Wu Tianming | 变脸 Bian Lian (The King of Masks) / 1996, USA 1999

using gender to survive

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wei Minglun (screenplay, based on a story by Chen Wengui), Wu Tianming (director) 变脸 Bian Lian (The King of Masks) / 1996, USA 1999

 

Noted Chinese director and studio head Wu Tianming filmed The King of Masks in 1996 after his return to China after a period in the US, where, at one point, to financially survive he worked in a video store. Although outwardly the film is not precisely political, it still has many political overtones, particularly with regard to the Chinese treatment of women and the long familial preferences for boys instead of girls. Indeed, gender is very much at the heart of this work.

    Street-performer Wang (Zhu Xu) is an elderly master of the art of mask changing. While he tells stories, he quickly snaps masks to cover his face with such speed that his audiences cannot even discern the moment of the sudden transformations. Like magic this “king of masks” is transformed from character to character, marveling his viewers enough to eke out a meager living. As an itinerant performer, Wang lives on a small dinghy.

     One day, in the midst of his performance, the great female impersonator from the Sichuan opera (the real opera star Zhao Zhigang) comes across Wang mid-performance and commands his retinue to stop so that he might watch. After the performance, he awards Wang a large coin and asks him to join him for tea.

      During their meeting he suggests that Wang join his company, but the old man insists he prefers to work alone. Accepting his decision, the impersonator suggests that he least he seek out a male heir, necessary by tradition, to whom he might pass on his bian lian artform.

     Wang, once married and the father of a son who died in childhood, determines that he should follow the great opera performer’s advice. Visiting an illegal “baby market,” Wang is accosted by dozens of children desperate to find a new home, some willing even to work for free if only they are adopted. Yet the majority of these are girls, and Wang prepares the leave the dreadful place.

      But as he begins to leave, a young boy cries out “Grandpa!” several times, forcing Wang to turn around and look. Taken with the handsome boy, Wang pays a few coins to the man who apparently is her desperate father and takes the child home to his houseboat, immediately feeding the nearly starved boy whom he names “Doogie” (Gua Wa), delighted to have finally found an heir.

      In the middle of the night, as the child wakes to pee, we realize, however, as Wang soon also comes to perceive, that he has been tricked: that his “doogie” is a girl.

     At first he attempts to outright reject her, but having already grown fond of the child, he accepts her back as someone who will cook and clean for him. And, although he will not attempt to teach her his art, he does train her to become a contortionist who successfully performs alongside him.

     One day when Wang is out, Doogie opens his box of masks, accidentally setting one of the masks and the entire boat on fire. Although she saves his box of masks, she is terrified of his anger and runs away, attempting to live on the streets. Suddenly she is kidnapped by professional child snatchers whom earlier on we have observed stealing a boy from a wealthy family, and is asked to care for the crying child. As the kidnappers drink below, she and the child sneak out through the roof and escape. Doogie is determined to bring the boy back to the man she now calls “Boss” as a gesture of reconciliation.

    ang is delighted by the “gift,” but soon after is arrested by the police and imprisoned for kidnapping. Doogie visits him in jail, bringing him his masks; but, now sentenced to death, Wang remains desolate.

    When Wang’s impersonator friend hears of his sentence, he attempts to influence an admiring general to free the old man, without success: the general will not enter into a local police matter.

     During one of Zhao Zhigang’s performances, Doogie ties herself to the rafters and, at a dramatic moment threatens, as she has seen the performer do before, to dive into space, demanding her “Boss” be freed. When the general in attendance turns to leave, she dives while Zhao Zhigang leaps up to save her, both of them rolling down a long staircase where, having observed the bravery of the young child, the general is finally convinced of the girl’s statement that she brought the young boy to her “grandpa” rather than Wang having stolen him.

       Together again on the dinghy, Wang tells the girl she, once more, can call him “grandpa” and begins to teach her his bian lian artistry.

        In short, in Wu’s film it is only through the collaborating efforts of the man who plays the role of a woman, and a young woman who has attempted to play the role of a male that tradition is resisted, love winning out over sexual prejudice.

       Just below the surface of this beautifully composed and touching film, however, is a frightening world of child abuse and implied sexual perversity. At one point Zhao Zhigang offers his remorse that he is only half of a man, and Doogie admits to Wang that she has been sold into slavery and been beaten by several men before him. The man who sold her was not her father.

       In that respect, many of the figures of this film, symbolically speaking, wear masks, altering their true identities and genders in order to survive.

