the stranger on the couch
by Douglas Messerli
Anthony Schatteman (screenwriter and director) Dag vreemde man
(Hello, Stranger) / 2016
[19 minutes]
With the long shadows of Wim Wenders’ Paris,
Texas (1984) and Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of
the Desert (1994) flickering over it, Flemish director Anthony Schatteman’s
Hello, Stranger is a very moving film about a man, Arthur (Arend Pinoy),
who performs each evening as a drag queen in a Ghent gay bar. He’s a popular
performer and has a deep friend in another elderly drag queen who performs with
a full beard, Michel (Wim Opbrouck).
Everything might seem quite ordinary for a gay film if it were not for
the fact that Arthur also is raising a young boy, Max, who he has brought up
alone since he wife Daisy (Delfine Bafort) left them when the child was still
an infant. Keeping the boy close to him in his dressing room as he goes on
stage, Arthur performs with his heart in his throat in worry for his son as
Michel often looks after the boy.
One
night, however, the boy awakens to wander off into the busy dance floor where
Arthur has been ordered to appear, and for a few moments he madly searches in
terror through the dancing drunk and drugged out customers to scoop up Max from
the bowels of the crowd. Even Max’s schoolteacher chastises Arthur for still
wearing nail polish as he delivers him up to school in the morning.
Arthur cannot even help encouraging Max, for time to time, to play drag
queen with him at home, where the numerous gaudy, sequined dresses and wigs are
on open display. He is he doing right by his son?
To
make things even more complex, Daisy has suddenly returned after all these
years, begging to see the son who might not even recognize her. Finally, Arthur
relents and, retrieving Max from Michel’s care, hurries home with the boy to
lay him beside his mother on the couch.
So the film ends, without any answers about whether that bond will bring
her to demand to keep Max or even bring her back together with the man who, as
she puts it, she just “couldn’t” any longer live with.
Played with enormous restraint, despite the exaggerated world in which
Arthur and Max live, Schatteman’s tender short film presents all the problems
of trying to protect and love someone
from aspects of one’s own life which to the
outside world may seem perverse and deleterious to the child. Arthur is a man
torn between his love of his son and his own identity. Need he, we ultimately
have to ask, abandon who he is in order to protect the child he loves? Will the
boy grow up to find his father, as his mother apparently did, to be too strange
to live with? Or will Max come to recognize that the real stranger in his life
is the woman with whom he has laid down to sleep, his own mother?
Los Angeles, September 9, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2023).
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