Eldar Rapaport | Postmortem / 2004

replay?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eldar Rapaport (screenwriter and director) Postmortem / 2004 [16 minutes]

 

Can a relationship that ended badly and with rancor be revived? Can both men, after meeting up again and discussing that relationship, begin anew? Or will it simply be a repeat of the first failure? Will they be afraid of seeing the old patterns, of performing the rituals that they had in the past that destroyed their love.

     Rapaport’s film is not nearly so profound to even consider these basic ideas. And although it is described as a “postmortem,” there is actually little discussion of each of their failures in the past other than vast generalizations and vague regrets. The most complex statements in this film consist of Troy simply repeating that he has been thinking of Thomas for a long while and has returned to the city in order to further reimagine what happened.

     Instead, using the wonderful music of Harel Shachal and Anistar (the music, according to Rapaport was how the idea for the film began), director Eldar Rapaport creates a backdrop that might stir up anyone’s nostalgia, along with placing two pretty boys Troy (Murray Bartlett) and Thomas (Daniel Dugan) across a table from one another, serves, if nothing else, to arouse our interest and hopefully reignite their old flame.

    Although the two leave each other in near despair after their breakfast meeting, with Thomas riding off on a motor scooter with his buff friend Raul (Francisco Valera), they do soon after meet up again in the small apartment Troy is renting and have what appears to be delicious sex. Although Troy has earlier insisted that he has quit smoking, after their sex we see him lighting up a much-needed cigarette, presumably symbolizing, one imagines, that he is ready to return the past he once shared with Thomas, presumably the good along with the bad.

      But can this event, however, restart something that has died? Can Thomas forgive a man who literally walked away from his life?

      The director clearly has no intention of answering our questions, and this short film ends with Thomas putting back on his shirt and walking off down the New York City streets, with absolutely no indication of a long term or even temporary reconciliation. Perhaps the nostalgia of their bodies bumping up against one another again with simply satisfy the itch.

      Yet clearly that surface scratch did fully satisfy the itch for Rapaport, since in 2011 the director returned to the subject, set this time in Los Angeles, the characters now named Troy and Jonathan, the latter in the feature version August now in a relationship with Raul. As soon as I see that movie, I’ll obviously let you know more about this mysterious couple. But until then, I can only say that the postmortem of 2004 did little more than declare that the relationship was dead.

      During our early years of marriage, my husband of now 55 years and I had such terrible fights that time and again we declared our relationship over. But the difference was that, although we may have left the house for a few hours, we returned and remained with one another; and that continuity gradually sustained us, helping us to realize that the sharp breaks were just that, momentary pauses in something that was far more sustaining to us both. Had one of us left and gone to Europe for a substantial period of time, I would suggest that whoever remained would have been forced to move on, and without the continuity any relationship would have meant starting all over again—not a choice I think either of us would have wanted to undertake. The fact that we stayed together despite everything begin to mean something in itself. And as we matured in our relationship, we realized that the difficulties we were having were typical adjustments to one another that all strong-headed individualists had to make. I think a true break in the relationship, one or the other cutting ourselves off from the other, would have ended our partnership for good, as we would sought out others more compatible than we were to one another.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

 

 

 

Jake Yuzna | Between the Boys / 2004

shaking off the snow

by Douglas Messerli

Jake Yuzna (screenwriter and director) Between the Boys / 2004 [4 minutes]

 

In 4 short minutes US director Jake Yuzna deftly paints a picture that several other films have only been able to accomplish in a lugubrious vale of tears.

     This work, however, purely light and comic. The two young men central to the piece, Eric (Rick Stahlmann) and Paul (Adam Vanderveen) are obviously young gay lovers. It’s early morning, and Eric still lays in bed when Paul comes sneaks into the room, straddles him and greets him with a morning kiss—well, a near kiss as they tussle for a few moments, meeting up in the bathroom to shower while one hugs the others back.

       They dress, one of the boys finally appearing to exit their Minneapolis house. Hardly does he get to take in the cold winter morning air before the other boy, out before him, comes at him, knocking him to into the snow, the two beginning the wrestle as simply another way to keep their bodies locked in embrace.

