Julio Dowansingh | Family Affair / 2023

a dad and son act

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Anemone (screenplay), Julio Dowansingh (director) Family Affair / 2023 [16 minutes]

 

The truly delightful short comedy Family Affair begins by seeming to be about anything but what its title hints.

    High school senior Tanner (Bear D’Angelo), an intelligent student is told by his mother, Beverly (Donna Vivino) that he not only needs to stop jerking off, but that his douchebag friend, an effeminate black man, is waiting in the kitchen, and that if Tanner does not immediately come down to claim him, she might murder Tanner in his “fucking sleep.” After all, the friend is explaining why is trying to convince Beverly that it’s not her “fault” for being single. “Men are socialized to fear a strong, aggressive woman.”

     Did I forget to mention that Tanner is a transgender male? He saves the day by offering his mother a celebratory Mother’s day gift, one day late, which, so Beverly declares will permit him “to keep him living a little longer.”

     Beverly, we soon discover, is evidently working as an on-line sex worker.

    Just as in John Waters’ 1998 film Pecker, the typical US family is revealed to be something a bit different from what many might imagine it to be.

     Meanwhile, I should mention, Tanner has been communicating via his cellphone with someone who sounds like a possible sexual date, who given both of their comments sounds quite sinister. “Are we still doing this?” “Yes. Stop asking.”

     We have clearly entered a world where asking is beside the point.

     In Tanner’s classroom, his black friend Emily (Morgen McKynzie) is worried about Tanner’s recent decision, while addressing the only black make in the room, an apparent gay boy, as Simon and later Calvin (his is name, he [Emmet Smith] repeats is Kevin, proving white cis boys are not truly important in this world.)

      Emily warns Tanner than Beverly will murder her when she finds out, with Tanner responding that his mother has been threateningly to kill him for the last 18 years, which, if nothing else, makes it clear than at least Tanner is of age. Maybe their course in body science (in which the students have chosen to name their resident skeleton as “Boner”) is actually a college classroom, even if the film’s publicists insist they are high school students.

     Back on the cellphone, her correspondent is asking “Have you told your friends about us?” Tanner answers, “Yeah,” her phone friend presuming that “it’s a bad idea.” Asking if he’s told his mom, Tanner replies “That would definitely complete her mental breakdown.” Who is this cellphonic pervert we can only wonder?

     Tanner encounters his fellow jock Mike to who she explains that she cannot show up to practice, his mother being slightly (perhaps enormously) incontinent, while also helping the poor gay boy with his spilled backpack dioramic of imaginary figures. In most gay films Mike might have been Tanner’s secret heartthrob. But then, this is not your standard US High coming out film either. Kevin doesn’t even matter in this world of  “other” concerns.

     Tanner finally meets up at the office, inside of the predesignated parking lot, of the man with whom he has been communication. “Look, I’m starting to think is a big mistake,” says what appears to be a doctor, a psychologist, or just a straight businessman. I can vote, I can serve in the military, observes Tanner. “This isn’t just about you’re your age, the handsome stranger observes.

“Look, I done living my life for other people,” Tanner finishes off the conversation.

      As Tanner begins to unpack his bag, the stranger insists, “Not here. We’ll go to my place.”

      In his bedroom we hear words, with no appearances of the figures behind them: “Ow, that hurts.” “I’m doing my best,” just before the camera reveals the two in sequined gowns, and in flaming red mock wigs. “How do I look?” Tanner asks her father, who replies, “As beautiful as the day you were born.”

      We suddenly realize that in Jamaican-born Julio Dowanisngh’s film, they are about to share the stage in drag.

      All fury, Beverly shows up, opposed to the whole notion of her “son” appearing with her drag- performer husband, but also realizing that it’s hopeless. But when the mother finally explains she’s just there to support her “son,” Tanner and his father Tommy (Dan Domingues) take to the stage to do what we all know will be an incomparable act.

