Muiris Crowley | Change in the Weather / 2015

the film that resists telling its tale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Muiris Crowley (screenwriter and director) Change in the Weather / 2015 [16 minutes]

 

Irish writer/director Muiris Crowley’s short film Change in the Weather almost resists telling its story. But who can blame Crowley for keeping it almost a secret for such a long time, focusing  instead upon what seems like normal actions, even when we know that something else is going on.

   The film begins with the teacher Michael (Crowley) putting up the student’s desk and erasing the teaching board at the end of a day. He drives to what appears to be a practice session for young soccer students, he doing exercises on the sideline before driving off into the night.

     In the very next frame, he is eating dinner with his parents, whom this late 20-year-old or man in his early 30s man obviously still lives.

     The next scene seems equally banal, as he rises in the morning, shaves, showers, and dresses before returning to the school, where we discover that he’s evidently tutoring only one slow learner (Brian O’Donoghue), whose father (Joe Mullins) picks him up after class and asks about his progress. Michael assures him that he’s “coming along.”

      We see Michael again later in the day at a local pub, and once more, presumably after, driving along in dark roads. But this time we get a far more revelatory scene as we see him stop at an isolated country spot where another car is also parked. And soon after in the back seat of the vehicle he is fucking another male.

       So we can presume that Michael is a gay man, living what the IMDb “handle” describes as a “furtive lifestyle.” He washes his shoes of the mud clearly accumulated from the country spot.

       The next day he attends a soccer game with his Da, anxious to check his cellphone. And again that night, he drives to the isolated place for sex.

       It is the next morning, probably a weekend, when he shops at a nearby convenience store. But here things begin to make terrible sense, as he encounters his student’s father once again, who this time approaches him menacingly, telling him to “To keep the fuck away from my son.” And what we suddenly realize, scrolling back through our bank of visual memories, is that in those trips to the country make-out spot, that the person he met up with was the boy he is tutoring.

     The rest of the film consists of Michael beginning to perceive the consequences of his acts: a drive to the ocean with his father where he enters the cold waters, quiet moments of pondering in the family kitchen, sighs, and the discovery that someone has written the word “queer” on the window of his car.

        He takes another trip to the ocean, floating on the surface of the water like a dead man. And after, a telephone call that expresses his sentiment that he “can’t do this anymore.”

        Michael makes yet one more trip to the country meet-up spot, but turns around without participating in sex. He returns home, sits up is bed mulling over everything that has happened,

stands up and goes to his parent’s bedroom to confess, as he breaks down in tears.

        We don’t know precisely what he tells them, but it is surely in preparation for a possible public outing and revelation of his behavior. We don’t know the boy’s age. Since he is studying in the summer, he may be attempting to graduate after his peers have, which may make him of legal age, which in Ireland, is 18 to engage in sex with anyone in a position of authority. But he doesn’t look to be 18, and he may still be of the legal age of consent at 17, but in which case Michael is still culpable. It doesn’t matter. Michael’s obvious guilt and the student’s father’s threats make it clear that the teacher has been in the wrong.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Jerell Rosales | Please Hold / 2016

hang up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerell Rosales (screenwriter and director) Please Hold / 2016 [15 minutes]

 

A young Asian-American man, Danny (Mike Ball), not terribly handsome and perhaps just a little overweight, hasn’t a very good image of himself and has sex primarily with older adults who meet him at out-of-the-way parking lots to fuck him in the back of his car. In the sexual meeting we observe, the stranger gets up immediately after he comes and will not even give his name. Needless to say, Danny’s sexual life is not very fulfilling.

     He discovers that the condom the man has used has broken in him. And, after not feeling well for a couple of days, he’s fearful that he might have contracted AIDS and visits a doctor for a test. All of this is all too believable and sad, the plight of so many men of all ages who for one reason or another don’t dare visit bars or hang-out at sites such as Grindr or other photo-based services, who instead make dates for quickies through other services on the internet and in gay newsletters.

     This time for Danny it feels different, as if he really has contracted AIDS, and he is angry at the world and mostly at himself for the way things are in his lonely life. What isn’t quite believable follows, and makes for good drama, perhaps, simply because it allows the character to speak at far more length that in most short films. Yet, in that process it allows the film to become a not terribly scintillating monologue that leaves realism behind without managing to become a fascinating fantasy.

     In Jerell Rosales’ work Danny calls up a condom manufacturer, spending hours attempting to speak to a real human being, and winds up talking, so it seems, mostly to himself while he waits to be connected with a man who can better handle his problems than the original spokesman, Logan (Ben Warner, whom we never see), who tells him the obvious: “We clearly state that our condoms don’t prevent sexually transmitted diseases or….” Danny interrupts him to say that he feels, in waiting for the test results, that he is observing his life roll out before just as we are told that happens just before a car crash.