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2105)

 

Wrik Mead | Frostbite / 1996

how to unthaw a frozen lover

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (screenwriter and director) Frostbite / 1996

 

The lighthouse keeper (Don McLaughlin) discovers a body of a man (Don Pyle) that has evidently come ashore on an icefloe from the surrounding ocean. Upon his discovery of the nearly frozen man, the keeper does something we do not quite expect in life-saving movies, but then this is a Wrik Mead film, in which sometimes brutal truths are literalized. The would-be savior simply grabs hold of one of his legs and pulls him, inch by inch—including over two heavy logs that block his path—back to the lighthouse door, whereupon he pulls him inside and hoists him up into his bed.

     The room is clearly warmly heated by a wood-burning stove. But the lightkeeper’s further actions once more seem more than a little baffling. After briefly fondling the bearded “stiff,” he pulls his shirt off and then his pants, leaving the frozen man totally naked.

      Again quite unexpectedly, he takes out some sort of drug, and with a needle injects it into the man’s arm. Is it some sort of stimulant or a pain-killer? We are surely puzzled, particularly when he now gets out a bowl of water, takes out a barber’s brush, and lathers up the man’s left breast, shaving the hair away from the breast and nipple.

      He then pulls the razor blade from its holder and cuts out a heart over the man’s real heart, placing a cloth over it to mop away the blood.

      All of this is done with great deliberation and in rather slow pace, as if he has already planned it out. And so it appears he has as he lifts the man quite easily—an act he might have employed from the beginning—and carefully lays in into his bathtub, filling it evidently with hot water.

    In the hot water the man suddenly comes to life, spots the heart now tattooed upon his chest, and reaches up to embrace and kiss the savior who has brought him back to life, the two kissing over and over again in Mead’s recognizable jerking-like motion of the frame. The film ends with the two of them repeating the act, deeply embraced in a kiss.

      It is almost as if the lighthouse keeper has been waiting for this event to happen for his entire life.

     Once more, with sly wit and ironic understatement, Canadian director Mead plays out gay fantasies and fears with a kind of straight-forward logic that releases them from the heterosexual romantic fantasies within which they are generally cloaked. His gay cupids, closeted men, and sex-starved boys inhabit worlds different from those of the ordinary myths and fairytales.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2012).

John Greyson | Les Feluettes (Lilies) / 1996

performing a confession

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michel Marc Bouchard and Linda Gaboriau (screenplay, based on Bouchard’s play), John Greyson (director) Les Feluettes (Lilies) / 1996

 

Based on a play by the noted Canadian French-language playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, John Greyson’s adaptation of Lilies is an unusual evocation of young gay love through the lens of an old man locked away for life in prison. Moreover, the play, supposedly performed in the prison chapel by inmates, including roles for both men and women (the women being performed as well by the male prisoners), toggles back and forth between theatrically-conceived sets and cinematically filmed scenes of realist presentations in nature and within the small Quebecois village of Roberval in which the story takes place. Moreover, the performative styles of the actors vary from highly artificed gestures, to a kind of mad-house theatricalism the likes of which we last witnessed in Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, to the campy gestures of a black man portraying a wealthy French woman.

     Finally, the theatrical genres Lilies embraces include highly romantic liturgical renditions of the lives of the saints, cinematic depictions of young gay boys coming of age, a picaresque-like voyage which ends in transformation, and, most importantly, and a play-within-a play. Greyson himself has described his film as a "strange Genet-inflected-via-Fellini fable.”

     Accordingly, for those who can’t easily assimilate quick shifts in narrative language, theatrical genres and tropes, and a radical mix of older and newer theater conventions, Greyson’s film may at first seem like a mish mash of traditional and post-modern methods of storytelling. Despite that, however, Lilies is amazingly fluid in its numerous transformations. And ultimately I think Greyson has created one of the most remarkable gay films ever made.

     Set in 1952, the play begins with the rather straight-forward arrival at the Quebec prison of the local bishop, Jean Bilodeau (Marcel Sabourin) who has agreed to hear the confession of a now elderly prisoner, Simon Doucet (Aubert Pallascio), who, sentenced for murder, is now nearing death.

     Bilodeau is hoping that the long recalcitrant prisoner may have come to terms with his crime and sentence, but is startled to find many other men already sitting among the pews of the chapel outside the confessional box. And, as he enters the box to hear Doucet’s confession he is suddenly locked in as the warden and the prisoner explain that instead of hearing a confession they intend to perform a play for him, beginning with a tableau vivant-like recounting the life of St. Sebastien, performed in the kind of gestural and declamatory acting style of 1912, when the event originally took place.

