David Mora | Mear (Pissing) / 2025

doing what comes naturally

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Mora (screenwriter and director) Mear (Pissing) / 2025 [3 minutes]

 

Written and produced evidently for Pride Month in 2025, Spanish director David Mora’s very short film, Pissing begins with two cute boys, David (Leo Ivanchenko) and Isaac (Julio Batalla), sitting at the edge of a pool, their feet dangling into the water.

      Whether they’ve just dared one another to confess their worst secrets or they just have spontaneous began such a discussion, as the film begins, Isaac admits that when he was little he used to pee the bed. David laughs, suggesting that such a thing occurs to many children, Issac interrupting with the added clause, “Not until you’re 12!”  

      “It was awful,” he admits. “I couldn’t invite anyone to sleep over, or go on school trips.” He was taken by his parents to psychologists but nothing worked.

      David wonders why he eventually stopped, to which Isaac replies: “I don’t know. I guess I just started doing it where I was supposed to.”

      David, in turn, admits that he has never kissed anyone.

      Isaac doubts his friend’s statement, particularly since he’s seen him making out with a bunch of girls.

      “I didn’t say no one’s ever kissed me. I said I’ve never kissed anyone…. For real.”

      Isaac naturally wonders why not, to which David honestly replies: “I guess I’ve never liked someone seriously, or maybe I have and I’ve just never dared to take the step.”

      Isaac argues that his friend should just do it, that kissing is like peeing, something natural “that when you feel like doing it, you just can’t hold it in.”

      Slowly, David leans toward Isaac and kisses him on the lips. “What are you doing?” asks Isaac, to which David quite naturally answers, “Peeing. [Mear.]”  And quite predictably, Isaac slowly leans toward David and returns the kiss.

      So, it would seem, ends our little gay vignette.

      Amazingly, however, the films is miniaturized, cut into a small corner as the director suddenly appears demanding a back delete to the line “Well, do it, because kissing is like peeing.”

      The new script suggests that David thinks that Isaac is probably right. Moreover, he’s like him since the first day they met in basketball, but as he’s about to do it, he runs off. Fear takes over, the fear of losing his friend, of what people will say, and being laughed about it in class. He stops at the fence, taking a deep breath, and “Tells himself a hundred times, ‘That’s not right.’”

      From where he remains sitting, Isaac asks “What are you doing?’

      To which David replies, “Peeing.”

     Tacked onto this sweet movie about coming to terms with love is the summary: “Porque los besos no se simulan. Se viven. Ni una generación más sin su primer beso. Un cortometraje sobre la juventud, los miedos, y ese primer beso que nunca debería olvidarse.” My translation (better, I’d argue, than the transcript of the film itself) reads: “Because kisses aren't faked, they're lived, not one more generation should go without their first kiss. This short film is about youth, fears, and that first kiss that should never be forgotten.”

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Rohin Raveendran | The Booth / 2019

frisking for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rohin Raveendran (screenwriter and director) The Booth / 2019 [15 minutes]

 

If Nick Neon’s character Jimmy Park in Zero One feels he cannot breathe, one might imagine how impossible it is for an Indian woman working days as a security guard in the large Pune shopping center to express her love for her young lesbian partner. We can suspect that she may have a husband at home, but even were that not the case, she probably does live with a family, who, if they discovered the truth, would not only shun her but publicly shame her. Even without family, as filmmakers have told us, lesbian life is not easy in India. In large part due to the patriarchal structures of the society, the sense of male supremacy, and the general homophobia still present in India. Despite gains made by the far more visible male homosexuals, lesbians have remained on the peripheries of the society, and are rarely even imagined to exist.

      Yet in Rohin Raveendran’s 2019 film, The Booth (in Hindi), two lesbian lovers are featured, but are forced to enact their sexual encounters in the most unlikely of places, a closed, tent-like booth, where one of the two women in this film, Rekha (Amruta Subhash) is employed presumably to check all women arriving and leaving for either a weapons or stolen merchandise.     

    Since she daily brings her lover Sargam (Parna Pethe) the traditional lunch box, we can only presume that this relationship has been going on for some time. We know nothing other than that. We perceive only that the guard’s younger lover—the film description telling us she is a college student—spends her day walking around and lounging throughout the spacious mall impatiently waiting for the time when the two can again come together to demonstrate their love.

       On this particular day, Sargam gets in line far too early, hoping for at least a special caress, but terrified of discovery with so many customers waiting in line, Rekha treats her friend as simply another person to routinely pat down, with no tender touching whatsoever.