     The film ends with Tommy responding to Beverly’s act of love, “You know, Bev, you’re the only woman I would have ever married,” she responding, “Ditto,” closes this totally queer deconstruction of US notions of gender and sexuality.

     By the time we finish this short work, we thankfully exit the theater dizzily wondering what gender and sexuality is all about.

 

Los Angeles, October 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October 2024).

     

 

 

Arthur Hiller | Making Love / 1982

perfect couples

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barry Sandler (screenplay, based on a story by A. Scott Berg), Arthur Hiller (director) Making Love / 1982

 

Los Angeles couple Zack Elliot (Michael Outkean) and his wife Claire (Kate Jackson) are the perfect couple, he a popular oncologist and she a television network executive. Having met in college, they have now been married for eight years. They both share a love for Gilbert and Sullivan musicals and the poetry of Rupert Brooke. And, most importantly, their real estate agent has just found the perfect home for them, with Spanish-influenced design elements, P & G (peg and groove) hardwood floors, a “view from every window,” and with two fireplaces, one in the living room and other, as Claire has always hoped for, in the bedroom. As the agent declares: “It is the ideal young married couple’s home.” Zack loves the place equally, but is afraid that at this early point in their careers they just won’t be able to handle the finances, a view which she reluctantly shares; it’s just not the right time, both of them disappointedly having to decline the house of their dreams. But it is the early 1980s, and the future looks so promising—at least from a Reaganite/Republican point of view—that Zack soon after changes his mind, the couple over the early scenes moving into their new house and planning for a child, a future Rupert. This blessed pair, in fact, do spend early scenes making love, just as the title has warned us to expect. 

     Indeed, this privileged couple is so idyllically rendered in Arthur Hiller’s 1982 drama that any seasoned moviegoer is already on the lookout for something wrong or something soon to happen which might encroach on their already almost realized “American Dream.” All right, at a dinner party at Zack’s parents’ house we perceive that his father, Henry (Arthur Hiller), is more than a little dominating and a bit disdainful of his son’s career; his mother, Christine, nonetheless seems supportive and loving. Claire fights with her fellow producers for a more dramatically serious anthology of plays, perhaps something closer to Playhouse 90, but she has no success in convincing them; yet she is about to be given an even more prestigious position in the network.

     Zack has already been worrying her by his inexplicable hours, his lateness in coming home, the times she has called him to find he’s not at work; is he seeing another woman? On the other hand, we also know that he is personally attentive to some of his elderly patients—in one particular instance a woman who may need a mastectomy—taking time out to talk with them on a personal level the way few doctors show their caring. All right, there is that time while Zack is driving when a motorcycle with two hunky gay boys pulls up alongside him that when takes a double look, his gaze remaining just a little too long on their intimate hugs and nestlings. Another moment of revelation occurs when on his way home Zack pulls up in a backstreet strip where several hustlers stand, inviting one good-looking guy into the car before he gets cold-feet. And what about that short, hit-and-run visit to a gay bar?

     To be fair, director Hiller and writer Barry Sandler aren’t truly playing cat and mouse with their audience’s expectations. From the very earliest scenes they have already imposed a second narrative layer upon the film in which the woman who we soon after discover to be Claire and a man, who eventually we recognize as the handsome patient of Zack’s, Bart McGuire (Harry Hamlin) speak of a time in the future after their relationships have fallen apart, providing a myriad of evidence—including a stack of Gilbert and Sullivan records the man’s lover has left him—that clues us into the fact that the former lover of whom he is speaking is Zack. 

     Frankly, I find these confessional monologues to be interruptive and narratively unnecessary. The story contains all the information that their statements reiterate. Yet they attest to the honesty and integrity that Hiller and his writer display in their painful recounting of how a happily married man suddenly begins to realize his true sexual desires and suffers for not only being able to admit them to himself but because of the possibility that he have to abandon all that has previously defined him in order to seek out love in the form of another male.

