Tom Garber | Sartanim Ba Hol (Crabs in the Sand) / 2012

giving pleasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Garber (screenwriter and director) Sartanim Ba Hol (Crabs in the Sand) / 2012 [11 minutes]

 

On an ocean beach Noam (Or Shefer) 13, with his little sister Maayan, and her female friends, Elinor and Tami, wait for the girls’ father to come back from visiting the beach prostitute. Clearly the father has allowed Noam and Maayan to join them on their outing, the girls arguing that, while they know their father is visiting a prostitute, at least their father takes them someplace, hinting that Noam and Maayan’s father won’t even take his children to the ocean.

 

    Lonely and bored, Noam climbs for a better view of their girls’ father fucking the prostitute, himself masturbating as he watches. Noam is curious, but unsure of his own sexuality or even of what sex really means. He simply observes, yet is obviously affected by the bodily movements and the feelings of pleasure it appears to provide them both. And today he appears more than a little curious.

      The same beach is home to mentally challenged 30-year-old man, Michael, with whom the children often play games. He is particularly attracted to Noam’s sister, and has apparently regularly played the game the children now recognize as “Shula,” obviously a kind of hide-and-seek game with which they engage him.

      Today, when Noam encounters him, they first engage in a kind of chase, the older man dancing heavily back and forth in a weaving pattern as Noam pretends to run after him, Michael already beginning to call out Shula.

      The girls now also spot him, and evidently enjoy playing their games with him, despite Noam’s suggestion that they should leave him alone. They describe him as “miserable,” but Noam corrects

them, insisting that he is “retarded.” Yet he is obviously willing to let his little sister play the role of “Shula” with the adult man.

      She runs forward chanting the name, as the other girls join her. Later, holding the hands of two of the girls, he is led back blindfolded, calling out the same name, “Shula.”

      But as the girls bring him back to their little sand fort, it appears that today Noam has other ideas for his older friend. He moves forward, hugging the man intensely, seemingly claiming him as his own lover, just as he has witnessed the girl’s father dominating the prostitute.

      Michael, still blindfolded, is surprised and somewhat disturbed by the turn of the game, the actual encounter with his imaginary Shula. Michael attempts to reach up and take off his blindfold, but Noam asks him to keep it on, suggesting that “Shula” is shy.

      Suddenly Noam runs forward, tackling the older man, landing him flat on the beach. Noam runs his hand across his chest and Michael, partly in joy, but also with clearly some nervousness, both giggles and growls at the boy’s touches.

      As the girls watch, Noam unzips the man’s pants and begins masturbating him. Elinor receives a phone call from her father, as he begins to call for her further down on the beach.

      She, followed by her sister, runs off toward him, Elinor pushing Noam away from the man as she passes, calling him a “retard.”

      At that moment, Michael pulls off his blindfold and is startled to see Noam by his feet looking back at him. Maayan demands Noam get up and come with them to car.

      We see them riding in the car together, Noam clearly contemplating the events of the day and his own actions. It is clear that perhaps even he doesn’t know why he has behaved in that manner, or even knows the significance of his actions, that he has, in essence, raped a man.

   Neither can we fully imagine his motivations. Is he seeking out his own version of a prostitute, knowing nothing of women, seeking out one of his own sex? Is he expressing, subliminally, his own latent sexuality in masturbating another male, knowing that there is no one who might give him such pleasure, nonetheless, offering it up to someone else?

     Some viewers who have written about this have described it as a terrible or horrible behavior, declaring the movie as offensive. But I believe, if you attempt to comprehend the fact that children are sexual beings, and that Noam’s behavior can be recognized as not intentionally being violent or brutal—although certainly he has just witnessed a kind of selfish sexual act, a man having purchased a woman to satisfy his sexual needs. I might suggest that the boy is simply experimenting, attempting to imitate the pleasure that the adults seemed to have taken in the act; but he is confused about what he is seeking and knows nothing about what his behavior signifies.

      The metaphor is established in the title, with regard to an earlier moment in the film in which we have observed the young girls, playing with the sand crabs, moving them about without any regard to the fact that they are a life form with their own needs and purpose. Noam’s behavior regarding the larger life form of the full-grown mammal is little different. It is a game for him, like the girls who can interrupt the normal path of the tiny crabs by lifting up their bodies and placing them somewhere else, so too does the boy suddenly perceive that he has the power to affect another human being, to offer him sexual pleasure. He has little concept of just how powerful and terrifying those acts can be.

