Jonathan Wald | What Grown-Ups Know / 2004

a territory for which even grown-ups have no words

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonathan Wald (screenwriter and director) What Grown-Ups Know / 2004 [30 minutes]

 

Perhaps the most complex of the five movies upon which I’m focusing is Jonathan Wald’s What Grown-Ups Know. In this film the young boy, Roy (Stephen James King), is quite obviously aware of, if not at all experienced about, his gay sexual orientation. Traveling with his mother, Elizabeth (Susie Lindeman) after they have just escaped without paying from a cheap motel, they make a pit stop at a public restroom, he scouting out the men’s room, about to engage in sex with an older man in a cubicle before she, impatient to know what’s holding him up, intervenes by pounding on the men’s room door.

      Their next stop is what is called in Australia—the film’s location—a “caravan park,” the rooms consisting of older trailers which obviously attract patrons who plan to stay on for a few weeks or months. At such places, accordingly, a deposit is required, which Elizabeth and Roy clearly cannot provide. His mother, frustrated by the situation, is about to turn and run again, but Roy, worn out by their endless travels and recognizing the manager as the same one he encountered at the truck stop bathroom, has a better idea. He puts himself up as a deposit, promising to remain at the camp while his mother looks for jobs; obviously, she won’t try to run off without paying with her son as bond.

      Roy apparently also has other plans in store, and can hardly wait the next morning to try to seduce the caravan hotel manager, whose name we later discover is Maurice (Daniel Roberts). That first morning the boy remains in bed naked waiting for the manager to come clean their unit; but his act of seduction doesn’t pay off, as the manager retires until he dresses.

       By the second day his mother has found a freakish job as a female Santa, Roy once more trying to hurry her off to work so that he might try his luck with Maurice. This time he strips down to his swimming suit standing by the side of a lake in which, so he is told by the manager, it is too dangerous to swim, perhaps a metaphor for the relationship he is trying to develop between them. As the two talk further, moreover, it is clear Maurice is quite aware of Roy’s sexual invitations, but like Tom in Birthday Time is wary of taking the boy into his bed; moreover, there is simply a great amount of daily work to be done in keep the motel in operation.

      There is also the problem of the mother. Elizabeth suspects what may be going on and forbids her son to go near the man she claims may be a “pervert.” And, although, given her childlike behavior her demands might be easy to ignore, in her implorations and near-sexual control of her son she is a powerful force on his life. More importantly, it is clear that she is dying of cancer. We gradually discover that the horrible blonde wig she is wearing is an attempt to cover up her baldness, a result of chemotherapy. In fact, the reason she has left Roy’s father—to whom the boy keeps insisting they return—has to do with the man’s rejection, physically and mentally, of his wife after her diagnosis. Having stolen his car, he has canceled her credit cards. Despite the boy’s pleas that they go back home, accordingly, she feels she cannot return to a man who longer will help her survive or support her mentally while she is dying.

     In his gentle ministrations, her son has become her symbolic husband, who she now treats almost like a sexual partner.

     It is the demands of both the maternal—and because of his sexual desire and absence of his own father—the paternal that is tearing apart what is left of Roy’s childhood. As he admits to Maurice, despite his actual age which is perhaps somewhere between 16 and 18, he is now too “old” for school.

     When Roy sneaks into the office drawers of the manager, he discovers photos of the man with a child, obviously Maurice’s son. And a later conversation subtly reveals, if you can read between the lines, that Maurice’s wife also long ago left him probably having discovered his closeted homosexuality and apparently accusing him—wrongly so Maurice asserts to Roy without naming the crime—of child abuse, winning custody of her son.

     The pulls on both Maurice and Roy, accordingly, are just too strong for either of them to overcome, and they ultimately do find themselves in bed together, Maurice shocked to discover it is the boy’s first time. Yet he is clearly a gentle teacher, and Roy is suddenly joyful about the possibility of staying on with him.

      But it is just at this moment that his mother—having been too sick to report to her job for a couple of days and after having offered her wedding ring as a deposit that might free her son from performing that role—insists they move on. When Roy adamantly resists, she begins packing and lugging her heavy suitcase to the car herself, declaring she will leave him at the caravan if he refuses to immediately leave with her.

