Friday, July 18, 2025

Arnau Vilaró | Entreacte (Intermission) / 2024

somewhere between nostalgia and melancholy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnau Vilaró (screenwriter and director) Entreacte (Intermission) / 2024 [25 minutes]

 

Catalan Spanish director Arnau Vilaró’s Entreacte is about time, and either the nostalgia or the melancholy that passing time creates. In the very first scene, where David (David Selvas) is acting in a series of Strindberg fragments, the director asks him about the piano piece which someone in the character’s apartment building once seemed to play for him every night. David suggests that it is the pain that the piece embodies, changing the word pain to nostalgia. But the theater director (Xavier Albertí) challenges him if it might not be melancholy. “Nostalgia is specific. Melancholy is profound and persists.” We suspect that if David thought he might return to that apartment building that so energized him, he might be willing to describe the sensation he now feels as nostalgia; but if he has lost the place forever and there is no returning, it may be closer to melancholy.

     The director asks if David thinks he will ever hear this piano piece again.

    Immediately after, the director evidently as called for his own “intermission,” as the actors debate where to go for lunch, David suggesting a new Argentine restaurant. But at that moment he receives a telephone call, taking us on a voyage which makes it appear that the luncheon “entreacte” has taken place over days or even weeks.


     The phone call, of which we hear only David’s responses, is elliptical and vague. David’s response is “Yes, yes, perfectly,” and a few seconds later the question “And do we both have to go?” Then he adds, “Sure, sure. No, everything’s the same. Yes. Alright. Thank you.”

   The first sentence is seemingly unimportant, perhaps simply a response to whether the phone connection is clear or whether he recognizes who is calling. But the second is an important clue, since it involves attending something and going with someone; involving an “other.” And it is that clue that takes us on the long intermission that David seems, immediately after, to embark upon.


    David’s first stop is a gay bar for a drink, totally empty except for the sensuous, dancing bartender. He returns to what is obviously his apartment building, checking his mail, and beginning up the staircase to his own apartment. But midway he stops and turns—taking yet another intermission—traveling by tram to visit an urban animal sanctuary or zoo. He visits the section devoted to birds where he finds a single caretaker (Arnau Comas) feeding two wild avians. David asks the worker if he knows Gerard, Gerard Poblet, who works with the birds.


   When that name seems to be unknown to the avian zookeeper, he asks after Sonia, “a tall girl, brunette…with big eyes.”

    The birdkeeper answers: “The Foundation fired many people, it could be that.” But, he adds, that was about a year ago. He, the stranger responds, is now the only one who works with birds. “Because they left me alone with everything.”

     In the very next frame David has moved on from the enclosed spaces that attempt to recreate the birds’ original habitats to the open wet-lands somewhere in the country, where the same birds actually live. This, we soon perceive, is a wild wetland where there are also keepers or, at least, bird and other animal specialists who keep watch over the natural world.

     David finds the small building where obviously the workers sleep, but no one is there. He waits

out the day in his car, observing the return in darkness of two workers by motorcycle, who enter the building on whose door he had previously knocked. Strangely, he does attempt to meet up with them, one of whom we presume is the man he is seeking, Gerard.


    The film, now almost 14 ½ minutes in, announces its title, or perhaps its very next action: “Entreacte.”

      When the narrative returns, David is now standing on his apartment balcony, the noise of the city heard loudly from where he stands. When he reenters his apartment, he dictates a voice mail to the missing Gerard, which explains to us his actions of the first Act of this drama.

      We immediately discover that David is now living in his grandmother’s old place, and that he and Gerard have not spoken to one another for about a year after 10 years of a relationship, the very length of both perhaps explaining his reticence to suddenly show up in Gerard’s life, particularly when he is with another man.



     David explains that he is now seeing a somewhat younger man, but taking things slowly and that his still acting with his theater company, preparing a new play based in Strindberg’s pieces. He recalls that they had seen Miss Julie together, but this Strindberg will be a long piece with an intermission. “You always said you liked plays with an intermission because then you had time to remember and imagine what would happen in the second part.” He explains that he no longer plays the roles of young lovers. Now he is playing a paranoid writer who spends his time concentrating on the past.

