Vladimir Bek | Я не боюсь (I Am Not Afraid) / 2021

terror of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vladimir Bek (screenwriter and director) Я не боюсь (I Am Not Afraid) / 2021 [22 minutes]

 

Phil (Mark Eydelshteyn) and Misha (Illarion Marov), fellow students, are more than friends. Many nights Phil stays over at Misha’s house when Phil joins Misha in his bed, the two sharing in sex.

    But this is, after all, contemporary Russia, where all such sexual relationships must be hushed up, and they quickly crawl back into their respective beds.

     At breakfast Phil nicely covers for his friend when his mother wonders why both of the handsome boys are not being chased the girls. Misha, he suggests, has a girlfriend. Having never heard from her son about such an event, she wishes Phil wasn’t moving away with his family to Germany. Why couldn’t he sleep, as he has so many times, in Misha’s room; they would adopt him, she fantasizes.

    For Misha, however, the upcoming separation is nearly unbearable as he attempts to imagine himself in a totally heterosexual world. In fact, there is a school girl who has her eye on him, Liza (Olga Balatskaya), who with her girlfriends joyfully watch Misha do his required pushups in gym class.

    The frailer Phil, however, surprises them all by doing an even greater number of pushups, and, as if to sustain his macho, Misha returns to match his friend’s achievement—unsuccessfully.

   Liza telephones Misha soon after, inviting him to a party at her house; she too is leaving with her family to Bulgaria.

    Misha, however, is angry at his impending situation, crawling back into the bed where Phil spent the night just to smell the linens where his night lover slept.

    At Liza’s party, Misha mostly hangs out on sidelines, finally leaving the house for a smoke. Liza, spotting his exit, joins him, demanding a kiss, which Misha eagerly offers up, suddenly attempting sex with the girl—but again unsuccessfully. As he two lay together on the grass, he turns away ashamed, while Liza assures him that doesn’t need to do anything he doesn’t want to do, hinting that she may suspect his feelings for Phil.

     Meanwhile, back in inside the house, another girl tells the boys teasing her that she most certainly would make love with a girl or even a transgender individual, they defining her as non-binary slut, as one of the boys Goggles it and reads out the definition to all.

     Most of the girls and even a couple of the boys agree that definitions of gender are assigned by the society, although Liza shares her irritation with the whole “LGBT thing.”

     Phil, finally speaks out, arguing against any labels, suggesting that if he kisses his girlfriend that doesn’t mean he’s heterosexual, or if he were to have sex with a boy he isn’t necessary gay. Finally, Misha, taking his cue from Liza, adamantly speaks out against such ideas.

     In response Phil challenges his secret friend to play “Truth or Dare,” daring him to kiss him. Misha refuses, suggesting he’s afraid he might get a disease, Phil reminding him that AIDS is not contracted through saliva. Angrily Misha is about to leave until Phil finally calls out his lover, naming him as a coward.

 

   Misha returns and appears to give Phil an extremely long an intense kiss; but we soon realize it is only in his imagination, that the camera has lied. In truth he has begun to slug him, the other boys having to pull him off of Phil, who now has bloody nose. Misha runs off into the night, confused about his reactions, the future, and life itself.

     Time passes, and Misha is now attending the university, his mother querying him about his friends; it is apparent that he has now learned how to lie, telling her he has many friends of both sexes, when it’s clear that he must be terribly alone, still suffering the absence of his school friend.

     She comments that she thought she saw Phil while she was out shopping, surprised that he was back in town.

     Soon after Misha goes on a run, perhaps in search of his friend, director Vladimir Bek’s camera again tricking us with moments from the past when the two of them raced together. In reality he runs into the total darkness of the end of the film. Whether or not he finds Phil and they patch up their relationship is not revealed. But perhaps there is now, at least, hope.