       The younger girl has lunch, wanders in and out of stores, and even performs a karaoke-like performance of a famous love song, hopeful that her voice might trail down the halls and escalators to her lover below. But apparently it does not reach into the dark recesses of the clearly claustrophobic space wherein Rekha is forced to remain.

       Only late in the day, near closing does the guard phone Sargam to join her, and for a few moments they make love, an event to which we are not party in full. The girl has returned her silver lunch box, and as she packs up to leave, Rekha puts in gently into her backpack. We know, no matter what she must face at home, it will be filled again the next morning with the emblem of her devotion.

       The extremes to which these two loving women must go each day is nearly unimaginable. They exist not even in the symbolic closets of their own homes, but literally in a small space where any expression of the love can never represent a night of passion, a day of pleasure, or even a few stolen hours of simply being together. Everything for these two is illicit, as if they themselves were the very worst of thieves from which the guard daily tries to protect the mall shop’s owners.

      And it is not just a family or neighbors who conspire to maintain this harsh punishment, but the society at large. They are forced to embody the homophobia of the world in which they exist.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).

 

Nick Neon | Zero One / 2019

the alien

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Neon (screenwriter and director) Zero One / 2019 [24 minutes]

 

     In many senses the young Jimmy Park (Nick Neon), just returned to his home in New York City from several years away in Seoul, is also a Prodigal Son (see my essay on Prodigal Son, 2017). Growing up in the city he was seen by many of his friends as the most likely to succeed, but now back at home he discovers that many of his former peers have careers and successful sex lives, and have grown into adjusted adults, while his life has seemingly gone nowhere. Should he have remained at home instead of seeking an exciting foreign city in the country of his ancestry, particularly since as a youth he was very popular and was not particularly thought of as being Asian?

     Having returned, he feels like an alien, but simultaneously wonders why he left? Now he most definitely is an outsider and through the fact of his having spent such a long period in Korea, is perceived of as being Asian, something that doesn’t seem to bother his friends as much as it does him. He is also gay, but doesn’t seem to fit into the current club scene.

     In the first frames of the film, he sits talking and heavily drinking with his former close friend Sally (J. J. Mattise); she is a tough black lesbian who nonetheless describes Jimmy as an “oriental,” which he tries to explain is simply unthinkable for an “out girl” to say, her answer representing the clever dialogue in much of this short film: “I’m not a political scientist. The sky is blue, this beer is cold, I’m black, and you’re a half a rug.” “You’re such a dick,” he responds to her. “I love you too pussy.” Her intention in celebration of his return is to get him “Gatsby drunk,” but also wonders what’s going on with him; is he perhaps suffering from “some mid-life crisis” at age 26?

     His answer is revealing: “I don’t know. I thought I was going to come home and feel like, ‘thank god I fuckin’ left.’ But I come back everybody’s doing so fuckin’ great, it hurts. Like, I don’t know I feel like that kid in high school who had such a bright future? That’s me. I’m literally the failed potential kid.”

      Moreover, he seems uncomfortable with some of the newer American gay “assumptions.” When a good-looking young boy (Christopher Schaap) follows him into the bathroom, tells him that he’s cute, and attempts to grab his cock, he pulls away angrily, the other suddenly wondering if he is gay. Reassuring him that he’s “way gay,” but reprimanding him for not having first—the way it was back in “his day”—asking for a name and a handshake at least, the kid yells out “Tom” as our friend is about to leave. He turns back, “I’m James. My friends call me Jimmy. And I’m not going to suck your cock in the bathroom.”

       At home, we meet his father (David Shih), who seems friendly and even accepting of his sexuality. So what is Jimmy’s problem? His father asks him to stay in that evening to that he might have dinner with his sister, Claire, who is about to marry. And we soon discover the source of, at least, some of his problems.

      In the interim he meets another young gay man, a quick date before dinner set up by his friend Sally. This affable good looker, Riley (Taylor Bloom) travels a great deal for a magazine for which he interviews and writes articles about international artists. Since it was apparently the career as an artist which Jimmy had originally planned to pursue, this quick date seems a perfect match.

       But first we have to undergo the horror of dinner with Jimmy’s sister. It’s obvious that the two siblings could not possibly be more different, both seeking to reenter the years-old fights. But Claire (Mallory Ann Wu) is more than argumentative. For example, she insists that her obviously non-religious brother say grace, she apparently being a true believer. And since Jimmy is vegetarian, she cooks up a full rump roast for dinner, mocking him not eating what he used to love before “he started making dinner statements.”

     To retaliate, he goes to the kitchen, bringing back a can of jellied cranberries, which he plops out onto his plate, sharing a portion with Sally, whom he’s invited to the family “celebrations.”

