Constantine Giannaris | Caught Looking / 1991

windows shopping

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Hallam (screenplay), Constantine Giannaris (director) Caught Looking / 1991

 

What Francis Savel did at the beginning of the 1980s for the generations before him, deconstructing images of gay desire in his Équation à un inconnu (Equation to an Unknown) (1980), so Greek-born Constantine Giannaris accomplishes anew in the 35-minute short Caught Looking (1991), but this time with an even greater sense of historicism.

    Giannaris’ brilliant introduction, before the existence of computer “chat rooms” and Grindr, to a computer game, “Caught Looking,” allows his character to stroll down the strange memory lane of gay porn genres to see if from the past that he might be able to discover a man of his dreams with whom—in what even describes as an a quaintly “old fashioned” idea—he might fall in love. After all, isn’t that really what porn is truly about, not just a series of images that provide sexual release but figures in a suitable landscape that meet up with the fantasies of the viewer / voyeur?

     That is, at least, how the central character of Giannaris’ clever and quite breathtakingly filmed work named the Voyeur whose name is Stephen Hunter (Louis Selwyn) sees it. The game is not about finding someone to have sex with and doing it, but to find through fantasy a true imaginary love. In a strange way, Giannaris’ view of porn brings it closer to role played by romantic novels for generations of young girls and adult mothers.

       And, particularly for an active gay male, knowing the genres and having even participated in the sexual milieu of the games’ fantasy heroes is important in the same way that an adult heterosexual male applies his high school memories of the sport in playing Fantasy Football. 

       In the process, with his self-mocking commentary, Stephen takes us also through a simulacrum of gay filmmaking from Victorian fantasies, Jean Genet-like bordellos of the late 50s and 1960s, innocent musclemen physique works of the mid 50s-60s, and the gritty toilet (or in Britain “cottage”) scene of the 1970s-80s, to contemporary times, planting us down into the pay-for-sex loneliness of the 1990s and the early years of the Millennium.

       In that sense Caught Looking is perhaps a bit too programmatic. Although presented slightly out of chronological order, one almost knows—if one has been at all active in the gay sexual world over the past several decades—what is coming next and how those sexual figures will engage. Had Alfred Kinsey had such a film available, it might have saved him years of research time and energy.

      Once we have gotten the game’s rules out of the way, the film plops us down immediately on the streets of British imagination—and this work is very much from the viewpoint of the English— US, German, French, South American, and Asian viewpoints would have taken us in several different directions; leather, western, and S & M genres are primarily ignored, for example—where two sailors (Grant Cottrell and Johnny Johnny) have just arrived in town. Immediately, the besuited surrogate for the viewer, looking at bit as Stephen comments like Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice, enters the screen to follow them to a harbor bordello where he pays for the sailors’ overnight room.

       There are also encounters with other Genet-like figures, the “dirty” street boy, “exotic” blacks, a tattooed trade figure, and a “pretty boy in tears” writing a letter (“to whom?” the narrator inquires: “His lover, his mother?”), the latter being the closest we get to a “coming out” story. A couple of men (Paul Spencer Dobson and Anthony Melon) are already in bed engaged in sex, enticing presumably those who like threesomes, which our Voyeur apparently doesn’t. A young black kid, Michel Compton (Michael Cox), catches his eye. Clicking on a key that evidently provides a brief interactive biography of the selected figure, the Voyeur discovers that the kid is 20 going on 17, a “chicken” too young and dangerous for his delectation.

     Besides he’s on the prowl or what gay men describe as “cruising” before making “decisions, decisions.” The next “room” is a toilet or a British “cottage” where the action is nonetheless universal, filled as it always is with “city boys, casual laborers, truckers (a nod the narrator says to US porno), Disco Dollies, boys on the dole, and one young college kid who reminds the Voyeur too much of youthful self. Although intrigued by and slightly nostalgic about the pissoir action, he finds the mustachioed tough too quick to action, unable to savor the slow seduction of the college kid he entices. Of course, he might have noted the hurry of such places is partly imposed by the regular surveillance of the police, who he suggests have closed down most, but not all, cottage action. And later, when Stephen returns to the toilet to watch the surrogate besuited businessman catch the action through the viewpoint of a tiny glory peep-hole, we hear the pounding feet of the local copper doing his closet inspections.

