Tami Ravid | Boy / 2012 [TV film]

between the reality and the dream

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cecilie Levy (screenplay), Tami Ravid (director) Boy / 2012 [TV film]

 

The titular “Boy” (Gerald Gonzales) of this short film is an undocumented Filipino house cleaner who lives with a gay pole dancer Rick (Arvin Quirante). Each day he cleans houses, overhearing conversations and arguments and observing the sexual activities of his employers. He observes all, but like Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” the Boy remains a nonentity for those around him, living in a world half way between what he himself describes as “reality and dream.” In the Dutch society in which he works, he’s attempting to turn his very real poverty into a dream, but it is an obscure and seemingly unobtainable desire, filled with lures and traps as this excellent short feature fully reveals.

     In one of the houses he cleans, he has befriended an elderly alcoholic writer whose dog he daily walks, and to whom he tells the sexual dalliances and other events of his other clients, the writer apparently planning to include them all in books he’s currently working on. Indeed, the two seem to have a wonderful rapport, since the writer, André (Bart Klever) seems to recognize him as a cognizant being and depends on him for his art. André even tries to get him to stay and chat a while longer, but the worker has other responsibilities. Amazingly, André even seems to know about the Boy’s lover, Rick, and asks after him.

       Every day the Boy, after work, makes his deposits to his banking account. Rick has evidently still not been paid from the gay club where he dances. But at dinner he announces that he has been asked to audition for a real dance company. The Boy offers to check up about the company from his employers, but Rick refuses his help. If he’s disappointed, he proclaims, he’s used to disappointment.

      He’ll have to take dance lessons, and they’re not free. Rick presumes that they’ve saved up some money, but the Boy responds that his mother may also need an eye operation.

      Finding no one at home in one of the houses he cleans, he gently opens the bedroom closet to simply touch and admire all the beautiful suits the man owns.

      When he returns to André, the Boy describes another of his clients who is finally having the baby she long wanted. He has observed a delivery of baby clothes. To André he admits the fact that at home he has three sisters and two brothers. This time the writer convinces the Boy to stay on just for one espresso. But in the midst of the Boy making the drink, a younger man arrives bearing a large photograph. As the two joke, it is quite evident that both men are gay, the younger visitor, surprised that his friend has a cleaning boy, teasing André why he never pays him and asking “Is he good?”

       The Boy takes his payment and leaves, having again become just a house boy, someone invisible. But as he begins to leave, the photographer (René van Zinnicq Bergman) runs after him, saying that he might need some help at his studio, giving him his card.

      At home, the Boy rubs his lover’s back. Rick has been dancing with a good company, whose dancers are clearly more talented than he. “It makes me a bit insecure,” he admits. It is clear that something has altered in their relationship, with Rick now focused solely on dancing; and the Boy looks troubled as, lying upon the bed, as he watches his lover work out.

        The next day at his lawyer’s house, the Boy watches through the slightly open door the lawyer lead in another man into his office, the visitor stripping before his client.

        At André’s the photographer is criticizing the elderly man for not doing any writing or even taking his own dog out for a walk. When the man leaves, the Boy sits down to tell André about his lawyer employer and the boy in his office. “The boy looked really young. Shouldn’t you write it down? For your book?” But André now seems disinterested, certainly dispirited. Looking over a photograph of a young Asian boy, he only answers, “Some people really know what sells.”

        Later that evening we watch the hardworking Boy doing his laundry before joining Rick on the roof. He talks about the time they lived together in Paris, and wonders how long they will live here, in the Netherlands, sensing perhaps that his lover’s involvement dance will involve further displacement.

        We see a montage of the Boy’s endless repetitive actions: he makes a bed, rubbing his hand slowly over the sheet to smooth it out but also to feel the material. He rides the subway. But he also receives a call from the photographer who’d like him to visit his studio. The Boy does so where we spot the same photo as in André’s house.

       What is clear is that images are all of Asian boys, one from a boxing school in Sri Lanka, another being an orphan who has lost his parents when the Mekong flooded. He’ll pay the same amount that André does, he tells the Boy. But what he doesn’t yet explain is precisely what he wants the Boy to do in his studio.

       When he returns to André’s house, the Boy finds the dog desperate to get out, and clearly hungry. The Boy takes him for a walk. When he returns to the house he finds André in bed, having died. As usual he takes up all the wine bottles and carefully takes a look at André Polak’s fairly thin book, presumably a short fiction and collection of stories. Remembering where he’s seen André pull out his pay from a book, he takes the money, a seemingly larger sum that the couple of bills he usually receives, and leaves. Presumably, he cannot call the police to report the death because he is undocumented.

       Again, he deposits some money and encloses a few bills in an envelope, we imagine to his mother at home. The Boy’s lover arrives home late, having been out with the other dancers chatting and drinking. “You have to join them, otherwise they think you feel you’re better than they are, right?” Even he doesn’t quite seem sure of his logic.

     The Boy reveals to his lover something we hadn’t quite perceived: “One of my employees killed himself.” Later he ponders, “I guess he was very unhappy.”

      Rick argues that the Dutch have everything and still they’re unhappy. “If I had that much money I would know what to do with it.”

       The Boy, however, himself looks troubled. He now has a substantial wad of bills. How does he plan to spend it? And what changes lie in store for him and Rick?

