Christian Flashman | Alfie in Love / 2020

queer seduction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Moss Perricone (screenplay), Christian Flashman (director) Alfie in Love / 2020 [19 minutes]

 

Perhaps one of the strangest of LGBTQ films I have seen is Orange County, California Christian Flashman’s 2020 short film, Alfie in Love.

     None of it is quite believable, but it’s nice to imagine a situation when, after breaking up with someone (the sex is never identified), a young man, Alfie (Matt Gomez Hidaka) retreats to a lovely Bed and Breakfast run by a rather bizarre woman, Talia (Mia Hjelte), a woman who evidently his mother knows.

     What Alfie doesn’t realize is that at the same Bed and Breakfast a slightly older man Leopold (Char Smith) is also residing. Leopold might be described as a Bed and Breakfast serial seducer since he picks out hosts and their residents to sexually seduce, Talia obviously representing his newest intended victim.

      If writer Moss Perricone’s script hasn’t already gone beyond rationality, it gets far stranger as we gradually discover that Talia is herself a kind of serial seducer, who likes to play strange psychological sexual games, beginning with one in which she demands Alfie get naked—he understandably only strips off his shirt—while insisting that Leopold take a knife, running its tip down the center from the forehead straight down to the groin of the young man. Quite inexplicably, these men follow her instructions. It is a game of trust.

      But Alfie is predictably nervous, and when the knife point reaches his stomach he jolts, permitting the knife to enter and serious wound him.

      Instead of immediately abandoning the nightmare Bed and Breakfast, however, he remains, quite obviously having fallen in love with the handsome Leopold.

       A day or so later, Talia introduces another game, where at the breakfast table to the two men must explain their first sexual awakening, Alfie describing that as a masturbatory youth he was sensitive to vibrations and since his room was over the garage he would click on and off the garage door—until one day it fell unto a man’s foot, breaking it.

       Leopold doesn’t wish to play, but is still forced by Talia to go face to face with Alfie. And soon after she plays a rather nonsensical game in which the two men are supposed to jump into the pool, blind-folded, to find a pearl, which places in her own ear.

       There, she kisses both of them on the lips, Alfie backing off, Leopold enjoying her attentions until suddenly he too realizes he is attracted to the young boy. They kiss and the film folds to its illogical conclusion. I presume the two might finally decide to share their beds, not only their breakfasts.

       Yet, somehow, for all its ridiculous plot twists, this film appears somewhat charming as Thalia seduces these men into each other’s presence. At least, she found away to push off Leopold’s advances. And Worn-Tin’s musical score lends this film a slightly sickening, disorienting experience that hints at the great movie-composer Bernard Herrmann’s collaborations with Hitchcock and others.

 

Los Angeles, April 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2025).