Wrik Mead | Fruit Machine / 1998

the mounties’ frankenstein

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (director) Fruit Machine / 1998

 

In what Canadian critic Tom Waugh has described as an “uncharacteristic” film, the always creative genius, Wrik Mead, explores a terrifyingly absurdist moment in Canadian LGBTQ history, when during the Cold War the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (CMP and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) hired the Carleton University psychologist, Dr. Frank Robert Wake to create a program that might determine whether or not the working men in public service were gay.

    Subjects were required to view erotic images and were tested on their responses to “homosexual words” and what were thought to be standard homosexual responses to different aspects of behavior. The fruit machine itself was a device, and early form of a lie detector which measure perspiration, pulse, and eye dilation in response to erotic images and words.

     Thousands of Canadians lost their jobs or resigned, some even dying by suicide.

     Eventually the entire program was found to be based on faulty concepts and innate problems with the machines, and the project was cancelled in the late 1960s. However, the RCMP research continued and over 9,000 individuals lost their jobs.

    As the Wikipedia article on this machine notes: “The functional mechanism of the ‘fruit machine’ was pseudo-scientific and its results inaccurate. First, the pupillary response test was based on fatally flawed assumptions: That the chosen visual stimuli would produce a specific involuntary reaction that could be measured scientifically with 1960s technology; that homosexuals and heterosexuals would respond to these stimuli differently with enough frequency and specificity to sort them; and that there were only two types of sexuality.”

     The second major series of problems concerned presumptions of the veracity of the machine and its results: “One physiological problem with the method was that the researchers failed to take into account the varying sizes of the pupils and the differing distances between the eyes. Other problems that existed were that the pictures of the subjects' eyes had to be taken from an angle, as the camera would have blocked the subjects' view of the photographs if it were placed directly in front. Also, the amount of light coming from the photographs changed with each slide, causing the subjects' pupils to dilate in a way that was unrelated to their interest in the picture. Finally, the dilation of the pupils was also exceedingly difficult to measure, as the change was often smaller than one millimeter.”

     In Mead’s satire we see Dr. Wake simultaneously reading out a series of “yes” and “no” questions at lightning speed, while at the same time a male individual sits at the machine reacting presumably to what he sees on the slides.

    When the work day finishes, Wake packs up his briefcase, very carefully handling it as he almost sneaks out the door of his research location, looking carefully both ways before proceeding. He carefully shirks others and as makes his way down the street before stopping by an ice-skating rink, where, after putting on skates, he glides across the ice, briefcase in hand.

     At home, he slinks through the doorway, sits down on his couch, and pours out two stiff drinks of Canadian Club whiskey. He takes a sip, opens his briefcase, and pulls out a gay man dressed on in leather, falling to his knees as if ready to perform fellatio.

     The suggestion is that the vast amount of material his has collected has actually gone into creating the perfect gay Frankenstein-like companion for Blake.

    The true-or-false questions that Mead proposes are loaded with crack-pot notions of what might define gay sexuality, such as “I would like to be a florist,” “I like dramatics,” “I think I would like to work as a dress designer,” “I have often wished I were a girl,” “There was never a time in my life when I didn’t like to play with dolls,” creating a hilarious perception of what gay men represent.

     Yet strangely, for all of its absurd narrative fabulation, this tale is not nearly as puzzling nor as funny as many other Mead works. Certainly any gay man of Mead’s age in Canada would have felt more anger and outrage than satiric satisfaction, and that, I believe, comes through in this director’s work. Wake, in this work is being revealed has having other more personal interests than research of any informational “truth” about male sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Alexis Van Stratum | Fast Forward / 2004

a young man standing at the edge of a dance floor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexis Van Stratum (screenwriter and director) Fast Forward / 2004 [5 minutes]

 

Dutch director Alexis Van Stratum’s fast forward is what you might describe as a short film centered around a gimmick, and not particularly, in this case, an original one.

