Benjamin Howard | Toast / 2015

what is the consequence of a kiss?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Howard (screenwriter and director) Toast / 2015 [9 minutes]

 

Some days while watching the thousands of short, mostly student-made gay films I seek out, I become confused and puzzled, particularly when I see films such as Benjamin Howard’s 9-minute Toast, a work which attempts to take us into some sexual breach where I, as a 78-year-old man, can not imagine there might be anything going on worthy of more than a smile and a pat on the head.

    Jake (Kristian Rodriguez), a hunky straight college-student has been out drinking at what appears to be a fraternity party for most of the night, and his friend Ethan (Nick Eiter), looking after him, tries to help him home safely, since they apparently share the same apartment.

    Jake is so many sheets to the wind that he doesn’t even know what he’s saying, as he praises the fact that Ethan is such good friend who cares for him enough to look after him. As they stumble up the stairs and into the apartment, he begs for his friend to toast him a slice of bread, presumably to help him sober up.

    But in the process, sitting on the floor, Jake continues to slobber out his praises for his friend, who we soon discover is gay through Jake’s ruminations. Jake admits that he wonders…and stops there, incoherently babbling out a further message and finally enacting what it might be that he wonders about by placing a kiss on Ethan’s mouth.

   Ethan, startled by the event, drops the toast that has just popped up onto his drunken friend’s chest, and scurries off to bed as if some terrible occurrence has just taken place.

    By morning, it’s clear that Jake, now sober, so strongly regrets his actions that he feels lit necessary to confess to his girlfriend Julie (Marissa McKinney) what has happened, and makes an appointment to see Ethan, begging him to try to forget and forgive his actions. He’s terrified that the events of the last evening might end their friendship, arguing what he needs, more than anything, is a friend just to whom he can just talk.

     That closing statement which ends the film, hints that perhaps he still does “wonder” about some things: perhaps concerning his sexuality, what it might be like to have sex with a man, or just what it’s like to live as a gay man as his friend does.

     Although the film seems to find Jake’s behavior of the night before a great significance, needing forgiveness, to me and I am sure to others of my generation, all it really needed was a pat on the head, and maybe even a gentle kiss on the cheek—certainly not the toast on the chest and a race off to one’s own bed in apparent confusion, all to suggest that their friendship certainly might be “toast,” their relationship “ruined or defeated.”

     A kiss is just a kiss, and Jake’s was just a drunken kiss, hardly worth any fuss at all in my mind except perhaps for a friendly smile. If it happened to me when I was Ethan’s age (even that phrase now dates me), I’d simply have helped my friend stand, deposited him on the couch, and tucked the covers around the sleeping hunk of flesh, maybe even awarded him a goodnight kiss on the forehead so gently placed that he wouldn’t even remember it in the morning.

      What I’m wondering is…what is all this fuss about? Why the guilt, the fear, the act of rejection, or even the hint of further problems down the road? What on earth has Jake done to warrant such an apology, a fear that he might lose his best friend, or even more seriously, as the film’s information liner puts it, the necessity that the “boys [need] struggle to deal with the unintended consequences of the incident?” What consequence might there possibly be? What happened that one might even describe it as an “incident?”

     Having encountered such melodramatic reactions now in several of these student films, I fear that youth today have become a mass of simpering prudes, fearful lest the slightest gesture towards sexual behavior might cause an earthquake. It is one thing if Jake had fondled his friend’s dick or Julie’s breasts without their consent—but even then, I might argue, it depends upon the circumstances. But what is the consequence of a kiss? A kiss isn’t sex. It’s just a sign of affection, particularly in this instance. Have we older folk grandfathered in an entire generation so afraid to even come near sexual intimations that guilt immediately descends from the skies in the form of a morning-after strike of lightning? Some times a cigar is just a cigar, a squeeze of the shoulder nothing more than a friendly gesture expressed through touch, and not at all an act that calls for apology, analysis, and forgiveness.

