Indy Dang | Influence / 2019

i am what you think

by Douglas Messerli

 

Indy Dang (screenwriter and director) Influence / 2019 [29 minutes]

 

Cal (Kyle Brier), a 16-year-old student who’s being bullied at his private prep-school, particularly regarding his rumored relationship with a student named Evan (Donald Riddle), now has even further problems with the return home from college of his brother, Landon (Samuel Blustein), who has more gently bullied him for most of their last years together. 

    Landon has dropped out of school, we soon discover—even though his parents come late to the revelation—mostly because of his heavy use of drugs. Although his parents seem to accept the return of the prodigal son with some sense of equanimity, we recognize there is tension in the air, created also by the fact that Cal, with high grades and the possibility of becoming the valedictorian, is obviously their “favored” son. They call him “baby,” and when his Spanish grade goes down to a B+ they offer him the services of a tutor.

     When Cal finds himself being chased home each night by a cadre of three school bullies, he at least finds a new purpose for his elder brother, demanding that he pick him up at school at the end of the day. While Landon is resentful for his request, the fact that Cal has found him with his drug paraphernalia on his bed—although his brother claims he just smoking weed—gives him the upper hand. And the next time Landon is threatened with the bullies, Landon tosses raw eggs at the three boys, meaning they may have to explain the cleaning of their uniforms to their mothers at home.

     

Yet the brotherly teasing continues. Since Cal goes to all boy’s school, Landon wonders, as they sit talking in the car for brotherly privacy, what does he do for sex. Cal points out that they have a sister, all girl’s school, and even suggests a possible girlfriend, which Landon, seeing her picture, suggests looks like a boy. Seconds later, Landon has started up the car taking Cal on trip he doesn’t want to participate in, to see his local drug dealer, Jackson (Alexander Matos).   

     Landon, of course, in an attempt to lighten up his brother, would like Cal to try some, but the boy resists, even Jackson arguing he doesn’t have smoke if doesn’t want to. The two, Landon and Jackson play some rounds of a computer game before Landon becomes so stoned that he passes out.

    Jackson explains that his drug dealing is just a side-gig because he’s need of money, not something he intends to continue for the rest of his life. And strangely, he befriends Cal, talking to him more like an adult that a high school kid, and soon after taking out his guitar to play. Since Cal is studying piano, the two get on, even momentarily offering his hand for Cal to feel his callouses which, he explains, how you get used to playing the guitar.

       When it’s truly time to leave, Cal receiving a cellphone call his parents, it is Jackson who drives them home, suggesting they “do this again sometime,” hinting—at least in Cal’s young imagination—of a possible sensitive (read gay) friendship in development.

 .     In another meetup, Cal does drink a beer when offered by Jackson, the process along with the school incident mentioned above, bringing him and his brother closer together. And soon after the two join Jackson at the pinball parlor. At one moment, however, Landon determines he has to go outside to get some air, probably for a smoke, while Jackson suggests Cal and he ride a nearby carousel. If it sounds almost like a kind of sexual set-up, you’d be as naïve as Cal. Jackson explains that his dad is now in the hospital and the expenses for his family are mounting up. The short and the long of his tale is another St. Francis student is willing to pay a “ton of money” for the drugs Jackson has, and wonders if Cal might be the delivery boy.

       Wisely, Cal bows out, Jackson once more playing the nice boy, saying he doesn’t want to pressure Cal. But once round of the merry-go-round later he’s read to do the drop off in the school bathroom. And we suddenly realize that all of Jackson’s flirtations with the obviously gay kid have been for this moment. “Oh my god, I could kiss you right now,” replies Jackson hugging the grateful boy, rarely finding the opportunity for even the male touch.

       As one might expect, it ends disastrously, with Cal hanging around a toilet stall out of which walks one of his tormentors. The other boy finally shoves him up against a wall and the bags of presumably coke fall out of his coat pocket, a faculty member intruding, and Cal being accused of being a drug dealer in the school where he has been such a model student.

       When his parents attack him for his suddenly bizarre behavior, Cal has no choice but to admit that it was Landon’s friend, the father immediately entering Landon’s room for an explanation. Landon, some rightfully denies he’s involved, but Cal insists that it was he who got him wrapped up in the whole thing. “You think just because you gave him that stupid uniform, you think he’s some kind of angel child. I don’t what the fuck’s going on, but is because of your mistakes Cal.

