to keep even the most ordinary of British brutes from breeding new sexual relationships between the Empire’s former subjects, and they are simply unable to resist the British abuse to which they’ve grown so nicely accustomed. No one can protect anyone in this bondage situation from what they want, even if their desires be utterly perverted. Fortunately, sex is more powerful even than the British union.

     Dominic Leclerc’s short film is a delusion: a seemingly quick blink into cultural fright, but actually a long view into the hall of mirrors of British sexual culture.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).