Fuoco Maria Balduzzi | Wolves / 2016

the boy in the woods

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fuoco Maria Balduzzi and Joachim Neef (screenplay), Fuoco Maria Balduzzi (director) Wolves / 2016 [20 minutes]

 

London Film School student Fuoco Maria Balduzzi’s 2016 film Wolves feels more like a cinematic fairytale than a contemporary story of loneliness and isolation, the context in which it is primarily set.   

      It begins with the central event of the work, a sixteen-year-old boy Josh (Roly Botha), sitting alone in the cold forest, sketching something in his book when he suddenly notices a vague image, and checking it out discovers a nearly naked boy crouching near the forest floor. He slowly approaches the terrorized boy, Blaine (Jay Walker) who seems unable to speak and ready to speed off at the slightest of provocations. Slowly he peels off his overcoat and scarf and presumably gives them up to the boy before himself running off back to his house in the English countryside.

     His father, Robert (Gareth Davies), unpacking groceries in the kitchen, queries him about his missing jacket, but Josh doesn’t answer, sloughing off even helping put the groceries away by his claim of having homework to finish.

      The next morning early Josh again returns to the forest, this time discovering a small shrine lined with an offering of ferns, flower petals, and other objects, where Josh lays out the gifts he’s brought in backpack: shirts, pants, tennis shoes, presents to the wild child.

      As he sits writing or sketching for a while, he observes Blaine again appear, this time with a handful of ferns which he ritualistically places on the ground as moves step by step, following the ferns he lays out before him, as if he cannot walk the sacred ground with protecting it from his footsteps with a leaf.

     He moves directly up the Josh, handing him a pinecone, turns and walks away, once more moving step by step upon the ferns, Josh following after.

     The movie interrupts Josh’s forest adventures to show him in his room, his father knocking on the door to nicely ask him to join them downstairs to watch the soccer game on TV, an invitation to which Josh simply says, “No, I don’t like football,” quickly shutting out his caring father. Both

stand at the door for a moment after, clearly frustrated with their lack of communication.

     Back in the forest, the boys further participate in strange ritualistic games, Blaine pointing with a large, many-branched stick, touching his new friend’s shoulder with it as if appointing him to some role in life with Josh picking up the far end and pointing it the sky. When he brings it back down again, Blaine reaches out his fingers along the branch, Josh meeting him with a touch and then a joining of the hands that appears to seal a bond between them that is quickly restated in a gesture of love as John brings his hand up to cup the strange boy’s cheek. It is as if both of them have miraculously found what they were seeking without knowing that they were even seeking anything.

     In his room again, Josh looks out the window to witness his father talking to his other male friends, expressing his intense disconcertion about his ability to communicate with is son. Josh looks on without seemingly being able to offer any truce between the two. As we know he has entered his own fantasy-like world with the strange boy wandering the woods. And in a brilliant intercut, Balduzzi shifts back to the boys in the forest with Blaine now carefully caressing Josh’s face, this time however with a gloved hand, as Josh returns the caress. In short, the expressions of their love have continued, with a quick glimpse of Josh raiding the home kitchen for provisions which he might share with Blaine.

      In the forest the boys have now constructed a kind of tent-like structure made up of branches, towels, and bedsheets, decorated, like a Christmas tree, with pinecones. We see them wandering the woods looking for other materials but when they enter a clearing, Blaine refuses to follow, despite Josh’s assurances. Back at the tent, Josh is attempting to light a Bunsen burner when suddenly, in the distance, they hear the call of “Blaine!” Josh again tries to tell his friend to ignore it, but when the call is heard again, the boy speeds off with Josh running after him. They finally meet up on a road running through the trees, Blaine in tears, Josh hugging him closely in an attempt to calm and soothe is terror. Josh assures him that he’s safe with him.

      But we know that even in fairytales children are not always safe. And as Stephen Sondheim has shown us, the real world too often intrudes. When Josh returns home late at night, his father is waiting in his room. They share the anger between the two that has long been brewing, the father’s total frustration for his son’s refusal to explain what’s happening in his life, and the boy’s evident resentment of his father for his mother having left. The father demands the boy be quarantined to his room at the very moment when the boy feels his new love needs him the most.

