Juliana Antonius | Velvet / 2022

an affair to remember

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juliana Antoninus and Damon Beirne (screenplay), Juliana Antonius (director) Velvet / 2022 [10 minutes]

 

One thing that doesn’t get mentioned very often is just how different the world is in gay and lesbian filmmaking, where many women, mostly students, get an opportunity to write and direct film—so much rarer in the commercial film industry.

     Juliana Antonius’ Velvet demonstrates, in seems to me, very much the vision of a young romantic female. I seriously doubt that even young femme film boys, such as the character Ben (Achilles Mulkey) in this movie, would fantasize about Edward VI, the boy king of British history, and after work as a bartender each night, put on a royal red velvet cloak and crown, and take up a scepter before returning home. He explains his fantasy as emanating from a shared love of history with his disappointed father, who clearly thought his son was not at all living up to his expectations of what a man should be. For Ben, the boy king Edward became someone he could inhabit in his imagination, allowing the young royal—at least in symbolic terms—to come to full adulthood free from his kingly expectations.

      It perhaps also takes a female’s imagination to conjure up a disappointed bar-goer like Marcus, whose date having not shown up, is charmed by the young transgender boy, particularly since Ben himself has a fetish for velvet, the material which covered so much of her mother’s untouchable furniture.

      In this romantic fantasy, the two come together for after-hour dancing, kisses, and a bathroom blow-joy, although with promises of another date and more encounters.

    Ben has finally found an adult king to sweep him up into his arms and carry him off to sexual heaven—although it might have been nice if Marcus had sexually reciprocated the joyful pleasures that Ben provided. Next time, we imagine, when returning the velvet robe he might also return the sexual favor.

     This is a nice gay—excuse the slightly misogynist terminology, but I couldn’t resist—“chick flick.” In truth, I’ve watched movies such as An Affair to Remember (the standard, Nora Ephron definition of such a film posited in her film Sleepless in Seattle) dozens of times with nary a dry eye. Accordingly, I don’t see this as a denigrating term, although I have to say, that I can’t imagine this series of events in real life.

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2025).