love or punishment
by Douglas Messerli
Jack Hessler (screenwriter and director) Sacrament / 2024 [9.14
minutes]
Jack Hessler’s 2024 film Sacrament is set in
the mountainous American west in the 1950s, but in some respects it might be a
story that could take place still today.
Two young
men, Belford (Rin Iverson), a black man (which was still an issue in the 1950s)
and a white man, Winston (Abel Benitez), both church-goers, have fallen in love
with the express intention of putting that love in practice on their camping
trip.
Beyond their verbal arguments in
which Belford is resentful about Winston’s more open viewpoints about their
love, Belford keeps thinking back of the first time he caught Winston’s eye in
church, an image that clearly haunts him.
“….what would happen if George A Romero, FW Murnau, and David Lynch were all put on the same final year project together. The crisp black and white cinematographer is strongly reminiscent of Romero’s Night of The Living Dead, with the constant off-kilter imagery being a strongly Lynchian trait, and the prevailing sense of doom and menace bringing to mind Murnau’s Nosferatu and The Last Laugh."
After their sexual encounter, Belford
becomes obsessed with what he feels is evil and he finally get ups, lantern in
hand, leaves their tent, and goes into the woods to pray. When he returns to
the tent, Winston is missing. Belford rushes to a clearing, evidently, where he
observes Winston being beaten before he is put upon a cross which is soon after
set on fire, obviously incinerating his lover.
Yet, there remains a true possibility that
Belford, himself, may have done his lover some harm. Certainly, we cannot
imagine him building a cross and, with demons, watching the fire he has set;
yet we must certainly wonder whether or not he has done in Winston.
It all
depends, I suggest, upon whether or not you see the work as a progressive
narrative, a linear story in which first Belford goes into the woods to pray
before he encounters his lover’s death, or whether we perceive this fraught
tale as a mix of narrative, imagination, and flashback, which allows us to
wonder whether Belford’s prayers occur after some terrible incident with
Winston.
Hessler
makes certain we cannot quite know what we are witnessing—nightmare, fantasy,
or exaggerated memory—but we recognize that despite Belford perceiving his
friend as both a kind of Christ on the cross and martyred saint, that with the hold
his religious teachings still have over him, Belford will never be able to
enter into a full relationship with Winston, and even if it is just rejection,
that Winston will have to suffer the consequences.
This
short work is so eerie and beautifully filmed that it makes us conscious, once
again, of just how amateur-looking and trite of plot most LGBTQ films have
become.
Los Angeles, June 16, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June
2025).
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