      Even Maurice has attempted to explain to Roy that he cannot replace his father and that he should move on with his mother. The boy has no choice but to accept his mother’s vagabond proposals.

      If you previously thought you comprehended just how difficult it is for a teenage boy to sexually “come out,” you need now to recalculate. Roy’s heart and mind may be absolutely willing, but the patterns his mother has imposed upon his life makes it a nearly impossible task. For him there is no possibility of “normality,” not even a potentially “different” one. He might as well be a child prostitute on the streets which is almost the role he has attempted to play at this last stand. Where they go from here is unimaginable territory for which even grown-ups have no words.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2021

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

 

 

Madeleine Olnek | Wild Nights with Emily / 2018

the vixen poet waiting in her den

by Douglas Messerli

 

Madeleine Olnek (screenwriter and director) Wild Nights with Emily / 2018

 

Let me begin by weighing in on the endless controversy about the importance of poet Emily Dickinson: I believe she is one of the central figures of US literature, her poetry speaking radically of love and death in a manner that few male American poets of her time were able to express. But her subjects—to call them “themes” robs them of their radical sense of exploration—are multitude, and as Susan Howe has brilliantly demonstrated in her My Emily Dickinson, her influences and responses to literature, culture, and history throughout time is immense as they are varying and always original.

    I have much more to say, but this is not an essay on Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and indeed it may not truly be an essay that very much concerns the poet or her life. I just feel it important to establish that I do not come to films about the great American poet lightly—although screenwriter and director Madeleine Olnek most certainly does, which was one of first things that somewhat rubbed me wrong about this film.

     We begin in the film with a slapstick scene, as Emily (Molly Shannon) greets her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler) in her room and gently kisses her on the lips before the two of them suddenly dive behind the couch in a fit of lesbian passion. It’s not necessarily that Olnek incorrectly deals with Dickinson’s probable lesbianism that so irritated me but how even that was pruriently presented to the viewer as if homosexual behavior between two women of the 19th century consisted primarily of endless kisses with just such an occasional leap into and behind a bed or couch.

      Young girls of the 19th century, moreover, spoke only in full sentences according to this movie, without any contractions, communing with one another in voices that appeared at all times to be speaking the kind of poetry that one imagines needs to be flatly intoned so as not to reveal to the reader/audience its full emotional richness.

      Males in the Dickinson house were clearly all idiots, including those who regularly visited the poet, who as we know from the long myths concocted by those—male and female—who were terrified of the true improprieties of such a female poet who dared to challenge years of patriarchal thought. Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman), for example, is represented as an utter Polonius-like fool, even though in her own writings Dickinson often speaks kindly of his discussions with her; and she chose to meet with him, despite her reclusiveness, twice. Certainly, he is no favorite of mine given how he and Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz) almost destroyed Dickinson’s poetry through their editorial disruptions of her texts and their erasure of continued poetic and personal correspondences with Susan in her writings.

     But surely there might be some middle-ground in which to explain why Emily (I resist calling her by her first name since critics often do that to women simply to diminish their shadow, but I will do so here in order to distinguish her from the several other Dickinsons who appear throughout) sought him out other than her desire to be published in The Atlantic Monthly.

     I am certain that he was literally made “dizzy” by her conversations with him, and his attempts at editorial surgery would anger any poet who knows what she’s doing. Moreover, his constant suggestions that because of its unconventional forms and styles that she resist publishing her poetry until readers had grown more daring is like asking someone like Guillaume Apollinaire or Louis Zukofsky to wait for a few decades before letting their work be read by the masses. One cannot imagine saying the same words to any male writer. Yet she still responded to him at one point upon his praising one of her works: "few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue." Was Emily too being merely hypocritical. According to this film she would have had to be.

       Apparently Judge Otis Phillips Lords (Al Sutton), with whom some surmise—with very little evidence since most of their correspondence has been destroyed—that she had a late-life romance, is easily dismissed by Olnek by portraying him as a doddering old man who sits in one of their weekly meetings dozing off and describing Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as “Wuthering Jane,” as well as, at one point, even forgetting the name of the woman to whom he speaking. But once again, despite the myth of Emily’s reclusiveness, she apparently enjoyed the man she called “My lovely Salem” for his discussions of Shakespeare’s plays, to which he brought her as gift Cowden Clarke’s Complete Concordance and with whom she evidently found delight in their regular literary discussions. The rumor that Susan Dickinson once entered the room to find Emily in his arms is explained by this film as simply being a moment where the old fool had lost his footing in getting up, she rushing to help him.