      Director Tom Garber himself has suggested that in this film he had hoped to put the often-ignored subject of childhood sexuality on society’s agenda. Given the general international terror of even bringing up the subject of children and sex, I suspect he may not find a truly open audience. But I admire him, as I have others in the past, for once again bringing up the subject.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).  

    

Emory Chao Johnson | 默 (To Write from Memory) / 2023

breaking away

by Douglas Messerli

Emory Chao Johnson (screenwriter and director) 默 (To Write from Memory) / 2023 [19 minutes]

 

Although Emory Chao Johnson’s film is centered upon serious topics, most importantly their (the writer/actor/director Johnson uses the pronouns “they/them”) transitioning from female to male, there is something basically comic about the constant banter and series of commands coming from their computer and cellphone in the voice of Johnson’s character’s mother and perhaps equally in an AI voice that tells them how to keep up their regimen and maintain their body.

     If the film begins rather silently with the character Johnson plays checking their breast and other parts of the body to see how it is developing—from all outward signs they have mostly made the transition to male—there is hardly a moment after when machines and mother are not commanding them, in both the past and present, to check their weight, to be more gentle, to lose weight, to use half-and-half sugar, etc. as well as drilling Johnson on their daily diet, demanding to know precisely what they have for breakfast.

      Mother and machine speak of the pureness of their skin, about their “potential,” about what the mother herself did as a young girl. The mother’s constant repetition of “Hey, I’m talking to you,” as Johnson can be seen injecting themselves with hormones, makes it almost appear, at moments, like an endless conversation with the former comedian Joan Rivers. There is absolutely no let up.

      But as the film progresses it is difficult to know whether the comments were made contemporaneously or long before, since they are not always in sync with what is happening to the receptor of the messages.

      Especially at one point when Johnson’s character returns home with a soiled comforter, the mother seems to be talking at an earlier moment in their life, commenting on what appears to have been issues that emanate from long before the actual events in the movie: “We need to talk about what’s going on in your head. What’s wrong with your attitude? Why do you tell everyone that you’re not a girl.”

      Finally reaching home with the comforter in a bag beside them, Johnson’s figure seems to be faced with a dialogue that might have happened years before their current changes. “All these years I cooked, picked you up from school, even helped you with your homework,” the mother complains as have millions before her.

      Finally, the mother grants, “Okay you make [the] decision all on your own,” Johnson replying “I haven’t even started the testosterone.” But clearly at the moment we observe them, they have. The accusations and frustrations past and present conjoin in a manner that results in seeming violence, the mother demanding that her then daughter kneel down and Johnson insisting that they want autonomy over their own body.

     Only a few moments after getting out of the car to deliver up their washing, Johnson returns, stuffs the comforter neatly back into the bag, and drives off. They stop off at a carry-out to get a kind of mix of chocolate, milk, and coffee, Johnson commenting several times that it is “too sweet.” But nonetheless they drink a few more sips before declaring “It is really too sweet.”

     The film ends with Johnson’s character pulling all the empty medicine bottles from which throughout the film they have been creating Chinese words into one massive pile. It is a closure on the endless dialogue with their mother and their past, the film ending with the words by José Esteban Muñoz, “The past does things,” hinting that Johnson has finally brought the endless harangues to a closure. They have finally become who they wanted to become, even if they also will always retain memories of their fractious past.

 

Los Angeles, October 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

 

Terence Greenidge | The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama / 1925

the fire of burning fanaticism

by Douglas Messerli

 

Evelyn Waugh (intertitles), Terence Greenidge (director) The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama / 1925

 

After having lived a life of wild carousing and extravagant expense for few years at Hertford College at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh earned only a Third Class Degree in History which, as Duncan McLaren writes, “his father thought wasn’t worth formally receiving by going back to Oxford to satisfy the university’s residency requirements.” His father, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh wanted him to get a job immediately in order, in part, to help pay back the bills he had racked up through his university years.

 

    In July of 1924, accordingly, Waugh was very much betwixt and between, having no likelihood of income and torn away from his friends, and yet having no money to keep living as he had grown accustomed to from his upper-crust acquaintances.

