Lucan Schmitz | Florence / 2022

the mendacity of being queer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Bozick and Luan Schmitz (screenplay), Luan Schmitz (director) Florence / 2022

 

Matthew Florence (Jack Bozick), a shy nerdy kind of gay boy makes an appointment to meet up with Justin (Luan Schmitz). The two boys have a pleasant day catching views of their beautiful city, San Francisco. But when it finally turns into a sexual rendezvous, Matthew backs off, fearful of even kissing someone he’s just met, and nervous about the possibility of his parents discovering his sexuality since he has yet told them. He’s only 18, but is about to turn 19, which somehow has more significance to him than the legal age of consent in California which he already reached. Perhaps he’s still in high school or plans to live with his parents for while longer yet. The film does not quite explain his fixation with adding an extra year.

   Justin wonders why he hasn’t discussed his sexuality with his parents yet, Matthew explaining that he’s seen videos on the net in which a young man comes out to his parents, a lot of them ending in disaster, the child being beaten, kicked out his home, and even worse—which suggests me that for all the positive things gay movies have brought into the world, they can also be detrimental. If nothing else, Matthew knows he’s not the only gay boy in the world—how could he not in San Francisco?—but he’s also come to fear the whole “coming out” process in a way in which previous generations might not even have imagined.

     Justin promises not to follow him on the internet or tell anyone else, if Matthew will only provide with him his phone number and “hang out” with him again.

    They do get together again and continue to meet up on a quite regular basis, a relationship developing between them, each sharing their favorite views of the city and ocean, etc.—just what those “coming out” movies generally signal to show a developing love.

     Time has passed, and Matthew is now about to turn into the magical 19-year-old man. Now at their private birthday celebration on sushi, Justin gives his Matty a special bracelet. Might this be the coming of age/coming out film that Matthew has been seeking out?

     But no, something evil comes this way as the next day Matthew rushes off with a final kiss to get home for his family gathering. Justin grabs his cellphone, communicating to someone: “He just left. I think he’s ready. Let me know if today is the day.”

   We seem to have suddenly entered a mystery adventure, perhaps even something worse. What does Justin and the receiver of this message have store for the innocent boy?

      And finally the director awards us with a meeting of the supposed gorgons, Matthew’s parents (JeJe Gentry and David B. Schively). Both seem absolutely delightful, well-educated, and warm and loving. These are the kind of people with whom you might want to sit down and share even your deepest secrets. And sure enough, Matty finally opens up to tell them that he’s gay, his father responding, “Gay, there’s nothing wrong with that,” and his mother adding, “We’re so glad you told us,” their son almost a little bit disappointed that there is utterly no startlement or challenge.

    Yet he’s so pleased, he also announces that he has a boyfriend, his mother immediately wondering when they can meet him. Asked if he has a picture of him, Matthew pulls out his cellphone and shows them, his mother agreeing that he’s handsome, his father pausing before repeating the word. The moment he leaves the room, the parents turn to one another overjoyed that he has finally told them, making it clear that they have long been waiting for this much-delayed revelation.

     Almost immediately after, the father insists that he needs to go make a call. The call is to, you guessed it, Justin. “You’re my son’s fucking boyfriend. Are you crazy?” For a moment we are even more confused. Is the father having an affair with Justin? What is his relationship to him?

     We soon discover that the father has actually hired Justin to help get Matt out of the closet, and his furious when Justin tells him he is now in love with him. “Get out of this life. Your job is done.”

     Unfortunately, from his upstairs window Matthew has heard the entire conversation. The betrayal may be even worse that the treatment of young gay boys in the “coming out” films Matthew has been watching. Storming downstairs and picking up his father’s cellphone, he discovers that the boy to whom his father has just spoken is named Alexander, with the same number as Justin.

     The mother is also startled by the news, betrayed as well by her husband’s actions. And at that very moment Matthew realizes that his parents knew he was gay the entire time without talking to him about it. That his father also hired the man who is now his boyfriend to help him turns it into an even further debacle. How can the father Mark and his son ever again ever come to terms with one another? Moreover, his own boyfriend, Justin/Alexander has lied him as well, not admitting that the relationship between them was part of a “job.”

