Tom Pardoe | Same Time Tomorrow / 2020

the shroud of silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Vacccaro (screenplay), Tom Pardoe (director) Same Time Tomorrow / 2020 [8 minutes]

 

Andrew (Michael Vaccaro) lives in the US and his would-be lover Vittorio (Giovanni Bienne) is in Italy, the two evidently having undergone a long COVID-related Skype relationship, talking late night and early mornings with each other about their fantasies and their eagerness to join each other in sex.

     Andrew is apparently close to scheduling a flight to Italy, but is still worried that Vittorio is maintaining a safe distance from others. From our viewpoint, through the lens of their Skype connection, they seem a slightly unlikely couple, Andrew a bit overweight and someone effeminate, snacking throughout his conversation with the lean, bed-bound, long-haired Vittorio.

      Both reassure one another that they’re being careful, but Vittorio is seeing his mother daily, although he sits outside her window to talk to her; Andrew tells Vittorio that his roommate is a nurse who comes home each night to cry, telling him all the stories, which sounds to be a much less safe connection that Vittorio has with his mother.

      They can hardly wait to meet, as Andrew watches Antonioni films and Italian TV series, Vittorio tells him he wishes he were there right now. But Andrew is also afraid that when they finally meet in Rome, Vittorio may not actually like him. He knows that their on-line adventures aren’t real life.

       But in a very touching scene Vittorio tells him that from the moment he gets up in the morning until when he goes to bed, he thinks about nothing but Andrew. When he broke up with his previous lover, he never thought he could love again, but Andrew has been so good for him. He knows he now has love. They close the day in tears with same refrain as always: “Same time tomorrow.”

       On March 23, 2020, Vittorio’s call to Andrew is not answered. Nor is it answered the next day. We see him attempt the call again on March 27th. Still no answer.

        Another love lost to COVID, along with the immense distance of time and space it demands in wrapping its victim up into the shroud of silence.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Leon Lopez | Where's Steve? / 2020

the beginning of loss

by Douglas Messerli

 

James McDermott (screenplay), Leon Lopez (director) Where's Steve? / 2020 [5 minutes]

 

In British director Leon Lopez’s second short film concerning COVID-19, an elderly man Eric (Terry George) returns home from the hospital where he himself has just recovered from the disease.

     Clearly he is joyful to be home, but suffers from early-onset dementia and is troubled since he cannot find his companion at home, Steve. He wanders the house looking for him.    

      Finally, when his nurse, Benny (Lopez himself playing the role) arrives, he asks him where’s Steve. Benny shows a picture of him in a hospital bed, since Steve too has been taken off to hospital with COVID.

     In the very next scene, we see Eric walking around the nearby woods in his pajamas, Benny running after him. He’s still attempting to find his long-time partner. And Benny reminds him that he’s sick in the hospital, Eric somewhat embarrassed to have forgotten.

     But the worry doesn’t disappear, and his absence is still noted from moment to moment.

     Benny comes running downstairs, his cellphone in hand. It’s a call from Steve. He’s better and being released the very next day.

      In the very last scene of the film, we see Eric standing in the driveway waiting for the car to return his companion. The car drives in, and the film comes to an end. We never see Steve, but we can imagine the difficulties of the two attempting to help one another recover from such a debilitating disease, and with Eric’s other problems, we know it won’t be long before it will be Steve who will once more have to suffer Eric’s disappearance, even if his body remains in the room. Eric’s inability to find Steve is the first of the loses both he and Steve must soon endure. Any time lost between such loving individuals that COVID has cost them, is a kind of small tragedy, one that brought tears to my eyes, despite the film’s basically positive ending.

      In a sense, they have both been forced to leave one another at the very time they needed one another most.

     The music by Myles Knox-Renshaw helps to establish the bittersweet tone that pervades this short movie.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Colin Sheehan | What to Expect When You're Expecting / 2020

preparations for a gentleman caller

by Douglas Messerli

 

Colin Sheehan (screenwriter and director) What to Expect When You’re Expecting / 2020 [3 minutes]

 

So what happens when the lockdown’s over and you have your first internet boyfriend in an actually face-face-meeting after all this time. Internet guru Colin Sheehan (also the short film’s writer and director) has some advice.

     First, brush up on your communication skills, particularly since you haven’t been speaking to someone for a long time. Sheehan can hardly be comprehended at this point, talking some sort of private language he’s created for himself alone during lockdown.

