Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Joshua Longhurst | Oasis / 2016

shame

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tim Spencer (screenplay), Joshua Longhurst (director) Oasis / 2016 [8 minutes]

 

There certainly is not much to this 8-minute Australian film, but I can say that the cinematographer by Michael Filocamo is quite excellent. The story, such as it is, is simply about a moment in time.    Evidently, Dale (Alex Packard), a closeted gay boy staying at a trailer park, has already encountered a handsome and friendly Englishman, Jake (Chris Dingwall).


 

      The shy boy bolts from a bathroom tall to take a shower in private, still fully clothed.

      Soon after, having parked his wet shirt in his duffel bag, he notices the entry of Jake. It’s almost as if he can’t resist sneaking a photo of the British beauty fully naked. But when Jake finishes and begins shaving, Dale has second thoughts, and admits his “crime,” choosing to keep his fragile relationship with the polite man rather than the memento to which he might have jacked off a hundred times.



     Jake does not approve of his behavior, and Dale, after admitting that Jake is the nicest man in the caravan park, runs off in shame. Yet the next morning he awakens to find his duffel bag on his trailer porch, obviously returned by the dashing Englishman, who has seemingly recognized the difficult decision the young man has made in remaining honest with him.

     Surely, it doesn’t offer anything up to his hormones, but demonstrates the depth of his sensibility. When he meets the right person, we are nearly certain that he will seek out a full relationship rather than seeking night-to-night stands. Although I might have been just such a young man, who waited so long to come out that when I did I went wild with sexual exploration, doing precisely what I suggest Dale will not. Although in the end, I did seek out a relationship that has lasted now some 55 years, so maybe I’m right after all.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

Hermine Huntgeburth | Das Trio (The Trio) / 1998

straight out of farce

by Douglas Messerli

 

Horst Johann Sczerba, Volker Einrauch, and Hermine Huntgeburth (screenplay), Hermine Huntgeburth (director) Das Trio (The Trio) / 1998

 

Derek Elley of Variety writes of German director Hermine Huntgeburth’s The Trio that the director “allows the comedy to come naturally from the characters and situations instead of trying to squeeze the story into a camp comedy format. Performances are natural rather than overplayed, and ellipses in the narrative keep things moving without dwelling on the moral implications of the characters’ actions. Once the new trio’s chemistry is established, pic moves easily to a warm conclusion.”



     But, in fact, at least from my point of view, the film stabs, stamps, spits, and noisily spins its way through space, doing everything but behaving naturally or underplayed as its three major figures attempt to deceive and betray each other in order to fulfill their desires. “Greed” might be another title to this comic work, as first Zobel (Götz George), his gay lover Karl (Christian Redl), and Zobel’s daughter from an earlier heterosexual liaison, Lizzi (Jeanete Hain) descend upon train stations, shopping centers, and any other large gathering spaces to pickpocket its denizens. This trio not only is clever in how quickly they rid themselves of their hot goods, but have trained to how to escape the clutches of the robbed or the police if nabbed, Lizzi being a particularly clever escapee.

      Karl, who occasionally entertains his bed-mate Zobel in the trailer in which they live with private drag shows, is clearly tired of their antics, at one point continuing to read a magazine and Lizzi attempts to escape capture, receiving an abusive put-down by his lover.

     But when he puts on the glasses of a blind man determined to bump into a man on the street in order to relieve him of his billfold, the man is not at all ready to forgive his “accident,” but begins to beat him for his apparent clumsiness, breaking his glasses as Karl is forced to go on the run.


    Terrified for the consequences—even more abuse from Zobel—and feeling completely inept he is almost ready to leap to his death from a walkway on the highway below until Lizzi and Zobel call out. They temporarily retrieve him, but soon after he walks dizzily into the line of a car, and is seriously hit and badly injured. The rest of the film he rests in a hospital before his death late in the film.


     Zobel and Lizzi, accordingly, must seek out a new third man, Lizzi choosing a local mechanic named Rudolf (Felix Eitner) whom she observes stealing a car radio. After a few tests, a great deal of abuse, and tossing the boy’s green, apparently harmless, snake out of the car window, Zobel agrees, Rudolf appearing more capable than Karl, if a bit ambitious; he almost gets caught after attempting to pick-pocket a man in a shopping center Lizzi has warned him against. But he cleverly keeps the wallet beneath his shoe, resulting in a small windfall for the trio.

