Friday, July 11, 2025

Dave Wilson | Pinklisting / 1985 [TV-SNL sketch]

one of your own kind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jim Downey, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and Don Novello and others (screenwriters), Dave Wilson (director), Pinklisting / 1985 [6.27 minutes] [TV-SNL sketch]

 

I suppose we have to give credit to Saturday Night Live for taking on such a taboo subject in 1985. The episode, comparing the current hysteria about AIDS and the gay spread of the disease with McCarthyism, mocks those who in 1985 still kept their distance from gay men for fear of infestation, thus forcing many gay men back into the closet.

     Actually, some of the incidents portrayed in the sketch were based on real events. As Matthew Rodriguez, writing in the online magazine The Body noted, “The sketch aired the fall after Rock Hudson died, after the tabloids ran several stories claiming his Dynasty co-star Linda Evans got AIDS from kissing the star.” There was still the notion among many in society that AIDS might be spread even by breathing in the same air, even though by this year of this work, most of the medical establishment had long corrected their original fears and confusions.


    In this version of that hysteria, a famous actress Melinda Zoomont (played by Madonna) is distressed since she thought they had cut the sex scene. The director, Art (Randy Quaid) explains that since in this soap opera she’s going to have male star Clint’s baby and he kidnaps her in later episodes, they had to reintroduce the scene where they loll naked in a hot tub. Yet the actress is furious since, proclaiming in her best Bette Davis imitation, “…I told you, I don’t do love scenes with actors I don’t know,” meaning she won’t even associate with who are not verifiably proven to be heterosexual and, so she was misinformed, therefore safe from acquiring the HIV and AIDS.


     At that very moment, Clint pulls up in his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. With a flat-top blonde hairdo, and walking as close to John Wayne as he is able, looking more like a robot than a man cowboy who just wet his pants, Terry Sweeney—the only openly LGBT actor on SNL until Kate McKinnon and John Milhiser, both of whom joined the cast in 2013, and Bowen Yang, who joined the cast in 2018—quickly convinces Melinda of his heterosexuality by responding to the director’s introduction by saying, “You don’t have to introduce me to television’s sexiest star.”

     However, during his makeup session with Joan Cusack, he reads is own favorite tabloid. He quickly scans the sports page announcing that the Raiders “clutched,” before he turns the paper around to read the headline: JUDY GARLAND BIO: LISA UNWANTED, upon which he immediately breaks down in a supposedly gay campy like outburst, putting his hands to head and gasping, “Oh my god, when are they going to leave that poor woman alone?” When he regains his composure again, it’s all sports that he pretends to talk about.


     The director now explains the scene: they share a glass of wine, gaze into each other’s eyes, you kiss passionately, you take off your clothes and you get into the hot tub. He demands that the sound director turns on the sound for the hot tub. “That’s a hundred and eight degrees in there, so you two should be quite comfy.

      Art suddenly calls in the censor, since the director a question about the kissing scene.

     Jon Lovitz, in his first SNL appearance, does various versions of tongue movement to represent kissing that is most definitely off limits.

       The actors begin their scene, but suddenly a pulley falls loose and a rock comes crashing into the small child’s pool next to them, all setting Lionel and his character Clint into a screeching hysteria fit, which immediately leads Melinda to declare: “Wait a moment. You’re gay!”

        Clint answers, “Yes, I’m gay.” Standing, he continues, “And now you all know. Art, you can fire me if you like, but I can’t go on living a lie.”

        The director responds: “Clint, I admire your guts, and I think you should know I’m gay too.”

        Suddenly, somewhat like the famous scene in the film Spartacus, where all his soldiers claim to be the leader, so does the entire crew (which includes later better-known figures such as Robert Downey, Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall) and the makeup artist also admit they’re gay.


         Clint summarizes: “Living out this little charade, you know, was not a matter of choice, but a matter of survival. [Looking hard at Melinda] But then I supposed you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

         Melinda stands, claiming she does understand them, admitting that she’s an “intravenous drug dealer.”

         Art wonders if they can now shoot the scene, but Clint storms off the set, insisting that there’s no way that he will work with an “intravenous drug dealer.”*

         Critic Rodriguez found the sketch to be disarmingly edgy and progressive.” While IndieWrite found it to be “something even more rare: the mainstream media addressing AIDS in 1985 in a borderline sensitive manner.”

