Saturday, October 26, 2024

Wes Hurley and Nathan M. Miller | Little Potato / 2017

nobody wants karaoke every night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wes Hurley and Nathan M. Miller (directors) Little Potato / 2017

 

It’s hard to know in Wes Hurley’s and Nathan M. Miller’s truly startling documentary when to laugh or when to cry. The complete absurdity of life is expressed in a surprisingly and utterly straight-faced telling of what might be perceived as a semi-tragic tale.

     Little Potato, as he was called, (Hurley, represented in his childhood by Benjamin Jakupcak), and his mother lived in the last days of the Soviet Union in one of the most Moscow-distant and corrupted of the major Soviet cities, Vladivostok, located on the Golden Horn Bay by the Sea of Japan.


     There Hurley grew up, vicariously watching television as his father regularly beat his mother, forming a frame around his eyes, as he himself represents it, to pretend that what he was seeing was not real but a movie or a television comedy.

      His forceful mother (Elena Bridges, her younger self portrayed by Darlene Sellers) left her husband, taking her son with her to her mother, who was not at all sympathetic to the divorce and, as Elena makes clear, felt that it was the husband’s right to beat his wife.

      Meanwhile, without even perceiving that he was different, Hurley began to grow up in the last days of Communist regime, where his biology books expressed the dangers of masturbation, a sin (since his mother was still a believer in the Russian Orthodox religion), a sickness, and crime which he confessed to his mother, who was relieved to be able to tell her little “Potato” that there was nothing wrong with it and that his text books were filled with outdated lies.

      At the very same moment—I was visiting the Soviet Union in those very last days—the Communist regime was collapsing. And at first it brought joy and tears to everyone’s eyes. One of the most memorable moments of this short 14-minute work is when suddenly US movies began to appear on a hitherto nonexistent TV channel, 3. The earliest films such as Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film Ghost and numerous others such as Home Alone, the second installment of The Addams Family, and Garry Marshall’s Frankie and Johnny (1991) become icons which Russians repeated to one another like a strange game of “Telephone,” each passing on the story to one another. Elena’s almost ecstatic-like comments about the last-named filmed epitomize just how sad and funny this fantastical and cruelly-real world was to those on the outside looking into the imaginary world of US cinema: “Michelle Pfeiffer’s little apartment was so cozy, and I thought I would be so happy and I would not need anything else. Certainly not Al Pacino.”

      The new Russia was not much better than the old Communist world. The former party leaders simply now described themselves as capitalists, and remained in power over a people still suffering shortages and food, electricity and other comforts. Only now the people could see that there was another world “out there” which they desperately wanted to be part of.

      As her “Little Potato” began to grow up, he also increasingly sensed a kind of difference with himself that was not permitted in the general society. “Every day of my childhood,” Hurley relates, “I heard terrible things said about ‘faggots’ or those ‘pedics’” (the Russian description of gay individuals who they saw as pedophiles). “I wasn’t even sure whether gay people were real or whether they were made-up monsters.”

      He doesn’t know why he can’t relate to “girls,” whether it is because he is a good Christian boy or something else that he just can’t fully explain. Yet when his handsome swimming coach (Matthew Cotner) was arrested for burglary, the young boy imagined himself arresting the beautiful man and keeping him under his bed. The film reads somewhat like a humorous Russian parable.

      Yet it becomes even more absurd when the mother, fearing for her son’s well-being begins to advertise herself as a Russian woman available to American men, finally hooking up with a man from Seattle, whom she visits, finding him, at first, as a gentle and kind man. She returns to Russia to reclaim her son as a married woman.

       The new husband and father is another kind of paternalistic fascist, so it appears, this time in the guise of an American religious fundamentalist, who is alternately gentle and kind, but who quickly becomes violent and abusive, just like the resilient Elena’s first husband.


       The new world, on the other hand, is a remarkable adventure for mother and son. The stores are filled with food, people smile instead of looking scowling, and suddenly, as Hurley defines the experience, there is the joy of, “just being in a place that doesn’t feel like the end of the world.”

      Yet as Elena expresses it, her new husband, was not only a determined born-again Christian, but was defiantly anti-abortion. As his new son summarizes: “He was always franting about politics and religion. He was always angry about the secular world and the state of the schools and…the gay rights movement.”

