Lasse Nielsen | Tim og Fløjtedrengen (Tim and the Fluteboy) / 2018

sending the gay boy off to the closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lasse Nielsen and Brent Petersen (screenplay), Lasse Nielsen (director) Tim og Fløjtedrengen (Tim and the Fluteboy) / 2018 [16 minutes]

 

It’s somewhat sad to see the same director of the 1970s, who created two major feature films (Leave Us Along and You Are Not Alone), both openly dealing with long-haired boys in love, now directing a rather amateurish-looking production to warn against gay teen suicide. Of course, the raw films of the late 70s, with their adolescent nudity—no matter its innocence—would be unthinkable in today’s sexual climate unless it were wrapped in boy-love anime in a cellophane Asian inscription. Even a picture of the two boys taking in the shower about their bodies got me banned from Google for representing pedophilia, neither my nor the director’s intention; indeed, the older was telling the younger how to keep clean. In Denmark, for example—Nielsen’s home country—the age of consent is 15; in California, where I live, it is 18.

     As I have reflected upon this subject several times throughout the years, however, over the last many decades we have become hysterics when it comes to nudity, a condition I can only see growing worse. Although pornography of many sorts rumbles through our daily lives, the nude male body is still verboten, particularly when it represents a young person under a “magically” numbered age of consent that varies from country to country and in the US even state to state.

     The long-haired beauty of Tim and the Fluteboy, Tim (Justin Geertsen) is rightfully angry from the beginning of this moral tale, as he goes stalking through a woods, banging nature with a large stick after he has been described as a faggot, presented with a rope in his backpack, and told to end his life or be outed to the entire school. He is, sadly, on his way to do just that, to hang himself from a high tree. Fortunately, the branch breaks before he can tighten the noose.

     Or is it really fortune, fate, luck? Tim, so he explains was visited by a beautiful boy playing a flute (Jonathan Lindinger) who, we discover, was Marius Jensen, a once a famous boy model who played a flute in Tivoli park before he committed suicide. He, so the ghost of Marius claims, caused the tree limb to break, since it was in that very woods where he made himself “disappear.”

     Tim, now seeing a psychologist (Mads Korsgaard), shares his fantasy with his doctor, who, upon illegally checking his patient’s cellphone, discovers that this flute-playing fantasy was actually once his own patient, and knows the terrible history of the talented kid.

     Once Tim dares to share with him the problems he’s been having at school, the doctor can finally prescribe a cure: yes, he is probably a homosexual, but he mustn’t let bullies force him away from the house of cards interrelationships that make up each of our lives. In a prescription that I cannot even imagine, this supposedly kind man argues that “To come out of the closet, you first have to enter it.”

     In short, young Tim should enter the closet from which he will soon discover that there are others like him, while eventually coming to the realization that any closet has many exits.

     I suppose that is a way of saying that the obviously “girly” boy with flowing long hair will simply have to “lay low” for a few years (Tim is only 13). But to me it sounds like someone telling a young person to just quiet down and deny his very existence for a time before dancing down the street to proclaim it. It reminds me of the mother, who terrified of offending her relatives during a Thanksgiving celebration, commands her son to “Be gay tomorrow” (the name of the 2022 film directed by Joshua Kellerman), when everyone knows for young teens there is no tomorrow.

    At least this doctor doesn’t pronounce the empty promise of “It will get better,” when we all know that throughout life there will always be a bully just around the corner, and finally you do just have to publicly shame them or utterly ignore his generally meaningless threats.

    In this case, however, since after his young patient has left, the psychologist actually finds a flute on his balcony, the boy’s hallucination may just be real enough to protect him until Timmy finds someone to make music on his own flute.

    As I noted when writing about Nielsen’s 2010 short movie, Lek and the Waterboy, fantasy may often be a good alternative to the world in which in which we currently live.

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Lasse Nielsen | Dragen (The Kite) / 2015

staying put

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lasse Nielsen (screenwriter and director) Dragen (The Kite) / 2015 [14 minutes]

 

Ever since the 1975 film Leave Us Alone (La’ os være), Danish film director Lasse Nielsen—his first two works done in collaboration with Ernst Johansen—has been exploring in various forms young long-haired, mostly blond, boys in love in a manner that was not only controversial in its day, but remains a territory which most US directors have been charry of entering. Nielsen’s and Johansen’s 1978 work You Are Not Alone (Du er ikke alene), reviewed in an earlier volume of My Queer Cinema, has long become an LGBTQ cult favorite, shown at film festivals around the world.

