Euros Lyn | Heartstopper: Kiss / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 3]

another version of me

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Oseman (screenplay), Euros Lyn (director) Heartstopper “Kiss” / 2022 [30 minutes] [Season 1, Episode 3]

 

How to explain to the heteronormative world when you are a young man growing up in an environment that utterly encourages one’s own feelings for the opposite sex, what it feels like when you suddenly begin to perceive and gradually have to admit to yourself that you’re different, that the attraction you now feel for other boys is disparaged by most of your peers for political, religious, or reasons that are simply borne out of fear. Not only disparaged, moreover, but are often mocked and dismissed as their mouths spit out words of absolute hate? There is no explanation possible of course. It is something simply to suffer alone in your bedroom late at night.

     Before the days of the internet, it was far worse.

     In schools throughout the world, young gay boys not only felt totally removed from the “normative” community but were thrown into a so-called normalized society that forced them to feel they were failed human beings justifiably left alone and apart.

     At least Charlie, a Brit who has gone through a year of coming out has posted a large cover jacket of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited upon the wall. Forget the fact that after he played around with boys throughout his “university” days that Waugh’s character Charles Ryder gave up the young boys such as Sebastien in order marry and to retreat back into rigid Catholicism very much in the manner of E. M. Forster’s Maurice’s friend Clive Durham, who abandoned his youthful lover in order to live a life of pretended heterosexuality. If nothing else, Charlie has an entire history of British boarding school buggering to help qualm his sense of isolation.

      In this work, the truly gentle public school rugby player Nick, having presumed in his own attraction to women that he was just like everyone else, is suddenly put into the predicament of an American high school queer, with no concept of what his sudden feelings of attraction to Charlie might mean to himself or others.

       As I suggest, at least he has a computer to help him through the process. Imagine what someone like me in the terribly homophobic early 1960s felt—or which in utter self-protection I even refused to think about.

       Nick is lost in a world in which he reads about people who may share some of his feelings but who also truly appear to be demanding that he share entirely other version of himself. Nick, however, also has Charlie, who has gone through these same experiences and is perhaps even oversensitive to what Nick must be experiencing, apologizing throughout this first season of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper for even making his new friend suffer through the pain of it all.

     The bullying issues which later blow up in full force in Episode 7 begin back here in Episode 3, without Nick quite being able to comprehend where his emotions are carrying him. Invited to a party for Harry Greene’s (Cormac Hyde-Corrin) birthday party, his locker room mates discuss his current relationship with Imogen Heaney (Rhea Norwood) along with his earlier relationship with a black girl Tara (it’s truly a relief of how non-racist this series is), who we now know is in a lesbian relationship. This conversation, going on in front Charlie as well, is difficult for the both of them.

      But the next morning Nick makes a leap, inviting Charlie to Harry’s party as his “date”—although neither boy can yet possibly describe it as that. In his constantly self-deferential manner, Charlie declares “I don’t know. It doesn’t really sound like my sort of thing.”

      But Charlie truly wants him to be there and begs him to come, Charlie finally agreeing to attend. Elle is pleasant astounded that he might now be able to attend what she, somewhat cynically describes as an “important people’s party,” while Tao dourly notes that his friend was supposed to come over for movies that night. This battle will be repeated throughout the series, Tao attempting to keep his only deep friend close and protect him, while Charlie begins to move off into a new territory where neither of them have ever before been.

      Charlie’s father drives him to the party, telling him that he’ll be back at 10:00, his son begging for another hour without success. But his father, who’s also worried about the well-being of his gay son, tells him to call if he needs help. What you quickly realize is that both Charlie’s parents and Nick’s mother are caring, loving people who openly accept their sons even if they are worried for them, another important generational difference from this third decade 21st century series compared with almost anything that came before it.

       Imogen, wearing a new dress, is delighted to be there, but Nick is only on the watch of Charlie. But when Charlies finally does show up, as one might have expected given this party is celebrating the existence of the most homophobic boy on the rugby team, things do now work out well.

