Adam Salky | The Dare Project / 2018

the last real kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Brind (screenplay), Adam Salky (director) The Dare Project / 2018 [34.26 minutes]

 

Salky’s film was not only well-directed and excellently shot with brightly hued colors by cinematographer Rick Siegel, but through David Brind’s script offered its millennial audiences something they related to, a good-looking gay hero who, only mildly bullied, was able to break through his sense of outsiderness, if only briefly, to spar with, challenge, and even initiate sex with the most popular, rich boy school jock, an act that had indeed come to define such fulfilling early “coming out” films such as British director Simon Shore’s Get Real (1998).

      In fact, this short film became so very popular that the director and writer were encouraged to do a short sequel, released with the first film, in 2018, titled The Dare Project, which featuring the same cast members brought them again into contact in the thirteen years since their first encounter.

     Unfortunately, although both actors have kept quite trim bodies and in Fleming’s case has developed into an even more handsome Ben, the new screenplay has not dated as well. We don’t know what Ben now does for a living, only that invited by a company head, Rob (West Liang) to Los Angeles with hopes of joining his “team,” probably something to do with filmmaking. After all Ben might now be a brilliant lighting director. But we do know he is openly gay, inviting in a Grindr or some other app’s hookup to his hotel room.

      At the party Rob gives for him, he runs into Johnny after all of these years, this time not a major player in the hierarchy, but only invited to the event as the fiancé of Samantha (Rachele Schank), a friend of Rob’s wife. White Ben is apparently quite successful, at least important enough that a wealthy man, once again with a full-sized pool attached to his moderne-style house, this time throwing a party in his honor, Johnny, as he puts it, is “between jobs,” and clearly not very happy about it.

      This time it is Johnny who seems somewhat more interested in Ben than the other way around, particularly after denigrating his own body, when Ben assures him that he still looks good and that he has “something special about him.” But this time when Johnny sits down on a chaise lounge and, as in days long gone, removes his shirt, Ben imagines that the straight guy is flirting with him, as opposed to the past. And we can only wonder whether that may be true when Johnny sends his girlfriend off so that he might stay at the party and further talk with Ben.

      But Johnny’s conversation does not revolve around “dares” as much as it does about regrets, and one gets the feeling that his probing about Ben and his gay life has less to do with sexuality than with an attempt to comprehend where he went wrong in his own life.

       An outsider might possibly suggest that Johnny is still not being honest with himself, that he is still a kind of poseur, pretending to be exclusively heterosexual when he may be at least bisexual if not gay. But there is something different about the challenges he arouses in Ben, a deep desire to know not only where he has gone wrong but why his life is so pedestrian, the complaint so often of schoolyard princes, who ruled their insular kingdoms at 17 only to discover no one was there to support their reigns outside the school parking lot. Their “act” was only embodied in their flesh.

       Ben manages to make a few shallow dares* but seems only vaguely interested, having become more prickly, even self-satisfied despite what we discover through his own words has been an empty life since he has never been to find someone special to love. After only a few moments of conversation, it becomes clear that Johnny is no longer a possible candidate, and although he is still curious, the magic between them has dissipated even while they try awkwardly to conjure up once more that special evening back in high school.

       Moreover, their chance at reacquaintance is interrupted by Rob’s attempt to provide everything that might lure Ben to Los Angeles, in this case a true hunk of a man, Justin (Adam Hagenbuch), a part time actor and a full-time beauty who’s been sent into the pool obviously to warm up the waters for Ben. For a moment, Ben can’t believe his eyes, wondering if muscular apparition is even real, but when the male model truly comes on to him, he can only whimper “What makes you think I want to go to bed with you,” beauty answering something to the effect that he has seen himself in a mirror.     

     Ben takes a piss break to seek out Johnny before he leaves, discovering him in midst of another leave-taking. They resume their impossible conversation, with Johnny finally breaking the ice a little further by asking Ben if he could change anything from the past, what might it be. Ben replies, “I guess I’d start with a kiss instead of a blow-job.” Johnny reminds him that he did get a kiss, Ben arguing that he actually didn’t: it was just a joke, a play kiss. Suddenly Johnny seals that past with a real kiss, a long full kiss instead of simply a smile, and a standardly polite invitation to look him up next time Ben’s in town.