     One almost longs for the good old days of a father taking up the rod and sending his son out of the house into the streets forever! Not really, of course, but this modern-day comic version of experience is certainly not as clear about the issues surrounding heterosexual intrusion and love.

     This is pure farce. Where do we go from here? Even more ridiculously we now learn that Mark hired Justin from Craig’s listen where “You can hire people to do things….” Perhaps we have entered the Twilight Zone. It turns out he hired an actor in Alexander without knowing he was also gay.

     Through Matthew’s closed bedroom door, the father attempts to tell him that they have long known he was gay, and were simply worried about making him happy, apologizing for his intrusion into his son’s life. The door isn’t opened.

    Now speaking in Spanish, the mysterious Justin/Alexander confesses to his friend, Juan (Pablo Ruiz) just how he too has fucked up. Has Justin also hidden even his ethnicity if performing his job, in his courting of Matthew? Layer after layer, we see how everyone has lied with the best of all possible intentions—with the exception of being honest.

     Regarding homosexuality, apparently, honesty is the most difficult of all possibilities. The “honest” coming out movies struck terror into the young gay man’s soul. His parents didn’t dare honestly confront him about his sexuality. Justin/Alexander in fear of losing the boy with whom he’d fallen in love, could not get up the courage to tell him of his own background, his profession as an actor, his relationship with the boy’s father. And Matthew couldn’t even imagine it was possible to tell the most open-minded people in the world that he was gay. Clearly, as the farcical comedy reveals, speaking the truth around the issue of being queer is not an alternative even today. I have to admit, I cried a little about that always evident truth.

    Unfortunately, Alexander’s friend Juan’s answer, a bunch of roses and a box of chocolates, is the answer of almost every predictable heterosexual comedy to a romantic dilemma. Yet love is love, isn’t it? Fortunately, Safeway was out of flowers, and Alexander’s roses have become a pineapple instead. To my way of thinking, that’s gay!

    Too bad that this charming film might not tightened up its script just a little, that Luan Schmitz (aka Luan Larbac) couldn’t afford professional actors, and that he hadn’t chosen an editor who might have more quickly cut away from the cars, showers curtains, and walls when the characters have already exited the scene, helping establish a more energetic rhythm in sync with farces such as this. This might have been a small masterwork.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

Henry Hills | Henry Hills: Selected Films (Porter Springs 3, Kino Da!, Money, SSS, Goa Lawah, Little Lieutenant, Bali Mécanique, Porter Springs 4, Electricity and Failed States) / 1977-2008

dancing artists

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henry Hills Henry Hills: Selected Films (1977-2008) (Porter Springs 3, Kino Da!, Money, SSS, Goa Lawah, Little Lieutenant, Bali Mécanique, Porter Springs 4, Electricity and Failed States)

 

New York filmmaker Henry Hills studied with James Broughton, George Kuchar, and Hollis Frampton at the San Francisco Art Institute, and was influenced by Bruce Connor and Harry Smith. The other afternoon I watched several of his short films, including the 1977 silent short, Porter Springs 3, Kino Da! (1980), Money (1985), SSS (1988), Goa Lawah (1992), Little Lieutenant (1994), Bali Mécanique (1994), Porter Springs 4 (1999), Electricity (2007), and Failed States (2008).

     Let me begin my discussion by reiterating the general statement about Hills’ work: that it all very much deals with dance, in some cases, such as SSS incorporating the works of actual dancers (Sally Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Harry Shepperd, Lee Katz, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano, Ginger Gillespie, Mark Dendy, and others) and Bali Mécanique, which involves four traditional Bali sections of the Lelong dance (the Condong, the Bapang, the Penipoek, and the warning of the Guarda). But even works without dance, often appears, in his usually frenetic intercutting, to be a kind of dance—of images, words, figures, and color.

     Secondly, Hills often works with New York poets (such as my friends Charles Bernstein, James Sherry, Diane Ward, Ron Silliman, Allan Davies, Jack Collom, Bruce Andrews, and others), and pieces with other filmmakers such as Abigail Childs, composers and audio artists such as Christian Marclay, John Zorn, and Zenna Parkins, and playwrights such as Richard Foreman—in a work not discussed here.