     The third room represents a trip back in the time to the 1950s physique magazine shoot, the ridiculously refined cinematographer desperately attempting to edify the humps of the perfect symmetry of rectangular curves packed up in posing straps with his knowledge of the Greeks and Romans. As the Voyeur perceives, it was an absurd exercise in frustration for those queens who loved the boys without daring to touch, necessitated, he admits, by the recreational hazards of blackmail and possible imprisonment. So despite his disgust of the Drama Queen’s tears when his two models suddenly pull off their straps and jump upon one another’s bodies, he is somewhat sympathetic. After all, he too is fascinated by one curly haired Greco boy and interviews him only to discover that he’s a surly rebel when it comes to love (“Love’s dead.”)

      After the brief return to the cottage and a swing back to the bordello where his surrogate takes out a camera and films the two sailor boys having sex, after which one of them, grabbing up the wad of cash gently kisses him on the lips, the closest Stephen gets in this film to sex.

      A sudden visit to a Victorian fantasy skit dominated by a transvestite Madame (Ivan Cartwright) is where the Voyeur finds himself attracted to a pretty Tunisian boy named Karim (Sofiene Levert). Our narrator finally determines it’s time to choose someone with whom he might interact. He pushes the necessary button, but too late; he is “caught looking” without anything to show for it unless he pays for a higher level of virtual interaction next time he visits.

       It’s a sad tale, in the end, demonstrating the isolating reality of porno images and videos. But in its gentle and probing satiric exploration of images of gay desire Caught Looking is also a lovingly filmed summary of where LGBTQ cinema connoisseurs have been and where they may be headed. Fortunately, filmmakers throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s began immediately to search for other images and surrogates of themselves.

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2021

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

 

Taisia Deevva | The Cure / 2023

the other alternative

by Douglas Messerli

 

Taisia Deevva (screenwriter and director) The Cure / 2023 [13 minutes]

 

Much like Denis Liakhov’s The White Crows of the same year, The Cure deals with Russian homophobia and the necessity of proving one’s masculinity by visiting a local whore house. In the first film, the young gay hero, having returned home for a visit from the university, is made to undergo the ordeal to prove his sexuality to his brother and his friends, while in The Cure, it is the father who has apparently discovered something in his son Renal’s room that seems to suggest his son his gay.

   In the very first scenes of this short film by Taisia Deevva, who lives in London, but whose films are made primarily in Ukraine and Russia, Renal (Nikita Kochnev) comes running out of his family home, his father chasing after until he catches and begins to beat him, the mother attempting to prevent him, but the father simply pushing her aside, injuring her as well.

     It is Renal’s uncle, Dayan (Oleg Kamenshchikov) who finally takes things in hand, suggesting to his nephew that they go for a ride. When Renal asks where they are going, he responds that it’s “a surprise,” already a strong warning in a movie where he know most of the older males are fiercely patriarchal and cannot abide sexual difference in their families and homes.

     Just as in The White Crows, Dayan takes his relative to a private bordello, where the woman is of an age that even Renal begs to be given another choice. The prostitute suggests a younger girl nearby, and for double the price, Dayan takes Renal there and sends him off to bed with the younger girl.

     The 18-year-old prostitute attempts to comfort the 17-year-old boy, but it is clear almost immediately that Renal will not be able to even get an erection. He begs the teen girl not to reveal the truth, which as in Liakhov’s film, she agrees to do, keeping him a while longer in her bed to make sure that the others believe he has consummated the sexual act.

      When middle-aged Dayan sees that there are still 18-minutes left in the hour he has paid for, he takes the young girl to bed.

     In truth, even laying in bed with a woman appears to make Renal sick to his stomach, and in the manner of the central character in The Crying Game, who vomits after having unknowingly had sex with a transgender woman, Renal escapes outdoors to retch, a gesture I feel is not at all necessary to convince us that he may have been uncomfortable in pretending to fulfill his uncle and father’s demands. But, really, I can’t imagine that most gays, many of whom have at least attempted in their early days to explore the opposite gender, would have such a visceral reaction to being with a woman. Evidently, the director felt she had to prove Renal’s disgust for being part of the ridiculous ritual.