          But frankly, except for a couple of moments, I did not find it amusing, and found Madonna’s acting to be something near to atrocious. Furthermore, all the gay stereotypes are here: the effeminate high voiced hysteria, the closeted queen, and the final self-righteous coming-out. Yes, the show should be lauded for taking on the subject; but they could have done so much better if they only had known a little more about the queer world and those who inhabit it. Rock Hudson didn’t have to mime a straight man; that’s what as a gay man he looked like, a gentle speaking baritone with a chiseled hunk’s body that drew in nearly every woman who came near him, from the seasoned (even if she claimed to be totally naïve) Elaine Stritch to my own mother. Even Howard, when I told him early in our relationship that Hudson was gay, refused to believe it.

        Although this sketch, moreover, is focused on those who would shun and isolate primarily gay men, it says nothing about all those gays and others who were actually suffering from HIV or full AIDS, and spews none its ire at those many parents and friends who had left their sons and daughters to die alone, without love. Let alone does it talk about the real political ramifications of a US President and his government appointees who refused to fund sufficient money for AIDS research, many who were only too happy to ignore and punish the gay community which most suffered the devastation of the disease.

     By 1985 the scourge and its effect on the gay the community was well known, yet this sketch makes no reference to it. Although someone like Jonathan Swift might have put irony to good use to create a comic statement; however, by 1985 irony as a literary tool unrecognizable my many people in the US, and the comic talents of Downey, Franken, and others were not up to doing much else than poking fun at those who misunderstood that the disease was spread not by sharing a hot tube or kissing, but in making love, in sex itself—a subject still off the radar in US TV offerings. In a sense, we have never recovered from the religious right’s views of the 1950s with which this reminds us in its first frames.

     Finally, I’d like to ask, are we supposed to feel that there is some equivalency between wanting to keep a distance from gay men and desiring to have nothing to do with an intravenous drug dealer? Is Clint’s refusal to work with Melinda Zoomont connected, in some manner, with her refusal to have anything to do with gay men? I see no corollary, and find the joke almost offensive, particularly given the not-so-distant events I mention in the footnote below.

 

*Audiences of 1985 would also be aware of the 1981 killings of the so-called Wonderland gang, who dealt in cocaine and heroin, and were shot to death in their Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles home for their robberies of other drug dealers.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

Shimon Kabili | The Way Out / 2017

perhaps the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shimon Kabili (screenwriter and director) The Way Out / 2017 [25 minutes]

 

This US film, based on true events, tells a story about a Mexican vacation, filmed in Israel with a mostly Israeli cast.


       Ryan Moor (Aki Avni) is a well-to-do real estate developer who is vacationing with his family, his wife Natalie (Sharon Ben Tovim), his daughter, and son in a Mexican resort. Evidently he is involved in deals in this community as well, since all the hotel employees seem to know him and he’s given a grand suite with a stunning view of the ocean, the hostess immediately providing his children with special tickets to a beach ride.

      He and his family appear to be nearly perfect, except for a very important matter that he has evidently long been hiding. Ryan is deeply in love with an Argentinian national, a male name Ariel (Nir Zelichowski) who is living illegally in Mexico. And in that regard, we immediately recognize this film as sharing issues that were raised, without the wife’s point of view, in Todd Haynes’ 2002 feature film Far from Heaven.


      This beautifully filmed movie, with cinematography by Shark De Mayo and an excellent musical score by Ophir Leibovitch, begins with Ryan’s arrest by Mexican police on the beach where he has retreated, after sex, to talk with Ariel. Even there, however, he can hardly keep his hands off his lover and the police find them as they are about to again engage in sex, illegal, so we are later told, on the beach in this resort community.

     Resisting arrest, Ryan is beaten and taken in for interrogation, he constantly insisting that he wasn’t doing anything, until finally meeting up with the police head, Juan (Makram Khoury) who tells him that the fine his criminal act is $1,000. A call to Ariel results eventually in the payment after long hours on a bed without mattress or pillow and a nearby hole in the floor for a latrine in a padlocked cage.

     Moving in and out of time, the film shows him with his wife revealing that their sexual relationship has changed, he rejecting her sexual advances. And yet we glimpse his moments of love and happiness with is children.


     But the most moving scene is the one in which, in the middle of the night and after sneaking out of his bed where Natalie lays sleeping, Ryan and Ariel meet up on a derelict side street. It is clear that his love for Ariel is far deeper than any love making he might be able to revive in his heterosexual relationship.

