Maj Jukic | My Dad Marie / 2020

feeling right

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rory Chiplin (screenplay), Maj Jukic (director) My Dad Marie / 2020 [14.34 minutes]

 

Charlie (Harry Pudwell) is having breakfast in a cafe with his father (Marc Baylis), who is babbling on about things they once shared, sports, Charlie’s college experiences, etc. But Charlie can’t bear with it anymore and jumps and leaves.

     His mother Janine (Jennifer K. Preston) has heard about the meeting by the time he returns home and attempts to talk to him about it. It’s his father, she explains, and he has come to come to terms with the changes. It’s simply how things are. We didn’t plan this, she argues, it just happened. And you simply have to deal with it. You have no real choice.

      He’s not my father, Charlie insists. But Janine tries to calm him insisting that, of course, he is and he will always be the boy’s father. “You simply have to come to terms with it.”

      But Charlie, clearly, isn’t coming to terms with the fact that his father is now a female named Marie, and he insists that he doesn’t want to see him ever again.

      His mother demands that he meet with Marie once more, and Charlie agrees, he declares, only to say goodbye. Janine drives him to Marie’s new flat and drops him off, telling him she’ll be back at 2:00, Charlie responding that it won’t be that long and she should just wait where she is. His mother refuses and drives off.

      Marie is clearly in the process of moving in, but encourages her son to sit on the couch. He does so begrudgingly, again refusing to answer any of the questions about college and getting right to the point, once more claiming that the woman named Marie is no longer his father.

      “Of course you’re still my son. This isn’t about black and white.”

      Charlie angrily counters: “If you wanted this in the first place maybe you didn’t want me. And you’re not my dad, then I’m not your son.”

       Again, Marie insists that their relationship of father and son cannot simply be dismissed, and that it’s not a thing of the past. But the boy is so hurt that he can barely stand to hear Marie’s attempted explanation, obviously feeling, as he expressed earlier, “if he has a right to make a decision, then I do too... I don’t want to see him again.”

       In the next frame we observe Charlie back on a street taking a long walk, presuming that once more he simply bolted from the conversation. But, in fact, Marie’s explanation of events continue, so we recognize that at least Charlie stayed on long enough to hear a partial explanation:

      

       I’m sorry, I’m sorry because it took too long. It took too long to

       make my mind up. I’ve had thoughts about this since I was young.

       I’d try on my mom’s clothes when she was out. And her makeup....   

       It felt right. My dad caught me once. And he hit me around for it.

       I was maybe 8, 9.  And it was things like that that made me shut it

       out, ignore it. I’ve only been ready to do this now. It’s the only time

       that’s been right.

 

       We don’t know whether Charlie posed any questions or whether Marie was able to proffer a fuller description of the feelings that pulled her into becoming a transgender woman. We only see the two of them meeting up for a lunch upon a later occasion.

     This time they seem more comfortable with one another even if their conversation appears to be quite trivial. And surprisingly—even to Marie—Charlie announces he has a gift for her. The gift is a ticket to a major football game coming up at which Charlie will join her, a treasure Marie very much appreciates as the two settle into what appears to be an open conversation once again between son and father, even if the father is now a woman named Marie.

     There is no doubt that this complex and, to most individuals, mystifying subject is treated in Slovenian-born, British director Jakic’s film far too simply and is resolved with a scene that doesn’t truly seem to follow from the previous encounter between his characters. We would have loved to have experienced a much longer discussion of the forces that led Marie to comprehend why she felt uncomfortable in a marriage with what appears to be a fairly loving wife and son. And it would have been helpful if the character simply got an opportunity to explain how her life has improved since her transition, or whether, in fact, her feelings about herself have given her a new sense of possibilities and emotional stability. Is she, in fact, happier now than living within the heterosexual  family unit? And how and when did Charlie finally come round to perceive her difficulties and comprehend that his continued friendship with his former dad were crucial to Marie’s well-being?

        And I, it should now be obvious through my writing, would be interested in learning how her gender change has affected—if it has—her sexual desires. Has she gone through a complete sex change or just a partial one? Is she now attracted to men or women, both or neither?

