Neil Ira Needleman | Red Ribbons / 1994

who’s that knocking on my door?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Neil Ira Needleman (screenwriter and director) Red Ribbons / 1994

 

Like many 1990s theater company directors who helmed small companies, gathering around them a loyal group of like-minded supporters, Frank David Niles (Christopher Cappiello) created almost a cult-like theater experience, finding a loyal writer from The Village Voice, Preston (William J. Ingersol) to call public attention to his plays. Even more important, Niles’ theater company, In Your Face, was a gay company producing plays in the time when AIDS was still killing off vast numbers of the community. His plays had meaningful titles for the day such as The Trojan War: A Condom Caper, Pink Triangles, and Two Lesbians from Verona.

     Needleman’s gentle satire of this man and his circle is only a chuckle or two away from the real thing. And what makes it feel even closer to the truth is that this now legendary theater writer and director has—as the film moves out of its beginning scene from his private video diaries, filmed and edited with the help of Niles’ lover Robert Cisco (Robert Parker)—has, in this gentle mockumentary just died of AIDS, his funeral having been held the day before the events of the movie.

      Devastated by the loss of his lover and mentor, Robert is expecting a visit from Niles’ mother, a woman who has never accepted her son’s homosexuality nor communicated with him since her boy’s announcement of his sexuality. Robert is fearful that she may demand that he now vacate what she may believe was her son’s apartment. But when his Brooklyn apartment doorbell rings, it is not Mrs. Niles, but his beloved sister, Carolyn (Princess Sandlin), knowing that her brother might need some company and admittedly loving Niles herself, having had a brief fling with him, of which Robert is already aware. But she bears even worse news than the impending arrival of Nile’s mother. She has asked her homophobic, racist, hate-mongering, rock band member-husband Zach (David Nahmod) over so that we will sign the necessary divorce papers, and she is fearful of being alone with him.

      Carolyn admits that she only married the fiend for the drugs and rock concerts which at first were fun, until the band became involved with attracting their audiences through their various manifestations of hate—clearly an early precursor of Donald Trump-like politics.

      In the meantime, we watch another bit of a clip from Niles’ video diary, among clips reviewed at regular intervals throughout the film in order to provide historical substance for the period, 1990-April 14, 1994, the date of Niles’ death.

      Another knock on the door produces two lesbian members of Niles’ company, Betty (Lee Sharmat) and Joan (Colleen O’Neill). They are seeking some last few minutes in the apartment which they consider hallowed ground, and are only too happy to watch episodes of the video diary which recalls some of their happiest experiences. Soon Preston the journalist shows up as well as the elderly ham actors Joshua (Victor Burgess) and, his far funnier but quieter partner/critic Horace Nightingale III (Quentin Crisp, in his last feature movie performance).

       The equal opportunity offender of the human race Zach eventually does show up, suggesting that Robert should hire on with the rock group for nightly homo beatings and stares down the aging “couple of ancient queers” who perhaps invited “ass-fucking.” He is quickly sloughed off to Carolyn who takes him into another part of the apartment to convince him to sign the divorce documents.

       Meanwhile, having heard of the impromptu gathering, an absolutely obnoxious TV journalist, Fag Hag (Elisa DeCarlo) pushes her way into the gathering to “interview” each of Niles’ followers, which means shoving her face into the picture with the camera and announcing their names as if she were a dear friend, no questions asked, thank heaven.

       Even male porn start Stud (Glenn Philipson) shows up just after performing in three sex films that were so memorable that he cannot even sit down. He quotes from a hack speech he performed in one of Niles’ plays that is so awfully bad you wonder how this company could have attracted any audiences, let alone a critic; but just to reassure us, the video shows Niles’ denouncing the same scene as being the nadir of his writing abilities.

       In one long scene, as Robert cuddles up to his lover’s still-rumpled bedding we are made aware that Niles was obviously far-more sexually unfaithful to him than Robert’s continued devotion to him might suggest, which perhaps explains why Robert is not also suffering from the dread disease as so very many of his and Niles’ friends have, who, in a hall of personal photographs are each festooned with a red ribbon in testimony of their deaths.