       In anger, Cal pulls out Landon’s drug box from under the bed, his father withdrawing paraphernalia that hints at the use of something far beyond weed. Suddenly realizing what their son had been doing in college and where some of their money went, the father picks up the box, goes to the front door, as behind Landon pleads for them to leave it, and tosses into the yard, soon after tossing his coat after him as he runs to check on whether they have broken anything. The door is locked. Their elder son is no longer permitted in the house. We also recognize that if this couple is so very unforgiving of their son’s drug abuse, not even interested in attempting to find him some help, how they might react if Cal were to tell them about his sexuality. Moral rectitude and social status are the heart of their upper middleclass aspirations.

     Cal breaks down in tears as well, and later that night escapes the house, going to Jackson’s place to see if Landon might be there. Jackson, who asks about the money, obviously doesn’t know, as Cal puts it, he “got caught.” Furious, Jackson refuses him to help find his brother and calls him “You fucking faggot,” Cal responding my calling him a junkie. A fight proceeds, with Jackson beating Cal, at that moment Landon driving up, pulling Jackson off his brother and beating him, until finally Cal pulls Landon away.

     The next words are Cal’s as the car pulls up in front of their parent’s house. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” The lines are never explained, and we can wonder what they entail. Is the little brother sorry for not knowing the depth of his own brother’s drug addiction? Was Jackson his primarily source all through college? Is he sorry for not knowing how their parents would behave in such a situation. Or is he perceiving something that is basically kept from the viewer, that the relationship between Landon and Jackson was something other than it seemed? That in protecting his little brother, he has had give up his drugs but also a deep friendship or even love.

      Cal, instead of pursing that comment, tells of his own lack of someone to talk too, admitting that everyone in school hates him just because someone found something and told everyone, something, he admits, that neither Landon nor his parents know. 

       Landon holds him, as Cal breaks down, the two of them seeming to have lost everything but one another. Finally, Cal speaks: “Come home. You can get help, and they’ll forgive you.” But Landon insists that he just can’t go back there right now—realizing as he must the severe limits of his parent’s love. 

      Cal suggests, we don’t have to go back there. Right now, we can do or go wherever we want.”

Landon lights up a joint, “Okay.” He hands the joint to his brother, who takes a quick whiff, as they drive off to Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 2, as if it were a gay brother love fantasy. We know, however, that this brother’s “influence” will continue to be a bad one for the younger romantic. Who will they live without money, clothes, a home? What happens when the drugs run out, there is no food to eat? Maybe they will change their minds by the morning or the next day. Will their parents be flexible enough to now face two major disappointments in their plans for heirs, symbols in their minds of their failures as parents? Perhaps in their endless demands for perfection, the parents may have lost their own children forever. Will the boys, like so many others, be forced to work the streets, to run drugs or even prostitute themselves. The moving film doesn’t attempt to answer any of these questions, and even the meaning of its title is abstract. If there are people to blame, Jackson is of the course the obvious party; but it may be that the parents are the true “influence” which destroyed their own children’s lives. If nothing else, it’s clear that neither son was given the proper love and acceptance they needed.

      Director Indy Dang made this film for his final project at The Rhode Island School of Design, later went on to direct the short Growing Pains, and to become the Production Designer for the TV mini-series No Friends Club.

      Influence, I’d argue, was one of the best short films in a year in which a substantial number of such works stood out, including Vasilis Ketatos’s The Distance Between Us and the Sky, Aiman Hassani’s Khata, Olivier Lallart’s Fag, Jessie Levandov’s Baby, Sharlin Lucia’s In a Moment, Nosz Anjembe’s Freed, Marine Levéel’s Magnetic Harvest, Saleem Haddad’s Marco, Gabriel Páucar Vásquez’ Hotel Paraiso, Haukur Björgvinsson Wilma, and Arthur Gay’s Lipstick.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

 

Jannik Gensler | Mir Selbst So Fremd (A Stranger to Myself) / 2017

compulsive sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jannik Gensler (screenwriter and director) Mir Selbst So Fremd (A Stranger to Myself) / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

Ben (Fabian Lichottka) is a compulsive sex addict in German director Jannik Gensler’s sexy and sensuous 12-minute film A Stranger to Myself. From the first scene when he waits in a parking lot by his car for a stranger (Alexander Chico-Bonet) to arrive, to the two men he fucks in a local toilet (Michael Gaschler and Maximilian Krüger), except for the length of their hair and other facial clues, he can hardly discern any difference. They are beautiful young men who Ben grabs hold of and immediately begins to have passionate and quick sex, obviously enjoying the sex without any recognition that they are actually human beings. They might well as be beautiful life-like dolls who give him pleasure.

