Zaher Saleh | War Within / 2017

the impediment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zaher Saleh (screenwriter and director) War Within / 2017 [4 minutes]

 

We have seen the struggle before in many dozens of short films, a young man of faith, in the case a Muslim man named Khaled (Ryan Tschetter) struggling through prayer to release him from the inner demons of male desire, but in the process the visions of that homosexual desire only increasing. There are brief moments with his disapproving mother, a moment of momentary transformation when the sufferer puts on lipstick, a scene with him and several half-naked gay men on a couch, and finally a dinner, with the mother presiding, with a gay friend (Richard Cortez) whom he kisses.

     That kiss clearly represents his having come to terms with his sexuality, despite the remaining guilt and continued prayers.

      The problems with this version of the inner turmoil most gay men feel in coming out is the short film’s length (not much can be complexly expressed in only 4 minutes); the lack of any innovative film techniques (the work is filmed with camera viewing the figure in half face, full face, and head bowed in prayer in a series of monotonal browns and purples); the lack of nearly any attempt at characterization other the religious stereotype (the actors are not even credited); along with the unoriginality of its subject.    

     The struggle is based on real experience I am certain, but none of that is fully conveyed to the viewer of this short work, and we are left, yet again, I am afraid of perceiving faith as merely an impediment to the expression of life.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).  

Barbara Willis Sweete, Phelim McDermott, and Julian Crouch | The Enchanted Island / 2012 [The Metropolitan Opera HD production]

everybody's opera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy Sams (writer and conceiver), with music by George Frederic Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and numerous others, Barbara Willis Sweete (film director) Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (stage directors) The Enchanted Island / 2012 [The Metropolitan Opera HD production]

 

Perhaps for the first time since the days of Baroque opera, an opera company, in this case the New York's Metropolitan, performed a pastiche, a mix of operatic works assembled and woven into a new story. As several critics noted, this might have been a disastrous mish-mash of music and story, but with the encouragement of the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, Jeremy Sams' selections intertwined with elements of the plots of Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, the opera community has a charming new work that threatens to become a standard in opera houses. Certainly I would go back for another visit to this quite satisfying piece.

     Prospero (David Daniels), having taken over the "enchanted" island of the title's name, has at first loved and then abandoned Sycorax (Joyce DiDonato), a sorceress banned to the dark side of the kingdom, now furious for the results. Prospero and his daughter Miranda, having stolen away Sycorax's spirit servant, Ariel (Danielle de Niese), spend most of their days reading books filled with the formulas of potions and magic spells, attended by Caliban, Sycorax's dunder-headed and brutish son. He, she argues, using him to gain entry back into Prospero's sight, should be the inheritor of the island! Yet it is clear, Caliban has little talent to rule anything.

     Passing by this isolated island is a ship bearing Prince Ferdinand, a likely suitor for Miranda's hand. Determined to marry her off to Ferdinand, Prospero plans to summon up a storm that will bring the Prince to is island and into the arms of his beloved daughter. Ariel, who is charged to carry out the spell, however, chooses—in part because of the influence of Sycorax—the wrong ship, and sets the storm upon a boat carrying four Athenian lovers, who wind up upon the island instead of Ferdinand. Confusing the two males of the foursome with Ferdinand, Ariel serves them a magic potion, which brings all those involved, Miranda, Helena (Layla Claire), Hermia (Elizabeth DeShong), Demetrius (Paul Appleby), and Lysander (Elliot Madore), into a confusing series of heteronormative and same-gender mismatches, each falling in love with the others, until it is difficult to know whom is madly in love with whom.

     IF in Cosí fan tutte, it doesn't seem to matter, these figures one by one they feel betrayed, confused by the vagaries of the heart, while Caliban cooks up his own scheme to be loved by one and all, men, women, animals, and demons from the dark.

     As in Baroque opera, each figure gets his or her own say in a series of beautiful arias, some well-known, others long forgotten.

     It is only by calling up Neptune (Plácido Domingo), at first furious for the interruption, then magnanimous in his help, that order is restored, Miranda married to Ferdinand, Sycorax restored to her proper position and the Athenian foursome paired with whomever they might at the moment desire.

     The frothy results are a delight, but would not have been so amazing without the wonderful costumes and sets of Phelim McDermott and his team (who previously put together the set and costumes for Satyagrapha). Every moment of this splendid work is underlined with their splendiferous wit.

     In a post-postmodern culture such as ours, it is only fitting that pastiche might come back into fashion, and if The Enchanted Island is any sign of its pleasures, bring it on. As the opera closes, even its performers seem enchanted by the experience as they joyously sing "Now a bright new day is dawning." Bringing together numerous composers, this is everybody's opera and an opera for everyone.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2012).

