João Pedro Rodrigues | Odete (Two Drifters) / 2005

drifting

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paulo Rebelo and João Pedro Rodrigues (screenplay), João Pedro Rodrigues (director) Odete (Two Drifters) / 2005

 

The two drifters of João Pedro Rodrigues’ 2005 film, are the handsome Pedro (João Carreira) and the hunky Rui (Nuno Gil), both total romantics who, as the film begins, are celebrating their first anniversary together, Rui giving rings that celebrate what apparently is their favorite song, “Moon River.” The film begins with their long goodnight kiss, as Pedro returns home to study for one of his college exams, coincidentally hearing on his car radio the same song, which is sung, in this version, in a rough male rendition as he drives off.

       Although that song may seem, at first, as simply a gay romantic adaptation of the Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard ditty, in fact, given that this heterosexual romance was originally penned by the very gay Truman Capote, its implications are far deeper. For, soon after driving away, Pedro is killed in a car crash, and the grieving Rui is thereafter stalked by a young woman, madly obsessed with Pedro, transforming what began as a gay-based drama into a study of what it means—or might mean—to be bisexual.

       The very same night another couple, Odete (Ana Cristina de Oliveira) is breaking up with her lover Alberto (Carloto Cotta). Odete, who works for a large supermarket as a roller-skating price-checker, wants a more permanent relationship with Alberto and, even more desperately wants a baby, obsessed with the idea as much as the actress Toni Collette is addicted to weddings in Muriel’s Wedding.

       Odete, a neighbor of Pedro’s, quickly discerns that he has died, and, without invitation, shows up at the wake, perceiving that the troubled lover, Rui is quite inconsolable about his loss and that Pedro’s mother is also deeply suffering. She not only intrudes, but, when the others are sleeping, steals the ring that Rui has given Pedro off of the dead man’s finger.

    Later, Odete not only attends the burial, but creates a spectacle as she jumps upon the casket, claiming a love between her and Pedro that simply did not exist.

      It is easy, and perhaps necessary, to realize that this woman is quite insane, desperate to become a lover to someone, anyone—particularly a handsome young man whom she, apparently, has previously seen only from afar and now in photographs. Yet, Rodrigues takes this madness for more seriously as Odete soon claims that she is pregnant from Pedro, and gradually convinces Pedro’s distraught mother that she will be bearing her son’s grandchild.

        Mad love and deep grief get all mixed up in this surreal story, as Odete also introduces herself to the suicidal lover, Rui, who strangely, through her imaginary infatuation with Pedro, helps to save his life as well as returning Pedro’s ring to him, and with that, restoring a restorative symbol of his existence.

     When it becomes clear that Odete’s pregnancy is what doctors describe as a hysterical pregnancy or, what we might restate as simply imaginary (in one scene, she herself discovers that she is not truly pregnant), she seeks to become her would-be lover, clipping her hair and, since she has now insinuated herself into Pedro’s home, dressing in Pedro’s pants and shirt.

      Ultimately, grief and loss meet head-on with madness and obsession when Rui and Odete come together, in the film’s very last scene, with a truly startlingly scene where we, as voyeurs, are forced to watch Odete (now seemingly reincarnated as Pedro) fucking Rui. In Rodrigues’ film it hardly matters whether or not this might be a real experience. Love is never what it appears to be. And the lovemaking on which the audience intrudes is quite inexplicable, as always.

      The very idea of “drifting” becomes something else in this film, where the needs of lovers are redefined by their obsessive desires. Love is often like that: people often seek out people who provide them with their desires, even if not always offering them what is best for their lives. Odete and Rui appear, to me, as a temporary solution to what they both desperately need, and perhaps, if nothing else, will sustain each other long enough to allow them to move on.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2017).

Juan Martín Simons | K / 2005

a bedroom trot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alejandro Andrade, Luis Gamboa, Roberto Quintanilla, and Juan Martín Simons (screenplay), Juan Martín Simons (director) K / 2005 [12 minutes]

 

K (Miguel Ángel Jiménez) seems to be a pretty tough character, known well around town as a man who can get you want you want. He passes quick drugs onto friends, exchanges cash in an open meeting place at a bar and makes love to the bartender, Nelson (Álex Quiroga), all within the first few moments of Spanish director Juan Martín Simons fast-moving short film, K.