      How long his homosexual activity has been going on or whether or not it has involved only Ariel is never revealed. But for any of us who have observed closeted heterosexuals in their attempts to find sexual fulfillment it is a sadly familiar story, as the head-over-heels in love Ryan must block out most of his life and his moral commitment to it for a few moments of pleasure.

       This story might have ended in a kind of cyclic pattern—after being freed with the payment, the husband returning to pretend his joyful embracement of the family—were it not that writer / director Shimon Kabili takes it in an odd direction.

       When the payment is made the police chief seems to be driving Ryan back to is hotel—although we are not certain and are somewhat fearful when Ryan asks, “Where are we going?”—all the while the older man, Juan, asking him questions about his marriage and family, which Ryan readily answers. But when he asks about his “boyfriend,” Ryan once more bulks, refusing to admit to such a relationship: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Juan pulls the car over to the shoulder and stops the engine, as we become truly fearful of the situation.


      The police chief begins by describing his Playa community as being religious and traditional with regard to marriage and family. He too had a son Miguel, he tells his prisoner, who people saw go into “a dice club,” where tourists go. He admits that he couldn’t accept it, being a great sin in his family and in response, he expelled his son from his home and refused to talk with him after, despite his wife’s constant attempts to convince him to change his mind along with his son’s attempts to resume their relationship. “I didn’t want to hear.”

      He takes out a photo of his son from his billfold and shows it to Ryan. After a long pause, he continues: “He killed himself. …I wanted him to live my way. Now he doesn’t live at all. Not my way or any way.”

       This is a very touching scene which we recognize as the only moral message possible in this film. But we have some confusion, obviously, about where his confession is going? Obviously he is heartbroken over his rejection of his son, his inability to accept him for who he was. But what is he suggesting for the man trapped in his car? Like Ryan, we want to ask, “Where are we going?”

        As Juan removes the prisoner’s handcuffs, before driving him on, he finishes up with a piece of advice: “I hope you understand what you are doing.”

        And now we can begin comprehend his meaning. Ryan himself, in this case, is both Juan and his son, a man torn in two, the one refusing to permit the other to live his life as he must. Death is imminent unless he makes a choice to find “the way out” of the bind in has put himself in.

       This excellent work doesn’t provide us with the answer to what this troubled man decides. All we see is his return to the early twilight hotel rooms, watching briefly wander the rooms in his torn shirt and his bloodied lip, after an absence surely noticed by his wife. He checks in on his children, closing the door tight before moving on into his bedroom, sitting down upon the bed and shaking his wife awake with an assured voice speaking her name “Natalie.”

       Let me just suggest, it does not sound like he is about to cry out in a complex lie of how what has happened to him is the cause of a terrible mistake, but rather that he has something to share with her. Just perhaps the truth.


Los Angeles, August 31, 2022 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (August 2022).

Dan Fry | Dancing Around / 2017

forget what you’ve heard

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Fry (screenwriter and director) Dancing Around / 2017 [15 minutes]

 

In Australian filmmaker Dan Fry’s 2017 short film, Dancing Around, he explores a family breakup due to a mid-life gay relationship through the daughter, Maddy’s (Taylor Morgan) eyes.

      Maddy’s mother Ned (Nereda Taylor) is a lawyer who daily drives to work from the family’s Queensland country home with her co-worker Johan (Johan Venter), while her husband, Dan (played by the director) appears to be a stay-at-home father. Certainly, it appears that he has the closest relationship to Maddy, encouraging her dancing, insisting she help out with kitchen duties, and indicating other attentions that evidences the fact that it has become mostly his responsibility to raise Maddy.


     But there are subtle signs, early on in this film, that things are not as perfect in this family as they first may seem. Maddy seems to be spending in an inordinate amount of time dancing; indeed Ned and Dan have even built her a small separate studio for her to get away from all other human contact, which she apparently takes every opportunity to do. Later, we learn that there have been regular arguments between the two adults, several of which she has overheard.

        Although she seems to like Ned’s law partner Johan, a visit from him on this particular occasion does not elicit joy. Maddy complains that all her mother and he talk about is law. But we suspect there are also other reasons. And when he arrives, we soon begin to wonder—when after dinner, Dan excuses himself from his wife’s company in order to take a walk, inquiring beforehand whether or not Maddy is in her room, and we observe Johan soon after exiting from what appears to be his room during his stay—what else is behind Maddy’s displeasure in Johan’s evidently commonplace visit.