       Even Elena senses her son is going “through something,” the common heterosexual definition of the trauma a young man or woman suffers when realize that they are not sexually aligned to the society around them.

      But now in the US Hurley realizes from the media that people are fighting for gay rights and “winning” their place in the society. His mother, when he finally reveals his real problem, is amazingly relieved, but now they cannot let the father, James, know, since he might divorce her and the son and mother be sent back to Russia. Closeting now becomes a mother/son intention, a very strange predicament that is seldom documented, but probably does regularly exist.

       Strangely, the very fact that now Hurley can go on line and see the increasing representation of gay men and lesbians throughout history makes him even more angry about his own situation and the treatment of his step-father of his mother, now a more tortured condition that even in his Soviet childhood.

        Yet “Potato” is now 18, a finally is able to move out. But Elena is left with a new kind of monster. One night she calls her son crying, she has come home to see a strange woman sitting on their living room couch. That woman is her husband James, now Janice coming out to her as “the person she knew and didn’t know.”

        The “monster” it appears is transgender, terrified of her own societally rejected behavior. In this hall of mirrors, structured actually around the long and endless history of the abuse of women and young men throughout world history, finally reaches into this immigrant Russian tale in a manner that not even the great Russian storytellers such as Gogol, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Platonov or Kharms might never have quite imagined.    

        James/Janis has chosen a Russian woman because he felt she, as a conservative being, might hide and help him in his own self-deception, but Elena, as we have discovered, was perhaps the most open-minded woman he might have found. And he now finds it possible to “come out” to her, maybe the most bizarre coming out tale one might have ever imagined.

        Elena becomes, as her son describes her, “like a groupie to Janis and her trans girlfriends.” Perhaps the most hilarious ending to a film ever is Elena’s admission that Janis and her friends enjoyed karaoke. As Zamyatin or Kharms might have expressed it, if it had been in the range of their experience, “There was karaoke night after night after night. That’s when I decided it was time to divorce him. Transgender was fine with me, but nobody wants karaoke every night.”

        Life is truly far more incredible than fiction. And happy endings do not exist, evidently, only in Hollywood movies.

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

Joseph Barglowski | Vermont / 2023

city lights

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Barglowski (screenwriter and director) Vermont / 2023 [19.50 minutes]

 

Vermont if very much a state of mind in Joseph Barglowski’s 2023 short film. The young man who has been holed up in a small cabin in a snowy few weeks in New England (Ryan McDermott) has just returned to his home in Brooklyn, where he has clearly been emotionally troubled by his experiences there.


      Throughout the early part of the film, director Barglowski shows us heavily bearded bears of men, who might have been said to have hibernated in the wild, getting the severe trims necessary for them to reassimilate back into the city.

      For our “hero” something has definitely not gone right in the isolated beauty of the frigid cold state. And the rest of the movie portrays him trying to reenter the equally harsh but stunning lit-up world of Brooklyn and New York City as if he has been dropped into a Martin Scorsese-like landscape. If these are “mean streets,” they are clearly also far more lovely to the eye than the

several winter landscapes we see later in the film, reminiscent of common postcard portraiture of the winter wonderland everyone believes Vermont to be. Clearly Barglowski, along with me, prefers the hot-lights of the city over the frozen north.


   We perceive that something has not gone right from the very first frames of this film, with McDermott returning home with two of the central figures who later play roles in the movie, showing up at a party hosted by McDermott’s female friend (Kathryn Isaac). Did one of them show up in Vermont unexpectedly, shifting the relationship of the central figures.      

      Back in NYC we see our central figure trying to reassimilate into his other world. He meets up with an older man (who we also see in the early segments as undergoing a new haircut) who claims to love Vermont. He, in fact, as a small painting on his wall depicting its wonders. The two have what can only be described as cold and efficient sex, stimulated it appears, mostly by the central character’s own memories of Vermont.


      Meanwhile, the young man we have seen next to him on the subway in the first frames seems to have had sex with the other man in the same scene. And McDermott’s character visits him just as the other is leaving.

      It almost plays out as a return of the prodigal lover, both men having realized that perhaps, despite what happened in Vermont, they still love one another.


