Lorenzo Caproni | La prima volta (The First Time) / 2012

unresolved desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lorenzo Caproni (screenwriter and director) La prima volta (The First Time) / 2012 [4 minutes]

 

A straight couple is arguing in the park, which draws the attention of one young man who is taking in the sun and reading a book.

    Meanwhile, another even more handsome boy looks up and spots the first observer. He obviously likes what he sees, since he looks up again and even begins to flirt with the other, somewhat slower to return the gaze, the way all cruisers do.

 

    The second man smiles and rises, the standard cue to suggest that the other might meet up with him nearby.

    The two do meet up at the park bathroom, the first man by this time even more excited than the apparently seasoned cruiser. But we also recognize in his panting eagerness, the hurry in which he attempts to get into the pants of the other man that, just perhaps, this is his first time.

    The two kiss passionately, the second man trying to slow down the first in his sexual excitement. But now that he has engaged for the first time in the thrill of bathroom sex there is no pausing his lust, until finally the second man pulls ever so slightly off, kissing the other’s forehead, and moving out of the stall.

     The first man quickly follows, but the second man has already disappeared as if by magic, almost as if he were a hallucination. There is that awful disappointment of the first time when this happens, the pit-of-the-stomach feeling of regret and desire for the man that got away.

     This will not be the last time the neophyte has this feeling, since this first time has aroused a passion deep inside which he will seek out time and again. But there is no emotional excitement like the first time, particularly when it has been interrupted, the desire unresolved.

      This film, featuring Eugenio Franceschini and Giulio Rubinelli, is in Italian with no English subtitles, but anyone who is gay and has had a happenstance encounter with a stranger will need no words to call up the unforgettable sensation, an emotion so powerful that it even creates a slight wave of nostalgia year’s after the fact.

      Some will find this 4-minute-film just a frustrating tease, but it is also clear in the cinematic intensity of this tableau that director Lorenzo Caproni is a pro. He has made over 10 gay films since his first, made at the age of 14. As the commentator, Dave, wrote in the online New Queer Visions: “…this work wonderfully showcase[s] fleeting glances between two men that can only lead to one thing. Only here Caproni weaves a different tale to what you may expect, along the way leaving the title somewhat ambiguous, given come close-of-play you're not quite sure if for one it's their first time having restroom sex, or whether it's their first time with another man? Played with gay intensity without being graphic, Caproni packs a lot into a short story that's beautifully played throughout. Say no more.”

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Marco Bellocchio | I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket) 1965, USA 1968

sound and fury

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marco Bellocchio (screenwriter and director) I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket) 1965, USA 1968

 

Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket of 1965 was one of a series of films by younger directors such as Pasolini who completely transformed Italian filmmaking. It had the loose and structure and visual energy of the French New Wave but expressed its Italian connections with grand family fictions such as The Leopard, without any of the latter’s splendor.

     This family was far closer to Jean-Pierre Melville’s—himself a precursor to the New Wave directions—Les enfants Terrible, with its characters” incestuous glances and pants, focusing on the weak-willed and spoiled boy who prefers death to life. There is even an element in this work that might remind one of the wealthy family in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, of five years earlier, who near the end of the film are visited by the vulgar Italian superstars and the raggazi-hangers-on—only this Italian family of former wealth has now become simply a nest of loonies, who even the course-cut provincials realize are beyond salvation.

       Of the four siblings living on in the decaying country villa, two of the brothers suffer from epilepsy, the brightest of them, Allesandro (Lou Castel) keeping his painful bouts mostly under control with medicine. His brother, Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio), however, although also under medication, still suffers deep bouts of epilepsy, and appears to be something close to a well-intentioned idiot. Their beautiful sister, Giulia (Paola Pitagora), if nothing else, is emotionally troubled, sending the girlfriends of the eldest child, Augusto (Marino Mase), threatening messages in the form of collage cut-ups of words. She and “Ale,” moreover, have something close to the relationship of the brother and sister in Les enfants terribles, he writing love letters and she responding with sexual poses and hugs, while at other times they fall bouts of sometimes quite violent arguments as they chase each other through the house.

      Their middle-aged mother (Liliana Gerace), with the demeanor of a permanent saint, painfully suffers it all; but then she is both symbolically and literally blind; she not only cannot see the madness going on around her, she clearly wishes not to know what is happening. Their meals together might be described as something close to a ghoulish funeral gathering.

