Piedro de San Paulo | A Boy Named Cocoy / 1992

compensation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Piedro de San Paulo (screenwriter and director) A Boy Named Cocoy / 1992

 

The Philippines director Piedro de San Paulo’s 1992 short film A Boy Named Cocoy shares its opening with many other Filipino gay movies, with a gay boy from the provinces having just arrived in Manila finding city life nearly impossible and utterly perplexing.

    In this case a young man (Jebong So) from the mountains, has just gotten off the bus, come to the city with a few changes of clothing, a small amount of money, and his uncle’s address in his knapsack. Exhausted from his journey, he settles up against a concrete buttress attached to a high-rise apartment complex and falls asleep.

    A street boy observes him and creeps out of the shadows, walks up to the sleeping boy, grabs up the knapsack and speeds off. Having observed what was happening from a high balcony, another boy (Brian Olaivar) rushes down to warn the new kid too late. When the mountain boy bemoans his terrible fate, now in a monstrously unfamiliar city without clothes, money, or even a way of contacting his uncle, the other boy offers him temporary shelter in his nicely furnished apartment, immediately removing from the refrigerator a large cold meal of leftovers, before he offers the boy a shower, and his own bed.

     We recognize almost immediately, however, he may require payment of another sort for his many kindnesses. While the boy, Cocoy is showering, an act the film viewers observe fully, the boy attempts to get a quick peek at his new naked friend through a small outdoor window; and later, as Cocoy lies sprawled out in his underwear in his bed, he attempts to stroke his guest’s chest and explore his penis, thwarted only by the boy’s movements in his sleep.

     The next morning, true to his promises, however, he does take his new friend to the large open market where he buys him new clothes and, presumably takes him as he has proposed to the movies.

      Still, we are now suspicious of his intentions. And that evening, when the boy awakens to find his bedmate missing, he creeps down the stairs, watching from the step his friend engaged in homosexual ecstasy as another boy fellates him and then fucks him. Cocoy seems utterly fascinated by what he sees, but finally returns to his bed, seemingly internally disturbed by what he has just witnessed.

    In the morning he begins packing, obviously having been provided with a new knapsack and a small wardrobe of clothing. When his friend confronts him, he admits that he has observed him having sex, and he fears that all the kindnesses he has been shown have simply been proffered by way of developing him as a sexual playmate.

     The friend apologizes him for not having revealed his homosexuality, but promises that he has no sexual intentions with regard to Cocoy and simply wants to remain with him as a friend. He begs him to reconsider and stay on, with the freedom to leave any time in the future.

       In a sudden change of mind, Cocoy admits that he is beholden to his generosity, and that the other does deserve some sort of repayment for his kind acts. He proposes, as he begins to undo his shirt, his entire body is open for one sexual act as compensation.

       In a sense Cocoy has offered up a nearly impossible to refuse temptation to his gay friend, since, by the time he has finished describing his offer, he stands before him naked. It is apparent that his friend even quickly mulls over the situation before moving forward and engaging in a long tender sex act with the boy, all of which Cocoy seems to very much enjoy, ending with him penetrating his host.

       Despite his apparent willingness in engage in gay sex and clearly enjoying it, however, after their encounter we see him packed up, ready to return to the provinces. Apparently, he is truly heterosexual or unable to accept the implications of homosexual behavior. But as he moves out of the frame, his generous host expressing a slight smile of pleasure on his face, we know that the Cocoy who returns home will surely not be the same innocent who left his mountain village. And what he perhaps does not yet fully comprehend is that he has now become a kind of prostitute.

     Although de San Paulo’s work provides us with several well-framed images and demonstrates his ability to film sensuous soft-porn sexual acts (in this instance unafraid of revealing an erect penis), the grainy textured obviously bootlegged Russian-dubbed tape I saw, along with the characters lack of clear motivations, made this for me a rather flawed film experience.

     Perhaps if the director had permitted his central character to actually link up with his uncle he might, seeing Cocoy in different circumstances, more fully reveal his own identity and actually given his character some room to better comprehend his own sexual feelings. As it is, we must impose our own emotions upon this enigmatic country-boy figure.