     His second point is to brush up in facial expressions, as he his eyes pop out and he attempts a lame smile or two.

     Part Two concerns “style.” He goes through his closets to find new shirts and pants that might take him into a realm out of sweatpants and T-shirts, expect they look somehow like the last time he bought a new piece of clothing was in 1949, without them giving off the vibes of a vintage look.

     And then there’s the setting. Which side of the bed is he going to sleep on? Who gets the teddy bear. And do you have enough new Netflix murder mysteries on hand? Maybe he even loves Madonna!

     But then he gets a response from his “match,” who doesn’t feel they’re at right for one another. With tears Colin suggests you also should wait for the other to respond back.

      He turns away from the camera, but suddenly his phone rings once again. “O my God, I’ve got another match!”

      Despite the film’s general silliness, a couple of his comments truly hit home. I did have some difficulty in knowing how to control the amount of information I poured out on unsuspecting friends who I hadn’t seen in months. Did they really want to hear about the hundreds of movies I’d been writing about? Evidently not.

      And no one, at my age, will be able to convince me now to change out of my pajamas and sweatpants—at least while I’m in the house. Besides, my clothes are also all outdated and no longer fit!

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Mariano Rodriguez Ingold | The Meeting / 2020

how to make covid into a sexually transmitted disease

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francesca Root and Max Brown (screenplay, based on an idea by Root and Mariano Rodriquez Ingold), Mariano Rodriguez Ingold (director) The Meeting / 2020 [4 minutes]

 

How to keep sexy without the ability to touch and hold one’s attractive lover, or perhaps, in this instance, just to simply explore someone to whom you’re attracted seems to be the subject of US director Rodriquez Ingold’s film.

     According to the narrator (Ender Waters) the character played by Rodriga Cavalherio has a dream in which he is already sitting on a small blanket in a green back yard, when suddenly the porcelain-skinned beauty, with “a bland tail” appears (Kaue Serra), who lays down on another blanket far off on the green lawn. Both admire each other and quickly connect up on their cellphones.

     Serra has evidently brought a gift for Cavalherio, a pair of (his own?) blue underpants which the receiver quickly begins to sniff, moving in quite sexual positions which obviously excites the other, until the sniffer begins to cough and cough, the dream quickly snapping off like a lightbulb. Has the very odor of the present’s owner spread the disease? Has the sexual excitement allowed COVID to enter his nose and take over his own body? Might COVID be turned into a sexually transmitted disease?

     I suspect these are more profound questions than the director has bothered to ask of his own short film. “The meeting” is simply a short one, and not even a true meeting at that, since everything’s a dream—or perhaps a COVID nightmare! Clearly neither of these boys can get any satisfaction.

     Nor does it provide any true excitement for the viewer for that matter.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023)

J. T. Seaton | Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye? / 2020

a witness who is not even allowed to watch

by Douglas Messerli

 

J. T. Seaton (screenwriter and director) Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye? / 2020 [11 minutes]

 

The problem of making movies about a phenomenon which most of us are encountering for the first time in our lives and in experiencing it in the very moment of creation is that it is difficult to know how to be objective about the very issues we know and hear to be happening, and is impossible to provide perspective to our presentation of those issues.

     Some of these related problems clearly exist in almost all of the short films produced in 2020 about the pandemic of COVID-19, which every day resulted in thousands and thousands of new deaths.

      In J. T. Seaton’s film Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye? the writer and director, just as in Leon Lopez’s Hey Google, tackles the subject head on, creating a gay character whose lover has just died of the disease.

      In both instances, the directors sought to know how survivors would react to such a situation when not only they have been torn away from their lovers at the very moment when their companions needed them most, but were unable to even fully know of their conditions and were themselves cocooned off into a world which took them even further from their loves than even space could. It was as if time and space had both come to a stop. Communication was impossible, doctors and nurses themselves were unsure of how to fully communicate and help their own patients without endangering their own lives as well. The levels of distancing were so numerous that there appeared no possible way not only to help but to know of even how to share their own fears and find ways to allay them. The world seemed to have moved into a kind of mass hysteria where, as in war, people were separated with virtually no way to know how they doing, whether or not they are surviving or dead. In some sense similar to the Holocaust and AIDS, the COVID pandemic pulled people away from one another to further assure their silent and unexplained deaths.