       Fortunately, the sexual-centric Stud takes an interest in the fag-hating Zach, interlocking arms with him as he attempts to get a lowdown on why he hasn’t encountered him before, finally forcing Zach to leave the loving community behind, Stud hot on his trail with everyone secretly hoping that he might catch up and give Zach a different kind of bashing.

       Of course, Mrs. Niles (played, quite fascinatingly by Georgina Spelvin, the former lesbian soft-porn star Twilight Girls and lead of the porno hit The Devil and Miss Jones) must finally appear, not at all behaving as the monster we have imagined her to be, but as a confused, still-loving mother, filled with the guilt for her past silences, particularly after discovering a trove of love letters in her son’s closet from Robert unlike any she has read before, and a sheaf of poems  written in response by her own son. No one from her world, she insists, has ever expressed love in that manner.

       The visitors end up in a group hug embracing her as now one of their own as the film we are watching focuses on the conclusion of the very first video we have witnessed. In that video, the very sick and dying Niles has suddenly left his bed, entering the living room where Robert is editing his tapes. Without warning, he gets his coat, opens the door, and begins down the long stairway to the street. Trying to stop him, Robert quickly throws on a coat and catches up with his lover, trying to coax him back into the apartment and into his death bed. But Niles insists there is nowhere to go but forward, and, after reaching and gently touching the face of his companion, moves off quickly down the street away from the camera, presumably to his death.

       This was a difficult movie to watch. In part, of course, because at moments it is yet another moving film about AIDS and the bravery those gay men and women who died of the disease demonstrated. But it this particular it was hard to watch the film at moments simply because, despite its wonderful intentions, it was so amateurish and god-awful. Gay movie columnist Michael D. Klemm fully expresses the problems:

 

“Combing pathos and over-the-top comedy, Red Ribbons is a well-meaning but ultimately amateurish film. Calling it ‘stiff’ would be polite. The acting ranges from good to terrible. From the amount of scene chewing that goes on, I suspect that most of the cast consists of stage actors who needed to be told to tone it down for the camera. Crisp looks like a wax figure throughout. Entire scenes are usually played out in one shot and this was probably a budgetary choice rather than an aesthetic one. The subject is worthy of our consideration, its execution just leaves much to be desired. Much of Red Ribbons is painful…. Yet every time I was going to eject the disc, something would happen to seize my interest. The trouble is, these moments usually don't last for very long.”

 

     I am never one, obviously, who would push the eject button, although I am often sorely tempted. But in this case, I would argue, that the good intentions and sometimes surprisingly near-perfect moments of pathos and comedy—the monologue in which Niles memorializes his ex-lover dancer who had just died of AIDS, the moment when Stud chases after Zach, the occasion when Horace gets his second erection of the year and demands something be done immediately to resolve it, the scene in which Niles admits to Robert that he has sinned, explaining that he has been filming their love-making to watch over as part of his video memories (a project he insists early in the film, he had begun long before he had contacted AIDS) and many other moments large and small make this a film worth seeing.

      After watching three other shorter films by the same director, I realized that Needleman is that kind a director, an obvious amateur with the visual sense and wit to keep his camera in position just long to witness something intimate and accurate, revealing a truth that his larger clumsier gestures often divert or cover up. He has something important to say, serious questions worthy of being asked. He just doesn’t know how to fold them gracefully into art. With Needleman’s odd casting of Spelvin and Crisp in a grade B LGBTQ movie, there is almost something a bit “Ed Woodish” about him, a creator of works so oddly bad that they become rather interesting.

 

Los Angeles, January 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

James Wentzy | Days of Desperation / 1994

that’s part of our world tonight

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Wentzy (director and editor) Days of Desperation / 1994

 

My husband and I, Howard Fox, will next week celebrate our 50^th anniversary as a couple, married now about 4 years, which matters little since in 1970 we met and cemented a relationship that would—despite what any gay relationship proffered as near impossible odds in those days—a commitment that settled us into a kind of “outsider” marriage that could not tear us apart, while everything in our world in those days and much still now desires to. We fight daily; perhaps most couples do. But we have such a long history now that neither of us might imagine a separation, and I believe that had we not met that year I most certainly and perhaps Howard also, as I’ve expressed elsewhere, might have died of AIDS. The year before, living in Manhattan and Queens, I had gay sex nearly every evening. And Howard, that first night we met, had suddenly become determined to pick-up guys; I was his first choice! We were, after all, from that first generation of the dreadful plague, when little was known about the disease or its transmission, and absolutely nothing was known about possible cures or extensions of life.

