Reinout Hellenthal | Anders (Something About Alex) / 2017

sorry caterpillar

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Bontenbal (screenplay, based on an idea by Mariska Breedland), Reinout Hellenthal (director) Anders (Something About Alex) / 2017 [18 minutes]

There is something wrong with Alex (Maas Bronkhuyzen). In the first few frames of this lovely short film, he goes stalking about the woods, hitting trees and fallen tree limbs in a branch. But a moment or later a clod of soil hits his back, and he turns to see his sister’s boyfriend Hendrik (Kay Greidanus), everything seems changed as they playfully toss small pieces of mud at one another before Hendrik finally picks up and tosses the younger boy over his shoulder, Alex demanding “mercy.” They sit for a moment talking, Alex probing at an insect on the stick in his hand. Hendrik demands he leave it alone, Alex commenting “It’s just a caterpillar,” to which the older boy responds, “But one day a butterfly.” He insists he say “sorry caterpillar.”

     The minute they return home, however, both his mother (Marike van Weelden) and sister Annelies (Roos Netjes) express their distress at his appearance, demanding he take a shower and get dressed immediately, his mother having laid out some fresh clothes. Alex undresses, looking at his lean boyish frame in the mirror, but when spying the clothes, he refuses to wear them even though the event they are about to attend is apparently a wedding.

     At the family table Annelies has some important news to share with Alex. She and Hendrik had long ago put their name in for a residence in the city, and it’s now come through; they will soon be moving there. Alex, furious, goes stalking off into the barn, relating more to the gentle cows that to his own family members. He’s in love, so it seems, with Hendrik and the fact that he’s moving away is not just uncomfortable, but a kind of teenage tragedy. To whom can he possibly relate when Hendrik and Annelies are gone?

    Hendrik soon joins him in the barn, suggesting that he must have known that this news was on its way. “It won’t be so bad. You’ll have a place to crash when you come in the weekends.”

     But Alex is still morose. “Everything, everything will change,” he insists, Hendrik admitting that it may be true, but change can also sometimes before the better.

     If we suspected that we were, in fact, witnessing a kind of “coming out” movie it is confirmed by Hendrik’s advice that Alex tell his mom, or maybe his sister, since she would surely understand.

     Yet, we feel something odd going on here. Is Hendrik really the object of Alex’s desire? And if so, does this farm story actually haunt the same halls as Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding (the film version of 1952) in which Frankie Addams imagines herself to be not only a witness to, but a member of the wedding of her brother and his soon-to-be bride. If Frankie might be perceived as a tomboy or a future lesbian who imagines herself as almost encompassing her brother’s role, Alex seems to similarly have a gay attraction to her sister’s future husband. And now that Annelies is taking him away to the city, he has no one to even share his imaginative secret.

     On the drive to the church, all his mother can complain of is the fact that he has worn his fancy shoes into the barn. She suggests that if he’s going to have such a grumpy face, he should sit in the back of the church. Alex does so, watching, as the couple marry at the altar, his own sister joyfully caressing the shoulder of Hendrik, reminding him again that soon she will not take him away merely to another place but remove him from any possibility of Alex and his private and secret love.

    Alex becomes so caught up in his fears that in the midst of the ceremony he stands as if is about to protest the marriage; but when the minister acknowledges him, runs from the church.

    As he returns to town near his farm, he sees a group of boys playing soccer, and oddly calls out to them, asking if he might join them. The leader, Lucas (Joes Brauers) quickly scoffs at the question, laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation, as if a “queer” boy could possibly be able play a game with them. But when Alex stands his ground, he agrees, demanding, however, that he loses he won’t cry.

    Alex not only holds his own, but outmaneuvers the others, controlling the ball and ultimately proving himself a far better player than most of the others.