       In an intercut to another scene in this multi-celebratory party, Elle shows up at Tao’s house, his mother so joyfully happy to see her again that Tao feels almost envious of his mother’s affections. As Tao and Ellie argue over film titles, Isaac calls saying he can’t make it, and they realize that it’s just the two of them sharing whatever movie they can agree upon—as well as what he also begin to perceive as a loving relationship of their own.

       Meanwhile, back at the party, Harry announces that Tara has shown up, a purposeful invitation aimed at breaking up Charlie and Nick’s couch tête-à-tête. Charlie, watching their reunion from afar, cannot imagine that what the two former school mates are telling one another is that they don’t really feel sexually interested in one another. “All of this could have been avoided,” Tara tosses out, “if I just told him (Harry) I was a lesbian.”

      Nick, the true innocent, responds, “But that’s not something you’d wouldn’t want to lie about.” Her direct, almost off-hand response is what makes their series so very different: “Wouldn’t be a lie.”

       And that understated confirmation helps to open up Nick to realize that he’s not the only one facing a version of the self that he has never previously imagined. Darcy and she no longer feel it necessary to keep it so quiet, although perhaps they’re not ready yet for a public announcement. But even Tara cannot imagine how sharing that fact with Nick gives a permission he is still not ready for.

       Nick, it turn, confesses that Charlie Spring, the known gay boy of the school, is probably his best friend right now.

        Things are shifting here without anyone even quite acknowledging it. Admissions are never that easy, but both Tara and Nick have shared something with one another that they are not quite ready to announce to the world.

        Nick turns back, however, to find Charlie missing. How might Charlie know that he hasn’t been yet again betrayed?

        Once more Harry tries to stop Nick on his search of Charlie, “that nerdy year 10,” who Nick once more describes as being his friend. Harry, of course, can only presume that he feels sorry for him for being gay. When finally, Nick calls out Harry’s accusations as being “homophobic,” he also declares something he will have to reiterate later all over again: “I don’t really like you. Happy birthday!”

         Back in Tao’s bedroom with Elle, he apologizes for his “weird” behavior, but admits he misses how things used to be with just the four of them. But the far wiser, and increasingly perceptive Elle, beginning to recognize her love for Tao, comments “But sometimes change is a good thing,” a maxim with which even Tao must agree.

         At Harry’s fiasco, as Charlie attempts an escape, a bit like and escaping Cinderella, down a long mansion hall, he runs into his old abuser Ben Hope, Charlie compulsively uttering his famous apology for even living “I’m sorry” for even accidently having running into him. When Ben attempts to once again kiss him, Charlie pushing him off, demands that he shouldn’t touch him. This is a new Charlie, an angry young man for the moment we’ve never before seen in the passive, frightened cute gay kid.

        While Nick looks for him, the endless storm of the party catches up with him, as Imogen grabs him, demanding he dance, even though he declares he cannot. Nick attempting an escape admits that he was just looking for someone, but Imogen, desperate to keep him beside her, insists he should stay imploring him as desperate young girls often do with the meaningless phrase: “I want to hang out with you!” She also begs him to like her, he pulling away to “find his friend.”

       As Nick passes through the hall of mad dancers he spots Tara and Darcy dancing and openly kissing and a smile absconds with Kit Connor’s otherwise worried face, realizing that there are, after all, quite positive alternatives to the dilemma he faces.

       In the midst of the chaos he discovers Charlie, quietly cowering upon another couch, who still cannot resist his endless apologies for having disappeared: “Sorry, I felt I was in the way. Your year 11 friends are kind of intimidating.”

       Nick says something that he will repeat even more emphatically in Episode 7, “I don’t know if I want to hang out with those guys anymore. I’d rather hang out with you anyway.” A vaguely shocked look of appreciation takes over Charlie’s face, one you better get used to if you now love Charlie as much as I do. He simply can’t believe his luck, that someone might really want to be with him for who he actually is.

      The two rush up several stories to an unoccupied room, where Charlie finally confronts Nick:

“So was Harry being serious? Do you like Tara?”

      Nick quickly denies any relationship with her.

      “So you don’t have a crush on anyone at the moment.”

      Nick, always honest, responds: “Well…I didn’t say that.”

   “What’s she like then?”

