Lovell Holder | You Say Hello / 2019

note to will

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Talbott (screenplay), Lovell Holder (director) You Say Hello / 2019 [22 minutes]

 

Will (Chris Bellant), born obviously to a family of some wealth, has apparently recently been having problems. Like so many late bloomers, this young man has discovered that he’s gay even if he hasn’t yet had a sexual encounter. But for him, even that realization with the possibility of his mother and sister’s censure, sends him into a deep fear which he plans to resolve with a gun he carries in his backpack.

     He escapes to his family’s beach house where he intends to commit suicide—bit not until he’s at least tried out gay sex to celebrate his birthday and to see what he’ll be missing in the past and in the future he plans to cut short.

    Scrolling through his screen, Will picks the comeliest young man he can find, Mike (Will Pullen). Fortunately, Mike is also empathetic and thoughtful, a man who when he discovers it’s Will’s first time takes it slow and easy, explaining just how nervous he was the first time. Mike gives him a few kisses, encourages him to join him in the hot tub, and finally after a number of beers, edges him toward the bed.

    No sex is represented in this squeaky clean, sanitized version of the supposed end of a gay boy’s life. And, in fact, there is little made and even established about gay life, which is strange since it apparently is what has triggered Will’s crisis. Mike, furthermore, establishes that he has a girlfriend who knows about his regular nightly hustles (by day he is a waiter in an unnamed restaurant).

    When he admits to Will that he’s basically bisexual, he even thanks him for not asking the obvious question: “Which sex do you prefer?”

     Mike wakes up with Will missing from the bed; he’s removed himself after sex, evidently, to the couch. The empathetic escort visits the refrigerator for another Dos Equis, and discovers Will’s suicide note to his family. He dresses and after a last, long good hug, leaves.

     Will eventually discovers that Mike has written him a note, reporting that he’s taken away the backpack and the gun, which now is deep in the ocean, suggesting that he call up his mother and sister and have dinner with them. Mike also suggests he find a boy to take home or at least flirt with so that he might discover that he is himself is a person with something to give to others.

     So the bisexual hustler saves the gay boy’s ass. At least for now. God forbid, when he finally finds someone and establishes a relationship, if should fall apart!

     And, no, as my cynical last remark hints, I don’t believe one iota of this well-meaning short film. Yes, it’s hard to admit you’re different from most of the others, and the thought of having to live with that fact or have your family discover it often makes coming out seem insurmountable. But Will is now old enough that the actions of a terrified teenager seem no longer appropriate, unless writer Daniel Talbott and director Lovell Holder are insisting that boys whose parents own a gated beach house never grow up.

     But most importantly, despite all the plays I’ve seen about good-hearted prostitutes, I don’t for one second believe in this saintly hustler. A good man may be hard to find, but a good hustler is even harder. I mean who would dare fuck a boy for cash and follow it up by reading a personal letter to his family and stealing his gun—even with the best of intentions? If prostitution was legal in California (and it’s not), theft is punishable with jail time, and opening up a letter not addressed to you is, at the very least, a misdemeanor. But more importantly, if you’re out hustling at night, the chances that you interfere with someone else’s life, I’d argue, are pretty slim. It just isn’t in the gay hustler’s playbook, no manner how nice that paid visitor is. And this particular hustler won’t even tell his client the name of restaurant in which he works for fear that he’ll visit the place and possibly get him fired.

    Perhaps I should write my own note to Will. “Dear Will, let’s start all over again: You say hello, invite the man you called over up to fuck you in, and go to it. You might find out that you like sex so much you won’t want to blow your brains out. And besides, your mother (Wendy Vanden Heuvel) seems to know that something hasn’t been right with you, that you’re depressed, and she’s worried about you; I can only imagine that your being gay has crossed her mind. So give her a try!”