    As the two boys, Lucas and Alex, walk down a lane together after, Lucas wonders whether Alex has learned the game on the farm, admitting that he is “pretty good.” A few second later, however, an even stranger event occurs. Lucas suddenly almost touches and quickly rubs against Alex’s hand, and as the farm boy turns in some confusion, he attempts to kiss him, Alex pulling away and storming off as Lucas cries out “Sorry. Sorry.”

     Back at home, we see Alex’s mother looking out the window in consternation, obviously wondering where Alex might have gone off to.

     When he returns, it is Hendrik again who rushes out to wonder what has happened, as Alex’s mother soon joins him, wondering what has brought on such behavior.

      Alex begs insists upon returning to his room, his mother insisting he come back, after several calls of Alex, demanding: “Alexandra come here!” Alex turns, glowering, “Don’t call me like that!”

     The mother continues, “No listen, you’re my little girl,” he yelling “No,” as she finally slaps him, Alex turning again to reveal a much smaller female with long, straight hair. And in that moment we perceive the reality of the situation, as Dutch director Reinout Hellenthal visually spells it out for us, forcing us to reexperience several previous scenes with the young would-be transgender girl who sees herself as the boy others, with the exception of Hendrik, do not.

       It is a brilliant way to help us perceive how a transgender individual might feel trapped in a body in which at every moment she is attempting to escape, and imagines herself having left behind. He is Alex, not the young girl his mother perceives him to be. He is Alex, another boy, and not the girl Lucas has thought might like a kiss. Alex refuses to wear a dress that his mother has put out for him to wear to the wedding. And the wedding itself sparks the confusion within him that heteronormative marriage presumes.

      At film’s end the two, Alex and Alexandra stand in a field, both in tears, as Alex gutturally growls out at his female self in an attempt to scare her off. A moment later, Alex feels Hendrik’s hadd upon his shoulder, his mother soon running to him as she calls out Alex, taking him into her embrace, admitting, “I just don’t know how to deal with this, you know.” She continues, “I noticed, but…” ending mid-sentence as the family gathers round to create a presence of support. It’s clear that in this loving family, at least, Alex will be in good hands. Unlike Frankie, he is indeed a member of the wedding even as his sister and Hendrik move off.

 

Los Angeles, September 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Krailas Phondongnok | มะลิซ้อนออกดอกเป็นมะละกอ (The Same Is Not the Same) / 2015

realities of chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Krailas Phondongnok (screenwriter and director) มะลิซ้อนออกดอกเป็นมะละกอ (The Same Is Not the Same) / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

We know that homophobia exists everywhere, although one might hardly imagine it in the seemingly LGBTQ-tolerant Thailand. Yet that is precisely the subject of Thai director Krailas Phondongnok’s short film of 2015.

     Watching her favorite TV film on the Zodiac signs, the Mother (Somkhuan Phondongnok) at the center of this film is interrupted by her daughter, Ap-Sorn (Siriporn Chaireun) who is fed up with her mother’s devotion to all things magical and spiritual, and changes the channel to her favorite subject, a boy-love film, a phenomenon of great popularity throughout Asia.

     As she begins to watch the images of the boy lovers laying together in bed, the mother grows angry, disgusted by such TV fare and amazed that it is even permitted to be aired. She walks away cursing how low society has become.

       In the same room, his back turned away from the TV, is her son, Inn (Nattapat Sookwongsil) who is disturbed by his mother’s homophobia, particularly since, as we soon discover when he hooks up with his friend Mac (Faseethong Phanwong), that he and Mac are a gay couple. When Mac stops playing basketball and joins him, Inn relates the news that his mother is totally unaccepting of his own identity, and fears that he will never be able to relate the truth to her. Indeed, he soon tries by wondering what he she discovered that her son was a “ladyboy”—unfortunately one of the ways in which Asian culture male homosexuality is still described. She perceives it only as an issue of gender, related to the dog she and her friends have worshipped because of its hermaphroditic features, beloved as a token to help in their choice of numbers for the daily lottery. “How many cocks or pussies do you have?” she flippantly asks.