     Compared to real thieves, this trio’s activities, sometimes themselves snaring true white-collar criminals, is truly petty, most of their money going to maintain their meagre survival—their greatest vice being horse-race gambling. And in this sense their actions play out a bit like characters out of Guys and Dolls, instead of us recognizing them as true criminals.

      But when it comes to sex, all three, Zobel, Lizzi, and even the bi-sexual Rudolf go all out to get what they want, Lizzi almost raping Rudolf in a camp-ground locker room, and Zobel actually engaging in sex with Rudolf soon after—despite his rule No. 1: “There shall be no exchange in the trio of bodily liquids.”


      And it is finally Lizzi’s discovery that her father has also had sex with the man she finds to be so desperately hot that breaks up, at least temporarily, the team. Furious, Lizzi leaves, Zobel sending Rudolf to fetch her or be killed.

       We don’t quite know how long it takes, but eventually he returns, having wed her. In the midst of the previous mayhem, we watch a scene that might have been located at the ending of the film, with Rudolf, now in Karl’s old tux, performing in a carney as the ringmaster of an amateur wrestling concession. He returns to the trailer and to a wife who looks now a bit like the cliché of “trailer trash,” along with a daughter and son.

       But Huntgeburth does not end the film there, but uses it to either to serve as a warning or show us the results of a series of mean and heedless events. Taking us on the trajectory of this ending, the director first shows the trio now working on a train, stealing mostly from sleeping coach car travelers before themselves changing coaches and planting the cash in other traveler’s coats and garments which they later reclaim

       In one horrible scene, however, Rudolf steals the purse of the train’s conductor. He is caught by the police and identified by the conductor; yet when searched nothing is found. They search the nearby Zobel only to find that Rudolf has planted the purse in his pocket. It is off to prison, a rather long stretch for papa, while Rudolf and Lizzi beget their daughter and son.


  The film ends, however, somewhat amiably, not at all as the nightmare we have already witnessed, with Zobel’s granddaughter opening up an old ladies’ purse and stealing its contents before serving it up to her grandfather. As the four walk down the board walk of a seaside town, with Rudolf and Lizzi locked arm and arm, their daughter by their side, Zobel’s cops of deep feel of Rudolf’s ass, to which the son-in-law seems not at all perturbed. Obviously, there still may be further betrayals in store. But no, I’d repeat to that Variety critic that it wasn’t at all natural or comically underplayed. The trio are straight out of farce.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025)

Ian Iqbal Rashid | Surviving Sabu / 1997

saying goodbye to poor sabu

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ian Iqbal Rashid (writer and director) Surviving Sabu / 1997

 

The Mysore Indian-born actor Sabu (born Selar Sabu in 1924, also known as Sabu Dastagir) was a beautiful child star whose career began at the age of 13 when he was discovered by director Robert Flaherty and cast as Rudyard Kipling’s Toomai in Elephant Boy, directed by Flaherty and Alexander Korda, the latter of whom would also direct Sabu in The Drum (1938) and the hit movie The Thief of Bagdad (1940) when the boy was 16 years of age. Roles in Korda’s Jungle Boy, another Kipling-inspired film, and John Rawlins’ Arabian Nights, both from 1942 followed, locking him into career as a figure in works of high exoticism, which, after World War II would result in his performance mostly in grade B movies, both British and American, for the rest of his life.


     At the age of 20 Sabu became a United States citizen and served in the Army Air Force as a tail gunner and ball turret gunner on B-24 Liberators.

      In 1947 he performed, at age 23, in what his last and greatest high-quality film as the Young General Dilip Rai in what was perhaps the most exotic and erotic film of them all, The Black Narcissus, directed by Korda’s own “discovery,” British filmmaker Michael Powell, who described Sabu as having a “wonderful grace” about him.

       A year later Sabu married Marilyn Cooper whom he met on the set of Song of India. They had a son, Paul, who later established the band Only Child which created big hits for David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Madonna, Prince, and many others (“Cassie’s Song,” “Just for the Moment,” “New Girl in Town,” etc.)

       Sabu’s career opportunities, once the beautiful boy he came of age, had mostly evaporated. In 1950 a fire to the second story of his family home in Hollywood was tried as a case of arson, but may have actually been arranged by Sabu himself in order to receive insurance money which he needed to help his family financially survive. He died, at age 39, of a heart attack, only two days after a checkup with a doctor who reportedly had told him: "If all my patients were as healthy as you, I would be out of a job.”

