Yoshihiko Matsui | 錆びた缶空 (Sabita kankara) (Rusty Empty Can) / 1979

cracks, crevices, and keyholes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoshihiko Matsui (director) 錆びた缶空 (Sabita kankara) (Rusty Empty Can) / 1979

 

Yoshihiko Matsui’s early film Rusty Empty Can, made up from seemingly clips and film sequences found on some cutting-room floor tells its story in somewhat incoherent fragments. Yet we almost immediately comprehend that the central figure of this work, shot by Sogo Ishii who was famous

for his “pink” films such as Panic in High School (1986) and Crazy Thunder Road, the year after Matsui’s work, is a young gay teen. But instead of opening showing the numerous “obscene” actions of the film, Matsui subverts the attentions of his Japanese censors by presenting his central figures masturbatory acts under paper cones, and other actions through cracks and crevices, and even keyholes.

      Yet, for all that, Rusty Empty Can concerns a rather traditional love triangle, but in this case not among heterosexuals but between a young gay man who in an early scene masturbates to his favorite pop hero depicted in a wall poster, a young male-identifying crossdresser Akira, and his boyfriend usually described as “a violent thug.”

      Accordingly, it is the outsider characters who constitute this disorienting story, not necessarily their behavior that sets this movie apart from other Japanese films of its day.

      Our “hero” encounters Akira one day on the street and immediately falls in love with him, determining to meet up with the long-haired, feminine boy. The young man writes Akira proposing a meet up; but he shares the information with the boyfriend who immediately demands that Akira cut off any possible connection.

      The boyfriend has already noticed the awkward youth following them around the city and into a movie theater, and he takes action in the form of impending violence which the youth escapes this first time. But even that doesn’t end the boy’s curiosity, as he follows them up to a room where they have retreated to talk and make love, watching them through holes in the wall.

 

      When he finally actually attempts to meet up with Akira, dressed in a precious suit, the angered boyfriend goes after him with a knife, finally forcing the young boy down in the public street, the knife poised just inches from his scrotum.

      Akira, angry with the controlling thug who has just previously painfully fucked him, takes revenge in the form of biting off his penis during his demand for fellatio which he claims tastes of shit.

  And the film ends with the thug/boyfriend crawling on the blood-stained toilet floor, as Akira, now gone mad in response to his action, runs madly out of control through the streets, finally falling flat on the pavement, ready to be squashed by any passing vehicle.

      From the very beginning of his work, Matsui manipulates us to feel sympathy for the young man, despite his autre behavior, by also showing us that he is so poor that he can hardly eat, and when he finally sits down to a ramen dish cannot tolerate it and throws it up, while Akiri and her boyfriend dine out at a kind of Japanese fast-food grill on cat and dog meat.

     And by the end of this hour-long film, despite him being a social outcast, we are happy that the young gay boy, who listens to his New-Wave music through a “rusty can” and is so very lonely that he takes joy in a mistaken phone call which he turns into a brief verbal sexual encounter, has been forced away from the rabid couple.

      At film’s end the young gay boy may still be suffering hunger and loneliness, enduring his own kind of mad emptiness by now painting his own lips in the subway from Akira’s dropped lipstick tube; but he is still whole and intact, while the other two have lost the major symbols of an operable male body, the penis and the mind.

      That all of this is expressed so fully in hastily shot frames on 8mm color film is almost a miracle of filmmaking. Little is actually expressed in words, but there is now finally a version with English-language subtitles. But I must warn anyone coming across this difficult-to-find variant since it is highly edited down from the film’s original running time to exclude some of the film’s central incidents, including the later anal sex and implied castration scenes.

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Kheaven Lewandowski | That’s What I Feel About You / 2023 [music video]

an autobiography of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Will Jay, Sam Creighton, Brandon Stansell (songwriters), Kheaven Lewandowski (director) That’s What I Feel About You / 2023 [4.20 minutes] [music video]

In this music video by gay country and western artist Brandon Stansell, he sings about meeting someone after having broken up with his former boyfriend. And in this case the person in the film, Stephen Garrett, is the real-life figure with whom he has fallen in love and about whom he feels frightened and confused for not knowing the full nature of their relationship:

 

But I should have known it’d be on hard on my heart

If somebody asked what I thought from the start

 

It’s a reckless drive

Don’t know if I’m gonna live or die

Kind of crazy staying up all night

Almost nothing I can do

New to the feel of being

Stuck in hell

When you’re gone are you with someone else?