       Ben has no other choice but to return to his friend ordered-up from the Hollywood stable as they begin to fall into the empty chat preceding what we imagine will be another pleasant evening in the sack for Ben. But neither of these men, it is quite apparent, can truly “get” satisfaction. At least this time there’s the possibility that Ben may stay in town and even take up Johnny’s “dare”— but for what purpose we cannot quite imagine except to quell our curiosity whether the kiss will actually be followed up with serious sex, an uninterrupted blow job. 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Adam Salky | Dare / 2005

first kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Brind (screenplay), Adam Salky (director) Dare / 2005 [16.25 minutes]

 

Perhaps the first of the openly LGBTQ films to feature game-playing as a major structural element was Adam Salky’s 2005 short film Dare (not to be confused with Germain Choffart’s film of the same name which I write about in this same context), and its continuation in his 2018 work which without specific references to the “Truth and Dare” game-playing nonetheless appropriates the same challenges without mentioning the game except through its title.

      In this work the young, quiet, somewhat bullied, and yet determined gay boy Ben (Adam Fleming)—nicknamed “Light Boy” both because of his work in the school’s theater department as a lighting worker and perhaps because of lack of a social position in the high school hierarchy—dares himself one evening to come out of his solitude which is clearly a shell of self-protection. Although Ben is a good friend to one of the most popular girls in school, Alexa (Marla Burkholder), who as the film begins is starring as Blanche DuBois in a horrifying bad high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire, he is clearly equally an outsider to nearly all others, or at least to those who for him matter.

      Inevitably, he is particularly smitten by Johnny (Michael Cassidy), clearly the most popular and certainly the most handsome boy in the school, who plays Stanley in the school production so badly that even kissing Blanche leads him to forget all his lines. With only a week before the opening, he is severely chastised by the adult drama director and his fellow thespian, Alexa, who in anger over her co-star’s ineptness will not even drive him home (why this wealthy young boy doesn’t possess a car is never explained), which leads suddenly to Ben’s recognition of a possible entry into Johnny’s world as he offers him a ride home in his car and the possibility of his helping Johnny learn his lines.

       Even Johnny is suspicious about the offer; and when they arrive at Johnny’s family moderne home with a full-sized pool replete with a bar stocked with several buckets full of the best brands of champagne and wines, the would-be actor doesn’t at all appear to be ready to study the lines Ben pitches to his schoolmate while he puts on a swim suit and flops down in a lounge chair. For his part, Ben, recognizing the expensive champagne on ice, pops a cork and begins to intentionally swig down a full bottle of the elixir of fortitude and forgetfulness.

     After only a few moments of cuing lines for the foggy-headed Johnny, Ben becomes almost another person as he probes his heartthrob about his sex life and challenges his braggadocio, suggesting when Johnny tosses out the brag that life would be perfect with a good girl and blowjob, that he is willing to take the girl’s place.

     This time even when Johnny tosses the epithet of “fag” in a seemingly self-reflexive manner (“I’m not a fag”), Ben counters that he is not the one claiming to need servicing and perhaps that Johnny is just afraid. Amazed by the tone of Ben’s challenges Johnny wonders what has come over him, turning him into such an “evil” dude.

 

     As Johnny even briefly considers the possibility before he swims off, Ben throws out yet another dare of sorts, announcing that although he is about to graduate that he has never yet been kissed by anyone. And what’s more, he is pained by the fact. Startled again by his guest’s unusual honesty, Johnny reluctantly admits that he’s never had a blow job either. And intending to resolve Ben’s problem he swims over to him to plant a kiss on his cheek, presumably suggesting it might be Ben’s turn to grant him his desire.

       As Johnny lays back at the side of the pool, Ben ups-the-ante of his dares even further, moving into the handsome boy’s crotch and beginning to lick his navel moving down toward his cock, as the camera moves up to Johnny’s face, where we observe his early attempts to resist and repel the predator before it becomes awash with the pleasure of the event for which neither of them have been prepared.

