Caitlin McLeod | One Like Him / 2022

different directions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tareq Baconi and Caitlin McLeod (screenplay), Caitlin McLeod (director) One Like Him / 2022

[16 minutes]

 

As children Karim (the teenage version played by Mohammed Nizar, the adult by Kais Nashif) was in love with Ramzi (Hamzeh Shaker Mahadin and Loai Noufi), but when Ramzi’s mother found a love note that he had written Ramzi, any contact the boys might have continued to make was cut off.

    Years later, the two meet up in the city, Karim now an openly gay man, and Ramzi a straight man with a new-born daughter. Karim brings him a letter in an envelope to read later, and attempts to speak to his childhood lover about their lives then and now.

     Various possibilities of that communication are played out, with, in the first case, Ramzi simply walking out and refusing to permit Karim’s confessions from even being expressed. In a second version, more gets set, but ends up equally bad. In a third version of this Rashomon-like playing out of past events, Ramzi chastises Karim for having refused all further communication, arguing that even if they might have gone in different sexual directions there still might have been years of friendship and understanding.

     We cannot know which version of this frustrated attempt to communicate in Arabic that does not even allow the words to express Karim’s sexuality, In all versions, the enveloped communication that Karim suggests that Ramzi should read later, is soaked in the whisky Ramzi spills in their angry and hurt conversation, and is left behind, unopened.

     The director herself describes the tense situation: “These two Jordanian men and what they say to each other in the context of present day Amman is so powerful in this story that our approach was to showcase those elements as much as possible. There is a magnetic stasis to the shots that allow us to feel each twitch of a cheek or a jaw tightening. We are real and up close and personal.

     At the same time the film sits in a surreal, fantasy space. The elements, emotions, energies disrupt reality and make us (and Karim) question what is real and what is imagined. Overall we want an audience to think about what "closure" really means in relation to personal identity and another person.”

     In such a world, it appears closure is not possible, since each time the epistle brought as a token by Karim to Ramzi is left behind. In the last moments of the film, he opens the letter to reveal that it is a wedding invitation between him and a man named Tobias, obviously presented Ramzi as a token of a past that was never permitted to exist in their culture, and most certainly a direction closed off to his friend.

     Apparently, it is still a reality that is not permitted to exist in men like Ramzi’s world. Yet, in such a world even the victim is also the perpetrator of the homophobia that pervades the culture. McLeod expresses it quite succinctly:

 

 “The film looks at the significance and consequences of what is spoken and unspoken. Karim has been living with the burden of what has gone unsaid, never having had the words or language to describe himself. He never had a chance to explain to his childhood friend and first love how he felt. In this conversation, Karim finally finds the courage to speak his truth. But each time he comes up against obstacles – in himself and in Ramzi - and the moment is not cathartic. Saying ‘I am gay’ in English alienates Ramzi, who finds the expression ‘undignified’. Then none of the words in Arabic feel quite right. Karim finally loses control of the moment. He lets go of the need for Ramzi to understand him. He accepts that, as limited and reductive as his language might be, at least it’s honest. And that is when something unexpected happens: Karim hears that he was accepted and loved all along. No one turned away from him. He had, in fact, turned away from himself.”

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Don Roy King (director) | Porn Doctor (The Doctor Is in My Butt 4) / 2016 [TV (SNL) episode]

serious medical attention

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Roy King (director) Porn Doctor (The Doctor Is in My Butt 4) / 2016 [4.50 minutes] [TV (SNL) episode]

 

On this January 17, 2016 episode of Saturday Night Live, Adam Driver performed or was at least

trying to perform the role of a porn doctor, Doctor Rockhard, concentrated on his hunky patient’s (Beck Bennett) problems with his upper thighs. Rockhard quickly finds the problem and is busy “handling” the situation when an unexpected patient (Aidy Bryant) intrudes, explaining that she is quite ill and she and her mother have been waiting quite a long time.

    Rockhard attempts to get rid of her as soon as possible, but even before she’s out of the room, she overhears the doctor explaining that there might be other ways to pay for the necessary operations of the mouth procedures and other medical insertions, the patient being a bottom, the doctor the top(s). Bryant explains that perhaps he can also find a way to help her and her mother, since their insurance doesn’t kick in until the next month.

    Even the confused Porn Doctor explains that, well perhaps he can work out something with her mother, but, no, the overweight teen who is evidently in deep pain is not someone he can operate on without insurance and assurances moreover from his crew.

     The skit keeps trying to return to the porn film obviously being taped, and her intrusions are becoming a problem as the skit talks about everything from “blue balls” to how he might make his patient’s groin even “more sore.” The medical talk, she proclaims, is way over her head, particularly when a group of muscular medical doctors (Taran Killam, Kyle Mooney, Pete Davidson, and Jon Rudnitsky) join in the joyful search for a cure to all the problems that the poor football-playing patient and each other have long been suffering.

     This is a gay skit worthy of the best of the SNL series, which seldom worried about the consequences of their bawdy gay humor

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2024).

 

 

 

Yu-Tong Weng | 宵禁 (Undercurrent) / 2020

love in a crisis

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yu-Tong Weng (screenwriter and director) 宵禁 (Undercurrent) / 2020 [20 minutes]

 

In Taiwan movie-maker’s 2020 film Undercurrent, which contains no dialogue, we are sent back in time to the winter of 1979, with the city was under curfew due to the anti-governmental protesters involved in the “Formosa Incident,” during the pro-democracy demonstrations that occurred in Kaohsiung.

    In this wordless drama we have no idea why the young teenager (Lee-Fong Huang) is still out wandering in the late night, although we might suspect that, despite a current girlfriend, he might be seeking out the sex that several others seem to be exploring in the local park, its public toilet, and nearby derelict hut into which he follows a handsome young youth (Lee-Fong Huang). Nothing sexual goes on between the teen and the youth except a gift of a cigarette and the great many languorous looks they exchange. Eventually the youth moves out of the enclosure into the park where we can see a number of other men also wandering.

      The official film description ponders whether these men, living under martial law, are “constantly escaping from their government, the society, or the affection buried in their hearts,” but any gay man can tell you outright, these are not political revolutionaries but perhaps equally troublesome men who are protesting the silencing of their hearts.

     Being gay in such a culture is perhaps just as dangerous as having political views, but even the policeman (Ming-fan Wu), when he finally arrives, is not interested in the older queers, including the handsome youth, but is perfectly ready to take the teenager into custody, whom he soon attempts to rape in his car.

       The boy puts up a good fight, and is finally tossed out into the now rainy streets, bruised and psychologically broken by the event.

        He attempts to move back toward the only safety he as found in the park toilet, but has no longer any energy. The youth reappears and helps him back to their refuge. When he attempts to undress the totally wet youth, the boy pulls away, the youth simply sitting beside him while the exhausted teen finally lays his head upon this lap, the older boy gifting him another cigarette and gently stroking his head.

       The government is something to be feared in every way possible, while the society outsiders, it appears, can mostly be trusted to offer up love for those like them who are lost and have no way to find their way back home into a society that provides them with few opportunities to be themselves.

        This is a lovely, mostly quiet movie that uses nature and the natural pull of love to great effect while opposing it to the intense lights shined into faces and the brutal assaults of the so-called normalized regime of hate.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).