    Vermont, frankly, cannot compete with the brightly lit-up streets that cinematographer Robert Orlowski captures along with the slightly discordant piano score by Cody Boyce.

     Love is definitely better for the two major figures of this film back home in the warm lights of Brooklyn.

     

Los Angeles, October 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

Shannon Deeby | RSVP / 2016

in prison

by Douglas Messerli


Shannon Deeby (screenwriter and director) RSVP / 2016

 

While searching for Vimeo’s on-line edition Laurie Lynd’s 1991 film RSVP, I coincidentally found a Vimeo streaming of another film of the same title—this directed by Shannon Deeby in 2016—which, although not as brilliantly conceived or realized as Lynd’s work and not, necessarily, connected to AIDS, was eerily similar in its narrative and themes.

     In this BeeNest production, a gay man, Devon (performed by independent director Lance Marshall) having just lost his loved male companion, Stephen, is seen driving with the urn on the seat next to him—which in the earliest frames of scene is represented by the image of his still-living lover (played by James Oxford, Marshall’s real-life husband)—as he travels to an East Hampton, New York, beach where, upon the request of for lover he is about release his ashes.


    He talks briefly to the imaginary image of his ex-husband about their love, etc., soon after pulling into the empty parking lot, whereupon he checks his cell phone to see if the others he has invited, apparently Stephen’s family members, have responded. His tears and apparent anger make it clear that they have all made excuses for their absence—excuses we can presume, particularly when we soon after discover that Stephen’s father is a Baptist minister, have to do with their disapproval of his and their son’s gay relationship.

    After another moment of sobbing, Devon grabs the urn, a bottle of champagne, and a beach blanket as he makes his way down to the water’s edge settling into the sand. He begins to drink directly out of the bottle, hinting that he may be headed for a real bender before he gets around to tossing what remains of his lover into the ocean. He toasts the bottle:

 

                     To Stephen. In your eyes I was able to see my purer self. And in

                     your memory I will eternally be held in the warmth of our love.

 

     Slowly another man comes running from the distance down to stand beside Devon. The man, Stephen’s younger brother Thomas (Ryan Jonze) apologizes, as the email message apparently had, for his parents’ inability to attend, their being “swamped with the revival” being held that weekend. Stephen’s devastated partner hardly bothers to answer, turning away.

     “Can I...may I join you?” He asks. “That’s why you were invited,” answers Devon, again turning away. Thomas sits beside him. “Sorry, I didn’t reply myself.” An uneasy silence settles in between them, which the brother finally breaks:

 

                 Yeh, he got out ya know. But..Dad disowned him but we was the

                  lucky one. Just wish I...I’d been stronger. And stood up to him.    


       

     So surprising is this short confession that Devon, pausing a bit, asks him “Are you gay?” “Oh no, no. Married. Kids.” Thomas responds, before nervously amending his comments, “I mean married to a woman. The kids...with her.” It’s a fascinating restatement of the obvious, as if he might have actually imagined the other possibility, which suggests his commitment to the normality of his life is not a total immersion, particularly when he follows this with stating that his father can really be a “prick.” “Sometimes...I can take it, but mom....I don’t know.” After another long pause, he adds, “Can’t say I didn’t envy his ‘get-out-of-jail-free card.’”

     Devon’s one-word interjection, “Wow!” is appropriate given his and our sudden perception that the father’s religiously-embedded homophobia has affected not just his homosexual son, but the entire family, delimiting the life of his wife and his heterosexual son as well. The inability to accept sexual differences is connected to the inability to accept the role of women in society, the different values—however minute—of even the heterosexual heir. The patriarchal world Stephen’s father represents admits no one.

     The film closes with a strange admission from Devon of his own lover’s limitations within this same context: “You know, I don’t know if he saw it that way. I wish he had.”

