Brian Rowe | Lonesome Bridge / 2005

world without love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samantha Marazita and Brian Rowe (screenwriters), Brian Rowe (director) Lonesome Bridge / 2005 [12 minutes]

 

Brian Rowe’s short film Lonesome Bridge explores various notions of violence in response to sexual behaviors, centering on a love-stricken gay college boy, Kevin (Ben Gaetanos) who shares a bathroom in his college dorm with his heterosexual heartthrob Rusty (Austin Beckford).

     It’s hard to imagine a worse pairing, given that Kevin is a true innocent who has become obsessed with the self-centered ladies’ man, who, according to Kevin’s best friend Liz (Aimee St. Piere), who has dated Rusty, likes to slap around his female partners.

     Liz is afraid of what he might do to Kevin if he were to discover his suite mate’s feelings, which actually begins to happen as Rusty catches Kevin watching him shower and, later, discovers him jacking of to a computer photograph of him.

     Kevin escapes from the first situation by lying about a need to urinate; but finally gets firmly told off by the rightfully angry Rusty for his having appropriated a personal image for his own desires.

     Liz hopes that her friend will come to realize just how absurd his infatuation is, but Kevin feels Rusty was justified in his verbal attacks, and continues in his hopeless love. But when he observes Rusty obviously discussing his suite mate’s audacity with a friend, Derek (Nick Puliz), he senses danger.

     Soon after, Derek meets up with Kevin one night on a campus bridge, clearly the “Lonesome Bridge” of the title, and, in a homophobic frenzy severely beats the gay boy.

      Kevin’s anger is more about his belief that Rusty has asked his friend Derek to enact the “punishment” instead of meting it out himself.

      In fact, Rusty is furious with his friend for having beaten Kevin and cuts off his relationship with the thug. But Liz misinterprets Kevin’s comments to suggest that Rusty himself has gone on the homophobic rage; and in an act of revenge, she hires Derek, ironically, to take down Rusty.

      We never witness the act of revenge, as the film ends with Liz attempting to minister to a hurt and disillusioned Kevin. But we realize that in this world in which nearly everyone chooses violence to resolve sexual matters, there is no end. Each person involved—except for the thoroughly violent and truly homophobic individual Derek—seemingly must suffer for the other’s desires.

      All will be left hurt and fearing to return to normal love, however one defines that, becoming damaged figures for not having been able to tolerate the various forms love takes.

      The thematic of this work is profound, but unfortunately the believability of the characters is put into jeopardy by amateur acting and the realization that there is perhaps no one quite as dense regarding love as Kevin nor any woman in real life as pettily spiteful as Liz. These figures behave more like manikins for writers Samantha Marazita and Brian Rowe’s ideas than as flesh-and-blood figures. And at the point when Kevin confronts Rusty about not having himself had the nerve to beat him up, we can only perceive the gay boy in this work as a sadly masochistic being, just as he charges Liz for being basically unlovable because of her cynical attitude toward one of the most important emotional responses in life, love.

      But, in fact, a great deal of sexual violence is intwined in just such a complex web of desire and masochism and feelings of worthlessness and envy that this short film portrays. The bridge these figures attempt to create with others, accordingly, will always leave them lonely, without the possibility of connecting because of their own and others intolerance of difference.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Fabio Mollo | Al buio (In the Dark) / 2005

behind closed doors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josella Porto (screenplay), Fabio Mollo (director) Al buio (In the Dark) / 2005 [10 minutes]

 

Italian director Fabio Mollo’s short 10-minute film Al buio (In the Dark) is about two roommates, Antonio Josefia Forlì) and Marcello (Daniele Grassetti), who have been friends it appears for some time.

       Antonio seemingly encourages his friend to engage in his heterosexual relationships and describe them to him; almost like a married partner he tells his friend which shirt looks best on him when he goes out on his dates and he keeps a close tab on which girls Marcello is seeing and which ones seem more than a simple “lay” or who represent someone who’s had sex with everyone in their school.      

 

     But on this particular evening, as Marcello is about to go out, tensions begin to rise as he challenges his friend to join him at a party, to get out instead of staying in the room as usual to study, querying when he might begin to explore some of the women he keeps talking about. He is also particularly disturbed by Antonio entering their small bathroom while he is trying wash up and dress for going out. But the boy literally ignores his plea, sitting down on the toilet seat to watch his friend in the mirror. And much of the rest of the scene is played out in mirror images of both, suggesting that there is another side to each of them.

      Finally Marcello tells him that he has invited a girlfriend over for the night and suggests his roommate find somewhere else to go for a few hours. The tension mounts as Antonio argues that the girl who he has invited over, Oriana, is like all others, and wonders why he has asked her to the room. Why is she special? Surely he doesn’t really love her.