      He pauses for a cigarette break, another short intermission, before pacing out what else he has to day. Actually, he begins all over again, greeting Gerard and commenting that it may be a strange to receive such a voice mail. He explains that he received a call from the adoption center, and there is now a child for them. “And they want both of us to go, of course.” Obviously, he observes, the situation is not the same as when they first did the paperwork. The process starts again. “You might find it crazy, but it’s been for me to imagine what would have happened if this child had come a year ago. What would have happened between us, of course. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so foolish to break up all of a sudden. Could have imagined if it had arrived 7 years ago when we started the paperwork? Most couples do that. Decide to have a child, have sex, and that’s it.”

     He reminds Gerard that he was finishing his Ph.D, and that he was looking for employment as an actor, and working extra hours at a bar. He talks about not having any money, of needing to give up luxuries if they had had a child. He also recalls his father, who had Alzheimer’s, regretting that he never told him that Gerard was his partner, not just a friend.

     He explains that after the call, he went to the museum (what I described as the zoo), and he explains that when he was told that Gerard no longer worked there he went to the Delta, to where Gerard had always wanted to return but didn’t because of David.

     David explains that he visited the Delta and waited to see him, but when he saw him on his motorcycle: “I can’t tell you what I felt. I can’t explain it to you. But I understood how much you loved me. Until I allowed it.”

     He explains that he went to Delta because he felt that it was something he could get back, much like the song the figure in his Strindberg play hopes to find again in the song a resident played every night just for him. But he realizes also that it had been something he had lost a very long time ago. “But maybe…neither.”

     The film ends there. And we left with the question of “Neither” what? Maybe neither of these ex-lovers can get back what they lost? That’s a strong likelihood. Throughout we see the urban world around David constantly changing, rebuilding itself. But the new will not include what the old did. Certainly, t will not include the world David knew.

     But Perhaps he means that it is neither nostalgia or melancholy, but a desperate and meaningless longing and desire to return to what cannot be returned to, akin to nostalgia perhaps, but not the same precisely because one knows he will never experience it again; and yet not precisely melancholy since he has already moved on, has already found a new friend as Gerard may also have. It is like the strange pause of an intermission, part of the past that yet permits one to imagine a future of the second act, or the next part of one’s life.

     We can imagine that there will be no child entering into the life of these two lovers, likely no reunion between them; but we can also dream of those very possibilities. That is what art allows, the mind to imagine something impossible, a halt to the mistakes of the past, a new creation built upon its foundations, while also knowing that such a thing is rare and nearly impossible.

     Fortunately, Vilaró’s profound work stops mid-sentence, allowing its viewers to create their own second act. Surely, many will see only a repeat of what old age brings, David, like his father, falling into Alzheimer’s without perceiving the truth, his acting career having come to an end; while others, admittedly like me, might imagine a longer play wherein Gerard feels similarly, that the child has permitted them a new possibility to rekindle the love they once had. There is no answer what happens but the decisions the characters—that we ourselves make.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Sean Devaney | Bare / 2012

remembrance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brandt Miller (screenplay), Sean Devaney (director) Bare / 2012 [8 minutes]

 

Sean Devaney’s 2012 film takes us back briefly with the terrible plague years of US LGBTQ culture. A young man (played by Chris Damon), not of that era, but a more recent HIV-status individual contemplates the situation after having had wonderful sex as a bottom for a man who has not used a condom and, like so many over the decades, is misinformed and mislead about his sexual actions.


    As a “top” (the one who fucks the other) the character played by Jonathan Hinman presumes he is not prone to infection. His comments send Damon’s character into a not so very pleasant series of memory associations which take him through his early years after moving to “the city” when an open sexual encounter resulted in his infection.

     Although he now just needs to take his medications daily—after all HIV-infected individuals survive these days—as director Devaney attempts to remind us, the “plague” nonetheless is still with us.

     The trouble with this dark Proustian short film is its paucity of images. Obviously shot on a low budget, it keeps taking us back into the same bar, the same downstairs sexual encounter and another pick-up image in a park or woods. And frankly, after a while, despite its good intentions, the film is rendered, accordingly, into a rather boring recital of the past that has led him to the good sex bed of the moment.