      This 20th Century-Fox Film, with the full backing of the studio’s head of development Claire Townsend and Head of Studio Sherry Lansing, was one of the first to honestly portray a story where a happily married man leaves his wife for a gay man with the hopes of living an equally fulfilling life. As if just to prove just how radical this concept was we later read of the difficulty in finding a well-known actor to portray the role Harry Hamlin says ended his own career. At first they sought Michael Douglas to play the role of Zack, but he passed. Others such as Tom Berenger, Harrison Ford, William Hurt, and Peter Strauss claimed conflicts of scheduling, while the vast majority of actors Hiller approached for the two roles advised him that they did not want to be considered.

      Sandler makes it quite clear that the movie might not have been made had it not been for the women behind the project. “I don’t know if a male head of a studio – straight, gay, or indifferent – would have made this movie, but really I think it took a woman in 1980 to be able to say, “Yes, I’m going to make this movie.”

      Although this film from the beginning posits, for one of the first times in the history of LGBTQ filmmaking, that its major character might equally find happiness in the homosexual world that he had found in his previous heterosexual one, writer Sandler, working with his then-lover A. Scott Berg, still felt the necessity—or we might argue demonstrated the reality of the era—of having Zack suffer the now-clichéd patterns of coming out: the painful alterations between curiosity, denial, attraction, exploration, and admission. For most LGBTQ individuals, the process is a slow and gradual one building up over the years beginning in childhood, but for Zack, at least as portrayed in the movie, his homosexual desires have been so very closeted that he hardly has time to adjust to the suddenness of his new feelings—which is perhaps how it must have almost seemed to the straight actors portraying gay men kissing and even portraying sex upon the screen. 

 

      This is further complicated when Bart, Hamlin’s character, himself plays coy about his gay self-identification, perhaps simply to entice Zack out of the closet, but also one senses to protect himself from becoming too deeply involved with his doctor-friend.

       That further brings up another set of problematics with the film script’s premises. Since Claire and Zack have been so deeply in love, how does one represent her sense of betrayal and justified anger with the sudden end of a marriage through which she has partially identified her own being without turning her into a monster for whom we can no longer have any sympathy? The balance, as the saying goes, is an extremely delicate one, and Sandler’s handling of this issue also falls into cliché-ridden patterns of anger, rejection, self-questioning, denial, self-sacrificial acceptance (she’ll permit him to have outside gay sex if only he remains within the shell of the heterosexual relationship), and finally acceptance and withdrawal. Hiller and Sandler attempt to encapsulate these reactions in short scenes, one of which takes her on a rather unbelievable visit to a man whose telephone number she found written on a book of matches, who, since he and Zack never again encountered one another, has no idea what information she is seeking.

      Basically, however, the movie does justice to her point of view. Of far greater significance is how to portray Zack’s lover Bart. The movie, by this point, has moved into the territory like Hiller’s earlier film Love Story into pure soap opera, a genre generally grounded in normative values that are challenged and, with disastrous results, transgressed, Zack is represented as desiring the same kind of monogamous relationship he had with Claire, only with a person of another gender. 

      In the pre-AIDS early 1980s, however, many if not most gays had so such values. Desiring a different bed-mate every night was not seen as a tragic flaw but rather as something joyful and desirable, a way of sexual existence that rejected hetero-normative values. Bart, who expresses just this point of view, accordingly, comes off almost as a villain not only for the hetero-conditioned Zack but for heterosexual audience members who might nonetheless still be sympathetic with the film’s argument. Contrarily, the gay novelist Bart goes much further in attempting to accommodate his new lover’s desires than you might have expected him to. Zack, both in his trauma of coming to terms with his new life and his demands that his lover maintain the same monogamous values he has grown used to puts an enormous burden on the normally free-floating and popular bar-going Bart Maguire.

      The post-AIDS / COVID-ridden world of 2020 Bart’s sexual appetites read almost like a outline for self-destruction, whereas when this movie was originally released Hamlin’s character might have been recognized as far more appealing to LGBTQ audiences. That reason alone might explain much of the backlash that this work received within the gay community at the time it appeared. It would be interesting to compare and contrast this film with Bill Sherwood’s far more complex exploration of similar issues in his Parting Glances of only three years later.

