Saturday, July 5, 2025

Harsh Agarwal and Sumit Pawar | Vaidya / 2021

the boy by the sea


by Douglas Messerli


Harsh Agarwal (screenplay), Harsh Agarwal and Sumit Pawar (directors) Vaidya / 2021 [23 minutes]

 

This Indian film in Hindi seems, at first glance, a gay romance in which Kabir (Puneet Kumar Mishra), a middle-aged businessman, meets a beach watcher named Vaidya, who describes himself as a kind of lifeguard. But questions put to him are regularly answered rather obliquely. Why, for example, is Kabir’s billfold, which he lost in a quick swim in his rolled-up pants, returned to him still dry? Why has Vaidya never before tasted alcohol? And why does he have no telephone or other contact, suggesting that Kabir will simply find him always on the same beach?



     Kabir senses almost immediately that that there is something unusual about this young man, and the relationship they soon develop appears to be something he has never before experienced. While Kabir answers rather Vaidya’s questions rather straight-forwardly, Vaidya evades direct answers with metaphors and other linguistic ruses.

     Anwesh Sahoo at Gaylaxy notes Kabir’s directness:

     Kabir shares with Vaidya what brings him to Goa, ‘Beech beech mein jeene ke bahane dhundte rehta hoon (I keep looking for reasons to live).’ to which Vaidya asks, ‘Toh mila kya? Bahana? (Did you find it? The reason to live?)’ and their hands swiftly come together. The subtle moments work. There’s no moment in the film really where they out and about proclaim their love for each other, but you see it in their eyes, the longing, the angst, the fondness and in the end the uncertainty and frustration [on Kabir’s part]. The film stays true to its namesake, mysterious yet gripping for most parts.”



   At first, I suspected in the generalness with which Vaidya answered his questions, and from Kabir’s comment that the boy’s lips tasted of salt, that perhaps the handsome young man was a kind of meerman, the male counterpart of a mermaid, that goes all the way back to Greek and Roman mythology, and reoccurs in Scandinavian, Germanic, and Celtic literatures. The monster known as the Gill-man from the film Creature from the Black Lagoon might be perceived as a modern adaptation of the merman myth. Each day of his vacation, indeed, Kabir seeks out the boy by the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, and takes him back to his hotel room for sex.



     When it finally comes time for Kabir to fly back to his home in the inland Indian city of Gurgaon, he begs Vaidya to join him; but once more the young man elliptically explains that he cannot yet travel there, but perhaps will one day.

      On his part, Kabir promises to return soon, emphasizing “I promise to return prepared to take you with me.”

      But upon arriving back in Gurgaon, Kabir’s friends find his story strange and are unconvinced of the innocence of the boy, particularly given that the young man has no method of contacting him. What if Kabir were to be kidnapped they argue, how would they even contact him, or even have a way of tracking down Vaidya.

      Kabir, a practical man locked in his workaday world, gives in to them, not living up to his promise he made to the boy he so loved.

      Years pass, and the rains come to his inland city, with them Vaidya, who confronts Kabir for not remaining true to his promise. Kabir defends himself, saying that there was no way to contact him and a relocation to Goa was impossible. We have to be practical, he again argues.

       Hurt and angry, Vaidya turns to go, telling his former lover that he will return to a place where Kabir will never find him.



       It is only as we watch him move toward the ocean and disappear into thin air that we realize that Vaidya is actually part of Indian myth similar to the father-son relationship of the Greek’s Triton, son of the sea-god Poseidon. The final credits reveal that Vaidya is the son of Varuna, the Hindu God of the Sea among other roles he performed.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Stephen Frears | Prick Up Your Ears / 1987

i chose him to kill me

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alan Bennett (screenplay, based on the biography by John Lahr), Stephen Frears (director) Prick Up Your Ears / 1987

 

The first scenes of Stephen Frears’ 1987 film, Prick Up Your Ears begins much in the same way that Dan Futterman’s 2005 film Capote does, with friends trying to comprehend why they have not seen the victims for a while breaking to their house to discover the gruesome truth. In Prick Up Your Ears it is the slightly nosey, but utterly friendly and nonjudgmental Islington neighbor Mrs. Sugden (Janet Dale) come to check on Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) who knocks on their door before calling the janitor and finally the police, who break in to discover the murdered couple: Orton hammered into death by Halliwell before the later downed an overdose of Nembutal, which, even in normal conditions, can produce symptoms of dizziness, nausea, excitability and nightmares—all of which, in one way or another might describe the lives of the two dead men, who had lived together for over 16 years, a long part of which was a kind of attempt for both of them to abandon the other.