Then you’re here and I can’t help myself

One thing i’m afraid to loose

That’s what I feel about you

 

Without even trying my eyes always find you

One step ahead with your hand right behind you

Reaching for me

You pull me in and suddenly

 

 

I know what they mean when they say that it’s different

Thought i knew love but something was missing

So hard to explain

But the moment that I saw your face

 

     By the time this video was released, however, he was truly in a relationship with Garrett and the following year they became engaged to be married. Their marriage was scheduled for March 2025, but I can find no reports beyond that. I have to presume the marriage occurred and the singer’s fears are now allayed.

     In any event, this song is about his falling love and challenging his now future husband about what their relationship meant to him.

     Throughout, we see Garrett with men, but just as often the “other” is Stansell himself, so was it just his imagination, his fears, or were there actual unreciprocated feelings? The song doesn’t answer that question, but it evidently did have an impact upon their relationship.

      In this work, autobiography and art are definitely interrelated. Stansell himself, in an interview with Tricia Despres in People, admits: “Anyone that knows me, and my music know that I write pretty close to the chest. I write pretty close to personal experience. I always have.”

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2005

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2005).

 

 

Katarzyna Gondek | Deer Boy / 2017

finding his kind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katarzyna Gondek (screenwriter and director) Deer Boy / 2017 [15 minutes]

Through a very hard labor, a mother (Katarzyna Sobiszewska) bears a male child, who grows up in their peasant household with the antlers of deer, just small nubs at first which as the boy grows into an adolescent turn into a small crown of horns.

      Marko Stojiljković, writing in Ubiquarian pretty much summarizes the entire story:

 

“The boy is born with a hint of antlers, but, as we know from the title and learn it further down the road, his presence is not demonic at all, and not even that of an animal. Deer Boy is a dear and playful boy, with only antlers to separate him from his peers. However, the opposite reactions from his parents to his existence and dual identity is something that will define him. While the mother is a force of mercifulness, the always grim-faced father (Janusz Chabior) is a force of nature trying to impose strictly human, that is predatory, identity on the boy. The father cuts his horns, teaches him to shoot and takes him on the hunting trips with his buddies once the boy starts coming of age. However, the other part of the boy’s identity starts rebelling and the young man has to make a choice – is he a deer or is he a boy.”

     If the father, in what appears to come as an almost sudden decision as he moves out of his brooding presence to take up a saw and cut away his young son’s antlers, is deeply disturbed by his son’s “difference,” as time goes on the adolescent boy himself can be seen in the bathroom, sawing away at his own crown, as if it were simply a part of grooming. Frankly, it is the eeriest part of this constantly moody film.

    The goriest moment, however, is when the father and his buddies shoot a buck deer and bring it home, hang it up to let the blood drip out, and cut into up into venison slabs for meals which will last them through many a month.

     The men do the butchering, while the mother cooks the daily meals for her carnivorous brood.

    The terror of these scenes come from our awareness that the boy has already begun to identify with the herds of deer roaming about the family cabin. In his attempt to be one of the family, he too, we realize, must consume the food which his symbolic ancestors have been slaughtered to provide.

     Yet, there is no protest. In fact, the movie is basically without dialogue, language replaced here but grunts and gestures (at times provided by the dubbing of Croatian actors). But we sense that despite his attempts to be just like everyone around him, there is an undercurrent of desperation in the deep glare of the boy’s (played at different ages by Mieszko Czachor, Eryk Maj, and Andrzej Adamczak) tender eyes.

      Obviously, this is a story of outsiderness that is as old as storytelling itself, as Stojiljković notes, part of the endless discussion about “identity as a choice category or as a predestined necessity,” an argument embedded into battles between the rationalists and the empiricists.

      But for any LGBTQ viewer it also cannot help but call up the entire experience of being a queer individual in a normative household. The metaphor is simply too strong to be ignored. And whether Polish director Katarzyna Gondek has intended it or not, one cannot help but associate the antlers that keep growing back as metaphor for gay desire that in most children is tamped down and controlled again and again in an attempt to live a heteronormative life before it becomes so all powerful that it can no longer be controlled or ignored.