     He explains he has only one penis but he still likes other boys, but she refuses even to deal with his statement, busy as she is in consulting her chart of numbers from which she will make her lottery choice.

     When he returns to Max, they get the idea to visit her as a couple and do so, in her presence engaging in a deep kiss—a kiss caught by his sister on her cellphone, she absolutely delighted to spread the word to her friends that her own brother is involved in boy-love. Furious, his mother is offended by their behavior and bans him from the house forever.

     Together, the two boys mull over the consequences, both trying to figure out what to do about the situation which has obviously gone awry. Suddenly, a smile creeps over Inn’s face. Soon after they show up to his mother both in the green robes of Buddhist monks.

      Monks in Thai culture are not only representatives of authority and, accordingly, in his mother’s thinking are images of good luck, but are permitted (more recently with great controversy and increasing hostility) some sexual latitude since there is nothing in Buddha’s teachings about homosexuality or transgender behavior.

      Inn asks his mother’s permission to enter into a relationship with Max. Seeing only the green robes of cultural significance, the color itself which she believes represents good luck, she has little choice but to bless their relationship. But immediately after, they tear their robes away, standing now only in their underwear, Inn asking the very same question.

      This time the mother doesn’t quite know how to respond, having just given the permission but now being faced with them as being mere boys with precisely the same request. Clearly, even as illogical as she is in her life, she cannot fail, we hope, to realize the absurdity of a rejection as a son and friend as opposed to the acceptance of a green-robed religious figures. Yet, as the film’s English title suggests, for some people “the same is not the same.”

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

 

Elnura Osmonalieva | Seide / 2015

cutting off childhood pleasures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elnura Osmonalieva (screenwriter and director) Seide / 2015 [13 minutes]

Kyrgyzstan director Elnura Osmonalieva’s 2015 short film Seide cannot truly be characterized as an LGBTQ movie, particularly since the young girl at the center of this film, Seide (Kaliman Kalybek Kyzy), is not even perhaps aware of her sexuality and certainly not in touch with a conception of “outsider” sex.

     She is simply a young child, growing up in the cold, snow-ridden plains of Kyrgyzstan who loves her horse and enjoys racing through the fields with the local boys. In the US we would describe her as a tomboy, and perhaps ascribe her love of horse-riding to lesbian tendencies. The lesbian astride a horse has long been a common image and a trope represented by the female warrior riding horseback throughout history (one need only think of Joan of Arc or the Germanic legend of the Black Fighter Johanna) to represent outsider and lesbian behavior.

     But here there are no symbols, just acts. Coming of age, Seide suddenly is the subject of her father and a neighbor concerning marriage, and without even telling her, it is decided in the traditional manner that she will marry the boy next door. Even worse, following the tradition of his ancestors, the father (Kanat Abdrakhmanov) intends to slaughter her beloved horse.

     Osmonalieva expresses all of this with the calm of inevitability—after all, what other choices in this isolated world does the young girl have? But it is Seide’s personal revolt against that inevitability which is at the heart of this emotionally touching film.

      Rising early one morning, she rides her horse far into the cold distance, perhaps to a location where she or the horse have never before traveled, with the intention of leaving her animal behind as she sloughs through the cold snow back to her home. She hugs the horse close to her, removes its harness, and tells it to run. She walks off, but when she turns, she sees her beloved animal following. He cannot leave her any more than she can him. “Run. Go!” she insists again and again.  “Go away! Silly beast.” Repeating this several times, she finally falls to a seated position in the snow in desperation, pain, and anger for the situation. Because of her love of the animal, she recognizes now that the horse must die to be replaced by another through her dowry. One wonders if the tradition was not purposely concocted to break off all contact with a childhood that saw no gender borders, and in the process to cut off all childhood pleasures in preparation for the hard life of heterosexual love a female of age will have to endure.

      The final scene shows her dressed as a bride, looking out over the winter landscape with nothing but trepidation for a future that has cost her all she loved.

