Ezra Li | The Variable / 2024

asked to be everything he isn’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ezra Li (screenwriter and director) The Variable / 2024 [9 minutes]

 

Writer and director Ezra Li stars in his short film as X, a racially ambiguous actor, obviously of mixed Asian descent—although not at all that obvious to the director (Peter Friedman) who has selected him to play the ex-partner of his stock-handsome leading white man (Ty Molbak) in what the director believes is a radical act of casting, a gay man come back to challenge his former lover albeit to lose out to the woman with whom his leading man has since fallen in love.

     X begins in a strange feminine costume playing the character as if he was told to employ an accent that sounds like it might have escaped from some Transylvanian-like Hollywood time warp. Obviously, along with the ridiculous script, it is working.

     Accordingly, the director suggests they play with other possibilities. Although he sees the boring Leading Man as having been perfect, he suggests X try it with a Spanish accent, along with an occasionally Spanish word tossed in. To him Li certainly looks Spanish and must, accordingly, speak the language.

     Miraculously, X transforms himself to be a Spanish-like drag queen throwing in mostly Spanish-sounding words in order to sound convincing, in the process actually making it a much more fascinatingly campy film that the supposed “hero” and his director might ever have imagined.

     Things still out going right, however, and the director and his casting director wonder if he might perform the effeminate villain as being French.

      Li refuses to even consider that alternative, suggesting that perhaps the character might be Asian. The director, however, insists that Li doesn’t at all look Asian to which the X replies, and what does an Asian look like?

     We perceive the director’s vision of an Asian in the very next scene where X is dressed as a Japanese Samauri warrior, eventually with sword in hand.

      Finally refusing to go any further, he dresses all in black, and now looking more like the venerable villain Fu Manchu demands a gun from props, aiming it at the hero. Nonplussed by lines that are not in the script, the Leading Man demands that he stop, reminding him that it is he, X, who must die.

     X changes the story, shooting the Leading Man dead.

     We suddenly realize this has only been in Li’s imagination, and he ultimately refuses to pretend to embody any figure involved with such a ridiculous production, while yet again losing a job due to racial and sexual stereotypes.

     Li graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Southern California in 2018.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

William Feroldi | Inflatable Swamp / 2010

the void within

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Feroldi (screenwriter and director) Inflatable Swamp / 2010 [14 minutes]

 

The short films which I regularly review with full seriousness generally are reviewed by others in only a very few on-line and even fewer print sources, many of the commentators devoting only a

few lines of often quite amateurish comments. It’s clear what struck the reviewers of William Feroldi’s 2010 short film Inflatable Swamp was primarily the hunky hirsute Francis Beraud’s (titled in the credits as the “Resident”) almost constant nudity throughout the film and the sexual frankness with which British director William Feroldi treated his characters, who suck and fuck and bathe throughout nearly all of the 14-minute duration of the movie.

     Dave Hall of the Celluloid Review, for example, summarizes what I presume was the film’s original response:

 

“…For those with a-liking for male frontal nudity in their films - did anyone say no?, then it has to be said that this work ranks as one of the most copious monty works I've seen to date; certainly for the short film genre. And whilst it lacks the homoerotic intensity of the films of the like of Julián Hernández, amongst others, the beauty of this piece lies in its sense of reality, given here Feroldi sets out to speak, albeit in a laconic fashion, of the naked desire for human contact and whilst the emphasis is on the word naked, the narrative nevertheless sets out to showcase a man who by way of fate, is forced to see the life of the man in front of him; rather than just the body of his latest one-night stand. An emotional wake-up call, indeed.”

 

     Hall’s response, in comparison with others, was quite sophisticated. Yet he hadn’t quite detected, it seems to me, this wonderfully charming short film’s comic tone. Beraud is presented not so much as a “nude” individual but a strutting cock, in wait in his apartment for anyone who might take up his challenge to appear at his door with a blue balloon with an uninscribed label attached.

      The balloon floats temporarily to the bedroom ceiling where it waits out his short sexual encounters, mostly involved—if we are to believe the comments “the Resident” later attaches to the blue balloons—involve blowjobs, also revealing his sexual partners’ cock size. These blue balloons, surely like the “blue balls” he seems to fear if he doesn’t have endless sex, serve as trophies of his conquests. The bathroom ceiling is filled with blue balloons, perhaps among many previous others who have popped or lost their air.

      In this “inflatable swamp” the denizen of the deep desire comes up for air simply to swallow down a protein shake, desiring perhaps but refusing the rich chocolate cake he also has at the ready.

      The first “conquest” (Edwin Ray) we observe our libidinal hero recording, he describes the man still in the apartment, as a “6-inch average sucker.”

      The Resident hardly has time for his bath and a shake before his next sexual partner, Luke (Paul Huntley), shows up at the door, blue balloon in hand.