     I don’t know whether Deeby ever saw Lynd’s film or was in any way influenced by it, but the desolation that lies behind both of these films was powerfully expressed decades earlier in Christopher Isherwood’s (1964) novel, A Single Man, reinterpreted by Tom Ford’s 2009 film of the same name. You may recall in that work the lover, George Falconer, was not allowed by the family to even attend the funeral of his lover, Jim, killed in a car accident. One might suggest, in the context of this film, he was not even permitted to reply.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2020

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

Laurie Lynd | RSVP / 1991

shouts in the dark

by Douglas Messerli

 

Laurie Lynd (screenwriter and director) RSVP / 1991

 

In terms of dialogue, Canadian director Laurie Lynd’s 1991 short film RSVP is almost a silent film. Nearly all of the spoken words we hear throughout this film—with the exception of a few murmurs of the students in the high school hall who almost point with interest or perhaps even with pride to the homophobic message “Sellman is a faggot” which they or other of their friends posted upon the classroom door of their English teacher, along a few words recalled to memory by Sid (Daniel MacIvor), Andrew Sellman’s lover when Andrew (Ross Manson) returns to retrieve his sweater as they are about to embark on a visit to the doctors—are spoken through the telephone, most of them which we hear from a friend of Sid’s (Stewart Arnott) and, at the very end of the work, from Andrew’s father (Gordon Jocelyn) spoken over the couple’s answering machine.


     Yet, the human voice, in this case opera singer Jessye Norman’s* glorious rendering of Berlioz’s “La spectre de la rose,” a song evidently requested by Sellman before his death to be played on a local Winnepeg radio station dominates the 24-minute movie.

      We first hear it when Sid returns to the couple’s empty apartment, soon after his lover’s death, unable to even imagine the possibility of answering the telephone message left by his friend. He enters the kitchen, opening and quickly closing the refrigerator after he discovers it mostly filled with pill cannisters that had obviously become part of Andrew’s regular regimen. Hearing the announcement of the song by the radio announcer Sid immediately, if at first unsuccessfully, attempts to record the aria.

     We hear the entire work as Lynd briefly transports us to various scenes of the workplaces of Andrew’s friends: a library, an AIDS support center where we witness a man clipping Sellman’s obituary from the newspaper to add it on a wall posting of dozens of others, and a bookstore—places obviously regularly visited by the literate, dying man.

      The very next scene features Sid at work, painfully tossing Andrew’s pills, personal toiletries, and clothing into a box. He saves only the beloved sweater. Checking their record collection, he discovers the original LP recording of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été which includes “La spectre de la rose,” in their own record collection and, we discern later, again requests it to be played over the radio, this time telephoning Andrew’s sister (Ferne Downey) and his lover’s mother (Judith Orban) to tell them when the piece is about to be aired.


       We observe the sister listening to it, breaking into sobs, and watch Andrew’s mother, after serving her husband his dinner, attempting to find the station of their antiquated radio.

       The last telephone message from the father is a particularly painful one which we hear recorded on the machine before Sid returns home after the funeral, the elder clumsily expressing his regrets that they had not been able to talk more after the funeral, but that he knew how good Sid was for Andrew, how he looked after him. It is apparent that the father had not been very receptive to the men’s relationship and perhaps had even refused to talk to Sid or even keep in close touch with his own son. The short call, accordingly, is almost a shout in the dark of his love after years of rejection and regret.

      Film critic B. Ruby Rich argued in her influential essay “New Queer Cinema” of 1992 that RSVP was one the many new films of the period appearing in the Gay Festival circuits by queer-identified people that used radical aesthetics to fight homophobia, to struggle with the issues surrounding the AIDS epidemic, and to discuss LGBTQ issues with regard to race. I don’t entirely disagree with her, particularly regarding the films outcry against homophobia. Yet, I’d also argue that Lynd’s film belongs more to the long tradition of quiet Canadian films that reveal their LGBTQ sentiments in a realist tradition that does not necessarily require overt commentary, a work in the tradition of Stanley Jackson’s Cornet at Night (1963) as opposed to his compatriot John Greyson’s far more radical works such as Lilies of 1996, along with US directors whom Rich also identified or would soon be connected with “New Queer Cinema” such as Cheryl Dunye, Gregg Araki, and Tom Kalin.

 

*Lynd sent a tape to Norman to obtain her permission to use her recording in his film. She was so impressed and moved by the film that she attended its first screening, holding the director’s hand for much of the film’s run.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2020

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

 

Index [listed alphabetically by director]

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.