by Douglas
Messerli
Bruce LaBruce
(screenwriter and director) Défense de fumer / 2014 [4 minutes]
This short film,
commissioned by the Festival de Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, might almost be
said to be a tableaux vivant of a leather boy’s gay paradise.
In the
garage where he works, handsome mechanic (Ron Dagenais) takes a break, turning
on the lights of a back space, taking out a cigar where a sign clearly says “Smoking
prohibited,” and lights up. Within minutes a half nude leather boy shows up and
the mechanic hands him his lighter, another appears, and yet another, five in
all, each time lighting up their cigars. I was reminded almost immediately of
what the lesbian figure Sigrid in the comic short film from 1968 says to the
woman she’s pursuing in The Dove, handing her a cigar, “Phalliken
symbolsk”— although here it’s not so much a symbol but something close to
reality.
The leather daddies (Notre Dame de Cuir,
Xavier Hamel, Van Hechter, Jessy Karson, and Leather Daddy G. L.) line up with
the mechanic in a row, the room quickly filling up with an impenetrable screen
smoke as the Sirius Quartet plays Mikael Karlsson’s “Danache.” (“Hereafter).
The blue haze that soon hides them all
quickly turns to red, becoming a scene right out of a gay bar like New York’s The
Anvil in 1968 or Truxx, a decade later in Montreal.
As Letterboxed commentator Mike Kennedy
notes: “…the classical music changes to the “4 on the Floor, Ass in the Air Mix”
of MC Spacebar’s “Cock Thoughts” performed by Hirsuite Pursuit,” the boys circling
round.
But
reality quickly returns, the fantasy boys disappear, and the mechanic’s break
is over. He tosses away the remainder of his cigar and turns off the lights.
If there was ever a good reason for
smoking, director Bruce LaBruce has revealed it in this humorous pocket mirror flash
of the worker’s inner desires.
Los Angeles,
September 21, 2025
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).
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