    A young shy teen (Geert Hunaerts) moves to the dance floor of a gay nightclub, swaying slightly with the music and clearly ready to join in if he can only find the right partner. He spots a cute boy (Nicolas Gilson) who stares back at him; but a moment or two later the youth’s boyfriend returns with a drink. The shy teen is obviously disappointed.

     Soon after the teen has transformed into a slightly older man (Matteo Simoni), but still attractive, who spots another cute boy on the floor. This time he does meet up with the boy and they speak, drowned out by the music, but obviously asking if he’d like a drink.

      In the moment or two he in which it takes for the bartender to bring him the drinks, we discover upon our hero’s (Bejamin Ramon) turning around that he has grown a mustache, having grown a little older. And when he returns to the someone older and perhaps wiser youth, the twink pulls away from his embracement.

     Shortly after, our shy teen has grown into an old man (Koen Onghena), sitting it out at a club booth, again with a young boy to whom he gives a large bill before he leaves the table.

     A few minutes later, a still older version of the original teen (Alain Von Goethem) stands swaying just like his youthful self, but suddenly is stricken by a heart attack and falls to the floor, presumably dead.

     Yes, time does move almost that fast, and all those years our cute teenager has somehow sadly never found someone to love. Perhaps if he simply got out of that bar or sought out more age- appropriate mates. One muses over the other possibilities.

     As one commentator with the moniker of CinemaSerf hints, it is difficult to point to this short film’s message, if it has one. There seems almost to be a whiff of homophobia here in the film’s suggestion of “the shallowness or fickleness of gay existence.” Surely, we don’t need another reiteration of carpe diem.

     I’ve done a lot of embarrassing things in my fairly long life, but I’m sure I’ll never fall dead on the floor of a gay nightclub. Unlike the old geyser in this film, I’m far too self-conscious about how silly I might look standing at the edge of a dance floor; but then I’m sure the young shy teen was just as self-conscious, which is perhaps why he did not enter into the fray of a fuller life.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Dominic Haxton and David Rosler | Teens Like Phil / 2012

the uncle dying in the woods

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominic Haxton and Cherise Pascaul (screenplay, based on the original story by David Rosler), Dominic Haxton and David Rosler (directors) Teens Like Phil / 2012 [20 minutes]

 

This work begins with a young handsome teen, Phil (Adam Donovan) in bed listening to what now seems to be a totally fatuous and inappropriate message from the hippie-Zen British speaking guru of Berkeley Alan Watts speaking via radio station KPFA to a young man whose life is centered around the body: “The physical world is transient. It falls apart. And bodies that were once strong, smooth, and lovely in youth begin to wither, become corrupt and turn at last into skeletons.”

     Phil, utterly ignores him and begins his morning exercises. But as Watts talks about St. Paul’s beating his body into submission, all Phil can recall is another recent instance when his former friend, Adam (Jake Robbins) intruded into the shower to beat him.

     Phil is a terribly bullied student who seems to have no way out of the relationship he once prized with Adam, now transformed into an ugly event given Adam’s own sense of sexual fear and guilt. Since Adam himself is faced with his school friends teasing him for Phil being his BBF (best boyfriend) he tags Phil’s locker with the word “Fag” and goes out of his way to daily torture him, at one point grabbing, blindfolding, and forcing him under the shower in front of the other boys.

      One teacher (Virginia Bartholomew) is already aware that her best student seems to be having problems and perceives from his essays that it’s obvious that he’s struggling to come to terms with his sexuality; and she meets with the school Principal (Domenica Galati) in order to encourage a counseling session. But it’s clear, as in so many situations of the day, that the Principal is resisting making such an arrangement formal.