       At one point when Ralph Waldo Emerson (Robert McCaskill) attends one of Susan Dickinson’s many social events, the recluse Emily comes racing out of her next-door convent only do discover a softly mumbling gentlemen pontificating only to himself, so inaudible are his remarks.

       And her brother, the handsome lawyer and treasurer of Amherst College Austin (Kevin Seal) is presented as an utter bore who attempts to escape his wife Susan’s social salons by retreating to a back room with like-minded males or attempting to charm attending women such as the wife of an Amherst faculty member, Mabel Loomis Todd. According to Olnek, he has promised in marrying Susan not to sexually “touch her,” but given the three children the couple had, as Emily later declares, “I guess he didn’t keep his promise.” Most obviously, he was a complete dolt if for no other reason that he was unable to perceive, with the daily letters being delivered by his own children as go-betweens for his wife and his sister, that something more than recipes and gossip might be going on between the two of them.

       Finally, this film often settles to the lowest depths in its recitation of Emily Dickinson’s poems, at one point near her death presenting “I died for Beauty – but was scarce / Adjusted to the tomb” as an absurd face-off with the dead poet reading her lines as moss crawls up her face in tandem with a dead black soldier. Fortunately, this comes late in the movie or I surely would have turned it off and ceased further watching.

 

     Given the endless epistles and notes Emily addressed to Susan each day and, far more importantly, the number of poems and poetic letters dedicated to her—most of them rubbed away by Mabel Todd out of what she might have described as judicious censoring for those who might not understand such a close “friendship,” but in reality perhaps just as much erased out of envy for Emily’s deep love for the wife of Austin with whom she was having an open affair—make it evident that the two were involved in some sort of intense romantic relationship. How sexual that was or how even how much it involved their bodies can never be known, although certainly one likes to imagine a lesbian affair.

     But in the end, when I almost gave up on Olnek’s film for any attempt to present an honest historical account of Emily Dickinson’s—even though the writer/director wraps herself around the permissions of the quoted letters from Harvard University and other sources, as if that were to verify her obvious historical aberrations—the film began to grow on me as a much needed tonic for all the sophomoric mutterings about the belle of Amherst and the tragic ululations of filmmakers such as Terence Davies who clearly prefers to see her as a suffering woman in utter loneliness instead of the figure Olnek presents of a lusty young intellect perfectly happy to jump into any corner with her childhood friend and brother’s lusty sister.

       Surely, it’s better to imagine this Emily, faced with the downstairs boisterous fucking of Mabel—who’d been hired to play the piano for the spinster upstairs—as refusing to meet Mabel simply because the moaning strumpet wouldn’t shut up long enough that she might intervene in order to tell them to quiet down.

       Perhaps a nearly always poker-faced comedian like Molly Shannon is the perfect one to play an intelligent woman of the 1870s who was so fed up with the local nabobs and the religious hypocrisy of the community in which she lived, that she could no longer have any desire to communicate with anyone but those she dearly loved and with whom she could express her deep sentiments and humor. Even Susan had been one of those who discovered their “salvation” in the Calvinist meaning of that word through the local church, and some of their arguments were surely about the “unsaved” Emily’s disinterest in organized religion.

      Olnek, herself, at moments, represents Emily’s beloved Sue as a kind of martinet, demanding that Emily produce new poems every day until her sister-in-law digs her new work out of the back pocket of her simple white dress, and uncurls them from within lockets and even hairpieces as if being demanded evidence of her hard work. No one, however, understood her poetry evidently as Susan did. And that bond alone made her hold her childhood friend close, desperate for some support in a world of true intellectual complacency and stasis.

       That the two also enjoyed a private world that might have shocked the late 19th century less that the coming 20th century is great fun to imagine. And, if nothing else, Olnek’s work makes clear just how Higginson and Todd—the latter presented as the real villain of the piece—among the rows of later Dickinson scholars, struggled to bury the radicalness of her texts. The most disturbing montage in the entire film is the last split screen where on one side Susan sits carefully sponging off Emily’s corpse, while on the other side sits Mabel in the Dickinson living room busily erasing Sue’s name from the top of numerous of Emily’s letters and poems.       