    Accordingly, we are forced to listen to Danny’s confession, becoming his witness, which puts us in the position, unknowingly, of the company clerk who without Danny realizing it also listens in to his personal history. In short, we are asked by the director to serve as a surrogate company spokesman without even the ability to truly communicate to the fictional customer. The service we provide depends solely on how each of us feels about the script and empathizes with the lost gay boy who tells us his life-story—certainly a chancy manipulation of his audience particularly since what Rosales’ script provides is far from original.

     Like so many young boys in his situation, Danny rather idealizes his mother, who was a nurse and might have even suspected him of being gay. Her motto, which she repeated day after day was, “You need to live a clean and healthy life style,” certainly not evidently an effective lesson given the life her son eventually falls into, at highest possible risk of sexually transmitted diseases by men he doesn’t even know and who may also be heterosexual and on drugs. But he now recognizes that despite all her prayers and warnings if she might simply have openly embraced who he was he might indeed have been able to live the life she wanted him to or, at least, help to protect him.

     When he discovers that Logan has in fact heard all he’s said, he’s startled, as Logan quickly responds that his shift is about to end and thanks him for calling Trojex before hanging up.

     Our fictional Danny has found a kind of imaginary listener just as the director has forced us to become, presuming that since Danny obviously has far more to tell that we will want to hear it as well. And the very day we observe Danny desperately trying to get through to Logan again without success and with a great deal of frustration. But finally, Logan does return, suggesting that there are other representatives that may be able to better help him. Even Danny knows he can’t put his new-found friend in the position of listening to him again and asks for someone higher up, as Logan checks to see to whom he might connect him.

      In the interim, of course, Danny will surely tell more of his story, a lead-in to our subservient sympathies. This time we discover that the young man has never been told by someone that they love him. He has, as he puts it, been “fought, smashed, plowed, and hammered,” but he’s never been made love to. And he’s scared, he admits, that if he gets sick that he’ll never be loved. “Or worse, that the right guy will come along, and he won’t love him anymore.” (Rosales camera briefly entertains us with a beautiful naked man, Jonathan Chironna, clearly Danny’s dream figure, whom magically does appear to top him and provide him with a fully-clothed kiss.)

     He recognizes that he seeks out older men because perhaps he has “Daddy issues,” but jokes that since he never had a dad, how might he be described as having “issues?” He tells us what so many like him must hear, those of his own age “pointing out his flaws,” while older men tell him he’s beautiful and sexy—men who having lost their own beauty cannot hope to get others of his age to join them in sex. “So I let them in. I let them use me and do what they want to me.” And for a brief moment in time, he can lie to himself, imagining that he is truly “being loved.”

     Of course, Logan is listening in again; of course, the director presumes his audience is still watching his film and hearing Danny’s confession. The boy’s tears are inevitably moving, Logan dutifully reporting “Unfortunately our supervising reparations manager is unavailable today.” He thanks his customer once again for his call and hangs up. For Danny there is now no possible consolation.

     At the doctor’s office he waits to be called, humming a song. But now we hear what quite miraculously and totally unbelievably happened yet again before his scene, another call to Logan who insists there are so many other people who can help him. “All my life, I have struggled with this question,” Danny proceeds as if Logan’s statement was an invitation. “Why would God make me the way that I am?” He feels he’s being punished for being gay, that he doesn’t deserve love. He calls Logan only because he would like someone, somewhere to give him some answers.

    Logan’s response is not what I might have suggested: “I want you to look at your toes and slowly bring your eyes up your body. All of that is worthy of love, especially the parts that you can’t see.” No matter what happens with the test results, he tells Danny, he wants him to remember that he is worthy of love.

     It sounds a far too much like a self-help program to me, a series of cliches, even if what he says might be helpful and true of any individual who dreams and aspires for love and purpose in his or her life.

     One would have to be without any emotional sympathy to not feel that Rosales’ character, as he describes him in a later interview, is someone who in his loneliness, his fear of death, and feelings of being unloved is a lot like all of us. It would be hard not to be somewhat moved with empathy. But I guess I resent this film’s sentimental hijacking of my emotions to fill out a story the author/director himself didn’t feel he had the time to truly explore. My own self-doubts are not very entertaining, and are certainly not worth creating a film around them. And given my age, Danny is certainly more attractive than me, I probably being closer to the older men who would lie to him about his youthful beauty while quickly stealing a moment of pleasure from his body.