      One cannot help but compare it with Crisaldo Pablo’s 2005 film Bilog (Circles), which also involves a young country boy who comes to Manila, in this case in search of his former girlfriend. In that work, however, unlike de San Paulo’s Cocoy, the gradually disenchanted innocent stays on, discovering in a kind of bisexual existence not only a way to survive in the city street life but to triumph over it.

 

Los Angeles, May 12, 2021

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

 

Wrik Mead | Haven / 1992

gay rorschach

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (director) Haven / 1992

 

Canadian director Wrik Mead’s Haven begins with what seems to be a statement regarding an experiment to determine whether or not scientists might determine whether a person is homosexual or heterosexual. In comic satire of such actual studies, the narrator describes an individual peering into an opening of a huge box in which images from a magazine were shown. A camera recorded the size of the pupil during the viewing of each image. The doctors determined there was a difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals. The eyes of the homosexuals lingered on the genital areas and pictures of males. Reading a list of homosexual words including “purpose, zeitgeist, wine, camp, sew, aunt, restaurant,” supposedly while holding a mesh bag of crystals, gay men would begin to sweat.

     Mead's extensive interview with fellow filmmaker Michael Hoolboom in 1996 contextualizes the strange beginning of this work. When asked about Haven, Mead comments:

“Haven was a reaction to the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] witchhunt of gays in the 1950s. They invented this thing called the fruit machine, which was a box where you looked at lewd images of gay men while holding a bag of crystals, and if you started to sweat, the crystals reacted and set off an alarm. The RCMP also read lists of words while you held the crystals, and certain words showed you were gay: circus, dyke, grass, trees, bagpipe. All civil servants who were suspected of being gay were made to take the test, and if you sweated, you were fired. This experiment was hushed up until 1992 when I made the film; no one had ever heard of it. On the soundtrack I asked my brother to read the newspaper report on the experiments, including the long list of words that would show you’re gay — camp, sew — and as he says these words, the two cartoon characters are getting turned on, you know, like “camp,” that’s a real homo word, that’ll get you going every time. …They just get right into it as soon as they hear those words.”

     Mead follows this ridiculously absurd first scene with two cartoon collaged figures, each with hugely large penises who join each other on the bed and as comic cut-outs proceed to maneuver themselves into anal sex. Running a piece of thread through the magazine cut-outs, he could move the collages into different positions, but when they actually begin to have sex, the film shifts suddenly an extremely blurry view of what he describes as “pornography stuff, it’s the nasty, close-ups of anal sex and blow jobs and stuff like that.”

      However, the blurs look also like clouds which often can remind one of anything they want to see, and even we can imagine we are observing sexual intercourse, we certainly cannot any longer determine the participants’ gender.

       The shift from the recognizable cartoon world to the abstraction of pornography—or perhaps simply a joke, depending upon how you read it, forces us to ask if only homosexuals see two men having sex in these vague shapes? Why do these abstract shapes seem more realistic than the recognizable collages. Would heterosexual men even perceive the collaged paper figures as gay men having sex, or would they ever bother to watch with interest, as certainly I did, such an absurd depiction of sexual activity? Would straight me see male sex in the blurred images? In a sense, Mead turns the RCMP tests around, forcing heterosexuals viewing the film to take the test as well.

 

Perhaps what gay men see as buttocks are really breasts. What if the two figures looked more like women, would the gay men turn away? Would they still imagine male figures in the cloud-like formations that follow?

       Throughout the film, we hear the sound of birds chirping as if the couple were beginning their morning with sex, enjoying themselves before rising. Would heterosexual males even notice this? Would such a crude imitation of sexual activity between two beings seem to them, as it might to some of the gay viewers, as a kind of “haven,” a port, a refuge, a shelter. Do gay men take refuge in their genitals? If words can be queer or straight, how do arrive at mutual meaning? Is it even possible?