      Fortunately, Fry postpones the scene, narratively returning to a scene somewhat earlier, evidently after dinner with the adult trio, when Maddy is asked to dance. But even before she is requested to perform by her father, we see a slight argument erupt as Ned seems to wonder whether her performance is worth watching, while Dan appears to scold her for not ever being there to see her work. Johan quickly resolves the devolving argument by asking to see her dance, her father reminding Maddy to “Forget what you might have heard, this is your time to shine.” The child dances a free-form series of movements that is quite remarkable.

     The director narratively moves the film yet a little further back, during a scene while they are all at dinner, Maddy stabbing at her fruit which she clearly is not interested in eating. She drops a piece of fruit on the floor and bends down to pick up, observing under the table that her father and Johan are holding hands. We see her break down in tears soon after.


   

     We now return to the scene that was interrupted earlier, where the two men meet and kiss a ways off from the house, but alas not far enough away from Maddy’s young eyes, as she stands on the balcony of the home, we later discover, photographing them. Clearly, Maddy is a kind of later version of Henry James' Maisie, of that novelist's What Maisie Knew.

     By the time the men return from their tryst, Maddy has shown the pictures to her mother. And when they return it is with the intention of finally revealing the truth to Ned about their relationship. She, however, bluntly faces off with her recent discovery, which obviously doesn’t end well.


      Dan is seen packing up, the two males obviously heading off, but Dan trying to make certain that Ned will remind Maddy, who apparently now refuses to talk with him, that he will be back with her in a couple of days. The bitter Ned reports that Maddy was not truly is daughter, a statement overheard evidently by Maddy. Johan insists that Dan go up to talk to Maddy as the film comes to a close; Maddy in her room alone, two pet hamsters upon her shoulders, takes down the photos of her father and mother to study them carefully as if she seeking in them some forgotten reality. The work ends with clips of film taken from when Maddy was a baby being carried, hugged, and kissed by her father, no mother in sight.

       The tragedy in this painful tale of late coming out—a common occurrence alas in societies, such as Fry argues Queensland is, where men and women are still encouraged to hide their sexual identities—is the pain it brings to Maddy who has already pulled apart from the human world as she puts all of her confused feelings into dance. Maddy may lose her greatest source of love, it appears, if her father is refused visiting privileges or if he is refused his parental care for her. The mother clearly has been far too busy to properly demonstrate her love for her daughter. And yet through her final statement we realize she is making a case for Dan to have no rights concerning his beloved daughter.

       In this sense the film represents a brutal reality that occurs in homophobic worlds in which individuals are forced to escape, like Maddy has into dance, into cocoons spun with lies and dishonesty.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).


Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio | Retablo / 2017

the second coming

by Douglas Messerli

 

Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio and Héctor Gálvez (screenplay), Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio (director)

Retablo / 2017

 

It says a great deal about the changes in LBGTQ filmmaking when one is suddenly faced with a film in Quechua—my first. It’s more than fascinating to know that even in a community in Quechua-speaking Peru a 14-year-old boy might suddenly be faced with the painful difficulties of finding his way through emotions that do not fit into the normative values of his society.


     Yet in Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio’s 2017 film, Retablo, it is not the boy, Segundo (Junior Bejar) who—at least at first—is haunted by his sexual urges, but his artisan father, Noe (Amiel Cayo), whom the boy, riding to the nearest town in the back of the truck in which his father is seated up-front, discovers, upon briefly parting the canvas barrier, giving fellatio to the unknown driver.

      It is so quick of a glimpse that perhaps even some of the theater viewers might not immediately recognize its significance. Yet Segundo, having grown up in this violent and homophobic society living at the foot of the Andes perceives immediately just what it means and, despite his love and admiration of the man preparing him for a career as a “maestro,” the term by which all of the natives address the elder, recognizes it as something so shameful that he cannot even think of, let alone speak its name.

     The voyage they are making is a fairly regular one to the nearby village to sell his father’s “tourist” retablos—small wooden framed structures, an assemblage brightly painted with traditional motifs that when opened, a bit like the doors of an apartment building, reveal shelves containing small likenesses of people, sculpted out of potato dough and, once again, brightly painted to represent their local costumes. These tourist versions of the grander 4-feet high constructions bearing the likenesses of real local families who have commissioned them are the major source of income for Noe’s poor family, who themselves live in a far less grandiose world in a stone hut with dirt floors. Their major source of food are the potatoes themselves and, perhaps an occasional lamb which they also raise as a source of milk and whose fleece provide them with clothing and blankets. 