       This family of horrors survive through the unidentified work of Augusto, the only seemingly stable one among them. Yet Bellocchio reveals him to be a brutal opportunist, a man who regularly visits the whores, while yet applying his charms to the local beauties such as the seemingly “normal” Lucia (Jenny MacNeil)—who is startled by the family’s seeming eccentricities.

      Despite this “nest of ninnes,” the sensitive viewer does come to feel for each of them, particularly for the brightest and maddest of them all Allesandro, who, as critic Deborah Young, argues, takes on the collective family guilt, determined to allow the bread-earning Augusto the possibility of escaping his familial responsibilities and to live a somewhat normal life—despite the fact that each night, we discover, he and his friends demonstrate their madness by shooting at rats.  

      Despite the film’s close kinship with the New Wave and the other specific works I mentioned above, it might be best compared with the American writer William Faulkner’s fictional Compson family of The Sound and the Fury, with Leone cast as the idiot Benjy, Allesandro as the suicidal Quentin, in love with his elder sister Cassie, here played by Giulia, and with Jason cast as Augusto. Their mother, like the Southern belle retired permanently to her bed, has simply become something they have to trip around quietly so that they might not awaken her from her descent into death.

       Only Bellocchio also reveals this world as filled with young furious rebellious beings who are so angry that they hide their fists from the rest of the world, best represented by Allesandro who plots a kind family suicide, by driving all but August off a cliff. A moment of joyous exhilaration, as he attempts to drag-race with another car, distracts him from accomplishing his task, and he is later forced to “do-off” the family members one by one.

      He first pushes his mother off the cliff to her death, then poisons Leone with extra dose of his medicine, while putting him into a bath. Giulia almost does herself in by falling down the family staircase in reaction to Leone’s death, perceiving that her beloved “Ale” has done him in; and, even in the throes of her recovery, Sandro (another of his family nicknames) is almost tempted to smother her to death. Is it any wonder that, now married to the local gentry, Lucia, Augusto wants to move out of the villa into an apartment in town?

      As she recovers, Giulia reveals to Augusto that their little Sandro has been behind their mother’s and brother’s deaths. But who might believe him if Augusto took up the matter with the police; and besides, we all know that this cold-hearted beast is not entirely unappreciative of his younger brother’s actions.

     Throughout this film, one of the most fascinating aspects has been simply watching Lou Castel’s physical enactment of Allesandro’s demented behavior. Even climbing out of the bed, the young man goes into a headstand and crawls nearly over the head of the bed. At his mother’s funeral, he desecrates her open coffin by putting his feet into it, as if it were a footstool. He is something like an absurd acrobatic, unable to move forward with any direct movement.

      In the very last scene, having nearly achieved his goals of destroying those about him, he goes into what can only described as a kind of transcendent dance of celebration not unlike that of Electra, while listening, in this version, to Verdi’s La Traviata, spinning around the room while uttering a strange series of animal cries unknown to human language. Suddenly he is again struck down by the painful throbs that emanate from his head, and which only Guilia can calm.

     In the next room, she realizes what is happening to her brother, as he screams out for help. But this time, a bit like Bette Davis in The Little Foxes, she ignores his cries for help, remaining in her bed, as we watch Allesandro physically “explode” from within, presumably finally finding peace in a literalized death rattle. Even if it is not quite the suicide Faulkner’s Quentin planned for himself, it is close enough that we recognize he is now free from the world that had so tortured him; and Guilia, somewhat like Cassie, can now explore her own endless trip through a tortured past, while Augusto, like Jason, can take his meaningless drive into the future.

      Throughout, composer Ennio Morricone, through an almost ethereal series of bells and gongs, has made us aware, simultaneously, that we have been witnessing the final rites ceremony for this unhappy family, none of whom are truly capable of surviving in the real world.

 

Orange, California, February 24, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).  

Orson Welles | The Stranger / 1946

time dooms its keepers

by Douglas Messerli

           

Anthony Veiller, Decla Dunning, John Huston and Orson Welles (screenplay, the latter two uncredited), Orson Welles (director) The Stranger / 1946

 

The other day I was delighted to discover that Netflix is now streaming Orson Welles’ 1946 film, The Stranger, a film I had never before seen. I quickly sat down to watch it.