      We see the inevitable as Josh quickly packs his bag and escapes the house, returning in the deep of night to their forest hideout. When Josh meets up with Blaine, it is now his turn to cry, the other comforting him. The two boys finally share their love cuddled up in the makeshift tent. But it is a momentary joy they share, the next morning spooning out peanut butter with their fingers and holding branches upon their heads like deer antlers as they wander through the woods. But as they lay out in the afternoon sun, Josh’s father discovers his son is not in his room. And as another night approaches, the call goes out to the community to find the boy.

      Meanwhile, Josh wakes up with the need to pee and rises. While he is out, a man suddenly springs upon the sleeping Blaine, pulling him brutally up to take him off, as he shouts out, “Did you think you could hide from me. Did you think you can get away?” Josh tries to fend him off and finally hits him over the head with an object that sends him crashing to the forest floor.

      As the men back at his house gather to strategize about finding Josh, he enters.

      In the next scene he and Blaine are the backseat of a car, and Blaine is asked to go with “the people who have come to take him away.”

    Unfortunately, the film ends far too abruptly, and we can only imagine what has happened: that Blaine has been kept by a violent man, perhaps his father or perhaps not, but clearly his abuser. The way the boy behaves it is clear he has kept him isolated, perhaps not even allowed to learn the skills of language. The boy, moreover, seems to be of Lapp or of an indigenous Eskimo origin. At one point as Josh returns home, one of the men throws out the name Harkstead, one imagines the name of the man who Josh has killed, perhaps a Norwegian who has brought the boy to England which could explain a Lap connection and would offer a reason why the boy speaks no English, Sámi being his native language.

     Presumably, the people who have come take Blaine away are the county authorities who will attempt to provide him with help and therapy, perhaps eventually find a safe home for him.

    What we do get firm evidence of is that the incident has brought Josh and his father together, as the boy hugs his dad to comfort him for what has happened and what he himself has done. Presumably, the authorities have believed his “fairy” tale. What we do know is that the experience has helped Josh to realize who he truly is and that he is capable of feeling and sharing deep love.

     For someone like me, who loves to find parallels and links throughout cinema and literature, what strikes me about this beautiful film is just how similar it is to the 1995 US film, Parallel Sons, another tale about a disoriented young man who hides the man he loves in the woods and attempts to escape abusive love, in that film without success. That film would unlikely have been known by the young filmmaker Balduzzi.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

The Youth Panel of the Old Museum Art Centre, Belfast | Wasteland: Michael’s Story / 2016

 

getting over it

by Douglas Messerli

 

The Youth Panel of the Old Museum Art Centre, Belfast (screenwriters and directors) Wasteland: Michael’s Story / 2016 [9 minutes]

 

Michael (Caolan Owens) is facing difficult times. He is a gay boy in a seemingly intolerant family in Belfast, the father (Fra Gunn) and mother (Gail McCorriston) not only unable to listen to his concerns but also unable to communicate with one another ever since the suicide one year earlier of Michael’s brother Kevin. We don’t know what was the cause of suicide, but we can only wonder was Kevin also gay or perhaps just a victim to the general intolerance of his parents.

     Michael does have a friend he loves at school, David (Adam Duff), who scoffs at Michael’s fear of being discovered and tries to convince him that it doesn’t matter what other people think about his sexuality. But Michael is dubious and clearly fearful of his parents’ reactions.

      As a celebration of their second month together, David has purchased a T-shirt which he jokingly demands Michael wear. It reads “Some People Are Gay. Get Over It.”

    After another night of his father speaking mostly to the TV, Michael leaves the house. Upon returning, he observes his mother outside his bedroom, his father going through his bedside drawers. Having suspected drugs, they’ve found the T-shirt, Michael admitting that he’s gay and confronting both of them for pretending to be a family for the long year since his brother’s death.      

      Angry and hurt, he again escapes the house in the dark of night.

      Evidently, he is hit by a car—only foretold in the film by a fast-speeding car rushing in front of him as he stops by a pedestrian walkway. Michael wakes up in the hospital to find his friend David beside him and his parents there as well, finally having come to accept their son for being gay and permitting his friend to remain by his side.

      A film funded by the British Film Institute (BFI), the “Into Film Shorts” program was supported by a lottery through the UK Film Council’s First Light Movies Initiative which permitted 15- to 19-year-olds to make films guided by professionals. Accordingly, Wasteland, is well-meaning but clearly simplistic in its reformatory intentions. As heartfelt as it is, we don’t get to truly know Michael and David well-enough to let them completely into our emotions, and they become notable stick-figures for the problems facing many young boys of their age. Nonetheless, one couldn’t imagine a better-intentioned program, evidently no longer in operation given that their Facebook and Twitter (now X) accounts seems to have vanished. But others of their films, not all LGBTQ-centered, are available on YouTube at the time of this essay.

