John Greyson and Jack Lewis | Proteus / 2003

claiming gay identity

 

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Greyson and Jack Lewis (screenplay, based on a story by Jack Lewis, and directors) Proteus / 2003

 

Canadian director John Greyson is among the notables of queer cinema, and anything he directs is worthy of our attention. His 2003 film with South African gay activist Jack Lewis, however, received highly mixed reviews, perhaps because so many of his other transgressive and postmodern gay political statements before this 2003 film were so beautifully clothed, as Variety review Dennis Harvey put it, in “lush aesthetics and impassioned complexity,” while the brown-toned Proteus, in the critic's estimation, failed.

     Partially due to the filming limitations of an 18-day shoot on the South African prison camp of Robben Island, to where Nelson Mandela was also sentenced for 18 years of his 27-year imprisonment, and because of the historical limitations of the central story, based on an actual criminal case of 1735, Greyson and his South African compatriot were not given as open of a postmodern perspective in this case. There is no dancing, no singing mix of gay representatives of different periods, no hot-house perspectives of gay sex in this truly profound film. Moreover, how Greyson and Lewis even interpreted events was open to question.

    One commentor on Letterboxd, with the handle of Lesego, complained that he was disappointed with the portrayal of the Khoi people, represented in this film by Claas Blank (Rouxnet Brown), as “harboring homophobic attitudes when historical evidence shows us they were positive.”

     Since the court records of this particular case, however, wherein Blank, a man accused and exonerated for stealing back cattle whites had already stolen from his tribe, but was still imprisoned for 10 years’ hard labor to the penal colony off of Cape Town, facts are sketchy. The crime which killed him was sodomy, which in this case he practiced with a white South African Rijkhaart Jacobz (Neil Sandilands), who had already been labeled a “faggot,” and was shunned accordingly by the rest of the prison community.

 

     It is the native black man, Blank, who in the strange nightmare community, is the “object of desire,” a man in this highly racist world of torture and violent punishment who offers something special to the man officially assigned to the prison world by the Dutch officials as an English botanist in order to develop exportable flower strains. The irony is already apparent, and one that seems almost inevitable for Greyson’s aesthetics.     

      What Blank represents to the conventionally married British botanist Virgil Niven (Shaun Smyth), since he was previously employed as a servant, is his ability to speak English, Dutch, and his tribal language with its inherent knowledge of the local flora and fauna. In Niven's categorization of all plant life and people, and for whom even Blank might be described as an inferior “Hottentot,” the prisoner Claas Blank, nonetheless, is the perfect conduit between his imperceptible and unacceptable desires: to create a  taxonomical listing of Robben Bay—which later the noted Swedish Carl Linnaeus claimed as being his own work—and fulfill Niven's closeted gay desires.

      Given his societal position and conventional role in this prison world, Niven is allowed to fulfill his voyeuristic needs—becoming far more sexually active when his returns to Amsterdam—while also being forgiven for carrying in his entourage a highly effeminate “poof” as his close assistant. Niven, accordingly, is quite willing to allow the highly attractive black man to become his guide into the native knowledge of floral category of Protea Cynarides, named after the shapeshifting figure of Greek mythology, while observing for something like 10 to 17 years (the official records being somewhat ambiguous) both Blank and Rijkharrt, as they travel back and forth to the water tank in order to maintain his flower garden and escape into anal sexual paradise.

 

     I think it is only logical that Blank, given his culture’s total indifference to all categorizations, sexual definitions, and hierarchies, at first resists the “faggot’s” embrace. But love is love, and the two soon after can no longer contain their sexual desires for one another, as the immoral voyeur Niven gradually threads his life to them in order to gratify his unfulfilled private desires.

    Only his presence, however, protects them, and his return to Amsterdam for a brief period of two years to publish his book, allows the vicious local authorities and fellow prisoners to finally reveal the couple’s “criminal” behavior, both as sexual outcasts and racial misfits.

  Critic Michael D. Klemm, writing in CinemaQueer quite nicely summarizes the gay couple’s situation:

 

“Unlike the European invaders who sought control and dominance by the assigning of new names, our befuddled heroes don't have, and refuse to accept, a name for what they are. This is hardly a case of love at first sight or meeting cute. Games of alpha dog dominance transform slowly into genuine affection over the course of a decade. At first there is only antagonism. It culminates in Claas taking Jacobz from behind and it's a scene straight out of Genet. Is this rape or is this something more? Claas vainly clings to a more traditional gender role and asserts his masculinity by speaking of a woman "with big titties" waiting for him back at the village. Jacobz, bearded and butch, has embraced his queer self and often gazes with longing at his sometimes indifferent friend.”