       As in so much of his work, Mead manipulates his odd images into situations that ask more questions than a feature movie filled with veristic images.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Ming-liang Tsai | 青少年哪吒 (Qīngshàonián Nézhā) (Rebels of a Neon God) / 1992, US 2015

the prodigal son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ming-liang Tsai (screenwriter and director) 青少年哪吒 (Qīngshàonián Nézhā) (Rebels of a Neon God) / 1992, US 2015

 

Somewhat in the tradition of Rebel without a Cause (a large movie poster of James Dean, in fact, shows up in the room of one of the movie’s central figures), and with relationships to Truffaut’s 1950s five Antoine Doinel films, Taiwanese film director Ming-liang Tsai’s Teenage Nézhā (shown in the US as Rebels of a Neon God) shifts the focus from the California and Paris streets to the neon-lit Taipei of 1992, its original release date; the film was not released in the US until 23 years later.

 

    In Chinese culture, Nézhā is a kind of child-god born into a human family who attempts to kill his father. The young Nézhā figure in this work, Hsiao Kang (Lee Kang-sheng), is evidently a not-so-bright student, who with his taxi-cab driving father’s and spiritual-impelled mother’s support (she truly believes her son is an incarnation of Nézhā) has been enrolled in an overcrowded school to cram for college-entry tests. Clearly his parents are determined that he will be able to achieve in a manner which was impossible for them. Yet the tortuously old-school teaching methods of the buxiban (cram school) are painful even to watch, let alone to actually have been suffered through by a young man or woman in their daily sessions.

     In one scene, as the children leave their crowded classrooms, we see that a young girl’s scooter has been meaninglessly towed while our “hero,” lower in the screen, discovers that his scooter has suffered the same fate. He can only get home through the arrival of his taxi-driving father, who briefly, sympathizing with his son, suggests they attend an afternoon movie—the first shared experience proffered evidently in decades.

     Given the difficulties of city living in Taipei, everything soon changes, as two young “hoodlums,” Ah Tze (Chen Chao-jung) and Ah Ping (Jen Chang-bin)—petty thieves who steal the change from phone booths and abscond with the motherboards of many of the arcade games they nightly patrol—purposely break the side-mirror of the taxicab. The young boy is asked to return to his classes as the father angrily drives off.

      Hsiao Kang opts out of his cram-class, asking for the money which his parents paid back, and moving into the world of the two small-time hucksters, presumably to track them down. Yet as we quickly perceive—although little of it has been spoken about in the reviews of this work—his stalking of these figures not only represents a desire for their desolate, but somewhat exciting life-styles, but signifies a kind of homoerotic fascination with them.

     The central figure’s major focus is Ah Tze, who lives in an apartment that is nearly always under water, a slosh of debris and decay which he evidently shares with his elder brother. The wonder is that his brother can somehow still attract a young working girl, Ah Kuei (Wang Yu-wen), who eventually attaches herself to the younger sibling.

     Ah Tze’s real emotional commitment, however, is focused on his friend, Ah Ping; and, although he eventually, and very much after the fact, does finally have sex with this clearly sexually available woman, he abandons her time after time, and finally, when Ah Ping is beaten for one of their petty robberies, offers her up to him for “hugs.”

    Throughout—although nothing ever visually occurs or is even spoken about it—this film represents a ménage à trois between its three major male figures, two of them not even knowing about the existence of the third. The passion that embraces them is not so much a gay sexual desire as it is a dissatisfaction with their lives and, simply put, “the way things are.”

     This entry into the dark neon-lit world of Taiwan’s major city never quite allows the sexual release that any of these trapped young men are really seeking. Instead of a love story it ends as a kind of strange revenge comedy, with Hsiao Kang spray-painting and glunking-up the engine of his idol’s scooter with glue. Symbolically, he strips his beloved enemy of his sexual power, the film ending, in fact, with Ah Tze giving up his woman companion to his own friend. Surely, he can now never win her back, so, in a sense, the invisible young stalker has turned his obviously heterosexual object of fantasy into a kind of sexually neutered being, a boy in whom he might find some sexual release. And, in another respect, he has finally redeemed his father’s promise to take him to the movies by making his own “midnight movie” in real time and space in which, finally, things turn out “right,” or at least possible on his own terms.

     If previously, his own father has locked him out of their home, one of the final images is of the father (or mother) carefully opening the door a crack which might allow their wild, disobedient son to return.   

    

Los Angeles, October 17, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2018).