       Presumably, with a name like K, the writers wanted to convey the possibly evil and certainly powerful hustler of Kafka’s tales. And there is something troubling and possibly dangerous, if not precisely evil, in this film’s central figure. Although he asks Nelson, also his next-door neighbor, to also meet up with him for sex that afternoon—it’s Nelson’s birthday—he is soon off for pickup in a car (Jesús Paglieny), evidently one of his many clients; and he seems to have a deal going with another of his friends for some hot goods fresh in from Thailand.

      But it’s the bi-sexual Nelson who really double-crosses K, who when K shows up for their appointed sexual rendezvous is still in bed with a local girl (Yanira Farray) who’s clearly convinced herself that Nelson belongs to her. And K, who has cancelled his attendance at a meetup that evening, nonetheless shows up to his client (Javier Campillo) and has a kind a S&M sexual engagement the overweight, heavily-tattooed man. Simons counterposes their sexual rendezvous, neither of which seem particularly fulfilling for our “heroes.”

      The next morning Nelson finally shows up in K’s apartment, having not been able to sleep all night, just at the moment with Nelson is about to go to bed. When Nelson asks him if we worked last night and even goes further to ask him “how it was,” K snaps back, “Like you and that chick.”

   Nelson agrees that both were just “routine,” but obviously there is a tension between them. Nonetheless, K pulls out Nelson’s now late birthday gift, the “hot stuff” from Thailand, a new pair of sneakers, a gift obviously perfect for the young man on the move. They quickly kiss, as Nelson, fed up with K’s droning music, puts on a disc for dancing, pulling up K from the couch as the two gently engage in a kind of bedroom trot to Jorge Aníbal Serrano’s “Loco (Tu Forma de ser),” gently kissing in a manner that neither of them was able to enjoy the night before.

    Despite the blockades both have put up to keep out others, their love has broken through, symbolized perhaps by the lock that K, throughout this film, emphatically pulls open to quickly let in his lover Nelson, while keeping everyone else out. These men surely prove that true love is wherever you find it, despite any limitations put upon it.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Todd Downing | The Underminer / 2005

the perfect image of a friend i never want

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Albo (screenplay, based on his novel), Todd Downing (director) The Underminer / 2005 [6 minutes]

 

We all know such a being, or least we imagine we know such an individual, someone who claims to be our best friend but has a remarkable ability to praise our every action through a subtle, undermining attack. “You’re so healthy, if you’d only lose weight.” “I admire your ability to drink so much.” The kind of compliment that slaps you in the face.

      In this dark comic short, Mike Albo plays both the self-infatuated, endlessly dismissive attacker and the victim of Todd Downing’s film The Underminer, a title which might work better if he were changed to “Darts into the Heart”—suggesting a kind of Cupid who has the wonderful ability to put an arrow into every little prick and pain you’ve ever suffered. But there I am doing precisely what the central figure Albo does throughout, complimenting someone or something while stabbing it in the core.

     I shall resist describing Albo’s rather loudmouthed onslaught as an abrasive method of acting and ascribe it instead to the necessary tone to his wonderfully obnoxious satire. Sorry. There I go again, compulsively praising what I find so difficult to fully enjoy.

     I mean, it’s not Albo’s fault that he doesn’t give his poor other persona an opportunity to say a word, interrupting even his attempt to describe the new puppy he’s acquired. I mean, really what’s a silly pet mean when you’ve got so much more important news to convey, such as how your friend’s former lover is so much better off now that he’s found a new lover, lost all that weight, and lives in a beautiful new condo? Sorry that you haven’t yet found the opportunity to fix up your dump, although I know just how hard to do a fixer upper in an apartment building where most people don’t even pay the rent.

     Not that it’s Albo’s fault that he simply not control his glossalaliac (I don’t even think there’s even such an adjective, although it perfectly fits him) fowl mouth, and demands people talk to him even while he’s on the phone. He’s one of those multi-tasking individuals who can hear every word he doesn’t want to while dishing another person at the very same instant, tongue out and ear plugged.

     Too bad that not all people are as passive as Albo’s other self in this little movie, who in real life would have turned heel at the very moment he began his loving harangue or even punched him out.

      But that’s the joy of having just such a friend who makes us feel so much like shit every time we encounter him that we’ve been forced to block his calls, lock the doors when we hear him tread upon the stairs, and refuse to watch another moment of his forbidding acting skills as presented in this short 6-minute silly camp monologue.