       Perhaps this is less an LGBTQ work than it is a feminist statement, a sad pliant for all those women whose fates are sealed simply because of where they live. But I can’t help but feel that had Seide grown up elsewhere, in Western Europe perhaps, she would have become another woman than the one to which she has been confined to be in her homeland.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

Chris Coats | Good Boy / 2015

everything’s going to be okay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Coats (screenwriter and director) Good Boy / 2015 [15 minutes]

 

US director Chris Coats graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara before joining up with the production company originally headed by actor Heath Ledger and Matt Amato, The Masses. In 2015 he made the troubling and moving film about toxic masculinity, Good Boy.

     Macon (Frank Martinelli) and his father Scott (Cliff Weissman) have just driven in from Flagstaff to the Yucca Desert to celebrate Macon’s boyhood friend Caleb’s (Nicholas Tucci) return home from the military. As they come to a stop at house, Macon is still having evident nightmares about a day long ago which becomes the central motif in Coats’ film. Evidently, the high school boys Macon and Caleb were out in the desert, dressed in mock army fatigues, to engage in a paintball battle, joined by Caleb’s younger brother Eli (Jance Enslin) and his friend Quinn (Eric Unger), both of whom seem far less interested in the battlefield game than in each other.

      As Macon awakens, his father reassures him that they will only stay a couple of hours, reminding him that Caleb was his closet friend.

      The “party” doesn’t go well. Caleb has returned home, having evidently been through several near-death situations, surly and angry, later admitting to Macon that he did not want to come back home. The older folks spend most of their time at the reunion playing poker, with little communication with the returned veteran.

       Besides Caleb has stalked off the backyard, his sister Kel (Toni Christopher) asking Macon if he could go talk with him since he’s clearly “in a mood.” Their conversation set against the desert backdrop and their attempt to play darts is not truly fulfilling to either of them, as Caleb—desperate for some weed—recounts past times such as the night when seeking out pot they encountered a mean man working Macon’s father, and ended up drinking a whole bottle of cough syrup as a substitution drug, returning home scared and sick, only to observe Eli sitting on the front porch with a whole bag of marijuana.

       Even the mention of the boy’s name further halts any possible communication, as we observe, once again Macon’s visual memories. In this scene as the two older boys, dressed as soldiers, survey the land they’re about to “conquer,” they notice Eli with his friend sitting beside a huge culvert drain talking and a moment later kissing, and kissing again. Clearly these boys are not of the same masculine mind set on symbolic acts of violence as are the older two boys.

       Caleb confronts his brother, and the two fight, Eli storming off after slugging Caleb, his friend disappearing in the violent confrontation.

        Back at the reunion, Caleb finally comes back inside to confront his father and the others for keeping all the junk of his childhood, including maintaining Eli’s room exactly as it was the day he disappeared, never to return home. The sister has followed up leads, she tells Macon, even traveling the year before, 15 years after Eli’s disappearance, to Oklahoma based on a lead.

       As Scott calls out that it’s time for them to leave, Macon joins Caleb in Eli’s old room as the soldier recounts his memory of a maneuver in which it appeared that death was upon him. The old wives’ tale about recalling all the major moments of one’s own life isn’t true, he argues, since all he could conjure up were scenes from his brother’s life. And suddenly he saw the boy, in Hawaii perhaps, having breakfast with his boyfriend, without ever knowing that his older brother Caleb had now died.

       Tears stream down his eyes at the very same moment when the final moments of the childhood paintbrush battle are played out in Macon’s mind. We see Eli continuing on his way home after striking Caleb, Macon now riding his bicycle past him. In anger for his participation in the bullying, Eli picks up a rock, lobbing it at the bicyclist and momentarily knocking him off the bike. Macon recovers, picks up the rock, and moves to Eli, hitting him hard on the head with the rock again and again.

