how
to ruin a wedding
by Douglas Messerli
Jennifer Sabel,
Andreas Hammer, and Benjamin Kramme (screenplay), Benjamin Kramme (director) Kälber
mit zwei Köpfen (Two-Headed Calves) 2022 [27 minutes]
German director
Benjamin Kramme’s Two-Headed Calves is a serious satire against
particularly religious communities such as the one in which Johannes (Andreas Hammer)
and Marie (Jennifer Sabel) live and have grown up in, where homosexuality is
still seen as such a perversion that the the community looks the other way
while assigning their gay men and women to quack therapy doctors, in this case
a man who has not only practice the standard conversion methods, but has
provided his patient, Johannes, with drugs and two exorcisms, resulting he
declares the devil rushing off as a black snake in one case and a puff of smoke
in another.
Today, however, is supposed to be the happy day, when fully cured
Johannes is getting married to Marie. The wedding dinner is planned to be an
outside affair, but since it is heavily raining the caterers have moved
everything to inside the church community center.
This short film satirizes the standard
wedding subjects, a nasty mother of the bride, who looks like a crone, is
delighted to finally get her 39-year-old daughter off her hands, but still
complains that at her age her chromosomes have probably gone bad and she will
be unable to bear a normal baby.
Johannes’
parents are unspeakably happy that their gay boy has finally married into
heterosexual bliss despite that fact that Marie is more than a little plain,
and older than Johannes.
His mother, however, is outraged that a
handsome Pakistani boy is one of the catering servers: how dare a Muslim enter
their little closed-off community!
Yet things seem to be going a nicely as
possible. That is, until Marie gets up to sing a song of love to her new hubby
in a voice that is frail to say the least, with a tuneless melody and clumsy
lyrics obviously written by her. In the middle of the song, Johannes suddenly
gets up and leaves the room, his therapist following him into the bathroom
where the groom insists he cannot go through with the marriage, his homosexual desires
having returned.
Marie, moreover, and followed and
overheard their conversation, now demanding to know what this is all about.
Johannes finally explains that he is gay—or at least he was, but is now cured
and is ready to rejoin the congregation, particularly after the therapist
demand he take another pill and quickly provide another exorcism in which he
speaks in an exotic babble of made-up words.
His new wife, however, is now quite
troubled and begins downing entire magnums of champagne straight from the
bottle. And in the midst of everything, she finally explodes at the numerous
questions her mother and others pose in explanation of her behavior, loudly
singing out, there will be no wedding night because “He’s gay!”
At that
very moment, three male can-can dancers enter and perform in rustic can-can
dresses and white tight undershorts.
The entire congregation is aghast, each
with a different homophobic reaction, the Pakistani boy trying to tell the
roomful of heathen bigots how wrong they are, as Johannes runs off, now ready
to jump from the nearby church steeple, Marie running after him and climbing up
to save him. And they hunker down nearby, he tells the story of how at 18 he
had a boyfriend named Adrian, who he brought home, introducing him to the family
as his “best friend.” Yet he felt terrible for lying in front his friend, his
family, and God.” Soon after, his mother entered his bedroom to which the two
boys had retreated, finding them in each other’s arms. She wanted to kill
herself, notes Johannes, and “my father wanted to kill me.”
They return to the party to announce they’re
getting a divorce and that no one should be forced to be someone who they are
not. The Pakistani boy kisses Johannes, and a couple of men come forward to kiss
Marie and one another. The entire congregation seems simultaneously to come out,
women kissing women, men kissing their male colleagues.
In the right hands, however, this could
have been much more humorous. As it is, it straddles the sour expressions of
the churchgoers and the joy of Johannes final dismissal of their homophobic
fears. It doesn’t help, of course, to know that in real life, such pious
church-goers would have merely hunkered down for heaps of further hate, running
poor Johannes right out of their godly temple, and probably his parents as well
for keeping his “condition” secret.
Los Angeles,
December 17, 2024
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).
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