     By the time it is revealed that Zack has found a permanent companion in an investment banker named Ken—one could not possibly imagine a more appropriate occupation and name (as in the Barbie’s doll’s male companion) for the normative-patterned relationship Zack has sought—and that Claire, apparently now a housewife living in Brentwood with three children, one of them bearing the remnants of her and Zack’s relationship in the boy’s given name, Rupert, we have been set-up for the tear-jerking reunion of the two that can only remind us of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were (1973); like those film’s figures from the past coming together for one last time, Claire and Zack are both in a hurry to scuttle off into the new lives which they have made for themselves.

       If I seem at all derisive of Making Love, however, I need also to commend its creators not as much for their often lauded “groundbreaking” subject matter, but for making a picture—at a huge financial loss for its studio—that represented a true “coming of age” masterwork, not as that term is usually used to describe a young man or woman’s coming to terms with his or sexuality but rather to characterize how an entire generation of theatergoers would come see queer people in general. As gay rights activist Dennis Altman put it, Making Love was one of the only films of the early 1980s that "suggested a willingness to portray homosexual relations as equally valid as heterosexual ones" and that "the wariness with which the film was promoted suggests real change will be slow." Anyone even slightly interested in queer cinema needs to see this movie and watch it again if they saw it when first released.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).   

André Téchiné | Quand on a 17 ans (Being 17) / 2016

desire and need

by Douglas Messerli

 

André Téchiné and Céline Sciamma (screenplay), André Téchiné (director) Quand on a 17 ans (Being 17) / 2016

 

Artists and writers have long suggested that there is sometimes little difference between wrestling and loving embracement (think of American painter Thomas Eakins’ The Wrestlers) or even between intense male struggles and making love (made so apparent in several of Robert Longo’s 1960s and 1970s performances). As a young man, even I recall the kind of thrill I sometimes felt when the pugnacious classmate and fellow worker, Eddie Poppe, used to grab me and threaten to punch—although I was also terrified of him and he would be horrified, I am sure, to know of my feelings at the time. Or maybe he did know, and, like the young figure at the center of André Téchiné’s new film, Being 17, threatened me because he was afraid of any sexual desires he might have felt.

      Téchiné, along with his co-writer, Céline Sciamma, has created in his new film one of the most intelligent deconstructions of teenage battles between hormones and angst. This work, moreover, also subtly speaks about class differences (an issue also with me and my high school torturer) and racial separation that lies just beneath the surface of hate and love.

      Oddly, however, in this film shows no one who truly hates. The bi-racial Thomas (Corentin Fila) lives in the French Pyrenees with a loving and caring farm family, who has adopted him, unable to have children of their own. If living in the isolation of mountain life, his days are filled with hard work as he grooms, feeds, and shepherds the farm’s cows, chickens and other animals, he is also in thrall of the beauty of his home, and made stronger in the process. His mother, ailing once more in early pregnancy, is determined that her intelligent boy should get a full education, and Thomas is excited about his dream of being a veterinarian, trudging each day hours through snow and a long bus ride to the school in the village below.

     In that village a woman doctor, Marianne (Sandrine Kiberlain) is dedicated to patients who often are unable to pay her, and whose beloved husband, Nathan (Alexis Loret) is an army pilot posted to some unknown war, their deep mutual love limited to Skype communications. Their son, Damien (Kacey Motet Klein) seems to be a happy well-adjusted young man, doing well at school, particularly in math and science; he is also an excellent cook, helping his doting mother by making sure that each evening she eats well.

     So what’s wrong with this picture? Why are both of these boys, of such socio-economic differences, seen as outsiders in their fairly well-to-do, mostly white village? And why are both boys’ grades suddenly slipping, as they simultaneously begin to do regular battle in their school’s halls and yards?      