     To tie the poet up with an LGBTQ rainbow flag and pretend to “out” her is far better than winding coils of lilacs around her neck, locking her away in her Amherst room like a madwoman in the attic, and whispering to those who dare to mention her name just how lovely her flower poems were, being as she was, obviously, a student of botany.

       In Olek’s vision, we see none of Emily Dickinson’s renowned gardens, instead watching her mostly dig up holes into which buries flowers instead of planting them. According to her sister Livina (Jackie Monahan) when she found a hatch of new-born kittens without a mother, she took them in to drown them and place their bodies in a bottle of formaldehyde, suggesting this Emily was more like a member of the Addams Family that the renowned Dickinsons.

       Even if she has little to do perhaps with the real poet, I think I like this Emily better than the vision most people have kept of her to protect them from her wild imagination or from accidentally revealing through her poetry her wild visions of love, life, and dying.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

      

Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen | Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) / 2003

consenting when you can’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen (screenwriters and directors) Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) / 2003 [17 minutes]

 

Based on a true situation in Norway, Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) concerns a young 15-year-old boy, Olav (Tord Vandvik Haugen), a little less than two months shy of his 16th birthday. Olav lives in a nicely furnished group home (a Norwegian teen orphanage) in an apartment with two other boys his age, in a small Norwegian town.

     The film begins with Olav showering, another boy brushing his teeth, and a third roughhousing, pretending to hump the towel-clad Olav when he gets out of the shower, obviously suggesting that these boys, if not gay, are quite sexually aware. Olav, it appears, is on his way to a date, and greets the rather dour house mother, Susanne (Toril Martinussen) on his way out.

     He crosses through a large field where he hears a mewling kitten, and finding it, picks it up to comfort it before proceeding to his destination.

    What we don’t know is that this charmingly innocent boy is responding to a personal advertisement placed in the local newspaper purposing a sexual encounter with a 30-year-old man.

     Per (Even Rasmussen) awaits in his local Quality Inn motel room for the boy, who has written him that he is of age. The age designated for sexual consenting homosexual sex with an older male not in a position of trust and authority in Norway is 16—an issue, it appears, for some anxious young Scandinavian boys. In Denmark the age is 15, and even a 14-year-old boy in Lasse Nielsen’s film Happy Birthday (2013) can hardly bear to wait the few weeks until he turns 15 enabling him to have sex with his hunky older neighbor.

      In any event, Olav and Per meet up, have enjoyable sex, and after, almost like delighted schoolboys discovering their sexuality, begin to play games, Per stalking the room under a blanket searching out the boy who keeps delightfully coming closer before withdrawing.

       At that very moment two policemen show up, finding both of them frolicking naked together.

      The man can barely comprehend what has just happened, as the boy is quickly forced to dress to be taken away by Susanne, who we later discover, has followed him to the hotel, spotting him going into the room and reported the event to the police.

      Per is handcuffed and taken away in the police car, later to be found guilty of child abuse, despite the fact that it was Olav who made the initial contact and claimed to be old enough to consent.

      Evidently the real “Per” was found guilty and imprisoned, something directors Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen found troubling. Krutzkoff Jacobsen is quoted: “I’m not saying everything that happened was all that ’precious,’ but I can’t help wondering what the hue and cry is all about” since the boy was only 56 days shy of being of age and that he had initiated the sexual encounter.

     What’s more, as I mention above, had he been living in Nielsen’s Scandinavian sister country Denmark, the boy would have been of consenting age. The film, accordingly, brings into question some of the difficulties and, one has to admit, the absurd arbitrariness of determining legal sexual age for young men and women between 14-18.

     Clearly, given the terms established in the film, there was nothing that occurred in that room between the two males that might be described as abusive or criminal except for the societally imposed determination of age, which, in fact, may represent the true criminality of the situation. I don’t know what a sentence of child abuse means in Norway, but for a US citizen is results in a life-long punishment that often keeps those involved, no matter of what age, from living in most neighborhoods where children reside or visiting any institution or place in which children gather. And in far too many cases it means being outcast from the society for the rest of one’s life.*

   This film’s title, incidentally, comes from a work by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, whose character in his controversial novel Powderhouse describes an experience of having sex with an underage boy as representing “precious moments,” but obviously, in this case, the intense value of those moments were not worth the elder’s freedom for much of the remaining life.