    In the first scenes of this film, we have watched the father and son working in their nearby studio, wherein Noe is slowly tutoring Segundo on how to create the nearly sacred peasant altars. Segundo is not only a good and loving student, but you realize at first sight, just how appreciative this sensitive boy is to have the opportunity to create something of beauty and meaning as opposed to the hard labor available to others such as his nearby friend Mardonio (Mauro Chuchon), the son of a pig farmer who dreams of running off to the cotton fields where, he insists, women are nightly available, like the cotton itself, for the plucking.

     His bragging machismo along with his and his friends’ sudden shifts from playing soccer into sometimes brutal brawls, is the only thing the far gentler Segundo knows of what he supposes is standard male behavior, except when his father, increasingly until the denouement of Delgado-Aparicio’s film, comes home drunk, sometimes unable to find even his own bed to which Segundo’s loving mother eventually guides her husband.

      In an earlier trip to the village, the two encounter natives nearly flaying a man, who simply as a stranger, an outsider to this also xenophobic world, is suspected of cattle rustling. Later, in a day of celebration akin to Mardi Gras, the locals, donning horrendous looking masks, play out in theater productions and in all-male battles involving leather belts demonstrate their quite obvious internal aggressions.

      The only woman who attracts Segundo is the town grocer, who in admiration of the “maestro” always saves some of her best produce and sweetly smiles at both father and son. Later, after witnessing his father’s sexual act, Segundo becomes determined to prove his own sexuality, breaking into her home while she lays sleeping, presumably to rape her or, at the very least, to gain entry into her bed.

      Yet, the boy can do little more than stand beside her bed for a few moments before running off in despair. In his mind, he has failed the test, while in the observer’s view he has simply proven himself as someone removed from the brutal enactments of the society in which he has been raised.


      Indeed, much of the middle panel of this—a bit too obviously segmented in this cinematic triptych—consists of Segundo “acting out,” the way any young teenager might, with regard to his angst over his father’s behavior and his fears for what it might mean about himself. For this boy the time has come, as it must for most children, in which he must negotiate the differences between the voices of his peers and those of his parents.    

    After witnessing the male-on-male battles, Segundo runs off to an old stone building, either a former center of government or religion, removing his sandals and painfully cutting his feet against the outcropped stones, an act which might be said to resemble the knifed arm and hand carvings suffered by disturbed young men and women in more urban communities. 

      After that last trip into town, Segundo refuses to return to work with his father in the studio and often goes missing for long periods of time, at one point insisting to his mother that he intends to join Mardonio as a cotton picker. The confounded woman kindly insists that if he does so he will be undoing everything his father has attempted to provide him, the life of an artisan instead of a peasant.

      It is only when Noe arrives home so terribly beaten that he is near death that Segundo begins to come with terms with his and his father’s relationship, in which he can only fear may force him more in the direction of his father’s behavior than those of the general community.


     When his mother demands that he immediately run to the neighbors for help, Segundo does so only to be shunned, Mardonio and his father both reporting that Noe had been caught having anal intercourse with a man, whose relatives beat his father with the intention of killing him.

      Returning home and to the studio where he suddenly perceives the sometimes open and howling mouths of many of his father’s hidden retablo, he realizes that perhaps for all these years Noe has recognized the horror of his neighbors’ close-minded values.

      When his mother demands to know why the neighbors haven’t arrived, Segundo can only mumble that they were not at home, in response to which, she herself, with her crutch in hand, makes the trip to fetch help.

      Her return is far more violent than Segundo’s simple horror, as she enters her husband’s studio like the mad Lytta (related to the the Maniae, the spirits of madness and insanity) of Greek mythology. With furious swipes of her arms and hands she wipes away nearly all of her husband’s creations, allowing the retablo and their figures to fall broken to the floor.

      Soon after, her mother arrives and they begin to cook and pack up for their journey to another region, far away from where they will now ever after be shunned.

     Segundo cannot assimilate that possibility. As he nurses his ailing father, he insists that they still have enough potatoes left for the dough for new figures and that they are still owed for the last retablos they have placed on commission in the village. Carefully, he attempts to retrieve any of the figures and wooden structures which have survived her revenge.

      Pulling away from them as they pack up, Segundo sits on a nearby hill, refusing to respond to their calls for him to join them as night approaches on their long journey away from a world in which they can no longer exist.