      The other day, a Facebook friend, John Wier, sent me James Wentzy’s tape about the ACT UP protests of 1991, however, that made me realize even further just how fortunate we were. That year, the apex of AIDS illnesses, when young and older gay people were suffering more deaths daily than the constantly news-reported deaths in the absurd wars of George H. W. Bush in Iraq and elsewhere in the Gulf States and more gays and others had died of AIDS than all those during the Viet Nam War, the gay-led movement ACT UP suddenly took over network reports, most notably CBS’s Dan Rather’s nightly news report, with Wier’s head popping up on screen, along with his friends Dale Peck and Darrell Bowman together shouting “Fight AIDS, not Arabs.” 

       Seconds after the screen went black and, with the intruders being carried off, Rather was returned into view apologizing for the interruption and arguing that they had been attacked by some very “lewd people.” I’ve always felt that Rather has been too exulted as a newscaster and writer, but this truly confirms it to me. He had not perceived that his constant reporting on the Gulf War, was totally ignoring the war at home that was killing so many people of the LGBTQ community (in those days simply described as “gays” and “lesbians”).

       Wier, whom Wentzy allows to talk about the event at some length, plays out the significance of those actions, quite humorously and yet clearly painfully, including his personal family crises that resulted—his father and brothers were all in the broadcasting industry—after which his father finally seemingly came to comprehend just how important his son’s action was. As Wier says, if I could influence just one person to perceive the problem, particularly my father, then I had succeeded.

       Meanwhile, at the same hour, Jon Greenberg, Mark Lowe Fisher, and Anna Blume, demonstrated at the studios of the PBS MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, but were unable to reach the studio itself. Unlike Rather, Jim Lehrer, who died this past week, later admitted that those protests and the events that followed the next day, January 23rd, 1991—which the ACT UP group described as the Day of Desperation Actions—in downtown New York, Harlem, and governmental offices throughout the city.

      At 5:00 they joined up at Grand Central Terminal, making it impossible for thousands of workers and tourists to make their way to their trains. The protestors held large signs reading “Money for AIDS, Not for War” and “One AIDS Death Every 8 Minutes,” holding hands and, as documentary filmmaker Wentzy shows, sometimes laying down to block the commuters.

      Their demonstration flier read:

 

“Within a matter of months the U.S. Government is able to house, feed and provide health care for half a million people in the middle of the desert. But here at home, the Federal Government continues to routinely deny these same basic necessities to people living with AIDS. We wonder—as we fight a war for oil in the Persian Gulf—whether President Bush and Congress are conscious of the desperate state of the AIDS crisis in this country. We are. Through 10 years of this plague and 10 years of Republican administrations, there remains no leadership. After over-whelmingly (and with much fanfare) passing the C.A.R.E. Act (aka the Ryan White Act), Congress and President Bush failed to appropriate the funds necessary to implement this disaster relief. Why is it that when a hurricane or earthquake hits—and causes mostly property damage and relatively few deaths—federal dollars pour in? When a disease devastates whole communities and kills more than 110,000 men, women and children—more than twice the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War—our leaders remain silent. And you remain silent. Silence = Death.”

 

      Soon after these events, Mark Fischer died of AIDS, and, a few years later, upon the death of another AIDS sufferer, Jon Greenburg, a friend read poignantly from the speech Greenburg had prepared for Fischer’s funeral, but could not deliver because of his own illness at the time. If there was ever a statement about how brave these desperate men and women were this is it. I wish I might print out that entire previously undelivered speech, but if you care at all you need to hear it as delivered in Wentzy’s movie.

      At the heart of this work’s statements is just how these young men and women where nervous, frightened, and doubtful about the actions they were about to undertake, while yet realizing that if they didn’t do so, their deaths would be suffered without consequence. They were not afraid of dying as much as they were horrified for the suffering of so many others before and after them. And they were justifiably angry. There was, as the speech declares, “an otherness about their fears.”

