Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Marco De Luca | Park Life / 2024

a one-night romance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Silver (screenplay), Marco De Luca (director) Park Life / 2024 [13.15 minutes]

 

This British film of 2024 has a very simple storyline. Two handsome men discover one another in the woods cruising, Noah (George Turner) actually in the middle of getting a blow job when he locks eyes with the beautiful Medhi (Alexander Da Fonseca). The two get a quick taste of one another’s cocks (no ejaculations involved) before Medhi suggests it’s late and he has to be on his way back home.


     Captivated by his new friend, Noah “walks” him back home, they have breakfast together, and end up back in Medhi’s public housing apartment, truly enjoying sex together.

     Why author Adam Silver determined that Medhi was just visiting London for a few days or why Noah will not provide him with his phone number is not fully explained, as Noah simply mumbles something the effect that it will only end in a slow resistance to a meet-up, while holding out the possibility that he will again be at the cruising park at the same time tomorrow morning.

      If this “blossoms into something romantic,”—as the IMDb site describes the story—why aren’t we allowed an appropriate ending? Yet author and director simply return to the transactional aspect of their characters’ lives, not permitting anything at all to blossom in the way I interpret that word.

      In demanding that in order to meet up with him again, Noah requires his friend trot back into the park cruising life, and the fact that Medhi has to leave for somewhere else, perhaps to Athens, both characters are determined to not permit anything at all to blossom. They might be temporarily infatuated with one another—and with such a beautiful couple, who wouldn’t be?—but here’s nothing going to happen here.


     Cinematographer Jack Hamilton, moreover, has escaped the responsibility of showing us their lovemaking and bodies, by shooting the entire film in near darkness, while De Luca blurs their bodies together in their brief scene that supposedly represents the actualizing of the newborn love. (I have brightened the photos so that they might even be visible on a printed page.) We can observe the gestures of the park far better than we can even determine the actions of their bedroom lovemaking, a strangely unromantic way of handling a supposed meeting up of two perfect lovers.


      De Luca also has made several horror films, and this so-called romantic work borders on the same genre. Both men, Jew and Arab, (it is established early on that both men are circumcised) seem forever trapped in their own worlds.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

Richard Kwietniowski | Love and Death on Long Island / 1997

fan mail

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Kwietniowski (screenwriter, based on the book by Gilbert Adair, and director), Love and Death on Long Island / 1997

 

British director Richard Kwietniowski’s 1997 film Love and Death on Long Island was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and received mostly excellent reviews when it reached theaters, this despite that it’s a rather odd-ball LGBTQ+ film in which absolutely none of the characters are clearly homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or anything else under the rainbow. In fact, it is doubtful that the central figure of this film, Giles De’Ath (John Hurt) has even had sex since the death of his wife several years before the action of this film begins, and even then he might not have had sex for several years before his wife died.


     In a strange way this is a coming out movie without anyone or even reason for which he might come to accept his newly discovered sexuality. And, in fact, it is not certain that he is even looking for sex. Giles, a writer of seemingly rather boring cultural histories that are perfect for people who love to attend lectures delivered by prudishly polite and intelligent British quipsters of the elder generation, suddenly falls in love with a young actor of teen films such as Hotpants College I, II, and III.

      Despite the fact that he rarely sees films, his agent has encouraged him to get out, and Giles had, over his protests, finally decided to take in a film version of an E.M. Forster novel (most definitely not Howards End, A Room with a View, or Maurice). His unfamiliarity with modern multiplex movie houses results in his buying a ticket for the teen fare which, being absolutely astounded by its stupidity, is about to abandon until he spots the young actor Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley) who plays the one “nice” boy taunted by the usual bad boys seeking out sex with any woman they can lay their hands on and desperate to get into trouble. Ronnie, in the first film he watches, ends up tied to a diner countertop with ketchup poured all over his body.


       So taken is the elderly writer with the handsome young actor that he sneaks in to see the film soon after, and before long, without knowing anything about the media devices of the day, buys a VCR player and, when the salespeople finally make it clear to him that the player needs a machine upon which to see the image, a TV set, evidently his first.