      Marcello simply describes her as his “steady,” but there is something deeper in Antonio’s resistance to her entering their male space; and we begin to suspect that there is something else about their friendship that we haven’t yet penetrated.

      Antonio declares “You don’t really like her,” continuing “She knows nothing about you.” Marcello demands he stop.

      But his friend continues, “You don’t give a damn about Oriana.”

      “I screw her every night.”

      “That’s different.”

      It now quickly opens up into a shouting match as Marcello says the obvious, that Antonio is 20 years of age but hasn’t yet been with a girl. It’s not “normal.” But still the other holds his ground, arguing he doesn’t need to have screwed a girl to know the truth.

     Just what that truth is gradually spins out of their argument as Marcello finally speaks out about his friend as being gay, the other responding, “Why? Does that disgust you?”

     It is a bit like the game George and Martha play in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: once one has brought up a subject it is fair that the other can expand on the it; and with a seemingly righteous

sense of vengeance, Antonio now snaps off the bathroom light to insist “let’s tell in each other in the dark.”

     “If I’m gay, what are you?” Evidently for years now every Saturday afternoon, Antonio has knelt down and in the dark given his friend a blow job, apparently without any in-kind response.

     Quickly snapping the light back on, Antonio asks him if he wants to stop. “Are you still here?”

     Marcello, still not ready to admit their relationship, turns away. “I’ll go out then.”

     Again, Antonio asks when he will be back as if he were a demanding house mate.

     But when he receives no answer, we see him turn and, almost as if a threat, call out: “What would mom and dad say if I told them? Would they still consider you the model son?”

    Suddenly, the world has shifted. As the doorbell buzzes, signifying Oriana’s arrival, Marcello returns to the room, putting his hands upon Antonio’s shoulders. He rubs his hands across the boy’s hair turning him around to face him, gently caressing Antonio’s chest.

     The door continues to buzz, as he takes off his shirt while continuing to rub his hands across Antonio’s chest, switching off the bathroom light once more. Antonio kneels, but this time Marcello, putting his hands on the boy’s chin, raises him into standing position and gradually bends down to himself fellate his brother. The door closes with a soft sigh of relief and joy emanating perhaps from Antonio or just the audience’s gasp in realizing that Marcello has finally been able to admit he is in love with his roommate who may just possibly be his sibling as well.

      This may conform to all of the hundreds of other “coming out” films superficially, but we recognize if what we now suspect is true, there can be no traditional “coming out” ending. The silence of the closing bathroom door with lights out says everything. This is a relationship that, alas, must remain behind closed doors.

     

Los Angeles, May 29, 2021 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).

 

J. C. Oliva | Sissy Frenchfry / 2005

 refusing to get real

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joe Brouillette (screenplay), J. C. Oliva (director) Sissy Frenchfry / 2005 [28 minutes]

 

Paralleling, in many respects, Alexander Payne’s Election (1999), Sissy Frenchfry (Steven Mayhew) represents the status quo at West Beach High, where even the most outlandishly fem boys such as Sissy and his transvestite girlfriend Dana Aquino (Justin Dabuet), this year’s Prom Queen, another openly gay couple who decide to get married, and the Frenchfry cheerleaders who ineffectually cheer on their always losing team demonstrate the new normal.

     Enter this film’s version of Election’s Tracy Flick in the form of the retro heteronormal Bodey McDodey (Ross Thomas). He convinces even the reluctant Georgia Peach (Laurie Meghan Phelps) to consider opening up her legs and mouth, whispers hopes of winning into Coach Bob’s (Richard Augustine) ear, and tosses around the promises of large sums of money his father will award to the school to Principal Principle (Leslie Jordan) if only he agrees to return the school to proper heterosexual normativity by outlawing the lesbian cheerleaders and pulling away several of the prime positions in school affairs that Sissy Frenchfry currently holds.

     Even more importantly, Bodey decides to run as Student President against the popular, friendly, and quintessentially cute, smiling Frenchfry.

       Now I know that there is currently a revisionist view about Alexander Payne’s portrayal of Tracy Flick, who is now recognized as a sort of off-the-road feminist attempting to challenge the old boy sexual network, which includes the teacher Dave Novotny who has groomed Tracy (Resse Witherspoon) as a sexual object, his friend Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), and their supported student body challenger Paul Metzler, the dim-witted but highly likeable football player. But I still find Tracy totally unlikeable, all too normatively smart, and utterly predictable (despite the fact that in the updated vision we might get of her in the forthcoming Election sequel). 

     And so too is Bodey totally despicable, despite his somewhat refreshing attempts to renormalize the world of totally correct thinking Frenchfry and his fryettes represent—enough so to make even the usual bullied figure such as the gay boy Sissy turn violent and provide his new competitor with a bullying-like slug in the jaw.

