Goran Stolevski | You Deserve Everything / 2016

turning on the devil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Goran Stolevski (screenwriter and director) You Deserve Everything / 2016 [19 minutes]

 

Doctor Edward (Sachin Joab) serves a large part of the Arabic community in his Australian hospital, using primarily Sami (Jean Bachoura) as his translator who reports to the patients their prognoses in Arabic and translates back into English their responses.

    Once out of the hospital, the doctor and Sami are also having an affair, mostly meeting up in the doctor’s car while plotting when they might be able to get away for a weekend together.

     Finally, they do escape away to the beach, through the doctor’s machinations of attending a either a real or made-up conference. There they, like so many gay couples in gay short movies, make love on the beach while drinking heavily, Sami even teaching the doctor a few words of Arabic. By the time they return to the hotel they are mostly drunk.

     While their relationship appears to be a heading toward a deep romance, there are subtle signs that not all is well. Sami, the younger of the two by several years, still imagines a scenario wherein he might someday settle down and marry. Yet their relationship seems to be moving forward as the doctor hands over a copy of the key to his home to Sami.

     Back in the hospital, however, when he next needs the translation services of Sami, the doctor discovers he is missing, and when he visits the interpreters’ office one of the others reveals that Sami is off from work because, as she puts it, “today is his big day.” Near Sami’s desk the doctor sees a photograph of Sami and a young woman of his age, perceiving almost immediately what his translator’s absence means.

     When he picks up the photo, he discovers it is a wedding invitation for Sami & Marie.

    Shaken by the news, Sami buys a wedding gift and attends the affair, arriving just after the wedding. He attempts to phone Sami, but unintentionally meets up with his new bride, Marie, who is taking a smoking break. She is a course and clearly inappropriate woman, at least from Doctor Edward’s and perhaps our point of view. Just as the doctor is about to introduce himself to Marie, Sami shows up.

   Loaded with sarcasm, the doctor notes how beautiful the happy couple are and wishes them congratulations, ending his visit by telling Sami, “You deserve everything that’s coming to you,” obviously perceiving that Sami is about to face a horrible life with a wife with whom he can never be truly happy.

     The doctor quickly returns to his car where he sits alone for a while in utter sadness.

     That evening we see the doctor watching a gay porn film on his computer while drinking, clearly in a funk.

    Back in the hospital, Sami is again translating for a patient, this time an older Arabic woman who is not happy to be back in a doctor’s office, reporting that she feels sorry for doctors since they see nothing but the worst in people. “You know what I say, doctor. When the devil’s chasing you, stop running and it’ll stop chasing you.”

     When the doctor goes to leave for the day, suddenly Sami again joins him in his car. Apparently he and his wife have already had an argument, and he is seeking to find a way to return to the doctor. The screen goes black before any reaction or resolution is expressed.

     Was Sami’s marriage an arranged affair? Was he committed to the marriage before he began the relationship with Doctor Edward? Was he frightened of his own homosexual desires and chose Marie as a possible solution? None of these issues are broached. We only know that for a few short days the two men seemed deeply engaged in a love affair. Unfortunately, the route Sami has chosen is one taken far too often, not only by men of a strict religious upbringing that represents homosexuality as a significant evil, as we can imagine was how Sami grew up believing, but to gay men who simply cannot find the strength of will to admit that they are queer.

     As I have argued throughout these pages, such men, as sympathetic as one may feel toward them, must also be recognized as cowards who often destroy the lives of the women they marry and, if the marriage lasts for a few years, the lives of their children. Their own lives are often terribly unhappy, and it is certainly tempting to proclaim, as the doctor has, they get what they deserve.

      Yet we know it is not simply a personal problem, but a societal one, a failure of both church and state to raise children who do not feel free to accept their own differences and sexualities. And, in fact, these men—despite the fact that they have lied to themselves, and often lie to and cheat on their families—do not truly deserve our condemnation and their having to suffer the dreadful lives they live out in guilt and frustration. The words of the older patient are really quite wise, we finally realize. When the devil is perceived to be standing just behind you, it is perhaps time to turn around and face your fate. Perhaps you will even discover that the devil has disappeared.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).