    But maybe this logical series of events I have proposed had not crossed the minds of the film’s creators, who have argued in an interview with Ben Turner that Will’s problem is one of general depression, robbing him even of his latent gay guilt, after they have already stolen away the hustler’s gay preferences. Why even describe this film, then, as being of LGBTQ interest? If Will’s just depressed and wants a good fuck before he kicks the bucket, why even write Will as a gay man? Originally the hustler was supposed to be a Serbian female prostitute, clearly also with problems of her own, so I gather something got confused in the script. The IMDb credits even list a character I didn’t encounter in the film, Seth (played by Zack Kozlow). Let’s hope at least that what with all this confusion the character didn’t go out buy a new gun and change the plot.  

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Nils Janlert | Minnet av dig (The Memory of You) / 2015

what now is

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nils Janlert (screenwriter and director) Minnet av dig (The Memory of You) / 2015 [12 minutes]

 

Filmed by Swedish director Nils Janlert in one long shot between three locations, a small restaurant, an art gallery across the street, and the street itself, The Memory of You might be said to be a very short gay version of Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were (1973), although in relation to this film the title of the 1973 film has even stronger implications.

     The way Adam (Emil T. Jonsson) “was” is gay, living in a deep, loving relationship with Erik (Mikael Bergsten). What broke them apart we never discover, although both admit to stupid mistakes. But now, on this particular evening, Adam is taking his wife out to a small restaurant when he notices, across the street, that Erik—whom he has evidently not seen for years (Adam has had two children in the period since)—is having an art show.

    Making up an excuse of having left his wallet behind in the car, Adam leaves his wife for more than a few moments to meet up again with Erik.

    The two immediately call up their old feelings, their deep love, and clear regrets. Erik has even finished a painting of the two of them titled “True Love.” Accompanied by the rumble of a deep bass organ, the two hint at a life of intense romance, a relationship that was “special,” which they both long for and miss. Yet, as Adam makes clear through his heterosexual shift, there is no turning back, even with Erik’s almost meaningless pleading to possibly be given a second chance.

     Adam crosses the street once more and renters the world he has since moved onto, presumably enjoying a pleasant dinner with his wife, Anna (Kerstin Gandler).

 

    Apparently bisexual, Adam perhaps can continue to be the loving father of a son and daughter which Erik has always said he would be. But what can only trouble the viewer of this dirge of a past love, is that Adam evidently still feels so very deeply in love with man, as he puts it, of “a lifetime ago.” The very fact that he admits he still misses Erik, does not bode well for his marriage. If nothing else there will remain in his life a deep nostalgia, an emptiness that Anna’s love will never quite be able to fill simply because of its “difference,” because of the way he “was,” as opposed as the way he is. And if a single encounter on a night on the town restimulates such intense feelings, one can only wonder if a night of doubt, a day of despair might trigger even greater nostalgia and doubts about the now of his life.

       As the reviewer of Gaycelluloid.com observes: “Nils Janlert vividly taps into the emotions of what could have been, over what now is.” And by filming this work in a single shot, the director clearly links Adam’s past to the present.

     The only fear that Adam might have is that his present may always remain wrapped up in a notion of that past, becoming stronger and more emotionally binding as his life moves ahead, filling it with the sublimated regret he even demonstrates on the single evening we witness in this film. For the way he was might surely destroy the way he is unless he has fully explained his past life to his wife, which his lie about his wallet hints he has not.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Guy Sahaf | צמא (Thirst) / 2015

 in the dark

by Douglas Messerli

Guy Sahaf (screenwriter and director) צמא (Thirst) / 2015 [14 minutes]

 

In Guy Sahaf’s 2015 short, two close friends (played by Dor Roen and Ziv Shalit) hike and camp out in the Israeli desert for what was meant to be a weekend.      

     But clearly the relationship between the two that one of them has tried to put behind him, reemerges in the wilderness as he allows his friend to masturbate and suck him off, evidently a long-time pattern between the two. [I brightened the photo below to reveal what is barely visible in the original.]

     The young man has apparently acquired a girlfriend or perhaps even a wife—the back story in this film is purposely attenuated—whom the other resents. It is the clear that the more openly gay man would like more—more of everything, evidence of the other’s love and more time to explore their sexual relationship together.