       As Caleb recounts his sad tale about his lost brother, he suddenly realizes that Macon is also in tears as they well up in his eyes and stream down his cheek. Macon stands, called again by his father, to leave, Caleb looking strangely at him and momentarily following him out into the hall with a strange look of sudden perception on his face.

       In the truck again, Macon begins a sentence, “Why did you….” which his father immediately interrupts, repeating what he must have dozens of times throughout the years: “Listen to me. You’d of regretted it Macon, you would. Our life would be gone. You’re a good man, Macon. You made a mistake, but you’re good man. I need you to believe me. I need to hear it when I say it.”

      The pound of a percussive instrument in Rebecca Calinsky’s effective score clicks and bangs as the father repeats these words—the delusions of all violent murderers who excuse their actions through the notion of protecting their own heteronormative values. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

       Obviously, for neither Caleb or Macon, things are not okay. Their lives have been emptied in the absence of Eli from the young love and non-violent values he daily reminds them of, emotions these men appear to be unable to find in their own lives.

      Coats’ short film is a powerful testament to how homophobic violence—perhaps violence of any kind—forever alters the lives of not just the abused but any abuser with a conscience equally.

      The director himself observes of his film: “It was my intent to create this intensely masculine environment in order to show just how fragile that masculinity can be. It’s a mask that men are made to wear and act upon, repressing other aspects that they consider weak but which in reality, make a person whole. When that mask eventually falls away, what’s underneath is angry, frightened, and underdeveloped like an animal, blind because it’s lived in the dark its whole life, having never been exposed to the light.”

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

Iver Jensen | We Remember Moments / 2015

comeuppance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Iver Jensen (screenwriter and director) We Remember Moments / 2015 [12 minutes]

 

Bullying of gay or simply “different” individuals in the high school world apparently takes place in nearly every culture. In the Iceland high school which Pétur (Fannar Már Jóhannsson) attends, the school bully is Dagur (Haukur Örn Valtysson) who daily tortures him over the seemingly slightest of reasons, gay sexuality not necessarily being one of them. Mostly, it appears, since his mother has died and his father is working at what might be day jobs—Dagur describes him as a “hobo”—he mocks him for his poverty and social standing, questioning that Pétur seems interested in photography, for example, when he cannot even afford a camera.

    In the very next scene, it happens to be Pétur’s birthday as we meet the obviously caring father (Jón Páll Eyjólfsson) who has baked him a birthday cake, “just as his mother used to.” Yet the son remains sullen, obviously not yet having assimilated his mother’s death. But the father truly surprises him with another gift, a second-hand fully equipped Cannon camera, which finally brings words of joy and appreciation to the son’s mouth.

      Now in the rough mountain range of the Iceland landscape we observe Pétur snapping scenery. That is, until two young boys suddenly appear along the path, boys who just happen to be from the photographer’s high school, Dagur and another boy Helgi (Mateusz Swierczewski). Pétur, with camera to his eye, overhears their argument about their relationship, in which Helgi is tired of being hidden behind the barrage of Dagur’s homophobic comments in the school, backed up by the others. He wants a more open relationship, a near impossibility of course, while Dagur begs him to wait just a little longer until they’ve graduated.

      Pétur snaps an attempted kiss between the two, as Hegli pulls away in anger and walks off, Dagur calling out for him and following.

       The next morning, having made copies of the photo, Pétur posts the photo throughout the high school halls, and by the time Dagur arrives at school most of the student body are gossiping about him being gay. He too is now ostracized as Pétur as so long been.

        Sitting alone outside the school, Dagur looks miserable as Pétur joins him, trying to actually begin a conversation perhaps for the first time of their lives. And later, as Pétur is walking home Dagur joins him, perhaps too predictably apologizing for all the terrible things he has done to hurt him.

        Up to this point, Iver Jensen’s short film We Remember Moments has seemed, uncomfortably, to have represented itself only as a revenge film, a work in which at this point it is difficult to feel full empathy for either boy. But in this moment, Pétur responds that he has something to tell him as the screen goes black, the credits rolling soon after.

