Stéphane Marti | Sur mon cou (à Jean Genet) / 2009

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Hannah Hilliard | Franswa Sharl / 2009

beauty queen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hannah Hilliard and Greg Logan (screenplay), Hannah Hilliard (director) Franswa Sharl / 2009

[14 minutes]

 

Australian director Hannah Hilliard’s 14-minute film about a true story involving the 12-year-old boy, Greg Logan (played by Callan McAuliffe), is a simple comic tale about a difficult to please father Mal (John Batchelor). Mal, like many a would-be-macho heterosexual perceives his eldest son’s duty to compete against his friend’s son, Richard (Ben Ingram) and flirt with his friend’s daughter, the beautiful young Cassie (Ivy Latimer).

   Greg, who is more comfortable singing and dancing, is a big disappointment. Even as a pre-pubescent, he is apparently well on his way to facing difficulties in high school sports, has no evident sexual inclination for girls, and might even possibly have some gender confusion. His mother, Fran (Diana Glenn) dotes on him, but Mal is endlessly disappointed and loses bet after bet with Mike Bishop (Steve Le Marquand) on swimming races and similar sports challenges in which he insists the boys engage.

      Fortunately, the next event on their Fiji vacation is a beauty pageant which he is sure that his daughter Kylie (Tiarnie Coupland) will win, even though she is equally certain that Wendy will come in first, she perhaps in second place.

      Desperate to find something which might please his father, the cute young blond boy decides he will enter the beauty pageant himself, and somewhat as a joke makes a prank call to register his name in the contest, pretending to be a French beauty, Franswa Sharl (François Charles).

      Cassie, in love with Greg wants a kiss, but he will give it only if she lends him her best bikini outfit to which she finally agrees. Catching the play of their shadows against a canvas wall, the Logans suddenly have hope that their son might after all be somewhat normal.

       The pageant begins with girls from New Zealand, Australia, and nearby islands, all of them charmingly cute. Cassie, however, is certainly the most beautiful, as Mal’s home-film camera reveals, although he’s still sure that Kylie has a chance and he might yet win the bet.

        Suddenly a young girl come all the way from France is announced, and out of nowhere appears a beautiful blonde, with a flower in her hair, dressed in a stunning red bikini. Mal discovers Franswa is Greg only through his camera lens and is ready immediately to put a stop to the nonsense, but Fran demands he stay put.

        In fact, the judge quickly announces Franswa as the winner and Bishop pays off the bet, Mal proudly winning his very first of numerous bets on his family members. How can he not be strangely proud of his lovely son? Cassie is sure he won only because she loaned him her best bikini, and he admits it, handing the floral crown over to her and thus pleasing everyone.

      Through broad comic tropes, this colorful film hints at a great many issues faced by young gay and possibly transsexual boys and their families without bothering to really explore the deeper issues. Indeed, at 12-years-old who’s to say Greg will actually grow up to be gay?

        Of course, most any gay man remembers that at 12 years of age he already began to know that somehow he might not fit in to family expectations.

 

Los Angeles, December 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Diana Petrov | Yet Another Family Drama / 2025

the mother who loved the fact that her son was a faggot

by Douglas Messserli

 

Diana Petrov (screenwriter and director) Yet Another Family Drama / 2025 [20 minutes] 

Mamma (Stanka Kalcheva) breaks into her son Georgi’s (Delyan Iliev) apartment in the midst of his gay tryst with a “one night stand” (Plamen Kanev) in Bulgarian director Diana Petrov’s cinematic investigation into a motherly love that borders on—if the film’s cabaret act is to be believed—and in the past has included incest.

     Although she reports she has come to tell Georgi of his father’s death, it is clear that she plans to move into Georgi’s grandmother’s former apartment with her son, despite the presence of a young man in his bed, who she insists leave the place immediately. The son comforts his lover by suggesting that his mother will soon be leaving.

     The son drinks, slams a bottle of liquor to the floor, refuses to touch any of the breakfast she has served up, puts his mother’s suitcase in the hall, and demands that his night-time lover simply ignore her.

      In the end, however, the lover dresses and leaves for the office, while the mother can be seen showering and comforting her son. There is evidently no escape from her, her love being devouring and implacable.

   Petrov, who infuses her more realist drama with outrageous cabaret acts, and psychological visions of the son’s attempt to escape his mother, describes her layered “drama” as representing three different aspects of her central figure:

 

“The movie aims to draw a three-sided portrait of its protagonist, Georgi. The first layer shows Georgi in his safe space—a wide, idyllic landscape where he feels happy and free—until his mother appears, shattering the serenity of his dream.

    The second layer, the predominant part of the film, is set in his apartment. Here, we are confined to a small, dark space, mirroring how Georgi perceives his life in reality. His dreams and hopes transform into frustrations as he struggles to achieve even a fraction of his aspirations.

    The third and final layer is a cabaret performance, representing how a complete stranger might perceive Georgi and his relationship with his mother. With bright colors and campy décor, the scene parodies everything we've witnessed so far, suggesting deeper insights into the mother’s feelings for Georgi. The song's lyrics heighten the grotesque nature of the performance by emphasizing the sexual undertones of the mother-son relationship—a subject rarely explored in Bulgarian cinema.”