 

     Today’s commentators, for the most part don’t like sexual ambiguity, even if it has existed throughout history. Yet Greyson and Lewis reveal their character’s true relationship when, after both are threatened with drowning, Rijkharrt—the seemingly “out” faggot, admits to his guilt, while Blank refuses to give himself over to the would-be sexual definers. Once his friend is sentenced, however, Blank is the one who finally speaks out, talking in two languages, as the director/writer Greyson reiterates:

 

“This is what drove us — in the court record, the [sodomy] crimes were mutually perpetrated. The only way he [Blank] could claim his dignity was in confessing. He says it in two languages and the translators [performed in an anachronistic matter by bee-hived haired 1950s typists] translated it in three. This is how we wanted our narrative to resolve the moment of claiming identity for the first time it condemns him to death.”

     Niven, involved in his own gay criminal activities back in Amsterdam, when it was historically recorded that 70 Dutch men were arrested and punished for their gay sexual activities—evidently Niven’s assistant among them—can only again play the role of voyeur as he watches his two lovelies drowned.

     This film, what the prolific Greyson imagines as being his last full feature film, is a tragedy of the highest proportions. Although he once again stuffs it with anachronisms in order to pull it into our own times, it is ultimately a crime of major historical dimension which we have to comprehend as part of the endless terror of our gay history rather than a mere reiteration of our own cultures continued hate of gay beings. This is an event of our horrible LBGTQ+ history, not just a contemporary injustice.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (February 2025).

 

Marie Losier | Bird, Bath and Beyond / 2003

sharks, shopping malls, and the kissing parakeet

 

Marie Losier (director) Bird, Bath and Beyond / 2003 [13 minutes]

 

The star and subject of Marie Losier’s 2003 short is the low budget, gay camp filmmaker Mike Kuchar, who made films with his also gay twin brother George, who died in 2011, and by himself. Together and separately, Mike made over 200 films involving lurid, mostly homosexual sex, Hollywood glamor, superheroes, monsters, and soap-opera situations. As Kelly Vance describes the brothers in the East Bay Express, “They were shoestring Cecil B. DeMilles, the Mozarts of 8mm cinema” (a sobriquet hung on them by screenwriter Buck Henry), charting epic concepts on cardboard and papier-maché sets.”

     In Bird, Bath and Beyond Losier lets Mike, dressed up in ridiculous costumes probably of his own making, talk. He says absolutely nothing about filmmaking, except for his beginning sentence:

 

"I used to have dreams where I would go shopping in a department store. But when looking down I would realize I forgot to put on my clothes. I was afraid that maybe I exposed and revealed myself too much through my films or drawings. I don't put myself into my movies because that would be too much - my pictures reflect my own feelings. So hopefully it's entertaining. Otherwise I can't bear looking at them, ha ha!"

 

     From there on, he opines on sharks, outer space, and his and George’s pet parakeet Lulu.

   Traveling horizontally in Losier’s frames, Mike bemoans the reputation of sharks. It’s the human being who is the predator he insists, having himself supped on shark-fin soup several times. All they do is take a bite out of you, he argues. It’s simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, although it’s the right time for the shark.

    He loves to think about outer space, the constellations. Surely as our sun dies off, we will have to extend human life by living on other planets, where we’ll have to build domed shopping centers like malls. “I like malls, shopping malls, they’re kind of space-agey,” he admits.

     The longest and most fascinating moment of Kuchar’s rambling conversation is about his pet bird Lulu, who every morning pecked him and his brother on the lips. He would take the parakeet out of its cage and put it upon his record turntable, putting it on the lowest speed where Lulu would move quickly to retain her position, like she were exercising on a treadmill. He’d then turn it up just a bit more and the bird would start into a kind of run, and when he finally put it on full-speed within 3 seconds, Lulu would fly off. One day she flew out the window, and they never saw her again.

     As in most of the Kuchar films, there is certainly nothing profound here, and unfortunately his wry short monologue is not really even that humorous. And it eschews any discussion of significant LGBTQ interest. But Kuchar is always fun to be with nonetheless, behaving like an uncle who, having grown up, still behaves as a naughty schoolboy of the kind in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933).

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review.

Clint Eastwood | Mystic River / 2003

that childhood car

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Helgeland (screenplay, based on the book by Dennis Lehane), Clint Eastwood (director) Mystic River / 2003

 

Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River which, years after its original release, I saw for the first time the other day, is a complex movie based on a kind of standard trope: three young boys, close friends in a Boston neighborhood, grow up to become social and moral opponents in their lives as adults. It happens all the time, or, at least, that’s what testosterone-driven male directors would like you to believe—not only Eastwood, but Martin Scorsese, even the melo-dramatist Douglas Sirk have all done variations of this theme.

