Inabel Selah | The Tailor / 2021

sewing up a new identity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Inabal Selah The Tailor / 2021[14 minutes]

 

We might guess where Israeli director/writer Inabal’s Selah’s short film of 2021 is going from the very first moment. Oren (Koren Solomon) a hirsute tailor is making a dress for one of his gay, transgender clients, all pink and chiffon, whom as a “top” he fucks.

    The would-be clothes designer has also applied to design school, and in the very first few frames of the film is sent a letter that rejects his application, to his devastation and his mother’s (Yael Daniel) sad regret. Mother and son in this movie obviously have a loving a relationship, but how far that rapport will take the now angry and confused dress designer is not quite established.

     Oren shaves his beard, and is interested in going even further, but the intrusion of his mother stops him from applying the makeup that he has discovered in their shared bathroom. Instead, Oren tears down all of his old designs from the wall, and begins to create a new wardrobe for his dummy model that consists of a gown all in white, almost like a marriage gown.

     That costume, we quickly perceives is for himself as, in the middle of the night, he finally is able to the makeup to his face, place the hidden wig upon his head, and dress himself in the gown which he has been sewing up for so very many nights.

     To her mother’s blinky-eyed middle-of-the-night awakening, he presents his newly discovered self, the transgender individual he has been hiding from himself and others for all of his life.

     We don’t even get a glimpse of his new transformation, but we surely guess it might be something splendid. If nothing else, it is the identity that he has been secretly sewing up for years of his closeted tailoring activities. A rejection of his dreams has freed him to become an individual he has for so-long struggled to become.

     There is nothing particularly earth-shattering here, or even amazingly revelatory. But in this short film we have witnessed another being come into her identity, and move into the new recognition of self. What is mother has to say about this is not really important for her grown son, now daughter. But it might, nonetheless, been interesting to see her reaction and the reality Oren had consequently entered.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Rebecca Ann Bentley | Stepping Out / 2022

coming to terms with reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rebecca Ann Bentley (screenwriter and director), Stepping Out / 2022 [9 minutes]

 

In this rather simplistic Australian film, first shown in international festivals in 2022, despite IMDb’s 2024 dating of its release, writer and director Rebecca Ann Bentley presents a rather simplistic view of coming out.

     Will (Will Hutchings) in this short film has just kissed Max (Darcy Smith), the popular soccer player of the elite all-male school which both boys attend, and Max is terribly disturbed since he truly liked it, and has made Will promise to no longer further discuss it.

 

     But Will, who is clearly quite comfortable with his sexuality, can’t resist making further advances.

     There is a tradition of gay films since 2020—perhaps even before—where smart sisters (Tori, in the series Heartstopper is a perfect example) clearly know what’s going on sexually between their older or younger brothers. In this case Liv (McKinely Markham) takes her brother aside to discuss his new “friend” to which he has just introduced her; “What do you know,” hisses her uptight brother. I know nothing she declares, “but if you don’t fuck that boy immediately, I will.”

     Max, however, despite is regular visits to internet gay sites is still haunted by the notion that everything he feels is wrong and rotten, and it takes a visit from Liv, who notices his appetite for young men, to finally get him to realize that there’s nothing wrong with his sexuality, and that even if his soccer-boy friends reject him, that no one should ever reject such deep love. Besides, she informs, she’s pansexual. O the progress (?) that has been made. Rugby player Nick (Kit O’Connor) from Heartstopper didn’t do anything more that blink before he described himself as bisexual. But Max has the problems that most gay boys share, how do I get from here to there?

     His sister Liv is the conduit, and it only takes a good conversation with his sibling and a plate of friendly cookies from his disappeared mother to set things straight, or perhaps we should say, in a crooked way. On the particularly school-day morning on which Max comes alive, we walks over to his clearly disappointed friend Will and plants a deep kiss on his lips. Even the student (Jeffrey Li) notices, and surely it will soon be all over the school. But who cares? The boys have a great deal of love to enjoy in the viewer’s imagination.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2024)