Wrik Mead | Deviate / 1992

real family hugs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (director) Deviate / 1992

 

Made the same year as his short films Haven and Warm, Deviate is a very different kind of film from the usual Mead work filled with puns and other forms of wit. This work, shot in Super 8 film, made for the Memorial Project, concerns one of his dearest friends, Dan Moyen, who died of AIDS in 1990.

    In this case, we have a work quite specifically described by the filmmaker himself in an interview with Mike Hoolboom. Mead describes attending, with others of Moyen’s close friends, the funeral, arranged by the gay boy’s devout Catholic parents.

“The priest at the service made many fatal errors in describing Dan, saying a young man in his thirties shouldn’t be deprived of his life. He was twenty-six! We all looked at one another. He said something about being a practicing Christian. Dan studied Buddhism. His parents were devout Catholics, but he was one of the great experimental thinkers at art school. I was shocked that he wasn’t kicking the grave open. If anything was going to make him come back, this service would have. But to make his parents feel better, we all had to hear these lies. They invited people Dan hated, like childhood friends who would beat him up for being a faggot. He didn’t like his parents, never saw them. We were his family, but because he didn’t have a written will, the decisions were left to them. It broke our hearts. We knew he would’ve been horrified to learn he’d ended up in a devout Catholic cemetery out in the middle of nowhere with electric towers all around. It just hurt so much to deal with all of that.”

 

      Although Mead had grown rather close to his parents due to the time he spent with them in the hospital where Moyen lay dying, he and several of Moyen’s friend, defining themselves as the boy’s real family, visited the cemetery where their friend was buried long after the funeral. Mead explains what happened during the visit of which also included Claire Lawlor, Dave Surman, Donna Evans, Kevin Mean, and John Walsh:

 

“We’d been talking about going up to the grave, and the film gave us a reason to go. I decided not to cry, but to celebrate our lives and our memory of Dan. We even poured a little champagne onto the soil so he might get a little drink if he was thirsty. We were looking for flowers or something to take to him and it happened to be Halloween time. I don’t know whether you can see it in the film, but there’s a pop-up skeleton head, a toy skeleton on a spring. We took him a bouquet of flowers with this little skeleton head sticking out and left it there. Apparently his parents came soon after and were horrified at something so satanic and evil, and I was sickened, I have done an evil thing, I’ve hurt two people who’ve suffered enough. Later I talked to my friends and told them we’d really hurt the family. They laughed and said we had a wonderful afternoon, it was so difficult to go out there, that was our ceremony. We were his family, the ones who really loved him, and we hadn’t called them and told them how hurt we were by their Catholic rituals. If you said the word “shit” in front of them, they’d dismiss you forever, so don’t be upset. We had a wonderful day. We sat on his headstone and talked about Dan, and I brought a tape recorder along. I wanted the real Dan, not all this phony priest shit about how great he was. He was a pain in the butt. He was the most beautiful human being on earth — that’s who he really was.”

 

     The film does not show us the cemetery plot but a “bedside tableau,” with a framed picture of Moyen, flowers, and a watch—objects which Moyen collected—as we hear friends tell stories of Dan including one woman friend describing her introduction to Dan of her female lover, who was rather tall, just as Dan was, while he pretended to stretch down to hug her, attempting perhaps to bring her down to the size of most of his other, far shorter friends like herself.

    A different friend tells of him wearing beautiful “gay boy” makeup and wanting to do the makeup of all the other friends.     

    Another speaker tells of a dream where Dan kept asking over and again, “What time it was.” But what he was really asking, so the dreamer realizes, is the date. This appears to have been some time after his death, so the dreamer knows, metaphorically speaking, “What time it is.” “I knew what was going to happen, and I gave him a really big hug.” She is so happy that she hugged him because it felt like a physical hug that she remembered even after she woke up.

    These may seem like almost meaningless comments to an outsider, but it is clear for those close to the young man now gone, the act of hugging, of coming into contact with his body meant everything to them.

    When Hoolboom asks why Mead called the work “Deviate,” the director answered:

 

 “Because the film was about Dan. He was the thorn in normal people’s sides. He thought differently and was aggressive about it. He would tell you you were stupid for being straight, you’re just following the norm, you’re not really straight. He was really into extreme thinking — he would pick his nose because he knew it was socially unacceptable, he would tell you the graphic things he’d do while masturbating because he knew it would make you uncomfortable. That’s the kind of guy he was, very aggressive and the sweetest friend you could ever have. He left us in a way no one could have guessed. He was such a life force. That’s why I called it Deviate.”