     Yet this film is far more complex than most such films. Afterall, the young boys involved, Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine, and Dave Boyle, seen playing street hockey in an early scene, behaving somewhat badly as they attempt to write their names in freshly poured sidewalk concrete, are suddenly accosted by a man pretending to be a police officer, who demands their names and home locations before pulling away, quite inexplicably, with Dave, demanding him to enter a car wherein sits a priest—the two of them abducting the boy for 4 days while continuously sexually attacking him—abuse is too kind of a word in this case of utter rape and sexual battery! That the equally macho Eastwood would even dare to take on this subject is quite amazing. But then this diehard Republican apologist has always been a rather surprising figure in the celebrity and film world.

    Pulled out of his native social community, Dave almost immediately loses contact with the world he has known, and as an adult, (performed by Tim Robbins), he remains an outsider—a person who as the simple representation of the death of his youth is shown through the closure of a window blind—remains haunted by his abduction. Not that his childhood friend Jimmy (Sean Penn) is much better off; he, now an ex-con, runs a local popular neighborhood grocery and liquor store, where he is still closely in touch with Dave. Not only that, but by marriage, the two are still related, having married cousins.

      Actually, the two former boyhood friends are also related by their manias and sense of violence. Jimmy is obsessed with the fact that his 19-year-old daughter Katie (Emily Rossum) is dating a boy, Brendan Harris (Tom Guiry) whom he despises, for reasons that are not immediately revealed, but later we discover have to do with the boy’s father, who committed the crime which put Jimmy in prison. But the very fact that he is still attempting to control a 19-year-old child speaks a great deal about his macho persona. Certainly, his wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney) is equally unhappy in their relationship, but that doesn’t seem to be of much importance in Jimmy’s mania.

     In fact, women in this drama are nearly deleted, including Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), Dave’s wife, who suddenly is intimidated to help her husband to “clean-up” after a mysterious event wherein, he claims, he was forced to kill someone who accosted him.

     The same night Jimmy’s daughter Katie is brutally murdered, her body left mutualized after Dave has witnessed her in a local bar with her girlfriends.

      The plot of this mystery/murder film gets even more complicated when the third childhood friend, Sean (Kevin Bacon), now a police detective, becomes involved in the search for Katie’s murderer.

    In a sense, the different directions of these three boyhood friends now reveal their extreme differences, as Dave begins to suspect Jimmy’s involvement in his daughter’s death, while Sean, with careful deliberation, attempts to track down the murder(ers).

       The fact that the hot-headed Jimmy becomes increasingly convinced that Dave has destroyed his daughter, represents not only his mania, but his guilt for not being the one who was enticed into the childhood car.

       It is as if all three boys were so terribly abused that day so long ago that none of them can let it go. At least Sean, with his partner, Detective Sergeant Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne) work together to track down the true killers; yet Sean’s own wife, pregnant at the time, has left him, so we must recognize him as another failed lover, another destroyed member of this trio.

      Convinced of Dave’s guilt, Jimmy corners him and demands an admission of his activities. Hoping to free himself of Jimmy’s immediate wrath, Dave admits to the murder—despite the fact that the man he has murdered, in fact, was another child abuser, whom he had discovered in a car with a young kid. Yet Jimmy, convinced of his righteous revenge shoots the former friend in the head, releasing his body in the Mystic River of the film’s title. In a sense, it is a revenge for his own lack of courage all those years earlier, a cleansing of his own guilt for not speaking out for his friend those long years ago, for not being the child the two villains chose.

      Finally, Sean reveals they have uncovered the real killers, two kids, one of whom was the son of the notorious “Just Ray” Harris,” the man who sent Jimmy to jail and the father of his daughter’s boyfriend, brother to Brendan, resulting in Jimmy carrying even more guilt and sorrow for the rest of his life. He confesses to his wife, and Sean also seems to know that the disappearance of Dave has something to do with Jimmy. At the end of the film, it is unclear just how much longer Jimmy can survive.

      I might argue that Eastwood and his screenplay writer, Brian Helgeland, might have simplified their story, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. But, obviously, that was just the point: the interconnected stories of these young men are just part of the inextricably complex and tortured tales of young men and women growing up in what Eastwood shows as an almost sour sewer, the Mystic River flowing through Boston, which we later rediscover in works such as in Tim McCarthy’s Spotlight. That great Brahmin world of high ideals was never what it pretended to be.