      Of course, everyone turns against Frenchfry and is convinced that perhaps finally West Beach High might receive a needed building do-over—promised from Dodey’s daddy—and actually win a football game!

      Bodey’s speech, filled with Trump-like promises, might actually get him elected! But never fear, Sissy returns with guns loaded, or rather cameras running, as he reveals Dodey’s sexual goings on, his serpent-like hisses into Coach Bob’s ear, and his promises of his Daddy’s money to Principal Principle, which we soon discover, is the result of crooked dealings which will get him arrested. Sissy admits that he even he was tempted to violence as well as ignoring the advice of his best friends. So, we now see, how easily the right can put its foot back in the doorway. Fortunately, director J. C. Oliva and his writer Joe Brouillette’s vision of that reality is easily redeemed as Sissy turns on his smile, greets each student like an old-hat politician, and wins his fourth year as Student President. 

     It’s hard to imagine that the director and the writer of this truly silly fantasy would, just three years later, would produce the truly dark and moving portrait of the incestual love of two brothers in his memorable 2008 film, Brotherly. That, based on a real event, might even wipe the silly smile off Frenchfry’s face.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

 

Sven J. Matten | Out Now / 2005

revelation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tina Schulte and Renatus Töpke (screenplay), Sven J. Matten (director) Out Now / 2005 [20 minutes]

 

This movie, by German filmmaker Sven J. Matten filmed in a picturesque Bavarian resort town, is a rather predictable portrait of a young 16-year-old boy in the process of coming out. One of the most difficult aspects of being gay in a small city or village is the feeling of difference, which is what most disturbing to Tom Beyer (Dennis Prinz). The feeling homophobia in this village, moreover, is palpable, Tom being regularly harassed by his classmates as in so very many movies about this issue, but even worse being pulled away by his mother from the candy kiosk because of the general perception that the cute boy behind the counter is gay.

     In truth, Tom not only realizes he is gay, despite his school arguments that he is no different from the others, but regularly communicates as Luckystar16 on the internet with a couple of other gay boys or men, one who goes by the name of Creator. As he admits to Creator, he’d love to ask the boy at the kiosk out for coffee.

     Creator himself keeps talking about “being the others, the outsiders,” and Tom is tired of that designation. At school, he has a good friend in a black girl, clearly also an outsider, Vanessa, but he is tired of even her suggesting she likes him for his differences from the other boys. And one day when he again meets up with the hostile hall-way gang, who the day before have all taken their towels to him in the shower, he grabs Vanessa (Jennifer Schmid) her and forces her against the wall as he kisses her, a kind a mock-rape for which she has great difficult in forgiving him. As she herself later tells him, even the others would not have treated her that way.

      But obviously being lonely, the role of the school outsider is simply too much for Tom, as after that incident, he decides to attend a Hip-Hop party at a local club.

      Even there he finds himself almost uncontrollably attracted to the DJ, evidently a notorious hip-hop celebrity. He makes up with Vanessa, who is also in attendance, but still has no one at the party with whom to dance or talk.

      Wandering down a hall in the midst of the party, he suddenly pulls open a door, commanding no entry, only to discover one of leaders of the bullying high school boys, Nikias (Veit Messerschmidt), scion of one the most noted political families in Bavaria, fucking his young Turkish schoolmate, Erdogan (David Langer).

      Suddenly, in that moment, the world opens up to Tom as he just as quickly perceives that Nikias is also the figure Creator on his internet chats, and in that realization recognizes he is not so very different from the others as he might have suspected.

      Both Nikias and Erdogan fear the consequences if Tom were suddenly to spread the news around town. It would mean the end of Nikias’ father’s political career and that Erdogan could no longer attend his mosque.

     But Tom clearly has no intentions in sharing his new discovery with the world, as he marches directly to the candy kiosk to ask the cute blond boy beyond the counter it if he might fancy getting a coffee with him when he’s free.

 

    It may be wonderful that the writers of this short film, Tina Schulte and Renatus Töpke, found a nice solution to allay Tom’s despair; but alas most of us don’t ever discover the sexuality whistling through our high school halls until years later—in my own case—if ever. And having now discovered that some of his tormentors are gay does not necessarily mean that the bullying will stop, particularly if Nikias and Erdogan must continue playing along with their heterosexual homophobic friends just to keep their sexual desires silenced.

      Tom is now, however, infused with a new sense of empowerment. And he knows, if nothing else, that he is no longer alone.