     Although this film is often dismissed since Welles, anxious to be able to direct a new film after 4 years of silence, made a sort of devil’s pact with the producer, Sam Spiegel, and the studio, promising to produce it on schedule and allowing for the numerous deep cuts that his overseers demanded. The ruminations and philosophical conundrums of his previous films he promised to resist. And, indeed this film was a true money-maker, one of the very few of Welles’ checkered career.

     Since this movie is set in a small Connecticut town where evil has been installed in the form of a seemingly well-respected teacher in the town’s all-boys’ school, the work is sometimes compared with Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. However, in Welles’ original there was a long sequence is South America which I would have loved to have glimpsed to help contextualize those parallels.

     Moreover, despite the film’s homey qualities, enhanced by the beautiful Loretta Young, playing Mary Longstreet—daughter of Supreme Court Justice Adam Longstreet—who is about to marry the hidden Nazi in their midst, Franz Kindler (played by Welles himself), Welles’ film is a far darker noir than Hitchcock’s wonderful work. Hitchcock’s creepy Uncle Charlie, after all, has murdered only a few elderly women for their money, while Kindler has evidently been responsible for the death of thousands or even millions of Jews. During the course of the film he kills or attempts to kill others, including the first of the “strangers” to arrive in the town of Harper, a former colleague, Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) who has purposely been allowed to escape from prison so that he might possibly lead authorities to Kindler (now living under the name of Charles Rankin). We never quite learn why the highly nervous Meinike, now a born-again Christian, wants even to meet with his former associate—perhaps simply to try to convert him—but the visit, during which he leaves his suitcase at the local drugstore, which seems to be the heart and soul of Harper, quickly results in Kindler-Rankin strangling him, presumably because he realizes the reason behind Meinike’s miraculous “escape” and is terrified that some of his students, racing through the woods on a “paper chase,” have spotted the suspicious looking outsider.

      The second, and more predominant stranger come to town is the US Wartimes Commissioner, Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), who has followed Meinike to that small village but, since his target has attempted to kill him as he enters Rankin’s school, has no clue to what the former Nazi, now teacher, looks like or knows anything about his current identity. All he knows is that the ex-Nazi has an extraordinary interest in clocks, which, obviously, echoes the lecture of Welles’ villain in The Third Man about the Swiss gift to the world of “cuckoo clocks.” Welles wanted Robinson’s role to be played by his long-time friend, Agnes Moorhead; it might have been a brilliant coup to have a feminist sleuth, but it was not to be.

       Despite all the limitations with which the producer and editor presented him—Welles described editor Ernest J. Nims as “the great supercutter, who believed that nothing should be in a movie that did not advance the story. And since most of the good stuff in my movies doesn't advance the story at all, you can imagine what a nemesis he was to me."—the director got the upper hand by inserting long discussions between Wilson and the local, laid-back druggist, Potter (the ex-burlesque actor Billy House) while the two play checkers as they attempt to check out one another, Wilson and Potter struggling to eke out as much information from the other as they might.

      Wilson loses the first round but later, paying the 25-cent fee, receives more information than he reveals, discovering the local church in the town square contains a large Habrecht-style clock mechanism, which Rankin is attempting to repair as part of his hobby.

      But even when Wilson realizes he has found his man, he needs the testament of Rankin’s new wife, Mary—or at least her recognition that she is living with a man who opposes all of the values which her family has believed in. Another cut scene revealed the long patriotic military history of the Longstreet’s through a tour of the local cemetery.

       Yet Welles, always the clever dodger, tells this part of the story through a bizarre combination of the wonderfully evocative score by composer Bronisław Kaper, with images right out of Fritz Lang’s M (menacing shadows overlaying the images of the town’s innocents), through the murder of Mary’s dear dog, Red, and the help of her wised-up brother, Noah (Richard Long), who, along with a sawed-off staircase (straight out of Shadow of a Doubt) incriminates and finally destroys—in another memorable scene that might have come from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist—Rankin/Kindler, allowing our villain to suffer the justice that the Nuremberg Trials could not provide.

       This isn’t Citizen Kane or (without the last scene) the brilliant The Magnificent Ambersons, but it comes close, at moments, to revealing the great director’s genius. And I’ll watch it any day over so many other less challenging movies of its genre—whether it be noir or Nazi conspiracy tales.

 

Los Angeles, March 28, 2019 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).     