       Before long he is buying up teen magazines and clipping out pictures of Ronnie like a young teen girl, renting all the movies in which the boy has performed, and notifying his servant woman that she need not come into his study to clear any longer. He has almost become a young boy who having just discovered porn tapes, demands privacy so that he might jack off. We have utterly no indication that Giles is masturbating, but we do perceive that he has fallen— to use the necessary cliche to convey his state of mind—“head-over-heels” in love with the mediocre teen heartthrob Ronnie Bostock.


      Like a female teenage fan, he discovers everything he can about his private life, what car he drives, what food he likes, what books he reads, and, most importantly, where he lives, in this case Long Island near the Hamptons.

      When Giles delivers a lecture speaking about the new discoveries he has made about the role of actors, metaphorical weaving them into some connection with his previous cultural concerns, his audience is so appalled that his agent insists that his client take a rest, perhaps travel. And so Giles winds up at a tacky motel on Long Island without even knowing the term for what he is involved with, stalking his boy movie hero.

       His refined way of speaking and the fact that he is a writer and British quickly gains him friends with the motel operator and the local restaurant owner Irv (Maury Chaykin). Literally walking around the Long Island territory near where he believes Ronnie lives, Giles begins to play detective, but to the suspicious locals appears more like would-be thief or sexual pervert, the latter of which he truly has become in his obsession. He chats with the local mailman, initiates conversations with Irv’s diners, and does everything he might to find out, without directly bringing up the subject, where a movie star, whom he knows merely to be a second-rate actor, might live on the island,  all with no luck. 


    Then suddenly he spots a dog named Springer, the one described in the fan magazines, and follows its trail, hanging out in front of the house until a woman finally gets into the car, “the one described in the fan magazines” to go grocery shopping. Hijacking a taxi he enters the grocery, tossing previously unknown fast food treats into his basket before crashing into Audrey’s (Fiona Loewi) grocery cart, Ronnie’s slightly older girlfriend, and by convincing her that Ronnie is well known and terribly popular in Britain, gains her trust and friendship, actually being invited over to their house.

      Unfortunately, his heartthrob is currently in Los Angeles, but don’t worry, he’s due back soon. And he’s at the perfect point in his career, disgusted as he is with playing juvenile roles in teen movies and desperate to perform as an adult actor in a film with a subject other than how to get into the girl’s locker room, or in Ronnie’s case how to prevent his friends entry from that sacred space, he playing always the good boy to their bad-boy tactics.

       When Ronnie returns, things quickly develop as the two, Ronnie and Giles, appearing to develop a true mentor-young actor friendship, at the very same moment when Audrey begins to uncover something close to the truth, at least suspects that Giles’ interest in her boyfriend is not purely that of simply an elder fan. Yet Ronnie, after spending an unsuspecting day with a man who wants to become his lover touring him through the Hamptons, is almost sold on the idea that the writer might create a new serious-minded script for him.


     There is a moment as the two stand upon the beach that we realize this film actually has the potential of becoming a kind of Long Island version of Death in Venice, with Giles dying for love while the unwitting Ronnie skips along the strand with his dog Strider. But Giles, unlike Gustav von Aschenbach is no silent admirer, and the slightly chubby-faced Ronnie is no longer a teenage beauty like Tadzio.

   The trouble is, of course, that Giles, without perhaps even realizing it, wants the Ronnie of the movies, the latent teenager with whom he’s fallen in love, and amazingly is already busy plotting a way into his heart and a route in which to lure Ronnie into his bed, or at least into his book-lined British study. 



     The film has suddenly become “vaguely creepy” as film critic Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune puts it, while at the same time, without our really knowing it, that it has truly become a touching love story, with the two men holding out their hands to one another in deep friendship—a gesture we realize may be the only sign of real affection that Giles receives for his absurd adventures “on the road.”

       To end the farce, Audrey secretly plans a trip to Vermont with Ronnie to meet his family before they both move back to California where Ronnie is scheduled to film yet another rewind of Hotpants College.

       In desperation, Giles takes his young man to breakfast and in a manner that surely has never been put to film before, proposes to him, not marriage of course, but the kind of marriage he can imagine might lure the boy into his home: an offer to become his agent in England so that he might arrange an entirely new film career for him in a Europe that is not only more open to producing the unsuccessful art films which Ronnie longs to make, but doesn’t blink an eye on younger/older liaisons such as Giles suggests were those between Rimbaud and Verlaine—which registers in Ronnie’s American Pie pea brain as “Rambo.”