    But at the same time, Simon (Jason Cadieux, as his younger version) playing Sebastian and his friend Vallier (Danny Gilmore) performing as the man ordered to shoot an arrow into the saint’s  heart—who together have obviously been exploring their offstage sexual urges for some time previously—play out the Saint’s martyrdom with strong homoerotic overtones, a fact that is not unnoticed by the young Bilodeau (Matthew Ferguson) who, seeing their interchanges, is himself sexually excited. Simon and Vallier, aware of Jean Bilodeau’s unrequited love for Simon, attack him, Simon planting a long passionate kiss upon Jean’s lips.

     The performance and attack is observed by Vallier’s slightly dotty mother, the self-declared Countess de Tilly (Brent Carver) who—although with her son lives in a derelict shack she describes their house as a manor and refers to her husband who long abandoned her as a Count doing in business in Paris—is seemingly delighted by her son’s and Simon’s sexual kinship. She has come to ask Vallier to accompany her to the event celebrating the arrival of the French aristocrat Lydie-Anne (Alexander Chapman) about to enter Roberval in grand style in a hot air balloon.

      At the celebration, the Countess unperturbedly mentions to the elder Doucet, Simon’s father, what she has witnessed, which later results in Doucet senior brutally beating his son so badly that Simon later seeks out the help of a visiting Parisian doctor to keep the act from being shared with the entire community by the local doctor.

     Clearly, his father’s homophobia has so instilled in the young Simon a dreadful fear of further abuse or even possible death that he determines to find a heterosexual mate, abandoning his lover Vallier. Into his life Lydie-Anne drops like a fairy-tale princess so taken by the boy’s beauty that they began a relationship that points toward marriage and Simon’s escape from the rugged rural world of Roberval to Paris.

       The sympathetic viewer immediately perceives that the affair between the two is perverse, not only because of their vast age difference, but because of the intensity of feelings both boys still share.

       The play oddly reveals this perversion in anti-gay and racist stereotypes that seem  counterintuitive to the homosexual love tale that is at the center of this piece. For, looked at from outside of the context of the drama, Lydie-Anne is a black drag queen who we cannot forget has been imprisoned for his crimes who expresses his character’s supposedly heterosexual love in an obviously swishy lisp that, if it were not so mimetically cloaked—actor Chapman brilliantly plays his role completely straight-faced, without even a wink—we might simply dismiss it as camp.

       Understandably, Vallier has not been invited to Simon’s and Lydie-Ann’s engagement party to be held the night before they fly away to Paris in the latter’s balloon. Yet Vallier’s mother insists he attend the event to declare his love for his life-long friend. If the party-goers are shocked by the entrance of the Countess de Tilly and her son, as Vallier begins to recite the lines of St. Sebastien role to Simon it quickly becomes apparent that the boys are still very much in love with one another. And despite Lydie-Ann’s intervention, revealing the truth (or perhaps lie) that she has indeed encountered the Countess’ husband in Paris with his new wife and child, suggesting that it was upon his recommendations of Roberval that led her to the town. Yet he said nothing of a wife and child.

   Hurt, but nonetheless still supportive of her son’s and Simon’s love (she is, accordingly, defined by the society as mad) the Countess stands up to Lydie-Ann’s assertions, to the hoots of horror emanating from Simon’s father, and to the community leaders gathered at the event. Simon  shall remain with Vallier the next morning to celebrate her son’s birthday in the bathtub which she has reclaimed from a garbage heap and brought to their shack. The sexual encounter between the two boys played out in the water of the tub suggests fluids their mouths and cocks share and emanate, symbolically representing a kind of marriage ceremony that could never be so beautifully expressed in the heterosexual ceremony Lydie-Ann had imagined.

      For the Countess there is only one more task to be enacted: her own trip to Paris symbolized by her death. Having chosen a deeply moss-covered tree for her grave, she demands that her son live up to his familial vows by strangling her. Strangely, this truly perverse act, a murder of sorts, seems almost natural and inevitable given her desires and circumstance.

      Following the trio into the woods, however, Bilodeau observes her strangulation and the boy’s sexual embraces after, and threatens to report them to the police if Simon will not become his lover.

      Virulently rejected, Bilodeau sets the bell tower room, in which Simon and Vallier remain, afire, eventually notifying the school’s staff and the police. With the door locked by their adversary and without windows for escape or ventilation, the boys soon lose consciousness in the smoke. With some regret, Bilodeau returns, pulling Simon to safety but leaving Vallier behind to die.