      In most cultures, moreover, deer are associated with the qualities that defy male macho behavior—which the brooding father clearly represents—deer being connected instead with kindness, softness, and gentleness, and because of those qualities with the imagination and the spiritual. Moreover, in at least two large cultures, deer are associated with homosexuality. Throughout Arabic poetry a deer often symbolizes an effeminate young man. In Portuguese culture, particularly in Brazil, the word deer (yiado) is used as a slang word to mock gay men, mostly because the word, linguistically, is a corruption of the word “transviado,” which means an individual who has strayed and lost his way.

      The young “deer boy” of this story, however, seems intent upon pleasing his family, at one point from an overhead blind for hunters catching the eyes of a deer in the lens of his gun before shooting it dead. The father and his friends are clearly proud of the boy. And when later the father descends to find and claim the trophy, standing below while the boy has stayed behind to point out the boy’s prize, we hear the gun go off once again.    

      In the very next scene we see the boy, now grown and naked, with a full head of antlers, walking away toward the wilderness, obviously as his way to join his own kind.     

    The promotional comments, finally, put this film very much in the context of gay literature by describing the film as being about “how man kills the thing he loves,” which cannot help but call up Oscar Wilde’s much quoted maxim from The Ballad of Reading Goal, “Each man kills the thing he loves.” In that single scene this boy has seemingly killed both his kind and kin.

Los Angeles, March 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Sverre Kvamme | Villdyr (Wild Beasts) / 2017

testing love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sverre Kvamme (screenwriter and director) Villdyr (Wild Beasts) / 2017 [10 minutes]

 

Norwegian director Sverre Kvamme begins in powerful short film with two young boys, the curly haired more dominant of the two, moving in toward the other time and again almost as if were an exercise routine, but with the sound effects of a rhythmic pumping that transforms the scene into a kind of sexual act, made ludicrous by the winter landscape and their heavy coats, but no less powerful for its impact upon the two boys. It is clear that the more innocent of the two (Mads Pettersen and Erlend Antonsen Meløy) is already desperately in love—if you can define an intense pre-pubescent desire in that manner—with his friend.

     But they are not alone in this winter playscape, as in the very next scene we observe the two boys, like pack-dogs, leading a sled topped with other children, boys and girls (Karoline Marie Røsberg Olsen, Johanne Gjertsen Larsen, Andrea Mørtsell Bjerkeseth, and Adrian Lesteberg Solberg). It is the girls, in fact, who will lure on the boys to several of their wild actions, simply to prove their childhood notions of manliness.

     In a grocer’s, the more dominant boy, Jonas, fills his friend’s backpack with stolen candy, and they run away from the store, Jonas hugged for his daring by the girls in their “gang.” One of the girls even kisses the curly-headed thief, his friend looking on in a bemused manner, but perhaps already revealing his jealousy for the freedom to act in such a manner.

     Soon after, the kids discover an abandoned house, Jonas helping in the girl, before being followed by the others. After investigating the place, checking out its seemingly “ancient” objects, its rooms, and its various drawers and cupboards, the girls first, the boys following begin to tear down the ceiling coverings and the wallpaper, before tearing apart chairs, breaking the dishes, bottles, and other kitchen ware still in their original places, and ripping apart a cupboard in which some of them were stored. There is no logic to their ransacking the place, simply the fact that they feel free to do so, releasing it appears, their pent-up frustration for all the careful attention to the very same objects they are demanded to pay at home—which might explain the girls’ particular involvement in this rampage.

     The nameless red-cheeked friend, however, wonders off into another room where he discovers a large hammer, checking it out with a few slams to a table before laying it down and sitting upon the floor in seeming thoughtfulness. His silence is interrupted by his friend running into the room with a girl on the chase.

      He immediately rises, pulling his friend away from the girl, demanding his friend lay down. The boy begrudgingly does so, frustrated by even having to give in to the weaker boy’s demands. With hammer in hand once again, he straddles the other boy’s body, putting the hammer over his friend’s head. When the one asks what he’s doing it, he responds only with a question, “Do you trust me?”

      The curly-headed kid cautiously expresses, “Yes.”

      His friend asks him to “Open wide,” Jonas opening his mouth as his buddy puts the head of the hammer slightly into it, holding it there until the friend responds, “Come on.”

      Again, the rosy-cheeked boy asks, “Do you trust me?”

      “Yes.”