    This short film reveals young Russian students speaking as openly as youths of their age might talk in the USA or any European country. But through the representation of Misha’s reactionary behavior, we see the fears of making any of that talk real remain overwhelming. And this film’s title becomes ironic as we realize that many young Russian boys like Misha are very afraid and lonely.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Francisco Lezama | Un movimiento extraño (An Odd Turn) / 2024

the swing of the pendulum

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francisco Lezama (screenwriter and director) Un movimiento extraño (An Odd Turn) / 2024 [22 minutes]

 

Argentinian director Francisco Lezama’s takes several odd turns, not just one. Part of the reason for this has to do with his authorial process. Opposed to what he describes as “the classic-Aristotelian-three-act-hero-journey [that] has been imposed in narrative fiction,” for many months before he writes and shoots a film Lezama collects “dialogues, editing ideas, academic quote, silly jokes, etc.” on a series of small cards from which he selects the best (about 20) of them, and then determines the characters, plot, dialogue, structure and much else without discarding any of the remaining cards.

     As he argues, the writers of the traditional method of narrative and filmmaking “are forced to separate characters from their background, to create challenges for them, to move them like puppets.” But his method seems, so he feels, closer to life, his film reminding him “of tapestries and imagery from the Middle Ages. In these paintings, rather than a clear single path, you can find a kind of wooded landscape… a forest with many trees and many paths. I find in these references much more inspiration, more openness, more vital electricity than in classicism. In this wilder and woodlike form every digressive idea seems to fit easily. Everything seems possible to unfold and enter the film — without prejudices regarding whether they would work or not. I believe this is closer than life. It’s something personal.”

    This almost Oulipian method allows him, in the instance of An Odd Turn, to combine dissimilar and even contradictory concerns. The major figure of the work, Lucrecia (Laila Maltz), works as a guard in a museum, who loves her job because it allows her long nights with the art itself in which she illuminates with her flashlight, seeking out their significance, so to speak, in the dark. And in that sense she a figure of rationality, like Plato’s vision of man, seeking to read meaning in the shadows.

   So too, however, she is also a figure of superstition, who often organizes her life around pendulum readings, using anything from a tea-bag on a string to a brass plumb to foretell the future.

    It doesn’t always work. For example, she tells her friend that she has foreseen the museum itself being robbed by the end of the month, an event that never happens.

     On the other hand, her mystical reading that the dollar will soon rise in value against the Argentinian peso does happen, particularly after Argentinian President Javier Milei suggests that the country should adopt the US currency which created a run on US money.

    Lucrecia is also a highly sexual being, and before the dollar’s rise has been regularly meeting up in the middle of the night with another museum worker. When their communications are intercepted by a museum head, and she is given a choice of a strong pay cut or being fired, she insists that her severance pay be in made in US dollars.

    And since in the meantime the dollar has risen, the currency exchanges send their workers into the street to call out, a bit like carnival barkers, that they can change the peso into dollars—for a good profit of course.

     One such exchange office worker (Paco Gorriz) attracts the attention of Lucrecia, who makes a date with him, and upon discovering that he occasionally uses the opportunity of his now open-air bartering to meet up with older woman, who pay him for both his services in bed and for any currency exchanges they may desire.

     The clever former museum guard, now working the night shift in a coffee-cup manufacturing plant, suggests the clear money-changer should use the methods of Grindr, letting people know where he will be at all times geographically so that he can meet up for rendezvouses.

     Meanwhile she and the money exchanger also have sex which they both enjoy, and soon they regularly meet up for intercourse. He explains, soon after, that he has made an appointment with a bisexual man who is willing to include Lucrecia as well in a sexual trio. And eventually the film catches their encounter with the Grindr guy (Alejandro Russek) first in a gay bar named Lolita where he and the other male dance together, and finally in an apartment, where it appears that the two men are more interested in one another, and that Lucrecia must continually remind them that she too is part of their trio.

     In fact, she is not at all sure of her romance with the money changer and consults the tarot cards on the matter, but he refuses to participate in the reading.

     Accordingly, there is no resolution in this wonderful tale, yet we learn a great deal about these individuals struggling to survive in a society that has just steered itself clear of the horrific period of the so-called “Dirty War” in which hundreds were killed mysteriously by death squads against socialism, left-wing Peronism or the Montoneros movement, along with Jews and anyone else who might have been seen to question their tactics. The present, in its advance of “frictionless capitalism,” as Lezama puts it, seems almost as problematic to young people like the characters in this work.