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

McGhee Monteith | He Could've Gone Pro / 2016

oblivion

by Douglas Messerli

McGhee Monteith (screenwriter and director) He Could've Gone Pro / 2016 [14 minutes]

 

He Could’ve Gone Pro is an angry little film, featuring as the focus of derision a stock character, a chain-smoking, mean-minded, unthinking and unblinking Southern granny right out of Flannery O’Connor and later diversions into the Southern gothic mode through horror films, Gayle Kellum (Cecelia Wingate).

     Her daughter Debbie (the film’s writer and director McGhee Monteith) hardly can deign to talk to her, let alone keep her abreast of her life, evidently having never revealed that she is now living with Lamar Bedford (Stephen Garrett), and that the only reason that they return home for Christmas in the standard $200 check that Gayle puts in the stockings over her hearth along with the numerous angel figurines she scatters across her living room.

     She even sets an extra plate at the table, not for Elijah, but for Debbie’s brother who “died” as a young high school boy, the young football-playing boy who, as the title argues, “Could’ve gone Pro.” Debbie has no intention of hanging around for Gayle’s honey-baked ham, but sticks around to get her check—as Lamar reminds her in the car, they could use the extra money—and, this year, to reveal to Lamar just what a monster her mother truly is.

     Unfortunately, we’re so distracted by Debbie’s revenge and Gayle’s absolute denial of the truth and her inability to comprehend her actions and viewpoints, that we almost lose sight of the story at the heart of this Christmas horror tale, another of the numerous queer American dystopias.

     A few drinks pass through her lips before Debbie begins to reveal the truth about her brother Daniel, events surrounding his death that have not allowed her to sleep, as she admits, for 10 years.

When she demands that Gayle tell Lamar how her brother Daniel died, the gorgon can only report that his “heart stopped beating.” Gayle sarcastically agrees, “This tends to happen when you shoot yourself in a closet with a hunting rifle.” “Lamar,” she continues, “would you like to know why my big brother shot himself,” as he pours herself another whiskey. “Daniel blew his brains out because mamma saw him kissing Jason Gordon, a boy from our school.”

      Like so many of these stories, the boy’s mother told him he was sick and threatened to send him to a conversion camp, denying her love, and, in her last words to him, told him “If you choose to live this perverse life, then you are dead to me.”

     The mother’s defense: “What was I supposed to do, stand by and watch? He would have lost everything, scholarships, babies, a normal life. He could’ve gone pro. What was I supposed to do.”

Debbie’s answer is simple and pure: “You were supposed to love him. You were supposed to love us.”

     Debbie, who as a young child stood by and said nothing, admits she will be tortured for the rest of her life for her inaction. But here the question of what we might suppose the child to have done has true meaning. Could she have stopped her mother from speaking her awful words of hate? Might she have changed her mother’s mind had she spoken up?

     So, she and Lamar collect their check and leave after respooling yet another US horror story about homophobia still embedded deeply in our roots.

     But lest we imagine that the mind of someone like Gayle Kellum could ever be changed, we watch her repeat the scene from the first frames of the film immediately after her daughter leaves the house. She picks up the fallen angels Debbie has knocked over, takes out a cigarette, and like Tennessee Williams’ mother in The Glass Menagerie, Amanda Wingfield, she picks up the phone and makes another call to a neighboring friend, with a “Happy happy and a ho ho to you,” immersing herself in a world of mean-spirited gossip, solving the problems of the world without a clue to understanding those involved in difficult situations that do not fit her world view.

     It is sad that in the 21st Century we still have so very many LGBTQ films telling stories of self-murder and attempted suicide by young men and women who because of their sexual differences from the heterosexual world in which they lived, were rejected by their parents. Among them are the characters in Marcus Schwenzel Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love) (2009), Mikel Ledesma’s Losing Your Flames (2014).  Miguel Lafuente Mi Hermano (My Brother) (2015), Lucas Morales’ Pourquoi mon fils? (Why My Son?) (2015), Daniel Castilhos’ Meninos Tristes (Blue Boys) (2016), Farbod Khostinat’s Two Little Boys (2020), Daniel G. Karslake’s documentary For They Know Not What They Do (2020), and Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank (2020)—not to mention the dozens of films in which young boys are locked out of their homes and must face a life on the streets or, in a few cases, are outright murdered by their parents or relatives for their sexual “perversions.”