       A car drives up into their driveway, and the boys immediately cease their play, brushing the snow from their clothes. A woman exits the car, both boys greeting her as “mom,” as she asks them get the groceries out of the car. They each pull out a sack, both looking a bit disconcerted and perhaps even glum until their eyes again meet, putting a smile upon both of their faces.

       With the ease of most gentle of love stories and the use of a single familial noun, “mom,” the director has quietly brought up a taboo which I have long argued is quite meaningless. What does it matter if gay brothers fall in love and even have sex. As anyone knows they’re not going to have babies with too much shared DNA? And as I recently pointed out in my reviews of Hermanos (Brothers) (2016-2017) and E vissero (2021), in most Western countries it is not even against the law, although it is still illegal in the Scandinavian countries, Estonia and, quite inexplicably, in Canada and in several of the US states, in some states being defined as a sexual offense with all the serious restrictions and limitations of movement that go along with that. If discovered, the cute boys of this short film might go to jail for sexual intercourse for 10 years according to Minnesota law.

      This subject is the focus of several other LGBTQ films I have written about including Starcrossed (2005), Brotherly (2008), Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love) (2009), Zwillinge (Twins) (2010), and In Half (2012). Of those I’ve mentioned, only the Italian film E vissero treats the subject with the remarkable ease and humor of Yuzna’s film, the earliest of them.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

John McCrite | Little Boy Blues / 2005

the impossibility of locomotion

by Douglas Messerli

 

John McCrite (screenwriter and director) Little Boy Blues / 2005 [22 minutes]

 

Little Boy Blues is a two-man piece about an attractive Los Angeles artist, Michael (Michael Gets, whose performance I found particularly effective) in his early 40s who one evening at a gay bar encounters a handsome younger sailor Zeno (Adam Bloch) who, on leave from his San Diego ship, has journeyed up to Los Angeles for a couple of days.

    The moment of their meeting is an important one for Michael given that his lover Hugh has evidently died a short while ago of AIDS, and he has sold their house in the Valley and moved to an apartment in Los Angeles where now for a year he has been feeling lost, clearly with a sense of sexual emptiness given his personal loss and his age. Still good-looking, he has, however, clearly shied away from the one-night pickups at bars and is, from the signs of it, truly lonely.

      The very fact that in the nearly empty bar, obviously near closing, a young man not only pays attention to him but approaches him and is willing to go back to his apartment is a near miracle in Michael’s eyes, making him almost a slave to the younger man who unfortunately seems to have chosen Michael with the hope that he might have the drugs the older, fatter man had promised him: “Crystal,” so great for sex, “I’m telling you it is the best fucking sex you’ve ever had. You just want to lock yourself in the bedroom and fuck for days.”

      But Michael apparently doesn’t do drugs, just pot, so he is at odds to provide something that will keep the strung-out man with him, offering up a superb bottle of Tequila and a box of poppers,* both of which the young man eagerly consumes, along with a porn tape the younger man requests.

     It’s interesting that all Zeno—who doesn’t even seem to know that he shares the name of the famous Greek inventor of the dialectic and creator of some the greatest paradoxes that have baffled thinkers of all time—can only express his needs, drugs and sex (evidently doing without food and sleep), while Michael tells two stories of men he loved, even if one of them was only for a night.      

 

    It is not that Zeno is unintelligent; he immediately links a small photograph sitting on a table with the large painting that hangs in a nook, both of Hugh, Michael’s former partner. Michael explains the source of the blue painting: a dream in which both he and Hugh were at a party at which everyone was wearing tuxedos, it seeming to be in the 1920s, a group of men seated at an oblong table. Suddenly the men began to laugh at the two of them, both wondering what was the source of amusement. When Michael looked over at Hugh he realized that his lover was completely blue, the reason for their amusement. When Hugh asked why they were laughing, he explained that it was because of his color, to which Hugh responded mockingly: obviously, that’s because I’m dead.

      The blue boy, however, might also have described Michael, left alone with only the memories of having loved a dead man.