      Asked by his teacher to write a Janus-like report on how the past effects the future, Phil goes back into his earliest days with then friend Adam. The two boys out the woods encounter Phil’s uncle Mike (Ken Burmeister), a large framed older man who seems passed out on the forest floor for most the movie until he suddenly appears to be dead. He is a source for the teenagers for weed, but also for a stranger entertainment. Mike, apparently, is a gay man who still has a pack of photos of friends from his younger gay days which intrigue Phil and Adam, particularly since some of them are nude males. Adam seems to be open-minded about it, suggesting it’s just who you fall in love with, and together the boys share their first sexual experiences, with Adam suddenly kissing Phil, the latter of whom seems utterly startled by the event.

      Presumably it is the subject of his classroom essay, the teacher stopping by to check whether he’s given more thought to the meeting with others she’s arranged. But embarrassments continue. Now that boys’ relationship has utterly changed, his mother who hasn’t comprehended the alteration, attempts to offer Adam a ride home, Phil trying to make clear to her he’s longer a friend. Adam makes up an excuse that his brother is coming soon to pick him up.

       In contemplation of events, Phil goes out into the woods again to recounter his once more drunken and nearly dying uncle. At dinner his parents are insistent upon knowing where’s been and why he is late, creating further tension for the young man. Phil does not comprehend why his parents can’t take care of him, but their reasons too reek of homophobia. And Phil realizes it, perceiving the man was yet another example of Watts’ assertion that we “are all always falling apart, under decay.”

    The very thing which as a young man Phil is most aware of, his own body, seems to berated now by all those around him, a distant radio voice of KPFA Berkeley, the example of his own uncle, the torture he must now endure from a former friend, and his own parents who can’t be bothered by an old, decaying gay man like his mother’s brother.

      We witness other events between the two boys, far more deeply sexual, one in which after jumping upon Adam laying on the bed, Phil is called a bitch, his lips painted red with lipstick by Adam, his mother entering his room to discover the scene.

     We now hear the pompous Watts announcing that sexuality is what you can’t get rid of. “Do what you may, life is sexual.” If the body is of no importance, is constant decay, a young boy like Phil might ask, what is sexuality all about? Why do we have desires for the beautiful body that won’t exist for long, just like his brief “gay” relationship with Adam, if there can be no consummation, no growing into what that sexuality might mean?

     Why is a young man like Phil not only confused but frightened of attempting to even try to resolve the mess that has ended with Adam attempting to dissolve any sexual connection to Phil that still might remain, his beating the boy brutally, dragging him out into the open of the locker room, and pissing upon him? In confusion and frustration Phil tears up one of his uncle Mike’s treasured photos, only to discover that Mike has finally died. To where can Phil turn for love? Feeling like he may have lost the brief time when his body is still young, smooth, and beautiful, what choice does he have?

     Like so very many of the short films of the early 21st century, Phil determines to commit suicide, hanging himself in his bedroom.

     Of the films I’ve reviewed to date from the first three decades of the current century, bullying and self-harm are the major subjects of an extraordinarily large number of works, these primarily involving just peer abuse—which is to say nothing about the numerous films in which parents have themselves tortured and abused their gay children or the youths suffered larger attacks on them by social and religious institutions.

     I thought to list them within this essay but when I gathered the list, including some 32 works to date, I determined to group them in the footnote below.* The fact that these sorts of films have continued in profusion beyond 2020 is even more disturbing. Bullying in school or elsewhere is still one of the major sources of child abuse for young gay men and women. And, although they represent perhaps a smaller number of individuals, it is even worse in terms of percentages for young crossdressers and transsexuals.

     Fortunately, Phil fails at self-murder, and his mother is there is save him. Three months later he reports to a group of sympathetic friends in counseling that he is coming out of the hole in which he has been. Alan Watts pronounces that “if you can be truly honest about loving yourself. And if you don’t pull any punches and you don’t pretend you’re anything but exactly what you are, if you can do that you have no further problem.”

      Sorry, I need to check in on the young boys who have numerous further problems as these films give evidence. Society, parents, peers, and religious officials all work terribly hard to make young gay men feel they’re not only wrong in their feelings but that the feelings are a simple aberration that do not really mean anything and do not truly exist.