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Alejandro Beltrán | Lost Years / 2016

the rape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alejandro Beltrán and Samuel García (screenplay), Alejandro Beltrán (director) Lost Years / 2016 [21 minutes]

 

Felix (Samuel Garcia) has just been shipped off to boarding school after the death of his mother and is tense in meeting his cynical new roommate Leo (Jack O’Neill), who tells him if he wants to survive in this school he will have to relax. Immediately after, Leo pulls out a bottle of whiskey and pours his new mate a drink, only to realize that this is Felix’s first taste of alcohol.    

     When Leo discovers that Felix is reading Magnus Hirschfeld and His Quest for Sexual Freedom,* they suddenly become fast friends, Leo sneaking him illegally out of the school on a bicycle trip, which ends up, as do so many films about young teen boys falling in love, with the two of them cavorting in some stranger’s swimming pool, and with Felix’s first gay kiss.

     The two quickly become lovers, but the fact that Leo will soon be graduating and the Headmaster of the school can be seen lurking around the showers and locker rooms do not bode well for Felix. Some of the boys soon begin heckling him, knocking books out of his hands as he walks down the halls, and generally stalking him.

      Leo finally presents Felix with a gift of tickets, telling him that he wants him to go away with him so that they might begin a new life together, Felix being delighted with the prospect. The two finally join together for sex, but Felix, for whom it is the first time, is too nervous to go through with it. Nonetheless, they do share their love for one another, and snuggle up in bed comfortable with one another’s bodies.    

    Soon after, the two boys who have been stalking Felix rape him in the shower, the Schoolmaster watching, obviously approving of or even having instigated the act.

     Felix goes into a kind of depression, afraid to talk about the incident even with Leo, and now fearing to even be touched. While he assures Leo that he still wants to go away with him, he basically pushes Leo away in the manner that rape victims often do with their loved ones, perhaps inwardly blaming himself or just being now terrified of intimacy. And soon after Leo leaves the school without his friend.

     Four years later, Felix now a businessman, reads in the paper about the Headmaster of his former school, now accused of rape. Felix shows up suddenly at Leo’s door, a voiceover stating that he had spoken to no one over the years about what had happened, but finally it was time to come forward. The fact that he visits Leo suggests that it may have been Leo who made the charge, that he too was raped long before Felix had he arrived, but had simply dealt with it differently.

      Spanish director Alejandro Beltrán’s beautifully filmed short movie is a powerful statement on how rape can alter an individual’s life. But if there is any criticism I might make about this film is how it seemingly fetishizes the sexual act as something so special that Felix allows it to destroy him.

     One might have imagined that after that first kiss, Leo and Felix would have immediately jumped into bed and into one another’s arms and other orifices as their youthful hormones dictated. The fact that even after scenes of heavy kissing, sunsets, and everything that goes with teenage gay love as portrayed in the movies that they still do not have sex and that, when they first decide to, Felix is too nervous, doesn’t register with my youthful experiences. Sex was not something one planned for but was an almost immediate expression of the excitement and pleasure of being with the other good-looking person of one’s age. The important thing, the relationship came after, not before. But, of course, we know not every young man or women behave in the same manner. Felix may have highly religiously educated or simply shy and fearful about the sexual act. But it is that worshipful attitude toward sexuality, I would argue, that helped to make it nearly impossible for him to have even physical contact after being raped, while obviously Leo didn’t have that problem—although we can see throughout that he is certainly bitter about his school life. This film reveals once again how rape is related to and an aspect of sexual hate and violence.

 

*Magnus Hirschfeld was a German philosopher, philologist, and medical authority who argued for homosexual and transexual rights throughout the Weimer Republic, establishing Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Research) in Berlin and fighting for what would eventually become LGBTQ+ rights. The Nazis destroyed the institute, its extensive library and research data in 1933, sending Hirschfeld into retreat to France. I discuss his immense effect on queer life throughout these volumes.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Damian Siqueiros | The Arrow / 2016

coring the apple

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matthew Richardson (creator and choreographer), Damian Siqueiros (director) The Arrow / 2016 [4 minutes]

 

The project, created for and with circus artist Matthew Richardson and performed with Francis Perreault, represents in acrobatics on the Cyr wheel how the couple fell in love and what their relationship has meant to them.