    

* I might just remind the reader that in the US, legal age limited by relationship (the older male not serving in a position of trust and authority) varies from state to state from 16 to 18 years of age, with numerous variants allowing for sexual relationships with males and females who share their age groups. In California, the state in which I live, for example, the crime of "unlawful sexual intercourse" defines any act of sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 18 who is not the spouse of the person. There are no exceptions; all sexual activity with a person under the age of 18 (and not their spouse) is a criminal offense. So if a 15-year-old willingly has sex with a 17-year-old, both have committed a crime, although it is only a misdemeanor. Harsher sentences are doled out for individuals who significantly differ in age.

     The age of consent in Iowa, the state in which I grew up, is 16, with a close-in-age exemption for those aged 14 and 15 who may engage in sexual acts with partners less than 4 years older.

     In the state where I went to university, Wisconsin, the age of consent is 18 and there is no close-in-age exception. There is, however, a marital exception which allows a person to have sex with a minor 16 or older if they are married to the minor. If the minor is below 16 both sexual intercourse and any sexual contact are a felony; sexual intercourse with a minor 16-17 by a perpetrator who is not married to the minor is a Class A misdemeanor. At 17 I would have committed a Class A misdemeanor for having sex with someone of my own age, a crime of which I am certain I was unknowingly guilty during my Freshman year or, even worse for having sex with a couple of my teachers, putting them in jeopardy as well.

     In the District of Columbia, where Howard I lived for fourteen years, the age of consent is 16 with a close-in-age exemption for those within four years of age. In thirty-one states the age of consent is 16, in six states it is 17, and in thirteen states it is 18.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2021

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

Lawrence Ferber | Birthday Time / 2000

a kiss is never just a kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lawrence Ferber (screenwriter and director) Birthday Time / 2000 [18.33 minutes]

 

Birthday Time begins in the high school men’s room where two boys, Christopher (nicknamed Toffer) (Cory Grant) and his friend Jonathan (Mark Pacitti), are crowded into a toilet stall exploring one another’s bodies. When Christopher attempts to meet the boy’s lips in a kiss, the other turns away, at that very moment another student entering the room which allows his timid friend to escape. Toffer looks off in disappointment. On his way out of school, a young man kissing his girlfriend calls the boy “fag” as he passes, so obviously Toffer has not attempted to hide his sexual identity.

      On his way home from school, he stares longingly into the local gay bar Flapjax, catching the watchful eye of the older bar tender. Clearly the boy is not sexually of age in New York state (the legal age is 17)* or able to consume alcohol (the legal age is 21). He is eager, but utterly disappointed.

       Back at home we discover his mother in their back patio. Evidently on Sunday her son will be celebrating his 18th birthday, and his mother asks if Jonathan’s coming to the birthday celebration, to which Toffer replies: “I don’t think we’re going to be friends anymore.” 

       Despite this boy’s own acceptance of his sexuality, it is clear that his schoolmates do not share his open viewpoints, giggling over the fact that he reads in his evening drama class from Oscar Wilde’s Salomé; and it’s clear from the speed with which he reads his lines that he is nervous in openly displaying himself as a gay individual in front of his peers.  

     That evening he again stares into the gay bar, observing a couple in the midst of a kiss. Spotting only the young bartender, Toffer bends down and speeds through the room into the bathroom where he encounters an older man pissing behind him. The man gradually extends his hand to grab the boy’s ass, and startled, Toffer spins around, the elder equally startled by how young his prey is. Claiming he’s drunk, the man apologizes, but it appears he might still go through with a kiss were it not for the sudden intrusion of the older bartender who insists the boy leave the premises. “Get puberty and come on back,” lisps the barman.

       This time when Toffer returns home, he discovers his mother packing. She’s gotten a freelance job in Pittsburgh and she has to leave until Sunday. She asks if he remembers a boy from New Jersey, Scott, Toffer describing him, somewhat dismissingly as a “jock.” “Yeah, but he’s a nice kid,” she insists. In any event she has asked his father to look after Toffer until she returns, her son protesting that at almost 18 years of age he doesn’t need a guardian. She is not up for an argument. Before she leaves she introduces him to Scott’s father Tom (Simon Woolley) the same man he had previously encountered in the Flapjax bathroom.