Wes Anderson | Moonrise Kingdom / 2012

finding family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola (screenwriters), Wes Anderson (director) Moonrise Kingdom / 2012

 

Over the past several years there has been a spate of movies and plays devoted to and influenced by the tales of J. M. Barrie concerning Peter Pan. I reviewed two of those, Mabou Mines' Peter and Wendy (see My Year 2011) and, more recently, Rick Elice's Peter and the Starcatcher. Now we have Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom that, although it has no direct references to the Peter Pan story, clearly has relationships to it. I suppose that in a time when "centers collapse"—as I maintain in this year's cultural annual—we should be prepared for children striking out on their own, seeking worlds or attempting to create new worlds that parents have failed at; or, as my movie-going companion, Thésèse Bachand put it, it is a time when children must parent the adults.

     Anderson's films, as several critics have noted, have always occurred at the intersection of children's fantasies and adult lunacies, of which there can be no better example than Anderson's most recent film. Just as in his 2004 film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (see My Year 2004), Anderson's new film begins with a world in miniature, a representation of the sets we will soon encounter on a larger scale, which both underscores the theatricality that is so central to his art and suggests the toyland-like conceptions of Anderson's fantasies. Color, decoration, and costume dominate as he introduces, one by one, the cast of eccentric beings who are at the heart of this director's vision. Of course, this may seem coy and even fey to many moviegoers: both Bachand and my companion Howard found Moonrise Kingdom to be slightly irritating just on this account. Yet that is precisely why I so enjoy Anderson's art. From the very start, he makes clear that the story he will tell is "made up" out of series of component parts, a tale spun by a storyteller who seems to be creating the work as he goes along.

     Anderson makes that process clear by beginning his work with Benjamin Britten's well-known Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, in which the composer, using a theme by Henry Purcell, takes apart the orchestra instrument by instrument and then rejoins them to help his listeners perceive how a work of music comes together, explaining how each instrument finds, metaphorically speaking, a role in the family of the whole. Anderson's metaphor is an important one, not only in representing his structural techniques, but in setting up his thematic concerns, since his heroine and hero, Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) and Sam Sakusky (Jared Gilman) have serious difficulties in finding their voices within familiar structures. Suzy is perceived as a troubled child—the fact of which she has discovered through a guide her mother has left on the top of the refrigerator—desperate to escape the hostile environment of the Bishop house, wherein her lawyer mother, Laura (Frances McDormand) —escaping her life in dreary affair with the local police captain (Bruce Willis)—is unhappily married to her lawyer husband Walt (Bill Murray), a man so disappointed with his lot in life that he wishes the impending storm would sweep him up and away, as if he might discover a new world similar to that which Dorothy encounters in Oz. Suzy is simply another sore issue in their failed relationship. When she goes missing the two respond accordingly:

 

                         Laura Bishop: Does it concern you that your daughter has

                                                 just run away from home?

                         Walt Bishop: That's a loaded question.

 

     Sam is an equally troubled boy, but his situation is even worse than Suzy's, for he has no family, both of his parents having mysteriously died, leaving him imprisoned in a large family of orphans in the Billingsley compound (certainly one of Anderson's private jokes, Barbara Billingsley having been the name of the actor who played June Cleaver in the utopia of American family life, Leave It to Beaver). Notified of Sam's escape from an island scout camp, Mr. Billingsley reports that they cannot allow him to return home, to the shock and bewilderment of Police Captain Sharp and Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton). The precocious Sam has difficulty surviving not only in that home, filled with delinquents, but in the scout camp with his equally delinquent khaki-panted peers.

     Sam and Suzy have met, quite by accident, one year earlier during a performance of Britten's children's opera, Noye's Fludde (see My Year 2011), based on the medieval mystery play. Showing us a flashback of their encounter and immediate attraction to one another, the director introduces yet more structural elements of his film, in particular, the pairing of animals and humans and the threat of a disastrous flood, which as the film's narrator (Bob Balaban) foretells, is about to settle over the New Penzance Island of 1965. Together, using Sam's scouting skills and Suzy's imagination and pluck, the two trek the island, attempting to outwit parents, police, scouts, and scouting master, as they seek a new paradise with one another on an isolated cove. For a short time they manage to elude their would-be captors, escaping, as Peter and Wendy, into a kind of magical Neverland where they might explore life as intelligent and sexual beings, hoping to establish the identities so rejected by all the others they have encountered before.