     To describe it certainly wouldn’t do the work justice and, furthermore, I do not have a language to fully relay the events of its images.

      One can say in general that it begins the couple approaching one another, reaching out and enjoying one another encircled by the wheel, before the other walks off. He comes back quickly, however, spinning with the other and interlocking bodies.

      Although at moments one leaves become coming back into the seemingly magnetic pull of the twirling circle, most of the film reveals their utter engagement.

 

     In the film’s last scenes, the two performers throw dry paint dust at one another, coloring their bodies in hues of purple, blue, and yellow and the wheel itself, picking up the colors creates its only images from its spinning motion. Obviously, it signifies the opening up of their selves to the complete beauty of the world, although personally I found these last images a little kitsch and circus like, preferring the marvel of their nearly nude bodies to the artificiality of the paint colors.

      I’ve produced a series of smaller images in an attempt to represent the beauty of their motions.

   The creators felt that their 2015 work became a homage to the LGBTQ community and, in particularly, to the victims of the Orlando, Florida attack on June 12, 2016.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Charles Whiteley | My Father's Son / 2023

shooting at clay pigeons

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Whiteley (screenwriter and director) My Father's Son / 2023 [10 minutes]

 

One has to wonder for whom the short queer film, My Father’s Son, is really intended? Are we about to embrace yet another 1920’s British drama moving back into the territory E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh long ago explored, the class differences between British boys in love? Frankly, one has to wonder how many boarding school boys and Cambridge/Oxford queers will run during a gay festival to see this film?

     I suppose there are enough infatuated US boys that love this kind of thing, but here all it’s so obvious what the film is showing us that it seems to be of little interest other than the beautiful Lincolnshire landscape.

     A gamekeeper is watching over the young lord of the house, Jack (Alastair Coughlan), as he attempts to hit clay pigeons, at which he is not very adept. He meets up with the gamekeeper’s son Michael (Forrest Bothwell) carrying his rifle along as well.

     For a few moments they rift about class differences, particularly about the cost of their guns and the number of cars Jack’s father owns; yet all in a way that makes it clear that they have a close relationship that both would like to further develop.

     At the next shooting site, Michael is about to show his prowess, but at the last moment asks Jack to help show him how to shoot. It is a ruse obviously to get Jack to come near and actually embrace him as he pretends to explain how to properly pull the trigger. The moment of their togetherness is performed and filmed quite brilliantly, as the tension between them builds.

     But it is interrupted by gamekeeper (Steve O'Dare), who recognizes immediately what their maneuver indicates, in remedy sending Michael off home, for the moment at least destroying any plans the boys might have had for sharing their sexual attraction. Michael’s father sends his own son away, attending to his titular charge.

     So, we might ask, what is the real issue here? Certainly, Michael’s father is not the first in queer film history to disapprove of his son’s gay tendencies, and surely the two boys might find other ways of meeting up if they are truly bent on it. In Forster’s Maurice, the servant simply climbed up a ladder to get into the bedroom of his wealthier would-be lover. And it’s quite evident Michael is clever, knowledgeable about the animals of the woods as well as the ways of Jack and his class.

     Accordingly, what is all the lovely fuss about? This may be a beautifully filmed short work about an unfortunate incident, but what does it tell us, truly, about these young men and their apparent love for one another? Perhaps that such a love can never flourish, not because they both cannot find a way around their conservative parents, but because of what becomes evident when Jack supports the gamekeeper’s command for Michael to leave, suggesting there is no way to argue or disagree with the older man; it is clear that he will not intervene in the traditional separation that these two must endure.

     Their relationship can never blossom in such an environment. Michael is well aware that there is nothing you can do for a bird that has suffered a rifle shot but let the crows peck at it, to allow nature to put it to death.

     And in this world, class structure is as certain as nature, where there is no room in it for a young ward of the mansion to fall in love with the gamekeeper’s son. Yet, did we truly need another film to tell us that? And to whom is Whiteley attempting to communicate his sad assessment? The Jacks of the world are taught this from the day of their birth. And even the stupidest of us commoners knows that that nothing good can come of shooting at clay pigeons.  

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).