     The children in Eastwood’s movie were just those kinds of abused kids that the news reporters shed their “spotlight” on in McCarthy’s 2015 film, boys who never could fully recover from their sudden abuses on the streets in which they were simply playing hockey and memorializing their names into the local pavement. They were innocents suddenly put into another world apart from their imaginations. Can you blame them for being failures as adults?

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2019).

Eric Mueller | This Car Up / 2003

kismet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Mueller (screenwriter and director) This Car Up / 2003 [16 minutes]

 

Minneapolis businessman Pete (Michael Booth) and bike messenger Adrian (Brent Doyle) could not be more different, so it appears. Pete, up in his 45-story office, calls up for a delivery of information, imagining for a moment being anywhere but in his office, perhaps on a tropical island. The heavily tattooed-and-pieced Adrian, going about his rounds, imagines himself in a white shirt behind a desk, suggesting that perhaps they are simply at the opposite ends of the worlds in which they would each like to be living.

     Both, however, firmly believe in chance or fate, Pete pulling out his old magic eight-ball to get the answer to his unstated question: “Will I soon meet someone with whom I will fall in love?”; and Adrian, upon a finding a quarter just outside of Peter’s office towers, tossing it again and again to find out the answer to a question that we suspect is similar to the businessman’s self-query.

     Unfortunately, Pete’s magic ball keeps responding “No,” and Adrian’s quarter keeps coming up heads when he obviously has hoped for tails and vice versa.

     This mostly silent film by Eric Mueller programmatically splits up the screen into four frames: one the lower left showing us the in-time office-bound experiences of Peter and the lower right showing us Adrian mostly making his way through traffic on his bike. On the upper left we catch glimpses of Pete’s thinking and imagination, while on the upper right we observe Adrian’s thoughts, the top two images also being represented at moments as a kind of casino slot-machine, indicating that each man is hoping to win love with—which becomes increasingly obvious—the other.

     But in their first go-round, the keep missing their encounter, Pete leaving the office to take the elevator down at the very moment that Adrian arrives with is package he delivers up to the office secretary.

     As Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas observes: “The filmstrips further express the lives and longings of the two men. On a smoke break by his building’s bicycle stands, the well-tailored Pete takes note of Adrian and soon realizes that he is attracted to him beyond his look, so very different from his own. Will the wheels of fortune spin in Pete’s favor, permitting another encounter with Adrian?”

     The quartet of images reveal them on the next day both taking outings in the park and, without realizing it, resting near trees nearby one another. They are so close that we observe, at one point, a man with a dog speeding through both their frames. This time we observe that they indeed do share a great deal in common, particularly in their interest in one another, in one glorious moment their panels aligning up like the planets, when both spot a nearby male couple greeting one another, as their minds return to the moment of the day earlier when they shook hands. A moment later we observe them both conjuring up the image of the other.

     That evening as both prepare Italian meals for themselves we recognize just how much these two actually do have in common given our ability to see what TV stations they are both watching and how they lay out in the couch, hit the bed at the same moment.

      The next day at the office, Pete can’t get Adrian out of his mind as the delivery boy suddenly shows up to his office—without a package. Pete suddenly realizes that Adrian has been attracted to him as much as he to Adrian, and with a wink he speeds his visitor off to the elevator, where Pete sheepishly admits that he was about to call for a package. Adrian, asks “Why didn’t you?” Peter answering that there are certain things you simply have to leave to fate or chance. Adrian prefers the word fate, as the two fall into a deep embrace. Suddenly, we lose the upper two panels of the film. The two continue their dual interaction until the door opens, the image turning into one full image of the two in the elevator still kissing in the clinch.

     If it is clearly not a very profound film, This Car Up is a nice excuse for believing in kismet when it comes to gay love.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Rahman Milani | Stille landskap / 2003

portrait of an outsider

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rahman Milani (screenwriter and director) Stille landskap / 2003 [8.40 minutes]

 

I must admit that the Norwegian film, Stille landskap was my very first LGBTQ film entirely in Farsi—moreover without English language subtitles. Directed by Rahman Milani, this starkly photographed tale presents, through a straightforward presentation of images, the story of an Iranian teenage boy (Homayon Hamzeloee), living in a rural Norwegian community with a family who have obviously emigrated to Norway, the boy having obviously fallen in love with a Norwegian school mate (Georg Lyngved).

      The two meet up in the Norwegian boy’s home to hang out together, share their love of art, and enjoy one another’s bodies, never imagining that without a closed curtain a neighbor, another Iranian immigrant, might be observing their lovely kisses.