     Perhaps the ridiculous mix of magic and clever entrepreneurship, as well as the almost unflinching willingness to try out any new combination of behaviors, including other sexualities, is the only answer in a world where the rigidity of a single viewpoint often meant certain death.

     Lezama’s film does not specifically locate any of his characters within this complex of ideas. They act eccentrically of their own accord. Yet his open-ended work allows us to at least query a wide range of cultural aspects of contemporary Argentine life. That he does all of this in a little less than a half hour is amazing. Little wonder it was awarded the Golden Bear Award for short cinema at the 2024 Berlin film festival.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2025

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

 

Greg Wolf | The Venmo Vanisher / 2023

the casa amigo mystery

by Douglas Messerli

 

Greg Wolf (screenwriter and director) The Venmo Vanisher / 2023 [10 minutes]

 

This short work bills itself as “a Los Angeles mockumentary”—with an inordinate, campy sense of hysteria, I might add.

    Greg is invited by friends for brunch, and all goes well, each of them telling their usual meaningless bitchy tales and sharing endless discussions of work. Meanwhile, a new member to their group, Loine, a handsome blond, begins to flirt with Greg. When it comes time to pay the bill each of them proceeds to throw their credit cards on the table, but Loine claims to have forgotten his wallet; might Greg just cover him and he’ll pay him back immediately on Venmo? Moreover, he orders up another drink, Casa Amigo, the others quickly joining him—on Greg’s credit card, of course.

    In fact, Loine does meet up with Greg soon after for fabulous sex, but no Venmo money arrives in his account. Now almost in tears the actor playing Greg reports that the next week there was still no Venmo. He calls and texts, but there is still no answer from Loine.

    A few days later he invites the boys over to celebrate one of their, Toby’s, birthday. But Loine does not show up with them. Even Patrick, the other friend, suggests Greg stop trying to collect. The two agree that Loine is just “flaky,” that he missed someone’s wedding just to attend Lance Bass’ pool party.

    In the style of the mockumentary, Greg argues that then “something really strange happened.” When he attempts to call Loine, he finds the number has been “disconnected.” We are entering the territory of a serious criminal offense in the story now, since Greg is still out $200, and clearly he cannot afford it.

    The film flips back to the “real” Greg (all the film’s characters, we are told, are played on the screen by “hot paid actors”), who now reports: “And that’s when I knew something bigger was going on.”

     Greg calls up Loine’s female friend Maggie, and discovers that Loine has also ordered up “Casa Amigo” drinks with shaved ice several times on her card as well, and similarly, he never paid. They do, so Greg reports, what any sane person would do. They begin to stake out Loine’s place where they discover something really “weird”: dust on the doorknob!

     Greg calls the police, reporting a case where there are now several victims and a missing person; but inevitably the cop scoffs at his desperation.

     Our distressed hero decides to take it back to its source, visiting Loine’s mother, who tells the tale of her good boy taking her out for Mother’s Day, he promising to pick up the check. But before paying, he goes to the bathroom and “he never came back.”

    Greg begins posting pictures of the missing criminal who appears to still be collecting more victims. “Make it make sense. I’m telling you, things just keep getting weirder and weirder,” he bemoans the situation.

    A man brushes up against him in the street, dropping a piece of paper inviting him to join him in an alley to learn about Loine.

  Greg shows up, explaining that he has now been looking for Loine for two years, but the hooded confidant will not reveal his identity: “It’s safter if you don’t know.” “Know what?” Greg cries out.

    At that very instant a burlap bag is thrown over our hero’s head, as he realizes he was set up to be kidnapped. They punched him and shouted “Quit searching for Loine, or otherwise next we won’t be so easy on you.”

     Greg thinks maybe he should stop, that he’s getting in over his head. But he simply can’t, he claims. He wants his money, and besides Loine is clearly on a rampage. Patrick suggests it isn’t safe anymore, that he needs help, Greg arguing, “No, what I need is my 200 dollars!”

