Neil Ira Needleman | Red Ribbons / 1994

who’s that knocking on my door?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Neil Ira Needleman (screenwriter and director) Red Ribbons / 1994

 

Like many 1990s theater company directors who helmed small companies, gathering around them a loyal group of like-minded supporters, Frank David Niles (Christopher Cappiello) created almost a cult-like theater experience, finding a loyal writer from The Village Voice, Preston (William J. Ingersol) to call public attention to his plays. Even more important, Niles’ theater company, In Your Face, was a gay company producing plays in the time when AIDS was still killing off vast numbers of the community. His plays had meaningful titles for the day such as The Trojan War: A Condom Caper, Pink Triangles, and Two Lesbians from Verona.

     Needleman’s gentle satire of this man and his circle is only a chuckle or two away from the real thing. And what makes it feel even closer to the truth is that this now legendary theater writer and director has—as the film moves out of its beginning scene from his private video diaries, filmed and edited with the help of Niles’ lover Robert Cisco (Robert Parker)—has, in this gentle mockumentary just died of AIDS, his funeral having been held the day before the events of the movie.

      Devastated by the loss of his lover and mentor, Robert is expecting a visit from Niles’ mother, a woman who has never accepted her son’s homosexuality nor communicated with him since her boy’s announcement of his sexuality. Robert is fearful that she may demand that he now vacate what she may believe was her son’s apartment. But when his Brooklyn apartment doorbell rings, it is not Mrs. Niles, but his beloved sister, Carolyn (Princess Sandlin), knowing that her brother might need some company and admittedly loving Niles herself, having had a brief fling with him, of which Robert is already aware. But she bears even worse news than the impending arrival of Nile’s mother. She has asked her homophobic, racist, hate-mongering, rock band member-husband Zach (David Nahmod) over so that we will sign the necessary divorce papers, and she is fearful of being alone with him.

      Carolyn admits that she only married the fiend for the drugs and rock concerts which at first were fun, until the band became involved with attracting their audiences through their various manifestations of hate—clearly an early precursor of Donald Trump-like politics.

      In the meantime, we watch another bit of a clip from Niles’ video diary, among clips reviewed at regular intervals throughout the film in order to provide historical substance for the period, 1990-April 14, 1994, the date of Niles’ death.

      Another knock on the door produces two lesbian members of Niles’ company, Betty (Lee Sharmat) and Joan (Colleen O’Neill). They are seeking some last few minutes in the apartment which they consider hallowed ground, and are only too happy to watch episodes of the video diary which recalls some of their happiest experiences. Soon Preston the journalist shows up as well as the elderly ham actors Joshua (Victor Burgess) and, his far funnier but quieter partner/critic Horace Nightingale III (Quentin Crisp, in his last feature movie performance).

       The equal opportunity offender of the human race Zach eventually does show up, suggesting that Robert should hire on with the rock group for nightly homo beatings and stares down the aging “couple of ancient queers” who perhaps invited “ass-fucking.” He is quickly sloughed off to Carolyn who takes him into another part of the apartment to convince him to sign the divorce documents.

       Meanwhile, having heard of the impromptu gathering, an absolutely obnoxious TV journalist, Fag Hag (Elisa DeCarlo) pushes her way into the gathering to “interview” each of Niles’ followers, which means shoving her face into the picture with the camera and announcing their names as if she were a dear friend, no questions asked, thank heaven.

       Even male porn start Stud (Glenn Philipson) shows up just after performing in three sex films that were so memorable that he cannot even sit down. He quotes from a hack speech he performed in one of Niles’ plays that is so awfully bad you wonder how this company could have attracted any audiences, let alone a critic; but just to reassure us, the video shows Niles’ denouncing the same scene as being the nadir of his writing abilities.

       In one long scene, as Robert cuddles up to his lover’s still-rumpled bedding we are made aware that Niles was obviously far-more sexually unfaithful to him than Robert’s continued devotion to him might suggest, which perhaps explains why Robert is not also suffering from the dread disease as so very many of his and Niles’ friends have, who, in a hall of personal photographs are each festooned with a red ribbon in testimony of their deaths.

       Fortunately, the sexual-centric Stud takes an interest in the fag-hating Zach, interlocking arms with him as he attempts to get a lowdown on why he hasn’t encountered him before, finally forcing Zach to leave the loving community behind, Stud hot on his trail with everyone secretly hoping that he might catch up and give Zach a different kind of bashing.

       Of course, Mrs. Niles (played, quite fascinatingly by Georgina Spelvin, the former lesbian soft-porn star Twilight Girls and lead of the porno hit The Devil and Miss Jones) must finally appear, not at all behaving as the monster we have imagined her to be, but as a confused, still-loving mother, filled with the guilt for her past silences, particularly after discovering a trove of love letters in her son’s closet from Robert unlike any she has read before, and a sheaf of poems  written in response by her own son. No one from her world, she insists, has ever expressed love in that manner.

       The visitors end up in a group hug embracing her as now one of their own as the film we are watching focuses on the conclusion of the very first video we have witnessed. In that video, the very sick and dying Niles has suddenly left his bed, entering the living room where Robert is editing his tapes. Without warning, he gets his coat, opens the door, and begins down the long stairway to the street. Trying to stop him, Robert quickly throws on a coat and catches up with his lover, trying to coax him back into the apartment and into his death bed. But Niles insists there is nowhere to go but forward, and, after reaching and gently touching the face of his companion, moves off quickly down the street away from the camera, presumably to his death.

       This was a difficult movie to watch. In part, of course, because at moments it is yet another moving film about AIDS and the bravery those gay men and women who died of the disease demonstrated. But it this particular it was hard to watch the film at moments simply because, despite its wonderful intentions, it was so amateurish and god-awful. Gay movie columnist Michael D. Klemm fully expresses the problems:

 

“Combing pathos and over-the-top comedy, Red Ribbons is a well-meaning but ultimately amateurish film. Calling it ‘stiff’ would be polite. The acting ranges from good to terrible. From the amount of scene chewing that goes on, I suspect that most of the cast consists of stage actors who needed to be told to tone it down for the camera. Crisp looks like a wax figure throughout. Entire scenes are usually played out in one shot and this was probably a budgetary choice rather than an aesthetic one. The subject is worthy of our consideration, its execution just leaves much to be desired. Much of Red Ribbons is painful…. Yet every time I was going to eject the disc, something would happen to seize my interest. The trouble is, these moments usually don't last for very long.”

 

     I am never one, obviously, who would push the eject button, although I am often sorely tempted. But in this case, I would argue, that the good intentions and sometimes surprisingly near-perfect moments of pathos and comedy—the monologue in which Niles memorializes his ex-lover dancer who had just died of AIDS, the moment when Stud chases after Zach, the occasion when Horace gets his second erection of the year and demands something be done immediately to resolve it, the scene in which Niles admits to Robert that he has sinned, explaining that he has been filming their love-making to watch over as part of his video memories (a project he insists early in the film, he had begun long before he had contacted AIDS) and many other moments large and small make this a film worth seeing.

      After watching three other shorter films by the same director, I realized that Needleman is that kind a director, an obvious amateur with the visual sense and wit to keep his camera in position just long to witness something intimate and accurate, revealing a truth that his larger clumsier gestures often divert or cover up. He has something important to say, serious questions worthy of being asked. He just doesn’t know how to fold them gracefully into art. With Needleman’s odd casting of Spelvin and Crisp in a grade B LGBTQ movie, there is almost something a bit “Ed Woodish” about him, a creator of works so oddly bad that they become rather interesting.

 

Los Angeles, January 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).