    For god’s sake, what might have happened if Jake had really wanted to explore gay sex? Would his best gay friend reject him as aggressive and unfit? At that age, I’d have invited Jake into my bed in a minute, and we’d both awakened with a lingering smile, and maybe a wink. Today, it appears that it all leads to consequences serious enough to be the subject of a totally insubstantial little movie like this one.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

 

Abhishek Verma | Maacher Jhol (The Fish Curry) / 2017

recipe for coming out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abhishek Verma (screenplay, based on a story by Verma and Jayesh Bhosale, and director) Maacher Jhol (The Fish Curry) / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

Maacher Jhol (The Fish Curry) is an animated Indian film of 2017 that takes the simple theme of “coming out,” and presents it almost as a recipe of success.

     The independent son (voiced by Amar Chaudhary) of this story has taken a long while in telling his father, who is still attempting to hurry him into marriage with any of women acquaintances, that he is gay. But the day has finally come, and he has invited his father for dinner in order to share his sexuality with him.

    To make certain that his father (voiced by Suraj Ghosh) is in the best mood possible for the unwanted news, he makes a fish curry from scratch, employing his own spices. Indeed in the first of the film we get the entire recipe for the curry as we watch him prepare it in a cartoon abbreviation, often taking time out to imagine the fish as his fellow lover, whom he joins in the sea in a kind of fishy duet, sung by Rajesh Pawar.

      He also takes time to get a proper haircut.

     The father arrives and they pleasantly chat, his dad once more insisting that he should join a dating site and going look the appropriate woman to marry. His son reports that he has already someone he loves, his father interrupting with a listing of the possible women of whom he knows in his son’s life.

     But finally, as the father chews delightfully on the fish, made to perfection, that the love he has found is not a female but a male, and admits that he is gay, apologizing as in so very many such films for not having told him sooner, having found not proper way or time previously to tell him.

      We do not see the father’s reaction, only that he has finished the curry and immediately proceeds to leave.

      The father arrives home with several stacked tins of leftovers, telling his wife (Rajesh Pawar) that the curry was indeed excellent, and that she should warm it up and share the rest with him.

     As she begins to do so, enjoying the flavors of her first bites, we realize that the story is being repeated all over again, the father taking the opportunity of the special feast to put his wife in a good mood so that he can tell her that her son is gay and has found a male lover.

       If the way to a lover’s heart is through his stomach, so too, does it appear, that a way to the parent’s closed heart about sexual deviation is through the taste buds. Apparently, you can’t say much when they’re being so pleasantly entertained by maacher jhol, the Bengali rohu (carp) dish that Howard I used to enjoy at our favorite Washington, D. C. Indian restaurant, Apana.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022)

Mark Abramowitz | Meet Up / 2017

the unknown

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Abramowitz (screenwriter, based on a story by Dan O’Connor, and director) Meet Up / 2017 [26 minutes]

 

It’s a young gay man’s worst nightmare, but it happens over and again, when he picks up a good-looking guy to discover himself before the end of the evening in true danger. One imagines that one learns through such experiences, if he survives, but gay men are easy prey for those with hate and other agendas on their minds, and it happens—as it has to me—more than once in a world that involves late hours, drugs, risk-taking, and unquenched desire.

     In this story the “prey” is a seemingly nice boy, the son of a judge, Miles (Kevin Necciai) who has planned to spend the evening with a regular or Grindr date, who doesn’t show up. As he waits at the bar, he’s cute enough to even attract the attention of the bartender who appears ready to jump into bed with him immediately if he’d let him.

     As he readies to go home, a handsome young man approaches him for a light—a time worn ruse, but successful nonetheless when you have the looks of Tyler (Jordan Sangalang), who quickly establishes that he’s ready to share some good weed with him if he’ll only drive him the local drive-in grocery for some papers to roll, and then to the guy who keeps his stash, a man named Chris, who he calls “Cash man.”

      The late evening (it’s now 1:00) begins in true fashion when naturally Chris isn’t home and they are met only by his understandably indignant mother, who’s not about to let them in, as Tyler insists, to look around the place for where her son has hidden his dope.

    A shrewd individual would have already perceived that there is a desperation about Tyler that suggests a deeper reason for his search, namely that he’s into far more serious stuff. But it takes the somewhat naïve Miles another late-night visit to what is clearly a serious dope house, with a doped-up girl in charge who’s not about to hand over more dope to Tyler when he already owes her more than $500.

     Miles thinks he might resolve the situation by purchasing a $40.00 bag of marijuana. But before they even reach the car again, Tyler declares he has to get back to his bag, even though Miles shouts out that it’s in the car.