     Just for the record, since both of the Russian films I mention are so similar in plot, The Cure was released in England in March of 2023, while The White Crows, made in France, was released in September. There is every likelihood that neither director knew anything of the other film, which may only go to prove that this bizarre ritual of manhood is quite common in contemporary Russia.

What it does, obviously, is to force the child whose sexuality if in doubt to lie and go further into the closet with regard to family life, since the other alternative is quite obviously brutal violence.

 

Los Angeles, June 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

 

 

 

 

Alfred Hitchcock | Psycho / 1960

the jealous mother

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Stefano (screenplay, based on the novel by Robert Bloch), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Psycho / 1960

 

It was not until I began writing the essay on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo that I suddenly realized that his well-known 1960 horror film Psycho bears much in common with his brilliant 1958 film in the sense that it too is a kind of romance—a very strange one to say the least, but still a romance between a young man, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), and a passing stranger, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), an unexpected guest at his desolate motel. The two hardly meet, sharing only a short conversation over shared supper, before it becomes clear that the lonely Norman, living miles from the more-traveled highway, is fond of his new guest, and through his shy looks and comments we observe his interest in her. A supposed argument with his mother confirms his emotions:

Norma Bates: [voice-over] No! I tell you no! I won't have you bringing

                       some young girl in for supper! By candlelight, I suppose,

                       in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap,

                       erotic minds!

Norman Bates: [voice-over] Mother, please...!

Norma Bates: [voice-over] And then what? After supper? Music? Whispers?

Norman Bates: [voice-over] Mother, she's just a stranger. She's hungry,

                         and it's raining out!

Norma Bates: [voice-over] "Mother, she's just a stranger"! As if men don't

                       desire strangers! As if... ohh, I refuse to speak of disgusting

                       things, because they disgust me! You understand, boy? Go on,

                       go tell her she'll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with MY

                       food... or my son! Or do I have tell her because you don't have

                       the guts! Huh, boy? You have the guts, boy?

Norman Bates: [voice-over] Shut up! Shut up!

     Unlike Vertigo, however, where Scottie—as a kind of voyeur—and Madeline—as a knowingly observed performer—have long days together as their love blooms, Marion is almost unaware of his feelings and Norman has no time to develop a relationship. The two are completely severed from any possible consummation of feelings, she having stolen $40,000 and left her lover—for whom she has stolen the money in order to marry—back in Phoenix, Norman having a more powerful love-hate relationship with his mother living just up the hill in his mansion house. The romance of this frightening tale, from the beginning, is off kilter. Both the soon-to-be victim and the murderer are not who they pretend to be.

     Like Vertigo’s Madeline, Marion is a liar and, in this case, a thief. The realization of her errors comes soon after her conversation with Norman, as she determines to return to Phoenix; and, like the mythical bird, she clearly hopes to be "reborn," to rectify her behavior. The shower, as numerous observers have noted, is a kind of ritual baptism, a washing away of her sins with a hopeful return to innocence. Yet, the attentive viewer also knows that a resurrection will be impossible, for as we have witnessed in Norman's room behind the motel's front desk, Norman's hobby is taxidermy: he stuffs birds, assuring no possibility of their being reborn out of the ashes.

     Minutes later, dressed as his mother, he stabs Marion to death in the famed shower scene, a scene so powerful that women all over the world became terrified to take a shower. The three minutes of 50 cuts is a kind of small and masterful film in  itself, revealing in its attention to the details to Marion's body just how obsessed Norman/his mother is with this woman. It is hard to perceive such a brutal murder as a kind of love scene, but the way Hitchcock has filmed it, beginning with the sensual pleasure Marion finds in the shower, her scream upon the sudden intrusion, the outstretched hand and fingers, the gradual fall, the appearance of blood, and the final focus upon her dilated eye, seen abstractly it is almost a kind of dance of pleasure as well as a dance of death.