      Gay men—and all sexually active human beings—should be reminded again and again that COVID is not the only disease out there that continues to kill off thousands each year, AIDS unlike COVID affecting young men and women more often than the elderly. The subject may seem passé and utterly boring to younger generations; but that it should remain on their minds and not left to be forgotten is clear to all intelligent individuals. All the more reason, however, to present it within the structure of more compelling visual narratives than Devaney has provided in his work.

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2022).

Matthew Puccini | The Mess He Made / 2017

reckoning

by Douglas Messerli 

 

Matthew Puccini (screenwriter and director) The Mess He Made / 2017 [11 minutes]

 

It’s strange how today almost all gay men and obviously many other viewers immediately recognize the very first image of Matthew Puccini’s short 2017 film for being an AIDS test. One can have a blood test of thousands of reasons, but standing as it does at very first instance of this gay film, we know the central character, Jude (Max Jenkins) is having a Rapid HIV Test, particularly when he’s told, moments later, that he’ll need wait only 15 minutes, sometimes less.


      In this fifteen minutes, which Puccini actually collapses into only ten, we encounter a man whose life has just gone into a spin, hence the film’s title The Mess He Made.

      Although he obviously hasn’t smoked in a while—he has no cigarettes nor a lighter—the crisis suddenly leads him to try to bum a cigarette off of another waiting patient. And when he reports he doesn’t smoke, Jude is led on a journey through a rural or suburban strip mall in search of cigarettes and, soon after, groceries, as well as a birthday card. Like everywhere in the US, this tiny neon-lit world seems to have nearly all you need to help correct and further corrupt a life you feel you have totally fucked up.


      We don’t know what led Jude to have his test, but a telephone call from his male lover who begs him “Can we please just talk,” in response to which Jude immediately hangs up, clearly hints at the reason. Did his lover just reveal to him that he was HIV-positive? Has he discovered that his lover has been having unprotected sex with others? It seems to be precisely a time in which he should sit down and rationally talk.

      But we readily perceive that Jude is not now rational, feeling all the guilt and sorrow that having gay sex in the US for centuries, despite the remarkable strides the LGBTQ+ community has made in general acceptance, is not easily dismissed, particularly when one feels he himself might have become another statistic in the long decades since 1981 when AIDS began to be described as the gay disease.

      The questions we have about his life with the mysterious voice, moreover, are just the beginning of a series of endless speculations that arise in our attempt to comprehend Jude’s dilemma, to empathize or even possibly judge the behavior of a man who believes he has made a mess of his life.

     His next stop in his endless 15-minute wait is a supermarket where he seeks out an appropriate birthday card for someone (Puccini not even permitting us a clue by blurring out the notation of the category from which he grabs his card). Ice cream is next on his list, but a telephone call from “home,” with a young girl’s voice, April (Maya Piel), interrupts even that activity. He reports he’ll be home soon, that he’s just picking some things up and he’s almost finished.

      April obviously is someone close to him, who speaks of another person asking when he’ll be coming home. She might, in fact, be his sister. But Jude appears to be a bit too old to still be living at home, with the other person possibly being his father.

      And particularly when he asks April is she’s done all her homework, it appears that she may, in fact be his daughter. And the way he asks her about her day at school—what was fun about it, etc.—is not the way a brother usually talks to a younger sister, whether or not he helping to raise her. When she asks if she can watch TV, he asks if she has asked “Dan”— of course wondering if we have misheard it; is it really “Dad.” But when she reports that the other man has told her she should ask Jude, it doesn’t sound like an older father deferring to his son. And that comment further blurs the issue of April being Jude’s sister.* She might, in fact, be describing her other father as “Dad.”


      When Jude tells April that “a little bird told me that it’s someone’s birthday tomorrow,” and that he’s thinking about getting off work early and picking her up at school, we further become convinced that he is talking to his daughter, one that he shares with “Dan” or whoever the other caretaker of April is. She asks if someone else can also come, to which Jude answers, “Sure, if he wants to.” April immediately proceeds to ask him, with an answer that makes it rather clear that there is some resentment between the two, “He wants to but is not sure that he can come.”

      That answer, played out with a hand to chin gesture by Jude seems to reveal one of the reasons why he feels he’s messed up everything. He has perhaps been having sex outside of his marriage with another man, the result of which finds him where he is at this very moment in space and in his life.