     Fortunately, Nielsen never rested on his laurels and continued into the 21st century to shoot features and shorts that speak in various ways about not only coming of age love, but love that has its roots in early youth. Perhaps if the US had further considered these issues there would have been no necessity for a brutally frightening work such as Farbod Khoshtinat’s 2020 short, Two Little Boys, in which innocent boyhood love turns into teen angst and a locker room murder/suicide—a film based on a childhood incident of the Iranian-born director, but is particularly American, I would argue, in its sensibility.

      In his 2015 14-minute film The Kite (Dragen) Nielsen takes us back to those first moments of love that later help define one’s sexuality for life. But before we can get there, the director presents us with a seemingly quite lonely adult, Bo (Mark Viggo Krogsgaard) who lives in a small, but comfortable house with walls lined with books and paintings, but a back yard of apparently old and rusting yard and patio furniture—folding metal lawn chairs, tables, etc.—and a swing set, as if there once must have been children in the house. Bo seems to be a kind of gardener with lots of plants and vegetables, but also checks out paintings and the jewelry portrayed in one of them with a magnifying glass. Is this his old family homestead or a home from which a wife and child (or children) have now fled. The clues do not completely add up to present us with a definitive answer. But there is certainly something solitary and forlorn about his life.

      Meanwhile, in another beach or country house we see the adult Ole (Mads Korsgaard) working in his garage, completing a home-made paper kite upon which his has rather crudely drawn a smiley-face in blue and red crayons. He picks up his cell phone and makes a call.

       Back in Bo’s house, we observe him in his greenhouse, clipping tomatoes. We hear his phone ring, and he picks it up to see a text message: “Kom til stranden ved Stængehus in morgen kl14. Se efter dragen!” (“Come to Stængehus beach tomorrow at 2:00. Look for the kite.”)

       Bo looks up and remembers, probably, the same message from long ago. And so the film begins with the long-auburn-haired Bo (Marius Bjørnbak Brix) riding his bicycle as a boy to Stængehus strand, which is evidently also a nude beach since, after he parks his bike and proceeds to the sand, a heavyset male nudist crosses the road from the wood, and soon after Bo observes a couple of young men lying nude upon a towel in a deep embrace, kissing. Observing the boy, they gently shoo him off. Bo watches for a moment, his lips eventually moving up to a slight smile, before moving on.

       As he comes closer to the shore, he observes a kite (much like the one we have seen the adult Ole recreate) high in the air, which finally falls to the beach just above where he stands. The boy Ole (Jonathan Lindinger) signals Bo to join him on the small cliff where he waits. Bo takes off his shoes, pours out the sand from them, and joins Ole to fly the kite.

       The film returns to the adult Bo now sitting on a small chair just outside the greenhouse, holding a glass of wine. A smile, just like to one that came to his face as a kid, shines over his face in his memory of the event.

       And the camera moves back to another day in Bo and Ole’s halcyon youth. Together they do what boys do, fly the kite, run after it and one another, and leap into the air with the joy of simply being able to.

      Evidently worn out by their efforts, we soon seem them laid out next to one another on a towel, sleeping. Bo awakens, looks over at the shirtless Ole and, observing his chest, takes off his own shirt. He begins to lie back but remains partially upright, rubbing his foot briefly against Ole’s. When Ole still doesn’t quite awaken, he picks up some sand and sprinkles a little over the other’s chest. In his sleep, Ole brushes it away. But when Bo follows by running his own hand lovingly across his friend’s chest, Ole quickly springs awake, wrestling his way on top of Bo, the other wrestling back into a similar position with Ole repeating it to plant a quick kiss on Bo’s lips. Bo pulls him closer kissing him more gently.

         Obviously, a great deal of affection has risen between these two friends, and slowly, almost as a game of bluff, the two now play at undressing, one first unbuttoning his shorts and the other following, alternately unzipping their shorts and then pulling them down and gradually off to reveal their swimsuits. They do a short striptease with each other eventually, we presume—since Nielsen’s camera has discretely pulled away to watch the high whip of the kite across the sky—until they are both nude.