      “You’re just going to assume they’re a she,” a very interesting grammatical mistake that we will have to later on analyze.

      Again the plural: “Are they not a girl?”

      “Um….”

      “Would you go with someone who wasn’t a girl?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe.”

      “Would you kiss someone who wasn’t a girl?”

      Their feet move closer, as do their hands. We already know the answer.

      “Would you kiss me?”

      “Yeah.”

      And indeed they kiss, a kiss which I have to admit I already thought must have happened.

      Then they really kiss. Oh, we know the result. Somebody knocks on the door, calls out Nick’s name. It’s not going to be easy. But it was as lovely as any series of first kisses ever brought to screen, even with the cutesy fluttering flowers and crackles of romantic electricity which this teen romance believes to be required.

      Even if Nick has to leave Cinderella’s ballroom to face the music, so to speak, Charlie’s 10:00 carriage arrives to speed him off, and for the one and only time Nick does somewhat betray his friend by agreeing with Harry that he was “just in a mood,” leaving poor Charlie to sob on the shoulder of his fairy (god)father, we still know everything’s going to be all right when Nick shows up in a rainstorm the very next morning at Charlie’s front door totally soaked to apologize and surely, even though the credits interrupt it, to kiss him all over again.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October 2024).

 

 

 

 

 

Oscar Micheaux | Body and Soul / 1925

at the crossroads

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oscar Micheaux (screenplay, based on his novel and play, and director) Body and Soul / 1925

 

By coincidence, nine days after the 96th anniversary of its release on November 9, 1925, I saw Oscar Micheaux’s classic silent Body and Soul at the Ted Mann Theatre at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which happens to be located across the street my home.

  

    The lead character in this work, Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins (Paul Robeson) is a formerly imprisoned crook who has traveled to Tatesville where his twin brother Sylvester lives (also played by Robeson), to prey upon this community by pretending to be a holy man of the Good Book.

     With the help of Deacon Simpkins (Chester A. Alexander) and Brother Amos (Walter Cornick), and more importantly the faith of true believer Sister Martha Jane Perkins (Mercedes Gilbert) and her religiously fervent friends “Sis” Caline (Lillian Johnson) and “Sis” Lucy (Madame Robinson), Jenkins has become so quickly ensconced in the village life that his followers are apparently blind to his heavy drinking, his skimming of their church donations, and, most importantly, his evil doings. If they’d merely asked the local Speakeasy proprietor (Marshall Rogers) they’d get an earful. Quite by accident, Jenkins' former jailcell mate, Yello-Curley Hinds has just breezed into town, on the lookout for any free female and ready to betray Jenkins if he doesn’t financially support his own gambling and drinking bouts.

       The center of this dramatic tale of deceit and treachery, however, is Martha Jane’s young daughter, Isabelle (Julia Theresa Russell)—the actress apparently a schoolteacher with no previous acting experience—who her loving mother, having saved up a sizable dowry, hopes Jenkins will marry. Isabelle—in love with Jenkins’ brother Sylvester, a would-be inventor with no likely livelihood—detests the Reverend, seeing him almost immediately for what he really is. There is no way, however, that she might be able to convince her blind-sighted mother who keeps her alone with the monster so he can supposedly gain her love, her conversion to the ways of God, and entry into the Reverend’s heart.

       After a particularly long “conversion therapy” session. Martha Jane observes that her daughter is especially distraught, but cannot quite make sense of it, attributing it to mere hunger, hurrying out to get some groceries to cook up a good meal for her “little girl.”

      When she returns she finds her daughter missing, and with her pious friends as witnesses discovers that the Bible in which she has been hiding her life savings is empty except for a note from Isabelle declaring she has run away to Atlanta where she intends to hide herself so that mother may never find her, admitting to having stolen her mother’s hard-earned savings.

      What one might describe as this crossroads of her faith—whether to believe what she knows in her heart about her beloved daughter or face the cold evidence put before her—is the crux of Micheaux’s domestic folk-tale made in the context of 1925 for a black only audience. Martha fortunately chooses her heart or spirit over the body of facts, and travels to Atlanta, amazingly able to locate and observe her daughter starving and living in a poor rooming house.

