Philip James McGoldrick | Siemiany / 2009

 agnieszka’s breasts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philip James McGoldrick (screenwriter and director) Siemiany / 2009 [19 minutes]

 

Siemiany is a Polish summer resort village in the countryside where each year two teenagers, Andrzej (Damian Ul) and Michal (Michal Wlodarczyk), along with their families, have visited. The two boys, like most pre-adolescent teens, wrestle, swim, fish, wrestle some more, challenge each other with sexual knowledge about women—particularly of their female friend Agnieszka (Aleksandra Radwanska) who years before has shown them her budding breasts—wrestle again, and generally just hang out with one another. Occasionally they show one another their hard-ons, the result, so they claim of thinking of Agnieszka’s breasts.

     This year begins very much like their years of the past. But something is different. One of their brothers has joined a sort of gang of whom he is the leader and with whom Agnieszka, now much taller and older hangs out. Her goal when she grows up, she tells the camera, is to become a slut. The group mostly bullies their own members and occasionally shows its clout to the younger boys, particularly when the brother pulls out his newly-purchased gun—fortunately unloaded, but later filled with bullets.

      Basically, however, the boys seek to maintain their usual activities. But it’s more difficult this year without Agnieszka, and there is a growing distance between the slower maturing of the two Andrzej and meaner and growing-up Michal. Michal seems only half interested in his friend and it is not all interested any longer in seeing his friend’s dick, although at one point Michal suddenly demands to see Andrzej’s penis, grabbing him and pushing him up against the wall in what almost becomes a rape. They still sleep in the same bed and enjoy one another’s company, but Michal’s language has become tougher while Andrzej’s imitations seem only half-hearted, although they are both hated for their bluff of verbal abuse by the locals.

      One day, Michal goes missing as he explores the room of another girl, the beautiful Dorota (Joanna Opozda) who has already joked to the camera—in one of the film’s misguided post-modern interpolations—“I don’t say much in this film, I just lay here.” But when Michal goes exploring she does far more than that, slowly engaging him as she shows off her body, little by little, flirting and toying with the wide-eyed and astounded youth perhaps on the edge of his first heterosexual adventure.

       Meanwhile, outside the white headed, dyed blonde crowd of older boys decide to grab and slightly abuse Andrzej, describing his as a faggot for his longer, undyed locks. They are determined to “make him a man” by dying his hair the same blonde-white as their own heads. I am not sure what this ritual means in Polish culture, but it clearly an attempt to pull someone of difference into their orbit. Making him look like them clearly frees him from any sense of difference.

    Having undergone the ordeal, and now with a bleached white crop of unwashed hair, the boy goes in search of his friend, surely confused and perhaps frightened. But as he seeks him out in the inside of the cottage, he quietly becomes a voyeur to the sexual “coming out” of Michal, watching for an instant as Dorota undresses for his friend.    

    In the next instant we see Andrzej once more outside on the run, racing down a long empty path, escaping what he cannot comprehend but clearly senses, that he has lost his friend forever to a world that perhaps he can never enter. The difference the older boys simply joked about may in fact be real, and Andrej is obviously terrified by its implications.

       Andrej suffers the feelings of so very many gay boys, that he has somehow missed out in the “normal” process of male maturation, realizing that his pretend interest in Agnieszka was just that; that in wanting to display his hard-on it was Michal who was his focus, the erection the result of his friend’s touch, not some imaginary memory of Agnieszka’s breasts.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

 

Johan Vancauwenberg | Blessure (Fair Play) / 2009

a reckoning

by Douglas Messerli

 

(Roland Javornik and Johan Vancauwenbergh (screenplay), Johan Vancauwenberg (director) Blessure (Fair Play) / 2009 [8 minutes]

 

This short film reveals a situation that, alas, still happens far too often even in our presumably more open world with regard to LGBTQ+ experiences.