        Clearly, he is about to admit what he has done. Unfortunately, it is too late for the film to explore what might have happened had that scene been shown and the aftermath revealed. Had Jensen’s film had the nerve to chart out that territory it might have stood out as a far more potent film than one that simply gets back at the bully forcing him to feel the pain that he has long caused.

     But as it stands, Pétur has himself become a bully. And despite the educative apology that we might expect in any short film devoted to showing how bullying is wrong, it appears none of the other students are more willing to accept gay or outsider behavior any more than Dagur was. If the only movie had moved into that territory instead of timidly standing on the outside looking on. As it stands all we have is a picture of young boy who has gotten his comeuppance, never a very interesting event in fiction or in film. George Amberson Minafer’s final comeuppance was so uninteresting to Orson Welles as director of The Magnificent Ambersons, that we walked off the set while others reshot the scene, creating a terribly flawed ending to a work that had otherwise been an example of great filmmaking.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).  

Jonah Greenstein | Dedalus / 2018

soil, flesh, and stone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonah Greenstein (screenwriter and director) Dedalus / 2018

 

Iowa-born director Jonah Greenstein’s first feature film, Dedalus has more connection with the Hungarian director Béla Tarr than to most Hollywood filmmakers. Like Tarr, Greenstein uses languidly controlled camera movements that focus as much on the detail of the landscape than they do on character, along with a highly disjunctive narrative that tells its story with huge gaps in both time and logic. The viewer must slowly puzzle together the story out of the images, and character derives from the landscape as much as it does from the acting.

   Greenstein uses mostly newer and unknown actors along with a few professionals to create unexpected faces who must basically tell their own stories. At one point in the movie when a man picks up the hustler (played by Alexander Horner) central to the second part of this work, he comments, “You don’t talk much,” to which the hustler answers, “But I’m a good listener.” So does this film demand that we all be good “watchers,” that we ourselves become cognizant of the visual.

     Dedalus is also a triptych, a work in three parts and different periods, the first taking place in Iowa, the second in New York, an the third in Los Angeles—fascinating for someone like me since these three locations (despite long periods in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Baltimore), have been the three central foci of my own life.

   What I am suggesting, in short, is that Greenstein’s type of filmmaking will surely not satisfy everyone, and a number of the few commentors who have even bothered to write of this neglected film have found it far too slow moving and even described it as boring.

     I find it beautiful and emotionally moving; but then I like the slow-process works of Tarr as well, a “balletic” approach to moviemaking (so argued The New Yorker of Greenstein’s method) which irritates the hell out of many regular moviegoers.

     Finally, although I describe this film to be primarily of LGBTQ interest, the shorter first and last parts of this triptych are heterosexual, although you might certainly describe the last section as even sexless.

     I have characterized the three parts as “soil, flesh, and stone,” although you might also designate them vaguely as a kind of past, present, and future reality of some minor figure, such as the grocery store cashier, if you imagine his escape from Iowa, a move to an unforgiving New York, and his inevitable transformation into an elderly man in Los Angeles.

    There is, however, no link between the characters from these distinctly different sections; only to the formal approaches to each with which the director takes.

     In the Iowa section we are immediately faced with an entire farmhouse of isolated and distraught individuals. The farmer father, worried about the weeds returned to his soy fields, cannot even arouse the attentions of his busy wife, who slaps his hands when he dares to touch her while she is busy in the kitchen.

     Meanwhile, the family’s daughter—evidently the offspring of an earlier marriage of the farmer or his wife since the IMDb description (presumably composed by the director or someone connected with the film) describes the boy of the film as her step-brother—takes a lonely run before returning home while her step-brother lies in bed, the latter only eventually wandering over to an isolated field where several derelict cars and other pieces of machinery have been ditched, there to drink beer with an older man.