    Ian Iqbal Rashid’s remarkable short fictional documentary of 1997 begins with an Indian man relating the early cinema days of the legendary child actor Sabu in what his son will soon describe, interrupting the narration, as a “Prince of Wales” voice. We catch quick glimpses of Sabu performing in Elephant Boy and The Thief of Bagdad.

       Suddenly the film shifts to black-and-white, where we see the British-sounding man’s son smoking a cigarette on the street and seeing his father (Suresh Oberoi) walking toward their house, calls out to his him, the father refusing to respond. Inside the walls and shelves are lined with photographs of the young Sabu, a copy of Life with Sabu on the cover, perhaps of the time of Sabu’s marriage, etc. The color “documentary” continues, while we witness more clips from Sabu’s films:

 

                       Sabu found fame and fortune in Hollywood. Still only as a

                       teenager, Sabu was living the life that most immigrants to

                       the West could only dream of. When my son was a boy I’d

                       make him watch Sabu’s films on television. I’d allow him to

                       stay up late. It was important he should know we can succeed

                       in the countries. That it’s possible.


      As his son Amin (Navin Chowdhry, playing the director), asks his father to now talk a little more about his coming to England and what life was like, we realize that this is not a documentary about Sabu but rather about the young director and his father, whose values we soon discover are quite in opposition to each other.

      In the kitchen, soon after or at another time (again filmed in black-and-white) we see the father preparing a full Indian dinner, the son, having brought him a tape of Indian music with jazz infusions, the father responding, “Fusion or confusion.” Asked if he is staying for dinner, Amin responds he’s got an appointment with his psychiatrist. He’s stressed. Besides, the son soon reminds his elder that he doesn’t eat wheat, dairy, meat. “All the things you said were good for us when I was a kid, they’re not.” We notice he’s wearing a T-shirt which sports the words “Gay and Lesbian Center,” something which obviously has stressed his Muslim father as well.

      Again through a color-film sequence, we see the son recounting his father’s experiences of having come to England to be a policeman, but after being refused year after year worked as a security guard, proud of what he does, proud of being loyal.

      At another meeting in the kitchen, where the father is fixing dinner, Amin announces that he needs to talk to his father about something, the elder responding, “You’ve decided to meet a nice Muslim girl and give us all a reason to live?” The son has shown the movie to some “important people” who are interested if only they can finish it. Yet his father finally responds that he doesn’t think he should be making a film about Sabu. “You are not worthy. ...You’re making fun of a great Hollywood star.”

      The son’s response says nearly everything that represents their vastly different conceptions of the world which they cohabit: “Hollywood star! He was a colonialist fantasy. Those films dad, they look at Sabu with a colonizers gaze.”

      “Why make a film” his father protests, “about someone you despise?”

      When we return to the description of Sabu, his golden almost nude body spread out in the sand  we might almost imagine that the narrator was speaking to us from the pages of a gay physique magazine rather than the father’s front room:

 

                    Sabu had an unnatural natural beauty. Such a beautiful body.

                    A muscular athletic physique. [In the clip, Subu turns over

                    to reveal the front of his body] I told my son, look at Sabu’s

                    body, that he should exercise and himself look like Sabu. But

                    he was always reading his books and playing with his dolls

                    and singing songs. Never interested in exercise.

 

Clearly if, as the son argues, Sabu was seen through the colonizer’s gaze, so also has his father and others seen him through a queer gaze.

     Again back in the kitchen (in black and white) the son continues: “You know the way you talk about him...it’s almost like.... Those movies filmed him like he was a woman. And you bought into it!”

      The resultant anger ends in the father hurling back his own insults at his son’s admiration of white boys.

       At another moment during the filming, in which the father has momentarily escaped to the backyard, they talk about Sabu’s death. “Poor Sabu. Died so young,” the father looking over at his son smoking a cigarette, “probably smoked. Anyway he wasn’t a Muslim.”

       Amin responds: “I don’t think it was smoking. I think he was probably crushed by a film industry that rejected him when he became an adult. He couldn’t get any decent work. Gave up hope.  ....It was about racism dad, a Paki leading man kissing a white woman on the screen. It was never going to happen.”

