Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt | Diamantino / 2018

bosom buddies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt (screenwriters and directors) Diamantino / 2018

 

Attractive, likeable, open-hearted, and dim-witted Portuguese soccer star Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta) is a fan favorite, surely the only one that can take his team to win the championship. As the crowd roars its approval Diamantino runs the field with what he sees are monstrously large, fluffy dogs instead of opposing and fellow teammates. He negotiates his movements down to kick in the goal among these amazingly harmless beasts who somehow seem to be joining him instead of preventing his final kick. Time and again he saves the day by weaving dog friends through clouds of pink smoke.

    There’s no attempt to explain or find logic for Diamantino’s on-field visions or anything else in his or the other characters’ lives in this somewhat surrealist, sports-based, science-fiction, dramatic, comic detective romance which is precisely what makes this film so very charming and worth watching despite some otherwise predictable maneuvers.

     As in any other sports film, the hero loses his mojo, in this case during the final shot of the FIFA World Cup championship! His fluffy friends disappear and with their absence goes Portugal’s chances to become great again.

     While usually such earth-shattering distractions of major athletes has something to do with a woman, in the naïve virgin Diamantino’s case it is his discovery on a yachting trip that the oceans are full of starving refugees from former Portuguese territories such as Mozambique and Cape Verde, a boat of which he and his father save on a family outing between games.

      Diamantino’s beloved father, coach and manager Chico (Chico Chapas) dies from a stroke soon after, as after his evil twin daughters, Sonia (Anabela Moreira) and Natasha (Margarida Moreira)—Diamantino’s equally beloved sisters—physically harass him for their brother’s loss. Now, as Diamantino’s managers, having the most to lose by his public disgrace, they quickly sign him up with a rightest government program to clone the boy’s talent and create a whole new team of Diamantinos who will help make Portugal the world power it used to be or should have been.

      The only problem is that in the cloning process, which includes hormones, the boy grows female breasts and he will surely die when the doctor attempts to transfer the knowledge in his brain into the other team mates’ bodies. The twins, however, convince their dumb sibling that his meetings with the James Bond-like villain Dr. Lamborghini (Carla Maciel) will help him return to the sport he so loves and stop him from seeing the waves of refugees that now haunt his vision.

     Meanwhile, working for the current government are two lesbian Secret Service agents, Aisha (Cleo Tavares) and Luica (Maria Leite), who are following the soccer player’s every move, electronically and personally for possible money laundering, having noticed the appearance of his name in numerous off-shore accounts. When Diamantino decides to give up football and adopt a refugee son to give him all the love he never had, Aisha decides to dress up in male drag to become his new son Rahim—and so the fun begins.

     Rahim, of course, discovers his new father to be a truly loving man, fawning over him with meals of whipped cream and chocolate Nutella, while Diamantinos cuddles up with his new son every minute he gets to reassure him of a father’s love. Unfortunately, a visit from Aisha’s lover finds the two, “father and son,” in bed together causing all sorts of complications.

      The "boy" also discovers, in the dark of night when the sinister sisters are in bed, that the offshore accounts are not those of Diamantino but of Sonia and Natasha. On their part the twins, while Diamantino is away at Dr. Lamborghini’s clinic, attempt to convert Rahim into their private Cinderella, doomed to scrub and clean the kitchen counters and floors. When their brother returns to discover his new son’s fate, he determines that he will never again let Rahim long out of his sight, bringing the refugee and his new father even closer, a situation that troubles Aisha’s real-life female partner.

     She returns as a nun dressed in high-heels—recalling the nun of Alfred Hitchcock’s early caper The Lady Vanishes and revealing to the observant twins that something is amiss. Eventually they find the nun and the refugee in bed together having hot lesbian sex!

     Aisha as Rahim also has made several discoveries about Dr. Lamborghini and the plans she and the sisters have for Diamantino. As the twins attempt to kill Rahim/Aisha, Diamantino whisks him off to safety on his yacht where they spend a night together, both surprised to find each other has breasts, but also, in the process, introducing Diamantino to sex with a female and Aisha to heterosexual intercourse.