     Similarly, as he awaits a cellphone hookup, Alexander (Thomas Hospes), the only one of his conquests with a name in this short near-porno piece, he doesn’t bother to get up and open the door, telling the man standing on the other side that the door is open. The beautiful Alexander enters, going straight to the bedroom where Ben just as quickly grabs him in a clinch, strips him naked and wrestles into bed for a fuck.

    Afterwards, he sits on the one side of bed looking off distractedly at the floor, while Alexander sits on the other side, occasionally turning back to see if they might not be some verbal communication, but finally gives up, dresses and leaves. Ben is a love ‘em and leave ‘em, all sex being with seemingly nothing to communicate even to himself.

      When Alexander leaves, Ben strips off the bed of the sheets, quickly replacing them as rashly as he has engaged in sex. He brushes his teeth, swirls a mouthful of Listerine and spits only to repeat the act, and showers, soaping up as if to remove any scent or sensation of the man with whom he has just engaged with sex.

      He returns to sit on the clean sheets just as comatose as he has in the very first frames of the film. But now he spots a billfold that has slipped out of Alexander’s pocket. He opens it only to pull out a picture of Alexander with a young girl behind him. Is it his sister, his daughter? Might Alexander secretly be married? This is seemingly the first contact with anything but the penis and mouth he has made with another human being.

      He texts Alexander to tell him that he has left his billfold behind and wonders whether he might come over to pick it up. He then returns to his “thinker” position, with evidently no ideas coming into his head in the process.

       This time he actually goes to the door, speaking his first word of the film, “Hi,” in response to Alexander’s greeting. They go into the bedroom where Ben hands the handsome young man his missing billfold. But instead of turning to leave, Alexander sits down beside him, perceiving some great problem is facing the strange being, and putting his hand gently on Ben’s arm asks in a friendly manner, “Is everything okay?”

        Ben struggles to speak, finally uttering a single word, “I,” Alexander now putting his arm around his shoulder as if to reassure him. The screen goes dark.

        We can’t imagine why Ben has arrived to such a state. Has he lost a lover or just lost himself— or perhaps both. Obviously, he has chosen his sexual trysts as a replacement for whatever he is missing, and it will take a great deal of time and love from someone if he can be salvaged from the depths of his isolation, an desolation even of the self.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

 

 

 

José Torrealba | Open Secrets / 2004 [documentary]

gay men living in a world of all men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Jackson, José Torrealba, and Shelley Tepperman (writers), José Torrealba (director) Open Secrets / 2004 [documentary]

 

Narrating his own film based on the book by Paul Jackson Courting Homosexuals in the Military, Venezuelan-born Canadian filmmaker José Torrealba documents the active roles played on homosexuals in the Canadian Armed Forces during and after World War II.

      Interviewing five former World War II veterans, Bert Sutcliffe (Regimental Sergeant-Major), Ralph Wormraleigh (Sergeant), Henri Di Piero (Lieutenant), Bob Grimson (Flying Officer), and Bill Dunstan (Private, Performer), this documentary basically confirms and extends what has been discussed and observed in numerous other such documentaries about both male and female service people in the US military in films about which I have already written.

      Like those other works, this suggests that in the beginning of the War as thousands of willing and pressured young men volunteered and were suddenly thrown together in military bases, the military had no policies regarding homosexuality. After all, several of the interviewees point out, homosexuality was never publicly discussed and all young military men were by decree labeled as good heterosexual boys wanting to serve their country despite the great possibility of death.

     Moreover, most of these men, several from small towns, did not even think of themselves as being “gay,” a term in those days not in common use, let alone homosexual. Many had dated girls back home even if they had felt other sexual urges, and presumed they would some day marry. Now thrown together with hundreds of other males, many of whom, particularly from the larger cities who were actively homosexual and other males who had promised their wives not to engage in sex with other women, felt perfectly at ease in engaging in male-on-male sex. Several others, perhaps bisexual, simply enjoyed sex. And the country boys such as Bert Sutcliffe simply found themselves happier among the male company without any longer having to deal with female relationships.

     Some begin what they described as deep male friendships, male bonding that included holding hands at night with the person in the next bunk or even occasional mutual masturbation without necessarily imagining it represented any great abnormality. As long as they were discrete, other soldiers in the platoons and battalions overlooked such behavior.

      Others were actively engaging in sex, Bob Grimson describing how he met a gay man who basically mentored him into gay life, taking him to gay bars and even a “bawdy house” for males only, in which while waiting for your room, you could pay to look into peep holes to watch the others engaged in sex. Naples had a notorious bar, the Mama bar, in which men performed sometimes in the open.