      Norman has to destroy her as his jealous mother to keep his psychosis alive; and it is that necessity—the acts of the jealous mother—that makes us realize just how attracted Norman has been to Marion. In a sense, Norman has been as obsessed with her as Scottie was with Madeline.

      But obviously, Norman is even more obsessed with his mother, a woman to whom he is not only in complete parental thrall, but with whom he is deeply in love. Indeed he has killed her because of her attraction for another man for whom he has believed she was preparing to abandon him.

      It is tempting, given this Hitchcockian muddle of Freudian-inspired psychological details to imagine Norman as being a latent homosexual. Certainly Freud might have argued that despite the boy's seeming love for and attraction to women he also fears and loathes them, explaining his need to destroy the women to whom he is attracted before they overtake his own identity or hurt him with their inability to fully share his love in the manner of his mother

      But with Norman the psychosis goes much further—partly out of guilt for his hidden hate and final murder of those of the female sex, but also out of his own recognition that he cannot truly fulfill their love (in the case of his mother because of the obvious incestual restriction, and in Marion's case because he is still a virgin too terrified to ever proceed with a sexual advance)—he replaces them, becomes them himself in order to consummate a relationship between him and the women he admires from afar. Through his personal intercommunication with his inner mother / lover he creates a relationship of husband and wife, lover, and dependent mate. Norman is more a kind of faux transgender figure rather than a man who secretly desires others of his own sex.

    The rest of the story, how family and authorities discover the truth, hardly matters. The only thing that keeps the audience's interest—which is why the director was so determined not to reveal the story's secret and would not allow audiences to enter after the movie had begun—is the fact that we do not yet realize the truths I have just expressed above, that Norman is his mother, having killed her off long ago. What gradually becomes apparent is that his real lover / mother was a tyrant who would allow him no other lover, keeping him frozen in infancy forever. So, in the end, playing the role of both his mother and himself, he is, as his last name suggests ("Bates") a man forced to perpetually make love to himself in a kind a kind of psychical masturbation. As the doctor summarizes:

 

"Like I said... the mother... Now to understand it the way I understood it, hearing it from the mother... that is, from the mother half of Norman's mind... you have to go back ten years, to the time when Norman murdered his mother and her lover. Now he was already dangerously disturbed, had been ever since his father died. His mother was a clinging, demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man... and it seemed to Norman that she 'threw him over' for this man. Now that pushed him over the line and he killed 'em both. Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of all... most unbearable to the son who commits it. So he had to erase the crime, at least in his own mind. He stole her corpse. A weighted coffin was buried. He hid the body in the fruit cellar. Even treated it to keep it as well as it would keep. And that still wasn't enough. She was there! But she was a corpse. So he began to think and speak for her, give her half his time, so to speak. At times he could be both personalities, carry on conversations. At other times, the mother half took over completely. Now he was never all Norman, but he was often only mother. And because he was so pathologically jealous of her, he assumed that she was jealous of him. Therefore, if he felt a strong attraction to any other woman, the mother side of him would go wild." [Points finger at Lila Crane]

     "When he met your sister, he was touched by her... aroused by her. He wanted her. That set off the 'jealous mother' and 'mother killed the girl'! Now after the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep. And like a dutiful son, covered up all traces of the crime he was convinced his mother had committed!"

     So it is strangely confirmed that Marion's murder was indeed a murder for love.

    At film's end, Norman sits covered in a blanket, as psychically dead as Scottie in Hitchcock's Vertigo. But while Scottie stood upon the edge of death into which Madeline has finally leapt, reminding us of his 20th century angst, the last images of Norman look more like a scene out of Fellini than anything else, hinting at something similar to the postmodern comic absurdity that cinema would portray in the years ahead. Even Norman's thoughts—his absurd belief that "I'm not going to even swat that fly" might convince someone of his inability to commit the atrocities he has—seems to be something out of Ionesco or Beckett rather than taken from a high modernist literary text which Vertigo calls up. Despite the fact that the two protagonists face similar destinies of meaningless and empty living, having both lost the women they most loved, Hitchcock's implication of what it means is far more comic in Psycho, despite the horrors of the film itself. For Norman, having finally consumed his male other, has now fully become his own lover. 

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2012 and September 30, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2012).