     When the boy’s family finds out, he is severely beaten by his father, despite the pleas of the mother to stop. And the last several frames of this 8-minute short—produced by Frank Mosvold, several of whose LGBTQ films I have previously reviewed—concern the boy readying himself in the middle of the night to escape, ending in a long train ride across the snow-covered landscape until he arrives in the city, presumably Oslo. What he might do there and how he might possibly survive is not explored. One can only conjure up images of another outsider youth stalking the streets of the Norwegian capitol, Knut Hamsun’s starving young would-be journalist in his 1890 fiction Hunger.

      Through the strains of the film’s music we also even get a hint of another world-traveling Norwegian wanderer, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. We can only wonder whether his story might also end on taking an even longer voyage in order to find safe haven.

      If this film’s narrative seems almost too pared-down to represent any complexity about Milani’s story, in its images of the frozen landscape and homelife violence, it fully brings to life the painful isolation of its central figure.

     Yet I would like to know where this young man’s suffering leads, to discover what possible solutions a queer life he has in a world in which he is a kind of double-outsider, both politically/religiously and sexually. Is there any haven available to him within Norway’s relatively small, like-minded population? Is there even any respite elsewhere in the world?  If there was ever a universal symbol of loneliness it lies in the face of this young kid.

    I lived in Norway in the 1960s, and absolutely felt at home in its gloriously open culture. But several years later, as an older man, I returned to Oslo, finding only a single store where I might have even imagined there might be gay literature available. The man behind the counter reacted to my question with a kind of distressed laugh: “No, in the small town of Oslo there is little interest in gay material.” I felt the cold of his sad laughter go straight through my bones; the lovely landscape of by beloved Oslo turned still and frozen as it must have been for this Iranian queer boy.

 

Los Angeles, June 24, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (June 2021).

Séamus Rea | Two Minutes After Midnight / 2003

every man’s fantasy lover

by Douglas Messerli

 

Séamus Rea (screenwriter and director) Two Minutes After Midnight / 2003 [11 minutes]

 

Two Minutes After Midnight is a comic gay fantasy that explores the various dream partners that a wide range of dancers at a gay club in Britain can conjure up in one evening. It’s a frightful thing, particularly for a nice-looking average gay boy just wanting to find someone to whom he’s attracted to go home with.

    Our hero John (Andrew Hinton-Brown) thinks he’s spotted the perfect person and approaches him on the dance floor, but the guy quickly walks away to the bar. Not to be easily sloughed off, John follows him, but is told to go away. John suggests he may not know what he’s missing: “I may be the answer to all your dreams,” predicative of what is about to happen.

     Disappointed by the abusive rejection, our average boy retreats to the bar toilet where he meets up with an angel (Mark Wakeling). When John snaps back that he thought “Angels didn’t have any vices,” the angel replies, in Oscar Wilde fashion, that vice is just what some call different kinds of pleasure.

     Strangely testy with his new angel friend, he finally is convinced that he can get back at the guy who rejected him and perhaps become the perfect companion of anyone else he desires by the obeying the instructions given to him by the heavenly messenger: “Just turn around the ring three times on your finger, and you will turn into any man’s sexual fantasy.

     The first time he attempts it, he indeed becomes a beautifully muscled hunk (Adrian Bouchet), with whom, when he returns to the dance floor, everyone is awed. The nasty boy who refused him cannot resist, telling him suddenly that he is the “sexiest guy I’ve ever seen.” John plays with him for a moment before he refuses his offer to go home with him, responding, “You’re so far up your ass, I don’t think there’d be room for anyone else.”

     So begins a series of transformations where, observing someone not so bad looking, he turns the ring to become their sexual idol. The results, however, are ridiculously unfulfilling as he transmogrifies throughout the evening into a woman, a grandmotherly drag queen, a man dressed all in rubber, a man-baby, a leather number, Brunhilde, Hitler, and finally a dog, making him wonder whether anybody is normal anymore.

     Finally, he spots a good-looking boy and returns to the toilet for one last try. Three turns of the ring and he comes out looking—just like himself. Convinced that he’s gone just beyond the midnight deadline, he dejectedly heads home alone. Meanwhile the last truly handsome boy, encouraged by his friend to “go after him,” argues what is the point? “Obviously he isn’t interested. He was perfect.”

     This is not at all a deft or truly clever film, although it does provide a few giggles. Unfortunately, the film is available on YouTube only in a miniaturized version with Russian subtitles, not the best way to watch British director Séamus Rea’s short work.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).