Eric De Kuyper | Casta diva / 1982, released 1983

expectations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric De Kuyper (screenwriter and director) Casta diva / 1982, released 1983

 

The figures of filmmaker Eric De Kuyper, in this experimental film from 1982, almost all represent variations of Narcissus, looking into space, into the images of other bodies, and mirrors in search, so it appears, of love without being able to achieve it. The act of looking and posing, a sophisticated kind of cruising, makes their actions almost comic as they endlessly preen and beg for attention, but seem to pull away or move off the moment it comes near. In almost every sequence of this quite static film—reminding one of the endless long shots of Hungarian director Bella Tarr—figures of great beauty and allure (performed by friends, models, and actors Paul Ruven, Ben Kettenis, Jan Simons, Paul Verstraten, Walter Nuyens, Jacques Castelot, Marina Berti, Gérard Lemaître, Hugo Hilgers, Rik Roesems) seem ridiculously unable to achieve their desires or even their simplest of acts. They are pure and chaste gods, not of their own choice necessarily, but because they are all unable to meet up to the expectations that they and others put upon them. In De Kuyper’s beautiful black-and-white “scenarios” or in some cases tableaux-vivants, they fail because of they are untouchable, gods who cannot come down to earth in order to participate in the real world.

 

    Similarly, the director himself continually delivers the unexpected, contrarily presenting us with the opposite of what we had imagined. In the very first scenario, a young man returns time and again from inside his apartment to his large terrace-like balcony as if he were waiting for somebody, and is attempting to look for his arrival. Actually, we eventually discover, that he is not only looking for someone but allowing others to see him, at one point removing his shirt before reentering his apartment, and returning wearing a vest, he looks off in all directions without apparently finding anyone he seems to be seeking or without observing someone who might see him. This beauty is absolutely frustrated by his chasteness, desperate for an encounter. As if he were in a film—which, of course, he is engaged in—he poses, smokes, and stares into empty space as if he might engage someone other than the viewers of the film, who are real in his “fictional” world.

     Just when he and we have given up on that possibility, however, the director presents us, apparently directly across the way, with a man who appears to be staring back at the model seeking his voyeur. But strangely, the original

seems not to be aware of the other’s existence and stares of in another direction, missing out, so it appears, on precisely what he has been seeking.

    In the second scenario, another good-looking, presumably gay man seems to be readying himself for a night on the town. He begins by cleaning up the bathroom tub, an act, one imagines, in preparation for a shower. But instead, he turns to the small sink over which hangs a mirror. Our young man strips and washes his body slowly and thoroughly, even giving himself a sort of douche. He then, just as completely, dries off his body.

    Just when we imagine he has finally finished, however, he takes up a bottle of lotion or oil and carefully applies the lotion to his body from top to bottom, almost seeming to undo the acts of cleaning himself he has previously accomplished. Just the length of his sink-bound shower seems to suggest he prefers the act of cleaning himself over any effects in my have in terms of others to whom he might later present such a lean and fresh figure.

       If we have no idea whether this young god is chaste, we certainly do know by the time the sequence is finished that he is squeaky clean and scented.

      The third of our male “models” is first seen in the kitchen preparing a meal in a pot, perhaps a kind of stew. On a small table in the foreground are table settings and napkins for two and a vase of flowers in the center. He soon opens a bottle of wine, moving the flowers to side ledge, and putting out the wine.

    Yet no one shows up, and he soon brings out what appears to be salad, finally seating himself on the empty place between the settings, and eating the salad leaves by hand, one by one.

    He brings a newspaper to the table and soon after, a newspaper. A book engages him soon after, and finally he leaves to bring in a typewriter.

     The pot of stew, looking more like a soup is finally also brought to the table, some of which, along with the wine he pours into a cup and a bowl. Ultimately he also brings to the small table a TV set. It is as if the lovely table setting is an image of something which has no reality in his real world, a shared dining space that never is realized. It reminds be a little of a scene in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), where “Buddy Boy” Baxter, despite his best intentions, is left yet another night alone without any one to share his meal. Or perhaps yet another movie, Hitchcock’s Rear Window where the central figure played by James Stewart watches a lonely female neighbor pretend to serve up a meal for another who isn’t there.

     We don’t know who or what this man was expecting for his dinner. Was he stood up? Yet, here it is made even more sad and absurd by the final preponderance of objects on the table, the fact that this cook eats his soup or stew directly from the pot, fishes his pickles with a fork out of the bottle, and has little time to ponder the taste of anything he has so carefully prepared.