      But the director does not confirm this, and with all the other possibilities available, I too might be creating a fiction.

      The fact that when he returns to the car to put groceries in, a meter maid is writing up a ticket for his parking illegally in a handicapped space causes almost a complete breakdown of this troubled man. “I’ve had a really hard day,” he pauses, and in near tears, continues, “and I wasn’t thinking.” When the meter maid (Zenzi Williams) asks “Are you handicapped, sir?” we want to respond, yes, at this moment our character truly is. Everything seems to be going against him, and he isn’t thinking rationally. 


     When he finally returns to the clinic and is called for the results, Puccini continues to keep his central character’s life private. We might suspect the news is not good, since the consulting nurse seems to spend too much time explaining things. And the camera catches a remarkable range of expressions that keep altering Jude’s face. First his slightly open mouth closes as if excepting what has been stated. Then they open again with a look of fear and doubt, his eyes seeming to focus on some distant point that he knew he might one day be facing. A slight smile forms, but it might be the kind of smile that comes over one when coming to terms when what one expected, just before tears well up in the face. But then, the mouth closes, eyes slightly looking skyward with a sense of hopefulness. 

    In this case, the excellent acting of Max Jenkins keeps us from knowing the whole truth. Yet even in the act of attempting to decipher the reality surrounding this unfortunate man, we have been forced to imagine the life of another, the possible realities for ourselves.

      Even if he is free from being HIV-positive, Jude realizes that he still must face the “others” in his life, whoever they be: a wronged lover, a husband whom he has betrayed and may never be fully able to forgive him, a daughter or a sister with whom he might have lost or still may lose contact forever.

      In the old days, police swooped down on bathrooms and movie houses, rousting out single and married men for indecent behavior, ruining their closeted lives. Today, the truth often comes raining down in the form of the medical profession, bringing with it all the sense of shame, fear, and possible death that those gay men of another age also had to face. Some things change for the better; but AIDS changed the sexual landscape for the worst seemingly forever.

 

*In attempt to confirm the name, I moved from a Vimeo video with no captions available to a YouTube version; but it too provided no subtitles which might resolve the puzzle.

 

Los Angeles, October 10,2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2023).

 

 

 

Giorgio Volpe | StandBy: l’attesa / 2018

removal

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giorgio Volpe (screenwriter and director) StandBy: l’attesa / 2018 [15 minutes]

 

Italian director Giorgio Volpe’s approach to his subject is through the eyes of a true female busybody, Anita (Camilla Bianchini) visiting, along with several others, a hospital, where she with the others are waiting results. As if she were a waiting room detective of sorts, she attempts to analyze and pinpoint the reasons why each of the individuals in the room are visiting the hospital and what their relationships are to each other.


     She quickly answers to her satisfaction the reasons why a father and mother are visiting the doctor with their small son; and, although she is bit confused by the relationship of an older man with a young hard-looking woman, she seems disinterested in a diagnosis. She is even more intrigued by a handsome young man who seems nervous as he waits for his report, but not too nervous to note the glance of another young man. He seems in a hurry to get back to office to have a meeting which may help him achieve a more prestigious position in the office. On the phone he reports his name to be Simone Alarti (Nicola Paduano). Accordingly, she is convinced she was absolutely right in her analysis.

      The second young man, Filippo Volpe (Tony Scarfi), she believes is a hypochondriac, who can’t wait to get the test results and leave. She suddenly turns to him, announcing: “His name’s Simone Alarti. He’s very cute.” Providing him with a bit of chocolate, she introduces herself and Filippo responds in like. She quickly guesses his age, 25, as he’s called up for his results.

       As he leaves, he encounters her again and she provides him, quite amazingly, with Simone’s cellphone number as well as her own. At home, Filippo calls up the man he made eye contact with at the hospital, but Simone does not remember him; nonetheless their make an appointment to meet up.

       They have coffee and truly seem to enjoy one another, talking about a shared love of art (Simone loves Van Gough) as Simone walks Filippo back to his apartment.


       They meet again for a lovely dinner. They go on long walks. They join one another for a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition. They kiss, and even cuddle-up at home to an old movie, stuffing one another’s mouths with nuts.