     In a maddening coitus interruptus, however, Johnny’s posse of males and females, including Alexa, arrive, brews in hand, forcing Johnny to push away Ben so suddenly and violently that the boy falls back into the water, struggling for a moment to regain his bearings, rising a bit like Venus from the waters, but with a bloody nose.

       Startled to see the outsider seemingly at home in Johnny’s pool, his friends wonder about Ben’s presence, their always posturing leader insisting that the drama teacher has sent him to help him study his lines, as the others quickly pull Ben away into the house.

      But Johnny, pulling on his shirt, turns back for a moment to look at Ben now alone and vulnerable once more in the waters below him, gradually flashing a gentle and affable smile, almost as if to suggest that the secret they now share might open up other possibilities in the future.

       Yet, of course, there is no future here, the film ending without suggesting or even logically allowing any other communication between the two. Johnny has recommitted to his old ways, even if Ben has if only for a moment realized his own powers to attract and even somewhat control the most popular boy in his class. For Ben it surely means an end to his slouching through the Bethlehem of his hometown. And, just as the central figure Léo learns in the last film I write about in this essay, these offstage and onstage actors are not so very able to play out their pretended roles.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

François Ozon | Action verité (Truth or Dare) / 1994

the real thing

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Ozon (screenwriter and director) Action verité (Truth or Dare) / 1994 [4 minutes]

 

The four 13- or 14-year-old adolescents in Ozon’s 1994 short film represent what might be described as the prototype of I am describing in this series of essays as works that explore sexuality past, present, and future through game playing. On the surface, the games played in these films seem fairly innocent until they reveal something to or about an individual which he, she or another has kept secret but is willing to reveal in order to challenge the status quo, either through that revelation or through the positive response of the other to whom the secret is revealed. And in that sense it does not so much involve a personal “coming out,” as a public one, a revelation to an individual or a community of friends of something previously felt to be inexpressible. The game actualizes or visually makes evident what the individual has been unable to express through language or daily social action.

     In this case, given the young ages of these French players—two boys, Remy and Paul (Fabien Billet and Adrien Pastor) and two girls, Hélène and Rose (Farida Rahmatoullah and Aylin Argun)—of “action verité” or “Truth or Dare” is basically an exploration of sexual variations through an adolescent lens. The players in this case begin with simple questions about whether or not they have “made out” with the opposite sex or dare each other to heterosexual kissing, in this first instance not even with the use of the tongue.

      That soon shifts to a dare to “suck face,” a more involved, but still timed, form of kissing; and quickly moves on other parts of the body, a request for one girl to lick the other’s foot.

       Finally, it gets down to a confession of one of the girls having slept with a boy, only to be called a “liar,” yet still insists that she has control over a guessing game to find out who it might be, questions squelched by the boys. A further dare requires Rose to fondle Paul’s dick through is pants.

      That, in turn, leads as these games often do to a dare of Remy to touch tongues with Paul for 5 seconds, a form of same-sex kissing, an act particularly difficult for the two boys given the generally homophobic response to such an act particularly at that age, when boys are first learning that they are “supposed” to be attracted only to the opposite sex and are highly curious about it. A few years earlier the same boys might have found no difficultly in kissing one another or even touching each other’s genitals, but at 14 their sexual urges and, perhaps even more importantly, the parental and peer pressures push the majority of them—the normative heterosexuals—toward the opposite sex and the abandonment of their previous “boys only” society. At this age they may even jack-off together but their thoughts must are supposed to be on the female sex.

      Paul doesn’t seem to especially mind it, but Remy spits out any share saliva, Paul shouting out that he doesn’t have AIDS, which itself suggests that the boys have been told or even taught that homosexuality is the cause of the dread epidemic, homophobia having become even more prevalent in the period of the film’s creation.