     Ultimately, of course, they are tracked down and returned to a "civilization" that further demeans them, the Bishops enforcing tighter restrictions upon their daughter and the Billingsleys ousting Sam from the only home he has known.

     When the authorities receive a call from Social Services (hilariously performed by Tilda Swinton, dressed in a kind of Salvation Army-like blue garb), the Police Captain, Scout Master, and the telephone operator are appalled by her cruel efficiency as she hints that the wayward boy may be sent to an orphanage or even given shock-therapy for his behavior.

      Even the bullying scouts, startled to hear of these potential tortures for their former camp member, decide to get involved, helping Suzy to escape and bringing her to Sam, now locked away on a boat belonging to the Police Captain. This time, they all run off together, Suzy reading to the boys just as Wendy has read stories to the lost boys and Peter Pan.

      Having now been abandoned by an entire scouting troop, the perplexed Scout Master Ward, Police Captain Sharp, and the Bishops again go in pursuit of the missing children, with the Captain Hook and Crocodile-in-one, Social Services right behind them.

     For once, I will resist revealing the rest of this delicious plot, saying only that in the brewing storm, lightning strikes thrice and the adult world is devastated before the children are miraculously saved, Sam finding a home with the lonely Police Captain and Suzy returning to the "darling" Bishops' snug house. Just as Mrs. Bishop formerly snuck off for trysts with her Police Captain lover, so now does Captain Sharp bring his new-found son to the Bishop house so that Sam might secretly visit the young Suzy. Each has found a family, in themselves and with others, bringing their distinct voices into the orchestra of life.

     Anderson cleverly repeats this theme once more even in the credits, as Sam narrates the orchestral components of composer Alexandre Desplat's original score.

      Corny? Perhaps. Obsessive? Obviously. Charming? I'll end with a quote from Anthony Lane's excellent review of this film from The New Yorker:

 

                          Who knows, we may look back on Anderson's works as we

                          do on the boxes of Joseph Cornell—formal troves of frippery,

                          studded with nostalgic private jokes, that lodge inexplicably

                          in the heart.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (June 2012). 

Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb | ین فیلم نیست‎‎ (This Is Not a Film) / 2011, USA 2012

how to tell a film

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (directors) این فیلم نیست‎‎ (This Is Not a Film) / 2011, USA 2012

 

For the last several years, because of his house arrest and his inability to make films, movie director Jafar Panahi has been creating works that “are not what they seem,” or directing films that subvert the genre and save him from the censors. This Is Not a Film is precisely that, not a film but a film about film, about how one might direct a film and how one might tell a film narrative without actually realizing it.

   Locked up in his comfortable Teheran apartment on a day his family members have traveled to celebrate the Iranian festival Chaharshanbe Suri, preceding New Year’s eve, Panahi turns on his camera to record, in documentary style, a day in his life, including his awakening and breakfast. Determined to find a way around his ban, Panahi calls up his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, and asks his to take up the camera, while he begins to read and, through the use of masking tape and imagination, to realize a movie that he was planning, but can no longer make, about a young girl, much like him, who has been locked up in her own home because she has determined to attend the university.

     The parallels between the locked-away girl and his personal condition are crucial, in that they convey the impossible frustration and desolation of a society closing individuals away from their destinies and creative endeavors. But almost as soon as he has begun to play out the scenario of a young girl locked away in her small room from the view only of a young boy who appears outside her window, the director gives up, realizing that, of course, you cannot “tell” a movie. As evidence he gives the example from one of his earlier films, showing a scene where an amateur actor suddenly behaves in a strange way that the director might never have imagined possible. A shot from yet another movie shows how a simple set design reveals much more about the character than he might ever have imagined.

      In short, the director shows us how film is not just about its narrative, the script, but about how actors, cinematographer, scenery director, and the others work together to transform what might have been imagined. Telling a movie is impossible. Or is it?

     Although billed as a sort of documentary, Panahi’s and Mirtahmasb’s film, pretending to be shot in a single day—the film as actually shot over a period of 4 days for a cost of around $4,000—the work incorporates a great many personal and political events which come together to make a far larger statement than they seem to represent. Panahi’s daughter’s pet lizard, Iggy, plays a large role as he roams the rather posh apartment, crawling up bookcases filled with books, and clawing his way behind them, casting a rather eerie presence which, clearly, is not unlike the Iranian officials. He refuses to eat his usual diet of lettuce and seems only happy when he is fed a few pieces of cheese, evidently a lizard delicacy. As Panahi complains at one moment, “your claws, Iggy, are hurting me, get off me, you’re hurting me.” And the very presence of the lizard fills anyone who is not a lizard lover with the sense of reptilian danger.