      We don’t quite know what happens in the few moments that Tyler is alone again with the drug dealers, but we do see blood being washed off his hands, and we can suspect there’s been a murder to go with it, particularly since, when Miles finds him again, he has some much stronger “stuff.”

       Miles now recognizes it’s time to end the farce, but it has already gone too far, and when Miles tries to finish off the evening, rejecting the heroin or whatever drug Tyler now wants him to share, Tyler goes “ballistic,” suggesting he “thinks he’s better” than him and offering him his cock if only to pull Miles further into the vortex into which he’s already spinning. But it is clearly now a client / customer relationship of which Miles wants no part. And when he demands Tyler get out the car immediately, it sets himself up for the tortures we (and he perhaps) feared from the very begging: a knife at his throat, he himself being pulled from the car, and a thorough beating, stopping, and kicking which as the dope kicks in might easily have ended in his death if in one lucky moment Miles had not found a large club of wood to knock his assailant to the ground and run off, pulling away in the car as he is chased by Tyler, begging him to just be friends again.

      Even for Miles there will never probably be such an unknown “friend” in his life again, as his former date texts that he’s sorry he couldn’t make it that night. It’s the kind of night that makes a gay man wonder if he ever wants to meet up with unknown again; but then how to find someone given the statistics for sex, let alone for possible love? These are, terrifyingly, the rules of the game.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

David France | The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson / 2017

stopping by stonewall

by Douglas Messerli

 

David France and Mark Blane (screenplay), David France (director) The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson / 2017

 

Netflix’s documentary film by David France, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, is not just a work about its titular hero, but a story about three women, Marsha—a drag queen, possibly transgender figure, born Malcolm Michaels, Jr., who didn’t want to determine his life as either male or transgendered female (if there was ever a Q in the LBGTQ community, Marsha represents it)—his close friend, quite clearly a transgendered figure, Sylvia Rivera, and, perhaps the most interesting of them all, Victoria Cruz, working for the New York City Anti-Violence Project in an attempt to solve the violent death as her very last investigation—a cold case described by the police as a suicide in 1992—and who doggedly in her near-retirement years, attempts to track down the real culprits.

      This was a terribly painful movie for me, since it involves the Greenwich Village gay community of which I was involved just a few weeks before I left New York previous to the significant Stonewall Bar riots.

      Night after night I began my evenings, after studying dance at the Joffrey Ballet studio, from Julius’ for a hamburger dinner—in which a couple of this film’s scenes are filmed—turning the corner to Christopher Street and walking past Stonewall (sometimes even dropping into the dive-like bar) before making my way down the street to the a bar near the Hudson, which was clearly more friendly to the college white boy world from which I’d come, with a very large back room for a nightly orgy of bodies which I loved.

      After watching this insightful film, about Rivera and Johnson’s abilities to establish the gay liberation movement, and their attention to lost street children through their S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) housing project, and, in particular, Johnson’s attention to men and women dying from AIDS, I wish I’d stopped in more often to the Stonewall. If I had stayed longer in New York City, I now realize, I might have been one of the gay-white men who usurped the gay liberation marches which annually followed, barely allowing Rivera to even speak at one of their later events, after the terrible death of the queen founder, Johnson.

      What I didn’t know, and thousands of other gay men did not realize as well: these gay/transgender women had made all of us freer.

      Yet the Mafia, who controlled most of these Village gay bars also controlled the celebratory parades, and evidently, according to this film and Cruz’s investigations into the facts, even some of Johnson’s dearest friends, such as Randy Wicker, who later attempted to take back the gay marches from the Mafia control, had perhaps unintentionally helped to allow her violent death.

       It seems apparent that Johnson’s fears about the Mafia were played out in her murder. She was just too flamboyant and popular for these mob bosses to ignore. She was a voice, clearly, that stood against their own secret control of a world which—the so-called midgets of the brutal Mafia world—it would soon become apparent, helped also, unintentionally, to kill hundreds of their bar-customers through AIDS.

       Marsha—whose middle initial, she proclaimed stood for “pay it no mind”—was beloved by all, a clearly caring individual who dressed in male and female attire daily. She/he was obviously way beyond sexual gendering with which we still today attempt to define individuals.