      By the time of Wentzy’s film, covering the events of 1991, Howard and I were ensconced in rather lovely jobs, he as a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and then the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and I, having been an assistant professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, going on to be a significant publisher, a poet, fiction writer, and memoirist. 

      In short, we were sheltered somewhat from the world this 1994 film recounts. But I feel highly guilty for my personal ignorance these events. I am glad that we narrowly escaped the AIDS crisis, but I do feel that, given my stubborn beliefs in fairness and my love of the LGBTQ community, I might have wanted to have been there to fight for those rights.

     Wier, as an AIDS activist, seems at moments to be slightly apologetic or at least a bit sanguine for his actions; but when he posted Wentzy’s film I immediately realized how proud he should be and perhaps is.

     Any growth in consciousness, in the US awareness of what is truly happening, is a near miracle, given our recalcitrant belief in our values, and those young men and women from 1991 helped to accomplish that with acts small and large.

     Goodnight Dan Rather; "That's part of our world tonight." These men where not “lewd,” but true believers.

 

Los Angeles, January 26, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).

Tom Donaghy | The Dadshuttle / 1994, 1996 general release

a future of which no one dares speak

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Donaghy (screenwriter, based on his play, and director) The Dadshuttle / 1994, 1996 general  release

 

Playwright and director Tom Donaghy wrote several plays and produced two LGBT works, the feature film Story of a Bad Boy (1999), and the short Dadshuttle, before turning to more commercial ventures such as Precious (2009), Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021), and the highly successful TV series Empire.

    His LGBTQ short Dadshuttle, adapted from his own play, is a work of doublespeak, wherein a father (Peter Maloney) and his gay son (Matt McGrath) are driving from their home where to the train station where the son, after his visit to his family in Philadelphia, is on his way home to New York. From the very beginning we comprehend that nothing truly will be communicated between the two, yet a great deal is expressed nonetheless that lies behind their verbal dodges and linguistic twists. It begins with what might have been easily answered:

                        Son: And why did they call him Yank?

                        Father: Oh you know, there’s, when he was a kid

                             he used to...I don’t know

                        Son: They just called him that because he...

                        Father: It was a name he got somewhere along the line...

                             but we worked for them for something like 25 years....

 

Even in this brief interchange, we already perceive that nothing will be answered, nor any possible completion of their sentences proffered. Both are evidently afraid to say the obvious, that perhaps as a boy the vague “he” of whom the father speaks masturbated regularly. But we also recognize that for the most part, what they speak about is meaningless.

   The son isn’t even quite sure of what his father actually does for a living. Perhaps he builds skyscrapers, yet he no longer works directly in construction but mostly meets with people. Is he a union negotiator? Does he suggest variations in the buildings’ construction or their codes? The son will never discover the answer.

     The father talks endlessly about small family matters, growing up with 15 related family members in one house, how is wife drags him to various tourist destinations such as The Edgar Allan Poe house, which isn’t actually Poe’s house but a replica, and isn’t a building in which Poe lived...etc. Later on, he begins a similar monologue about Clara Barton’s house.

     The son cannot comprehend why the family reunion picnics are always held in famous gravesites such as at Gettysburg battlefield, as the father attempts to explain that his wife likes to make candles, but later, after the son seems confused, clarifies that she likes to watch the candlemakers at Gettysburg make candles.

      There is an entire conversation about a relative who gets “frequent flyer passes” that are good only on the train. The man travels back and forth endlessly on the train, getting up and going without saying anything to his kids. The son cannot even find out why he, whoever he might be, doesn’t talk to his kids other than the father’s proclamation that the whole family is just crazy.

      There are incomplete sentences spun out about the son’s brother, Marty, who’s disturbed evidently that no one told him that their mother is seeing, so it seems, a psychiatrist. No one around them, the father insists, ever go to psychiatrists which the son understandably finds impossible to believe.

      A later mention of the other younger brother comes back into the conversation with the father’s statement that “He’s getting better you know. All his friends come to the house.” He evidently has a girlfriend, but he never calls her; she only calls him. Again the communication breaks down without us discovering what Marty is getting better from, or what might have previously been wrong with him. Our only clue is that he seems to be very much like his mother.