      But far worse, Claire is virulently homophobic, barely able to even tolerate her brother’s company as a queer. The meal, ends disastrously, with Jimmy storming out, and returning late to have a conversation with his waiting father.

      The elder has no answers, but we now see the real problem behind Jimmy’s feelings of cultural, social, and evidently sexual discomfort: he has never come been able to come to terms with his own self which is definitely tied up with family’s Asian heritage and the expectations put upon the only son. If Mr. Park has made peace with his son’s sexual difference, Jimmy himself has not and still feels that he is a failure and embarrassment to the family. “I know that I’m a fuck-up. I know that I’m a failure....I just don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I can’t breathe.”

      What we see time and again is that the real danger of homophobia is not the perverted values of the homophobe but the way it infects the intended target, strangling their self-esteem and their possibilities in the world. Homophobia turns the victim into a kind of passive homophobe, hating their own sexual desires, which, in turn, make them question all of their joys and pleasures in life.

      His father replies that he’s given him his freedom, “I don’t know else I can give you.” Like the Biblical father in the Prodigal Son tale, he insists that Jimmy has a home to come back to if that’s what he wants. And he offers him love, asking to come sit with him on the couch.

      Jimmy asks the unspoken question behind all his fears and frustrations: “You never wish I was normal.”

      His father answers, “What’s normal?”

      Jimmy’s someone humorous comeback, “A desk job and a girlfriend” reveals the notions of his limitations.

      His dad encourages him to continue to pursue art if that’s what he wants, adding, “besides who says you have to conquer the world at 26?”

      The smart-aleck answer, “Wikepedia,” belies deeper fears. “Does anything get any easier?

      “No,” replies his father, “But you get tougher.”

      He is scheduled to return in a few days to Seoul, and he angrily now returns to his room apparently to pack for the trip; as he attempts to reach up into the closet to bring down something a box falls, out of which spill all his childhood drawings. Inspecting them, he realizes that perhaps he did after all have some talent, and maybe it is worth pursing what he has previously described to Sally as “a pipe dream.”

      Composer Nikolas Thompson’s lyrics seem to suggest that despite his urge to go he will “stay anyway,” perhaps to get to know that nice boy Riley or even have a longer period to get to know the sexy Tom. Like his friends, he may even become a success back home.

      It is clear that the director’s work does, in fact, come from the director’s own encounters with familial homophobia of the sort the film’s sister portrays. As Neon writes of his film:

 

 “Zero One follows a lost youth trying to come to terms with his own self-worth in a world moving faster than ever before. It is about finding hope and redemption within family and old dreams long forgotten. It is about starting all over from zero. This film comes from a very personal place.”

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

 

 

 

 

Amalia Ramírez Atiles | Hijo Pródigo (Prodigal Son) / 2017

intolerance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Felipe Restrepo (screenplay), Amalia Ramírez Atiles (director) Hijo Pródigo (Prodigal Son) / 2017 [9 minutes]

 

A Spanish language film, released from the US, Prodigal Son begins like so very many other “coming out” films with the son (performed in this film by the script writer Juan Felipe Restrepo), returned home evidently from college, prepared to finally reveal to his parents (Iliana Nuñez and Andres Miranda) that he is gay.

      In so many of today’s films, such a revelation generally results in some difficulty at first while the parents deal with the issue before coming finally to realize that they love their son more than the difference of sexual behavior that has come between them; or, increasingly, they declare that they had long known of his sexual identity, but felt they could say nothing until he brought up the subject. In film upon film, accordingly, the situation is generally resolved, the tension between the family members overcome. Of course, there are numerous exceptions, this film being one.

      If, at first, Andres’ parents in Prodigal Son appear to be loving parents, happy to have their son home again, as they sit down to dinner they immediately begin to denigrate his best friend Diego. Andres asks why they are against him, only to hear them suggest that their friends have

hinted that he is gay. And immediately the formerly “nice” mother goes into a rant against homosexuals, attacking them for their general behavior, seeing them as carriers of AIDS, and extending the myths surrounding LGBTQ individuals we all know, that they soon become rapists and criminals, all the disinformation the uncomprehending employ to justify their ignorance.

      When Andres attempts to correct their thinking, they go even further until finally he can take it no longer, standing up in anger declaring that the Diego of whom they are speaking is his boyfriend, his lover, and that he, himself, is gay.

      The father immediately leaves the table in horror, while the mother musters the standard artillery with which to attack things outside of comprehension, drawing on stock expressions such as “Do you have any idea of what people are going to say?” before extending that banal sentiment to “What are your dad’s colleagues are going to say? How this affects us?” questions that generally lead to the final retreat into a total disjuncture from the other “How could you do this to us?”