       This wonderful documentary even attests to the segregation of gay males and transgendered people, each marching down opposite sides of the street. Rivera’s later plea to the gay men who have captured the “Pride Parade’s” annual events, shouts to the crowd, as they booed her down, shaming them for their failure to comprehend how they are now as responsible for the police dismissal of and continual deaths of transgender or drag-queen individuals.

    I realized, while watching this moving film, that I too was guilty. As a gay man, proud of my sexuality, I had long ignored the difficulties of those who didn’t share my own sexual sensibilities.

     If only I had dropped into the Stonewall more often, talked to the denizens of that small, somewhat sleazy bar, I might have discovered another world which as a young man I simply dismissed.

     Marsha often haunted the Hudson piers, which I’d heard about, but never visited, just a block away from the bar in which I regularly received sexual delight. She evidently was a force not to be reckoned with, a true adventurer who cared about the entire LGBT and now Q world which I, as a 20-some year-old never perceived.

     At one point in this film, she is reported to be visiting The Anvil, another East Side bar which I only visited one time, but where I met my first lover, Dick Charmatz, then a curator at the Natural History Museum of New York, who I presume is no longer living.

      Marsha was killed, given the evidence that Cruz accumulates, probably by the Mob, but she is killed, in their total lack of investigation, also by the 6th Precinct Police Force: a kind of double murder, by the government which was supposed to protect her, and the mafia who paid off the police to protect their then-illegal sexual dens. I was there. I was one of their participants without even knowing about it. I drank their liquor; I enjoyed the pleasures offered in their illegal interiors.

     An innocent boy from the Midwest, how could I know it was all be offered up to me for the death of the individual who helped, a few months later, to transform myself into a sexual rebel? Howard and I were saved from prejudice through this man/woman’s death.

     I lived and she died, a kind of Christ-like figure. I now feel I can never forgive myself for just not stopping into the Stonewall Bar to meet her.

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).

Kevin Rios | Little Bill's Peep Show / 2017

true porno

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kevin Rios (screenwriter and director) Little Bill's Peep Show / 2017 [8 minutes]

 

Bradley Fitz (Vlad Chebo), a gay student, has hooked with a Grindr guy (Michael Wetherbee), and has asked his straight roommate, Bill—known by his family as Little Bill (John DiMino)—to be out of the room at the hours when he plans to meet up with his friend.

     Little Bill, however, thinks it might be fun to hook up a hidden camera to catch all the gay action, of which we see only a few seconds, mostly while Bradley fucks his partner under the sheets. But when Little Bill sends in out on the internet, it goes viral. Bullied, embarrassed, and belittled, Brad puts a gun to his head and kills himself.

     This nightmare tale, told by our midnight peep show story teller, happens far too often to young men who are bullied in this manner, a sad statistic that usually ends with the news of the young gay, lesbian, or trans figure’s death.

     But in this case director Rios, via his storyteller narrator decides to take it further, turning it into a story of awful revenge. Frankly, I find the continuation of this sad story cheapens and denigrates the reality of all those who really felt there was no way out, and were destroyed by an intolerant society.

     But, obviously there are many viewers who feel that it’s utterly justifiable to turn the dead boy into a vengeful zombie, who determines to visit Little Bill’s home and seek his revenge. “What would happen,” asks the narrator, “if homophobia were deadly,” like a kind of disease?

      The camera zooms in on Fitz’s roommate’s family domain. The denizens of that house, other than Little Bill, include his monstrous father, Big Bill (David Nash) and a drunken harridan of a mother, Greta Baby (Rew Star), who both argue that their son’s roommate deserved to die for his homosexual perversions. Little Bill is shocked by the entire series of incidents, tortured by the fact that his actions have led to Bradley’s death, and finds his own parents to be the true monsters. His very attitude gets a black eye from his father, who insists that his son should feel utterly no guilt.

     At that moment Bradley, fresh from the grave, shows up at their doorstep, eating through the mean fleshy football fan before he can even close door in his face. The mother, Greta Baby, yells for her son to get the gun, as she attacks the zombie by herself.

      By the time Little Bill reaches the porch with the gun and shoots off into the air to scare the monster off, the zombie is eating his mother’s heart as Billy stares in horror. He tries to explain to his now former roommate just how sorry he is for what he did, admitting that he was probably jealous, and revealing that he, himself, is actually gay.