     Having returned to the family house at Underhill in Hampstead, close to Golders Green, a semi-rural area of dairy farms, market gardens, and woods at the time, he spent much of his now spare time with his current male lover, Alastair Graham—he’d previously had romantic affairs with Hugh Lygnon and Richard Pares—until Graham departed for Kenya. In the meantime, perhaps just to entertain themselves his friends Terence Greenidge and others each divvied up a small sum to produce a silent movie for which Waugh wrote the intertitles, the script evidently being extemporized as they moved along. Much of the film is shot at Underhill.

      Its impetus, in part came out of their youthful satirizing of their recent university days. Although Waugh had once been deeply involved in the Anglican Church, by the time of his days at Oxford he’d pretty much abandoned religion and, as a member of the Hypocrites’ Club with his friends such as Harold Acton and Brian Howard took up a life of heavy drinking and homosexual activity. Waugh and his Hypocrite friends took an active disliking to the Dean of Hertford, C. R. M. F. Cruttwel—particularly after he took Waugh aside to advise him to correct his ways—describing him as being sexually attracted to dogs, at nights barking, as McLaren notes, “seductively in the quadrangle below the Dean’s rooms.” As McLaren continues about the Dean of the nearby college Bailliol, who would become a central character in the film, Waugh and his group had no positive feelings since he closed down their Club and stole Waugh’s first boyfriend, Richard Pares from him.

       The film, The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, presents the Dean of Balliol as being “a leading Catholic layman of England” who is involved in a burgeoning homosexual relationship with the Prince of Wales. Dressed in a blonde mop of a wig, looking somewhat, as McLaren describes him, like Andy Warhol of later days, Waugh plays the role of the over-attentive lover who, missionary style, would love to convert the Prince to the Catholic position, literally a “hands-on” project which means that Waugh can hardly keep his paws off of the Prince (played by the director’s brother John Greenidge, also later a director and actor).

      The film begins, however, in Rome where the Pope Septimus Nixon (Guy Hemingway) decides to deploy the clever Cardinal Montefiasco (John Sutro) to England to begin a campaign to convert the Prince to Catholicism. Much is made of his relationship between the Pope and the Cardinal’s mother, Chiara Montefiasco (played by Evelyn’s elder brother Alec, who had been previously kicked out of his preparatory school for homosexual behavior and had gone into the military after). The major characteristic of Chiara is that she is a complete lush, drinking down bottles of wine as quickly as the Pope can provide them. Almost everyone, except the Dean and the Prince, drink profusely throughout.

       Reaching England, Montefiasco and the Dean plot the overthrow of the Anglican Church by first attempting to solidify the relationship between the Dean and the Prince, but also by stealing King George V’s (Derek Erskine) ring to help sustain their activities.

       They succeed in getting the ring off the dozing King’s finger, but the Prince seems increasingly bothered by the Dean of Balliol’s constant attentions and sends his “entertainment secretary” Lord Borrowington (also played by Waugh), to the noted Bohemian chanteuse Beatrice de Carolle (Elsa Lanchester). Asking her if she might be interested in a dinner engagement with the Prince. The two hit if off immediately, and after several evenings together the Prince no longer has any interest at all in the Dean and his homosexual past.

       Foiled at what he does best, the Dean sends his friend Father Murphy, S. J. (Terence Greenidge) to Beatrice’s hovel to award her with the King’s ring now hung upon a necklace. She is so stunned that she puts it on immediately for her date with the Prince that evening.

       Father Murphy, however, has fallen head-over-heels in love with Beatrice and cannot do without her.

       After dinner as the Prince and Beatrice drink their champagne in the restaurant garden, her date suddenly spots her necklace, recognizing it as it as his father’s stolen ring, and immediately rises from his seat casting her away from him forever (“Good God, my father’s ring! Leave me you thief!”)

 

     Distressed by his female companion, he now allows himself to be taken away by the Dean and the Cardinal for religious atonement and some much-needed libations. But it appears that he is none too excited about returning to the Dean and his homosexual advances.

        Beatrice is heartbroken and spends a troubled evening with the Cardinal lying at her doorstep, awaiting her exit so that he can describe his sudden love. She finally rises early, after the sleepless night, and calmly steps over his body as she moves off in a London park in despair. When he sees that she has left, he quickly attempts to follow her, the long chase serving as a highly comical routine as every time he tracks her down, he takes a few moments to drop to his knees and thank God for having found her, at the same moment, accordingly, losing her yet again.

