Luc Feit and Marcus Sauermann | Ferkel (Piglets) / 1999

sex prevention

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcus Sauermann (screenplay), Luc Feit and Marcus Sauermann (directors) Ferkel (Piglets) / 1999

 

To describe the narrative of German directors Luc Feit and Marcus Sauermann’s four-minute film Piglets is somewhat like telling a very bad joke.

  

      A good looking man (Christoph Marti) with his pants dropped down to his ankles leans over another man (who the script describes as the “trick,” Tobias Bonn) laying across the edge of a bed with his hands cuffed to the bedstead heartily engaged in the act of fucking.

     A bad and loud German polka rings out from the next room, distracting the two from their sexual intercourse. The man engaged in the act of fucking, waddles out into the next room, scoops up his “granny’s” (Andreja Schneider) radio and breaks it apart as he clumsily moves back into the bedroom to continue the act.

      A few seconds later a piercingly loud sound shakes the walls, one small picture dropping to the floor. The man reaching up to where he keeps the keys to the handcuffs, frees the trick from his prostrate position as he attempts to quickly pull his legs free of his pants, but hasn’t the patience to finish before he struggles across the room once more to enter the space where granny has now a large drill in hand, mindlessly driving the bit into the wall. The frustrated fucker pulls the drill from her hand and uses the handcuffs to lock her hands where she sits in her wheel-chair tight against the wall, dismantling the drill as he returns to his object of pleasure.

      He returns to his partner for the third time, but now finds both his cellphone and land phones ringing, his number dialed in, evidently, by his granny’s foot.

      Again, he is frustratedly forced to return to the monster in the next room to pull away her cellphone and toss it into a goldfish bowl.

      At the door, however, he meets his friend, now fully dressed in a suit, ready to make a departure. The two briefly hug and kiss as granny, again using her foot has pulled on a lever that somehow releases two wind-up toys, the one atop the other—little pigs who scurry across the floor toward the loving men.

    I think we safely read this “joke” as a kind of fable of the variously absurd attempts of past generations and ill-willed heterosexuals of the present to stop by all means the unholy actions of their queer family members and acquaintances.

     This 1999 film almost reminds me, in some respects, of Andrew Porter’s 1997 short, Nobody I Know, in which a young man brings home a friend for sex, his sister and mother conspiring to make certain that they might never to able to spend a moment together, the son forced to deny in the end that he might even know the man who has made his way into their house.

      Of course, parents and friends also find plenty of ways to work against love between young heterosexual couples. How many thousands of tales have we been told of parental interruption in the sexual adventures of young girls and boys. But in this story, as well as in Porter’s, there seems to be an absolute joy and feeling of justification in destroying the possibility of sexual fulfillment between two gay men.

     As film critic Earl Jackson reminded me, the German work ferkel means literally a piglet, but it also is a much more truly insulting word when applied to humans. It is not plural, suggesting that the work sits squarely upon the intrusive Granny's shoulders.

Los Angeles, December 20, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).