Mario Galarreta | Wayne / 2015

love lost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mario Galarreta (screenwriter and director) Wayne / 2015 [10 minutes]

 

Mario Galareeta’s Wayne was one of the best LGBTQ films I have seen in a long while. It’s a very simple but totally affecting work.

      Wayne (Stu Klitsner) is an elder man with senile dementia, unable to even recognize any longer his own wife, Louise (Martha Milton Stookey), whom he unintentionally awakens in the night during a dream in which he remembers himself as a younger man (played by Ross Neuenfeldt) in the barn wrestling, embracing, and preparing to kiss a fellow rancher or ranch hand, Ron (Jeremy Kahn).

      We have to presume that since the couple have been wed for 50 years that he was already married to Louise and that these meetings were forbidden secrets, which she perhaps knew about or discovered—since we see things basically from the perspective of the demented Wayne, we have no possibility of filling in full back stories. All we know is that she is more worried about his having wet the bed than the content of his dream. She helps him to stand, and when he begins to wander off, asks him where he’s going.

      Ron is waiting for me, he answers, to which she replies, “For goodness sake let the dead be dead,” hinting that she knows of his secret past.

     She patiently sits him down again and goes off to run some bathwater. But Wayne wonders off, returning the barn of his dream, Louise, having discovered him missing, desperately going on the search.

     She calls out her husband’s name several times, and tries to follow him down a path, but when she sees where he’s headed, she pulls back, half-smiling, half-in tears, knowing that he is seeking a love that he can not longer have, and perhaps was never fully permitted to enjoy.

      The young Ron visits him again in the barn, kissing him gently on the lips, stroking his hair. Wayne sits there, perhaps for the very last time in his life, enjoying the pleasures of a forbidden life.

    I have often brought up the issue through many different films about how men and women who discover or admit to their same-sex passions after heterosexual marriage bring pain both to themselves and their companions. But, in this case, Louise already knows that she has gone missing in his life, recognizing that his true lover perhaps was always another man despite their long life together. This film is most closely related to French director Olivier Peyon’s 2022 film Lie with Me (Arrête avec tes mensonges), in which a young Cognac region farmer gives up his youthful gay love to remain on the farm and marry, finding gay love again only in the arms of a fellow farmer living at a distance from time to time. For him also, it is an unfulfilling life, that ends in death and the memory of his young lover, the facts of which, in this case, his son comes to uncover, bringing the love of his youth, now a famous writer, back to the region to help him comprehend and explain his father’s forbidden romance.

     In some respects, the true hero of Galareeta’s film is Louise, who knowing that she has lost her husband’s love to a dead romance, still watches over him and cares for him, loving him even if he no longer even knows of her existence. The film, notably, is dedicated to the filmmaker’s mother.

     But the power of the film comes from the poignant sadness that neither of them has fully found the love they sought.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

Jeremy McClain | You Like That / 2023

costume drama

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy McClain (screenwriter and director) You Like That / 2023 [11 minutes]

 

The featured reviewer on the IMDb site for British director Jeremy McClain’s 2023 film, You Like That nicely summarizes my feelings about this short film: “In essence, crumbs of story, put together by imagination of [any] viewer who can be interested more by image than by story itself.”

    In fact, this doesn’t really make clear how flitting and silly this cinematic narrative truly is. An effete gay American student, Joshua (Jeremy McClain), studying, apparently, 19th century romance fiction, is attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. By day he spends his time mostly in the library reading romance fiction and poetry or drawing the gravestones and other sculptural objects strewn about the city.

      But to pay for his student loan and other costs, by night he dresses up in 19th costume and performs sexual acts in front of his computer for pay. In a sense he plays out his world of romance in 21st sexual terms by combining the most contemporary of communication tools posing as the romantic figure of a deep “gay” love he would like truly to become.

      A meet up with a real fellow student, the equally good-looking Sebastian (Marcus Hodson) evidently ends up in disaster—although McClain is great with still-lives he cannot sustain a narrative beyond the length of a wink, so nothing is full established in his story—as in attempting to make love to his would-be lover Joshua imagines himself dressed as a young soldier madly dancing with an equally handsome cavalryman, which makes him so dizzy, presumably, that he passes out in a faint.

      The writer or McClain’s promotional team would like you to believe that the film is perusing far deeper issues: “While his beloved books speak of transcendent love, his modern reality offers only fleeting digital encounters. …You Like It explores whether authentic romance can survive in an age where connection is just a click away.”

      What the copy doesn’t actually tell us whether that fleeting click is that of a computer key or a camera which dotes on pretty images that can’t possibly be fully connected up. The result is just all to silly to imagine that there might possibly be any deeper exploration of ideas.

      Pretty boys, city scenes, and costumes alone do not a movie make. And actually, I didn’t “like it,” even if, as the IMDb reviewer observes, McClain has the looks of a Caravaggio model.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

Gloria La Morte | Crush / 2011

shall we dance?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominic Colón (screenplay), Gloria La Morte (director) Crush / 2011 [9 minutes]

 

Gloria La Morte’s Crush takes place at a Prom Night in the South Bronx. Michael (Sean Carvajal) has taken along his best friend Nikke (Gleendilys Inoa) to help back him up in his final opportunity to tell his friend Brandon (D. J. Afanador) that he is in love with him and has been for years.

     But everything goes wrong. The film begins with Michel in the toilet, vomiting, having mixed too many drinks before he’s even entered the dancing floor. He is ready to turn around and run, abandoning his last opportunity to express his love.

    When he does enter the dance proper, he sees Brandon and nearly faints at what he perceives as his beauty, but is even more terrified and he sees him approaching. Brandon asks he he’d like to join him and others for a “smoke,” but Michael quickly demurs, Nikkie prodding him to join his dream boat. He hands Brandon a lighter, but quickly drops it; and when they both bend to pick it up, they butt heads.

     Suddenly, he seems to get up the courage to tell Brandon how he feels, simply babbling out his long love for him. Brandon, at first, is put off, not because he isn’t mutually attracted or afraid of being seen as gay, but because it just isn’t proper to speak out like that.

     Nonetheless, he asks Michael to dance, Michael amazed by his friend’s audacity in proclaiming that it doesn’t matter what anyone else might say; tonight they own the dance floor, as they go floating off in one another’s arms.

    We know it’s all too good to be true, as the camera returns to a view with Michael on the floor, having been temporarily knocked out by the crash of noggins. Brandon helps him to stand, and again Michael is too terrified, now that his fantasy has been crushed, to move ahead.

      Once more, however, Nikkie spurs him on, and this time he puts it perfectly: looking into Brandon’s eyes, he asks simply, “You want to dance?” Black out.

     However it ends, he at least has not “punked out,” and brought his fantasies into a possibility in real life.

      This short film is simple, likeable high school fare, offering little more than what its title proffers, a high school crush come to life. But we’ve all been there, if not in real life, in our memories of what we might have done differently that long ago special night. I purposely made the situation clumsy by asking the female school photographer to be my date. I was certain nothing could happen between me and the camera she held strapped to her neck. I was safe from female pressures.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2025).