     Steven (Tom De Hoog) is a married man, in what appears to be a loving relationship with his wife Marie (Janne Desmet). We see her busy cooking dinner as the film begins.

      She is interrupted by one of her husband’s soccer friends, Tom (Steven Boen), who has stopped by to deliver up Steven’s locker bag which he left, so he explains, in his van. Since Steven has not shown up to their soccer games recently, he hasn’t been able to return it, and, he insists, it’s beginning to smell up his auto.

     She rushes back to her pot, inviting Tom in who surprises her by saying that he’s not seen her husband at the soccer game, since he went to play soccer yesterday.  He didn’t even show up last week, he explains.

     Maybe he watched from the side, they both cover up the matter.

     He’s on “Me time,” she explains. It’s when something’s bothering him and he needs to take a break from it all. She mocks him describing “Me time.”

     But bit by bit, we quickly discover what “Me time” is all about. Steven and Tom have been having an affair. It’s a ruse he uses to explain his time away from her and the house.

     Marie is finally beginning to wonder that if he doesn’t play soccer during “Me time,” where does he go?

     Tom tells Marie that her husband loves her; he always talking about her.

    At that moment Steven returns home, shocked, obviously, to see his lover—actually, we soon discover, his ex-lover, since he and Tom have just broken up—in his house.

    What brings you here? he asks Tom suspiciously, Marie explaining, as she continues her meal, that he’s brought the bag Steven has left with him.

      Tom seeks out an immediate exit, thanking Marie for letting him taste her excellent cooking. But Steven has good reason to walk him to the door.

       In a testy interchange, Tom explains that he’s told Marie nothing, but tells him the rest of his things are also in the bag.

     By this time, Marie is already down on her hands and knees, tossing her husband’s dirty soccer clothes into the washing machine. But she soon discovers, at the bottom of the bag, two sealed condoms and a box of unopened ones. She says nothing.

      But we watch as Steve climbs into bed with the cute boy Tom for the last time. Tom attempts to tell him that he loves him, but Steven insists that they’ve already discussed that: “I’m in love with Marie.” “And not with me,” he retorts.

      Steven insists that he does love Tom, but it’s different.

      “Then maybe you should go and love someone else differently.”

      It is as almost as if the self-deceiver has been waiting for this moment, as he sits up in an attempt to explain the obvious: “You can’t imagine what kind of situation I am in.”

     We all know all too well what kind of situation he is in. He has been lying to himself, his wife, and to his lover for a long while, particularly to himself. He probably does love Marie, but as a closeted gay man he also needs outside sex. The pulls in such a situation are intractable. There is no solution but truth, which would collapse Steven’s world. But refusing to face up to it, only makes it worse, the punishment of love perpetuated for all parties involved.

     Tom perhaps summarizes it best, if somewhat selfishly: “No, you’re just too stupid to understand that you’re never going to be happy with Marie.” It’s that realization that women in love with gay men also have gradually come to perceive, cutting their hearts open with something like the blade of a knife. But Steven is a coward, and leaves Tom.

    We now have to wonder, what has he been doing these past weeks on his “Me time,” seeking out a new gay companion? What lies was he about to again tell his wife as he entered the door, beginning his sentence, “You’ll never guess who I ran into?”

      “Bye Tom,” is all this gay deceiver can say as he walks out the door.

      And, finally, one truly wonders, as one viewer asked, “Who could ever leave a boy as cute as Tom alone in his bed?”

      As Belgian director Johan Vancauwenbergh’s camera backs away from the washing room scene, with Steven at the door watching as Marie angrily slams the rest of his clothes into the machine, we know his reckoning has finally come. For once in his life, he will have to face someone else in their time and speak the truth.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2024 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Anaïs Sartini | Spasibo (Thank You) / 2012

vanished

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anaïs Sartini (screenwriter and director) Spasibo (Thank You) / 2012 [14 minutes]

 

Clément (Clément Bayart) has just arrived in Russia for a film festival, and is pleased by his large quarters, which even includes a piano. On the telephone he tells someone back in France that he plans just to walk around, perhaps visit the Hermitage, etc.