      As she hugs her sickly daughter near to her, pleading for an explanation to the reasons for her having left home and stolen what eventually would have eventually been hers and her husband’s, the loving mother is forced to realize, ironically, the dangers of her own blind faith as Isabelle recounts, against both her mother’s and her own will, the story of Jenkins’ debauchery.  

      Several months earlier when she and the Reverend had been out on a Sunday afternoon ride in the country, a terrible storm came up, forcing the couple to take refuge for the night in an empty cabin. There Jenkins raped the girl, reasoning rightly that if she dared to tell the truth, no one, particularly her mother, would believe it.

      Later, on his more recent visit, he had violently assaulted her, demanding she show him where her mother had hidden her renowned savings for her daughter’s future, and when shown its hiding place, demanded that the girl hand it over to him, once again knowing that Isabelle’s version of the truth would never be believed.

      Thinking back on various other strange events, Martha finally sees the truth, but too late since her daughter closes her truth-telling session with her own death, too frail to survive the consequences of what has happened to her.

       Returning to Tatesville broken-hearted, Martha takes the opportunity of the Reverend’s special sermon about judgment day (the “telling of the bones”) to denounce him for his actions in front of his own congregation, alleviating his former jail mate from the responsibility. The churchgoers rise up in revolt and seek out the fleeing preacher, tracking him down at one point in Martha’s own kitchen, where he has pleaded with her to hide him so that she might save him from his sins.

      Martha convinces her pious friends that he is not there, and they leave, the Reverend now on the run again, this time when confronted by another church member in the woods, striking and down and killing him.

      Surprisingly, as Fritzi Kramer in her Movies Silently blog reminds us, such topics as rape, church robbery, fraud, and murder had been the subject of other films, although mostly reported only as hearsay. But for the censors of the day, these subjects—most particularly in a work by a black director—became incendiary the censors insisting that his film was “immoral,” “sacrilegious,” and would “tend to incite crime” among its black viewers.

       Micheaux responded, according to film historian Pearl Bowser, that there was only one movie he knew of that might accomplish that, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” a film which the censors had recently approved.

       Clearly this was a personal film for the director, who according to Bowser was cheated out of his money and property by his father-in-law, a minister. And Micheaux, struggling with the censor’s demands, winnowed down his film of nine reels to only five before the film was approved. Micheaux’s original cut is considered today as a lost film; we have only his final edit; and of an estimated 26 films Micheaux made, this cut-down version is one of only 3 surviving.

       Accordingly, we have to wonder if the original ending was as benign as the final cut is wherein we discover that Martha has only been having a nightmare, sent by God apparently to show her the narrowness of her ways. Having discovered that Isabelle is still safe at home and the money in its proper place, she accepts a second visit by Sylvester who announces that one of his inventions has just been purchased, and shortly he will have enough money to marry Isabelle.

       Gathering up her life savings, Martha tells the couple that they won’t have to wait, sending them on a honeymoon whereafter they return to a modern, smartly appointed house she has bought for them and her to live in happily ever after.

     It’s hard to know, given this wrinkle in the story, whether or not Reverend Jenkins really raped Isabelle, drank, or had a criminal record. Where does the dream leave off and reality commence? Or, perhaps, this happy ending is really the dream, the other having represented the awful truth. By film’s end we don’t know what to believe, and somewhat like Martha, we must make a choice between the facts presented and what we feel in our hearts.

       In 2019 Body and Soul was finally added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry for works of cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. This film certainly fits all three of those categories.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).

Francis Ford Coppola | One from the Heart / 1982

a romantic paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Armyan Bernstein and Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay, with additional dialogue by Luana Anders), Francis Ford Coppola (director) One from the Heart / 1982

 

I suspect many critics and moviegoers disliked Coppola's absolutely charming One from the Heart for its lack of realism, something they may have felt was essential to his great Godfather films. In actuality, however, Coppola has always been a romantic, with a greater interest in the theatricality of film than in its realist perspectives. Any filmmaker who might undertake to direct the absurdly ridiculous (but loveable) fantasy of Finian's Rainbow has to be possessed of an inflatable heart, ready to expand at the slightest of yearnings. Equally incredible is Coppola's huge remake of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a murky tale in the first place, but even darker and more inscrutable in Coppola's Apocalypse Now, a film that nearly killed everyone in its making. Although I think any slightly perceptive viewer realized the Godfather films were romantically inspired—if nothing else Nino Rota's and Carmine Coppola's musical scores make that evident—yet many felt that the New York and Italian settings lent these films a deep sense of realist sensibility. Looking back on Godfather and Godfather II we can now see just how both films are romantic noirs at heart, bigger and more audacious than any "slice of life" movie might possibly have been able to achieve.