      In his dare, Paul takes the next logical step, requiring rose to put her hand inside Hélène’s panties. Both girls declare the boys to be immature jerks, but as required, proceed. But when her hand returns to sight we see menstrual blood upon it, all four these children suddenly becoming utterly silent as in those few seconds they have suddenly witnessed something far beyond what they might imagined in terms of smell or touch. Sexuality has suddenly become something very real without them perhaps being even able to explain it to themselves.

     Both boys and girls may in fact prefer to turn to their own gender rather than deal with what they cannot fully comprehend.

 

Los Angeles, June 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Douglas Messerli | The Games We Play [Introduction]

the games we play

by Douglas Messerli

 

Over a period of several months of watching short gay films, I observed that the people in many of these LGBTQ movies of the millennium often seem to engage in game playing far more than previous generations did as youths—at least in the movies—even bringing back a game sometimes played at certain parties of my own ancient time, “spin-the-bottle,” along with various versions of “Truth and Dare,” the game which US singer Madonna made famous.

     Game-playing, I realized is important to this generation not merely in order to bring people together and explore sexuality in general, but in a more complex society in which adolescents are also curious not only about discovering whether a girl or boy is sexually interested in them but whether or not they are even attracted to the same gender, games help to reveal to straights what queers had long communicated through language, playing language games such as “dropping beads” or using coded references, dropping in names and situations that have meaning to only someone who might be lesbian or gay.

    In a world of more open sexual possibilities, it is all the more confusing when it comes to determining who might be available and if they might be interested in oneself. As I’ve noted below, computer groups such as Grindr and others serve a true purpose for those seeking sex with like-minded others. But when it comes to finding out about one’s own peers, a good old-fashioned game “of spin-the bottle” often breaks the ice just as “Truth or Dare” reveals information necessary to discover about the other.

     And of course, these are not the only games young people play in order to get to know and please others. There are numerous games for slightly older individuals as well, including S&M role-playing to more theatrically-conceived activities. Most of the games beyond the moment of a party event involve play-acting to some extent, the ability to reveal and dodge sexual questions as they arise and appear necessary to be answered.

     Two of the films I discuss below may be seen as early exemplars of what later became far more common in short LGBTQ filmmaking, French director François Ozon’s Action verité 1994, perhaps the prototype of the genre, and US director Adam Salky’s 2005 film Dare, continued in his 2018 work The Dare Project, the latter two of which together may be said to have served the same role for this small genre as did Simon Shore’s Get Real (1998) for the extraordinarily popular “B” version of “coming out” films, both Shore's and Salky's films bearing significant connections.

      The others I write about, an international selection, represent a sampling of what I am sure I shall soon discover to be a much larger number of works: popular French filmmaker Pascal-Alex Vincent’s El Colo (Holiday Camp) (2010), Italian Giuseppe Bucci’s Una note ancora (One More Night) (2012), US director Dave Scala’s Grotto (2013), Danish Søren Green’s En eftermiddag (An Afternoon) (2014), the prolific US director William Branden Blinn’s Truth or Dare (2014), Mexican Julián Hernández’s Muchachos en la azotea (Boys on the Rooftop) (2016), French-born Germain Choffart’s Dare (2016), Dutch Niels Bourgonje’s Turn It Around (2017), Australian Sam Langshaw’s Amsterdam (2017), and three other French directors Olivier Lallart’s  PD (Fag) (2019), Thomas Raoul’s Bonhomme (2020), and  Quentin Jabelot’s Fauvre  (2021).

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2022 / October 14, 2024

 

Don Wingate | Kaye Ballard: The Show Goes On / 2019

where or when

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Wingate (director) Kaye Ballard: The Show Goes On / 2019

 

It seems to me that I always loved Kaye Ballard, the singer/comedian—and her talents don’t end there—but that can’t, obviously, be true since the only role that I actually heard her perform (dozens and dozens of times) was in the 1961 Robert Merrill and Michael Stewart cast recording musical Carnival in which she played The Incomparable Rosalie. I was only 14 at the time, and would not visit New York City until at least 8 year later; yet I fell in love with her—as well, I should add, with Anna Maria Alberghetti (who I did meet one evening years later), Jerry Orbach, James Mitchell, Pierre Olaf and the rest of that august cast—through her drunken rendering of the love/hate relationship she had, apparently off stage as well, with the James Mitchell character. The song was titled “Humming,” (she was brilliant at singing songs that represent a slightly tipsy chanteuse such as in her famous Rodgers and Hart rendering of “Where or When”), although I now prefer her performance in Carnival of “It Was Always You.”