       So, we discover, the death of Vallier is the reason why Simon is still locked behind bars. And, as the play comes to an end, it is Bilodeau who is forced to confess to Simon, the reversal of what he had imagined might take place.

       In a short epilogue to the play, the now elder prisoner Simon Doucet confronts the criminal Bishop alone in order to ask a question that has obviously always haunted him. Was Vallier still alive when Doucet was pulled to safety? Bilodeau, nodding yes, now asks not only for forgiveness but entreats Doucet to kill him in revenge. Doucet’s refusal to do so leaves the Bishop to live out his guilt within the frame of hypocrisy for the rest of his life.*

 

*One might add, that without the original playwright or the director of this film version of the work needing to say anything, the Bishop’s long-ago murder for the rejection of his love resonates with our recognition of the thousands of young boys who have suffered sexual abuse from the hands of church elders throughout the years. The film suggests that it is not the homosexuality that was the crime of so many priests and church leaders, but their imposition of their love upon the innocent and unwilling that society cannot forgive. Their crime may not be a physical murder as in the Bishop’s case, but was a spiritual one that destroyed the trust and belief their victims had assumed.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

François Ozon | Une robe d'été (A Summer Dress) / 1996

bang, bang

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Ozon (writer and director) Une robe d'été (A Summer Dress) / 1996

 

François Ozon’s short of 1996, A Summer Dress, is almost a formalist film in which its simple structure plays on lyrics of a song which Sébastian (Sébastian Charles) performs before his lover Luc (Frédéric Mangenot) in an attempt to entice him into sex.

     We know absolutely nothing about these two beautiful young boys except that they are apparently on vacation near a quiet beach. But we do sense that there is some friction between the two gay lovers, particularly when Luc’s first words to his friend Sébastian are “Shut up!” Luc seems completely disinterested in his friend, his own devotion evidently being to his tanline.

       As his lover seductively waves his ass in rhythm to his dance while lip-synching the 1960s French pop singer Sheila’s version of Sonny Bono’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” Luc openly expresses his irritation.

     The dyed blonde-haired Sébastian, we also note, is a bit effeminate, and Luc chastises him for singing “fag” music and performing outside where everyone might see him before he shuts the music off, which Sébastian immediately starts up again, forcing Luc, as he himself insists, to leave—much as the song also decries—without saying goodbye. 

       What we do now realize is that these two males are having some sort of difficulty regarding notions of masculinity. Indeed the song itself calls up some of those issues, particularly as Sheila and Cher before her sang it, putting the emphasis not on the narrative of lost love the way Nancy Sinatra (whose recording as used in the film Kill Bill) and Lady Gaga do—both treating it as a quiet love ballad—but upon the words signifying the sound of the gun of the childhood cowboy game, suggesting that the singer and her relationship had died even before her lover left as an adult without saying goodbye.

 

                      I was five and he was six

                      We rode on horses made of sticks

                      He wore black and I wore white

                      He would always win the fight

 

                      Bang bang, he shot me down

                      Bang bang, I hit the ground

                      Bang bang, that awful sound

                      Bang bang, my baby shot me down

 

                      Seasons came and changed the time

                      When I grew up, I called him mine

                      He would always laugh and say

                      "Remember when we used to play?"

 

                      Bang bang, I shot you down

                      Bang bang, you hit the ground

                      Bang bang, that awful sound

                      Bang bang, I used to shoot you down

 

 

   Now at the beach, Luc begins to go in for a swim before continuing his sunbathing, but quickly goes back to his blanket to strip naked, the beach being empty, before entering the ocean.

      When he awakens from his tanning slumber, a Spanish girl, Lucia, hovers over his naked body asking for her cigarette to be lit. She settles in the sand next to him and without even missing a beat invites him to join her in the woods. When he asks, “And why,” she explicitly tells him “I want to make love.”

       If he laughs, a bit hesitant for this sudden invitation, he is clearly also interested and quickly takes her up on the offer, both of them soon finding a spot, undressing, and proceeding with sex. In the midst of coitus, however, he spots a man in the distance watching them, she implying with her answer, “Forget it. Close your eyes,” that the voyeur might almost make it more interesting. We also later note near the end of the film that Luc is once again wearing his orange bathing shorts.