      The humorous yet seriously probing Money, for example, sends almost all of the figures mentioned above to the New York streets to speak about and read works about their needs or disregards for money. Hills then chops up their comments into a manic mishmash of single words, short phrases, and slightly longer sentences which clearly express not only the freshness and energy of these mostly younger artists, but the importance and comic urgency of what that word might mean to them. I knew most of the people involved in this work, and was both delighted and a bit shocked to see these friends dressed in the style of the mid-80s and to revisit their then fresh faces. The  beautiful Ward looked more like a teenager, and Andrews, Sherry, Silvers, and Bernstein—all born performers, seemed a bit more like street hucksters and poets and dancers, but then that’s the point: in a sense they were, as Bernstein would later write of poetry, pitching their art.

      The earlier Kino Da! uses poetry in a different way to create a kind of zaum-like work similar to a mix of Russian poet Khlebnikov and the American poet Stein, read by San Francisco poet Jack Hirschman (also a friend).

      Little Lieutenant steals Weimar cabaret scenes, German labor footage, and images from Walther Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (see My Year 2015), combining these with John Zorn’s arrangement of Kurt Weill’s “Little Lieutenant of the Loving God,” along with choreography by Silvers and Cydney Wilkes to give us a stunning sense of what Weimar Berlin was before the Nazi takeover.

      Goa Lawah focuses on the dance of the bats in the sacred bat tree in Bali, as their pitched-voices accompany their upside down antics; while Failed States represents the spin of machines and humans which end in their collapse, all accompanied by the poem “Guru Guru Gatha” by Jackson MacLow (yet another good friend). Electricity centers on the dance of the high wire trams in Prague set against the backdrop of other significant sites.

       Perhaps only in the more personal Porter Springs movies, which return the filmmaker to a Georgia mountain retreat where his family visited almost every August, does this pace let up a bit. Yet even here, in the third manifestation of those films, the trees weave in and out with wind in a heaving motion that seems to call up, once again, dance; and in Porter Springs 4, made up of family home movies shot over 20 years, family members leap into air and jump into water in a near ritualistic pattern.

      The short music video commissioned by John Zorn’s Elektra Records calls up both the film noir images of Jules Dassin’s film of the 1950s and scenes from Bernstein’s West Side Story.

       By the end of watching these 10 short films and 1 music video, I felt that I too was sharing an evening of marvelous home movie about friends and acquaintances from the present and years past. While some might define Hill’s “palette,” so to speak, a very limited one, in its very specificity, his films become almost a kind of time box for a group of talented, mostly New York-based artists. Just as Teju Cole recently described William Christenberry’s photographs of Hale County Alabama and his own works of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park as a way to capture time in images, so too does Hills’ use of the same poets, playwrights, dancers, musicians, and other artists throughout his career document a very specific history of time and place, a process he repeats in his return to a beloved spot in his four Porter Springs films.*

 

*Teju Cole, The New York Times Magazine (February 5, 2017), pp. 14-17.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).

       Perhaps only in the more personal Porter Springs movies, which return the filmmaker to a Georgia mountain retreat where his family visited almost every August, does this pace let up a bit. Yet even here, in the third manifestation of those films, the trees weave in and out with wind in a heaving motion that seems to call up, once again, dance; and in Porter Springs 4, made up of family home movies shot over 20 years, family members leap into air and jump into water in a near ritualistic pattern.

      The short music video commissioned by John Zorn’s Elektra Records calls up both the film noir images of Jules Dassin’s film of the 1950s and scenes from Bernstein’s West Side Story.

       By the end of watching these 10 short films and 1 music video, I felt that I too was sharing an evening of marvelous home movie about friends and acquaintances from the present and years past. While some might define Hill’s “palette,” so to speak, a very limited one, in its very specifity, his films become almost a kind of time box for a group of talented, mostly New York-based artists. Just as Teju Cole recently described William Christenberry’s photographs of Hale County Alabama and his own works of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park as a way to capture time in images, so too does Hills’ use of the same poets, playwrights, dancers, musicians, and other artists throughout his career document a very specific history of time and place, a process he repeats in his return to a beloved spot in his four Porter Springs films.*

 

*Teju Cole, The New York Times Magazine (February 5, 2017), pp. 14-17.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).