     Alas, we don’t even discover if this young man ultimately is AIDS free or not. But then given the generalities the writer has thrown upon him I guess it doesn’t truly matter. Now if he I had actually had the opportunity to get to know this character other than through a few vague confessions, I might really care. But just as Danny says, even his creator doesn’t seem to care enough to give him the full reality of his love. The character himself deplores precisely what the director has done: “I let them use me and do what they want to me.” If I were Danny, I’d demand a new script with if nothing else another ending that tells me where I might be headed and lets the audience in on the facts.

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Robert W. Gray | Aidos / 2016

the shame of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert W. Gray (screenwriter and director) Aidos / 2016 [5 minutes]

 

The narrator of Canadian director Robert Gray’s Aidos begins the short film with declaring that “by the time Ben died 21 people had declared their romantic love for him.” I would suggest, given the film’s title, that the word “romantic” here is out of place, since, as the narrator continues to explain, “some [of the expressions of love] came too early and some too late,” the words turning out in the end to be somewhat of a hieroglyph.

    Indeed, by showing 21 faces of mostly males but also females we must question which of these expressions of the simple phrase “I love you” represent the many different associations gathered around the word “Aidos,” the Greek Goddess of shame, modest, respect, humility, and numerous other inter-related concepts, including honor, sobriety, moderation, scandal, and disgrace.

    Given the context we must suppose that Ben died young, of AIDS—a dirge accompanies the images and we get one glimpse of what appears to be a sick man sitting up a bed—and that the faces were are observing are those of lovers, family members, well-wishers, bedside visitors, old friends, perhaps even nurses and doctors, etc. And it is only by attempting the carefully read their faces that we can determine what their true feelings, despite their outward expressions of love, might mean.

    Some apparently love with erotic desire without the modesty or shame, others almost hypocritically say those words with a sense of pity for the sense of shame that his illness represents. Still others contextualize their love as family members expressing a sense of respect and honor; while a few seem to say the words almost with a sense of scandal in their very love of the young man.

    Gray provides us with no guidelines, and as I watched his very short, 5-minute, film over and over I keep alternating my interpretations of the faces’ expressions, subtly reinterpreting the words that we cannot hear spoken.

    Ultimately, we must recognize that it is a fruitless game that even appears to trivialize the word love, which most certainly wipes away any romantic connotations. Love here is anything but romantic; it is embarrassed, polite, conforming, accepting, even erotic perhaps, but seldom if ever “romantic” in this context. And, in that sense, the film is quite unrelated to the issue of his queerness, but is grounded simply in Ben being a diseased man, shamed perhaps only for having contracting a disease he could not escape.

 

Los Angeles, May 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Mariana Thome | Straight A / 2016

the new pressures of coming out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Lien (screenplay), Mariana Thome (director) Straight A / 2016 [9 minutes]

 

Straight A, like so many films featuring an Asian-American gay individual, concerns all the pressures society and family put upon a young man, in this case Alex Chen (played by screenwriter Todd Lien), who in order to get into a top college is participating in school politics and other organizations as well as managing to keep a straight-A grade level.

      Yet even these achievements are not enough for his demanding father (Nathan Chen) who now wants him to focus more on his college requirements and tests, and to focus less on his senior activities and, in particular, spend far few moments best friend, Kyle Miller (Zach Cramblit).

      The two begin the movie in bed together, a gay couple who have been going together now for 4 years, an occasion which Kyle celebrates with a gift of a ring. But how can Alex accept it, and more particularly, wear it when he has been challenged all his life to carry on the family name with a wife and child as well as finish a challenging education in medicine?

      Understandably, Kyle is angered that Alex has still not brought up the matter with his father and that they can only pretend to be friends when both feel a strong love between them. And after having to jump out of bed and play-act as good friends in the midst of studying when Alex’s father returns home, Kyle walks out, demanding some serious changes in their relationship.

      The Asian pressure on young gay men is well known and has been the subject of many of the films (short and feature) on which I have previously written. But what this film also made somehow clearer to me is just how so many young boys now feel pressured, having sexual affairs beginning in high school, to settle down with their high school lovers without even bothering to consider the issues of college and exploring other possible companions for life.

      It seems more than ironic that after fighting and winning marriage equality, gays, particularly young boys of 16-18 are now being asked to settle down into a monogamous relationship the way young heterosexual boys and girls were being pressured to do in the 1950s-1960s. Feminism liberated a lot of females from having to make such life-time decisions at such an early age. But gay rights now seemingly demand that young boys come out to their families, introduce them to their lovers, and settle down into a life-time relationship some time before the end of the senior high school year.

