José Oldenburg | Sing / 2025

the fan

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Oldenburg (screenwriter and director) Sing / 2025 [8 minutes]

 

A street performer (José Oldenburg) in New York City has just performed a song on a subway platform, observing a leather jacketed man with a mohawk haircut across the tracks. Riding back to his stop he notices the same fellow (Pedro Elias) seemingly having caught the same train. When the singer gets off at his stop, the other trains him down the street, the singer stopping in his tracks, and turning to ask him “Excuse me, are you following me?”

    Instead of simply replying in the negative, the man in the leather jacket asks, “Do you want me to be following you?”

    “No, replies José, “What kind of question is that?”

    “Then I’m not following you,” responds the apparent stalker.

    But the singer needs some proof, demanding his address, and finally, just as oddly, demands he provide some ID, all of which Mr. Mohawk is only to read to provide.

    “Are you always this tense?” the stranger queries him.

    “Pretty much so,” José admits.

    “Well, if you want me to be chasing you, then I’m chasing you. If not, then I’m just walking home.”

    What else is there to do but to take the follower home, kiss him, and make him at home.

    Later, after their kissing session, the leather boy asks him to sing something, but José suggests, rather shyly for a street performer, that he gets nervous.

    But finally convinced, the singer takes out his guitar and sings, mostly in Spanish:

 

    “I want you to say that you will listen

      That only for now you’ll be quiet

      I’m scared, I see you packed your things

      It’s between you and I [sic], a tale of two

      Who cares what they say, please

      Don’t leave me on my own…”

 

    The singer breaks off there.

    The next morning José wakes up to an empty bed. But in the kitchen the mohawk man is fixing eggs, brewing coffee. He has not run off into the night.

     As they sit on the stoop after breakfast, the leather boy asks him he he’s been to a local performance spot, insisting that he try out his song there.

     But the singer seemingly refuses, remaining home to try to complete the song he sang the previous evening, writing lyrics down, but still happy with his own performance. Frustrated, he takes and nap. But then dresses, picks up his guitar, and again catches the subway.

    We then see him singing a song in a small club, perhaps the place where the mohawk friend had suggested, since he is in the audience. Frankly, it’s not a very remarkable performance, but the audience seems pleased, and afterwards, the leather boy walks him a ways, asking how the performance felt.

     Our singer is happy that at least he gave it a try. “It worked out,” concludes our mohawk man.

    What this very amateur but basically pleasant film is trying to say, I have utterly no idea. Perhaps, that you have to take chances? That the mean New York City streets are actually filled—as Judy Holiday convinces Dean Martin in the film musical The Bells Are Ringing (1960)—with very nice people who just need someone to dare to say “hello”? That it’s good sometimes to be followed home—just as the starving hero, Pontus, of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, retold in the 1966 film by Henning Carlsen, follows a woman he dubs a woman he names Ylajali? That you can’t judge a man by the way he looks and dresses?

    If nothing else, we’ve discovered through the rather silly little ditty that José sings that he is lonely, and that he wants someone to come home with him and stay, just as the man with the mohawk haircut as done. Maybe he’ll come and spend the night again with the singer, who will wake up to such a breakfast already prepared. It could be that the moral of this tale is simply that you have to sing for your supper—or breakfast, or love.

    This work might make a nice double feature with the short Audition film of 2015 by Adam Tyree.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).