       Tom seems somewhat appalled when he recognizes the boy he has been asked to look after, while Toffer now has other designs.

       The moment they are alone, the elder again apologizes, claiming he was drunk and, after pondering what Toffer might have been doing there, suggesting he avoid “those kind of places until he’s out of school,” presumably meaning to wait until he graduates, yet another of the several age and time limits imposed by adults upon youths.

      Tom declares, since they have cleared their air of any confusion, they might return to their normal child and adult positions. But the boy interrupts him to ask a personal question, just as quickly getting embarrassed by what he’s about to say and backing away. Tom encourages him to speak freely, but the question shifts everything back to where it was: “What is buttfuck like?”

      “Go do your homework,” responds the astonished adult.

      But that is just the first of sexual declarations, innuendos, and seductions that the boy has planned for his Saturday stay-in during which he determined to discover what being gay truly means, spying on Tom as he showers, leaving the door open several inches as he himself showers so that Tom might watch him (a treat of which, we observe, Tom takes advantage), and essentially torturing the poor closeted father of his supposed jock friend Scott. 

      At one point, Toffer sits on the couch with Tom, unwrapping and eating a banana as he inches closer and closer to his guardian in the process. Tom attempts again to talk reasonably with him, trying to explain that although he admittedly “likes to play around a bit,” Toffer has no business being in a place like Flapjax.

       Toffer, in turn, summarizes his problem: although he’s tentatively explored gay love, he’s almost 18 and hasn’t yet been kissed. Reminding Tom that in the bar he was about to kiss him, he lays out his terms: “I want my kiss god dammit!”

       When Tom refuses he calls him “a closet queen.”

       “Stop it!”

       “Then kiss me!

       “I can’t”

       “Then have a drink.”

And so it continues throughout the day as the boy attempts to break down all of Tom’s defenses.

      When Tom wonders whether the boy going out at all, Toffer answers: I”m going to get my kiss from you or I’m twirling straight back to Flapjax without any underwear on.”

      You might almost describe what takes place after as a kind of sexual showdown, as each of them is seen, the clock ticking away, peering into mirrors, Tom checking out his greying temples and Toffer his facial features, the latter kissing himself intensely in the mirror, presumably as practice for what is he will be facing by sundown.

      Tom finally dares to enter the boy’s room. They share small talk until Toffer wonders whether or not he should grow his hair longer or keep it short, inviting Tom to feel it. When he again refrains, Toffer challenges him: “You sure you don’t want to feel my hair...or have a drink?”

        After more chatter, Toffer gets right down to the issue: “Am I not your type or something? Am I too young or too gay or something? Why won’t anybody kiss me?”

        Tom answers seemingly with wisdom: “You should get your first kiss from someone who loves you. Do it right.”

      “He [presumably Jonathan] won’t kiss me, and you won’t kiss me either.” After a pause, he continues, “I’m ugly, I mean I’m so fuckin’ gay and I’m going to be 18 and even retarded people who can’t read get kissed. I went in there because I wanted to get kissed.”**

         Tom answers, “Count on me, you don’t just want a kiss Toff.” He strokes his hair, and we know what’s in store, particularly when Tom declares that it’s not the boy’s birthday yet, whereupon Toffer sets the clock ahead.

         When his mother arrives home the next morning, her son is still in bed, Tom evidently  having left. She knocks on her boy’s door wishing him a happy birthday. Get dressed, she demands, “Don’t you want your present?”

     Christopher lays back in his bed with a large smile on his face, making it clear that a kiss is never just a kiss.

    

*Although this film clearly appears to have been shot in New York where the legal age of consent is 17, meaning that the character would be 16 about to turn of age, somewhat explicably, but perhaps simply to quell any criticism of a 16 year-old-boy behaving as Christopher does, the movie establishes that the boy is 17, turning on 18, which he and others describe as the age of consent. In more than half of the US states the legal age is 16.

**It’s interesting that the desire to be kissed, which quite obviously stands for a whole set of other sexual possibilities, is also the great desire of the character Ben in Adam Salky’s 2005 film, Dare, perhaps another example of a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality in a much less painful way than the standard plot of the “coming out” movie generally requires. He too wants to simply kiss someone before he graduates from high school.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2021 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).