      The intensity of that experience, in both films, is conveyed through a first-hand report from the victim himself, permitted only after the fact. If the survivor, accordingly, has the apparent solace of the dead man’s love, is also is presented with the living guilt of not having been able to be there (without even a “there” to go to) at the very moment in his companion expresses his love and recognition of death. Any catharsis, accordingly, comes long after the fact.

      There is an intense melodrama played out as the two actors must convey love, guilt, suffering, worry for the survivor, and sorrow for the dead all at the very same moment. So we watch Seaton’s character Ryan (Noah Brown) listening to a recording made days or even hours before the death of his lover Jacob (Jamal Douglas). As in Lopez’s work, it is the dying individual who is the position of strength, since he has had to face his death alone, has had to come to terms with his death, and even is charged with the act of communicating with the other, sharing his love and warning him to remain safe, to isolate himself even further than he already has. Ryan, on the other hand, cannot even properly mourn his loved one’s death. 

     It puts the central actor, in short, in the position of being a tearful individual without any words to speak, a witness whose very role has been stolen from him. He has not been able to witness, only hear of what he might have witnessed after the fact. It puts the central character in the most insignificant of spots, and the film accordingly attempts to create a narrative about a man who can do nothing but listen to their previous love for one another by the one who cannot even leave his bed or ventilator except for a few moments to speak these words of consolation.

      In short, these COVID films are some of the most frustrating and passive of narratives possible, putting their viewers, furthermore, in the position of voyeurs with nothing to watch or really learn about either of the two men who loved. Any brief moments of joy, sex, or pleasures are in the past and represented through snapshots or portrayed in hallmark card-like cinematic moments.

     In this instance, unlike Lopez’s film, the character has dared to move back into nature, returning to the beach where they had recently gotten engaged to be married. But in moving out of the cave of isolation Ryan is placed by the director in an even stranger world, as the coughing lover’s voice suddenly turns into that of a trapped beast, threatening figures we also hear on the tape as if Jamal had suddenly been turned into a kind zombie who needed quickly to be shot. Vague figures also begin the wander in the background of the beach where Ryan sits.

     The final few moments, accordingly, hint at the way society is treating anyone infected or, for that matter, anyone who dares to leave the private world into which the doctors and other officials have demanded they retreat for their own safety and protection.

      The ending, accordingly, is jarring without really being logical. Doctors and nurses (the nurse Dale, for example, who Jamal even describes as being so beautiful) obviously didn’t shoot him at the moment he recognized Jamal was near death. Zombies did not suddenly begin to roam the beach where Ryan has escaped to listen to Jamal’s last words. It’s only a metaphor for a situation that cannot otherwise be logically explained.

      Creating a film as Seaton and the others have done during the pandemic allows for no narrative, no perspective, and no true evaluation of what is happening. The daily numbers of the death, the silence of a room, a Wi-Fi or zoom call from others, is all we really have of the intense drama going on underneath. As the title of this film hints, the characters cannot really say goodbye since they were forced to do so before they even knew they were saying it and why.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Marco De Luca | Two Meters Apart / 2020

calling the whole thing off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marco De Luca and Irene Harris (screenplay), Marco De Luca (director) Two Meters Apart / 2020 [3 minutes]

 

In this truly brief film, we experience the aftermath of a short but extremely intense relationship in the context of a sudden cessation through the pandemic COVID-19 lockdown.

     Adam had just met Tom and is clearly in love, announcing that he would continue to love him anywhere, from any distance. We see brief frames of their love-making, kissing and simply the enjoyment of each other’s presence.

     And now, he suddenly cannot reach out to his new lover, does not know how he is, whether or not he’s sick and needs his help. The feeling shifts from one of intense love to memories, which is now all that is left.

     Just as suddenly a signal appears on his e-mail: “I don’t have the virus. But let’s call it quits. It was only one day anyway.”

     What this film seems to suggest is that the isolation of the lockdown did not just affect long-term relationships and family intimacy, but even the beginnings, the buddings of friendships and love that now suddenly have grown dead before they even had a chance to get started. Had they only had a week, a month, a few days they might have been to withstand an isolation of months. But there is no chance now to even get to know one another, despite the joyful day they had together.

     Not a profound work, English director Marco De Luca’s short piece reveals further the total devastation of lives that the Pandemic had. It changed nearly everyone’s life.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023)

Leon Lopez | Hey Google / 2020

the human voice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leon Lopez (screenwriter and director) Hey Google / 2020 [10 minutes]

 

British director Leon Lopez’s film begins, not as you might expect it to in the morning, but rather in the evening as Nader (Sareed Farhat) trims up his hair just above his neck, enjoys a cup of coffee, brushes his teeth and commands his Goggle home hub system to wake him up at 8:00 a.m.