        But you have to credit Jakic for simply taking on this subject, this being one of the very first short films I’ve seen that even comes near such LGBTQ territory. Moreover, Jakic has not made his transgender woman into a sort of drag queen personification of a female, nor even a woman who has focused her transition on stylish dresses, wigs, and makeup. Charlie’s Marie is quite frankly rather plain and ugly, with manly features draped by long, straight hair, dressed up in a loose beige pants suit, blouse and simple half-heels. If she’s wearing makeup, it hasn’t done much good to hide her facial blemishes. Marie clearly made the transition from within far more than in simple outward appearances. There are a great many cis-gender drag queens that look more convincing as a female than Marie does. And that fact helps to establish Marie as a true character, a still fragile being who perhaps cannot fully explain herself why she has needed to change her gender. All we know is that she has patiently waited and fought for her decision when she felt it was the right time.

       Accordingly, even if this short film’s ending does not ring true, we are pleased that life for this fictional Marie does not end tragically. We still wait, however, for a film that might reveal the forces that lead to transgender desire and how that significant transformation effects the individual’s life and his or her family, particularly within a society that has yet to fully comprehend and accept such behavior. Surely, if nothing else, we know that transgender men and women are some of the bravest of beings on the planet.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Caio Scot | Depois Daquela Festa (After That Party) / 2019

 can we talk?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mel Carvalho and Lucas Drummond (screenplay), Caio Scot (director) Depois Daquela Festa (After That Party) / 2019

 

Of the dozen films I discuss in the collection of essays, “Family Secrets,” Brazilian director Caio Scot’s After that Party is the only truly comic presentation of family sexual secrets, reflecting as it does a far more contemporary viewpoint which we hope now dominates open societies.       

     This story is really quite simple. Leo (Lucas Drummond) and his long-time girlfriend (Mel Carvalho)—with whom, oddly since it has no reason to appear in this tale except as a kind of quirky aside, he evidently doesn’t have sex—attend a party at which, quite by accident, they both witness Leo’s father (Charles Fricks) in attendance kissing another man.  

    The shock of the scene momentarily sends Leo reeling, having to leave the party immediately to contemplate the situation. His girlfriend pushes him quickly to try to express his true feeling about the incident, and it appears that he is not so upset because he has discovered that his widowed father is now gay, but that he hasn’t told him. The two, father and son, have long been close, and Leo still lives at home with his dad.

      Although the discovery does not seem to be particularly momentous with regard to his love for his father, he and his girlfriend feel it necessary to relieve his father of his secret by revealing their discovery. The question is simply how to go about it, and Leo spends a sleepless night in creating a scenario over a meal of lasagna where he might bring up the subject by discussing his father’s job as an advertising executive before turning it to a discussion of his friends, their off-hour activities, and whether or not he meets others outside of his co-workers, etc. until he can zero in on the particularities which might lead to the revelation.

       Unfortunately, his father serves stroganoff, not their usual Friday night meal, and their conversation is interrupted by a telephone message before it can even begin.

       A day or two later Leo finally confronts his father by recalling a childhood story about himself in which he was afraid of asking his teacher permission to go to the bathroom, as a consequence peeing in his pants and receiving the taunts of his fellow students, all resulting in his determination never to return to school. His father reassured him that he had done nothing wrong, and to prove that he needed to return to the classroom to assert his innocence of wrongdoing.

      So too, he now suggests, he argues his father needn’t feel that he has done anything wrong in the fact that the son has witnessed at the very same party that Leo and his girlfriend attended, his father embrace and kiss a stranger.

      For a moment the father attempts to deny it, but quickly becomes speechless. When he regains his composure, he explains that he never cheated or lied to Leo’s mother and loved her dearly. But suddenly he has found an unexpected love with another human being who just happens to be a man. But there was simply no way he could explain it to Leo for fear that he would misunderstand the situation. 

    

     When it is now established that Leo has no problems with him now having a “boyfriend” the two hug, the elder realizing that there was no need for secrecy, that he was deeply loved and remains so. Leo insists that the three of them have dinner so that can, he jokes, “determine his intentions” regarding his dad.

      Scot’s film feels a little too much like a liberal school-room advocation of open minds and free talk about sexuality. But the script, written by the two actors playing Leo and his girlfriend, at moments is delightfully manic in the son’s attempts to arrange for that open and free conversation between father and son, resulting in Scot’s work being a lot of fun, even if we know the final “feel-good” results. Surely there are a great many Leos and dads out there who have been shaped, post Stonewall, by the general acceptance of LGBTQ behavior in liberal societies worldwide. But, alas, I am afraid that they still do not represent the majority of households. On the very same day I am writing about this film, I have also just watched director/producer Aiman Hasani’s Dutch film Khata (2019) in which a couple of teenage brothers, trapped into male prostitution and with nowhere else to turn, are denied entry into the own home by their parents upon their discovery of their boy’s secret vocations, which only closes off their final possible route of escape. Indeed this film might also have been included in these pages except that I felt it was more centered on their involvement in gay prostitution which I will feature in an upcoming essay, “Working Boys.”