      Nonetheless, he begins to see that what Giles is suggesting is utterly impossible if not total nonsense, forcing the elderly writer who has clearly lived a life of cautiousness, to openly reveal that he truly is in love with him. Ronnie, fortunately, is a good boy and does not fall into a homophobic rage, but is shaken nonetheless, standing up finally to wish his would-be lover goodbye for one last time. If I were the director I might have allowed him a kiss on the cheek. But Giles has nothing left.

         Having never before even known that was such a thing as a FAX machine, Giles makes one last desperate pitch, writing to tell him that someday if he reads the full letter of several pages the elder has written, he will secretly retain it and read it over again and again knowing that he perhaps made the wrong decision at a crossroads in his life.

        Ronnie, having indeed read the whole letter, begins to tear it up. But suddenly rips out a single page wherein Giles has written a special scene for the script for the movie in which his boyfriend is about appear. His mother having died, Ronnie’s character reads a poem at the burial, lines from Walt Whitman, “Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find."

        The scene indeed makes it into the final film, surely without Ronnie ever discovering who Walt Whitman truly was, a gay man speaking of love, nor perceiving that the words were truly directed at him instead of the fictional mother in her grave.

        In a sense, accordingly, Giles has greatly benefited from his perverse love affair, having brought himself out into the modern world, effecting a small change in a terribly mediocre script, and perhaps even registering in Ronnie’s consciousness a tiny blip of regret, if not now perhaps at time later, in Ronnie’s mind and heart for not having taken a chance for something completely different when it was offered.

     Just as we know Giles will never find someone again with whom he might even imagine living his life with, so too are we certain that Ronnie has no career ahead in serious filmmaking, and probably only a year or two, if that long, of further teenage roles. If Giles’ adventure is over, so too is Ronnie’s, their lives both having reached a road-block for which there is no way around, although youth is still on Ronnie’s side. Surely he will become like so many used-up cute-boy and girl actors before him a bit player, a real estate agent, a car dealer, a restaurateur like Irv.

       Perhaps Giles will write on what he learned about love and publish yet another book.

       But neither of them perhaps will ever again have the chance to experience such a beautifully queer love.

 

Los Angeles, December 18, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).

James Ivory | Maurice / 1987

a world and time that kills love and dreams

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kit Hesketh-Harvey and James Ivory (screenplay, based on E. M. Forster’s Maurice) James Ivory (director) Maurice / 1987

 

James Ivory’s 1987 film, Maurice (the name of the work’s cinematic hero, pronounced “Morris”) is certainly one of the most beautifully filmed gay romances ever committed to celluloid. Even the costumes captured the attention of the Academy Awards, who chose this film for its Best Costume Award.

     The acting, particularly that of James Wilby (as Maurice Hall), Hugh Grant (as Clive Durham) and Rupert Graves (as the stable boy-bay lover of Maur), is believable and effecting. Moreover, these three leads are all remarkably beautiful men.

     Even minor characters such as Simon Callow (Mr. Ducie), Billie Whitelaw (Mrs. Hall), Judy Parfitt (Mrs. Durham), and Mark Tandy (as Lord Risley, young and older) are superbly acted.

     The sets, particularly those at Cambridge and Pendersleigh, are breathtaking.


    And despite a rather simple narrative—young Cambridge student Clive falls in love with another student, Maurice, but demands their love remains non-sexual because, so Clive argues, somewhat inexplicably, it would diminish them both.

     Ultimately after a desultory trip to Greece Clive returns to England determined to break off his love affair with Maurice—particularly after the arrest and imprisonment of their acquaintance Risley for homosexual behavior—and return to heterosexuality, in part so that he might marry a rather clueless and not truly beautiful woman, Anne, he has met in Greece and become the sole resident with his wife of the country estate Pendaersleigh. In other words, he chooses wealth, position, and the sexual status-quo of English society, rather than his true love and sexuality. He is a coward in a world of such men.

    In the second mirror half of this story, Maurice shaves his moustache—which Clive has somewhat justifiably dislikes—to become a younger looking and far more handsome boy. Clive now sports a small black moustache which completely alters his face, taking away nearly all of Hugh Grant’s natural beauty, if that’s possible.