       In order to assure that longer time together, the gay friend covertly pours out the remaining water left in one of their bottles, and later empties an entire second bottle. Perhaps the more experienced hiker of the two, he purposely gets them lost. To save energy, they hike through the night becoming ever more disoriented, the bisexual friend finally growing angry with the situation and physically attacking the other which quickly leads to another sexual incident, as if any bodily contact compels them into sexual action. One of them suggests that they need to control their actions if they do not wish to get dehydrated.

      Finally, with the bright sun burning down upon them, the conflicted friend calls out the other for depleting their supplies. It appears that he has seen what the other has done, yet allowed it to go on, joining him on the longer-than-intended stay in the desert. It is evident that he too has been unable to sublimate his desires.

      When they finally find a railroad and return to cellphone territory, they call his wife to come pick them up. Tired, desperately thirsty, and dirty, they get in the car in complete silence as she attempts to discern what happened and what condition they are in.

       But both men remain silent, the one in the front seat ostentatiously leaning over to kiss his savior wife or girlfriend, the other remaining bitterly quiet in the backseat, obviously recognizing the self-deceit and hypocrisy of his friend. Does the woman know that there is a tension between the two and perhaps suspect the cause? Will they remain friends, the bisexual someday finding the need once more to take an all-male camping trip?

       Obviously, the director keeps us in the dark about all these matters. In fact, I would argue that the entire film is presented to us far too much “in the dark.” It’s difficult to even distinguish between these individuals, and although we know what is happening, we are never privy to their facial or bodily responses. Does the apparent bisexual truly enjoy their sexual interludes or does he simply endure them for the sake of the other? After a while, the prudence of the director—perhaps out of respect for his orthodox audiences—begins to border on self-censorship and evades the very issues, much like his character, which the film attempts to bring up. Perhaps it is time for a new Amos Guttman, the former bad boy of Israeli LGBTQ cinema.

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

 

Julián Hernández | Muchacho en la barra se masturba con rabia y osadía (Young Man at the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve) / 2015

the dance of sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emiliano Arenales Osorio and Julián Hernández (screenplay), Julián Hernández (director) Muchacho en la barra se masturba con rabia y osadía (Young Man at the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve) / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

After reviewing Julián Hernández’s 2020 film, The Day Began Yesterday, I wondered why, although I have evidence that I had seen his 2015 movie Young Man at the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve, I had yet gotten around to commenting on it; meanwhile I’d forgotten most of what I’d seen. Watching it once again this morning, I realized why I, metaphorically speaking, had pushed the pause button. Obviously, I needed to assimilate this strange biopic, in which this seemingly totally sexually honest narrator begins the film under his rent-boy name of Jonathan, reporting that he charges 1,500 pesos per hour (about $75 US dollars) before describing his own body and his very few don’ts of any sexual meeting.   

    Yet only a few moments later begins to describe his own life from his childhood on. The actor Cristhian Rodríguez, who performed also in Hernández’s 2007 gay adult sexual fantasy Bramadero describing here, presumably, his own life which begins in a small town near Mazatlán where he was such an effeminate child that everyone knew he was gay, several older straight men taking advantage of that fact, returning to fuck him several times, and leading him to believe that gays were like women but with whom no true relationship with a man was possible.

      But even here we begin to question the complete veracity of his stories. The distance between biography and fiction increasingly becomes something to be questioned. Rodríguez does not at all appear that effeminate except when he imitates effeminacy. And his totally fluid and fascinatingly complex narrative makes you realize that this is a written text (by the director and Emiliano Arenales Osorio) that he is speaking.

      Nonetheless, we quickly are convinced of its authenticity when the narrator describes his move to the city of Mazatlán where he discovered that men, sometimes both macho men, openly kissed and even effeminate gays grabbed male butts and encouraged sexual activity—in short, that relationships between queers was not only possible but a given outside of his small pueblo—but perhaps even more importantly that he not only loved to dance but was perceived as others to be gifted dancer.