        Even little boys taunt her, and finally, having lost all hope, she prepares to jump into the river. But glimpsing her from afar the Cardinal rushes toward her, telling her of his love, and saving her life. The poignant moment of his final rush to her as she stands on the ledge of the footbridge to save her is played all over again as in a rewind and repeat of the most significant moment of the film.

         The two, now charmed by one another, wander throughout the day together. But at one point, as they sit together, Father Murphy bemoans the fact that it is sad that she is a Protestant, perhaps among those who will soon die in the attack of the Roman Catholic faction who plan that night to kill major Protestants throughout the country.

         Shocked by the news, Beatrice rises and hurries off to the King with the news. The King’s aids, particularly the Earl of Kettering (William Lygon) plan to rid the country of the Catholic faction just as they have previously removed the Communists.

          In pretense of discussing the divisions between Protestants and Catholics, King George invites the Catholic delegation of the Dean, Montefiasco, and others to the palace where he secretly poisons their wine, all falling immediately dead.

          In the very last scene, we observe Father Murphy evidently now working with children, suggesting, perhaps, a pedophilic future for him.

          If what you might describe this “student-made film” is irreparably silly and amateurish, it is also quite funny at moments and charming over all, particularly in connection with the Pope and Chiara Montefiasco’s alcoholic relationship, the Dean’s desperate attempts to woo the young Prince of Wales, and most notably in the performance, her first film role, of Lanchester in her disappointing relationships with both the Prince and the Father, two men with which any such relationship was doomed in any event.

     Hardly anyone saw the film at the time—and even today, although it is streamed free to Britishers by the British Film Institute—is nearly impossible to view for Americans, both North and South, without VPN service—but must have provided a few entertaining weeks before those who made it were forced to face quite different futures, Waugh temporarily enrolling in Heatherley’s, the London art school in the autumn only to drop out and take a job as a teacher in a boy’s preparatory school in North Wales.

      The film is interesting also in terms of Waugh's own future, particularly since in 1927 he would marry Evelyn Gardner, "converting" evidently to heterosexuality, an issue that also troubles me as well in his Brideshead Revisited; I do not comprehend homosexuality as a "passing phase" resolved by marriage and children, although many an Englishman apparently underwent just such a shift in their lives. E. M. Foster's Maurice shows us another such situation. And in 1930 Waugh converted to Catholicism, despite that fact that his fictions were time and again described as blasphemous.

 

Los Angeles, August 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

Adrian Brunel | Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffonery / 1925

cutie and petite

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrian Brunel, Edwin Greenwood, and J.O.C. Orton (scenario), Adrian Brunel (director) Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffonery / 1925       

 

Boxed in between what is described as a “heavy handed humour about boxing styles” and “a fascinating [boxing] pastiche of all things Russian, with Brighton Pavilion standing in for Moscow,” is what might be the very first true example on celluloid of openly gay camp humor. By 1925, the date of Adrian Brunel’s strange little film Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffoonery some serious bows had already been made to the LGBTQ community, particularly in films which featured recognizable gay figures such as Mauritz Stiller’s Vingarne (The Wings) (1916), Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) (1919), Ralph Ceder’s The Soilers (1923), and Carl Theodore Dreyer Mikaël (Michael) (1924). Bernard Natan’s Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920)—long before the much touted first gay porn film, Surprise of a Knight (1929 or 1930)—had already represented explicit gay sex on film, three times, with both male and female couples and a masturbating male servant. 

     In Roscoe Arbuckle’s Coney Island of 1917, “Fatty,” about to dress as a woman bather, addressed the camera in a manner that surreptitiously winked to the audience the self-conscious cross-dressing action he was about to take. But in most of these films there was a quiet—and I am not just observing that these were silent films—assertion of a reality that was still not openly spoken.

       But with the sudden appearance of Cutie Cannaro, “the nicest man in boxing,” and his adversary, we have a full-blown gay man bowing to and throwing kisses at his seconds, his opponent, and evidently his royal lover in the audience, Lord Pifford (the director playing the role). And suddenly we perceive that are witnessing for the first time a gay figure who truly expects us not only to recognize him as a homosexual but through his display of satirical gay stereotypical actions that he is a queer boxer mocking his own identity.