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

François Ozon | Frantz / 2016

the outsider

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo (screenplay, based on the film Broken Lullaby by Ernst Lubitsch), François Ozon (director) Frantz / 2016

 

All the time I was watching French director François Ozon’s 2016 film Frantz, I kept feeling that I had seen this film before; and, indeed, I had, evidently in a forgotten viewing of Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby of 1932. I still cannot recall when and where I saw the Lubitsch movie, but I do remember the power of its narrative: a former French World War I soldier who has killed a German soldier, who he realizes from a letter of the dead man’s body, was a pacifist, who had not even loaded his gun. The guilt of the murder leads him to follow the address back to Germany.

    Ozon’s version is a much subtler and more intelligent version of the earlier film, bringing in many other elements which the original contained, based on the French play by Maurice Rostand and its 1931 English-language adaptation, The Man I Killed by Reginald Berkeley. Not only does this version present a truly sensitive portrayal of the leads of two still-opposing cultures, Anna (Paula Beer) and Adrien (Pierre Niney), but more clearly than Lubitsch’s version, suggests that—after Anna spots Adrien delivering flowers to her finance’s grave—that perhaps the two men, both aesthetes, had had a homosexual relationship. Certainly, his description of their sharing of music and art in Paris (both are violinists) was a deeply sensitive event, that strongly affected their lives.

     The German family upon which he intrudes, the Hoffmeisters (Ernst Stötzner and Marie Gruber), are obviously of the upper middle-class who have brought up their son in an atmosphere of cultural involvement. It is, ultimately, their own cultural enthusiasm which allows them to let the French soldier—an outsider to most Germans, and in Lubitsch’s version someone to which the entire community negatively reacts—into their household. I think it’s more than a little interesting that in Ozon’s film, they quite quickly embrace the Frenchman, while in the German director Lubitsch’s earlier rendition their embrace is a far more laborious event. Nonetheless, the Hoffmeisters like the Holderlins before them, do emphatically allow Adrien into their inner circle, and permit and even encourage their son’s would-be wife to fall in love with him. The world of “them” and “us” easily fades away, as they perceive in the young friend of their son another image of him, which he carefully projects, perhaps falsely upon their suffering memories, a bit like the film Six Degrees of Separation (1993).

      In this sense, this work, in all of its forms, is actually a study of ingress, the entrance of one culture upon another, which, given our current American government’s stand against immigration, speaks more strongly today than it may have in Lubitsch’s day—even if the same issues were clearly there as well in 1932, when Hitler had begun to make such issues visible.

     The fact that what Adrien is really seeking is simply forgiveness does not make him more lovable. He has murdered their son, and when he admits the truth to Anna he betrays her own belief in a possible reconciliation with her past. Yet his simple attempt to anneal the past draws Anna to him, even when she inwardly knows she must push away.

      When, after he returns to Paris, and she attempts to reconcile her feelings for the “outsider,” she finally determines to not only forgive him but seek out what has seemed to be the relationship he has proffered her, she discovers, to her horror, that he is not at all the loving companion whom she might have sought; that, instead, he is a kind of “mamma’s” boy, who to please his domineering mother (Cyrielle Clair) he is now determined to marry his childhood friend, Fanny (Alice de Lencquesaing), an ever-patient and actually quite lovely woman who attempts even to embrace the woman who she recognizes as her sexual opponent. Yet, it quickly becomes clear that Fanny will win simply because Adrien is so very weak. His guilt is only a small part of the story: he is a man who cannot even face his own past actions.

      The last few scenes of this wonderful film, which moves subtly between stark black-and-white and light color, are revealed by the “false news” she sends in her letters back to the hopeful Hoffmeister family, who have now psychologically adopted the French “murderer” as their own son, wherein she tells them of her nonexistent relationship with Adrien, attending concerts and art museums together. She does, indeed, attend these events, but now completely without him, even though the film ends with their joint viewing of Manet’s painting Suicide, which may, alas, signify one or the other’s end. In Orzon’s film, it is clear, any such action will not be that of the now independent and strong-minded Anna, but that of her weak would-be lover.