      I loved the woman at the end in the cerulean dress and coral beads, but my god did you see her "Bride of Frankenstein" hair?

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Craig Boreham | Transient / 2005

the other half

by Douglas Messerli

 

Craig Boreham (screenwriter and director) Transient / 2005 [10 minutes]

 

Narrated by Ian Roberts, Australian director Craig Boreham’s Transient is a common gay love story where a couple, in this case Daniel (Boreham) and John (Phoenix Leonard), meet up in a strange city and country, in this case Hanoi, Vietnam, and feel such an intense relationship that it is almost as if their have discovered in one another Plato’s “other half.”

     For a long while they feel almost special, Daniel particular anxious to share their relationship with one another and, in particular, with a lesbian friend. Some of those whom they share it, make light of the relationship, not being able to comprehend, a response that evidently is common in Vietnam where gay relationships exist openly but are nonetheless not spoken about.

     Although they both have good jobs, they contemplate moving in together. But gradually they simply “lose one another,” John seeking out other sexual encounters, while Daniel just seems preoccupied with his job. They spend long times apart before reentering one another’s lives with a short intensity, but also realizing that the deep love they once had has evaporated.

      Daniel finds himself seeking for something which he can no longer find. Obviously having hooked up with another guy, one day he sees John, who doesn’t even notice him, on the street, and it suddenly becomes apparent what is missing in his life. But a moment later John is gone, having disappeared from sight.

     Daniel seeks to discover where John now is without success. His friend Monica has briefly met up with John, and describes him as appearing as if he is lost, looking for something. Is he too looking for his now lost other self, ponders Daniel?

     The very beginning the film has shown the return of Daniel to Australia, obviously having never again reencountered the man he once thought of his other half.

      A bit like a tepid version of a Wong Kar-wai movie such as The Mood for Love or even Happy Together, Boreham evokes a strong sense of nostalgia in a world where a sense of true well-being and self-identity is tenuous at most, and love is nearly always fleeting and impossible to sustain.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Dave O'Brien | Straight Boys / 2005

hold the tomatoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dave O’Brien (screenwriter and director) Straight Boys / 2005 [14 minutes]

 

Roommates Ben (Damian Pelliccione) and Morgan (Nick Bartzen) are “straight” boys with girlfriends, Lori and Sarah (Vanessa Born and Jenna Allen) who both realize what the boys can’t admit to themselves, that their boyfriends are totally infatuated with one another. Both boys dream of sexual encounters and let loose their testosterone frustrations with regular wrestling matches in each other’s beds.

     I know these boys or, at least, I knew boys just like them at the same University of Wisconsin campus decades earlier, the boys in this film still dining on the now almost world-famous Plaza burgers, which apparently still existed in 2005, the date this film was made. Howard and I ate there many an evening.

     When both of their girlfriends reject them—Ben obviously coming more to terms with it than is slightly more resistant companion, Morgan—the latter has no choice, so he thinks, but to violently reject him, leaving a party after his girlfriend has complained of having to share her boyfriend with the obvious “other.”

      A fight ensues, yet almost turns into their desired sexual encounter were not that Morgan simply still hasn’t the courage to come to terms with his sexuality, while still admitting his love for Ben. It’s clearly a time for a break-up between the two. All for the better perhaps, since at least now when Ben approaches him it is clear what he wants.

      Whether or not Morgan is yet ready to accept his attentions is another matter. But at least there are no dark tensions in the air, nor pretense, nor even the need for Ben to put tomatoes on his Plaza Burger just because that’s the way Morgan likes it.

       Of course, I liked the film for momentarily immersing me back into the ice-cold world where I first met my husband Howard, and reminding me of my friend Walt, a hunky Chicago Polish boy, who back in the day told me that he wrestled with his roommate and clearly, when the two of us traveled back to Chicago, was praying that I might make the first move to free him from his sexual cage. Frankly, I was more interested in Walt’s high school teacher and the “boys in the band”-like friends whom he had gathered around him.

      I didn’t touch the boy, and poor Walt married a very jealous woman, of whom, he told me when years later I met up with Walt for lunch in Washington, DC that if he dared to tell her of our meeting, she would suspect something else that might jeopardize their relationship. This, after years of my marriage to Howard, with no interest on my part in Walt’s body or sexual soul.