       For the early days of World War II, indeed, when soldiers weren’t engaged in their daily dirty, deadly, and degrading daily duties, no one seemed to resent the differences of those who sought ought sex with one another. Soldiers grew to realize they all had to work together in order to survive, and those few who were outed and discharged were usually charged by people outside their units.

      Yet military officers soon realized they had a major problem on their hands which they couldn’t identify to the world in general, particularly if they wanted to keep the myth that their young men were all good, patriotic straight boys working for God and their country. Increasingly the military police begin to spy on noted gay spots, and the military itself, writing up a new code of military decorum used the dreaded court-martial proceedings, designed to humiliate the suspected or actual acts of homosexual behavior by describing them in detail while still defining them only as “improper and indecent conduct.” Grimson himself was asked to serve as one of the judges and made to feel that he had no choice but to agree with the higher offices with whom he as serving if he wanted to protect his own life. Besides, as written into the military code, it was improper conduct, he insists.

     The military itself had been assured by the medical community that homosexuality was a disease and that it was dangerous for gay men to be in daily contact with heterosexuals who might be swayed psychologically to explore the perverted sexual world of homosexuality.

     Asked about the hypocrisy of his position when he himself was engaged in such improper conduct, he hedged by simply responding that when he was having gay sex he did not think about the military code, obviously able through discretion and mental compartmentalization to escape the moral implications of his actions.

     Others, like the beautiful young Bill Dunston, who had been a talented singer, was asked to join the entertainment corps. Since his face was so femininely beautiful, he was asked to dress in drag and perform in shows that delighted the soldiers. Indeed, he and another soldier in drag became quite famous for their drag routines and falsetto singing. His friend became a noted drag queen after the war, but ironically, Dunston is the only one of the five men interviewed who was actually straight and has been married to a woman for decades since the war.

    The second half of the film is devoted to the real service of men such as Sutcliffe, who remained in the military after the war and in 1962 was about to be promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and stationed in the pentagon when he made the mistake of visiting a bathroom in Ottawa and approaching a man hovering in the back seeming to look for sex. He was arrested, visited by brigadier generals and kicked out of the military the next day, told to go back to his apartment.

     As with so many of the men shamed, they had no way in those days of finding other employment. And, as Sutcliffe describes it, how was he to tell his brother and sister why he had left the military. “I was desiccated. The military had been my life.” He takes out a luger, contemplating suicide before he realizes that do so would merely condescend to the ridiculousness of military logic. He had already proven his worthiness despite his sexual differences with their code.

     Perhaps Di Piero tells one of the saddest stories in the film. Having taken over Germany, the unit to which he was attached was assigned to go to Dachau and gather up the dying, skeletal bodies of Jewish men and women left behind. But the Germans had booby-trapped to bodies to explode when touched. To move the bodies was to die. The skeletal remaining survivors argued that they would remove the bodies since they already felt sentenced to death. Di Piero breaks down in tears with the horrific memories of what happened and which now some people doubt. He grows angry. I was there and I saw it happen, he argues.

     Once the bomb had been dropped, most soldiers were told to go home and wait for further orders. Di Piero returns to a different Montreal, deciding to visit the Mount Royal Hotel, rumored for its cruising bar. There he met a young Air Force man. They sat down on a settee and began to talk and suddenly were arrested by military police.

     Di Piero was charged with “suspected” homosexuality and sent to a psychiatrist which only made things worse since he argued the young Lieutenant be discharged. I was discharged “on suspicion” of being a homosexual, not even for actually being one, he angrily observes. I was thrown out of the army after four years of good service.

      Later Di Piero came to teach at McGill university where he had heard a former young lover had become a student. When he asked about the boy he knew and had fallen in love with at age 26, he was told that, tired of being labeled a gay man, the young lover had taken his motorcycle into a garage and asphyxiated himself to death on its fumes. Finally broken, Di Piero left Canada to move to England where he remains today.

     The horrible tales of sexual discrimination this film tells finally came to an apparent end in 1992 when Michele Douglas sued the Canadian military for sexual discrimination based on sexual orientation and won, the military establishment being forced to change its policies. But Torrealba wonders how much things have actually changed in people’s minds. At a recent military celebration in Ottawa, Canada’s Governor General paused to consider who Canada’s unknown soldier might actually have been. “She mentioned race, profession, and all kinds of personal traits. But what she did not say was, ‘And he may have been gay.’”

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).