        But the kite in this instance also becomes a sign of their location, and we soon see Ole’s father (Kenneth Christensen) coming down the path ostensibly to bring his son home. When he spots the naked boys he angrily pulls Ole off, the boy having to grab Bo’s swimsuit to quickly hide his nakedness. Bo, wrapped in a blanket, looks down to see Ole’s white swimsuit in front of him. It is almost as if in the remnants of their clothing they have exchanged something close to a vow.

        Throughout Bo’s recollections we have heard the lovely strains of a song by Nielsen’s frequent musical collaborator Sebastian, and now that songwriter/composer’s lyrics for “Når lyset bryder frem” (“When the Light Breaks Out”), posted in English at the very beginning of this film, make sense:

 

                               You little child, on your way to dreamland

                               Suddenly you meet a strange man.

                               He takes you across the deep water

                               To a strange beach

                               Where everything you see

                               Is like a fairy tale.

                               And when the light breaks through,

                               Yeah...time to go home.

         But this time the “light breaks through” in a different manner, as the adults, Bo and Ole, return to the same beach, Bo, with Ole’s long-lost swimming trunks hanging from his pocket, as in the first time stopping to pour the sand from his shoes which eventually he leaves with the swimsuit before running to join Ole on the small rise from where he is flying the kite. This time the two immediately embrace before releasing themselves in a series of intense kisses—the kite flying off into space—without any fear this time of their being “found out.”

        Not only do we have no idea what has happened to the two in the years since their childhood encounters, but we do know why they have remained apart for what some sources (IMDb for example) describe as a 20-year separation; all we know is that this time they will not have to “go home” alone.

       

Los Angeles, January 28, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).

Neil Armfield | Holding the Man / 2015

a matter of geography

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tommy Murphy (screenplay, based on the memoir by Timothy Conigrave), Neil Armfield (director) Holding the Man / 2015

 

Australian director Neil Armfield’s Holding the Man (2015) is a painfully touching film about two teenage boys who fall in love, but whose parents attempt to keep them apart.

      Indeed, Tim Conigrave (Ryan Corr), whose letter to John Caleo (Craig Scott) has been intercepted by their geography teacher at Xavier College in Melbourne, is threatened with a lawsuit by John’s father (Anthony LaPaglia) if Tim attempts to continue his relationship with John.

    When Tim’s parents are notified of the letter and the boys’ sexual actions, they also, although kindlier, forbid him from any further relationships with John. But Tim, in utter defiance, quickly escapes from the house and bicycles to John’s bedroom window, where the couple kisses through the wire screen.

      When John’s father suddenly enters the bedroom suggesting that he and his mother intend to send him to a psychologist, the boy bolts the moment his father has left the room, the two of them escaping via bicycles into the night.

       Unfortunately, thereafter Tommy Murphy’s screenplay—adapted from Timothy Conigrave’s book that relates the 15-year long relationship between the two—transforms into what I might describe as a “diary-film,” as years toggle back and forth, announced in huge white numbers. Directorially, this is a rather clumsy device.

       That is not to say this movie about gay life in the 1970s and 1980s is not completely engaging, as, like so many gay men, these two lovers are torn away from each other by many forces, including Tim’s desire to study acting in Sydney. Although he gets into the famed drama school—now celebrated by his young friends as a possible new Mel Gibson (rather strangely, since Gibson is recognized as a homophobe)—it also means that the boys, now young men, will be separated from one another; and, preparing for that separation Tim asks for a “trial separation,” wherein each is allowed sex with others.

       Tim’s teacher in Sydney, Barry (Geoffrey Rush) puts his classes through somewhat ridiculous exercises (performing as chickens, etc.) in order to toughen them up to play the heterosexual roles they will be asked to perform—yet another attempt by an adult to deny Tim and the many other gay men in the school their identities. Tim rebels, and the role as Stanley Kowalski is taken away from him—another oddity given the creator, Tennessee Williams’ own sexuality.