  Visited by the under-gamekeeper, Alex Scudder, late one night in his bedroom, Maurice falls desperately in love with the servant, but soon after fears that he will be black-mailed, particularly when Alex invites him to the boathouse to talk about ‘something important,’ and later visits him at his London office at the stock-exchange.

   After a fearful few moments, Maurice visits the British Museum with the handsome boy and discovers that Alex does not want money but respect and continued love. Maurice rents a hotel room where the couple again have an evening of satisfying love-making. Unlike the sensuously-based love between Maurice and Clive, his love with Alex is most definitely carnal and completely fulfilling to both lovers. 

    When Alex reminds him that since the very next day we will be traveling with his brother to Argentina and new job, Maurice insists that he stay. “And live with your mother?” Alex asks somewhat aghast. Certainly, Maurice could not continue his job at the stock exchange. “We’re both smart,” insists Maurice, we can find something else. But even Alex is a bit flabbergasted by his friend’s fantasies.

     When Maurice, carrying a small token of his love, arrives at the boat that is to take Scudder away, he meets his lower middle-class parents, the brother, and a minister who carries with him a reference so another minister in Argentina who will baptize the young sinner.

      When Alex does not show up by the time the boat is ready to sail, Maurice realizes just what Alex has sacrificed for his love, and instinctually rushes off the Pendersleigh to visit the boathouse where he is sure he will find Alex waiting.



      Maurice pauses only to tell Clive what he is about to do, his former lover begging him to rethink his folly. Ignoring Clive’s pleas, he rushes to the boathouse wherein the two again embrace and kiss, Alex whispering into his ear: “"Now we shan't never be parted."

     The film ends with Clive closing up the house for the night, and another perhaps not so perfect evening with his sweet but not-brilliant wife. At one window he pauses for a few moments before closing down the curtain, peering into the darkness surround Pendersleigh. Yet we can clearly imagine what he is thinking: about his past love of Maurice and, perhaps, the desperate choices he has made as opposed to the open possibilities Maurice has created for himself.

      If the plot I have just recounted, in abridged form, seems as if it could be that of any paperback heterosexual romance, with hunky men and long-haired beauties attempting to escape the fates, fortunately, the real heart of this film, as well as Forester’s original novel, remains unspoken, about a love that cannot be spoken and the inner turmoils of the individuals trapped within its web.

      If, at work’s end, everything seems to be somewhat peaceable as the closing credits rise, we know that Alex’s fears for their future were not at all insignificant. Just how the happiest couple might now survive is difficult to imagine. For there are still three major villains waiting in the darkness into which Clive seems to be peering before heading off to slumber.

       We get glimpses of all of these villains throughout the movie, but the full brunt of their force is not fully revealed in the film itself. The first of these, obviously, is long list of laws against homosexuality that remained on the books until 2010 and, for the military, 2016. Beginning with the 1533 Buggery Act, the offences, without the punishment of death, were extended under the 1961 Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 and The Labouchere Amendment of 1885, the law by which Oscar Wilde was tried. And the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment extended those previous laws to include any kind of sexual activity between males, obviously the law through which this film’s Lord Risley was imprisoned. As late as the 1950s, another Cambridge genius, Alan Turing received chemical castration (in place of imprisonment) for his gay sexual actions, and later, it is believed, committed suicide

     As the doctor Maurice temporarily visits to be cured of homosexuality by hypnosis, advises, when, upon the second visit Maurice reveals he has again had wonderful sex with Alex and argues that it is simply human nature, “Perhaps you should move to France or Italy which more openly allow such sexuality. England is a country which has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

     One can only imagine the thousands of young men who grew up in a world where that had been educated in a male-only world, with plenty of opportunity and sometimes even encouragement to participate in male-on-male sexual relationships, forced, upon their university or college graduations, to suddenly move into a new heterosexual space.

     For some like Clive the new reality was gradually accepted, sometimes with secret exceptions—a trip to the city, a hunting party with friends in the wild, or frequent trips abroad. For men like Maurice, truly moral beings who longed to love one person, those choices were quite impossible.