      A scene where Rodríguez is teaching popular dancing to a group that appears preparing for a gay drag number certainly suggests his terpsichorean skills. But when he describes joining a famous dance company and moving to Mexico City to study modern dance, we have little evidence except a small dance segment and a splendid work-out on gymnastic rings that he was actually invited to join the famed Mexico City dance company La Cebra Danza Gay. Although Rodríguez mentions the founder José Rivera Moya, there is no record that I could find that he was actually among the six-male dancers which constitute the main company.

      And almost the moment the narrator begins to describe his love of dance and his need to discover dance technique, his discussion of the body quickly turns to his even greater commitment to sex, which he claims he was forced to use as a source for outside income because of the low pay he made as a dancer. Teaching popular dance is truly believable, but given the strictures of a dancer’s career I doubt that staying up most nights as a rent-boy or escort might serve as a source of income that most dancers might choose.

      Moreover, it quickly becomes apparent that Jonathan / Rodríguez or whoever else’s story we are being told is far more addicted to sex than he is interested in studying dance. But even here we quickly perceive that as attractive as Rodríguez is, that he is not a high-end escort but a small-time prostitute who basically engages in role-playing with his young clients, at one point entering the room as if he were a birthday gift for a client, perhaps a shy boy just in town, not so very different from the “cowboy” figure brought to the birthday party of The Boys in the Band. And in another instance, he role-plays a wheel-chair bound victim who his client quickly tosses upon the bedsprings and fucks.

     Suggesting that he is also well known as a renowned bar performer, we see him atop a small bar performing lame versions of what Montreal’s Stock Bar muscle-bound performers alike what in London, Berlin, or Mexico City’s Divina stage dancers do every night (although Marrakech, where he performs is a well-known Mexico City gay bar). 

      Our narrator boldly declares that although he engages in such sex to supplement his income, he is far happier in his lifestyle than he would be working at Starbucks or any other such job, again restating his complete addiction to sex.

       Yet soon after, he declares that by age 40 he hopes to be able to own a laundromat, which is almost comic—despite its My Favorite Laundromat associations—given its low-paying dividends and the hard work one needs to involve oneself for its upkeep. If you want to talk about menial jobs, we can begin with that of a laundromat assistant, although perhaps he sees himself only as the owner, not the operator of the place. What is also interesting is that this narrator, despite his totally open sexuality, has almost a compulsion for cleanliness, telling his first potential client that he will suck any appendage as long as it’s clean, as the frame switches to a large block of pristine white showers where we see our narrator among others enjoying their refreshment; there is no sex among these visitors to purity.

        But, of course, the issue of age also brings up the most important issue of this almost manic and truly comic flow of verbal babble: both the worlds of sexual escorts and dancers, being all about the body, are notoriously short-lived given the demands of bodily movement and beauty; as cute as Rodríguez is, he is clearly already over the prime of most dancers and male prostitutes. At one point the narrator suggests, upon his move to Mexico City, that he has little time left because he is turning 22; but my guess, particularly given the dates of earlier films starring Rodríguez, that he is closer to 30 or beyond, nearing the end of such careers.

       It hardly matters, however, since the actor is so very compelling and believable in his role. And we get another glimpse in this film of director Julián Hernández’s righteous claim that sex is very much at the heart of the gay experience, despite the continued attempts to wash it over with heterosexual domesticity in contemporary film and narrative of 21st century LGBTQ life.

      But the story he tells does very much matter since it has been that of many another young man come to the city from the provinces in search of love and success. We gather that Rodríguez’s character has never found nor will never find either, and we realize that the not-so-longer very young man sitting at the end of the bar has suddenly only himself to entertain with rage and, yes, a great deal of nerve, which is what makes him so very watchable.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

Tom Hooper | The Danish Girl / 2015

i am entirely myself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucinda Coxon (screenplay, based on the novel by David Ebershoff), Tom Hooper (director) The Danish Girl / 2015

 

Reviewer Christy Lemire begins her Roger Ebert-site review of Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl with the very questions I had about this work:

 

“Can a movie be impeccably made—well-cast and strongly acted, flawlessly appointed and gorgeously shot—yet still leave you cold? Can it do everything right technically without touching you emotionally? Can it offer a transporting experience without changing you one bit? Such is the conundrum with The Danish Girl.”