       Tim, again almost in rebellion, begins to have sex with several of his acting classmates. And when asked to create his own play, determines to interview several sufferers of AIDS, a disease in this period that didn’t even have a name.

       In the midst of performing role from Noel Coward’s (another gay man) Private Lives he discovers John in the audience, and instead of proclaiming his desire for the women to who he is speaking, declares “I want you back, John.”

       The blunder helps the two to get back together, but given Tim’s recent sexual activities, including a visit to a gay sauna, and his recent encounters with those who are suffering from AIDS, he and John agree to be tested. John tests negative, while Tim proves positive for HIV; that is until the doctor, calling them back into his office reveals there has been a mix-up in records, and that John also is positive.

      Toggling back to 1988, while Tim is visiting Melbourne for his sister’s wedding, he receives a call from the Red Cross, notifying him that from their records of him having given blood, he has infected another man with AIDS, realizing that he has “killed the man I love.”

      These scenes are at the heart of this sad film, and tears welled up in my eyes when I realized that both Howard and I, who had occasional “other” sexual encounters, sometimes as threesomes, were incredibly lucky in that very same period.

     Just before we met, in 1970, I had lived a wild life in Manhattan, with sexual encounters nearly every night; and even when after we met, old habits are not easily erased, particularly when we too were separated geographically between Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia for week and week.

      John, the least sexually active of the two, is the first to die, with Tim gradually deteriorating while still able to write the story on which this book is based. At one beautiful moment, they both imagine they might be able to escape the ravages of the disease, being part of what they describe as “The Second Wave,” imagining there might soon be a cure.

      They would have survived only if they were in the “Third Wave” one now realizes, when an expensive regimen of pills allows men and women to go on to longer lives.

       The film ends with a trip by the surviving Tim to the beautiful Lipari, Italy in 1994—evidently the town where from John’s family originated—from where the surviving lover, in a kind of panic, suddenly calls his female friend, Pepe Trevor (Sarah Snook), wanting to know where John sat at a party they attended as teenagers.

       The question, given John’s death, seems almost meaningless, yet for the now dying Tim it appears to be momentous, as if he was attempting to find yet another way to remain in the world of someone he has lost.

       In the first scene of the movie, he cannot reach her. But in the last, the concierge calls him back from his swim to deliver up the answer to his question from Pepe—whether truthful or not we cannot know—“he sat next to you.”

       As fellow students in a geography class, the two central figures of this work are continually defined by large and small geographical positions: the barriers imposed upon them by their families, their separation between Melbourne and Sydney, the space created between them by John’s death, and, finally their immediate proximity at a celebratory table in their youths. In this film space and place mean everything—even their comical attempts to fuck in a small car or in a house thought to be abandoned by John’s family.

       In an afterword, we are told that 10 days after completing this memoir, Tim also died at the young age of 34, at a time when Howard and I were just a few years shy of our 15th-anniversary.

 

Los Angeles, January 10, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).

Lee Haven Jones | Want It / 2015

insiders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roger Williams (screenplay), Lee Haven Jones (director) Want It / 2015 [11 minutes]

 

British director Lee Haven Jones’ Want It begins with a simple desire to have something that doesn’t belong to oneself. An intruder Rob (Jamie Andrew Cutler) breaks into a moderne mansion, wandering its rooms, eating a small cake and drinking from a bottle of wine from the refrigerator before he passes as if awed and almost struck down by desire with the beauty of the living room as he reaches to the ceiling and falls to the floor.   

     Soon after, we observe him in the master bedroom trying on the owner’s T-shirts, which he fits perfectly, and we realize, now fully, just how beautiful this intruder is, trim and well-built. Surely this body has been shaped by a gym subscription as opposed to living on the streets.

      A moment later, in a reflection we see that the owner, Simon (Alan Turkington) has returned, a kind a bat in hand. Surprised by the appearance of the other, Rob slowly takes off the shirt, and is ordered by Simon to also take off his pants. Standing naked, revealing all his beauty, he appears so very attractive that Simon rushes to him, grabs him around the neck, and simultaneously begins to masturbate his unwanted visitor, now clearly an object of the owner’s desire.

      Rob reacts with outrange, hissing “I’m going to kill you,” but Simon, grabbing him tighter around the neck, reacts, “That’s a strange thing to say with your cock in someone’s hand.” Together the two men, obviously now erect, begin to thrust themselves at each other, kissing as they ejaculate.