        The father finally at his wit’s end, storms out. “When I get back I want all of you out of my house.”

      In Rashid’s film, we have come to perceive, Sabu is but a symbol of all that one generation perceives as a continuation of the racism and denigration of outsiders about a culture that the previous generation could not admit if they were to survive and succeed to the best of their abilities. In this short film we see not just the generations clashing against their different perceptions about moral values, work ethics, and sexuality, but facing off in a directional shift in the entire course of history: for Amin’s father every patient step on his part was a movement forward, a small act of progress that could lead ultimately to assimilation, while for Amin everything is turned around, having never resulted in significant change; the hope to which his parents’ generation had been committed has shifted into a despair for what Amin and his friends see as movements into the past of discrimination and outright hate for anything that stands outside of ruling society’s normative cultural patterns. The two of them view the world from entirely different perspectives.

       Yet, in this director’s amazing short work, father and son each are able to turn around and see one another from the other’s viewpoint, which brings them back to life, away from their frozen stares into the future and past, into the present:

        Amin’s father speaks: “When he was growing up, I tried not to talk to him much about the past, about back home. I thought I should focus on the future, tell him what he didn’t know about this place. Instead he told me.”

         In antiphon Amin speaks: “He left Uganda* with no money. He started from scratch. He rebuilt his life. He had courage. How did he do it? It couldn’t just have been so his son might have a better life. It just couldn’t.”

      The father realizes now that when Peter Sellars and other actors rubbed a chocolate-covered makeup across their face, everyone laughed. “They were laughing at me.”

      Amin speaks of the time when he first told his father that he was gay, recalling the look upon his face, realizing, “He’d have swapped me for anyone. Anyone else’s son.”

      And the night he told us he was gay, his father recalls, he stayed over that night, wanting everything to be all right: “That took courage.”


       Returning to the house, Amin finds his father watching a Sabu film and joins him on the couch, the two quoting in unison a line about Mogli from Sabu’s Jungle Boy. The elder agrees to finish the last few frames of his son’s film with him, remarking that he will be all right with whatever his director son presents in this movie. His philosophy he says is “Relax, it’s only a film. What harm can a film do?” If his question appears to offer a true reconciliation, it also belies the truth that language, story, and image are the most terrifyingly powerful things in life.

 

*Director Ian Iqbal Rashid was born in Tanzania, from where his family, after being refused asylum in the United Kingdom and the US, settled in Canada, Rashid finally moving to London as an adult. Rashid has made other films, including the gay comedy Touch of Pink, but is best known in England for his poetry.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2021

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

 

Peggy Rajski | Trevor / 1994

straight boys teaching a peer how to be queer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Celeste Lecesne (screenplay), Peggy Rajski (director) Trevor / 1994

 

An interesting trivia question: what was the first short gay film to win an Oscar?  The answer: Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall in 1988! The film I’m about to discuss, Trevor, shared that award with Peter Capaldis’ Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life for best short film in 1995. I should remind the reader that the first Academy Award for Best Picture was awarded to the gay-coded William A. Wellman’s Wings in 1929.


     Even if those facts have been forgotten, Trevor has lived on as a major statement by The Trevor Project about gay children’s suicide, which the sad young 13-year-old boy of this film, played by the astonishingly charming Brett Barsky, does attempt when he discovers that all his classmates have recognized that he’s gay before even he has, and he is mocked for his adoration of Diana Ross and for his boyhood crush on the school sports hero Pinky Faraday (Jonah Rooney).

      Things actually begin well in this empathic comedy. Diana Ross has just belted out her Do You Know Where You’re Going To? and Pinky Faraday has miraculously become his friend, walking with him half-way home after school. Trevor might even dress up as Diana Ross for Halloween.


      True, his bland 1950s-style retrograde parents (Judy Kain and John Lizzi) don’t seem aware of his existence, even when, like another earlier film, a distressed young man, Harold Parker Chasen (Bud Cort) of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971), he stabs himself to death with a knife and lays his dead body down on the grass in the path of his father’s lawnmower, and performs a reenactment of  Jacques-Louis David’s painting of The Death of Marat, in which Trevor sits in the bathtub stabbed by his Charlotte Corday impersonation. His father merely mows around his son’s body, while his mother retrieves her kitchen knife; in the bathroom Trevor’s mother simply mops up his dripping blood.