      We can declare all the freedoms in the world, but as long as restrictions remain within family, society, state, and church, young boys, girls, and those who can’t even identify their gender will have to suffer and risk the possibility of being destroyed.

      Although Teens Like Phil may not be the best film of its subject and time, it nonetheless gets immediately to heart of the problem. Nothing has truly changed between the past of the now lost Uncle Mike and his young nephew. They are linked to death instead of life. It’s only when you can make room for that uncle dying in the woods that you can allow young gay boys to grow up normally in your house.

 

*Alan Brown, O Beautiful (2002), Alexandra T. Steele, Like a Brother (2002), Brian Rowe Lonesome Bridge (2005), Boys Grammar (2005), Jaime Travis, The Saddest Boy in the World (2006), Matthieu Salmon Weekend in the Countryside (2007), Lisa Marie Gamlem, Benny’s Gym (2007), Soman Chainani, Kali Ma (2007), Evan Randall, The Letter (2008), David Färdmar, My Name Is Love (2008), Laurie Lynd Verona (2010), Venci Kostov, The Son (2012), Manny Mahal Room 303 (2012), Jansen Franklin, Live to Tell (2012), Adam Baran Jackpot (2012), Christin Freitag Beat Beat Beat (2013),  Dylan and Lazlo Tonk Caged (2013), David Tjen, It Gets Better (2014), Michael Ledesma Losing Your Flames (2014), Nate Trinrud Goodbye, Charley (2015), Chris Coats, Good Boy (2015), Dean Loxton,  Dániel (2015), Iver Jensen, We Remember Moments (2015), McGhee Monteith, He Could've Gone Pro (2016), Olivier Perrier, Faggot (2106), Eric Bizzarri Cold Hands (2017), Jovan James The Jump Off (2017), Gjertrud Bergaust Hunt (2018), Olivier Lallart, Fag (2019), Michael Beddoes, Sequins (2019), Ethan McDowell, Queer (2019). And certainly when I finish these early millennial volumes there will be numerous others.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

Jordi Estapé and Marc Vilajuana | Diumenge (Sunday) / 2012

sunday sleep-in

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jordi Estapé and Marc Vilajuana (screenwriters and director) Diumenge (Sunday) / 2012 [14 minutes]

 

For young students Marc (Marc Vilajuana) and his girlfriend Carla (Sara Tafalla), as their teacher Claudi announces to the class on the first day of their senior year, it’s not going to be an easy, but a difficult year. They’re in a period of change, he warns them, “A period of new things, new experiences….”

    One of those sudden changes appears almost mid-sentence in Claudi’s speech with the appearance of a handsome new student, Max (Enric González) who’s not even sure if he’s in the right room. Because he’s so handsome, Carla is already convinced that the new kid is gay, and by the time of their first recess, four class thugs have already chosen to bully the newcomer.

    Max is also intrigued by Marc, whom discovers lives just a short distance from him, and the two quickly become friends. As they walk home together, Marc apologizes for the thugs, while Max suggests they may have already spotted him as being gay, openly admitting his sexuality. As they turn to move on in different directions, Marc’s look back at his new friend suggests he’s more than a little bit interested in Max. And at home we see him trying to check out Max on his computer.

     By the very next day, the teacher announces that the next assignment will be for his students to write a paper on “globalization.” Gathering them into groups of three, includes Marc, Max, and Alex (Alex Duran), the latter the head to the gang that bullied Max the previous day. In fact, Alex refuses to join the group because he does perceive the others as gay. Most of the students negatively react, but he answers in his ill-informed defense, “Homosexuality is like an illness; when you get close to it you can become infected.” He and Max get into a verbal row, forcing Claudi to send Alex to the school principal. 

     Max also quickly leaves the room in response to the outburst, and when class is over, Marc hurries to the men’s room where he meets up with Max.