      When he and his boxing partner, Le Petit Beurre, go for the opening handshake, it becomes a hug which the referee (Miles Malleson) must quickly attempt to break up, time and again, as the two gentlemanly sluggers seemingly seek to prove that they prefer clinches to punches. At several points the two men wrap their arms around each other’s heads and move into more of a traditional waltz instead of the dance of a boxer’s deflection.

 

    Cutie’s lovely ringside attendees show their horror whenever a punch is pulled, and hover over their man like chorus boys over a resting tenor when the round is finished. Cutie takes tea.

 

   To everyone’s shock, particularly to Petite, when they return to “fight,” Cutie actually dares to hit his friend several times, resulting in his opponent’s settling on the floor in a half-sitting position and refusing to get up despite the referee countdown. Clearly, he is not playing fair, although, of course, Cutie is declared the winner. But who cares. This little match is about a much longer affair.

        The British Film Institute has posted this portion of Brunel’s film online separately, with good reason. But I wish that they had included the entire short film, if for no other reason than to spotlight its oddity in the annuals of gay filmmaking. For Brunel is not truly mocking his homosexual boxers as much as they mock themselves for the very fact that they are performing on screen in the most savage of heterosexual sport challenges. Their representation of that defines gay “camp” decades before Susan Sontag stumbled upon the concept. And this film gives new context to later gay boxing films such as Dudley Murphy’s The Sport Parade (1932) and Marcel Carné’s L’Air de Paris (1954).

       Upon discovering this little-known gem, I felt a rush of feeling that this changes everything!

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2021).

Louis J. Gasnier | Parisian Love / 1925

the thief of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lois Hutchinson (screenplay, based on a story by F. Oakley Crawford), Louis J. Gasnier (director) Parisian Love / 1925

 

Louis J. Gasnier’s silent film of 1925, Parisian Love is a highly crafted film that is also one of the strangest works of cinema of the period. Through the device of a sexual and class-structured ménage à trois of a woman named Marie (Clara Bow), her lover Armand (Donald Keith), and a doctor/professor Pierre Marcel (Lou Tellegen), Gasnier’s adaptation of a story by F. Oakley Crawford interweaves Apache dance and gangsterism with upper-class tangos of thievery that often seem to be indistinct except in the locations of where the dance is held. While all seek innocence and purity, the methods they use to obtain what they desire are filled with mendacity and violence. And finally, while the men seek out heterosexual love, they attain something close to what they most seek in their homosexual love for one another.

      The film sets the tone almost immediately in its first frames in a seedy French bar which wealthy tourists haunt in order to catch a glimpse of the Paris underground Montmartre life.

       Marie, Armand, and their partner “the Knifer” (Jean De Briac) give them the performance of a lifetime, as Marie and the knifer begin a rendition of the Apache, he bringing her close to him in dance for a few moments before throwing her to the floor, pushing her off, kicking and then dragging her, as she gradually staggers back to standing position, moving toward, and entering into a deep kiss at the very moment that the seemingly jealous Armand appears, pulling a knife and charging at the male dancer only to be stabbed to death; the police are quickly called in as the patrons rush out of the café in horror, leaving some of their possessions behind—only returning to their meals when the “actors” have been swept “off” to backstage safety, where they change their clothes and gloat over their successful performances and whatever loot they have uncovered. One of them has also found a dropped business card of one of the patrons, Pierre Marcel, whose mansion they suddenly determine to rob that very evening, presumably because he appears to be spending a night on the town.

      The gang checks out the place, Armand and the knifer climbing to the bedroom balcony while Marie, dressed as a man, waits below on guard. Hearing noises, Pierre rises from bed and hides in the shadows as the two men enter his room, hoping by suddenly turning on the light he may scare them off.

       When he does so, however, “the knifer” pulls his switchblade ready to kill and rob Pierre, but almost inexplicably Armand stops him, fighting him to protect Marcel from murder as the knifer leaps out the window, now both he and Marie being chased by the alerted police. The police shoot and kill the knifer, and think they have wounded Marie, who instead tricks them by returning to female garb and walking past them, hitting up one cop with a request for a drag for her cigarette.

       The police, meanwhile, attempt to arrest Armand, but Marcel lies for him describing his as a friend posing as a decoy; and, in fact, he does appear to recognize the young man, but also quickly discovers that Armand has been gravely stabbed in his attempt to wrestle away his cohort’s knife. Armand falls into a coma, and a doctor is called, a long period of recuperation following.

