Matthew Allen | Sunday Morning / 2017

torturing the vulnerable

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matthew Allen (screenwriter and director) Sunday Morning / 2017 [45 minutes]

 

California-born Matthew Allen has written and directed a very personal and moving film of a young man going through the difficulties of many gay boys coming to terms with their sexuality at age 16 or 17. This young man Sean (Tristan McIntyre) has other problems facing him as well. He is adjusting also to life in a single-parent household, and trying help his two sisters Hayden (Francesca Calvo) and particularly his younger sister Molly (Molly Allen) also come to terms with a life without their father.

     Sean, fortunately, is popular and plays on the school lacrosse team, but finds his own teammates to be fairly homophobic when it comes to a new player who’s joined the team James (Ethan Haslam), whose parents are undergoing a brutal breakup with loud arguing every night. Sean’s mother, Heather (Summer Moore) asks her son to befriend the older boy James given her son’s own recent experiences, hoping that he might help the boy. Invited to a drunken sports party at team member’s Kyle’s (Edmond Truong) house, Sean surprises his friend by paying especial attention to James, and even accompanying him home.

     Indeed, Sean finds himself attracted to the supposed “gay” boy and even dreams about him, and the feeling seems to be mutual. In fact, their relationship might have developed into something positive, even a shared love with sex; but James is also a spoiled and impatient child used to getting what he wants, and as a pretense to help keep his parents’ evening fight from enveloping him, asks if Sean can stay over. The next morning, he makes a move on Sean, basically raping him.

    Allen, himself a survivor of just such an experience, sympathetically portrays the reactions of Sean who, after surviving simply the violence of such an act, must now face a very different James, who carefully manipulates him through threats to reveal Sean’s sexuality that will affect, so he claims, even his sister Molly, forcing Sean to return to him and provide him with further sexual acts. As James argues, “I don’t give a fuck at this point; people can know about me, but I know it matters so much more to you.”

    The previously well-adjusted young Sean becomes depressed and silent, crying himself asleep and being privately terrorized by what has suddenly happened to him. It is as if through his own sexual desires he has become entrapped in something much larger that threatens to divide him from his other friends and result in scandal for and hate from his own family.

     Eventually, even Sean’s mother begins to suspect that James has done something to her son. And when he runs to his room in anger one day, his older sister follows, allowing to confide in her that he’s gay. This loving event permits Sean to come to terms with himself in a beautifully-lit dream sequence. He finally is able to tell his mother, who not only supports him but still believing that James in involved in her son’s despair is ready to act upon it.

     Sean not only is able to come out to his mother but has now found the fortitude to face off with James himself, refusing any longer to be intimidated. Although it is clearly understandable, I do wish that Allen’s character needn’t have resorted to violence, punching out his rapist as he does. What about those of us who never learned how to fight?

     Moreover, what about those many young men and women who don’t have such supportive mothers and sisters (let alone father) as Sean has? Allen cannot answer for all situations. He has shown us an example, clearly, close to his own experience.

     But what we finally realize it is just not bad enough for such vulnerable individuals as young LGBTQ people coming terms with their sexuality, and who must then face rape and threats that makes it almost impossible for these people to come to terms with their own feelings. Even worse, we know statistically that such incidents as rape often occur within the family itself, wherein revelation of the self or other has even higher stakes.

     As Allen himself has noted, “isn’t something usually told.” But by keeping it secret, as this character himself does, it only permits others to abuse and manipulate young men like Sean.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinem Review (September 2023).

 

Atefeh Khademolreza | Meteor / 2023 [documentary]

speaking the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Atefeh Khademolreza (screenwriter and director) Meteor / 2023 [10 minutes] [documentary]

 

There are very few movies like this one, a surrealist film about a relationship between two individuals in the repressive Iran, from which the narrator escapes to Canada, leaving behind the friend who has apparently been struck down by AIDS.

     Through animation and other images, the film conveys the reality that such behavior is not only outlawed but that HIV-positive figures are given no permission to survive, that in fact the punishment is death. The narrator leaves the friend behind to find freedom somewhere else, but the sickened former partner stays behind, developing a relationship with a man, only to fall further into illness and die.

     This is a very short work, which because of its digitally-created images does not permit us easy entry to the couple’s former relationship, but movingly documents a world, nonetheless, of which we know so very little. The images themselves hint at a world so closed off and lost that we can have little entry into it.

     When the narrator’s friend dies, his parents claim he has suffered from COVID-19, failing evidently to reveal his true condition, which is quite apparently AIDS. Here, at least in a kind of sketch of the situation, we get a glimpse not only to that problem but through the lens of a culture that is utterly hostile to even recognizing the problem. Today, of course, one wonders whether it would be much different in the US. Speaking truth is nearly impossible today in so many countries.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2025).