Houcem Slouli | Désir conditionnel (Conditional Desire) / 2023

riddle of desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Houcem Slouli (screenwriter and director) Désir conditionnel (Conditional Desire) / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

What we don’t know at the beginning of Tunisian director Houcem Slouli’s short film of 2023 is gradually revealed without dialogue. Ahmed (Slim Dhib) and Salma (Imene Ghazouani), newly married, live in a life of seeming entrapment. They have almost regulatory sex, but sit with quiet impatience with one another most of the rest of the time.

     Salma’s life seems particularly defined by entrapment. Both characters are shown behind banisters which create bars, but Salma is particularly in a state of stasis, pots boiling over as she swallows chocolate bars and forlornly finger-spoons melted chocolate into her mouth, as if she were desperately trying to salve what she is missing in her life. At one point, the camera catches the decorative bars across a window while at the same moment portraying our heroine upside down in the mirror, hinting at both how her world has shifted her life and entrapped her simultaneously.

     There are no arguments. They have what might be described as dutiful sex before Ahmed rises and goes to the coffee-shop which he apparently owns and operates by himself.

      But gradually, we get glimpses of Ahmed in bed with a man, Cherif (Ghassen Trabelsi).

      Although the married couple sit calmly entrenched in the relationship in the house, their comings and goings on the staircase are noted, at one point, comically, their motions further entrapping each other as she forces him back toward their apartment while he pushes her to retreat back down the staircase.

   Their only conversation with each other consists of two central questions preceded by the statement: “The situation weighs on us.”

    Then, in a “face-off” in which they stare off in different directions:

              Salma: “Why did you say yes?”                   Ahmed: “Why didn’t you say no?”

       Soon after we see Salma with her own same-sex partner, Feriel (Aicha Azzouz) as two giggle together in bed.

       We perceive, in other words, that in the restricted society in which they live, both have chosen a marriage with the other to hide their own queer passions from others. But family has already interceded. Ahmed’s mother wants to know when she might expect them for dinner. Salma’s sister advises her that it is time for her to have a baby. And meanwhile, the very presence of the other puts restrictions of their sexual lives that they obviously did not previously experience.

       Slouli’s work never preaches, and, in fact, says absolutely nothing about their “other” desires and relationships, but in their empty stares, their own formulaic sex we sense their frustrations and impatience.

       Again, these are not exaggerated expressions. One might almost suggest that there is an almost Kabuki like aspect to Slouli’s work, the slightest gesture representing a world of significance making clear that although they have chosen the form of their imprisonment it is prison nonetheless.

       Whether they can maintain the charade, fitting the pieces of their passions into their relationship, or if they might actually grow to love one another as friends is not answered in Slouli’s riddle of how desire can become conditional.

       This film is a truly profound gem about a culture in which the personal sexual desires of individuals are so restricted that he chokes off nearly all joy and life. That these two have, at least, sought out some sort of compromise speaks to their bravery, given the suffering they still must endure.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

 

Krit Komkrichwarakool | Freefall / 2017

leaping into pity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Krit Komkrichwarakool (screenwriter and director) Freefall / 2017 [19 minutes]

 

I wanted to love this short film by Canadian director Krit Komkrichwarakool, particularly because of the gentle acting by both Chris McNally as Lucas—the lover and now full-time nurse of Ivan, suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known in US as Lou Gehrig’s Disease)—and Andrew Jenkins (playing Ivan). Both beautiful men have created an intense quiet drama that deserves the viewer’s attention.

 

   Yet the film is so surrounded by sentimental and, at moments, even kitsch images and devices that it’s hard to focus on the drama itself. First of all, both men are musicians, Lucas an amateur pianist who begins the film playing against the city skyline as busy workers hurry by, and Ivan, evidently a professional pianist who cannot resist joining Ivan that morning, the two of them creating a “beautiful ballad.” The resultant piece, which we later see Ivan—before the development of the disease—performing is described, at several points, as “a song written to his dream,” while “he put the dream into the song.”

     Mostly we see Lucas playing nurse to his lover. The major dramatic incident having happened long ago in the past, the night Ivan was first diagnosed in the hospital, when Lucas determined to finally leave him, unable to deal with what lay ahead (or, as he puts it, “I jumped.”) But obviously he returned, and Ivan is determined—now, after having lost most of his use of his legs, that he is even losing the use of his arms—to know why? Later, Lucas answers the question in the now quite traditional linguistic reversal in situations of love: “I didn’t stay because you needed me. I stayed because I need you.”

     But with all the pretty music, the repeated images of the lone piano player being joined by a partner, and the needy kisses of a man soon to die, this film, alas, is nearly all sentiment. If there are a few witty moments, a mockery of its own skydiving metaphors, they are simply too few such moments to escape the overwhelming sense that we should break out the tears and rend our garments in the desperate fear that is overcoming Ivan and the endless sacrifices made by Lucas.     

     Although Ivan is resentful about Lucas’ possible pity, the film itself wallows in it. And by the end of this short work we feel only pity, since we actually know so very little about the characters themselves.

     Besides playing early morning piano, what did Lucas actually do for a job? What did Ivan’s musical career consist of? Certainly, it cannot have had it its high with the little ditty by composers Samuel Kim and Blake Matthew. And what were our loveable fellows’ lives like before that fateful day by the lake? Did they have any friends? Why has Ivan fired all the other nurses? And what does he mean that they were “flirty”; did they hire only gay nurses? In short, who is this suffering man and his saintly nurse?

      Empathy is one thing, and I’m a born sentimentalist; but if I’m going to invest my tears in a movie I want to know why and what I’m blubbering about.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).