       Clearly, if Morgan in this movie doesn’t soon come out, he will find himself in this very same position, unhappily married to a woman who has caught the wild beast of an exploring young gay boy in a trap from which he will find no release. If I’d given Walt a kiss, perhaps offered him a good suck or fuck, he might have been able to decide for himself. But I was fully out, and young boys seeking a guide to their sexual determination was not on my radar back in 1967 or ’68.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Dean Francis | Boys Grammar / 2005

diving into manhood?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rozlyn Clayton-Vincent (screenplay), Dean Francis (director) Boys Grammar / 2005 [8 minutes]

 

It’s difficult to know what precisely to make of Australian filmmaker Dean Francis’ short film about bullying in the extreme. That extreme, in this case—not the first instance of this crime to show up in short gay cinema, and not the worst if you consider those films that end in the victim’s death—is a gang rape in the locker room shower with a large segment of dowelled wood.

     The victim, Gareth (Matt Levett) is not the typical gay boy, but a diver who seems to be fairly popular with the others, and if one looks closely at the eye contact between him and one of the sideline observers, Nick (Tom O’Sullivan), watching his dive in the first scene, he perhaps even has a sexual admirer among them.

      The problem, if you can describe it as such, is that Gareth has taken an art book of the naked male form into the locker room with him, arguably a book he’s reading for his art class, yet admitting that he himself likes the human form. Nick, who discovers Gareth with the book seems to have no choice but to draw attention to it jokingly before the others discover it, wondering whether the pages are stuck together. Gary attempts to fight him for the return of the book, Nick pinning him to the lockers asking, “Do you like this human form?”

      Gareth’s answer is equally provocative, “not bad,” which forces the others now in hearing distance to respond as such homophobic schoolboys generally do, by calling him a faggot; and before one can even imagine things get out of control as the others drag him into the shower and painfully fuck him with a dowelled stick.

      As they leave, Nick attempts to briefly comfort him, but when Gareth pushes away, he insists that it is all Gareth’s fault, presumably for not being careful in covering his sexual tracks so to speak, in bringing the book into the open and even accepting Nick’s sexual challenge.

      Even worse—if one might imagine using such a phrase given the horrific events I have just described—is that having told his father—who appears to be a dean or teacher at the school—about the rape and requesting that he leave the school, Gareth if forced the face off with the rapists themselves along with his brother, all of whom his father has invited to dinner, believing that confronting the experience is the best remedy. “We have all had to go through the same thing,” he argues, “even your brother. It’s what you make of the experience that most matters.”

     Repeating this absurd logic in front of the others, the father seeks out agreement even from Gareth’s torturers, Nick now appearing very much like the school trouble-maker played by Malcom McDowell in the 1968 film if… but who is quickly on his way to becoming the Malcom McDowell of The Clockwork Orange (1971) smiles in smug agreement. As his father chatters away—“some boys it makes them stronger, gives them resilience”—Nick almost challenges his former friend, leaning toward him, “Are you a man, Gareth?”

      Gareth lunges toward him, pushing him to the floor and lifting his hand through the air to bring down fists upon his face. His father holds his brother back, obviously feeling that the “manly behavior” is not being properly acted out. But just as quickly Gareth’s arms move into an embrace of his tormentors’ face as he hugs Nick to himself tearfully crying for his inability to stop loving the man he knows he should now hate, Nick also moving his arms into an embrace.

      Surely this strange enactment of love is not what his father had hoped for. Or is it? Does this all-male community accept rape as a force to help the weaker come to terms with their homosexual feelings? The values of this world are so very perverted that we might almost imagine any possible scenario, come to almost any illogical conclusion. In this world one thing alone is clear, brutal violence is confusedly interlinked with love.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

 

Victor Erice | El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) / 1973

monsters, bees, and spirits

by Douglas Messerli

 

Víctor Erice, Ángel Fernández Santos, and Francisco J. Querejeta (screenplay, based on a story by Victor Erice and Ángel Fernández Santos), Victor Erice (director) El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) / 1973

 

In conjunction with his show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro was asked to curate a series of films, the most recent of which, Victor Erice’s 1973 El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), which Howard, our friend Pablo, and I attended this past weekend.