      Is it any wonder that Alex keeps describing all the pressures on his life, resenting, in particular the demands his father continues to make when he already the near-perfect son, or at least has aspired to be. But Alex’s father, in this case, is no monster.

      By the time Alex has dinner with his father and returns to his room, he notices the ring in its box is missing. He quickly rings up Kyle to see if he has taken it back, but there is no answer. And when he returns to the living room he observes his father speaking to his dead mother at their small home shrine to her, praising him to her, and praying to guidance to help him tell his son that he knows about the relationship. He has taken the ring to show it to the dead mother as evidence one presumes, and now hands it back to his son demonstrating his love and acceptance.

     Finally, the two, father and son, can openly communicate and reiterate their love for one another. But first Alex feels it necessary to clear up his boyfriend situation and runs off to Kyle’s house, openly kissing him in the doorway, proving that he’s finally come out.

       It’s fine as a story; the two boys can now openly share their love. Isn’t that what we elderly gay men wanted? Yet something in the pit of my stomach is churning, and I suggest poor Alex has yet further pressures facing him at age 17 that he shouldn’t have to deal with. Will these boys be going to the same university? Will they be able to sustain their relationship with all the various pressures and distractions of college life?  Mightn’t there be other young men who might have made for better mates or, might Alex or Kyle even end up preferring a single life?

      The happiness I am supposed to feel at the end of this, and so many other short films like it, is increasingly turning into a kind of generational angst. Why this hurry to rush into a relationship that demands a ring and life-time commitment? What happened to “playing the field,” to the process of learning above love, to all the fun that is often involved with open sexuality in youth. Coming out shouldn’t have to mean introducing your family to your future husband.

      I’m afraid the “coming out” film is now beginning to devolve into a wedding shower.

 

Los Angeles, August 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

 

Anthony Schatteman | Dag vreemde man (Hello, Stranger) / 2016

the stranger on the couch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Schatteman (screenwriter and director) Dag vreemde man (Hello, Stranger) / 2016

[19 minutes]

 

With the long shadows of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) and Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) flickering over it, Flemish director Anthony Schatteman’s Hello, Stranger is a very moving film about a man, Arthur (Arend Pinoy), who performs each evening as a drag queen in a Ghent gay bar. He’s a popular performer and has a deep friend in another elderly drag queen who performs with a full beard, Michel (Wim Opbrouck).

      Everything might seem quite ordinary for a gay film if it were not for the fact that Arthur also is raising a young boy, Max, who he has brought up alone since he wife Daisy (Delfine Bafort) left them when the child was still an infant. Keeping the boy close to him in his dressing room as he goes on stage, Arthur performs with his heart in his throat in worry for his son as Michel often looks after the boy.

    One night, however, the boy awakens to wander off into the busy dance floor where Arthur has been ordered to appear, and for a few moments he madly searches in terror through the dancing drunk and drugged out customers to scoop up Max from the bowels of the crowd. Even Max’s schoolteacher chastises Arthur for still wearing nail polish as he delivers him up to school in the morning.

      Arthur cannot even help encouraging Max, for time to time, to play drag queen with him at home, where the numerous gaudy, sequined dresses and wigs are on open display. He is he doing right by his son?

      To make things even more complex, Daisy has suddenly returned after all these years, begging to see the son who might not even recognize her. Finally, Arthur relents and, retrieving Max from Michel’s care, hurries home with the boy to lay him beside his mother on the couch.

       So the film ends, without any answers about whether that bond will bring her to demand to keep Max or even bring her back together with the man who, as she puts it, she just “couldn’t” any longer live with.

       Played with enormous restraint, despite the exaggerated world in which Arthur and Max live, Schatteman’s tender short film presents all the problems of trying to protect and love someone from aspects of one’s own life which to the outside world may seem perverse and deleterious to the child. Arthur is a man torn between his love of his son and his own identity. Need he, we ultimately have to ask, abandon who he is in order to protect the child he loves? Will the boy grow up to find his father, as his mother apparently did, to be too strange to live with? Or will Max come to recognize that the real stranger in his life is the woman with whom he has laid down to sleep, his own mother?

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Tanuj Bhrama | Dear Dad / 2016

when home is not where the heart is

Tanuj Bhrama (screenwriter and director) Dear Dad / 2016

 

As the reviewer Subhash K. Jha begins his piece in the Hindustan Times about the 2016 film, Dear Dad:

 

“It takes a whole lot of guts to make a film on alternate sexuality in India, especially when you are a first-time director. Tanuj Bhrama has pushed the envelope out of the closet as far as possible. And then some.”