      As usual on this Iranian holiday, people set off enormous fireworks—even though they have been recently banned. And the city, which we glimpse through the many apartment windows, seems to be entirely on fire. His phone mates and his visitor complain of not only the impossible traffic but seem to suggest the entire of Teheran has gone slightly mad. “Traffic is impossible.”

     And the final appearance of a garbage-collecting young man, a student in Art Research, substituting for his sister, brilliantly introduces us to another perspective in the Iranian underworld. This handsome young man, embarrassed for his appearance (he keeps asking if he can change his shirt) and the smell of the garbage he is collecting, recognizes the famous director immediately, and is stunned by Panahi’s interest in him, as the filmmaker accompanies him in the elevator, floor by floor, until he reaches the lobby in making his garbage-gathering rounds.

      If nothing else, we can only hope for the future in the grace and comprehension of this young man, who, once they reach the lobby, advises Panahi to remain behind so that he will be safe. It’s clear the limits of reality are perceived by all.

     In the end, Panahi has found a way to “tell” his film visually, with amateur actors that do precisely what he has advertised, behave in way that you might not expect. This Is Not a Film is a totally understated work that profoundly makes its message clear through all the elements of cinema, while pretending, nonetheless, not to use them. It is, quite clearly, a radical expression of what it means to make movies in a society that cannot accept them, but yet having an audience desperate for their messages.

     Panahi put this “movie” on a flash drive, which was sneaked out of Iran in a birthday cake. The movie was shown, as a surprise entry, in the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and later appeared at the New York Film Festival, demonstrating that the collapsed society cannot truly censor an imaginative mind.

    

Los Angeles, February 13, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).

Bruce LaBruce | Défense de fumer / 2014

lighting, camera, action!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruce LaBruce (screenwriter and director) Défense de fumer / 2014 [4 minutes]

 

This short film, commissioned by the Festival de Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, might almost be said to be a tableaux vivant of a leather boy’s gay paradise.

     In the garage where he works, handsome mechanic (Ron Dagenais) takes a break, turning on the lights of a back space, taking out a cigar where a sign clearly says “Smoking prohibited,” and lights up. Within minutes a half nude leather boy shows up and the mechanic hands him his lighter, another appears, and yet another, five in all, each time lighting up their cigars. I was reminded almost immediately of what the lesbian figure Sigrid in the comic short film from 1968 says to the woman she’s pursuing in The Dove, handing her a cigar, “Phalliken symbolsk”— although here it’s not so much a symbol but something close to reality.

    The leather daddies (Notre Dame de Cuir, Xavier Hamel, Van Hechter, Jessy Karson, and Leather Daddy G. L.) line up with the mechanic in a row, the room quickly filling up with an impenetrable screen smoke as the Sirius Quartet plays Mikael Karlsson’s “Danache.” (“Hereafter).   

     The blue haze that soon hides them all quickly turns to red, becoming a scene right out of a gay bar like New York’s The Anvil in 1968 or Truxx, a decade later in Montreal.

      As Letterboxed commentator Mike Kennedy notes: “…the classical music changes to the “4 on the Floor, Ass in the Air Mix” of MC Spacebar’s “Cock Thoughts” performed by Hirsuite Pursuit,” the boys circling round.

       But reality quickly returns, the fantasy boys disappear, and the mechanic’s break is over. He tosses away the remainder of his cigar and turns off the lights.

      If there was ever a good reason for smoking, director Bruce LaBruce has revealed it in this humorous pocket mirror flash of the worker’s inner desires.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Luis Buñuel | Un chien Andalou / 1929

music for dead donkeys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel (scenario), Luis Buñuel (director) Un chien Andalou / 1929

The well-known 1929 experimental short film, Un chien Andalou, might almost be described as a purposeful shocker. Eschewing most normative narrative devices, and purposefully selecting disconnected scenes based on dreams involving “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation,” the film’s two creators, Dalí and Buñuel—so legend has it—turned up on opening night with rocks in their pockets, expecting the audience to negatively react. When the audience responded rather calmly, the artists were disappointed. In fact, the film’s run, planned for only a limited period, had to be extended to eight months!

      The growing popularity of Freudian psychology as well as, what I have commented on elsewhere, the innate conservatism of Surrealism probably accounted for the film’s success. And more than anything else, what the film does show us is that there is no such thing which the human brain does not instinctively attempt to link to narrative, even if the work of art does not pretend to tell a story. We think in narrative, even when we encounter something seemingly disjunctive, and particularly when it comes to dream imagery, the brain struggles against the notion of unrelated images to bring them into more coherent patterns.