       We can only imagine that the man overseeing the act might be Sébastian and we must presume that the same thought surely has crossed Luc’s mind. Indeed, after the sexual act, he almost apologizes, not for the sex, but for his lies. He has had sex before, although with a woman, and he is not vacationing with his family. She immediately recognizes him as a “gay boy,” congratulating him for providing such pleasure to a woman.

        When they return to collect his clothes, however, he finds both his shorts and towel to be missing. She ruffles through her bag but can come up with only the dress she was wearing over her bikini suit for him to slip on naked body for his bicycle ride home. And he has no choice but to put on the dress and pedal off, a passing car honking him presumably for his aplomb in wearing the flowered shift.   

        Upon reaching his and Sébastian’s vacation flat, he suddenly greets his lover with an apparently renewed energy, kissing him while still in the dress, and allowing himself to be immediately dragged into the room where Sébastian repeats the sexual act Luc has just performed on Lucia, even ripping some of the girl’s dress in the process. If nothing else, we quickly recognize there has been a major switch in both their senses of sexual prowess as well as an alteration in their personal notions of the standard cultural dichotomy of what it means to be masculine and feminine. If Sébastian previously was referenced as a feminine queer “fag,” he now is dominate to his new male-in-drag lover.

       In other words, their entire sex life has been reversed in a way that also echoes the lyrics of the Bono song as their actions have repeated the explosive chorus of “Bang bang, bang bang,” Both gay men, in alternative ways, are banging a female figure in an attempt of restoring their masculinity.

       I’d argue against Ozon’s apparent concern with the masculine/feminine dichotomy. If some critics such as Thibault Shilt, writing in Senses of Cinema, suggest that the director is exploring these boys’ sexual fluidity as they find new and innovative ways to keep their love alive, to me it appears as simply another way of shuffling normative notions of sexual identity, even if there is also a somewhat comic element to all this “banging.”

     Ozon’s films often frustrate me in just that way. Yet, they are nonetheless always interesting for the passionate responses they invoke. And no one who loves film can deny his cinematic skills in investigating various aspects of the LGBTQ community.

 

Los Angeles, October 20, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (October 2020).

 

Bavo Defurne | Particularly Now, in Spring / 1996

the man from france

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bavo Defurne (screenwriter and director) Particularly Now, in Spring / 1996

 

A young man on the very cusp of adulthood spends his entire spring days with his other male friends in the locker rooms and showers undressing and dressing before and after swimming, running, leaping, and other athletic engagements. The world-renowkned Flemish director Bavo Defurne creates in hazy black and whites is a kind of nirvana of the homoerotic without any of the participants apparently being aware of one another’s bodies.

     In fact, except for the young man who narrates this story they seem to have no individual identity. We learn nothing about any of their personalities, emotions, thoughts or even names except for when the credits identifies the narrator as Olaf, naming the others as part of a group that includes Bart, Ignance, Sven, Tom, Adriaan, Johan, Werner, Alexander, Mark, Stefaan, Alain, Oswin and Geert.

     Olaf describes them as his friends that function almost as a collective. “There’s something that bonds us together. It’s like a secret agreement that we’ll always be friends. We’ll always stick together,” who live daily as a unit is a kind of suspension. “I sometimes think time won’t move here. It’s just like everything will stay like it is right now.”

     They always sing in the shower, he notes, “just as if we all had one voice.”

   In other words, our Olaf seems to be describing a bubble of total male innocence in which the participants gladly join in a half-sleeping, half-waking spell of juvenilia from which none of them ever wants to be awakened. It is, in short, precisely what results in so many jocks’ inability to develop into mature adults. You see them in the bars, escaping the marriages they have agreed to because it is the local custom and their often unsatisfying jobs to which they have assigned their daily lives as they escape into televised sports competitions or join up in weekend scrimmages in desperation to relive those halcyon sports-minded days of their youth: the universal Peter Pans who almost intentionally never really wanted to grow up.

     Except their bodies are no longer lean and sexually appealing, and their drunken mutual cheerleading for their favorite team can never replace the excitement and grace of pushing, pulling, rubbing, and wrestling each other with utter unawareness of their desperate desires to simply touch each other’s skin, their addiction to one another’s smells of sweat, piss, spit, and hair. Our narrator expresses it in terms of the showers themselves: “The showers have a special smell. It’s like the sea or a wood in the summer.”

     Like these faux naïfs, Olaf seems to believe that anything is possible. As he expresses it early in his narrative: “Everyone can make it in life. I think everything is possible.” A little while later he restates his near-absurd optimism “There’s nothing you can’t do that can be done. You need to work out really hard. And I’m not afraid of that.”