     But it’s a delight to watch a work in which family secrets do not necessarily result in terrifying consequences.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Welby Ings | Sparrow / 2016

wing boy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Welby Ings (screenwriter and director) Sparrow / 2016 [15 minutes]

 

New Zealand director Welby Ings, trained as a designer, creates films with slightly eccentric characters dropped into landscapes that are stunningly beautiful and original despite the banality and blindness of most who walk the same turf, the films’ images themselves often overlaid with written sentences and fragments of language that attempt to make sense of the characters’ absurd acts. I previously reviewed his remarkable portrait of a small town outcast, Boy, in which the central character finds a way to bring those who have tortured him to justice.

      The young ten-year-old boy of his 2016 film Sparrow shares elements of that earlier work. In this case the boy, Jim (Merrick Rillstone)—somewhat autobiographically related to the director—believes he can fly, a fantasy somewhat tolerated by his father but which still results in his being demeaned by his fellow students and other outsiders.

      The problem is that this determined child wears his homemade “wings” nearly everywhere—his father refusing to let him wear them to the dining table—even on his way back and forth to and from school. And when he isn’t wearing them, supposedly doing a writing assignment in class, he draws pictures of birds, infuriating the teacher, who rips his drawings up.

     On his way home from school several other boys gang up and attack him for his oddities, his father (Paul Glover) rescuing him, but demanding—since he himself apparently was once a boxer—that he learn how to box in order to protect himself. The boy refuses to hit him, and the lesson ends with the father’s frustration.

     In his private time, the boy watches old films of his grandfather, a foot soldier in Egypt during World War II, in which the film glorifies his past, demonstrating frame by frame just what a hero his grandfather was, winning a prestigious medal. He was killed in war and buried a hero, so proclaims the old movie, even today his son, the boy’s father, wearing his war medal and marching in local parades in memory of him.

      While trying to repair his broken wings Jim visits the work shed in back of the house, and looking in an old drawer for bits of parchment and string he discovers a box in which trinkets of a soldier (buttons, a ring, etc) line a tray beneath which lays a trove of letters which the boy secrets back to his bedroom.

       As Jim begins to read the letters and postcards he discovers that, in fact, his grandfather, Gordon (Matthew Arbuckle) had not wanted to go to war but, called a coward by the locals, finally joined up. In the trenches he “bunked” with a close friend who was shot and wounded. Together they two had a caged pet sparrow with them in the trenches, who also seems to suffer as the wounded soldier lays deep in pain for days, the sores becoming infected.  Trying to bring him back to health Gordon holds him in his arms, kissing him, revealing to the others the intensity of their relationship.

        The outraged commander orders the wounded friend to stand at attention, who, as he attempts to do so, is shot and killed by German gunfire. Outraged by the incident, the boy’s grandfather rises from the trench, strips naked, and refuses to any longer serve this country as he picks up his lover’s body in an attempt to walk away with him from the battle site. One of their own soldiers shoots him, he falling to the ground with the body.

     Apparently he survived and was shipped back to New Zealand, where mentally and spiritually broken, he was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. He grew old with no one showing up to see him, his son, wife and relatives obviously embarrassed and disapproving of the rouge deserter and secret queer. The letters the boy reads were sent by his grandfather to his father, never to be opened, the boy himself reading the truth for the first time in all these years.

        Ings reveals these facts to us through recreated wartime images that play out in silence except for a musical accompaniment and sentences imposed upon the images—as in the earlier film—such as “They brought him home,” “broken,” “and “he died alone”—all of which provide narrative but force the reader to imaginatively fill in what the letters are revealing in far greater detail to the ten-year-old boy.

     At school we again see our young “queer” boy being taunted by his fellow-students, male and female, who throw things at him, calling him “wing boy” and other names. When two boys throw the sandwich he is trying to eat, his lunch box, and finally the boy himself to the ground, he stands, strips open his shirt and tells them: “Hit me. Come on hit me.” They back away. “Come on, just hit me.” They move away almost in fear, unable to comprehend his seemingly masochistic demands.