     It is perhaps the spritely cabaret scene with which this film ends, however, that most engages the viewer, as what he have just witnessed is played out by Kanev in drag with a dummy representing the long-abused son, whose behavior as a “faggot” is perhaps what keeps the “naughty boy” close to her heart; she is obviously the only woman he can truly love. And she, clearly, has preferred loving the son instead of his father.

      The lyrics of the cabaret song, say it all:

 

“This beloved son of mine…

I will spank him so hard…

He pretends to be so great…

But he’s just another…

Faggot.”

 

    The only thing that makes this short film untenable to me is that Petrov seems to presume that

queer male behavior has its roots in the mother’s attentions to her son, and is a psychological condition that has grown around those incestual relationships; in fact, we have learned increasingly over the years that being gay, transgender, bisexual, or whatever is primarily biological, something we carry within us from birth, not learned primarily through nurture, although certainly this mother may have helped to foster her son’s queerness.  

     But here the presumption is that the son has sought out gay men since his relationship with women is caught up with the horror of incestual attentions from his mother, and accordingly, it is the mother’s “fault.” But there is no “fault” or even “choice” in being gay; it is merely another manner of sexual behavior, existing also in numerous other animal species.

     Even brilliant minds such as that of David Antin have not yet come to that realization. David once confided to Howard that he saw no problem with anyone choosing the “life style” we had chosen. Howard briefly attempted to explain to him that being gay was not a chosen life style, but something that chose you and was accepted by most individuals only with much suffering and pain for being different from the majority of human beings.

     Think of this way. I have green eyes. Only 2% of the world’s population are blessed with such a coloring of the eye, yet no one has ever told me that I was strange for having such a pigment difference. According to the 2024 Gallup poll, the percentage of those US citizens who identify as something other than straight or heterosexual has now risen to about 7.7%.

 

Los Angeles, July 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

Nora Dahle Borchgrevink and Lyndon Henley Hanrahan | I Hope He Doesn't Kill Me / 2024

imagining what’s behind the door

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lyndon Henley Hanrahan (screenplay), Nora Dahle Borchgrevink and Lyndon Henley Hanrahan (directors) I Hope He Doesn't Kill Me / 2024 [13 minutes]

 

A cute young man, Buzz (Lyndon Henley Hanrahan) pushes the buzzer to the door of his anonymous Grindr hookup, but just before anyone answers, he suffers, time and again, various scenarios that might play out within.

     In first the horrifying vision, he is tied up and bound in an S&M date with the man suggesting that he is going to skin him alive and eat him, a knife already put to the boy’s throat. The young man suggests that he has eczema.

     In the second fantasy he has met up with a handsome man who drugs him by offering him a glass of water. They also fight over language, the young man arguing the other’s words are so “not sexy.” But all of that doesn’t matter in the end, since our young hero simply passes out.

     Another is into pills, chemsex, “G,” “X,” and “MDMA.” Yet another believes in having sex they were “generationing,” he passing on HIV, convinced that he was the boy’s “gift giver,” and Buzz was his “bug chaser,” turning Buzz, as he describes it, into an HIV-positive sex prostitute.

      The next ring of the buzzer brings Buzz into contact with a man who simply likes to imagine others on the street wondering what might be happening with the flashing “speckles” in his bedroom, and has scheduled a uber to show up just after Buzz and he have retired into bed.

      Buzz’ imagination next calls up a young man who seems to be as terrified of the killer behind the door as he is, which young hero describes as a “miscommunication.” But in the very next moment the new encounter asks if he can piss on him.

    The next man has just come out since his “super homophobic” Dad passed away about a half-hour before, having been wrapped in a “Turkey bag” where in he evidently suffocated. The body still lies in the kitchen.

      Perhaps the wildest of Buzz’ imaginings is when he meets up with a young man whose mother is from Sheffield, but who father “fucked off back to Chicago.” It so happens that Chicago is also where Buzz’ family is from.

       Apparently this hookup and he have had good sex since Buzz would like to see this partner again sometime. Indeed, they play a short fantasy game of Buzz’ date meeting up with his Dad in Chicago, in the midst of the game the stranger calling out “Bartholomew,” the first name of his father, Bartholomew Huggins. That just happens to be Buzz’ last name as well, and suddenly the couple realize that they have just committed incest, even worse his half-brother calls out, “gay incest.”

    Why is that worse that “regular incest” queries his Buzz,” his bedmate suggesting that Buzz himself is now pejorating gay incest by describing the heterosexual version as “regular.” His Grindr date determines that they are going to have to kill themselves, holding up a looped rope.

     When the buzzer is actually answered, it turns out to be a nice guy with whom we can presume Buzz has had great sex. But yes, we are reminded that such killers and odd perverts (all performed, in this case, by Vincent Moisy) may just be out there waiting for a visit from an innocent blind Grindr date. These are the fears of the digital age.

      This comic work from the United Kingdom, performed without any British accents, is a beautifully lit and colorful comedy with excellent acting that has made it quite popular on the gay film circuits of 2024 and 2025.

 

Los Angeles, July 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).