Sven Spur | Eden / 2020

count me out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sven Spur (screenwriter and director) Eden / 2020 [17 minutes]

 

Let me begin this essay by repeating what anyone who has made their way through the pages of the several volumes of My Queer Cinema will already know: I have nothing against pornography or with sexual cruising, and I have embraced both, porn as a viewer and sexual cruising (in my youth) as an active participant.

     Yet, this short film which borders on porn and concerns sexual cruising leaves me rather bored. Perhaps it is because the actors—given rather meaningless character names that matter little in the “story”—Wolf (Mustaf Ahmeti), Benny (Vincent van Driessche), Dirk Couvent (Philip), and Ludovic Harnais (Lu)—simply don’t attract me; they seem all at the edges of S&M, not my cup of tea. But it is also because the soft porn of this film (only one glimpse of a flaccid penis, no semen spewed) is not terribly sexually exciting. Even TV series have shown more sexually arousing images.

      Belgian director Sven Spur has his figures reveal a lot of butt and engages his actors in a great many anal fucks, but provides the viewer with very little in the way of sensual lust. If this is Eden, Adam was lucky to have escaped. Here it’s all mirrors and colors, red being the dominate one, perhaps suggesting, rather puritanically, that in Wolf’s endless sexual searches we are approaching hell.

     But even so, it’s all rather safe sex. Wolf wears a condom, as presumably do the others; and at one point he romps down the street in the rain with one of his meet-ups as if he were a young pup in love. Being a Wolf, however, he also howls.

     Perhaps the major reason this film leaves me cold is that it is simply boring. Wolf meets someone in the park for sex; he sits soaking in a spa pool waiting for Benny to swim over to him and encourage him into sex; he sits in a room of mirrors where he fucks Benny; he cleans out his butt in the bathtub; he has sex in a bedroom; and he ends up in a sling where he gets fucked by another. And that’s all there is. Nothing is made of these events, except perhaps a bit of jealousy by Benny as he watches his former partner get fucked, rather longingly and not as a voyeur.

     In so many gay films attractive men and cute boys have a much more active and sensual love life. Wolf, his ears and fingers stuffed with rings, seems on the hunt for something which he can’t quite reveal to us, even if he presumably finds what he’s seeking. Good for Wolf, but leave me out of this record of his acts. Well, in fact, the director already has.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

Máté Konkol | Budapest, zárt város (Budapest, Closed City) / 2021

controlling desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Máté Konkol (screenwriter and director) Budapest, zárt város (Budapest, Closed City) / 2021 [13 minutes]

 

Hungarian director Máté Konkol’s 2021 film Budapest, Closed City is a very sad testament to a once great and vital European capital city that, at least from the viewpoint of our young teen tourguide Péter (Péter Dániel Katona) is quickly closing down, all of its major cafes and bars having been closed by the government of Viktor Orbán, whose racist, homophobic, and generally rightist policies have turned Hungary into a country that the European Union no longer perceives as a democracy.

   Péter is touring around his British friend Adam (Adam Wadsworth) explaining how even old neighborhoods such as the one in which he was born, have been torn down. Clubs have disappeared.

     Eventually the native Budapest boy takes his friend into what looks like a highly graffitied toilet, so terrible that even Adam comments that this must be the filthiest bathroom in all of Budapest. Yet actually it poses as the entrance to a semi-hidden club where singers perform and many of Péter’s friends can be found. You can perceive that he is more than a little proud to be able to introduce Adam around, all of them presuming that he might be his boyfriend, but no one willing to speculate. This is not a world in which homosexuality is accepted, and being openly gay or even engaging in homosexual behavior can end in violence or imprisonment.

     The two boys drink, and Adam, who doesn’t smoke pot, even asks for Péter to roll him a joint. It’s clear that Adam is enchanted and basically in love with his guide, now nearly desperate to engage in sex.

    But even here Péter points to a woman standing in the corner who has been following him, even though he’s cut her from his intercut connections. Her intentions seem to be sexual, but it is almost as if she might be a kind of spy trailing his whereabouts and behavior.

     As the two boys finally leave the underground club, and sit together in what seems to be a subway passage or an underground walkway. Adam suggests that Péter should leave the city, to which Péter agrees, but it’s clear he won’t, his days spent in hard work, his nights in partying. Adam leans forward to kiss him, at first seeming to be accepted; but when Adam gets more serious Péter backs off, insisting “I can’t.”

     Adam gets up and walks off. Péter can only curse the impossibly frustrating situation. Soon after, the older woman from the bar comes up behind him, carrying a bottle of wine. Péter gets up and walks home with her for sex, clearly the only way to relieve his sexual duress. The next morning, he gets up early to leave for work. The film does not even bother to show us the two in bed, the sex, if it occurred, having been utterly meaningless. Péter is a gay boy who in Budapest apparently cannot even live a closeted life.

      It’s not only the city’s nightlife that the Orbán has basically closed down, but its citizens.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

Pauline Noel | The Pianist / 2024

the story of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jessica Limbardo (screenplay), Pauline Noel (director) The Pianist / 2024 [8 minutes]

 

Jackson, a composer/pianist has evidently been commissioned to write a new piece, but is obviously in the midst of a creative block. He has been drinking for days apparently (bottles of wine and scotch litter his otherwise immaculate apartment) without having been able produce anything of value.

     His lover Teddy rises and attempts to lure him back to the piano to compose, reminding him that Jackson once told him that songs are just like stories. “So tell the story,” he insists. “Tell me the story for love.”

     As he begins to play, the film shifts to the now stereotypical street scene (this in New York) with in love boys running every which way and bumping into each other in the middle of the street, only to rush off again hand-in-hand.

     But once more, as Jackson describes it, he gets “stuck in the middle.” Is this a reflection of their own relationship we have to ask? “I don’t want it to end” moans the pianist.

     Once more Teddy reassures him that he can do it. “I’ve seen you do it a thousand times.”

     The street scene returns, but Jackson blocks it out. He can’t go on.

    This was about half way through this little cliched film, and I too was about to storm off given the amateur theatrics and inane plot of Pauline Noel’s short film. Surely, as a writer, I can no longer talk about such simple-minded works!

      But finally the friction between the two actors produced a tiny bit of heat, Teddy facing off with his lover: “I know what this is. It’s just you and me here babe, where you gonna hide?”

      But then, the back story made it even worse. Apparently, Jackson’s still miffed because Teddy failed to appear for one of his concerts. There he was waiting to go on, and no sight of Teddy. But, Teddy tells him, life is cruel. Get over it, you’re a pianist, that’s what you do!

      I almost quit this little movie once again to switch on the 1940 film Knut Rocke to hear Pat O’Brien shout out, “The last thing George said to me, 'Rock,' he said, 'sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper”—which given my disinterest in football and football movies should give you a clue of my state of mind.

      Back at our little movie, of course, Jackson finds a way through music to bring him back to love. What we discover, as well, is that the reason Teddy didn’t show up for the concert is that he evidently stepped off a New York street corner and was hit and killed by a passing car, and the concert, we discover, is a memorial for William Theodore Davis, the pianist’s beloved “Teddy.”

     Images of An Affair to Remember blur out the dance of Jackson and his dead Ted, tears presumed to have welled up in your eyes. The end.

     I recognize that this well-meaning film might have even been based on a real-life event, so I truly don’t wish to make fun of an amateur indie. And I’m a sentimental being. But….well, there’s a limit. This is most definitely what the males of Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle would describe as a “chick flick.”

    

Los Angeles, January 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).