Victor Ciriaco | Sailor / 2014

surabaya johnny

by Douglas Messerli

 

Victor Ciriaco (screenwriter and director) Sailor / 2014 [13 minutes]

The young, almost baby-faced, long-haired Peter meets the dark-haired, muscular older sailor Johnny at a party, and it is love at first sight, the two of them coming together as in a romantic musical. From the beginning the young man taunts the older, demanding all of his attention by pulling, time and again, a cigarette from his mouth.

   The seduction continues the next day at breakfast, Peter almost dancing his way through a coffee-pouring routine as he lures the sailor back into bed.

     But this is no normative narrative about the passionate relationship between two men, but a loose rendition of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s song from Happy End, “Surabaya Johnny,” with lyrics that read:

 

I was young, I was just sixteen then

When you came up from Burma one day

And you told me to pack up my suitcase

And I did, and you took me away

I said, "Do you work nice and steady

Or do you go sailing and roving out to sea?"

And you said, "I have a job on the railroad

And baby, how swell it's all gonna be."

You said a lot, Johnny. It was all lies

You sure had me fooled, right from the start

I hate you when you laugh at me like that

Take that pipe out of your mouth, Johnny

 

Surabaya* Johnny. Is it really the end?

Surabaya Johnny. Will the hurt ever mend?

Surabaya Johnny. Ooh, I burn at your touch

You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you so much

Thought at first you were kind and gentle

'til I packed up and went off with you

And it lasted two weeks until one day

You laughed at me and hit me too

You dragged me all over the city

Up the river and down to the sea

Now I look at myself in the mirror

And some old woman looks back at me

You didn't want love, Johnny, you wanted money

I gave you all I had. You wanted more

Oh, don't look at me that way

I'm only trying to talk to you

Wipe that grin off your face, Johnny

     In this work we see a pattern established early on, as Johnny, soon after their love-making disappears, leaving his phone number pasted to Peter’s face. But when he calls the number a woman answers.

    In suffering and pain the youth waits the return of Johnny, who when he finally appears at Peter’s door again engages in passionate sex. Peter even gives him money to stay, but the Brazilian sailor rises early, puts on his navy whites, with a small medal hanging from his chest, and is almost out the door before he takes off the medal and leaves it for the boy as a token of his love.

   Victor Ciriaco’s short film is more akin to an erotic music video than a standard queer movie. Although the depicted love-making is tasteful—you could never confuse this work with pornography—the sex is most definitely hot, and their kisses are as intense as in the melodrama of Brecht and Weill’s original musical drama. And although this 13-minute film is in Portuguese only, it poses no problem for those who don’t know the language since it is mostly performed through the music with hardly any words spoken.

    Johnny doesn’t beat him, nor does Peter travel with him, aging along the way, but clearly the sailor in his long absences, is no good for the boy. He has forever changed young Peter’s life as the kid becomes one of history’s long line of lovers spending hours in waiting for the return of their roaming men.

 

Surabaya Johnny. Is it really the end?

Surabaya Johnny. Will the pain never mend?

Surabaya Johnny. How I burn at your touch

You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you so much

 

* Surabaya is the capital city of East Java province and the second-largest city in Indonesia, long noted as a naval base which at the height of the 19th and early 20th centuries rivaled Shanghai and Hong Kong as trading hubs and ports of call that sexually serviced the sailors from all over the world.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).