        In the last scene the boy visits the now empty psychiatric hospital, wandering its decaying rooms where images of the aging grandfather haunt him like death itself. Still, he moves from room to room almost as in search of the man he now feels has taught him how to be brave while the others have just pretended it. And he too, he must now realize, is alone in a world where most likely he will always be disparaged and attacked for his differences.

       He finds a small bird trapped in a room hugging a wall lined with leaves. He carefully picks up the sparrow, carries it to a window, and releases it into flight, just as his grandfather has done for him through the truth of his letters too long buried in that hidden box.

        Once again, Ings’ film is not about the complexity of narrative or even the depth of its ideas. Rather it is the emotive power of this director’s images that make his movie into something profoundly moving and disturbing. Even the wide-open, always-in-motion eyes of his young hero help us to realize his wonderment of the world around him despite the general brutality of those who inhabit it.

       I can’t wait to see the movie he is currently working on, Punch, in he takes his young hero Jim into adulthood.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Ray Yeung | Paper Wrap Fire / 2015

consolations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ray Yeung (screenwriter and director) Paper Wrap Fire / 2015 [13 minutes]

 

Hong Kong filmmaker Ray Yeung chose the title of his sixth film Paper Wrap Fire (2015) from a Chinese proverb, which calls up not only the obvious logic but suggests all the attempts usually made to control such calamitous events which are illogical, doomed, and often tragic if also, at times, necessary.

     The central figure of this New York-based film is Vincent (Alestair Shu) a Chinese-American teenager who is has reached one of his most unhappy moments of his life. The film begins with several young bullies attempting to beat him up in a concrete playground, calling him “fag” and scuffing up his face before his mother, Lisa (Rachel Lu), who’s been out shopping, chances upon the encounter and shouts them away. As she embraces her son and checks out his wounds, she also chastises him for allowing the boys to abuse him, arguing that he should stand up to them. Anyone who as a child has suffered such peer abuse can sympathize with Vincent’s feeling that he is being attacked by his mother for his inescapable torture; there is no way that one child might possibly protect himself from two or three boys at once. She demands that he stay home for the day from school, and he is only too ready to take advantage of the restriction except that when they near their derelict apartment, they see men pounding at their door, demanding immediate payment of rent, Lisa pulling Vincent with her down into the floor below so that she will not have to confront the debt collectors personally.

      She has a new job, however, and can’t miss it; despite a few telephone calls no one is able or willing to offer Vincent a place to hang out until she is through with her job, so she drops him off at the local community center, a dismal affair consisting of elderly Chinese men watching television and a large ping pong table with no one lithe and spry enough to play a game with him.

     He stands by the window, staring out onto the street with the blank eyes of a child bored to death but also suffering the deep despair of having no one who really cares about his existence except a busy and uncomprehending mother.

      Suddenly, a young doctor, Chen (Shing Ka), connected with the center, pushes a wheelchair holding an elderly woman into the room, the boy’s eyes immediately focused on the handsome man who returns his gaze with a gentle smile and notices as the boy’s eyes follow him around the room as he deposits the woman and turns on the radio player to a song certain to please her. A moment later Chen turns back to Vincent suggesting he’s allowed to change the channel to anything except hip-hop, the boy clearly appreciating his unexpected attention.

       It’s clear from the instant that Chen has walked into the room that the boy is riveted by the older man, who might be an older brother or a caring uncle. But Chen almost immediately tells the woman that he’s off from work, but that her daughter will soon be there to pick her up. As he leaves he drops his ID card, Vincent quickly retrieving it and running after the man, who has already made his way down the block.

       Vincent follows, obviously looking for the opportunity of actually meeting him but—given the way Yeung’s camera shifts and cuts the scenes of the “chase”—also intrigued by Chen’s destination. When Chen ducks into a massage parlor, we can almost sense Vincent’s disappointment and distress as through the window he observes the man talking to the manager before he disappears behind a curtain into the back rooms. Vincent returns to a stoop to wait out the visit.

       Yet like most young people his age, he is also curious, and when he observes the manager leaving the place, he peeks back into the parlor and enters, carefully making his way behind the curtain to peek in the back room where Chen lays half-naked, someone messaging his chest. The boy, who may be gay or not, is fascinated by seeing his sudden hero’s physique, but soon backs away before determining a moment later to get a better view and pulling up a small step-ladder to look over the partition.