    In a nearby conference room, Claudi is lecturing Alex about his behavior, the message he sends only encourages just such attitudes: “I know that [being gay] can make you feel uncomfortable…”

   Contrapuntally, Max discusses his long-time problems in being gay, which previously resulted in attacks on him, his family, and later even his friends. He had thought a change of schools might make things better. “People don’t accept me,” he tells Marc.

    Back in the conference room, Claudi continues to reinforce the heart of the problem in his behavior, continuing with the sentence, “It’s normal that this kind of people could annoy you!”

    In the bathroom, Marc moves forward with a handkerchief, whipping Max’s nose and eyes before impulsively moving in for a kiss. The two boys hug, and at that very moment one of Alex’s gang enters to observe them.

      Without a beat the boys decide to meet up that Sunday to work on the paper they’ve been assigned.

     When Carla meets up with her boyfriend, she demands to know what’s going on with Max, finally forcing the question: “Do you like him?”

      His silence leads her to quickly walk away from him. The homophobia that rots human relationships has begun its rounds.

       In Marc’s bedroom, he’s marked off the days until Sunday, obviously impatient for the meetup and getting to know Max better. And we can almost feel his excitement and fears when the door finally buzzes.

       Unfortunately, Catalan writers/directors Estapé and Vilajuana seemingly ran out of money, energy, or simply ideas, and instead of taking their short film to a new level or even a different one, they send Max to the door to report his father has found a new job and his family will be leaving in a day or so.

       It seems highly unbelievable that having just arrived in the city, his father would relocate again a few months later; one has to presume that he has decided to take his son to yet another location where his sexuality won’t be known. One might wish to grant the authors credit for not simply providing us with another correct thinking or educationally elucidative moment. But in not permitting their young heroes to develop some other solution to the surrounding homophobia, they are just as guilty, in some respects, as the teacher Claudi in permitting the seemingly inevitable ending to once more be played out. And it now leaves Marc all alone to face the backlash for the already brave decisions he has made. Perhaps the filmmakers might have, at least, taken us in that direction and explored how this intelligent and loving human being might adapt.

      As it is, we can only feel like the narrative of a promising film was simply chopped of before its creators had an opportunity to fully take the voyage that Marc had been willing to travel, just as if the tornado tearing through Dorothy’s farm in The Wizard of Oz suddenly turned a corner, leaving her safely asleep in a Kansas bed.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2023 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

 

Jansen Franklin | Live to Tell / 2012

another martyr to the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jansen Franklin (screenwriter and director) Live to Tell / 2012 [22 minutes]

 

US filmmaker Jansen Franklin’s short film Live to Tell recounts the basic high school bully story, featuring a young “out” boy, Dylan (Andrew Hopper), who—despite the daily abuse he suffers as well as the well-intentioned but totally uninformed reminders by his inattentive father that he should go out for sports—has the wherewithal to post a daily blog on his experiences, a blog incidentally that his parents somehow are oblivious to, his mother only discovering that her son is gay when she uncovers an LGBT magazine under his bed. When later she attempts to discuss it with her husband, it appears, through a fight we overhear, that he is no more insightful about how to help his son or even approach him with their knowledge.

      The story is so familiar that it has become almost a cliché, including Dylan’s discovery that one of the bully Mike’s (Rory Cosgrove) best friends, Brandon (Chris Petrovski, who more recently starred in Andree Ljutica’s How to Say I Love You at Night of 2020) not only watches Dylan’s blog but finally admits it to him and becomes a friend, suggesting he has similar feelings and awarding Dylan a kiss.

   

     And as in so very many such stories, Brandon is simply not ready to come out or even break ties with his school-bully buddy, which quickly leads to Dylan’s frustration. Dylan who has realized the importance of “being yourself,” even attempts to approach the school principal to begin a Gay-Straight Alliance club at the school, hoping to start the whole process of breaking through the general homophobia which arises through ignorance. But the school administrator is as unenlightened as his students, and suggests that it’s one thing for Dylan to choose to become gay, but that the school cannot promote homosexuality. You have to credit Franklin’s script for making it clear that both of those statements are false, that a gay boy or man does not “choose” his sexuality but that it chooses him and admitting to being gay is merely identifying the truth about oneself; GSA, furthermore, does not “promote” anything but tolerance. But it is all to no avail, and once more Dylan begins his lonely walk home with frustration and despair.