    When Google does awake him, he is not in his bed but laying on the living room couch. Apparently, he couldn’t sleep—at least not in his bed. And we sense almost immediately that something is wrong with this rather well-organized and physically-conscious individual. 

     The TV tells us of at least part of his problems. Infection rates have returned to nearly normal, and schools may reopen. So we gather Nader has been living in lock-down alone, segregated from others for weeks or perhaps even months—since the lockdowns in different countries and even regions greatly varied—from the COVID-19 world-wide pandemic.

    When the announcer (Terry George) begins to speak of the death toll, Nader immediately asks Google to turn the TV off. Perhaps he is just sensitive, as many of us were, to the startling daily reports of national and international deaths; but we also suspect that perhaps something else has made him not wish to listen to that data.

     He looks out the window, but still asks Google what the weather will be like, which, when she reports, he mutters maybe I should get my shorts and go swimming, the female Google voice responding in a friendly manner, “Maybe I’ll go with you.” Nader smiles. In a lockdown, it’s good to have a friend, even if its intelligence is merely artificial. At least it brings broad smile to his face.

     But soon after, when the radio begins to play a song, he demands that Google again stop. He asks “her” instead to play bird songs, and when she addresses him as “Nader,” he tells her how much appreciates it, she responding that she shall do it more often. But while he speaks to the “cheeky” disembodied voice he stares down at a picture with him and another young man his age, obviously his lover, not there for him in this long and painful crisis. He asks Google whether he can ever get over loving somebody, she answers that she’s not sure that she’s the right person to answer that question, perhaps he should consult Wikipedia? He smiles and answers, “No.” Clearly there are limits to the artificial intelligence of Goggle home hub thankfully.

     The fact that he has even asked that question, however, hints that whoever it was in that picture, they are no longer a couple. As he returns to bed, presumably that evening, he again picks up the digital photos and stares at them, putting them aside with frustration. Once again, he asks to Goggle to turn off the lights, but he responds to question about the alarm that he doesn’t need it tonight. Instead of remaining in bed, he moves to the building’s rooftop, drink in hand.

      And again, he wakes on the couch. As he begins his workout, Google reminds him that he has one calendar event for the day: “Sam’s funeral. Would you like to repeat this?”

      He slowly sits up and asks Google to call Sam. And we realize in that command what will likely happen. We hear Sam’s voice beginning with a pre-recorded message that he can’t get to the phone right now, and then Nader’s message: “Hey baby, I really miss you. I miss you so fuckin’ much,” tears welling in his eyes. I can’t even go to your funeral. No one can. I don’t think I can do this without you. I feel so lonely. Why didn’t this fuckin’ virus take the both of us?”

      He goes to his own voicemail to listen, one last time, to Sam’s last words (read by the director Lopez). Heavily coughing, Sam tells him that meeting him was the best thing that happened to him. It’s the only thing that makes this, he proclaims, referring evidently to his COVID illness, as bearable. He asks that Nader tries to stay strong, and he begs him to do all the things that they, as a couple, had planned to do. He even gives his lover the permission to find new love before the beep interrupts, the machine by which Nader now survives cutting off the final message from his  now dead loved one.

     This film might almost be described as new perspective on the famed Jean Cocteau play of 1930 The Human Voice, in which a woman spills out her love, anger, and sorrow to her departing lover.

     Of the 7 films I discuss in this essay about films made during and concerning the terrible pandemic of 2020-21, Lopez’s “Hey Google” is clearly the most emotional and complex simply in its recognition of how much we all truly rely not only on the comfort of other human bodies but each other’s voices and language in general in order to survive.

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2023

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Douglas Messerli | Lockdown: Eight Gay Covid Films [essay]

lockdown: eight gay covid films

by Douglas Messerli

 

As of the date of my 76th birthday on May 30, 2023, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) there were 6,938,353 deaths of 767,364,883 confirmed cases of COVID globally. Just so that we can comprehend this vast number in relation to that other horrific pandemic in near memory: around 40.1 million (estimates being between 33.6 million to 48.6 million) people died of AIDS with 84.2 million infected. It is believed that in 2021 there were 38.4 million people living with AIDS.

    In short, although substantially more individuals contracted COVID than AIDS, far more many people died of AIDS than of COVID.