     Both the men in her lives, it is now apparent, have left her empty-handed, the one by not even defending himself, and the other by refusing to embrace her open love.   

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2018).

Joan Montesinos Aznar and Gabriel Virata | Wherever You Are / 2016

the boy friend

by Douglas Messerli

Joan Montesinos Aznar (screenplay), Joan Montesinos Aznar and Gabriel Virata (directors) Wherever You Are / 2016 [14 minutes]

 

The 14-minute film Wherever You Are (2016) presents us with a different perspective than most LGBTQ films. In this work a grieving father (Guy Hargreaves) is seen traveling around the British landscape in an attempt to find someone who may have known his son, killed in an automobile accident.

       Experiencing memories of his son as a child, mostly of their putting together a miniature train track upon which they ran the train, he himself speeds endlessly via railroad in search of someone who may have known Paul. The father has perceived that his son was gay and was traveling on most weekends to see his lover in another town. The elder’s search is to find that lover so that he might explain his son’s absence, but also, we suspect, so that he might share his grief with someone else who loved his son.

        Although his search seems unceasing as he tracks down the various coffee houses and restaurants that have appeared, evidently, on his dead son’s credit cards, he finds no one who seems to know him. Another friend, just a friend not the boyfriend, telephones, sharing in a brief conversation; but that friend also doesn’t know who Paul’s boyfriend was.

     He finally encounters a young server in a restaurant who recalls the young man and his friend regularly dining at her restaurant, even suggesting that the other man works at a nearby establishment called The Terrace. The father excitedly seeks out the place, but the young server there is new to the place, helping his grandmother who has evidently just taken over the restaurant.

      In frustration, the father visits his son’s grave, only to find a rose laid upon the stone along with a note apparently thanking the dead boy for his love and wishing him well “wherever you are.”

      Obviously, Paul’s lover has heard about the accident and has even reached out to share his own sense of loss. It offers the father the only small piece of consolation he can find, as he dutifully writes out the contents of the note, presumably the only communication, sadly, he will ever have with his son’s gay lover.

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

Barry Jenkins | Moonlight / 2016

learning how to float

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barry Jenkins (screenplay, based on a play and story by Tarell Alvin McCraney, and director) Moonlight / 2016

 

Barry Jenkins’ well written and excellently directed film, based on a play and film script by Tarell Alvin McCraney, takes us to places where few black films have previously gone. In its tripartite structure, Jenkins’ work explores the issues of growing up in poor projects (this in Liberty City, Miami) from childhood to being an adult and the toll it takes on people’s lives.

       Beginning with a skinny, almost malnourished young boy, Chiron (Alex Hibbert), whose nickname in his early days is “Little” because of both his size and manner, is plagued by a mother who is quickly developing a drug habit.

       The film begins (shot in Fuji film) with the young schoolboy being chased by his larger peers into a vacant motel, where he hides out to protect himself. A local drug dealer, Juan (Mahershala Ali) finds him there and, recognizing his terror, takes him home to his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe) where, together, the two feed the boy and finally get him to talk. Returned to his mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), “Little” is berated and punished for having not come home.

       Over the next few days, things get even worse as she becomes more and more involved in drugs, and finally attacks him (which the film brilliantly expresses in silence) as a “faggot,” a word the young boy does even understand. He returns to Juan and Teresa, who, once again, invite him in, as he asks questions about sexuality and other fears, which they, kindly, attempt to explain to him, reassuring him that if he does later find himself to be gay, he must choose his own identity.

       Juan is the first of many stereotypes in this film who is revealed to be a different individual as he lives day by day; despite Chiron’s painful connection that this is one of the men who sells his mother drugs, he might have made a wonderful father for the boy, behavior we particularly perceive when he takes “Little” to the ocean and gently teaches him to swim. And even when Juan drops out of the film (we hear later that he has apparently died), Chiron continues to return to Theresa to escape the mother he has now grown to hate, she, in turn, slipping extra money into his pockets.