     After reading a biography of lyricist John Latouche and while working on a piece on “My Favorite Broadway Songs,” I much later discovered her “Lazy Afternoon” from The Golden Apples, which easily made “My Favorite’s” cut.

     But I must have seen her as well on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show, The Mel Torme Show or The Perry Como Show; and, of course, I saw her, without knowing it, in The Ritz, in which even the handsome Treat Williams couldn’t make me divert my gaze from her.

     When last year an email message suggested I might watch the Don Wingate special live-streaming production of Kaye Ballard: The Show Goes On, I immediately signed up and waited patiently until 7:00 only to be told that I could not enter the platform I was viewing it through with two connections—the same problem Criterion had for a few weeks before they fixed it, despite the fact that my WIFI connection was my only entry onto the site.

     I was highly disappointed, but knew that it would eventually show up somewhere else, which it did this past week when I watched it with great delight on the Los Angeles Laemmle Movie Theater streaming service.

     I discovered, accordingly, that I was not the only one who had developed a crush on this woman just because of her immense talent and openness. It seems that everyone—except Phil Silvers who treated her badly and cut most her songs from her first full Broadway show, Top Bananas—was her “very best friend.” Marlon Brando, Carol Channing, Eve Arden, Julie Andrews, Mimi Hines, Spike Jones (with whose crazed orchestra she first performed), Ethel Merman, Desi Arnaz, Jerry Lewis (“I must have been the only American who truly adored him,” she observed), Judy Garland, Andy Warhol, Bette Davis, Alice Ghostley, Doris Day, Steve Allen, Woody Allen, Donna McKechnie, Liliane Montevecchi, Jerry Stiller, Ann-Margret…the list goes on. Many of these and others she also helped in their careers, since she often premiered the songs they later made famous, including “Fly Me to the Moon,” “My Man,” and “Cabaret” long before they tickled the vocal chords of Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Barbra Streisand, and Liza Minnelli.

     In fact, Ballard was, in part, responsible for the hiring of Carol Burnett (after she turned down a stint on The Gary Moore Show), Streisand, Joy Behar and numerous others. She was a true “Broadway Baby” a number which she sang on a revival of Follies, yet she was so much more.

      Singing for years in the most noted nightclubs in New York, including The Bon Soir, The Blue Angel, El Morocco, and elsewhere in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, she would draw in the crowds and celebrities like Garland, Merman, Davis, Betty Hutton, and others just to watch her sing brilliant imitations of their own renowned performances.

      After watching the tabulations of Wingate’s celebration of her life, it appears that except in her later years, Ballard was never without a gig, either in a nightclub, a theatrical revue (the old name for loosely bound musical entertainments), a Broadway show, a television series, or a film. Even the shows that closed out of town, such as the musical rendition of Molly Goldberg’s serial radio show The Goldbergs, Molly and noted composer Marc Blitzstein’s Reuben, Rueben were awarded deserved kudos by critics. She even famously played the flute.

     When one of the celebratory guests of The Show Goes On asks why, after she had become so incredibly famous hadn’t Ballard risen the very top of many legends with whom she was friends, he argues that it was, in part, the era in which she lived which demanded pigeon-holing performers. “The trouble was that Kaye Ballard was just too versatile,” he concludes.

     What Wingate doesn’t reveal is that Ballard was also a lesbian, somewhat closeted but open enough to appear in fundraising reviews in the late 1980s in the Pines on Fire Island. Ballard subtly refers to her sexuality in her memoir, writing “I found emotional connect with women like Liz [Smith] that I could never find with a man.” Smith, who later as a noted gossip columnist and editor of Cosmopolitan, was a self-declared bisexual who served as Ballard’s road manager in the 1950s. 

     It was certainly not a problem for her various audiences or even for me, who fell in love with her in a Marion, Iowa living room.

