Edwin Brienen | Cruising Ballet / 2022

dance of desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edwin Brienen (director) Cruising Ballet / 2022 [16 minutes]

 

It’s early evening when a boy in white pants begins to trudge up and down the sidewalks of a Berlin park. Another bearded man takes a view of the highly graffitied bathroom, and a man, having driven to the park, walks his pug. The performers of this dance of desire are named at the film’s end: Peto Coast, Lucky Joe, Gregor, and Casper the dog.

      The bearded man stands by a tree while the white pants wanders. Although no one speaks, the noises of the late evening are almost unbearable as the bells of a local cathedral ring out and an engine, perhaps of some park-grounds keeper, roars into action, soon falling into a kind of rising and falling rhythm. The bearded man notices the dog and pets him.

       When the pet owner moves in closer to the bearded man, the latter puts his hand momentarily on his crotch, but soon drops it, the dog lover smiling and moving off. It is far too early yet for serious business.

     As darkness begins to fall, the camera itself becomes a cruising figure moving stealthily through the park foliage to seek out, once more, the white pants of the walker. We now observe everything from ground level, the pants being passed by the sneakers of the bearded man. The feet stop and the white pants leans up against a tree to take in a drag from his cigarette. The ground his covered with trash, pamphlets, smashed paper cup and other pieces of plastic debris. A used condom hangs from a branch.

       Under the park lights we glimpse only the outlines of their faces as they each stand in wait. Once more the white pants slowly approaches the bearded man, pauses and smiles before he moves off. It has become a dance. No one dare approach the other directly, but circle, seemingly weighing their own desires against the imagined desire of the other. But there is also a sense of evaluation going on: are you the man I’m looking for this evening, can you succeed in providing me with pleasure, are you willing to complete what you begin?

       Now in a car, the bearded man drives off to a spot near the Brandenburg Gate. Meanwhile, the boy in white pants visits a public bathroom, noticing the same bearded man from the park coming out of another cubicle. Following one another like animals, they wander down some of the brick halls that seem to be interlinked with the toilet, moving deeper and deeper into the bowels of the construction before they briefly kiss, but still pull away and circle one another in a final check-out of one another.

 

      Finally, the boy in white pants kneels, pulls down the bearded man’s pants and begins sucking his cock. There is no wild expression of joy on either of their faces, no look of ecstasy upon ejaculation. The act is simply completed as the boy stands, puts his mouth briefly around the bearded man’s chin, pulls away, and walks off.

       This pas de deux is completed.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).