      Love is all set to win the day until the sisters kidnap their brother and return him to the clinic for the final brain transfer, convincing him that Aisha and her lesbian lover have tricked him. What’s a true believer to do but to submit? Fortunately, Aisha is on his trail and kills of the evil sisters before they do her in; but it appears to she has arrived too late for save Diamantino since the doctor has just switched on the current for the transfer.

      The transfer fails, of course, because of the insufficient brain power of our dim-witted champion. But just as he comes to, Lamborghini shoots Aisha it what appears to be a fatal blow. Not to worry, viewers, Diamantino does in the doctor with his trusty saber and pulls his former refugee once more to freedom, escaping—in a vision that begins with a final nude run through the fluffy dog filled stadium—escaping with her to a tropical island where presumably they live happily ever after as bosom buddies.

 

Los Angeles, June 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Ben Walton | Zinzan / 2017

backing off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Walton (screenwriter and director) Zinzan / 2017 [11 minutes]

 

New Zealand filmmaker Ben Walton’s short film of 2017, Zinzan begins where most coming out films leave off. Long before the first scene of this work, with Mr. Lewis’ (Chris Hobbs) son Liam (Simon Mead) is seen in bed with his gay lover Michael (Dion Greenstreet), and it is established that the father has clearly accepted his son as a homosexual. We get a brief glimpse of his earlier discovery of them making love in the locker room.

        If he’s not yet totally comfortable with the situation, he is basically tolerant to it, hesitantly greeting Michael leaving his son’s room early in the morning, as he goes to awaken Liam for his rugby workouts. He drives both boys to the ruby field, with Michael making the decision to basically remain in the car while his friend goes through the athletic workout and a scrimmage. But even Michael’s daring to stand by the edge and watch the final moments of the game results in taunting by two of his teammates for Liam’s having brought his “girlfriend” along to the exercises, Liam reacting rather violently, but held back by his father.     

        Liam, we discover, is a local hero for his rugby achievements and in a few days we will be considered for recruitment into the national Under 20s team, a high honor which presumably may lead to further national rugby team placement. And his father is worried that something might get in the way of that possibility.

       So too is the affable Liam, who clearly loves his companion deeply and refuses to leave him behind or even uninvite him for an evening home with his dad watching professional rugby on the telly. You can see the tension of Mr. Lewis’ face, yet his response is simply to order up another pizza. The taunting of his son, however, looms large even in the father’s imagination.

       Just days before the event, Liam himself admits to being nervous about the upcoming event. Even Liam and his father’s shouts in support of the television game seemingly embarrasses him, perhaps afraid they will do the same from the stands in his try-out game.

       The next day when they drive to the stadium, the father also remains in the car with Michael. And, for the first time we get to see that Michael is also worried about his lover. He suggests that if the father wants him to “back off” for the time being he will take no offense and will do so. Mr. Lewis says nothing, but it is clear he appreciates the boy’s comments and that he also now recognizes just how deep is Michael’s own love for his Liam.

     The film ends with the two sitting on the back fender of the car watching the game far off from any others’ observation. They cheer Liam on as he once more goes for a win, realizing perhaps for the first time an alliance that they never before had felt.

       In the urban dictionary “zinzan” means “a cool person” and in Indonesia, a culture that simply through its geographical position is closely related to Australia and New Zealand it means, in particular, an aspect of being safe, of being protected. Both meanings work in this film as the father and his “son-in-law” realize that together they are “cool” with the situation in offering Liam their love from a safe position, whether he is chosen for the rugby team or not.