     Things, however, are far too complex for that more rational decision, as we grandly are presented a précis of their lives together through the widening gyre of flashbacks we are soon after presented, first with the help of Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsay (Vanessa Redgrave)—who assigns herself the role of Orton’s “widow” as opposed to his neglected first wife, Halliwell—and soon after American theater critic and biographer John Lahr (Wallace Shawn) who follows the crumbs of the trail Ramsay provides him (somewhat abusing his wife Anthea in a manner not entirely different from Orton’s treatment of his lover) before Frears’ director and Alan Bennett’s screenplay veer off into their own presentation of some of “the facts” that almost seem to make the gory ending of the central characters’ lives inevitable.

      Of course, nothing is truly inevitable. The Leicester street kid who determined to better himself by taking elocution lessons and studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts—given his near-complete lack of knowledge of theater literature—was an unlikely acceptance, as was Halliwell, who, although he knew his Shakespeare well, performed his monologue in a declaratory voice much like the ham actor he would later show himself to be.


     The rather prissy elder might not at all have been attracted to the rough-hewn Orton, and given the young man’s cynical approach to almost all things that reeked of high culture Halliwell might never have introduced his cute young pupil to the greats of world literature as well as its gay delights such writers as Ronald Firbank, whom their collaborative fictions often imitated.

      Surely, given his more conservative nature, Halliwell might never have allowed himself to, at Orton’s urging, check out library books by established British authors, in over 70 cases, rewriting the blurbs and collaging different art upon their covers, acts which landed both of them in jail, charged for theft and malicious damage for which the judge handed down a sentence to serve of six months, an usually long period of incarceration for such acts, which they attributed to the fact that they were “queers.”

      And once they each decided to pursue their selected careers solo—Halliwell collage art and Orton playwriting for both radio and stage—Orton might have more fully acknowledged Halliwell’s tutelage. Certainly, he need not have spent most of his nights out “cottaging”—in US lingo, fucking and sucking off young men in the public urinals—particularly at a time in Britain when it was illegal. 


    Or Orton might simply have long ago taken the advice of many of his friends, and simply cut off his relationship with the increasingly unbalanced Halliwell, who—faced with his own failure as an artist of any kind, began to refer to himself simply as Orton’s “personal assistant” and even his overlooked housewife.

      If nothing else, Orton might have taken as his invited guest Halliwell instead of his agent to the award ceremony in 1966, where his play Loot won the best play of the year. Halliwell himself evidently begged his friend to take him to the “ball”:

 

“Kenneth Halliwell: I just want to go to the awards! I could! Look, ‘Joe Orton and guest.’ I'd behave. I wouldn't say a word, I promise.

Joe Orton: No.

Kenneth Halliwell: Why?

Joe Orton: Because it's for me. I wrote it.

Kenneth Halliwell: I gave you the title.

Joe Orton: Okay, so when they have awards for titles, you can go to that.”

 

      Orton’s acceptance speech, insisting:

“My plays are about getting away with it, and the ones who get away with it are the guilty ones. It's the innocents who get it in the neck. But that all seems pretty true to life to me. Not a fantasy at all. I've got away with it ‘so far’

[hoisting trophy]

and I'm going to go on…”

 

states that it would not have at all pleased his fussy friend. And certainly, Halliwell would not have joined him in a cottage where, depositing the trophy Orton had stuffed into a paperback beside the urinals, before the award-winning playwright removing the bulbs from the overhead toilet lights, where he joined in a group sex act.

      As Ramsay herself comments things might have different, permitting him a greater longevity, if Joe just out of kindness, had taken Halliwell out for dinner on the night of August 9, 1967.

      By that time, however, as the Washington Post critic Desson Howe argues, “Halliwell finds himself a forgotten (and balding) lover. Eliza Doolittle has overtaken Henry Higgins and is picking up other men to boot.”


     Finally, having come to terms with the reality that, despite the fact he given all the benefits of money, a good education, and a mother—unlike Orton’s toothless ogre from whom he escaped—who encouraged him to create, Halliwell had come to realize he simply did not have the gift, while his street-smart friend had all the talent in the world.

     With an almost calm demeanor, Kenneth Halliwell, already seeking psychological help, calmly takes up a hammer to bludgeon in his lover’s head before eventually serving up a cocktail of drugs to himself, while declaring, as if it were a completely rational statement: I must have loved him since “I chose him to kill me.”

      In retrospect, it almost appears that Orton chose Halliwell to kill him as well, or, at least, to stop him from “getting away” with everything he previously had. Fortunately, in his three major plays (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw) Joe Orton did get away with transforming British drama, while influencing the dark humor of theatrical comedies around the world.

 

Los Angeles, August 9, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

 

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...