     None of these people seem to be able to find much human communication. Only later that evening do we see a gathering of younger folk around a fire. At the event the farm girl, fairly drunk, goes wandering off into a nearby woods, her step-brother following. When the two encounter each other, she removes her blouse as he approaches her, the two engaging in consensual sex. But only moments later, it becomes clear that several high school rowdies have followed them, immediately gang raping the girl. The camera does not show us the sexual acts, simply the bare feet filthy with mud and, soon after, her naked body curled up in a fetal position after her spiritual “soiling.”

   Time passes quickly, and in one of the very next scenes we see the girl angrily storming off to the grocery story, dust flying through the air as she speeds into town, there to spot the rapists in the local café where her own step-brother also sits apart from them.

     Soon after, she is already quite obviously pregnant, and upon a later visit to the same grocery store, she takes along her toddler son, who encounters in one of the aisles a couple of the rapists, one of them perhaps the father of the child, she scooping the boy up, checking out of the grocery line near where her step-brother also works as a cashier, and driving home with the child strapped into the back seat.

    Neither she, her step-brother, or father, dare say anything in this small town about the event, and each evidently have no choice but to bitterly stand in silent witness to the impact it has had on her and their own lives. Their internal anger, however, is conveyed in several ways, the father hunkering down in the middle of his soybeans, almost disappearing within his crops as he pulls out the weeds, the mother staring longingly out a high window, the boy angrily tossing eggs at a dumpster during a work break.

      Yet the beauty of their world shines through brightly at nearly all times of the day and night, Greenstein’s and cinematographer Jake Saner’s camera focusing on it as if it might be the only thing that keeps these folks alive in the hostile environment in which their lives are determinedly shaped.

      After a short moment of blackened screen, we are set down into a noisy gay club in the back of which we vaguely observe a 20-some year-old man fellating a far older man. He is a homeless hustler who connects up mostly with older men who can provide him with food, sometimes shelter, and a kind of desperate sexual intimacy.

      Either this young man is seeking a father, an idea thrown out by one of his clients (Thomas Jay Ryan), or is a true gerontophile is not established. But it does appear that our rather handsome young angel prefers to offer up his body mostly to elderly men.

     A one point, while sleeping on a New York City park bench he is picked up by a young woman (Ashley Robicheaux) who apparently seeks out temporarily empty apartments to inhabit and later actually rents another place, in both cases sharing her bed with the charming hustler.

      There is no sex between them shown, but clearly they come to care for one another even though it has become apparent that our young hero has become particularly attracted to one of his clients, perhaps a teacher, returning to him time and again. Another of his elderly clients even takes him to Atlantic City for the weekend, handing him cash even to try his hand at gambling.

    But it is the professional who takes him to a dance/play and regularly dines him in quiet restaurants that the handsome hustler keeps returning to, despite the fact that gradually the older man, his symbolic “daddy”—a word once affixed to this film—attempts to wean the boy and himself away from one another, knowing that it cannot be good for either of them to imagine a long-lasting relationship. Yet the elder clearly enjoys the sex, and the younger not only enjoys the sexual experience but the older man’s company. At one point, to demonstrate his love, the younger man, having just hooked up with another client a few days earlier, offers to pay for dinner with the pride of hopefully demonstrating his responsibility in what he may wish might become a real relationship.

     It is this tension between the desire of flesh and the reality of the age, along with class, position, and experience, that dominates this part of the movie.

   We have no idea what drives the rather high functioning gay man—a man who insists that he and his siblings remain quite close and still care for one another—or the younger hustler into the arms of one another except the call of flesh. But finally, there is more in their encounters than either is able to fully accept. The youth’s attempts to fly from the labyrinth of his life fails because his hopes are too immense to be answered by the gifts of his father Dedalus.

 a doctor’s office. Soon after the camera catches him with his woman friend sitting on the stoop of a liquor store without speaking, and a few frames later she is hugging him, tears running down her face. I read the scene as her discovery that he is HIV-Positive. As usual in this film, no such words are spoken, and we have no testimony through dialogue that this might be the case; we are simply forced to deduce the logic of what we witness with our eyes.

