Mazen Khaled | Cadillac Blues / 2002

life on the run

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mazen Khaled (screenwriter and director) Cadillac Blues / 2002 [26 minutes]

 

Omar (Wassim Bacho) and Ryan (Najib Zeitouni) are close and caring brothers, living without their parents in a small apartment. They both lead active lives separate and secret from one another, respecting each other’s privacy to the best of their abilities, which perhaps also explains why they have moved out of their parent’s house.

      Omar, the elder, spends his nights in clubs where he is heavily involved in drugs; he often brings girls back home. But Ryan is even more secretive, or we might say frustrated about his life, as we quickly perceive in the early sequences where, after viewing some online gay porno, he falls to sleep and dreams that he is watching the porno with his brother, terrified of his reactions. When he awakens, he realizes that Omar has been calling to him, trying to awaken, worried for the movements and noise he has been making in his sleep.

     The two share a Cadillac and, evidently, a single cellphone, trying to alternate as much as they possibly can. But for Ryan even the Cadillac does not provide for the needs for living his life.

     As we observe during his one night out, Ryan picks up a friend with whom he’s been texting, Loverboy81 (Mike Ayvazian), who, Loverboy suddenly announces, has also invited two other friends along for a party, none of which pleases Ryan who has hoped for some private and sexual time with the good-looking man, presumably making out in the car. Although he has privately accepted his sexuality, parties are not his thing as he explains. And in Beirut, where being gay is dangerous and can lead to imprisonment, such parties, moreover, evidently are often places where young men engage openly in sex in front of others, not something which appeals to the still inexperienced Ryan, who keeps calling people who engage in such activities as “fags,” repeating it over and over to himself until he finally identifies himself as one of them, admitting his “faggotry.”

      Having the Cadillac for only one or two nights a week, his entire life, we perceive, is confined, in some sense, to the automobile. Although it is a spacious car, it is utterly delimiting, almost claustrophobic for him. Whereas his brother can use the car as a conveyance for his sexual partners, for Ryan who has not yet shared his secrets with his brother, it is the “location” of his sexual existence.

     He leaves the party early, frustrated once again. Seeing a handsome hitchhiker on his way home, he picks him up. The boy begins by suggesting that he has just broken up with his girlfriend, expressing his anger with the whole female sex. But he soon comes on to Ryan, and apparently when Ryan responds he threatens him with violence, forcing him to take out all his money from an ATM machine and reporting that next time he’ll report him for arrest as a queer.

     The evening ends, accordingly with not only with further frustration but with fear, a sensation that something has to change. He calls Omar, but refuses to tell him precisely what has happened. Indeed we, who observed these events, are not quite sure what precisely transpired. And perhaps even Ryan, living in the compacted almost surreal world in which he exists does not know quite how to describe it.

      Back at home, he refuses to discuss the evening’s events, obviously terrified of talking about the hitchhiker and the man’s behavior for fear that his brother will begin to perceive why he picked up the stranger and how his own behavior was used as a threat by the aggressor, a reason why gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals often do not report crimes against them even in more sexually open societies.

      But Omar will not stop in his demands for an explanation, insisting that Ryan explain not only what has happened that evening but over the last few weeks, the emotional tension of which both brothers have realized has been building between them for some time.

      Finally, Ryan tells him that he is gay, the result being fairly predictable with Omar behaving like a parent who at first denies his statement’s reality, suggesting it’s just a phase he’s passing through. And then bringing, as always, in yet more guilt, which in this case not only involves their parents but the possibility of being punished by the society and imprisoned by the police.

     But Ryan is not a 17-year-old kid, and makes it clear that this is something that he has long had to suffer, that facing the constant fear of police and societal hatred is part and parcel of the identification of a self that now recognizes it is part of his world. There is a limit for guilt that has already been identified and accepted.

     Like many parents, his brother finally responds with the question of why he hadn’t discussed this “problem” before. Ryan, taken aback that his brother still sees it as a “problem,” an abnormality, hits back strongly with the assertion that he is normal and it is not a “problem,” but is simply the reality of his life. As for sharing the information with his brother, he challenges him, what did he expect, that he bring back a boyfriend to his bedroom, as Omar does his girlfriends?

     Temporarily shocked that he might even want to do that, Omar seems startled that things have progressed so far without his knowledge. Ryan puts the entire issue back into his brother’s court. “I guess I will have continue living my life in a car.”

      We don’t know how the confrontation truly ends for them, but we do see that Omar has perhaps recognized his brother’s pain and dilemmas, and that his final turning off of the night is a loving and protective act, a recognition that for these two caring brothers things will have to change.

      Given the restrictions that still exist in most of Arab world, this 2002 film is a very brave work, expressing fully the oppression most gays in Lebanon and in other Arab countries experience in their necessarily hidden lives, suffer, living out their sexual lives in small spaces or even in “friendly” public spaces instead of possibly being enjoyed privately in the silence of a bedroom. In such a world, even in his Cadillac a driver can feel the blues.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).