    But as he begins to walk the St. Petersburg streets he discovers something he never expected: he has become the invisible man. As he calls out in Russian, French, and English to speak the citizens on the street, to his fellow filmgoers, and whoever else he encounters, there is no response. They hurry on talking among themselves as if he didn’t exist. “Здравствуйте!,” “Hello,” “Please,” none of the terms of greeting seem to have any effect. Even asking to know if a doorway is the entrance to the festival receives no reply.

     It seems to be worse for Clément in this 2012 film than it was for me in the Soviet days of Leningrad, where the people were discouraged from speaking to foreigners, and the differences in language often made it impossible. Try getting lost in Leningrad and seek for help, as I did.

     But here, we sense, something else is happening. Finally, as he sits near the Neva, a man (Andrei Odintsov) approaches him, speaking in Russian. Clément is amazed that he can even be seen. The stranger offers him a cigarette, and our French festival-goer smiles, responding, “Spasibo,” “Thank you.”

     When the Russian finally determines that Clément can speak English, he sits down beside him, reassuring him that “I can see you, you can see me,” but also wondering what he is doing “here.”

       I came her for a film festival, the Parisian explains, “and I vanished.”

     “Why” asks Andrei, to which Clément responds, “I don’t really understand.”

     The Russian speaks his own language for a moment, and then asks the visitor to come with him.

     What other choice does a man who is otherwise invisible have, but to go with a stranger who at least recognizes his existence.

    The Russian explains that he too vanished, on the 7th of March. “I started to be transparent in February.”

      “What happened?” the curious Clément eagerly asks.

      “I remember, I was afraid. I couldn’t do anything. The people in the street were screaming because of this. The authorities didn’t know what to do. We were just vanishing, disappearing, like this.”

      “The policeman, the government, they didn’t do anything?”

      “No.”

     As they have been walking they finally come upon the location for the Film Festival, which Clément points out to his new friend.

       “So you are an actor?”

       “Yeah, a transparent actor.”

       Andrei invites him out for the night, suggesting he knows a good bar.

       Slowly, for the perceptive viewer, this parable, like so many Russian stories, a veiled statement of moral value.

       The bar is, obviously, a gay bar.

       Back in his Nevski Prospekt Hotel with Andrei, Clément declares that he doesn’t understand. How can they see one another if other people can’t?

       Andrei suggests that perhaps they don’t want to.

      When the Frenchman asks why, Andrei answers, “Maybe they don’t want to. Maybe they are afraid.”

       “How is it possible that people don’t see me when I feel fire burning somewhere inside? …When I feel like a hole, a darkness in each part of my body?” The two men kiss.

       The time has come for Clément to leave, and Andrei has accompanied him to the train station. They hug, as Andrei sadly recounts their futures: “Soon, you will be in Paris existing again. You will see you[self] in a mirror, you will be able to speak to people, people will hear you. Tell them, tell them that here we vanish.”

     Andrei returns Clément’s “Spasibo,” as he is blurred out by the camera lens, now an almost smudged out image walking off.

      The film was evidently inspired by the censorship of another film by director Anaïs Sartini, Between Bodies to be shown at the Parisian Seasons’ Festival in St. Petersburg. That film introduced gay people in Paris. Sartini quickly filmed Spasibo in response. The Russian law which resulted in the censorship of the earlier film, and which came into force just before that film’s premiere, prohibits “the propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia among minors”—but, of course, is easily applied to filmgoers of any age.

     By coincidence, when I first begin the write about this film in mid-August 2024, I had almost finished with the first draft when I looked up to find that all my writing had suddenly vanished from the screen. I madly begin to look to all my computer back-up locations, but couldn’t find it. The writing had been completely lost. It took me several weeks to get up the energy to begin all over again.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).