      After a long pause, he asks, “Ready,” lifting the hammer over his head, the girl looking on in horror, Jonas almost pleading, “What are you gonna do?” Calling out his name, he brings down the hammer beside him, the girl suddenly pulling it out of his hand and shouting out, “What the fuck are you doing?” “Give me the hammer,” the boy demands, she responding, “Are you a complete idiot?”

     His angry answer is crucial for comprehending what all of these strange events might mean. “Why do you always have to destroy?” Jonas, standing, shakes his head as the girl walks off uncomprehendingly.  

      One might first imagine that the boy is asking her about the destruction of this derelict houses’ objects, although we also recognize she has also just destroyed the test to which he was putting Jonas, a test of trust and love. But what she truly has destroyed for the boy, I would argue, is the singular relationship he had with Jonas which we observed in the very first scene, interrupted by her and the other’s girls attempts to pull Jonas into their orbit with their expressions of normative heterosexual love.

      Jonas turns back to his friend with a look of utter exasperation, appearing to comprehend his motives but also disapproving of them.

       In the very next seen, the “gang” is seen running across a snowy field in their swimming suits, barefoot. In a cold environment such as Norway’s, it is apparently necessary to prove to oneself that one can easily endure it. I recall some of my classmates during my childhood year in that country attempting to see who might hold out the longest into winter before beginning to dress in an overcoat, perhaps to impress me as well, without quite realizing that I had grown up in just such a harsh climate.

      The girls rush ahead, taking a leap off the wharf into the fjord. Jonas is rushing ahead until his friend puts his arms around him and pulls him back, Jonas asking, “What?” as his friend replies, “You will die. …I don’t want you to die.”

       Jonas permits the hug for a few seconds longer before almost brutally pushing the red-cheeked boy away from him and thrusting him to the ground as he dives off into the cold waters.

       Our young friend stands, looks down into the deep arctic waters, and, as he momentarily recalls the warm body of his beloved friend, dives in. He has passed Jonas’ test, in his mind risking his own life for his friend.

       If these are wild beasts, they are not mindlessly marauding and plundering their space, but unknowingly playing out the most serious of mating rituals, making and testing alliances for years to come.

 

Los Angeles, May 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023). 

Andrés Losada | Tarro (Kick the Can) / 2017

fair exchange

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrés Losada (screenwriter and director) Tarro (Kick the Can) / 2017 [5 minutes]

 

In this short Columbian film, a group of teenagers determine to play a game; some want basketball, others soccer, another kick the can (tarro) which is a kind of hide-and-seek game. The last game is chosen, but to see who must be the first seeker, they settle the matter by playing a quick finger- grabbing game, each putting a finger under the palm of one of their group, whoever’s finger getting caught in the grab being the one who goes first as the kicker and seeker.

      Much of what they decide gets expressed in such finger games. Two of the boys (David Cobos and Juan Camilo Ortiz) are hiding together as they watch another boy discovered crouching behind a car. Seeing a cut in a nearby fence which separates their playground from a highly cared-for wood and yard, they determine to move off into that safer space. But once again they use a finger game to decide who goes first.

      Manuel slides through the fence, the other eventually following. For a rather long period of time, given the film’s short durance, the second boy seeks out the first, wandering through this version of the Garden of Eden in search of his friend.

      When he finally meets up with the other boy they stand opposite one another, the second boy almost holding his breath at the face-to-face appearance of the other. The more dominant Manuel suddenly pulls off his T-shirt standing half-naked to the obvious wonderment of the second boy. Now take off yours, he insists, explaining this way it will be harder to identify them when they’re discovered. Yet the explanation almost seems like an afterthought, even more so for the surprised second boy, taking his shirt off almost as if it were a secret rite played out with his buddy.

       The first boy quickly pulls on the other’s shirt, while the second slowly pulls the first boy’s shirt over his head. When the other isn’t looking he takes a deep smell of the shirt he is now wearing.

       Just as we might have expected given his earlier reactions, it becomes clear that he is in love with his friend, enjoying the heady smell even of his body sweat. He calls over to his friend Manuel, who has become already to trudge off deeper in the wilds, calling out “Nice one!”

       Presumably, Manuel will comprehend his message as an appreciation of his idea, but our young gay friend clearly means something entirely different.

 

Los Angeles, June 25, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023). (screenwriter and director)