      And as issues about the boy’s mother creep into the conversation, the father keeps moving away from them to further describe visits, other family members, and pieces of furniture they have recently purchased.

      It gets even worse when the son begins attempting to ask if when he comes home at Christmas he can bring someone home with him. It takes several tries to even get that question posed, which the father immediately deflects by saying that he needs to ask his mother about that. But the son finally breaks through to say that he would like to have Paul over, who the son’s father keeps confusing with a waiter who has spilled something over him at one time in the past. The son attempts to explain that Paul is not that waiter, but does work as a waiter.

      Slowly as the father rattles on about the Edgar Allan Poe which is not a house, we begin to perceive that the son wants to invite Paul to the family Christmas because he is all alone, and from there we begin the realize, despite the barrage of miscellaneous interruptions what the father seems to refuse to comprehend, that Paul is the son’s lover.

      After a sudden interruption by the father about “all this stuff”; “We’re still reading about all this stuff, for years now....People magazine keep having these articles about these young guys who work in New York City...girls now too....all these young people they get sick and they don’t get better.” And suddenly while the son is now insistent about correcting his father’s notion that he works in a bar, we realize that the elder is talking about AIDS.

      Finally, the son shouts out, that he doesn’t need to worry. “I take care of myself....” And finally, as his father goes on and on about “all this sickness,” he cries out “I don’t have sex. I don’t have sex.”

     The significance of that outburst finally begins to explain to us that Paul, his lover, indeed has AIDS, the reason for the son no longer having sex. And slowly, in between endless meaningless harangues on anything that crosses the father’s frightened mind, his son reveals that he too has gotten tested.

      We never quite find out if he is positive or negative since the two have a ridiculous discussion about the ambiguity of those words—the father is convinced that “positive” means good. But we can glimpse the boy’s fear. And it slowly dawns on us that his father is equally worried about the health of his wife, the son’s mother.

     Neither ever express their feelings or even convey the truth of their partners’ conditions to one another. But we now recognize that this shuttle between son and father has been a voyage very much like Charon rowing the dead to the underworld.

      We can almost be certain that neither father nor son will see one another again except perhaps at a funeral, and perhaps not even then, since if the mother dies first, the son will surely be occupied with his dying lover; and if Paul dies, the family will surely not wish to attend a funeral in New York City.

       For a few seconds, now and then, it almost appears that they have communicated something below or above the torrent of intentional miscommunications. Yet as they finally arrive at the door to the underworld, they have nothing left to say but to awkwardly signify their love.

       For me, this is the saddest story of the group, even though, unlike the in so many of the others films, no one in this work has yet died, and we truly know nothing about the mother or Paul—or Marty or the dozens other family members they superficially list. We just know that both father and son are scarred, terribly frightened beings, unable to even communicate their fears to themselves let alone to one another.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

 

Derek Jarman | Blue / 1993

jean cocteau takes off his glasses: joining derek jarman at his death bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman (screenwriter and director) Blue / 1993

 

It is difficult to actually describe what Derek Jarman’s important work of 1993, Blue, actually is. It is most certainly not a “motion picture,” since there is no motion with only one image that does not move projected on the screen: a screen-sized field of the color International Yves Klein Blue.

     Although it is projected through a film projector, it could just as easily have been experienced with individuals watching the patch of color hearing the audio of the work through a radio, recording, or any number of other such devices. Indeed, since the “film” is centered around the director, suffering from the last stages of AIDS and losing his eyesight, the work purposely, except for the blue image which Jarman sometimes saw in patches out of one eye, it eschews the visual.

     It probably doesn’t really matter how we label this masterwork, since its impact is so immense there is no need for labels. Yet, even in its narration by actors and friends such as John Quentin, Nigel Terry, and Tilda Swinton, along with its score by Simon Fisher Turner with fragments of music by John Balance, Karol Szymanowski, Erik Satie, Brian Eno (who would later score Jarman’s Glitterbug), and others, it does quite behave like a work of cinema.