       It is not long after that she attempts to invert her selfishness by describing her son, for his very existence, as being selfish, which easily leads to her complete condemnation of him, her denial of him being her son, and the final hurling of the deprecating expletive “fag,” which turns him from a human into something, the perverted logic that has long ruled such rants.

     But Restrepo’s and Ramírez Atiles’ mother takes her obvious homophobia even further. When a month later Andres returns, once more the prodigal son, this time with Diego (Jonathan De La Torre) to back him up, a bottle of wine in his hand to celebrate the father’s birthday, the father comes to the door, greeting his son once more with a hug, to tell them that the mother will not come down and, accordingly, he cannot let them in. This Prodigal son is again rejected without even being heard, and certainly without any evidence of love.

       Fortunately, the two lovers, who perhaps will always remain outsiders to Andres’ family, are of an age with other possibilities that we know they will survive. But the pain of these homophobic rejections can never be healed, while we strongly suspect that the actor/writer is speaking from a somewhat autobiographical perspective.

       The film itself functions like the Biblical parable, an irony turned on its head. Yet the original parable is problematic if it had been extended in this short work, since returning to the father in the original was also represented as an act of repentance, an act we hopefully imagine is not in this case possible or necessary. It is the mother, who here symbolically performs the role of the other brother, who must repent.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).

Dave Sarrafian | I Quit / 2009

what’s sex got to do with it?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dave Sarrafian (screenwriter and director) I Quit / 2009 [20 minutes]

 

I Quit is the second Sarrafian film I’ve seen, and both share a sense of gay community and a devoted love of Philadelphia, the city near to where the young director grew up. I once taught at the university he attended, Temple, so I share some sentimental emotions in watching his movies. Yet there is also something clumsy and over-plotted about his films, wherein he creates situations that I find simply hard to believe.

    In this film the idea that a cute young 20-year-old, Finn Page (Aaron Michael Davies) would abandon any other gay relationship simply because his first love affair—of only 3 weeks—failed is hard to imagine. If nothing else, the simple biological call to sex would draw him back into the sexual fold. But perhaps already in 2009 (in today’s queer films it has become a standard pattern of behavior), this serious-minded young man is seeking only a permanent relationship that allows no room for one-night stands.

    His friends, Stevie Perkins (Gabrielle Barnett) and barrista Truman Blake (Nick May) might certainly agree with me, encouraging their friend get back into the swing of dating and refusing to believe his threat to “quit” the gay life.

     But a few weeks later, with their friend still not having hooked up with anyone new, they throw a party and pay a straight guy, evidently, to plant a deep kiss on Finn’s lips. Finn is somewhat pleasantly taken back, but it doesn’t work, particularly when he accidentally overhears the guy demanding more money from Truman for having had to kiss “the faggot.”

     Finn rushes off, Truman behind him, finally cornering him and attempting to tell his friend that he’s behaving childishly in cutting himself off of all possibilities on account of one bad experience. It does not end well, with Finn finally slugging Truman in the eye.

    An apology is made and accepted before the end of the film, and in the last frame Finn has even come across someone to whom he might be attracted, the beginning of a new sexual conquest.

      But with the determination to turn every meet-up into a permanent relationship, I doubt this young man will easily find happiness. It seems to have become a sort of fetish now for some young gay men that every sexual encounter has to be seeded with the desire to make it into a life-time commitment, monogamy required.

      In his later film, Queerboy Begins a young man has even killed his unfaithful companion’s Grindr dates and strung up his lover in his basement. Does this represent the new gay imitation of heterosexual behavior? In my day sex was enjoyable, pleasurable, fun, not a route necessarily into marriage or even a relationship that lasts more than a week. When sex actually leads to something more complex than a series of pleasant physical sensations, it is usually the result of a far more complex mix of mind and heart, of shared or perhaps intriguingly different personalities, behavior patterns, activities, and values.

     But then, what do I know? I’m an old man who long ago stumbled into a very long-term relationship at an early age despite my negative attitudes toward monogamy and marriage. And I agree with John Waters’ observation: “I don’t trust anybody my age who says, ‘Oh, we had more fun when we were younger.’ No we didn’t. That just means you’re an old fart and don’t know what’s going on.” And John Waters is only a year older than I am.

     Yet we did have fun, at least I did. And sex without any strings attached was very much a part of that pleasure. And I never looked over a heterosexual coupling as a model which I wanted to imitate, as does Finn.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).