 

Los Angeles, March 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

Yudho Aditya | Pria (Man) / 2017

 the english teacher

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Cigarroa, Yudho Aditya, and Dea Kulumbegashvili (screenplay), Yudho Aditya (director) Pria (Man) / 2017 [22 minutes]

 

The central character of US-Indonesian born director Yudho Aditya’s 2017 short film Pria (Man), is a Muslim teenager, Aris (Chicco Kurniawan) living in a highly agricultural region of Indonesia. He attends a school where his English language teacher is a gay American, Peter (Jacob McCarthy), who teaches the language, in part, by distributing US pictures and postcards to the students and asking them to describe the images along with synonyms for their choices of English words.

      Aris is handed a picture of New York skyscrapers, and seeing the photo on the postcard it is hard to know whether he has more quickly fallen in love with the vision of New York or the teacher himself. What is clear is that both Peter and Aris have already formed an unspoken admiration for one another. After class, Aris asks if he might keep the postcard, a request which Peter immediately grants. But as soon as the boy has left the classroom, the teacher runs after him to tell him that it too is one of his favorites and that he hopes he will take special care of it, obviously a ploy just to be able to form a bit closer relationship with the obviously troubled young man.

      The boy has reason to be troubled since his doting mother is so attentive to her son that he can hardly finish his homework as she quite literally pets him as she speaks. Worse, she has determined he has reached the age of marriage and has arranged with a local man for Aris to wed his daughter, whose pudgy face is all we see underneath her dress and head coverings.

      Even with the wedding looming in the near future, Aris attempts to focus his imagination on school, his increasingly attachment to his teacher, and for all things Western. At one moment, alone in his room, we see Aris with headphones listening obviously to a Western song. He slowly begins to dance, a self-created dance that reveals his simple joy in being young, somewhat in love, and able to imagine a world into which he might someday be transformed. As critic Serafima Serafimova writes about that scene:

 

“…one of my favourite moments in the film, is the scene where Aris dances in his room, without any inhibition, his pure joy almost palpable. This is abruptly brought to an end by the following scene, where we see him getting his hair cut and along with it his freedom and only chance of true happiness.”

 

    Describing the same scene, critic Upasana Dandona observes in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal: “His facial expression in this scene shows that he is in great affliction; he is helpless in a society where he is not permitted to preserve what he values deeply—he is forced to forgo a part of himself and his identity.”

     The wedding preparatory ceremonies are highly alienating as the girl’s father takes out a horsetail, forcing the hair into a circular position and sticking his finger through the hole in order to demonstrate to the boy how to fuck a woman. Later, the girl herself declares that the boy, who has been forced to walk through muddy paddy fields to visit her, smells disgusting.

     Increasingly terrorized by the forced marriage, he confesses his fears to his mother. Soon after the we see the boy knocking one evening on his English teacher’s door.

     Peter invites him in, as the boy expresses his horrors in the best English that he can muster up.  Finally, the boy leans over and kisses Peter, who readily returns the kiss, the two embracing deeply kissing several times before Peter finally pulls the frightened Aris away, holding him tightly to comfort him with both of them realizing that there is nothing to be done. As an outsider to a culture that is hostile to homosexuality and which has increasingly come to argue that LGBTQ behavior is entirely a foreign intrusion upon their world—this despite the many documents revealing a long tradition of gay and lesbian behavior in Indonesian culture from ancient times—there is nothing Peter can do, and the boy, already signed and sealed through legal documents that require the ceremony proceed, has no choice but to go along with the parental arrangement.

      Director Aditya, accordingly, offers no solution to the dilemma the film has raised. But his gentle and beautiful depiction of Aris and his hidden desires makes it apparent just how awful it is that children such as Aris and the child bride equally are forced to become man and wife against their personal desires. We can only hope that those fearfully loving moments with Peter and the picture postcard might continue to serve as solace that carries him through with the life imposed upon him; one day he may be able to escape as an adult. But there are still also many men in the Western world who, unable to accept their homosexuality, willingly enter into marital relationships which end disastrously or at the least unhappily, and we fear the same for Aris and his new bride.

     Aditya’s is a brave film at a time in which Indonesia has witnessed increasing hostility and violence against its LGBTQ citizens.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).