      His confessions, however, have no effect, as the dead boy goes straight for a kiss, delivering up Little Bill’s mother’s tongue.

       This little gruesome moral homily, I argue, is not for those who truly care about the effects of homophobia. Rios simply uses the serious pain it has caused as a cheap narrative device.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Francis Lee | God’s Own Country / 2017

learning how to love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Lee (screenwriter and director) God’s Own Country / 2017

 

Why is it, I felt Francis Lee’s 2017 film about a young, gay Yorkshire sheep farmer (Josh O’Connor) and a Romanian migrant temporary worker (Alec Secăreanu) to be totally believable and touching, whereas I found Ang Lee’s 2005 gay romance, Brokeback Mountain, about a gay relationship between two sheep-herders utterly unconvincing?

     It wasn’t that I was surprised by the sudden sexual passion between the two rugged Wyoming-based shepherds who get the hots for one another; as I wrote in my review of that year:

 

“The first part of the film, a long laconic testimony to the lonely life of the sheep-herding cowboys and an evocation of the beauty of the landscape in which they work, was perfectly reasonable. And I think it is not at all illogical or even out of the ordinary that these two lonely men, both of whom had come from dysfunctional families, would develop a kind of unspoken bond, even be attracted to one another, and, upon that lonely mountain, find themselves having sex. I don’t care how loud the Christian coalition’s yell, men—even straight men which both of these cowboys proclaim themselves to be—sometimes have sex in situations where they exist for long periods of time without women. So, their rather violent sexual outing—although we later suspect that it is not the first time for the Jake Gyllenhaal character, Jack Twist—is quite believable.”

     The central character of Francis Lee’s movie, Johnny, in this more nuanced work, begins also by presenting love with rough and quick sex, the young farmer grabbing up anyone he might encounter in his rural isolation for a quick fuck in the back of his van in which he carries his cows to market. His sexuality is clearly a thing of frustration and anger.

     The young lad with whom we first encounter him having sex tries to encourage a deeper connection through an invite for a drink at a local pub, which Johnny brusquely refuses. He is bitter, forced as he is to run his father, Martin Saxby’s farm since the elder has suffered a stroke and can now barely walk.

      His grandmother, Deidre (Gemma Jones), with her gorgon-like personality doesn’t help. Johnny is clearly locked up in a world not to his liking and which he has no chance to escape. His only outs are his drunken evenings at a nearby pub, after which he is apparently delivered up by a local taxi, whose driver is forced to literally deposit him, like a piece of rubbish, in the driveway of the farm, a scene which the temporary Romanian worker, Gheorghe, painfully observes from the small trailer near the house in which they have ensconced him.

      Johnny’s first encounter with Gheorghe, given the Yorkshireman’s unhappiness with his life, is not a pleasant one, although we immediately sense that the handsome Gheorghe, given his deferential attitude to life and his gentle responses to the brutal comments of his new employer and the conditions in which he must now live (including a dialect so peculiar that subtitles are needed), might be perfect to calm the angry young man. And that is, precisely, what makes this film so wonderful.

      Gheorghe, a bit like a saint of Pasolini’s Teorema, appears out of the blue in order to gradually tame the beast in Johnny, showing him, without saying a word, how beautiful his Yorkshire landscape truly is, that even a newborn baby sheep “runt,” might be nursed back to health—in one of the most painful but enlightening moments of this film, he takes up a knife to skin a stillborn sheep, placing the pelt around the runt, which when the dead sheep’s mother smells, encourages her to nurse it—and helps Johnny to learn that another male body is not just an ass to be intruded, but a being to caress and even kiss. Sheep are not simply something to be sheared, but produce, if you are knowledgeable, a beautiful cheese that is not only delicious but possibly financially beneficial.

     For the bitter Johnny, these lessons, particularly when he realizes that he cannot possibly bring his new lover into his house, are learned slowly. And when drunkenly and casually he chooses to fuck another young gay man in the local pub in the presence of his new “teacher,” Gheorghe determines, as the agreement has always been, to move on. The angel has flown off to Scotland.

      When Johnny’s father has another stroke, however, the son realizes that he must now take charge, and despite the dismissive stares of the gorgon grandmother, determines to find his Romanian lover and bring him home and, presumably, into his own bed.