     Returning home with groceries the next day, he suddenly observes Loine jogging. “So I did what any obsessed, exhausted, unhinged person would do.” He drops the groceries and goes chasing after Loine. But when he catches up with jogger, it isn’t at all Loine, just a runner with long blond bangs, a bit like the way Loine used to look. But Greg, now almost mad, insists he’s going to find Loine, repeating it over and over again.

    An end note reads: “Greg never found Loine. No longer being able to afford Los Angeles, he was forced to leave his friends and career behind and move to a small Wisconsin town. He lives a quiet life with his two dogs, Schnitzel and Falafel.”

     After seeing this short film, I have now determined to discover why director Greg Wolf made this movie other than an intent to satirize just how out of touch with reality gay drama queens really are. I promise you to make it devote the rest of my life to getting to the bottom of this.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Leon Lopez | The Definition of Lonely / 2015

finding a friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leon Lopez (screenwriter and director) The Definition of Lonely / 2015 [14 minutes]

 

A man (Nick Hayes) wanders the streets every day of what appears to be London dressed in a suit, although he clearly has no job. Indeed, according his narrating voice, he has not only no job, but no purpose in live, no friends, and, what’s worse, no wish to make friends or find a companion. Looking at other people every day, he observes what he sees behind their open smiles as a great unhappiness. But since he cannot be made by others to be unhappy, perhaps he is simply happy since he has no one could make feel anything. He likes being alone, he suggests.

     His only true friends, and they themselves are greedy things, are the ducks he daily feeds on the pond where nearby he sits on a bench, pretending to be like all the others. But this day, something unusual happens.

     He seems to doze and suddenly upon awakening sees a small dog standing in front of him, who simply stares up at our friend without moving, even though the man attempts to send him off. But soon another man (Lucas Rush) arrives on the scene calling out “Charlie,” obviously the name of the dog. Our lonely friend calls out to him, pointing at what he seems to be looking for. Surprised that Charlie (Lola, in real life the companion of Rush) has been friendly with the stranger since she usually has nothing to do with them.

     He sits beside the well-dressed man, explaining that Charlie was going to be sent away if he didn’t keep him in the settlement, suggesting his divorced companion was a real bitch. The first man presumes the “bitch” was a woman until the newcomer explains the situation with a pronoun, our friend apologizing for his presumption.

     He makes a couple of witty statements, suggesting that Charlie might have been attracted by his perfume, but suddenly falls into what appears to be a daze, the stranger worrying about what’s happened to him, attempting to wake him up and joking about the fact that certainly he can’t be that boring!

     The lonely guy finally comes to, explaining he has catalepsy, meaning that he feels and hears what’s going on, including having felt the man’s touch, but is unable to respond. Very different, he explains, from narcolepsy, from which he also suffers, which is a sudden and deep sleep. Now, finally, we understand why he has no job, no close relationships, no apparent friends.

      But the gay man finds him charming and quite clever—which to our surprise our retiring friend seems to be—suddenly asking if he likes girls or boys. Strangely, the first man doesn’t really know, never having had a date or anyone of either sex bothering to take an interest.

      Charlie’s friend, however, truly does take an interest and invites him to a 6:00 date the very next day, insisting once he has obtained his telephone number, he will call him on the hour starting tonight so that he has no excuse for claiming catalepsy or narcolepsy and even turning suddenly shy.

     And if he should be straight, he declares, that’s all right too, since he has lots of straight friends.

I’m sure given his sort of campy gregariousness that he does have lots of friends, both gay and heterosexual. But now the loneliest man in the world will have his first date and, at least, have a chance to decide what gender he likes best or even if he likes sex. As he notes to himself, it can’t hurt to have at least one friend.

     As Rick says to Louis at the end of Casablanca, “I think is the beginning a beautiful friendship.”

These actors play so well together that one might imagine them having worked as a team for much of their careers. They haven’t, although both have performed in numerous theater musicals, and both director Lopez and Hayes have appeared in different British productions of Rent.