       The second section of Moonlight is shot in modified Kodak, signaled by a blue image in the quick interlude. As the teen Chiron (André Holland), has grown in a gangly kid, who still seems lost in pain and fear. Now those who taunted him as a child are even more aggressive in their raging hormonal changes, not only threatening him, but mocking his tight jeans as opposed to their baggy streetwear. Chiron is also further abused by his increasingly drugged-out mother.

       One fellow student, in particular, Terrel (Patrick Decile), is determined to punish the still-shy boy, who now, with his only friend Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), realizes his gay sexuality one late night on the beach. Yet Kevin is also a former tough guy, accepted by his classmates, including Terrel, who forces him to engage in a hazing tradition of beating a chosen classmate until he refuses to get up.

       Having now fallen in love with Kevin, Chiron, when struck by his friend, stands again and again to accept his face blows, finally leading to a schoolyard brawl, saved only by the intervention of school faculty. Chiron retaliates the very next day by angrily slamming a chair over Terrel’s head, and, when finally quelled, is hurried off to jail by police.

       The third section, shot in Agfra film stock (adding cyan to its images, a complimentary to red, signified by a red spot in the brief interlude), features Trevante Rhodes as a march darker, hulkier, and menacing adult Chiron, who, working in Atlanta—where his aging mother now lives and works in a rehabilitation center—as a drug dealer, like his father-figure Juan. If we do not like the gold-tapped toothed “Black,” his new nickname, as much as we did his previous incarnations, it is because he has now retreated so far into himself that he no longer knows who he was or might have been.

      Yet in his nightly wet sweats, he realizes that he realizes that as a street thug he is having many of the same problems of his youth. His mother calls to beg him to visit her, as he equally attempts to ignore her pleas. When the phone rings again he attempts to reassure her that he will visit, before finally realizing that this call is from his old friend-enemy, Kevin, who now works as a cook in Miami, after having himself served time in jail. Kevin has heard a song on his restaurant’s jukebox that suddenly reminded him of their long-ago friendship and has somehow found Chiron’s telephone number.

       For “Black” the call brings up everything he hates about himself and the love he once (and evidently only once) so enjoyed. Without even thinking carefully, “Black” visits his mother—which, in one of the most touching scenes of the film, results in a kind of painful resolution to their lifelong separations—and takes to the road, arriving at the small café where Kevin works as chef and server both. After recognizing his long missing classmate, Kevin whips up a special Cuban dish and serves it to his friend, insisting that, even though Chiron does not drink, that he share a couple bottles of wine.

       Their elliptical conversation seems to take them nowhere, as Kevin admits that he married, had a baby, and is now separated but friendly with his former wife; and Chiron, as unable to express himself as always, dares not to hint at why he has made the trip. Neither knows how to clearly brooch the subject of their own failures, loneliness, and total isolation.

      Having nowhere to stay the night, Chiron takes up Kevin’s offer to visit his small apartment, where finally Kevin himself admits that he had failed in almost everything he attempted until now, working as he does for nearly nothing. Chiron, meanwhile, admits that he has never been with another man since Kevin on the beach, perhaps one the saddest admissions about love ever expressed in film. Whether these two men have sex that night or not is beside the point: each has come home to help the other to find expressions of love that they have never before been able to admit, and the final scene simply portrays the somewhat menacing Chiron with his head upon Kevin’s shoulder.

       While this film, in part, is a kind of black gay story, it is, more importantly, about abused children who have never had the opportunity to express the love which might have nurtured them into adulthood. These now hardened males must find their own way back into tenderness and feeling, a difficult journey for anyone.

      Jenkins, his cinematographer James Laxton, and his editors Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon take what is basically a naturalistic tale and break it down into stunningly-timed images that reveal more than any one character can express.

       Although all of the actors are quite wonderful in their gentle and almost mute performances (Naomie Harris and the child actor, Alex Hibbert, are particularly memorable), it is their actions that matter most: tears at the most unexpected moment, a quiet and hard-won bubble bath, the gesture of helping one learn to float, an unexpected kiss, a loving sprinkle of parsley upon a special dish. To say this small film is elegant in those images is an understatement. Jenkins turns the everyday, the painful, and the ugly into visions of a restoral of life.

        As awful as Chiron’s surroundings have been, it is a world, when looked into more carefully, as this film does, we recognize as filled with would-be loving figures—if only given half a chance.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).