    It is important to remember that both pandemics were “equal opportunity killers,” infection being easily spread to all genders and any sexuality; the deaths have killed vast numbers of both men and women, and in Africa the number has been primarily women. Yet, there is no question, that although there is no way of telling what percent of those who died of AIDS were homosexual, we know that at least in the US and in European countries, the hardest hit community were males who had sex with other males (described in the statistical reports as MSM). It was not until 1982 that the disease stopped being called “gay-related immune deficiency” (GRID), and was retitled Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). According to a report by Dr. Dana Rosefeld of The British Academy gay men suffered “the most AIDS deaths by far at the epidemic’s height.”

   To my knowledge, COVID has not hit the LGBTQ community any heavier than other groups— the communities suffering most being economically deprived blacks and Hispanics and the elderly in general, all of whom died from the current pandemic at much higher rate. Just as I was a member of one of the most endangered groups in the AIDS crisis, so too was I in this pandemic.

    The first gay movies concerning AIDS were released in 1985, Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies, John Erman’s TV drama An Early Frost, and Canadian documentary filmmaker’s No Sad Songs, with others important works followed such as Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), David Wojnarowicz’s Beautiful People (1988), Jerry Tartaglia’s A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M (1988), Marlon T. Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989), Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1989), and Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992). It wasn’t until eight years later that the first truly commercial film dealt with the subject, probably the film most audiences remember today, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) was released, the same year three other memorable independent films were made, Roger Spottiswoode’s HBO production of And the Band Played On, Steve Levitt’s short work Deaf Heaven, and John Greyson’s truly innovative musical drama Zero Patience.

      What is interesting about the above time lines is that AIDS was first identified in 1981, and by 1982 US Representative Henry Waxman already convened the first congressional hearings on AIDS at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Hollywood.* It would takes years to reach the ears of the general public and even longer before the government took any interest in attempting to do something about it.

       One need only compare that with the fact already in 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic, the 8 short films I discuss here and Mexican director Roberto Pérez Toledo Hidroalcohólico (Hydroalcoholic) and The Fourth Date—which I discuss elsewhere—also of the same year, all were released.

       Obviously, there are numerous reasons why there was a much quicker response in cinema to this pandemic than for AIDS, one of them being simply the history of AIDS itself, which no young director can forget, since the disease (as well as COVID) is still very much with us. Moreover, the gay community was still relatively silenced in the early 1980s and there was no proliferation of gay short films as there is today, indeed there was no guaranteed audience for such films, while today the young directors can imagine, at least, that their works might be seen by sympathetic audiences at LGBTQ+ festivals.

       But I was struck yet again, given the above statistics, just how devastating to the global population and particularly the queer world that AIDS had been, particularly in relation to a disease which from day one received major newspaper and—despite a slow-thinking and dismissive US president—substantiative governmental action. Yet a well-informed, even learnèd, politically left-leaning friend of my age commented that he had believed that our generation might have been spared the international horrors of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations of the 20th century, meaning the great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 (killing internationally some 50 million individuals), two World Wars, and the Holocaust, only to suddenly be faced with a disease of such global proportions as COVID. Evidently, for him, as a heterosexual American living in Britain, AIDS had not at all appeared to have been an even worse and more life-changing phenomena.

       I will not begin in this introduction to analyze what these 9 works concerning COVID reveal to us overall; I discuss some of the general implications within the works themselves.

       The works I discuss here (there were others) are British director Leon Lopez’s Hey Google, the same country’s Marco De Luca’s Two Meters Apart, US director J. T. Seaton’s Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye?, US filmmaker Mariano Rodriguez Ingold’s The Meeting, US director Colin Sheehan’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting, another film by British citizen Leon Lopez, Where's Steve?, an innovative work, involving both AIDS and COVID by the Canadian LGBTQ genius’ Prurient and the Skype-based work between Italian Michael Vaccaro and American Tom Pardoe in Same Time Tomorrow, all of these works made during a year in which theaters and majjor film studios were shuttered.

 

*What isn’t generally discussed is that the subject had already appeared Off-Broadway in William Finn’s musical March of the Falsettos from 1981, and in the final part of that work, Falsettoland in 1990. The work was presented on Broadway in 1992. In the musical there is still no name for disease suddenly striking down young gay men. The work appeared in film in 2017 and is reviewed in these pages.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2023

Reprinted from My World Cinema (June 2023).