      What I keep hoping for, other than the fantasy fairy films such as Sissy Frenchfry (also a short film of 2005) that with the increasing recognition of gay life around the world, the locker room bullies might tire of their torturing of others they feel are different from themselves. Today in the USA, however, with the newfound hatred of the right, it appears to be getting worse and I see no sign of let up in the current crop of coming out cinema.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2024  

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Onir | My Brother...Nikhil / 2005

swimming back to life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Onir (screenplay, story, and director) My Brother…Nikhil / 2005

 

For either budgetary reasons or, perhaps, the sudden hiring of a gay programming wizard fresh out of India, Netflix (god bless them) have suddenly issued on the live-streaming venue several new gay Indian films, movies that got made despite the restrictions of Indian censors and, even more importantly, speak of the homophobic aspects of that culture.

      Onir’s My Brother…Nikhil (2005), the earliest of 3 films I saw in the past few days is surely the most emotionally wrought and the harshest in its critical evaluation of India’s anti-LGBTQ attitudes. For in this film, a strapping young champion swimmer suddenly is diagnosed with AIDS and thrown into the nightmare of early (late 1980s and early 1990s) hysteria about what people then described as the “gay” disease.

     Nikhil, although asked whether or not he has been having sex with women prostitutes, is also almost immediately accused of being a homosexual. He secretly is gay, an Indian reality that is explored in all of the three films I saw. Being closeted is also terribly destructive in this culture.

     Not only is Nikhil Kapoor (Sanjay Suri) immediately isolated from his former swimming colleagues—when he attempts to return the pool all others immediately remove themselves from the water—but he is virtually arrested, taken away from any contact from his family, his father Navin (Victor Banerjee) and his loving mother Anita (Lilette Debey), and is thrown into a lockdown rat-infested room with no proper necessities. Goa, where this movie takes place, represents the capitalist tendencies of its former Portuguese rulers. Here Nikhil is not even permitted a phone call to his now-alienated family.

      Fortunately, Nikhil has three individuals who care enough to find him and seek for his recovery back into the society: his handsome lover Nigel D’Costa (Purab Kohli), his beloved sister Anamika (Juhi Chawla), and her boyfriend, Sam Fernandez (Gautam Kapoor), who hire a lawyer to release him from the horrible imprisonment and work to help make people perceive that AIDS is not an outwardly communicable or a singularly gay disease.

      The pain of this almost complete isolation from the lovely world in which he has grown up—in a beautiful Goa home with a loving family around him—makes it quite clear how almost anyone in this period, suddenly diagnosed as HIV-positive, was shaken from everything he or she had previously known, the ability to be who they had been and the ability to love, as well as now being faced with the inability even to be loved. Fortunately, Nikhil has the trio of individuals who fight for him, despite the fact that both he and they know it is a terrible non-resolvable battle. Even the lawyer warns them of the ostracization they will surely face.

     It’s odd (one of my ongoing coincidences) that the day before I had seen Kurosawa’s 1946 film No Regrets for Our Youth, in which an entire family was similarly rejected because a son during the rise of Fascism was accused of being a spy. That film was based on a true story, as was this one which was based on the life of Dominic d'Souza. But Onir was forced by Indian censors to disclaim the reality of the work simply so that he might get the movie approved.

     Perhaps the history of the film is even worse than what that film depicts. But it is, nevertheless, a brave project, despites its occasional sentimentality, that reveals what happened the earliest of AIDS victims.

 

    Onir, quite brilliantly, turns his film into a direct encounter with its audiences by having the characters speaking, quite often, directly to camera, recounting their own memories and, most importantly, their regrets for not having acted more forcibly to help create the changes needed to accept their loved ones. The statements of Nikhil’s mother, wherein she recognizes how she should have spoken out against her husband’s prejudices, are particularly moving.

     What can any of us say? In those days, the 1990s and even earlier, the entire culture didn’t know what to do with those who suddenly were dying and wasting away, who were marked by terrible bruises on their faces, welts across their bodies, stomachs that no longer could allow them sustenance. 

      At least in this Bollywood version there is a lot of plaintive singing, a longing to be whole again, an empty desire to rejoin the society from which they have almost inexplicably been ousted.

And fortunately, as in Tony Kushner’s great duo of dramas, Nikhil has angels—lover, sister, friend—to help carry him into the next world.

      Onir clearly was influenced by Kushner’s work, but his version of it is so specifically Indian, with its overlayers of years of colonial Goa rule, that Roy Cohn seems like a slight distraction. Goa in this film, is Cuba, imprisoning its gay-infected inhabitants. This is Russia, who proclaimed again and again that AIDS was not occurring in that country (after all, gay sexuality had been banned). This is Reagan territory. It is about people who didn’t want to admit that a whole new world had become infected simply through the act of the most beautiful joy possible, sex.

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).