     The balloon goes to the ceiling almost a quickly and the new guest’s pants are unzipped. It begins with apparently the standard, fellatio. But Beraud soon pulls him into bed, as Luke, donning a condom, begins to fuck the hunk. In the midst of the act, however, he becomes weak and pulls out a blood test kit, evidence that he is diabetic. Our naked hero rushes to the kitchen to bring back one of the delicious slices of chocolate cake he previously resisted, handing to his new sexual partner, who gratefully devours it.

 

 

      Like a cave man or a creature of some hidden lagoon suddenly discovering the existence of the “other,” Beraud finally takes a finer to wipe away some of the chocolate icing which he has so long refused off the other man’s lips, speaking the first lines of the movie: “What did you say your name was again?”

      For the first time in his life, in this comic parody, a sexual conquest has become a person, a man with a delicious treat on his tongue who is also willing to fuck instead of suck. The empty man seems to have found someone to help fill up the void within.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

Gillo Pontecorvo | معركة الجزائر (La battaglia di Algeri) (The Battle of Algiers) / 1966, USA 1967

a beautiful lie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gillo Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas (screenplay), Gillo Pontecorvo (director) معركة الجزائر (La battaglia di Algeri) (The Battle of Algiers) / 1966, USA 1967

 

Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is a carefully crafted fiction, based on real facts, pretending to be a documentary. It’s also a work in which writers Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas appear to be objective while basically siding with the Algerian revolutionary cause and the National Liberation Front (FLN). While the film appears free from romanticizing the city and its people, it, nonetheless, still represents a slightly glorified notion of both. And because of these contradictions it still remains a powerfully watchable from today, some 50 years after its making.

       Originally, the film was to have been a psychologically based study of an American journalist who gradually loses his faith in the French rule. The role was to have been played, astoundingly, by Paul Newman. One supposes it might have been a film somewhat like the cinema versions of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. And later, with a different script by Saadi Yacef, it might have been more of a propagandistic work had Pontecorvo not rejected it. In short, the remarkable film that today exists is somewhat of a miracle.

        What the director—after interviewing many figures involved and carefully capturing the jerky motions of the hand-held camera and the grainy textures of newsreel footage—finally achieved is a kind of reportage that shows the vast cruelty of colonialism while refusing to downplay the equal cruelty of the terrorist methods of the revolutionaries.

       We sympathize, in other words, with the Algerian revolutionaries while at the same time are appalled by some of their methods, particularly the random bombings which so remind us of ISIS and Al Queda-inspired attacks in France, the US, and elsewhere. At one point we can only flinch with recognition when the FLN members demand a moral cleansing of Cashbah, particularly when we observe an elderly drunk being attacked by gangs of young boys who throw and pull him down a long set of stairs.

     Yet, as critic Peter Matthews observes, we cannot help but agree with history, realizing the necessity of the Algerians to take back their own country from the often-brutal French, particularly when the local police chief retaliates by bombing a supposed address of a suspected murderer, killing innocent children, women, and men in the process. And, as Matthews suggests, the natives, far from being exoticized, in Pontecorvo’s work seem the be made of flesh and blood, while it is the ruling French police and wealthy elites who are pale and distant; the director hardly ever allows them even a close up, while we get beautiful details of each of the terrorists’ face. History, after all, is on their side.

         The only professional actor in The Battle of Algiers is the French stage actor, Jean Martin, the handsome, swaggering Colonel Mathieu, called in to quiet the rebellion. His methods are so convincingly real that even the Pentagon played this film for their officers, presumably in order to help them to comprehend the revolutionary cells, wherein only groups of three knew of each other’s existence, since they were interlinked only by close friendships, and even when recruited are tested, as the young hero is, told to kill a policeman, but given a gun with no bullets.

        How shocking this film must have seemed upon its first release. The French banned the film for five years, even after it had won several awards. Today, of course, several of the same methods—the use of both women and children to do bombings, the existence of sleeper cells, etc.—are writ large in newspaper and magazine articles. But at the time, what the public knew about terrorist methods had mostly to do with World War II underground activities. Pontecorvo’s film changed all of that.

       In fact, the unstated heroes of this film, the FLN, as the film makes clear, did not even win the fights of 1954 and 1957, and the film begins and ends in their betrayal by a tortured Algerian which results in the French discovery of the “heroes’” hiding place. Only a coda reveals the actual results of their activities, with the French being ultimately forced to give up their control of the country. The vast atrocities of the Algerian War, with the death of thousands on both sides, in short, is presented as almost a footnote. The Battle of Algiers is presented simply as a trigger, a beginning of the end, which, in turn, further helps to objectify it from the messy truths hinted at in Resnais’ earlier Muriel and expressed in far more surreal terms in Mohammed Dib’s 1962 novel Qui se souvient de la mer and his Algerian trilogy before it.

     Much has been made of this film’s ties to Rossellini’s neo-realist movies, Open City and Paisan, the latter of which influenced Pontecorvo to begin making films; but those cinemas, as great as they are, are far more straightforward about their narrative-based structures, while The Battle of Algiers is simply a more beautiful lie.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2018).