    There he gets an eye-full of the oiled body of Chen, who, under cover, is also now being masturbated by the masseur. We don’t see it, but we can only imagine the boy’s eyes growing larger, but just as suddenly he sees the masseur herself, his mother who suddenly becomes aware of her peeping son.

     Back on the street, Lisa traipses home, Vincent angrily following. You can sense her horror in having been seen performing her job, her fear for how she has affected him. She cannot know that the man she was serving was also, in the boy’s imagination, a surrogate lover. We know this since immediately after his viewing he tore up Chen’s identification card and stomped on it; he is angrier because of the man’s behavior more than his mother’s.

      As their slowly climb the paint-scarred stairway to their apartment they see the door has been graffitied in Chinese: PAY UP WHORE. Lisa lowers herself to the floor, overwhelmed by her life and the recent events, Vincent moving to sit beside her. Tears flow from her eyes as her son reaches out to hold her hand in consolation for her grief.

      In Yeung’s brilliantly nuanced short film there is nothing else that needs to be said. Paper cannot wrap fire, but if it is all you have available, what can you do?

      In the years since the wonderful films such as this one, Yellow Fever, Doggy...Doggy, Derek & Lucas, and Entwine, Leung has released several notable feature films, the most recent of which, Suk, Suk (2019). won numerous film awards.

     I should add that Lucas Lechowski’s original score for this film is a notable contribution to the poignance of the work.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021)

Nathalie Álvarez Mesén | Filip / 2015

a comfortable place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathalie Álvarez Mesén (screenwriter and director) Filip / 2015 [11 minutes]

 

The gentlest and truly most innocent of all of all these films is Costa-Rican/Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Filip starring the wonderful Josef Waldfogel as the boy who shares the title’s name. Like many younger brothers, particularly in homes such as his in which the father appears to be missing, Filip clearly idolizes his older brother Sebastien (Simon Reithner) to the point that he listens and responds more to him than to his otherwise clearly loving and patient mother who teases him to discover if he has a girlfriend.

      The bond between the boy and Sebastien however is so strong that in its focus on sports (the older plays soccer) and the elder’s interest in cartooning that there seems to be little room in the life of 7-year-old for girls. But then many boys of that age have no time for girls.

      Particularly when Sebastien’s friend Stor comes over to the spend the day with him, the boy becomes so physically engaged with both of them, leaping between them jumping over their seated bodies, and jabbing and punching them—often a boy’s way of demonstrating his love—that we sense his desire to keep in male physical contact. The two of them, seeming to recognize his needs, allow him to interrupt their adult communication until, literally worn out he falls to sleep and is put to bed.

       But when he awakens in his own bed alone he peeks through the doorway into the other room where the light is still shining to catch another glimpse, perhaps, of his beloved friends only to observe his brother and Stor gently kissing one another.

        The sight almost seems to awe him, while obviously creating a deep sense of confusion. Nothing is said about the incident, but he seems removed the next morning, a bit uncommunicative, and proceeds throughout the day to be walking almost in a kind of dream, obviously trapped in his own thoughts as he struggles to makes sense of what he has seen.

        On his way home he observes a couple of slightly older boys bullying and mocking a young boy who appears to be even younger than he, pushing him down upon the playground concrete and striking him as they call him a “faggot.” Does Filip even know what the word means?

        Surely he senses its significance and as the young boy walks away passing near him he follows his motions with an intense stare as if he is almost identifying, as Álvarez Mesén’s camera already has, his relationship to the other.

       That night we watch him rise from his sleep and walk down the hall, peering for a moment into his mother’s room before turning and carefully opening the door of his brother’s bedroom, entering, and attempting to awaken him to announce that he can’t sleep. Sebastian turns back the covers, and Filip crawls into the warm bed to cuddle up to the warmth of his brother’s body. It is as if, even if he has not resolved the riddle of the male kiss, he has resolved where he feels most comfortable and safe. He has found a place where he feel at home.

     To describe this, as one commentator has, as evidence of his being gay, is I think an unnecessary conclusion. But surely if he does find himself more attracted to males as he comes of age he will not fear it and feel far more comfortable to enact such a kiss which as he has now witnessed.

     

Los Angeles, June 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).