       Rick has had a strange dream. He was dancing with the other dancers and was able to keep up. But he suddenly spotted a new dancer who had joined them who looked like one of his previous clients in the club. He looked again, and indeed it was the client. It startled him and he awoke.

      Is he afraid of his own past, that past coming to overtake him and the new future is attempting to create through his dance lessons? Or could it be his own lover, someone who he has long been with who has also become a dancer, someone with whom to contend?

      In fact, later that morning the Boy asks if he might watch Rick rehearsing with the others. We now perceive that indeed the group Rick has joined is a modern dance company, not a gathering of nightclub chorus boys as we might have expected. It is serious dancing, and the Boy too must realize that his suspicions have been mistaken, that Rick is actually involved in something closer to his ideal of art.

      Rick has now been told by his teacher that he might be recommended into a master class with a choreographer in New York. But it costs 500 euros. In the morning the Boy has put out the money for Rick’s classes. When asked where he got it, he responds, quite truthfully, “I worked hard.”

     The photographer, taking the Boy aside, tells him that he is angry about André’s suicide, claiming that he was so talented but that he wasted so much of his time. The Boy tells him that he was working on a book, but of course there is no way of knowing whether or not that was delusional.

       The photographer calls him again, and they meet up, he suggesting a little extra money might come in handy for such a hard worker. And a few frames later he has taken the Boy to bed, telling him he wants to include him in a photo series of “boys like him.” We recognize, of course, that the other Asian boys in the photographs have also probably shared sex with him as well as part of photographic experience.

       The Boy plays it somewhat cool, expressing interest without becoming fully enthusiastic. The photographer argues he wants to “Put all those illegal lives in the spotlight. To show what people do to survive.” The Boy’s answer is characteristic of his lack of expectations: “Are you serious? Illegals don’t want their pictures taken.” The photographer kisses him, “I think you do.”

       Indeed, the Boy has already been somewhat seduced. And soon the photographer and the boy are meeting regularly. And instead of his normally dour face, we see the Boy smiling, drinking wine with his new friend at lunch, joyfully walking through parks and the streets with his new lover. The photographer takes dozens of pictures of the Boy while he pretends to be cleaning, scripting the action, “Now think about your family: ‘O, my God.’”

        All along, he continues to make love to the Boy, enticing him even as he is clearly using him to enact a fairly fictious scenario of narrative photographs. But now the photographer has also begun to take pictures of the Boy in bed. He asks, “What if I were to take care of you. But without that boyfriend of yours.” Our young friend is now being asked to betray his own life, his own way of living. Fortunately, he doesn’t answer the question.

       But the Boy now begins to become somewhat acquisitive. He suddenly discovers that he wants things. In the bathroom he tries on one of the photographer’s suit coats. While they are driving he pulls off the expensive sunglasses from his new friend’s face and puts them over his own eyes.

       The photographer, like Rick, also has dreams. He is in a sculpture garden and suddenly he sees a sculpture that he recognizes to be himself, “it was me!” The same body, but it had no face.

      One wonders immediately whether it is the Boy, not the man, who has no face—at least to the artist. In the very next frame, director Tami Ravid shows the photographer holding his hands over the Boy’s eyes as he leads him to a photograph, finally removing his hand and declaring: “That’s you. The cleaning boy.”

       It is the picture of him lying half nude in bed, not busily cleaning up or pretending to worry about his family at home or the call of his employers. We can observe a look of confusion on the Boy’s face.

       Now the photographer turns on him. “That’s who you are, right? The cleaning boy sleeping with his employer. That’s the hidden story, isn’t it. With me. Without André.”

      “What makes you think that?” he finally speaks.

     “André always behaved so mysteriously about you. Let’s face it, he paid you quite decently. For someone who only cleans once in a while.

      “Where did you get that idea?”

      “Oh, Come on.”

     “You don’t know me actually. I cleaned at André’s. I was his friend. I helped him. With the book. I told him stories. He didn’t have a real life.” After a pause, he continues with the perhaps the truest statement of the film: “You also don’t have a real life, actually.”

     “But our money is quite real, isn’t it?”

     Reversing the Pygmalion myth this photographer has turned a real person into a frozen image—instead of bringing him to life, turning him into an object. A living person has been put behind a mask. The artist in this case has created, just as in his dream, a sculpture without a face, actually an image of himself filled with his own greed, envy, and selfishness.

     The Boy justly protests, and in his statement suddenly becomes a man, a true citizen of the world demanding his own identity: “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know anything at all. I’m not here for your money.”

      The boy become man, although still in this world without a name, leaves the photographer’s studio and returns to watch Rick rehearsing once again. Soon, we presume, his lover will also move on to New York. The Boy, even now as a man, will go back to work cleaning houses. We can only ask where will this new man now be forced to move on to, like a butterfly, as he puts it— relating his own dream—always on the move from place to place, a real butterfly who believes he is a man.

      Ravid’s fable reads as true as today’s headlines and reveals the patient frustrations and imaginative dreams of all those immigrants, documented and not, who are forced to work at the lowest levels of society, yet do so with great dedication and true belief. With a quiet intensity Gerald Gonzales delivers a powerful performance that makes you want to cheer for him when he finally has his showdown with the sleazy artist. And the gentle engagement of André with the hard-working immigrant speaks volumes for those who really do care about the people around them. I don’t how these was received on Dutch TV in 2012, but hope it was with the same awe and respect that I came away with.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).