      Still caring for his father, the boy packs up a retablo with the intention of selling it, but, met along the way by Mardonio and his soccer-playing bullies, he is mocked by his former friend who beats him, bloodying his nose and destroying the large retablo. For the first time, Segundo himself releases his fury, tripping Mardonio as he turns to leave, and slapping him over and over again in his face. We can only take some small pleasure in Segundo’s final coming to terms with the world around him; yet, at the same time, we are horrified that he too might have now become a member of the society which he, Noe, and his family have previously shunned.

      Segundo returns home knowing now that there is no possibility of ever again finding some version of normality. Arriving in his hut, he sees that his father has disappeared and hearing the far-away bleating of their lambs, realizes that Noe has left the yard. He finds his father’s body hanging in the nearby well.

      Once again entering the studio, Segundo creates his own small retablo, showing his father as a teacher while the son sits below him, creating still unpainted and unformed villagers below, a gift which he places gently into his father’s pine coffin before buying it.

      The director could not have provided a clearer statement of what lies ahead. This boy’s future in society is still something unformed, like the pristine white clay which he and his father worked into shape before painting eyes, hair, mouths, and the multi-colored clothing upon the small icons.

     Packing up the paintbrushes and the few pieces of wood and figurines undestroyed in this symbolic devastation of his world, Segundo moves on and away in a direction opposite the route his mother took. He too will need to move into another still unknown world where the sins of the father—if in fact they are sins—will no longer hinder the development of the son. But in taking on his father’s avocation, with both its sacred and profane elements, Segundo has become, like the second “one” whose name he bears, a kind of Christ hopefully redeeming the new world he encounters.

 

Los Angeles, August 23, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

 

 

 

Timothy Ryan Hickernell | Foreign Lovers / 2017

love with a stranger

by Douglas Messerli

 

Timothy Ryan Hickernell (screenwriter and director) Foreign Lovers / 2017 [19 minutes]

 

US director Timothy Ryan Hickernell’s short film Foreign Lovers seems like a trailer for a full feature old-fashioned romance movie in the manner of William Wyler’s 1953 Roman Holiday or

Jean Negulesco’s 1954 Three Coins in a Fountain—only with everything reversed, the romance with a celebrated Italian being carried out in Manhattan instead of Rome, and the lovers being gay instead of heterosexual.

     The “American” in New York (Timothy Ryan Hickernell) tries to hook up with a friend to a dance concert at the Joyce, who doesn’t show up. But he’s clearly been impressed by the dancing, particularly of one young Italian man (Lucio Nieto).

      Afterwards, on a whim, he stops by nearby gay bar and runs into an old friend (Joshua Cruz) with whom he discusses the changes in their lives. Apparently once a naysayer to on-line dating, our handsome American hero now regularly makes a phone call and moments later shows up naked in someone’s apartment, as he puts it, suggesting he’s now a Grindr regular. He’s clearly grown somewhat cynical about finding someone with whom he might settle down. After all, he couldn’t even find a date for the dance concert.

       And then, just as he is about to leave the bar, he runs into the Italian dancer, who has also noticed him from the stage, even observing a slight altercation at the end of the performance as our friend attempted to snap a photograph. The two return to the bar, a celebrity hanger-on attempting to get the attention of the Italian dancer and almost pulling them apart until they finally escape together and join up in the dancer’s bed for what is obviously perfect sex.


     For a few hours the next morning they wander the New York streets as they begin to realize they are falling in love, despite our American friend trying to briefly deny it. The Italian asks, “How do you know this isn’t love?”

    But there’s only one more concert that evening before the dancer returns home. And after a lovely encounter neither of them will ever forget, our “hero” kisses his all too brief lover, leaving him at the theater door with the deepest of regrets.

    In the full movie they would have obviously found a way to reunite—or perhaps not, since Audrey Hepburn has to leave Gregory Peck and all three women gathered around the suddenly empty Trevi fountain are fearful of losing the men in their lives.

       This film does seem to harken somehow of another time, oddly making a big thing about the “foreignness” of the main character’s love, even describing him as the “Foreigner” in the credits. It’s hard to imagine in these days of such international communications and travel as anything or anyone seeming to be “foreign” in any major city, particularly New York. But then, having made it nearly impossible for any but the wealthiest of families to live in Manhattan, perhaps it has once again become a provincial city to which everything else seems foreign. And even Hickernell’s camera (the cinematographer being Eun-ah Lee) treats the city streets like an American director would have once presented Rome or Paris.

 

Los Angeles, December 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 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...