      And the second story he tells is also of love and the perversity of the living dead. At a grand party in London a beautiful East Indian boy takes him up into the balcony of the grand ballroom in which the party was being held and wants to engage in sex there, in front of the entire party below.

       They begin to kiss and Michael momentarily licks the boy’s neck, the lover crying out “harder.” Afraid that he might bruise him, he nonetheless does lick more intently, and even more eagerly when the boy calls for yet more energetic kissing, finally asking him to bite him there.

      Stunned by the request, Michael nonetheless continues kissing and licking the man’s neck until the boy again screams out, “bite me!” which he does, the beautiful young man immediately ejaculating and Michael shooting his semen soon after. As he suggests, for a moment he became a werewolf, a lover once more of the living dead, obviously never having encountered the boy again after that event.

       Trying to encourage the young man now in his arms to stay, he offers him a bed, about which Zeno seems disinterested, and begins to kiss, Zeno backing away, jokingly inquiring whether he intends to bite him.

       With the poppers and the porno, however, the young man offers to fuck him, and Michael excitedly complies. In seconds Zeno has removed his shirt and Michael his, and as Michael attempts to open a condom pack, he insists Michael snort more of the poppers, the condom pack falling to the floor as Michael sits upon his cock, the young sailor wildly fucking him until he cums.

       The sex is once again, fulfilling, certainly to Michael and perhaps even to the young man, who now insists that he must be on his way, although he has no destination evidently in mind. Perhaps, as Michael suggests, he plans just to visit the baths across the way. Zeno’s true destination, as the ancient philosopher argued, can never be reached because of the infinite number of stages of any journey that one must travel to complete it. The problem of locomotion to a destination is one of Zeno the philosopher’s most profound paradoxes. For the voyage can never be finished, only half completed, a third, and fifth, a sixteenth, each increment breaking down into an endless multiplicity of others so that it becomes an infinity.

       Although he has claimed to be HIV negative, we can only wonder given his immediate destination and his stories about how drugs affect him, whether he has practiced safe sex. Michael could also now be infected.

       But that is not what this gently painful story is truly about. What we know is this evening too will probably become one of Michael’s later tales of the living dead. It also will be a memorable point among his moments of great pleasure in the midst of long, meaningless, and empty hours, surviving as he does, not upon his art—he has sold only one painting in his life, purchased by the Chicago Art School he attended—but upon the money from the sale of his and Hugh’s home and a modest insurance policy paid out after his lover’s death.

       In that sense, both are already dead men, blue boys—which is the expression in some societies to describe gays, the very opposite of the English language meaning. Zeno will rush forward, he’s off on a military mission by the end of the week, to his death either in the military or from drugs or sex. And Michael is already almost dead, living out his days with so few pleasures that each takes on the quality of a myth.

       Little Boy Blues, accordingly is a sad tale about two young men who have seemingly everything to make them happy—good looks, money, a career, intelligence, and talent—all rendered meaningless without someone to regularly share those treasures. And that too, my friends, might be described as a baffling paradox.

 

*Poppers is the popular word for amyl nitrates which creates sexual stimulation by increasing arterial circulation to the penis or to the anus. It was in popular use by gay men in the 1960s through the 80s, but momentarily came under suspicion of spreading AIDS, to which it has no relationship except, as this instance, that in the immediate effects of stimulation through inhalation it sometimes leads to forgetting about using condoms.

     

Los Angeles, June 19,2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Garth Bardsley | Latch Key / 2005

necessary alterations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Garth Bardsley (screenwriter and director) Latch Key / 2005 [11 minutes]

 

About a third of the way through Garth Bardsley’s comic short film, Latch Key, I was about ready

to turn it off since it didn’t at all appear to me to have anything to do with the LGBTQ community, unless some gay man got some perverse joy in watching to pimply adolescents jerk off together—under a blanket, I should add—while upstairs one of their brothers is trying to convince a girl that he should fuck her.