       These events, large and small, are what make the love between these two unlikely gay lovers so very different from the other Lee’s simple-minded, lust-induced cowboys. We believe in this relationship because we can comprehend it; we understand what they do and don’t have in common and perceive how together they have worked to create something different, a world unthinkable in the Yorkshire wilds. In order to have a true relationship, you can’t just drop in from time to time on a married man to restore that “oh such special feeling”; you need to wake up, recognize yourself and your love and act on that.

      Francis Lee, unlike Ang Lee, using his own experience as the basis of his filmmaking, truly comprehended what love (any love, not just gay) is all about. And in a world in which gays are not yet accepted, you need to simply take a stand, bring the boy into the house and let him work with you to make a better life together. Even the gorgons will surely back off; besides Gheorghe is a much better cook! And that goat cheese he has left behind looks so very delicious.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2018 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Gregory Oke | Été / 2017

summer idyll

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory Oke (screenwriter and director) Été / 2017 [19 mintues]

The British director Gregory Oke, who made this film as part of his graduating requirement from New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, begins it with a blurred and distorted image from French television, which quickly reforms into an image of the lush Herefordshire green landscape where a young man, Rhys (Dan Patridge)—listening in his car to the music of French singer Jacques Dutronc while studying French from a tape—is working the summer as a sheep shearer.

     His fellow shearer, the handsome Freddie (David Burnett) knocks at the window, teasing his friend for his French obsession, reminding him that it is time to return to work. And throughout this 19-minute film there are several scenes altering between lunch breaks with the two working mates, their performing their shearing tasks, a bit in the macho rhythm and dance of director Claire Denis’ Beau travail (1999).

     Rhys is studying French not only because of his admiration of hip music sensation Dutronc, but his love of a young French woman, Emma (Rhiannon Handy) who is visiting England. The couple discuss Rhys’ traveling to France and staying in a local hotel while he visits her. And in one important long scene, they join Freddie, his girlfriend, and others on a beach picnic where Rhys seems to be playing games of balance in a culvert with Emma while his handsome friend and his girlfriend stare out moodily at the nearby stream, the one representing the trope of play, the other an image filmmakers love to flash before our eyes as a symbol of enduring love.

     But that is just the problem. As we glean from the brief lunch sessions and shearing episodes between the two males—all highly homoerotic—Rhys is unconsciously falling in love with his co-worker, observing the hair in his armpits, how his well-muscled body moves, etc.

     A drive in the country with Rhys and Emma seems about to spill over from a deep kissing session into a sexual incident, but Emma almost immediately perceives something is wrong, and when Rhys comes up for air it is clear to her that his outer actions do not match his inner emotions. Even he, becoming aware of it, sits moodily for a moment before attempting to make another go at it, she finally refusing and the two breaking off, she demanding her drive her home.

      No words are exchanged, no scenes of our confused young hero pondering the situation or even leaning into a closer relationship with the object of his sexual confusion. Rhys knows that despite Freddie’s good-natured, sometimes hands-on teasing, there is no hope for his growing sexual desires to be quelled. The only release between the two of them is through music, and this case the music of “outsiders,” Dutronc and his wife Françoise Hardy, representing the Francophone obsession of a British citizen.

      We come to learn of Rhys’ growing tension primarily through the richly-hewed, sensual, views of landscape and characters by director Oke, using a palette and lens closer to Luciano Visconti’s than to most other current younger filmmakers. And often his framing, with important elements visualized at the edges and corners of the image, help to reveal more about the meaning than the narrative at its center.

      Inevitably, during a night of drinking and pool playing at a local pub with friends, Freddie carries his good-natured joshing of Rhys too far, putting his arm around the boy in the toilet as he mocks a yawn, hinting of the breakup of Rhys and Emma. Soon after, the young sheep shearer explodes into violence, slugging the man he loves endlessly until Freddie wrestles him down the ground and back into reality. Rhys goes storming off as the others, shocked, stare after him, one describing him as a psycho.

      Back in his room, Rhys pounds the bed in despair. In the last scene he returns to music, his only outlet for sexual release, as his sings along in French, in karaoke-style, with his idol, Dutronc.

       Été is a beautiful and restrained film that reveals a remarkable talent for filmmaking that one hopes results in a feature film.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).