      But according to his diary, Pinky the next day even walked his new friend further, almost all the way home. He and his schoolmate Walter Stiltman (Allen Dorane) talk about masturbation, but Walt warns him not to get it on his hands. Pinky, on the other hand, is even cool with Trevor’s decision to go into theater. So excited is our young hero about the good series of events that he can’t resist telling Walter about Pinky Faraday, who suggests he needs to be careful because he’s heard stories about boys doing it with boys, and “it’s totally gross. And you could end up a pervert…or worse.”

      So word quickly spreads, even before Trevor can get back to class, about Trevor’s infatuation, two girls reporting that the guys are talking about him behind his back about how he walks like a girl. In response to his note to Pinky, the boy writes back calling him “a fairy, a weak person, and not even deserving to live.” “I’m not sure,” ponders the startled Trevor, “but I think this means that we’re…not friends anymore?” Trevor decides that he’s definitely not going as Diana Ross to the Halloween party.

     Accompanied by Ross’ Ain’t No Mountain High Enough Trevor attempts to escape to San Francisco, but his parents board the bus in time find him, soon after arranging a meeting with Father Jon (Stephen Tobolwsky) who tells him all about the birds and bees and attempts to get a confession from him that he’s been having imagining sexual actions with someone like, for example, Pinky Faraday. His parents, so he discovers, have read his diary. If Trevor is sure of anything now, it is that he’s changing religions.

      Suddenly “everybody at school is saying I’m gay. It must be showing. But when I look in the mirror I don’t see any difference.”


      Trevor decides to commit suicide, slowly downing the pills with a glass of water; while listening to Diana Ross’ and Lionel Richie’s My Endless Love he pauses to sing along with Diana, in the midst of facing death, demonstrating his very ecstasy of living. It’s an extremely sad yet wryly humorous moment, where love and death as in the great operas like Richard Wagner’s  Tristan und Isolde are intertwined in an unhappy 13-year-old boy’s mind. Inappropriate some argue, but thoroughly necessary to project the way our younger selves exaggerate our rejections, fears, and disappointments into the realm of universal tragedy.

     Fortunately, as Trevor discovers, you can’t die from taking too many aspirins, although you may prevent yourself from getting a headache for several years. And in the hospital he meets a young male candy-striper who not only befriends his young patient but presents him with a special gift, so Trevor later discovers, a ticket to a Diana Ross concert.

     This loving, tear-producing, and absolutely funny short film blends all the tumult that young gay boys must face in Coming Out, the song Diana Ross sings at film’s end.

      But even sadder, it seems to me, is that after performing in this work which began shooting when he was only twelve, the heterosexual actor Brett Barsky, the grown father of two daughters, recounts in a 2010 interview in The Advocate that he was labelled as gay in his own school, losing most of his best friends. Reality is far more awful than even the movies can project. Maybe the proverbial “they” ought to make a movie about that. Dan Collins and Julianne Wick Davis have made a successful musical from the original film that premiered Off-Broadway in 2021.

     Writing this short piece today, I realized that despite some far-right parent’s concerns that gay boys will teach their children how to become gay, that far more likely what usually happens is that straight boys often teach their peers who are little bit different from themselves how to be and what it means to be a queer.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

Hiroyuki Oki | あなたが好きです、大好きです(Anata-ga suki desu, dai suki desu) (I Like You, I Like You Very Much) / 1994

the shooting star

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hiroyuki Oki (screenplay and director) あなたが好きです、大好きです(Anata-ga suki desu, dai suki desu) (I Like You, I Like You Very Much) / 1994

 

Plot is not a significant element of Japanese director Hiroyuki Oki’s challenging “Pink”* film of 1994, Anata-ga suki desu (I Like You, I Like You Very Much). In fact, there isn’t actually a narrative plot in this film in the usual way in which we conceive it. A few things happen: waiting at a station for a train in order to return home, Yu encounters a somewhat beefy guy, Taka, waiting on the bench with him and apparently falls immediately in love, running after him when they reach their destination in Kochi to report: “I like you, I like you very much”—words I’ve been told by Asian film scholar Earl Jackson that in the Japanese, suki desu, mean something much stronger than a mere “liking.” 


      In any event, the boys soon after are observed in Taka’s apartment having sex, seeming to ejaculate several times, at one point when the cum is visible on Taka’s upper chest, Yu preventing him from wiping it up as he leans into hug and kiss him again and again, finally licking up the sticky residue with his tongue.