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Francisco Lupini | TÚ. YO. BAÑO. SEXO. AHORA. (You. Me. Bathroom. Sex. Now.) / 2015

getting down to basics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francisco Lupini (screenwriter and director) TÚ. YO. BAÑO. SEXO. AHORA. (You. Me. Bathroom. Sex. Now.) / 2015 [17 minutes]

 

This witty comedy, a Venezuelan-Spanish-USA production, is not really a film you can describe by talking about the plot. Everything in the work depends upon the endlessly campy, witty dialogue between Roberta (Puy Navarro), the bartender and owner of the dive, and her long-time customers Pepín and Antonio (Miguel Belmonte).

      Tony has just broken up with his lover after arriving home one evening to discover him “eating out a beautiful piece of ass.” Now he’s so depressed that he doesn’t even want to talk about it, but of course he does nothing else but babble on about his failed relationship throughout the film.

      Enter a stranger, Nacho (Bautista Duarte), a German, it seems, who can’t speak a word of Spanish and who Pepín takes an immediate disliking simply because he’s German. Even ordering up a drink without knowing a world of Spanish here is nearly impossible. Nonetheless, he manages to write out a message on a napkin he asks Roberta to hand over to Antonio, a message which cuts through all the problems of the unnecessary deviations of conversation: “TÚ. YO. BAÑO. SEXO. AHORA. (You. Me. Bathroom. Sex. Now.). A moment later he gets up and walks into the john.

      Tony is unsure about the invite; should he really follow the stranger into the dark bathroom which Roberta somehow can’t even imagine being a location for fornication? But finally, she insists it’s the only way for him to get even for what Ramon, his former lover, has done to him and the best way to cure his broken heart.

       The two have great sex, Tony giving the stranger a blow job and both fucking each other despite the fact that Antonio endlessly spills out his sad story from beginning to end. When everything is over, Nacho—who is actually from Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish, although Antonio argues he can barely understand a word of Argentinian Spanish—wonders if his friend ever stops talking, explaining the German act was all a ruse to escape the necessity of getting to know one another and dealing with all the past that comes with that process. Without language, he argues one can just come to essentials without be forced to hear the other’s terrible problems. But, of course, he has had to go through just that given Tony’s endless conversation to basically himself, since his sexual partner, so he believed, couldn’t understand a word he said.

     In any event,  Antonio is a new man, ready to try the experiment out on another stranger who has just entered the bar, Chico (Mauricio Pita), caught up in the world of his cellphone so it seems. Tony writes his message on a napkin and suddenly the distracted Chico perks up and smiles—although how Tony will hold up to a new round of such intense sexual pleasures is not explained.

     As I began this essay short commentary, however, the plot isn’t what really matters in New York-based Venezuelan director Lupini’s film. It’s the patter that most matters here, almost in the way that the hysteria of language works in the earlier movies of Pedro Almodóvar. Here’s a brief example:

 

[As Roberta pours out a glass a special Greek wine for Antonio, Pepín enters]

pepín: What a relief. Another second would have been too late.” (Looking over a Tony) What’s

   up with her? She looks like she just came back from a funeral. Did your pet parrot die?

roberta: All I know is that she’s had it.

pepín: Me too! All those years of sharing my ass left me without the power of retention. A sad 

   story.

roberta: Worthy of an old slut! (Turning back to Tony) This one’s diagnosis is heartbreak.

antonio: Heartbreak is for pussies!

toberta: If we are talking pussy, look no further. Mine’s a work of art since the doctors made all

   my lips match.

pepín: Listen, after I came out of my mother’s vagina, I never saw another one. Talk about trauma.

antonio: So if you already know, why do you ask? I devoted my body and soul to that son-of-a-

   bitch! And how does he pay me?

pepín: With a killer fuck, I hope. One of those I haven’t had in decades.

toberta: Not a boyfriend either (throwing a piece of popcorn at Pepín), frustrated, bitter bitch!

pepín: They are useless anyway.

 

    I haven’t heard such clever dialogue in ages, particularly in the preachy, proper, sanitized film school offerings of so very many US freshman filmmakers. We need more of such gutsy, nonsensical, blabber of the old school which spoke in a coded language to the real love behind these individual’s seeming self-centeredness, and at heart it is yet another way to get around the sad daily discourse of personal life.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).