     The second villain of this piece is the entire British culture, its dead religious principles, its reticence to speak out and up for anything outside of the status quo, and, most importantly, its class systems. Clive is as much punished by these absurd rules of behavior. And clearly Alex is punished by the last, at first even by Maurice, who hardly notices him, until, like the story of Rapunzel, climbs a purposely situated ladder to get into Maurice’s beautiful blond hair. And when Alex later arrives in London, the first thing he complains about is Maurice’s public embarrassment of him and his treatment by Anne at Pendersleigh, who can never seem to remember his name. Throughout the film, Alex is also being hounded by a minister who wants him baptized, even at his destination of Argentina. The pomp and circumstance of the people around him, leave Alex quite literally in a whirl, with little possibility of putting a new reality of his own into place.

     Yet the final villain, more subtle that these others, is only hinted at by the director’s decision to literally date his scenes: 1910 The Edwardian Age, etc. And, later, by all the young women’s attempts to bandage ever nearby male who they can get their hands on. 

     I believe that the last dated scene of this film is 1913. By the next year, World War I will have broken out, and many of the young men portrayed in this film—most certainly Maurice and Alex, Clive perhaps to be saved by his position in the class system—finding themselves in trenches or involved in impossibly meaningless maneuvers that would kill thousands. One need only remind oneself of another very handsome Cambridge-educated poet, Rupert Brooke, who was bisexual and died in 1915; or the gay poet Wilfred Owen, who died in 1918, author of Anthems for Doomed Youth.

     When I began this piece I was going to describe Ivory’s film as a “gay fantasy,” but the dreams of living together for the rest of their lives in peace, are not simple fantasies; rather they are sad statements about a society and time that would squelch and destroy all of their possibilities for love and dreams.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2020).

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío | Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) / 1994

tea, books, music—and sympathy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Senel Paz (screenplay, based on his story), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío (directors)  Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) / 1994

 

Despite its rather romantic comedy-like title, Strawberry and Chocolate is a film with attempts to discuss what being gay in the Cuba of the late 1970s meant in a more serious context.

    Unfortunately, the film has problems getting there. At least early in the film when actor Jorge Perugorría plays his central character Diego in a far too fey manner, almost creating a kind of stereotypical gay man as he bets friend/lover German (Joel Angelino) that he can seduce the beautiful doe-eyed boy, David (Vladimir Cruz) who the two have just spotted in Havana’s Coppelia (the city’s grand ice cream parlor).


     Diego’s somewhat effeminate manner as he brazenly sits down with the boy to order up strawberries—which he argues are the best thing that Cuba still produces—as opposed to the chocolate which David is spooning, is definitely the wrong approach to take in seducing this straight, slightly homophobic, dedicated Communist university student.

     Yet somehow Diego knows more about David than seems possible as he attempts to lure him to his apartment first by promising to loan his precious books of major Spanish-language iconic writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Goytisolo, José Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy (the latter two renowned Cuban gay authors, while the Spanish writer Goytisolo is also gay) and claiming to have photographs of David performing as Torvald (although there’s a suggestion that he might also have played Nora) in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. How he knows that the boy, studying politics, is secretly a would-be writer and that he has performed in the university production of the Ibsen’s play is never explained. In fact, he has no photographs. And the incident is never mentioned again. Something perhaps has been lost on the cutting room floor. But it leaves a rather sour taste in our mouths since it may suggest that Diego has been trailing David for some time, not at all the later Diego we come to know.


     Once he has gotten his Torvald into his lair of literary tomes, however, and “accidently” spilled coffee on the boy enabling him to remove his shirt and hang it from the balcony—a sign to German and his other gay friends that his seduction has been a success—there is no turning back, despite David’s increasing disdain of his host; upon discovering that Diego has no illicit photos of him, he announces that he wants nothing more to do with the “fag.”

      Diego, who along with his artist friend German is pretentiously religious—he uses it more as an act of cultural rebellion one suspects that out of true belief—prays to one of German’s religious sculptures that the boy will be brought back to his flat. But it is not the gods who draw David back, but curiosity, the books he has seen, and the music (such as Maria Callas singing from Verdi’s Il Trovatore and “Adios a Cuba” by Ignacio Cervantes) and, almost as importantly at first, the challenge by his roommate Miguel (Francisco Gattorno) to spy on Diego, who as a gay, highly literate man who openly disobeys political dictates, is automatically suspect.