       Later Yu admits his infidelity to his lover Shin and the two have a sort of breakdown, wherein Shin, running into Taka at the same train station, tells him to take care of Yu, with the two lovers further quarreling over Shin’s action. Yu returns drunk to his old lover and his new boyfriend for consolation while both attempt to get him into their bed before he passes out, and Shin seeks out late-night sex in a group masturbation scene in a local park.


      In the morning the two, Yu and Shin, come back together realizing that they love one another far deeper than any of the other temporary sexual experiences they have had in the hours previous, watching the “hot” and apparently straight Taka passing on his daily run by the field in which they have laid out sheets to breakfast upon. As one commentator observes, this “soft porn” film ends in a completely romantic note.

     If that’s all there is, many viewers will be terribly disappointed watching this film—as many obviously were in their early comments about the work. Although there is lots of sex, as Andrew Grossman writes in Bright Lights Film Journal:

 

I Like You’s shadowy sex scenes are a muddle of lifeless realism and private intensity, combining organic, naturally recorded sounds with looped panting. In a Japan where the penis is (more or less) verboten, the sex never dares to cross the threshold of hardcore; as is frequently the case with Japanese erotica, however, neurotic censorships only facilitate fetishes that would not otherwise exist. Most conspicuously, Shin’s jockstrap serves not only the pragmatic function of camouflaging genital taboos, but becomes a nearly metaphysical totem that crystallizes the longings of those who gaze upon it. Though at times excruciatingly tedious, the film’s monotonous seaside atmosphere lingers in the memory, and the tedium does eventually blur into a kind of melancholic relaxation, even if the undernourished characters who populate this milieu remain as alien to us as they are to each other.”

 

     Actually, I found Oki’s hand-held camera swirling around the sweaty bodies of Yu and Taka as they fuck again and again—emptying themselves of everything other than physical contact in a  manner that might even remind one, at moments akin to a gay version of Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses—truly arousing. Unlike Ōshima’s couple, however, their encounter only goes on for a single sexual session, even if Yu continues to remain on a sexual high many hours later. But in this film even that becomes almost comic, as Brandon Kemp describes it, “When a girl with short-cropped hair sitting next to Yu hears him muttering it to himself with headphones in, she pulls them out and listens. There’s no music!’” Yu goes on to express the most poetic lines of the film: “A shooting star passed…for the first time ever. It soared straight through the sky inside my heart.”

     For in contradiction to his world of temporary bliss is the world in all of these various lovers exist. The coastal town of Kochi, primarily a fishing and agricultural center, is a bleached-out village—the fact of which Oki’s overexposed outdoor images constantly accentuate—wherein everyone seems to live in ramshackle three-to-four story apartment complexes whose major access are the winding backyard paths over which are flung lines of drying shirts and pants and which are themselves lined by garbage bins. The town center, such as it is, seems to be a dusty, telephone-lined street with fast-food restaurants almost in the manner of many US Midwest burgs. There is little here for individuals like Taka, Shin, Yu, and Yu’s ex-lover to do but to engage in sex. Compared to the marvels of Tokyo and Kyoto, Kochi might as well be on another planet.


      Everyone seems to know everyone, moreover, and privacy is not even a consideration, as the redeemed lovers Yu and Shin, after their night of dissolution, hug and kiss one another in an open field as legions of high school boys and girls and morning adult exercisers shuffle and run by, only Taka, in a gymnastic somersault of approval for their reunion, seeming to even take notice of them.

      In this world all the boys seem to have the poster for US director Gregg Araki’s The Living End on their walls, suggesting their commitment to what critic B. Ruby Rich has described as the New Queer Cinema with which this fascinating film, as well as its character’s lives, have little in common. But the dangerously humorous “on the road” adventures of Araki’s film seems a suitable goal for these aimless boys who use sex as their link to the world of beauty and pleasure their society seems unable to provide.

 

*Japanese “Pink” films, most often heterosexual in nature but also, at times, homosexual, are quickly made and inexpensively filmed works that feature sex and violence, while sometimes bordering on pornography. Held in low esteem in Japan, they have nonetheless, become cult favorites and many of their directors have been able through these films to move into the more established cinema filmmaking. For some directors the grade B- Pink films have almost served as a badge of their disinterest in establishment film.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

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...