      But then everything changed as Sam (Ren Casey), at the moment he and his jerk-mate Thomas (Brendan Bradley) were about to come, passionately kissed him, clearly the first time the two had done anything that was even vaguely gay. In the past, their sessions, while watching straight porno tapes, we can guess were the “normal” activities of two male teenagers trying to simply satisfy each other’s sexual needs. It’s become clear that Sam is now seeking something closer to gay sex.

     Upstairs, Sam’s brother Lou (William S. Caleo), having finally convinced Vanessa (Carey Macaleer) to engage in sex (Lou has evidently been away and in his absence Vanessa has been dating another guy) had just cum when the boys’ mother drives up, finally back home after a long hard day at work, box of pizza in hand.

      Rather abashedly, Thomas stands with hands in his pockets, perhaps still sporting a hard-on, and as Sam runs upstairs to throw the blanket in the laundry, he notices Vanessa has been unable to escape.

     Sam helps her slip through the front door, while Thomas, a regular in the household as Sam’s best friend, makes up a rather flimsy excuse for why he can’t stay for pizza, running off.

     Mother and sons serve up the slices and prepare to eat, when they hear a commotion in their front yard. Running to their front door to find out what’s going on, the trio discover Thomas and Vanessa arguing in their front lawn, before hugging and making up, engaged in a long and loving kiss, which director Garth Bardsley brilliantly captures in the reflection of the front door window through the boy’s peer. Logic tells us that Thomas is Vanessa’s new boyfriend. And from now on the brothers will have to look elsewhere to satisfy their sexual needs. But perhaps it is all for the best: Thomas will perhaps have to look for another gay boy and Lou will have to seek out a girl who won’t be so easily convinced by his bullshit theories about love and sex.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Rhys Marc Jones | Burn Bridge / 2017

the woes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rhys Marc Jones (screenwriter and director) Burn Bridge / 2017 [16 minutes]

 

Harry Kiteley (Charlie Rice), when he’s not at school—an activity this short film chooses to ignore—he’s basically up to trouble, stealing pot from under his mother’s panties, carefully placing a piece of sharp glass in front of the tires of his mother’s current boyfriend, and even trying out his mother’s dildo, kept in the same drawer with panties and pot.

     More that anything else, whoever, he’s troubled. His close friendship with his life-time chum, Jamie Johnson (Macaulay Cooper), and with whom he suddenly realizes he is in love, is in danger as Jamie’s attentions have turned almost entirely to Lucy Brown (Amy Cartledge). Even a decent game of backward soccer is near-impossible with Jamie’s constant breaks to hug his Lucy.

      With his mother out one evening, Harry asks if he might “crash” with Jamie, only to find himself in tent with Lucy. As Harry lays beside the couple who are busy fucking, he simply cannot any longer resist laying his hand upon Jamie’s exposed back. Jamie cries out in horror, sending Harry running off into the woods to mope. It’s clear that the love he feels will never be returned.

      Back at school (just outside of it), he apologizes for his behavior, which Jamie also describes as inevitable.

      “Look man, I was bang out of order.”

      “It’s fine, don’t worry about it,” answers Jamie as he kicks the soccer ball.

      “It’s not fine though is it?”

      “We know, and it’s cool.” Jamie answers, recognizing it appears his friend’s sexual interest in him. But there is a sort of selfish bravado in his next statement: “It’s bound to happen isn’t it?”

      Even worse he invites him to join Lucy and him, this time accompanied by Lucy’s friend Chloe (Lucy Acklam), forcing Harry to pretend a heterosexual reformation.

      After this day, I can only imagine, their friendship will be finally over, Harry realizing that

things can never go further and that given Jamie’s smugness about the whole thing, it may in fact be better. And presumably, Harry now knows that he has, indeed, “burned his bridge” to the idyllic boyhood of his past.

      But Welsh/Irish director Rhys Marc Jones doesn’t move in that direction, leaving us only with the horror of a long day of pretense, yet another reason for Harry to be unhappy with his current life. And the film closes with what most viewers might perceive as a healthy normative gesture, but what anyone in the LGBTQ community recognizes is a nightmare.

      O the woes of a young gay boy in an isolated heteronormative world!

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).