     Rather that relating the sequence of this 16-minute film’s events—this is a film that demands being seen more than being talked about—I shall recount the kind of events that occur in this film to explain what I mean. One might suggest that the scenes in this picture fall into at least six categories, some images relating to more than one: religion, social or cultural institutions, sex (both heterosexual and homosexual, including variations of gender), nature, violence, and death.

     The film begins, indeed, with what appears as a violent act, a man (Luis Buñuel) cutting a woman’s eye with a razor. Later, another man (Pierre Batchef) attempts to attack the same woman (Simone Marueil)—after he has been sexually aroused by stroking her breasts—in an attempt to rape her. A woman who has found a severed hand in the middle of street is run over by an automobile. Later a third man (Robert Homent) appears to chastise and punish the second man for wearing a nun’s habit over his male clothing. The man he chastises ultimately shoots him with magically-appearing pistols. The man falls dead in the middle of a meadow. The film ends with a couple buried up to their waists in sand.

     Relating to the religious category is the man bicycling down the street with the nun’s habit over his suit. When he is later prevented from attacking the young woman, he picks up a rope to which are tied stone plates of the Ten Commandments and two grand pianos containing the corpses of dead donkeys, all hooked up to two shocked seminarians (Dalí and Jaume Miravitilles). One might even describe the very first scene, with the influence of the full moon, as suggesting an archetypal religious/sacrificial event.

     Social and cultural forces are represented by the reading material left by the young woman when she rises to look the window: a reproduction of a Vermeer’s The Lacemaker. The grand pianos also fall nicely into the cultural forces at work in this film. The police who keep the crowds away from the young woman poking the severed arm are obvious social forces. And even the scolding man who forces his “friend” to remove the nun’s clothing appears to be representing social and cultural norms, his punishment being evidently, like some schoolboy, to stand in the corner.

      Natural imagery appears in the very first scene in the image of the moon, and reappears several times when the young male lover’s hand becomes infested with ants. A death-head’s moth prevails over some of the final scenes, as does the idyllic meadow in which a man dies and the final stroll of a seemingly happy couple by the sea. Even their embedment in sand suggests the forces of nature.

     Sexuality, with which a great many of the film’s images are concerned, seems to link up many of these seemingly random occurrences. Certainly the violent cutting of the eye in the very first scene also seems connected to sex, a stealing of the woman's proper vision. And throughout film sex is implied in a series of gender confusions: the man dressed in a nun’s habit, the woman on the street looking very much like a transvestite. The man who comes back to life attempts to feel the young women’s breasts and struggles to get nearer to her as he is transformed almost into a werewolf, blood dripping from his mouth. The young man who comes to chastise the man dressed as a nun appears to not only be correcting his ways, but in his intense stares and emotional involvement with the other man appears to have some very deep relationship with him; perhaps the two have been lovers. When another man arrives, he wipes his mouth away with his hand as the young woman applies lipstick, sticking out her tongue at the would-be suitor. The last stroll by the sea suggests they the young couple have finally found true love, even if that love ends up in Spring (the season for lovers) with their being half-buried.

     Death of course is the end of many of these events. The ants plaguing the hand of the man who has fallen from his bicycle certainly suggests the result of any burial. The woman who is struck by the automobile apparently dies. So too does the man whom the cross-dressed man shoots, his death being more thoroughly revealed in his second collapse in a meadow. The death-head’s moth clearly calls up the skull of a dead man. And the half-buried couple suggests a kind of perfect Beckettian-like end’s game.

     That these various categories are interrelated are often self-evident. The attempt to rape the woman is held back by the culture and the church, representing so many stubborn taboos which must be destroyed before the man can act. Love leads, again and again, to violence. Violence, symbolized by the severed hand, leads ultimately to death. Bit by bit, accordingly, each viewer ends up a series of inter-casual relationships between these seemingly disjunctive images that create a kind of poetic narrative, the kind of narrative without plot that American poet David Antin argues for his “talk-poems.”

     We might even go so far as to describe Un chien Andalou as being a kind of imaginary movie, a film less interested as defining the genre of cinema than it is interested in creating a large mulligan stew of the subterranean relationships between sex, culture, religion, society, nature, and death. It is no accident that Buñuel called for Wagner’s finale to Tristan and Isolde and a variation of a tango as the music to accompany this love-and-death dominated work of art.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2012).