     In the very last scene of this section, we see our hustler with a much younger man with whom he evidently has enjoyable sex, after which he insists that he doesn’t need to be paid. Whether or not this charitable act represents a shift in our young hero’s behavior, guilt for his possibly infecting another human being, or some other unexplained transformation we are not told. It is again up to us to make sense of the incomplete reality displayed before us on the screen.

     As in real life, people do not behave as we might expect them to. In such delicious filmmaking all individuals are original eccentrics.

     In the last section, we see an older man who evidently worked as a photographer or perhaps has recently taken it up as an avocation. At the moment he is doing a shoot of a handsome elderly woman with whom it might be said that he is flirting, complimenting her on the way his frame captures her.

   This is clearly a man who has survived into old age by trying to keep in good health, and seeking out his independence as long as possible. But in the short span of this part of the film, we observe his body beginning finally to rebel, things he used to do daily suddenly and without warning become difficult. Small disasters begin to pile up, symbolized by a moment when he is vacuuming his balcony while leaving the water running in the kitchen sink, quickly spilling over onto the floor.

   He has difficulty walking at some moments. And finally he visits the doctor who reports the inevitable, his spine is aging and decaying, his knees and legs are breaking down.

     He now has no choice but to move in with his daughter, an enormous sacrifice of both their previous independence. She seems pleased to be able to care for him, but also realizes the difficulties she will have face as he greedily eats the pulp of an orange in a most unpleasing manner.

     But he, even more than she, feels now utterly lost. Taking a short swim with her in the pool, he decries his condition, that which if we live long enough, we all must face: “I lost it. I don’t know what needs to be done. And I’m scared. And I tried to change, and I did change. But I didn’t…I didn’t do anything, that would make a difference.”

     Even Greenstein’s language, when it appears, generally has a dual meaning. He may be speaking of his immediate condition, the quick shift to exercises and physical changes he has made when he has begun to encounter his bodily changes. Yet, at the same, he might be reflecting on his entire life, that he has now felt he has lost without making a change on anything around him, including himself, forcing him to recognize his life as quite meaningless, the way the characters of the very first section and the young hustler of the second might also have already perceived their lives. Their dreams—mostly shallow, their desires—basically unreciprocated, even their final stand of independence—leaves them with nothing as their bodies turn to stone.

    The old man with his cane goes tottering down a garden lane to be lost to nature in the film’s very last frame.

    Critic Ben Lindner, writing in Picture This Post, expresses what I have said somewhat differently, but with similar effect:

 

“How the script tells each story with very little dialogue is a very effective tool, in this writer’s view, to bring us deeply into the powerful emotional terrain of each story. It’s not just the young girl’s tears as she drives, but also the exhausted gaze from her parents as they stare over their moonlit cornfield, and later the stolen glances from the boy who saw everything.  Without words we see how her trauma has poured from her into those around her.  Similarly, in the second story the young man’s expression as he looks into the mirror to see himself as a starving man scarcely resembling the naïve young boy he was just months ago, the arc of the story seems to be captured in one look. In the last part of this triptych, it is when we see the old man calmly taking in the sunset above the ocean waves that we realize that this is the first time we have seen him stand still. In this way the camera reveals his newfound acceptance of his mortality, rather than with any words.”

 

    One might almost witness this ultimately astounding film as a kind of scrapbook of far too many American lives, the way their dreams have of drying up and disappearing before they can get the chance to explore them; the way their attempts to find true companionship falter before they can break through fully to the heart of another; and the way even their own bodies betray their existence, forcing them to finally give themselves up to the ephemeral world of ghosts who inhabit the nonetheless immensely beautiful landscape which they briefly inhabited.

 

Los Angeles, August 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).