     Yet, we soon discover, Olaf is a liar, not to his friends or us who overhear his thoughts, but to himself. Or, if nothing else, he is filled with contradictions. I’d suggest that he is simply a person who has not yet come to terms with his own thinking or what he describes as “ideals,” or “beliefs.”

     In fact, the director’s images of this handsome boy also contradict his own naiveté. Although he speaks of the collective spirit of his friends, he is often shown apart and away from them, and hardly ever sharing in their singing, grabbing, and playful group activities. Although he describes their dependence upon one another, in the very next sentence Olaf ponders: “Why is it that people are not always the people you want them to be? No matter what, we can’t miss each other. We’re alone, everyone.”

     During these comments, the boys are playing leapfrog, filmed in a manner that reminds one a great deal of the leaping games of naked males in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 moving photographs of athletes. In Defurne’s film, however, the moment that Olaf insists  “We won’t let each other down ‘cause we’re best pals,” one of the leapers crashes into him knocking both of them to the ground.  At another point when the boy is insisting on their shared commitment to one another, the camera shows two gatherings of the boys on opposite sides of a long rope, one group eventually toppling the others struggling to do the same to them.

     At another moment when he is spouting his idealistic vision of the infallibility of will power, suggesting that, after all, “All my friends are there,” he pauses to express his fearfulness of their beating him to what he might be seeking: “I am just afraid a little bit of the idea of a lot of people wanting what I want.”

     What he seems to be seeking, moreover, does not appear to be what any of the others might even imagine him desiring. Olaf begins his long conversation with the camera with these words:

 

“I think I can tell you now I want to be a movie star. I think I’m no boy anymore. I’m ready for real life. I’ve heard a man’s coming from France. It’s for a movie. They’re going to make a movie about a young runner in the war or something. Anyway they’re looking for an actor. The leading part I think. I’d like to do that.”

 

     One cannot imagine a more isolating desire than his, something that might certainly require a kind of willed selfishness that would quickly take him out of the very circle of friends he defines as representing something outside of time and change.

     Not only is he quite aware of he own coming of age but of his necessary departure from the world in suspension that he pretends to embrace. Although all he describes is about a boyhood fantasy, he recognizes that he is “no boy anymore.” And despite his argument that they need to stick together in order to survive, he is absolutely ready to let a stranger guide him into a new universe. Even if, as he hints by the end of the day, that the stranger—critic Tim Isaac correctly associates him with Beckett’s Godot— has not and may never truly visit, it is clear that Olaf will remain a believer, that even if he never leaves his never-never-land of male sports camaraderie he will know there is another world outside of his to which he was hoping to enter.

     That’s not to say, of course, that his views of that “outside world” are not hackneyed and doomed to failure. As his model for an “real actor” (“I want to be an actor. Not just any actor. A different kind of actor.”) he has chosen the outrageous Grade B figure Johnny Weismuller, mostly because he was a swimmer, and Olaf swims—although admitting he’s not sure he’s very good—with great seriousness. As the narrator says of the others, again putting himself at a distance from those with whom he proclaims an unspoken bond: “It’s just that the others are just messin’ about. They go swimming just to enjoy themselves. I like that too. But above all I want to be strong one day.”

     But the very fact that his fantasy figure is a male living for much of the films alone in a jungle with only animal friends, suggests that there is no woman in this boy’s vista. He never mentions a Jane nor any woman in his meandering confession. Rather, a bit like a gay body builder of the 1950s, Olaf projects himself into the world of athletic muscle builders, the perfect target when he is whisked away by the stranger to the Hollywood of his imagination for the beefcake photographers such as Bob Mizer and his Physique Pictorial, simply a less campy version, in fact, of the photographers Defurne referenced in his 1997 film Sailor, Pierre et Gilles.

      The poor boy, locked away in the embryo of Jean Genet-like compound of a locker room instead of a prison, has no idea what is in store for his slowly awakening sense of a world outside of where he begins to spend his Spring. If his longings are still incoherent and even laughable, we comprehend them as, just as he is beginning to perceive, something that will sever him forever from his sports-loving friends.

    Olaf suggests that “At the end of the day we say goodbye as if there were no end to it.” But as he grabs the hand of one departing friend and the others wave goodbye, we realize the end is nearer that he might ever imagine.

             “The man from France didn’t come today. Maybe tomorrow he will come. Maybe tomorrow will be the day. Maybe everything will be all right. I want to be a star. Or did I tell you this once before.”

 

Los Angeles, June 29, 2021

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