      Yet before he can even leave the school yard, Mike, who has seen him talking to his buddy, demands to know what it’s all about. Finally, the usually passive Dylan reacts, childishly but still with a furious power, suggesting that Mike himself may be a “faggot.” The result, of course, with such homophobic individuals, is that Dylan is beaten severely, the principal coming out to order someone of the passively watching students to call for an ambulance.

      This is obviously a film devoted to all those who find themselves, despite the hundreds of films recounting such experiences, alone, fearful, and terrorized. And accordingly, Brandon suddenly realizes that his inability to face his own sexuality has only helped to brutalize others such as his secret friend Dylan. Like Dylan, he now approaches the principal arguing for the GSA club, and the principal, who himself is partially responsible to Dylan’s beating for not even recognizing the problem, finally sees the light and agrees.

      In an upbeat ending, Brandon makes posters which he and his female friends pass out among the students, and finally calls a meeting, sitting alone in the room until gradually, in ones and twos, others enter, as well as, evidently just released from the hospital, Dylan. What the group discusses and how it effects the school is not explored. But perhaps just to show up for the meeting is itself the important statement.

      Unfortunately, such “good feel” stories are not generally what happens in real life, for if things might be changed that easily there would be no reason for yet another film about school bullies and suffering gay students.

      All can hope is that other bullied LBGTQ students might see such films and realize, if nothing else, that they are not alone and survival is possible, a better world awaiting them.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

 

 

Mehmet Binay and Canner Alper | Zenne Dancer / 2012

honesty kills

by Douglas Messerli

 

Caner Alper (screenplay), Mehmet Binay and Canner Alper (directors) Zenne Dancer / 2012

I wish I could report that the film I am about to write about, Zenne Dancer, by the Turkish film-makers Mehmet Binay and Caner Alper, was a total fiction; alas, it is based on a true incident that occurred to an acquittance of the directors.

      The movie recounts the inter-relationships between three figures, a beautiful male-in-drag belly dancer, Can (Kerem Can), his former gay lover, the university student Ahmet Yildiz (Erkan Avci), and a gay German photographer, Daniel (Giovanni Arvaneh) who, while in Istanbul, shifts from his war-time reporting to the delights of the city, including snapping pictures of Can, whose patronage helps him to survive in a strange world where, in an attempt to escape the military draft, Can goes out only at nights to dance without pay at a gay club.

      In case it might strike you that Can is involved in a strange activity in belly-dancing with lavish costumes but often with a bare chest that reveals his beautifully chiseled torso, I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs from an article by Tara Isabella Burton in Smithsonian Magazine about the zenne dancers who participate in a popular entertainment in Turkey:

 

“Male belly dancing is hardly a new phenomenon in Turkey. Most zenne dancers date the practice back to the Sultan’s court in the final centuries of the Ottoman Empire, when women were largely prohibited from performing onstage. Much as how boys would play women’s parts in Elizabethan Shakespeare, young men – generally ethnic Greeks, Armenians, or Romani, drawn, often unwillingly, from the Empire’s non-Muslim population – would be trained as dancers, adopt androgynous or feminine attire and makeup, and – in many cases – moonlight as paid courtesans to noblemen.

     In traditional Ottoman practice, the terminology of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ was largely absent from discourse, as explained by scholar Serkan Görkemli. Sexuality was more customarily defined as a matter of status/rank and sexual role. A higher-ranking nobleman would as a matter of course define himself as an active or penetrative sexual partner, one who would under other circumstances sleep with women; a zenne dancer would be expected to take on a more so-called ‘feminine’ sexual and social role. Regardless of whether or not sexual relations between dancers and their spectators took place, however, zenne dancing (and the watching thereof) was considered part of ‘mainstream’ masculine culture.