     This marvelous performer died, at the age of 93, on January 21st, 2019.

 

Los Angeles, August 3, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

 

Gary Halvorson and Mariusz Trebliński | Tristan und Isolde / 2016 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

the sublime and the ridiculous

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Wagner (libretto and music), Mariusz Trebliński (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Tristan und Isolde / 2016  [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

The first HD streaming production of the new Metropolitan Opera season, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is musically sublime, with outstanding performances by the great soprano Nina Stemme, Stuart Nelson (singing only his second Tristan), Ekaterina Gubanova as the intruding servant Brangäne, René Pape as King Marke, Evegeny Nikitin, singing the smaller role of Tristan’s loyal allay Kurwenal, and, perhaps most importantly, Simon Rattle conducting the Met’s great orchestra.

     Yet this version of Tristan und Isolde is often equally leaden and confusing through production director Mariusz Trebliński’s decision to set the opera on a war ship in Act One, and upon another ship and in that ship’s enormous lower-deck storeroom filled with large containers of what appear to be weapons all stamped with “Warning” in Act Two. The return to Tristan’s childhood home, where Kurwenal has set up like a hospital room, where other portions of the home, having undergone a fire years earlier, appear ready to collapse, is nearly inexplicable, particularly when Tristan retrieves his father’s military jacket from the floor of a nearly creosote leaden room.

      On top of this, set designer Boris Kudlička’s and projection designer Bartek Macias’ sets and projections sometimes clumsily recreated the story of the young Tristan’s loss of his mother (in child-birth) and father, along with the quite unexplained torching of their home and the woods around it, further making murky what is generally a fairly simple tale of love, consuming desire, death, and transfiguration.

     Certainly these various elements do keep our eyes quite busy during the opera’s many long, static passages; and certainly they help to make clear that part of Tristan’s determination to find love—first in his obedience of and service to the King of Cornwall and, later, in his love of Isolde—has a great deal to do with his being an orphan. The worlds of Tristan’s Brittany, Isolde’s Ireland, and Marke’s Cornwall, moreover, obviously are structures of military might achieved through violence—just the kind of world in which Wagner generally locates his operas. Everyone here is a loyal warrior or a traitor, with heroes being awarded and traitors (i.e, the other side) being destroyed.

       But these things are fairly obvious within the long narrative passages Tristan and Isolde recount throughout the opera, and hardly need be reasserted with such heavy-handed imagery and metaphorical projections.

       At moments, particularly the long, long love duet in Act II, the projections of clouds and spinning planets truly do give rise to the kind of splendiferous visions being experienced by the loving couple, particularly as Brangäne interrupts their “maddened” lovemaking with her beautiful off-stage song of warning—a moment, as Rattle himself described it, of near transcendence. But, for the most part, the maritime imagery and weapon’s room storage scenes seemed in opposition to the lovers’ Schopenhauerian ruminations about day/death and night/love. The fact that their verbal love play verges, itself, on gobbledygook is certainly reiterated by the drab surroundings of this production.

       And finally, the metaphorical ghosts of both Tristan’s child-self and his dead father, particularly in Act Three—although again much-needed visual elements while Tristan lies dying—created more murkiness than clarity. It’s apparent that Tristan is being visited by the ghosts of the past, but a child flashing the light of a cigarette-lighter into the dying man’s eyes seems nearly ludicrous—if not dangerous.

      As in all successful renditions of this great opera, moreover, any singer who credibly endures it is a wonder. Here, despite my cavils, this production, particularly given Rattle’s languid and highly nuanced musical direction, along with Stemme’s beautifully balanced and modulated singing and acting, will be recognized as one of the greatest of this opera’s performances.

      Finally, even if by slashing her wrists, Isolde doesn’t quite go “gently into that good night,” it allows her to represent her “Liebestod” as a gradual transformation of worlds through the gradual loss of blood, making Marke’s and Brangäne’s reentries, once again, simple intrusions on the inseparable lover’s lives.  In Tristan’s and Isolde’s love there is no room for others, not even room for living.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2016).