 

    Although made in the slightly more liberal period of the late Franco regime, it was still a time when artists found it better to hide their critical messages through ellipsis and layered symbolism than to openly express it, much as the later Argentine poets of the XUL group hid their meanings from the censor, but which might later would be comprehended by their audiences. The art here lies in its complex subtlety; obvious gestures could be easily perceived by the government, and yet too obscure messages might be missed by general viewers and readers. Such writing, as in Carmen Laforet’s stunning Nada (see “Leaving Nothing Behind” in My Year 2007) and numerous other works of the Spanish Franco era, depended entirely on a kind of balance of open narrative and more obscure meanings that might be missed by people outside of the culture itself.

     Erice’s beehive, derived from the Maurice Maeterlinck work The Life of the Beehive, published in English in 1901, presents the life of beehive as a mixed affair. Although its ordered notions of society help the bees to work as an effective community, they are, at the same time, all subjects to their queen, and unable to make individual decisions, a blind obedience which makes it nearly impossible for humans to completely comprehend. Yet, of course, Franco’s dictatorship was attempting just such subjugation to the general society (as, we must remind ourselves, Stalin also attempted to instill in the Soviet Union and Hitler in Germany).

     Erice takes us to the beehive world not only through the intellectually removed father and husband of this work, Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), who spends most of his days caring for his honeybees, but through the entire honeycombed windows of the family’s house and honey-colored light that infuses this entire film.

     Fernando’s younger wife, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), on the other hand, is a true romantic, pining for her lost lover of another time, and writing him secret love notes she posts to mail boxes on the local trains which pause in her village.

     At the center of this film, however, are the couple’s two young daughters, Isabel (Isabel Tellería) and Ana (Ana Torrent), who, except when they are in school, are left pretty much to their own devices, wandering the local village and fields. Early in the film, they attend a mobile cinema screening in the town’s city hall of James Whale’s Frankenstein, brought by Franco forces to this village and others presumably to show the dangers of “monsters” within the society, people who did not obey the Franco norms who needed to be destroyed so that the society might safely survive.       

      Ana, however, is not so much frightened by the monster but is curious about "Why did he kill the girl, and why did they kill him after that?" Her older sister, a bit impatient with Ana’s naiveté gives the “realist” answer: the monster did not truly kill the girl and she isn’t really dead. But she then adds in admonition that might surely have been supported by the Spanish Catholic Church: such monsters do exist, but as spirits, that can be called into life by simply speaking to them: “It’s me, Ana.”

     Ana is even more convinced by such unearthly spirits when her sister takes her, across a vast unplowed field (clearly representing the failure of Franco forces to help the farmers to create a rich land) to a crumbling empty sheepfold. No spirits appear, but Ana does see a large footprint that seems suggest someone or something who has visited the spot.

      After her sister later tricks her by pretending her own death, Ana becomes further troubled, and one night escapes the house, making a late-night visit to the isolated building. There she now finds a man, a Republican soldier who has escaped from a train and holed-up in the sheephold. He, in fact, may be the lost lover of Ana’s mother, but the child has no comprehension of what she suddenly discovers. Like the young girl in the Frankenstein myth, she simply knows that he is suffering, and returns the next morning with food, her father’s coat, and his watch which she has stolen to give to the stranger—events which also call up, without even having to speak of them, Charles Dickens’ c hildhood classic Great Expectations.

     That evening the Francoist forces arrive, discovering the soldier and shoot him to death.

   Having found the coat and watch in the dead soldier’s possession, the police visit the gentle beekeeper, searching for an explanation. Fortunately, they presume it had been stolen; yet they perceive the truth by watching the family members’ reactions to his report of the incident.

     When Ana returns, she finds only remnants of blood, magically suggesting her bond with the dead soldier. Followed by her father, she bolts and is unable to be found for several hours.

      Along her route she may or may not have eaten of the poisonous mushrooms which her father had previously pointed out to her and her sister. In any event, she is eventually found unharmed. But her recovery is slow, and she seems to lie in a kind of fitful coma, suffering the events which their doctor assures them will eventually be forgotten.

      But perhaps Ana has gone into a kind of trance, much like her mother’s romantically-inclined memories of her past. Although Ana’s mother finally comes to realize that the past is over, as we see her throw yet another of her letters into the fire, Ana links herself with it, calling out into the night, “It’s me, Ana,” connecting herself with a pre-Franco world that is the only one which the citizens can hope for. Surely the spirits of the past, whoever they are, cannot be as terrible as the monsters with whom they have been forced to live.

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2016).