    Others with high expectations, but low results follow, including a truly beautifully coiffed young gay man who decides to give himself, again in the mirror, a little trim. But a snip with the scissors at one point, leads to yet another, and another, and on until we’re not sure at the end of haircut he looks better or worse than when he began.

     In yet another sequence a young man living in a near-barren room with his entire wardrobe apparently slung over and upon two chairs, tries on a pair of pants before looking into the mirror, and quickly decides to change into another pair, and then into yet another. He does the same maneuvers with shirts, equally unhappy with the results. Finally, he puts on a pair and shorts and a T-shirt with which he ultimately seems pleased. But instead of going anywhere—sits down on another chair and drinks from a bottle of milk and eats on of three apples laying in the foreground.

All of his efforts at dressing up appear to be for naught.

    And in the very next sequence we observe basically the opposite of the previous scenario, as a man, staring into the mirror attempts to button the three-way gathering of the collars and final button of a tuxedo before attempting to formally tie a bowtie.

    At a swimming pool a swim-suited boy anxious, it seems, to make a hookup, bruises a bearded man across the way, who for interminable moments sits on his haunches while looking in the opposite direction of the parading male across from him. Finally, a pool boy enters the scene, closing the curtains of the various shower stalls before also attempting to engage the crouching lion of a man. Although the latter does talk to the bearded man, he seems to get no further in encouraging him to exist his hunkering pose. You might almost cite this “expectation” as the kind of cruising event we saw in the first sequence, except here all players are far more obvious in their intentions, the two cute boys trying to seduce the sad man in thought. Although the stand-off seems to last for hours, no one budges, and once more there is little interaction between the seemingly desirous participants. Each of these individuals seem to caught up their voyeuristic poses to actually engage with others.

    In two of the sequences, handsome gay men meet up with machines, in the first case a man simply trying to install a light over his bathroom sink find that despite his careful measurements and box of tools that the bolts he attempts to affix into wall either will not fully enter or can not easily be pulled out. The holes he has made grow larger and larger until one wonders whether he can ever get the fixture to align. But with dogged determination, he finally achieves his goal, lighting up his narcissistic mirror image.

   One of the most visually fascinating of the sequences is in a vast field, at the far end of which is a typical Belgian road lined with trees.

    In the center of this field is a car with both its engine hood and back truck opened wide. Nearby sits a man (perhaps the same model as in the swimming sequence above) lying on the grass, as if frustrated by trying to repair his automobile has taken a rest or even a picnic.

  Eventually, however, he determines to continue in restoring the engine, pulling our wrench after wrench from his tool box and from within the car itself to find just the right tool for the nuts and bolts which keep his engine and the other parts in place. In utter frustration he returns to the driver’s seat and pulls out a beer, but even that does not relieve whatever bothers him as he puts his head down pulling his arms over it as if in deep grief. But he too seems aware of a possible audience, eyes each passerby who happens down the road in the far distance, as if someone might cross the field to help or at least commiserate?

    In the next sequence we watch a handyman wash and dry a gigantic mirrored wall of a major ballet company, an act that he achieves through a careful pattern of the application of water, the spreading of it, and the wiping away of the liquid.

    In this section’s last few moments, customed dancers enter of go through their steps in front of the now glistening clean mirror.

     One of the most fascinating of the sequences is held in a large room wherein the camera basically scans its long walls, reviewing versions of nearly all the characters we have seen until this moment—each of them poised in a position of exhibitionist stature, without any of them playing the voyeur, each looking off into space as if they were the object of the film goers viewpoint. Once more there is no interchange here, as the camera takes yet another voyage around the room to reassure us that not one of these figures seems to be allured by the others. One might argue that this represents the very essence of the misconceptions of these men, caught up in themselves so intensely that they have lost touch with the very sexuality which they intend to incarnate.

    It is as if all those gestures, the cleaning of their bodies, the clothes they put of their bodies and remove, the mechanical gestures they employ to amplify and engage the other has been for naught. This is a vast space of empty stares, of sexualized bodies that have lost their purpose. Even the art of seeming disengaged with which we have observed the director teaching them in the previous sequence has lost its meaning; and we are left with a vacuum that no longer enchants.

    Even the glorious music by Bellini (whose song “Casta diva” from Norma is sung by the chaste Druid princess to the moon), Puccini, Dalida, and Offenbach can no longer awaken these frozen mannikins. Their beauty and sexuality has been robbed from them in the artificiality of their gestures, in their frozen stare into nowhere.

Los Angeles, July 22, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).