       But in the midst of this, Simone sees a large white pill being hand-fed to him by Filippo, and suddenly it is that time in the film for the long-expected transition, as Simone puts it, “Filippo, I have to tell you something.”

       As we have long guessed, he is HIV-positive, his reason, so very misdiagnosed by Anita, for having been in that hospital waiting room. The hypochondriac who has transformed is regular visit from angst into a magic love affair has come up against the wall he has so long feared. But instead of escaping, he hugs Simone close with intense affection and love.


       The next morning at the breakfast table Simone brings up the idea of having expectations in life. But Filippo, immediately knowing where Simone is going, argues that his expectation is “I’d like to enjoy this deep connection with you as long as possible.” Yet they argue about the risk, Simone fearing more than Filippo suddenly about how it might change his new lover’s entire life.

       Simone argues he has a death sentence on his head and does not want to extend that to Filippo. Clearly Combivir has not resolved his fears. Even Filippo perceives that the notion of death sentence should be reconceived as a “chronical infection.”

      But Simone’s fears leads to their breakup. Clearly, however, they have kept in close touch, as Simone suddenly breaks in to Filippo’s room to announce that he’s won “the Tender,” an Italian procurement, a public financial position which in this case evidently involves travel.


      We soon see Simone calling Filippo to congratulate him on passing his exams. Yet we know something is still amiss when Simone suggests that because of their bad connection they should talk again tomorrow. He clearly is delaying bad news.

      If Filippo hasn’t figured it out, we certainly have come to realize that because of Simone’s fears he has determined not to return from wherever he has gone. He has put himself entirely into his new work, admitting he’s been a coward for not having explained his intentions, but feeling that through his love he is protecting Filippo. So much for the possibility of a return to normal life through pills in the era of AIDS after AIDS!

      Filippo meets up with Anita, the prognosticator of the first scene of this film, to whom he explains: “Time doesn’t erase memories. Time just puts them on standby mode.” In short, he too has been so affected by AIDS that his life has been transformed into and endless world of waiting.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2023).

Omid Iranikhah | People (Who Need People) / 2024

the split

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Grant (screenplay), Omid Iranikhah (director) People (Who Need People) / 2024 / [8 minutes]

 

Alex (Patrick Sprague), recently separated from his husband Raj (Adron Duell), breaks into his former house with its front-door lock now changed to steal back the Barbra Streisand album he has signed and given to his ex-lover as an anniversary gift.


     Raj grabs back the album and threatens it as hostage if Alex will not sign and countersign the waiting divorce papers. Evidently, at least as Raj puts it, Alex has not listened to him in years and has cheated on him several times, the former evidenced by the fact that he has never known that one of the Christmas balls Alex holds up as ransom has held the ashes of Raj’s great-aunt.


     Yet, Alex wants the album, he argues, because it reminds him of Raj and their better days.

     Clearly, both of these men who find it nearly impossible to live with one another, are still very much in love, or at least have a nostalgia for when they were very much in love.

     Writer Eric Grant keeps the reasons for their break-up vague, which shifts most of their highly dramatic and slightly campy actions into a kind of fast-flowing surrealist sketch. This work might be described as a comic riff on relationships. Even the set, filled with boxes, including a cardboard-covered couch, seems like something out of a Eugène Ionesco short play. Their world as been empty, a makeshift reality that never allowed either of them to become totally adults.


     Yet we feel there is something more serious going on here, and are almost disappointed when Alex finally accepts the facts, slicing the album in two and signing at least the first and most crucial page of their divorce papers.

     We long to know more, however, given both their crazy likeability about what really happened between the two of them; and it is apparent that director Omid Iranikhah and Grant might have made a very different film if they had relented and given in our desires. Probably it would have tipped the short cinema into a sort of painful realist apologia of which we have all seen far too many. As it stands, the work is a kind of absurdist emblem of all the relationships that, in hindsight, end for reasons that even the parties no longer remember unless they are the kind that hold a grudge and define their ex-companions as evil.


    In the glimpse of what once was, we see two men near insanity which is probably what drew them to one another in the first place. It is unfortunate that now they see that aspect of themselves only in the other.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

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...