     Although Miguel is a stalwart Communist ideologue, writer Senel Paz and directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío also hint that Miguel is possibly attracted to David as well and is curious about Diego not simply because of his anti-political views but his sexuality. In a sense he sends David to Diego both as a kind of buffer between himself and his desires but also as a subtle “test.”

      And so, the directors have created a kind of structural device that works perfectly to bring these two very different people together—an innocent boy (who incidentally has just been dumped by his female lover, Vivian [Marilyn Solava] in order to marry an older and wealthy man) and an intellectual mentor—creating a dialectic which is intended to explain contemporary Cuba politically and culturally both.

       The problem here is that neither the Marxist-Castro rhetoric that David spouts or the literary lessons that Diego would teach his beautiful youth amount to anything more than clever name-dropping. Diego mentions John Donne, the novelists I mention above, musicians, and, occasionally, visual artists, but their contributions or even their own values are never discussed. David’s talk of the needed failures and continued new beginnings of Cuban communism sounds more like Mao’s philosophy of eternal revolution than Castro’s radical versions of Marxist theory.


     Of course, to actually talk seriously about these subjects might make for a terribly intellectual but equally terribly boring story. What these two do both share is a love of Cuba, and gradually, over their many comings and goings and agreements and arguments is a love for one another, a love that necessarily transcends sex.

       As critic Roger Ebert nicely put it, Strawberry and Chocolate “is not a movie about the seduction of a body, but about the seduction of a mind. It is more interested in politics than sex—unless you count sexual politics, since to be homosexual in Cuba is to make an anti-authoritarian statement whether you intend it or not.”

       What we also discover is that Diego is just as much an idealogue for free-thinking and open-mindedness as David is for the Party line. Fortunately, they are changed by their encounters—Diego, since David demands that he use no pet names or camp slang to describe him, dropping his clever repartees and some of his artificially swishy gestures, while David slowly grows to admire how bravely Diego stands up to a government that would like to wish him out of existence.

       Inevitably, Diego’s brave tactics get him into trouble both with his friend German—who is willing to sell out by accepting an offer to show a few of his works in Mexico as opposed to a full Cuban gallery presentation—and the governmental authorities after he sends a letter of protest on behalf of their refusal to show German’s art, which results in his inability to partake of any employment except as a laborer.

       David meanwhile comes under question for his quietude around his school mates and outbursts of support for Diego when he comes under attack. He even begins to bring flowers to the beloved friend with whom he will never have sex, and rumors have arisen that he is having a homosexual affair with the man he was supposed to be investigating.

       As it becomes clear that Diego, like so many other Cubans who left their country under duress, will have to immigrate if he is to survive, he attempts to keep his departure secret, asking his neighbor Nancy (Mirta Ibarra), rumored by neighbors to be a whore, to look after David and even introduce the still virginal boy to the pleasures of sex—which for him may be the greatest sacrifice of all.

       In one last whirl of sensual joy, Diego fixes a huge Lezama Lima-style dinner (the movie does not explain that the great writer was a man of enormous girth known for his gastronomic appetites) and a tour of what is left of the old architectural wonders of Havana. By this time, we’ve become so charmed with the duo that we don’t even mind that the film has denigrated into something like a simple travelogue. As Diego looks at the city’s treasures with the eyes of someone for whom they will soon be lost, David, now in love with Nancy, sees everything with the eyes of a youth being thrilled to have his whole life laid out before him.


       The final scene wherein Diego, about to leave, breaks down and admits his original plan to seduce David—admitting that he has himself unwittingly helped put the boy in jeopardy by allowing the rumor that they were sexual partners to prevail—seems a bit tacked on. We already know all this, as David now must as well. Yet it allows Diego finally to admit that he couldn’t bring himself to deny the rumor because of the deeper truth that he truly has fallen in love with David; and it allows David finally to stand up and show his own love, for the first time in the film fully touching Diego as he embraces him in a deep hug. If this isn’t truly what queer love is all about, then I should perhaps immediately stop the arduous task before me of seeing and sharing every movie that represents LGBTQ lives and loves that I can.

     One of the very first of Cuban films to feature a gay character, Strawberry and Chocolate won the Goya Award for the Best Spanish-Language Foreign Film, a Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize, and the 44th Berlin International Film Festival’s Silver Berlin Bear award and a Teddy (awarded to films with LGBT topics). It was also nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2021

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

 

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...