      Even though with Turkish modernization, the zenne tradition fell out of favor, it remains a

staple of entertainment in many parts of Turkey.”

     

     As a university student, Ahmet is still also very fearful of being stopped by the Turkish military police and being conscripted. In the very first scene of the film, in fact, he seeks to be hidden in Can’s dressing room, fearing that even being seen out at night, and, in particular, in a zenne bar, might draw attention, and he is particularly fearful in this case because of his traditional Muslim parents, particularly his harridan of a mother, who is perhaps the real villain of the work

     Through Can’s agreement to be photographed by Daniel, the hirsute Akmet meets up with the equally hirsute photographer and, gradually over a period of days the two become lovers, while still both remaining friends with the more fragile and needy Can. If both Can and Akmet live basically shadow-lives out of fear for the societal forces, Daniel has the ghost of his past in his sex-wife, who is now his agent and is highly critical of his new photographic interests, wishing he might return to filming on-site battles and the children scarred by war instead of his new fondness for the picturesque oddities of the great Turkish city.

      While Akmet’s parents are holy horrors, his sister, with whom he lives, is totally modern and seemingly accepting of his nightly wanderings—except when the gorgon of a mother comes to visit. Can’s aunt, with who he lives, is a loving and caring woman in complete acceptance of his lifestyle, even while her husband highly disapproves; and Can’s mother, living in the country, loves her son so dearly that it truly borders on incest. On a visit to her, later in the film, he can hardly pry her hands from a deep embrace to escape back to the city. The outsider Daniel, given his completely Western upbringing cannot even quite comprehend their predicaments.  

     And therein lies the rub, so to speak. As Daniel and Akmet grow closer, so too does the German, who is determined to take Akmet back to Germany with him, encourages him to speak out about to sexuality to his parents, as does the obviously utterly outed Can. Daniel is simply naïve, while Can’s motives seem somewhat sinister, since he should perhaps perceive the difficulties of declaring homosexuality in a modernized but still mostly Muslim country—despite the fact that his family has clearly adored for being “special.” Strangely, when both men are forced into interviews prior to induction, Akmet gets off for being gay (the Turkish military like to see pictures of sexual penetration to prove those who claim homosexuality, and to this day may have one of the biggest collections of gay pornography in the world), while the zenne dancer Can is accepted: we can always use a belly-dancer in our ranks cracks one military officer. But both men are destroyed by their “honesty,” although perhaps Can survived military duty to return to his love of dancing.

    When Akmet finally does confess his sexuality to his parents, the mean-spirited mother forces her husband to take up a gun and to kill his son in a kind of reverse “honor killing,” usually reserved for women who have supposedly been immoral in sexual activity or for divorcing their husbands. In Turkey, evidently, Akmet’s father is still in hiding.

      Despite the fact that this is quite amazing and that such a movie was even permitted to be filmed in Turkey, the production values of the work are excellent, the directors working within a fairly large financial investment for such an independently produced work. My only quibbles with the film are its sometimes quite excessive production numbers representing Can’s imaginary choreography of his dances; as one critic observed, at moments the film seems undetermined whether it wants to be a serious expose about the terrible events it documents, or a comic drag film in the manner of Priscilla: Queen of the Dessert.

      In the end the film succeeds simply because of its honesty about its trio of gay heroes. And quite surprisingly, when shown in gay film festivals in Turkey, became a great hit, as it was in the gay film circuit in the US—although until its release in Netflix it has not had general US distribution. Even I, who often seek out the unusual, almost passed on this one. Belly-dancing in Turkey, I smirked. But on further exploration, I became more interested, and am happy I was. This is a tragic statement not so much about being gay, but about being different in a culture that is based on broad ethnic and cultural differences, but with individuals often trapped within the confines of those very walls of identity.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2018).