      In One from the Heart, however, Coppola seemed determined from the beginning to attempt to outdo Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, to make it clear to his admirers just how deeply his work was embedded in theatricality and melodrama. Instead of shooting on location, the entire film, including La Vegas' McCarran Airport, was shot at his Zoetrope studios—that is, except for the most theatrical scene of all, shot on the back lot of a "Las Vegas junkyard" set. The lighting is pure hokum, everything awash in stage lights throughout, while the minimal dialogue is elucidated through the music of Tom Waits, as if the work were a homegrown opera. Those who know my writings will immediately recognize that, while Coppola might have disappointed American audiences (the film cost more than 26 million dollars, while netting only $636,796, bankrupting his studio), the director gave me much of what I wanted to see.

     That is not to say that One from the Heart is an entirely successful work of art. The story is so simple that it is difficult to describe it as plot. Hank (with the sad-sack look of Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (the very much "egg-shaped" [as she is described by Hank] Terri Garr) are about to celebrate their 5th anniversary. But during the minimal celebrations Frannie announces she is leaving him. Long desiring to get away from her travel-agent job—with an intense desire to go anywhere or do anything out of the ordinary—she runs into the arms of the sleazy romancer Ray (Raúl Juliá), who, on the night she visits the club in which he has told her he sings and plays the piano, is serving as a waiter. He quits on the spot, impressing the desirous Frannie with his spontaneity, if nothing else. During two long nights, the couple make love and plot to escape to Bora Bora, often described in tourist books as "the center of the romantic universe." Both Frannie and Ray live life less in the moment than in a sort of idealized future, just the world Coppola has whipped up through his designers and lighting artists.

     If Hank is less imaginative and slow to catch on, with the help of his "friend" Moe (a role well acted by Harry Dean Stanton), he goes on his own romantic spree, picking up a circus artist, Lelia (Nastassja Kinski) along the way, and spending at least one long night with her wandering through the magical junkyard set I described above, where everything seems to proclaim the possibility of romantic apotheosis.

     Yet, "the little boy blue," Hank is not thoroughly satisfied with his new romance, and unthinkingly tracks down Frannie and Ray in a motel room, carrying her away like a naked trophy; she is, in fact, undressed, and must redress herself during their quick voyage home.

     This time, Frannie is determined to leave forever, and, apparently, is off to Bora Bora with her new lover. Desperately, Hank—the romantic urge rising up in him—rushes off to the airport to bring her home once more. Frannie turns to see him as the airplane door is about to close.

     Having previously pleaded:

 

                             If I could sing, I'd sing. I can't sing, Frannie!

 

Hank now bleats out "You Are My Sunshine." But it is too late.

      Hank returns to their house in despair, followed shortly after by a repentant Frannie.

      As one can observe in my brief recounting of the film's "story," there's not much there to keep one interested, and the acting—although certainly competent—is equally vague, since the chorus of Chrystal Gayle and Tom Waits far outweighs the lines given to the cast. As Janet Maslin complained in her New York Times review, "the sets are invariably more interesting than the people who inhabit them." This is simply neither a character nor a dramatic piece, but like much of opera, is based on the composer's skills and the director's ability to bring out the epic wonderment of an often slender tale.

      If you think that the real Las Vegas, with the bright lights of its architectural absurdities, would be sufficient as a theatrical backdrop, Coppola obviously disagrees, providing a far more lurid desert town with the kind of lit-up dizziness of Las Vegas in its early days combined with the ruins of that one-time world. The way Coppola portrays it, Las Vegas is far more romantic, even paradisiacal—as artificial as we know it to be—than any Tahitian island could possibly have been.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2011 

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).

Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein | The Strange Ones / 2011

the conundrum

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein (screenwriters and directors) The Strange Ones / 2011 [14 minutes]

 

Screenwriters and directors Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein have crafted a purposefully illusive tale in The Strange Ones, the kind of story that too often appears in newspaper headlines, where suspicion, doubt, and reality rub up together enough to make one fear an unknowable world where truth is nearly impossible to discern.

    A man (David Call) and a boy (Tobias Campbell) traveling together in a car find their auto stalling out, the elder of two telling the boy to grab his stuff, as the two are forced to hike it to get help.

     Before long, the two, sharing a large container of water, grow weary and worn out, particularly the boy, who finally sits, refusing momentarily to go further. The man gently tells the boy: “I know this sucks. But we just have to go a little bit further, and we can get a ride and we won’t have to walk anymore.”

     Soon after they spot a motel. After checking it out there seems to be no one else around, so the boy strips and enters the pool. For a moment there seems to be a real rapport between the two, the boy admitting to the man, “I didn’t mean that before. I was just kidding.” The man responds with a smile, “I know.”

    A cleaning woman (Merritt Wever), possibly the motel manager has by this time spotted them, and approaches the man, obviously ready to kick them out.

     After a dive, the boy rises to see the man talking with the housecleaner.

     The man has evidently explained to “the nice lady” that the two of them, younger and older brothers, are on a road trip to see their mother.

     “I was just telling her how we’re going to visit mom in the hospital,” the man seemingly coaches the boy.  

    The cleaning girl suggests that when she finishes up that she can give them a ride to the tow company that’s not to far away, the man seemingly appreciative, while the boy interrupts the conversation to declare that he’s thirsty.

     The helpful lady points to a machine in the back, and the man goes over to get a can soda.

     Meanwhile, the boy shares a story which immediately changes everything. She wonders where the coming from, the boy responding “nowhere.”

      “I thought he told me you were coming from Cantonment.”

      He’s lying, insists the boy. “If that’s what he told you, he’s lying.”

      “Why would he lie?”

      “Because he’s a liar.”

      “That’s not really a very nice thing to say about your brother.”

      “He’s not really my brother. He’s a kidnapper. And a drug addict. And a rapist. He kidnapped me and molests me all the time. He says we’re in love.”

      She looks back at the man pounding the stubborn machine.

      He talks further about there having been on TV, that his parents are looking for him and they hired a psychic “She said I was dead. You know, you should probably get out of her before he comes back. …I mean he’s probably planning on killing you. And raping you. And stealing your car. I mean we’re lost right now and he’s getting kind of desperate.”

       She looks back again at the “brother.”

       “You should probably run.”

      Then, just as suddenly, the boy adds, “Just kidding,” the very same words he earlier said to the man.

        Neither she nor the audience now as any ability to know what is true. Is the child disturbed, creating a reality that he has heard from TV or the internet. Or is he attempting to reveal the truth, asking in a roundabout way for help?

      The woman rises and walks off.

      The man, returning, wonders what he said to her.

      “Nothing,” declares the boy. “She just left.”

       “She was going to give us a ride.”

       “Yeah, well she was gross, and she made me sick.”

     The last sentence is perhaps the most revealing of all, suggesting the boy is, in fact, mentally disturbed.

     But what follows is even more shocking, as the man immediately slugs the boy in the face. Obviously, he is violent, reacting in such a manner with a child in unforgiveable, even if the boy might be living in a deluded reality.

      Looking out from the closed motel door, the cleaner sees the man grabbing up his duffel and pulling the boy away. She observes the man seemingly kissing the boy several times in order seek his forgiveness, as the boy turns back, revealing a blood have dripped down from his nose to his lip.

      Something is obviously going on between the two, and we can only hope that she might call and report their odd behaviors.

      This short film is self-evidently not about LGBTQ behavior, but concerns possible pedophilia which coincidently involves male on male sex. It is important not to confuse the two, although as I have often argued previously, it is a necessary topic in the large picture of queer behavior.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2024 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October 2024).