 

The film about one of the first Danish transgender sex changes is beautifully filmed by cinematographer Danny Cohen, beginning with a hedge of trees that Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) paints again and again, as well as a lush score by Hollywood favorite, composer Alexandre Desplat.

     Yet the pedestrian director Hooper (The King’s Speech and Les Misérables) presents what might have been a very spicy tale with a distant admiration instead of the deep passion Wegener’s sexual transformation deserves. Instead of the real-life transgender film shot by Sean Baker, Tangerine, Hooper fetishizes Einar as he transforms into Lili a bit like the way the journalistic reportage did in their pieces on the hunk sportsman, Bruce Jenner (I remember when his seemingly outsized cock slapped against his running shorts—and shorts were precisely that in those days) long before he transformed into Caitlyn. The media simply presented it as a matter of fact that Jenner had always wanted to become a woman. But why? How does that happen? Certainly not overnight for either the successful painter Wegener or Jenner.

      Wegener, at least in this fictionalized version, was deeply in love with his lesser successful portrait-painter wife, Gerda (Alicia Viklander). The film suggests that they lasted 6 years, lopping off 20 years from their real marriage, the truth of which might have made for a much more compelling story. How many years did Lili remain, as she describes it, “inside” the body of Einar the artist?

      Even more important, the film seems to basically ignore Gerda’s own sexual conundrums. Although Hopper (through writer David Ebershoff’s novel) does hint that she helped push the beautiful young artist into his feminine identity, first through a quick posing for her as their ballerina friend Ulla Poulsen (inexplicably named Ulla Paulson in this work) and later, in a somewhat kinky manner, enjoying the fact that her husband/lover observes her new nightgown and later wears it under his suit—with shades of Ed Wood—and, finally, encourages him to make a party appearance as his inner Lili, at the same time her personal life, given her many paintings of lesbian women (not just her “in drag” husband) is totally ignored. Perhaps this long-term couple was not so heterosexual as this movie pretends.

     Moreover, both the original book and this cinematic version create imaginary relationships with characters named Hans (Matthias Schonaerts)—who first kissed Einar as a young man—and Henrik (Ben Whishaw) who, apparently knowingly falls in love and kisses Lili at the party, suggesting Einar might have been a homosexual simply confused about who he/she was. Certainly, several doctors he consults suggest as much as well, and are prepared to lock him up as a pervert or simple mental case.

     Many transgender males, however, do not have homosexual tendencies before their sexual shift (apparently Caitlyn Jenner being one of them). If it may be confusing for general audiences, love is simply like that. The lines of sex and love are not easily drawn.

      And, even more importantly, why not explore Gerda’s own later relationship with Fernando Porta or Lili’s connections to Claude Lejeune? Or, for that matter, why shoot a film about a “Danish woman” in Norway? Although both countries have had long relationships, in my experience they are very different.

       This, obviously, is truly a fiction, as film often is. And reasons for authorial and directorial choices in how to present characters are obviously complex and sometimes obscure. But, in this film, Hooper’s choices are at the heart of what makes us unable to comprehend and feel for its figures. The feminine in Redmayne’s performance, despite the somewhat feminine features of his own beautiful body, seem all to do here with a love of satin and silk, more an issue of cross-dressing rather than the radical sexual operations he undergoes—the removal of his penis and insertion of a vagina—that ultimately killed him. If you want to become a woman to dress up, put on a wig, and makeup, then, I might suggest, you don’t know what a woman is. Lili’s courage and sacrifices become utterly trivialized.

    And why would any director want Gerda to rush to Lili’s death bed, when the very outsiderness of her actions at that time, meant, as reality proclaimed, she could no longer join him, and was not there at the time of his death?

       There are times when truth is more interesting than fiction. As Lili herself says after her first operation: “I am entirely myself.” Too bad we didn’t truly get to know that self.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2020).