       This might have been what the promotional blurb suggests it is, a tale about “longing and desire in all its forms,” until the game comes to an end with Rob asking, “What time to do they come?” presumably referring to their mutual guests expected for dinner.

        What appeared to be a statement about need and desire has now been transformed into a short film about two rich boys who like playing out the games of the acquisitive behavior to enhance their sex lives. Too bad. We, like the boys who have finished jacking off, find ourselves with limp cocks and empty heads, disinterested in what might have been at least fascinating as a metaphor about the relationship of social classes, those on the inside and those on the out. These gay boys are obviously both insiders who live so similar to well-to-do heterosexual couples that they need to play games simply to arouse themselves.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

Jang Young Seon | 아직 끝나지 않았다 (A Naked Boy) / 2015

still in love

By Douglas Messerli

 

Jang Young Seon (screenwriter and director) 아직 끝나지 않았다 (A Naked Boy) / 2015 [22 minutes]

South Korean director Jang Young Seon’s A Naked Boy features a high school history teacher, Jin- tae (Kim Young Pil) who is having a very difficult time since one boy in his class of all-male students looks very much like his childhood boyfriend Seok-joon, whom he left behind when he moved to Seoul where he teaches. Moreover, the student, unlike all the others, appears to him as completely naked.

     The boyfriend has long since married and has a son, and now Jin-tae, at 45 years of age, is finally about to be married. As he himself admits later in the film to Seok-joon’s son, he is not as handsome as Seok-joon, but he’s now nonetheless found someone who wants to marry him. What a terrible moment to become daily haunted by a nude classroom student (Ha Kyung). Jin-tae is unable even to sleep at night. What’s more, the young boy seems to be almost flirting with him, or at the very least mocking his teacher.

     Over a short school break, Jin Tae returns home to his mother’s house, happy just to escape the daily vision of a beautiful nude boy in his classroom. In an attempt to finally send away his demons, Jin Tae invites his boyhood lover’s son for dinner; he dare not see the man himself, knowing that it would be disastrous for both of them.

      The young man (Kim Jae Heung) is obviously surprised by the invitation, but even more startled by his father’s friend’s comments. Jin-Tae admits not only that the boy’s father and he were close friends but that, he liked him a lot, “I really liked him….”

      The boy orders dinner and Jin-tae watches him eat, the strange couple joining up after on a beach. As the boy finally rises to leave, the older man makes a truly strange request, one that I don’t think you might find in any other movie. Would the teenager be willing to ride the teacher piggy-back from where they are standing to a post in the distance. 

      At first, the boy is quite understandably a bit confused, even troubled by the request. But eventually he agrees, and Jin-tae bends down so the quite sizable teen might get on his back. As the ride commences, we suddenly observe another boy in another time, obviously the boy Jin Tae carrying Seok-joon on his back, these young men dressed in heavy winter coats.

      Evidently, about leave their small town for ever, this ride was Jin-tae’s only request of his childhood lover. As they reach his house, Seok-joon asks might there not be some other way of saying goodbye, moving toward Jin Tae to kiss him. But Jin-tae, the young boy, pulls away, turning to go as Seok-joon moves off into the house. 

     At the very last moment Seok-joon reappears to wish that his friend will “Be a great man in Seoul.”

      Putting down Seok-joon’s son, the older man has now repeated the gesture of staying goodbye, has carried the son of his lover off as a token of his love and respect just as he had previously done with his father.

      Back in his school, Jin-tae encounters the beautiful “naked boy” in the hall once again, but this time the boy is fully dressed. Relieved and finally believing that he has laid his demons to rest, the teacher reaches out and strokes the top of the boy’s head, leaving his hand there for just a little bit longer that simple pat of affection. Both man and boy immediately know that the act has represented a kind of transgression, and the boy quickly walks off.

      As Jin-tae turns to watch the boy, he realizes the student is once more totally naked. He will not so easily lay his past to rest and certainly he must realize that heterosexuality will not be an easy or even possible transition in his life ahead, particularly since he is still in love with his boyhood sweetheart.

 

Los Angeles, October 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).