 

      We learn almost from the very beginning of this film that the central character, Nitin Swaminathan (Arvin Swamy), married with a son and daughter, has recently come out to his wife as a gay man and that she is seeking a divorce. She quite rightfully insists that Nitin also explain the situation to her son, Shivum (Himanshu Sharma). So begins a road-trip drama to Mussourie and other Indian nature spots that is not so very dissimilar from the journey the gay figure of Evening Shadows takes with his mother. And, like that film, the central purpose of the trip is to reveal and explain his homosexuality, which in both cases ends at first in confusion and anger before final assimilation.

     Yet, unlike Rangayan’s lean telling, wherein he reveals the love the hero and his friend feel for one another, Bhrama’s Dear Dad has little to do with sex—Nitin is single and apparently has no lover, nor do we get a glimpse at his sexual preferences, although he does mention that he is not attracted to “all men.”—so that the film becomes a statement of the father and son relationship more that it is a gay film.

      If the movie represents, at first, Shivum as a fairly typical self-obsessed kid, far more interested in his cellphone and a “celebrity” (Aman Uppal) whom he spots at a local restaurant (requesting a signature), it suddenly shifts when the two stop by Nitin’s parents. There his overly-loving mother greets Nitin and Shivum with joy; but it is the sad empty relationship between Nitin and his dementia-inflicted father that provides deeper psychological perceptions.

      While Shivum seems mostly bored in the company of his father, Nitin quickly leaves the arms of his loving mother to attend to the old man, who has been left in the yard with shaving lotion pasted across his face, apparently awaiting his daily shave from his wife. It is an almost a surreal scene, as Nitin takes up the razor—hinting at both true love and perhaps a little hate—to accomplish the task of shaving his father. During the gentle scrapes of the razor he explains, knowing the father will comprehend very little of what he is saying, that he is a gay man. The camera focusing on the older father and son, however, gradually pans away, revealing that Shivum has overheard the conversation.

      Through this device, quite early in the work, Bhrama sucks almost all the expected drama out of his cinema, while for the rest of the film the focus shifts to the hurt and angered son who must suddenly come to terms with a father who he has never truly known.

      The only bit of drama, other than the son’s growing angst, is provided by the fact that the duo again encounters the “celebrity” (we’re never truly told why he is famous) along the road, hitchhiking, Shivum insisting that they give him a lift, if no other reason than to put another being between the intensity of his father and him.

       The two, father and “celebrity” even share a bedroom—hinting that the easy-going and quite accepting “guest,” could have shared Nitin’s bed. Yet Bhrama does not suggest any sexual actions, and the “celebrity” expresses a kind of standard “heterosexual trope”: “But you’re married, with kids!”  So too was the hero’s uncle in Evening Shadows.

       However, it is the “celebrity” who, after Shivum has fed his father something to make him very ill, who nurtures Nitin to health again and who advises the boy that he must accept his father for who he is, admitting that he too left his father out of hatred, and hasn’t been home in 15 years. By film’s end, we recognize that his journey has been one to see his family again.

       Shivum moves on to his boarding school, still harboring anger that “things can no longer be the way they were.” He, so a pop song proclaims must still grow up and “learn to fly.” Which he eventually does, winning top honors in mathematics in his school.

       For the honors celebration, his mother, with her new lover (“Isn’t he a bit old?” asks Nitin; “Well at least he’s straight,” she quips. “Ouch,” is his response); but the loving Nitin, after a long emotional scrapbook of images from Shivum’s and his close relationship years earlier, does unexpectedly show up to congratulate his son, who finally is able give him the inevitable hugging forgiveness.

     If this is not a great queer film, it is an important one simply because within a very homophobic culture it takes a different trajectory, exploring a married adult coming out—with all the numerous issues that decision represents—as opposed to the more common young man coming out to his parents or to himself. Yet there seems to be something missing here, particularly when Shivum asks his father, near the end of the movie, “are you going home?”

      The film might truly have explored this question further. For a man who has had to abandon everyone and everything in order to no longer live a “false life,” where is home? Clearly for such an individual, “home is not where the heart is,” but in a larger world of possibility and desire. It is quite clear that for Nitin his love lies with his son and younger daughter. But his access to them will now be limited, and his ability to show that love or any love will lead to constant searching.

      Yes, this is a brave film, a work that truly explores what is next in mid-life after you made a major decision to change your lies into truth. Where do you go from there, and how to obtain whatever dreams or even illusions are left?

    And for those left behind, well patriarchal relationships, as this film makes clear, are always so far more difficult that matriarchal ones. Just ask Freud.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).