     One reviewer pondered why this work had become Jarman’s most popular. I cannot attest that it is actually is his most popular work, but if so, I’d argue it is because in its numerous shifts from simple everyday accounts of the what a dying man has to suffer in the hands of doctors and nurses (Jarman complains of having to take nearly 30 pills each day, some bitter, some way too large, shares the optician’s chant of “turn eyes to the left, up, down, to the right,” and repeats his terror of “the constant drip” to blood and body fluids) to his intense sarcasm about the British attitudes towards gays, to those suffering from AIDS, and towards the environment in general (“Charity allows the uncaring to appear to care,” “The earth is dying and we do not notice it.”); from his brief returns to childhood (at one point he poetically calls up his childhood romance with India, at another moment he recalls the names by which he called his Grannie, Mosel, Rueben, etc.) to Jarman’s comic commentaries about his condition (“I caught myself looking at shoes in a shop window. The shoes I have on me should be enough to walk me out of life.”); from his passionate recollections of his wild sexual experiences in London of the 1960s and 70s (“I was a cock-sucking slave, a size queen,” “We were cum-splattered nuclear breeders. What a time it was!”) to the dying director’s poetic musings (“O blue come forth, O blue arise, O blue ascend, O blue come in”); and finally in his repetition of the names of his past lovers, all now lost to AIDS (“David, Howard, Graham, Terry, Paul”)—through our one hour and nineteen minute immersion in these various aspects of a single human being, it is almost as if we too had been invited to sit by the side of this dying man’s bed, to hold his hand, and simply listen.

      For those of us who never had the horrible joy of mattering deeply to someone on their AIDS death beds as well as for to those who were there far too often, Blue asks similarly for us to share the life of an astonishingly gifted human being who had fully loved and lived his life so that we might help him to find the peace to die. “We all know tomorrow will end after sunrise.”

     In making this film Jarman once more sacrifices the most private moments to invite us into his life.

     He died only 4 months after finishing this work. By experiencing it, he permitted his audience to feel that they had shared those last days. And just as he describes imagining an encounter with Jean Cocteau in the visage of a little gray man in a doctor’s waiting room, by the time this work ends we too feel as if we have witnessed greatness first hand.

     In accomplishing this, finally, we realize that, like one of the earliest of such films, Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies of 1985—which also asked us to sit at the bedside of a dying gay man—Blue was one of the most significant of the many dozens of AIDS movies.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Steve Levitt | Deaf Heaven / 1993

witness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Douglas Shurtleff Cole (screenplay), Steve Levitt (director) Deaf Heaven / 1993

 

Coming almost from the other end from the big blockbuster Hollywood movie about AIDS in 1993, Philadelphia, was the indie, under-budgeted short work, directed by Steve Levitt, Deaf Heaven. And yet how is it possible that the short film seems to me so very much more profound and believable, despite the couple of avowed “miracles” that are described in this film? Perhaps it’s as simple as the fact that, despite its own moments of sentimentalism, Levitt’s short does not force your tears, but permits them to well up in your eyes out of true empathy, and not only for the poor young man, Paul (Charley Lang) who is trying desperately to cope with the impending death from AIDS of his lover Matthew (Kyle Secor), but for a man whose wife and children were killed in Auschwitz almost 50 years earlier.

     In even comparing the Holocaust with AIDS, writer Douglas Shurtleff Cole is in dangerous territory.*  Fortunately, Cole does not attempt to make grand analogies, and approaches the subject only in terms of the two individuals, in this case Paul and an elderly survivor of Auschwitz, Jake (played by memorable Yiddish actor David Opatoshu) who have had to face the death of their still young loved ones by a force that is beyond explanation.

     Like most AIDS dramas, much of the action takes place in the hospital room of the one who is dying. In this case Matthew, suffering from great pain, has been provided intense painkillers which take his mind into delusionary worlds: he is skiing at a lodge with his lover, is about to embark on a long sea cruise. His ability to perceive the world with any normality of perception is minimal.

     That might be fine, even for the lover who finds himself already bereaving a lost companion, if it were not that the hospital has just received word from Matthew’s parents—who in the long period of the diagnosis and gradual illness have never once flown out to see him of even telephoned him except to say the disease he suffers is God’s vengeance—that they would like him to be flown back to Kansas to see out the end of his life. In short, they would take their son away from his true family, his companion of 7 years, to salve their guilty conscience with a few months or even weeks of home care for the son whose sexuality they have never accepted.