      From the very beginning there is a look of deep longing and sexual desire for the criminal expressed in Pierre’s facial gestures, glances that Armand clearly does not quite know how to interpret.

      As Armand recovers, he admits that he had once taken a course with the noted scientist, but that his life as a student had radically been changed when he was mistaken for a thief, choosing to actually become one in retaliation. And yes, there was a woman involved, a woman with whom he is still desperately in love.

      You can almost see Pierre (through Tellegen’s excellent acting) suffering through this revelation. This is no coded film, and he realize that he has quite obviously fallen in love with Armand, and has no intentions of giving him up to some woman from the street. Yet, perhaps just to satisfy Armand’s heterosexual desires, he does arrange for him to meet a proper lady of the upper class, a beautiful young woman whose attentions, if not directly leading to Armand falling in love with her, are nonetheless pleasant to him.

      When the young man has almost healed, Pierre “sentences” Armand to stay on with him another six months. And it is apparent that Armand is also willing to remain with Pierre, if not precisely as a lover, clearly as an intimate friend. Indeed, their deep friendship reminds me somewhat of that between the two men in Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil of the very next year.

     Armand begs only a single hour of complete freedom before he commits to what appears to be a kind of conjugal relationship with Pierre, which the elder, with some hesitation, grants him.

      Meanwhile, Marie has taken a job as Pierre’s maid so that she might determine for herself what her lover’s situation is. Mostly she finds her job consumed by keeping away from the advances of Pierre’s socialite friends. When she sneaks into Armand’s room, she is interrupted by Pierre’s introduction to Armand of Jean D'Arcy, with whom, as Marie hides in the closet, Armand appears to strike up a relationship.

      When she hears from others in the Apache gang that Armand has been sent by Pierre to England in a business matter, and—as they joke about the obvious relationship that has developed between the two men—it wasn’t she who Armand kissed goodbye, she becomes furious, plotting revenge.

      Angry about the turn of events and tired of living with the snuff-consuming, wine guzzling Madame Frouchard (Lillian Leighton) and her alcoholic husband, she takes off—at the very moment when Armand comes to visit her in the old apartment, hoping to find his lover and possibly to renew their relationship. He leaves on his business trip to England believing that his affair with Marie is permanently over.

      Marie, meanwhile, steals money from her gang to front Frouchard and herself as a wealthy aunt and niece, relative to one of Pierre friends who has just died. The two, living at the Regent, create a comical sequence of events wherein, despite a series of outrageous faux pas enacted mostly by Frouchard, she successfully seduces Pierre who, obviously without his male lover around, believes in her innocence enough to determine to marry her. Apparently, like so many other homosexually-inclined gentlemen of the day, a heterosexual marriage is still a necessary cover. And before we even assimilate the fact, the plot reveals their nuptials are completed.

     Marie now reveals to Pierre just how she has tricked him and the financial rewards she now expects to release him from her treachery.

     At that very moment, however, Armand, having successfully finished his business negotiations, returns to find Marie married to his new male companion. Both Armand and Marie quickly realize that they are still in love with one another, but once more it is apparently too late, as the Apache gang takes their revenge on Marie for absconding with their stolen money, shooting her while in Armand’s arms.

     As the somewhat ludicrous plot will have it, Pierre, realizing that he has himself become a thief, not of money but of love—having stolen both Armand and Marie for his own desires—goes on the lam, taking the first steamer out to America. Marie, although seriously wounded, must now also go through the long process of healing, but in Armand’s arms.

     Evidently, both of the younger, lower class thugs must symbolically die before to being  reborn as people of wealth and class, a position provided to them by Pierre, who has left his house and fortune to the normative heterosexual couple.

     Parisian Love, at least in Gasnier’s hands, is not so very different from early 20th century English love or American eros: even if this film has been utterly honest about the homosexual desires of Pierre and Armand’s passive receptivity, “true” or normative love inevitably must win out over the “perversity” of that love. Same sex love once more must be sacrificed to the sexual “normality,” the outsider culture must be abandoned so that the wealthy might survive. The queer is no match against the social order of the status quo, even if the lovely effete Tellegen gave it his best.*

 

*Not only does Tellegen appear as an effete aesthete in this film—somewhat like Oscar Wilde—in the 1915 interview with Djuna Barnes, published in my collection of Djuna Barnes Interviews, he reveals himself to be precisely that; he even quotes Wilde.

 

Los Angeles, June 28, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (June 2021).