 

       It starts simply enough, when the earring-wearing Damien solves a math problem in front of the class that has stymied Thomas. “I didn’t think you were that stupid,” he quietly hisses in a low voice to the farm boy. Soon after, Thomas retaliates by tripping up the slightly spoiled kid. By a few days later they are truly going after one another, breaking into schoolyard fights which students and teachers are forced to break up. Called to the school, Marianne tries to discover the cause, but when she perceives that the authorities are already determined to label Thomas as a bully, she attempts to speak up for him as opposed to simply supporting her son..

       Just previously, she has been called to Thomas’ family’s farmhouse, his mother falling into a condition she has suffered each time she has become pregnant. But this time, with medicine and nursing care, the doctor is determined to help Thomas’ mother to bring her child to birth, despite the woman’s own fears, understandable since she has several times had the babies die in her womb.

       Perceiving the difficulties of farm boy’s life, Marianne becomes determined that she will make it easier for him by inviting Thomas to come and live in their house, particularly since they have an empty room.

       Without really knowing the volatility of the situation, she insists that Thomas will be better off and installs him into their family routine. Although the boys attempt a kind of truce, they escape to the wild to duke it out, Thomas following it with a nude swim, watched by the awed Damien, in the cold mountain lake. Marianne, herself, has an erotic dream involving the virile young mountain man.

       We now recognize what the boys’ violence has been all about. To relieve his own desires, Damien makes an on-line appointment with an older gay man, forcing Thomas to drive him to the destination. The man, also a farmer, immediately recognizes Damien—who asserts he is 19—to be underage, just as he himself has bragged on-line to be younger than he truly is. Rejected and now disinterested, Damien returns to the car, but Thomas, fascinated by the farm itself, follows the man, asking him questions about his farming management and, in the process, discovering what the thwarted meeting has been all about. Damien finally makes the issue clear to Thomas: “I don’t know if I’m into guys or just you.”

       The very painfulness of that remark has been lost, I’m afraid, on most critics, who almost to a man (Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Holden of The New York Times and Peter DeBruge of Variety, to name just three) all imply that neither boy may actually be homosexual, but just experimenting with desire. It may be that they all, having truly liked Téchiné’s honest film, simply wanted to help it reach a wider audience than the standard gay filmgoers, and,  if so, I admire their attempts. But the statement is a purposeful dodge for any young man fearing that he might be gay, a natural way of delimiting one’s own sexual confusions. Of course he is “into guys,” and one particular “guy” at the moment.

     I argue that, even at their early age of seventeen, there is little doubt that both boys are, in fact, homosexual, even though when Damien first attempts to kiss his new lover, Thomas momentarily accepts it only to lash out in another attack (the reason for his later apology, “Can’t you see I was just afraid.”)—a similar series of events is played out in the British teenage coming-of-age film, Get Real—and Thomas, accordingly, is banned from attending further classes; he is permitted to take courses by correspondence.

     Recognizing her mistake in bringing the boys together, particularly after investigating the bruises each other has inflicted upon their chests and backs, she insists that Thomas return home.

     By film’s end, however, the two boys, after helping each other through two family dilemmas—the birth of Thomas’ sister and the death of Damien’s father—do find their way into bed and into delirious sex, first with Damien being fucked by Thomas and after, Thomas being fucked by Damien—an expression, surely, of their sexual equality and equal commitment in this relationship.

     Having confessed his relationship to his mother, Damien is afraid, if they move to Lyon as she wishes to, that Thomas will not come to visit them. Nonetheless the film’s last scenes, with its images of a local celebratory Fall bonfire and, following, what is apparently another sexual fling between the two boys on the mountain, we are assured that even if this love does not truly last, it was a serious thing, a first love that will never be forgotten by either of them.

       In the end, as the two boys are assigned the topic of distinguishing between “desire and need,” we realize that Being 17 is not simply about a passing desire, but about getting over the childish fears that seventeen-year-olds naturally still embrace. Obviously, some people are slow to or never can grow up, being unable to embrace the adulthood that stands before them. But most of us “come through,” moving on to find the needs of our life and seeking to fulfill them.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2016).