Paddy Breathnach | Viva / 2015

the most beautiful slum in the world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark O'Halloran (screenplay), Paddy Breathnach (director) Viva / 2015

 

A favorite “underdog film” at the Telluride festival in 2015, the Irish-Cuban film Viva went on to be the Irish nominee for the Oscars. While it was excluded from the final list, it still remains an amazingly powerful small film, despite its rather formulaic story.

       Yes, this is a gay tale about a young Cuban boy, who, after losing his mother in death and losing his father to prison as a toddler, survives as a neighborhood hairdresser, often going unpaid by his equally poverty-stricken elderly woman neighbors. He picks up a bit more money by working on the wigs of a local drag club at night. And when things get really tough, he picks up mostly tourist customers on the Malecón as a male prostitute.

       Jesus (Héctor Medina) may be slightly built and rather effeminate, but he is also savvy about surviving, and realizes that his second profession doesn’t last for long. And since he’s inherited a varied collection of major female singers on record from his mother, he becomes fascinated by the performing drag queens, particularly his boss, Mama (a terrific Luis Alberto García), and more to get on in the world than any innate desire, he’s interested in giving the drag club routine a try. When one of the performers goes missing, he auditions for her place in the show.

      Putting on a short skirt which, as one nasty queen notes, reveals his cock from Cienfuegos, he becomes (after a quick glance at a nearby magazine) Viva. She’s not very good, but Mama knows a needy hire when she sees one, and casts him for a single performance. Again, she’s not a natural, and more customers leave than remain through his performance. Yet Mama needs Jesus for her wigs and gives him one more chance. Another performer, Cindy (Luis Manuel Alvaarez) gives him some good advice: interrelate with the audience. Even if you don’t like the look of someone, make him feel that you love him.

      Unfortunately, Viva, performing much better, chooses the glance of a stranger at the bar, who ends up slugging her in the lip. She has not recognized her own father, come back from his prison stint.

      An ex-boxer Angel (Jorge Perugorría) is a homophobe, and even more upset that his own son has turned out to be a drag queen. We all know what will happen next. As he moves in with his son in the small run-down apartment, he won’t permit the boy to perform, so in order to bring food to the table, the boy has no other choice but to return to prostitution, an odd predicament which he does not share with his father.

     Angel attempts, on the basis of his old reputation, to involve himself in the local boxing club as a coach; but even he knows he’s far beyond his prime, and thus, although we hate his character, we feel for him as well; and so does Jesus, who does his best to cook up dinners of rice and beans, while still keeping up his job of dressing the drag performers with wigs.

     Cuba, with its poverty-stricken beauty, a country filled with individuals who make do with the very little they left, is caught in-between clumsy, hand-held camera maneuvers, in the lens of cinematographer Cathal Watters. Even Angel, poised on the balcony of his son’s squalid apartment comments: “It’s the most beautiful slum in the world.” Perhaps no one in Cuba might say that—the film was scripted by Irish writer, Mark O'Halloran and directed by Paddy Breathnach—but it’s an apt statement. And the movie, which now begins to wallow a bit in the tension between Jesus’ new Daddy and his drag-queen Mama, is equally on target.

      Yes, we all know where this movie has to go. Despite all the absurd sacrifices of his boy and heart, Jesus comes to love his father (who, of course, we found out, is in the last stages of cancer) despite his rough exterior, and works hard to please him. We cannot help but to tear up a bit when, after yet another drinking bout, the pugilist becomes hospitalized—although I must confess, I couldn’t wait for him to die so that Jesus might return for his big comeback as a real star drag queen just dying to let all hang out.

       Fortunately, the movie awards us with that last treat. But all along it has also been awarding us the beautiful performances of its actors and setting, which leave the Irish director and writer a bit in the dust.

       But then, these Irish folks didn’t take the film through the dirt and carnality that others might have. For all the sexual activity going on, Viva’s heart is as pure as John Waters’ Hairspray and Pecker. The lip-synching broads really do sing their hearts out, and we have no choice but to totally love them—even though we all know, as Cindy declares, “it’s just an illusion.” So too is Havana; maybe even more so if it becomes a new tourist destination.

 

Los Angeles, December 7, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2016).