Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Cullen Arbaugh and Bradley Hildebrandt | Bram (Bräm) / 2025

the psycho

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cullen Arbaugh and Bradley Hildebrandt (screenwriters and directors) Bram/Bräm / 2025 [21 minutes]

 

Dalton (Ryan Maltz) has recently separated from his wife of five years and given up the custody of his two children, and his mother Fiona (Lucinda Holshue) decides, after a complete silence of three years, to pay a visit.



    There is certainly evidence that Fiona is a bit unstrung, calling her psychologist Dr. Armstrong-Steen regularly, and praising herself for only having one drink on the plane trip to Minneapolis, but even a totally calm and collected being might be a little taken aback by the man Dalton has taken to be his boyfriend, Bram (Bradley Hildebrandt).

     He met Bram, it appears, when working as a corrections officer in the local prison, Bram being not a fellow worker, but a prisoner who, we soon discover, accidently killed his parents through his meth lab in the basement, which, while he went out for cigarettes, exploded, killing all within.   Bram, moreover, is not a particularly handsome man, but an effeminate, if seemingly gentle being who slinks about somewhat like a petulant cat about to pounce at any moment.

    Bram begins their relationship by correcting the way his name is pronounced, Bräm (with the umlaut), not the flat Americanized Bram as Fiona keeps repeating, and proceeds to make Dalton’s mother a stiff drink of mixed liquors.



     The two, Bram and Dalton sit together, kissing one another for long periods of time as if Fiona were absent. Fiona is also disturbed that Bram has redecorated nearly every wall with gay flags, drawings, and other gay insignias and pictures.

     One of the joys of the film is attempting to determine whose reality to believe, the foreboding world that Fiona seems to recognize in Bram, a danger that seems all too real and present; or the fact that Bram is a lovely person, the right man for her son, but that Fiona is close to a nervous breakdown.

     She certainly appears that way as she hears through the airduct the sexual encounter between her son and Bram, one of whom intensely fucks the other—with Crisco, which suggests perhaps a far deeper fuck than the usual insertion of just the penis.



     By film’s end, Fiona proves the true unstrung patient, her doctor Armstrong-Steen suggesting a higher dosage of what the mother already believes is giving her hallucinations, while the two young gay men, as strange a combination as they appear to be, are simply attempting to provide her with a comfortable visit.     If there is a psycho is this moral fable it is the heterosexual mother, not the oddly matched gay couple, who seem happily in love.

     This still remains a quite strange work, however, with some very creepy possibilities. At times we half expect Bram to pounce, strangling her from years of resentment of others of her kind, homophobes who desperately attempt to affect love and acceptance.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

Liz Uys | FBoy / 2023

is sexual monogamy truly necessary?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Connor D’Angelo (screenplay), Liz Uys (director) FBoy / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

In the student movie from Chapman University, Liz Uys takes on a familiar subject in the gay community. How do young man who came out long after their high school heterosexual peers, find the time to properly explore their full sexuality before attempting, like their straight

counterparts, to seek out full time relationships?



    Or should they even be expected to repeat all the behavior patterns of heterosexuals? There are, after all, one might argue, actual social and perhaps even behavioral patterns engrained in the lives of gay men, that argue for a difference. Although it has now become popular for gay men to repeat the patterns of heterosexual life—marriage, children, pets, and even suburban living—do we need repeat what has also been shown in many a culture of having failed spectacularly? Is sexual monogamy truly necessary?

     I can hardly be a spokesman, having been married and fairly faithful to the same man for 55 years. But I can report that when our relationship began, having just had a full year in New York City to explore all my sexual desires, I was perhaps not at all ready to settle down and enter the imitation of the straight world gay marriage denotes. I too wanted more, more time to explore the many dark and joyful worlds of LGBTQ life. But fully accepting the world of the man I loved probably saved me, during those dreadful days of the 1980s and 1990s, from acquiring AIDS.

     In fact, both my husband and I, easily accepted in the straight world as professionals in the literary and art worlds, lost nearly all our ties with the gay world—one of the reasons you find me at 78 exploring the gay experience through film.



     In this short take, Finn (Zach Kelch) is that person who still is not quite ready to give up his full sexual exploration, while his boyfriend Lucas (Andre Heimos) is dead-set on the idea of marriage, children, and pumpkin patch visits. This irreparable difference between them—still represented as a lack of maturity regarding Finn’s position in this movie by Liz Uys—results in a breakup between the two at Finn’s home, where his accepting parents and slightly crazy podcaster sister Charli (Siena Solinda) want more information about the couple’s daily activities, not less.

    Lucas, seemingly comprehending his friend’s need to explore, moves on to his search for the heterosexual ideal, while we don’t quite know where it will lead Finn, who at least symbolically suggests a somewhat more coherent lifestyle by revisiting, no sex involved, a previous one-night fling.



     Although it is clear where author D’Angelo and director Uys hearts are on this issue, they nonetheless present Finn as a sympathetic character trying to come to terms with the gay values of today, while feeling the pull of those of the time before gay marriage served as such a beacon of societal acceptance.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema bog (June 2025).

 

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

https://myqueercinema.blogspot.com/2023/12/former-index-to-world-cinema-review.html Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [For...