     As a young couple Matthew and Paul have not yet made out their wills or drawn up legal papers, and in 1993, long before any possibility of marriage rights, parents and other family members could easily tear apart loving gay couples, even disallowing the partner to attend the funeral or claiming legal rights over shared property. As the head doctor, entirely sympathetic to Paul, attempts to explain, the hospital can do little but ascertain the patient’s level of acuity and determine his wishes—all at a time when Matthew hardly knows where he is, let alone who he is and with whom he would like to remain.

      Troubled, Paul goes for his daily swim at a nearby club, envisioning nightmarish scenes of Matthew’s drowning body and himself suffering the delusions of the mind that often accompany such stress. Sitting in the sauna with the elder Jewish man, Jake, Paul finally lets go, breaking down into sobs.

     Jake pulls him out of the sauna, forces him to drink some water, and sits down with him to have a conversation. When he discovers that a friend of the boy’s is dying, he recounts his own story of how the Nazis had killed his wife and son, but he had kept them alive through a small picture he hid in his boot, speaking with them daily, helping his son to grow up in his imagination as the years passed; and miraculously, he survived when so many thousands of those around him did not. Paul appreciates his help in creating a perspective upon his own situation, and, without the film even saying it, clearly vows to keep Matthew alive, no matter what happens, within his own mind and heart.

      As the friend head nurse, Libby (Anna Maria Horsford) prepares to leave for the day, Paul relays his terror about the next day when the doctors will interview Matthew. She suggests that he pray, but Paul dismisses her request, saying he’s not a believer. Her response is an almost furious protest, attesting to her belief that God doesn’t a care a damn whether you believe in him or not, but if he cares enough about Matthew, he will still ask for His help. She admits that she prays for each of the patients in her ward each morning before she leaves for work.

  

    Paul attempts to break through Matthew’s dementia, eventually falling to sleep on the same small bed where is lover lays dying. The doctors arrive, and send Paul off to a nearby chair, as they attempt to interview Matthew, who is now clearly very much in pain. Nonetheless, he speaks rather coherently in answer to their questions, recognizing that he is ill and “will likely die.” When asked who is family is, he points to Paul whom he describes as “that lug over there in the chair.” And when asked if he might like to go home, he responds that his only home is with Paul.

      As Paul later describes the event to Jake, who makes a special visit to the hospital just to support Paul in his time of sorrow, “a miracle of sorts” has occurred in that room, describing Libby as an angel. Matthew himself has more logically explained events, after his interview, telling Paul that he needs the shots of mind-altering medication just to get through the pain, but promises he will try to “awaken” again before he dies to say goodbye properly to Paul.

      Jake, amazed to hear of the miracle, asks how is friend is, Paul finally admitting that he is not a friend, but a lover, Jakes recognizing what that means, having learned about homosexuality, he claims, from TV. Jake asks if Paul himself has also been stricken by AIDS, the young man relating that without being able to explain it he has remained HIV-negative. And with that information, Jake suddenly describes his role, like one he himself as taken on, as being one of the “Aydes,” given the job of being witness to what has happened, to help explain to future generations how so many beautiful young people suddenly came to die. It is not a joyful role, and some of those who undertook it, later themselves died of the sorrow, and in the case of AIDS epidemic, of the disease itself.

      To be honest, the most compelling witnesses, at least for me, were the early filmmakers, who began creating movies that at the time, in the early 1980s, no one wanted to see, works such as Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs (1985), Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies (1985), John Erman’s An Early Frost (1985), Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), Jerry Tartaglia’s A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M (1988), and Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1989). But of the second wave of these important testimonies to AIDS victims, I’d argue that Levitt’s short film is one of the best.

      

*AIDS is a disease that makes no choice in who it kills. Despite the fact that it has taken the lives globally of approximately 41.6 million individuals to date, it is estimated that 650,000 of those were due to AIDS, a similar number of homosexuals and previously convicted criminals who died in the German death camps where approximately 6 million Jewish people were exterminated (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia). In short to compare the attempted extermination by human beings of those of a particular religious belief or heritage with a basically indiscriminate disease that, due to its spread through sexual contact, struck down a large number of homosexual men is not an appropriate, the one involving only human hate, the other primarily the cause of a disease that has no will but to survive as a virus.

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).