Pedro Almodóvar | Hable con ella (Talk to Her) / 2002

guys and dolls

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Hable con ella (Talk to Her) / 2002

 

Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film, Talk to Her, is a work of subterfuge, a film pretending to be about one thing while actually being about many other things. We’ll begin with the two male figures, Benigno Martín (Javier Cámara) and Marco Zuluaga (Darío Grandinetti) who first encounter one another at a performance of Pina Bausch’s dance number Café Müller, in which two women mirroring each other crash into the walls, one of them finally losing control, as she cascades into rows of chairs which a male dancer attempts to quickly move out of her way.

      In a sense it is a kind of metaphor for both the destroyed women in Almodóvar’s film with Benigno serving as the male who attempts to make things easier for the berserk female dancer. In this early scene Benigno observes the man next to him, Marco, crying with tears of empathy for the women whose lives have obviously been destroyed.

   Benigno, it turns out is a male nurse and beautician, caring for a dancer whom he has obsessively watched in her dance studio through his window while he was caring for his dying mother. By accident he is assigned the same young dancer, Alicia Roncero (Leonor Watling) after she has fallen into a coma from which she is unlikely to come out of, since she has been hit by a car.

      It is clear that Benigno has had very little experience with women sexually, and he seems almost like a shy but curious boy who first actually meets Alicia after she drops her wallet. He retrieves it and gives it back to her, but in the process notices that she lives in an apartment building where her father is a psychiatrist, with whom he quickly makes an appointment in order to get closer to Alicia. At the first meeting with her father, he sneaks into another room, stealing a hair clip belonging to Alicia. And the two, Benigno and Alicia, do soon begin meeting, finding a mutual interest in dance and silent films.

      In caring for her in the hospital it soon becomes apparent that he is a more than excellent nurse, cleaning her, doing her hair and her nails, and most importantly, talking to her as if she were still coherent. Her father, accordingly, after asking about Benigno’s sexuality—perhaps simply to protect his job, the young man responds that he is gay—hires Benigno as her personal caretaker, a role which he lovingly embraces, often spending nights as well as daylight hours with her.

      The second male, Marco, a journalist, gets himself assigned to interview the famous female bullfighter, Lydia González (Rosario Flores); she meets with him but grows suspicious when he admits to having very little knowledge about her art, and demands he leave her off at her home. As he begins to drive away he hears her scream and stops his car. She runs to him, telling Marco that she has found a snake in her kitchen, which, open entering her house, he quickly kills.

      Despite all of her fearlessness in the ring she is terrified of snakes and refuses to even return to her house. A relationship also rises between the two of them, and it appears that, having been left by her former boyfriend, Niño de Valencia (Adolfo Fernández), also a bullfighter, she and Marco may develop a relationship. She has something to tell him, she reports, but not until she has finished the day with her bulls.

      During one of the fights, a bull suddenly gores her, and she also falls into a coma, from which the doctor suggests it is unlikely she will awaken.

      It is here, at the hospital, that Benigno again encounters Marco, he attempting to help the bereaved male deal with Lydia’s condition; he needs to “talk to her,” he assures him.

      So it appears that the two straight men of this film are caring for woman they hardly know, obsessed with them. As critic Robert Ebert perceptively adds: “Almodóvar treads a very delicate path here. He accepts the obsessions of the two men, and respects them, but as a director whose films have always revealed a familiarity with the stranger possibilities of human sexual expression, he hints, too, that there is something a little creepy about their devotion.” Clearly these two men are not only obsessed but are treating these unaware women to the male gaze, to voyeurism, and possibly even sexual abuse, a situation we have to deal with when it becomes apparent that Alicia misses her period and is found to be pregnant.

      Yet this is not simply a kind of soap opera concerning another series of incidents of patronymic behavior. For these two empathetic males, although in control of the situation, are actually under the thrall of these two females. I would argue that in real life, both are slightly terrified of women, and in that sense, despite their lack of recognition, if they are not precisely gay, their sexuality is most certainly queer. Women are only available for them when they no longer exist as living, acting beings, but become something like sexual toys, in a sense, who can no longer speak back to them, challenge them, or question their male sexuality.

      Despite the critical agreement that this is the director’s most sexually normative film, I’d argue it one of his most explorative films into where sexuality may also lead.

       These two men are brothers not just in their fears and inexperience with women, but in the fact that they play the traditionally feminine roles, while their would-be lovers are the dominating forces in their lives. Benigno is clearly a mamma’s boy who doesn’t quite even comprehend what a woman is about. Alicia is no more than an inflatable sex doll for him, not a true woman. He is the caretaker here, the one who can make women beautiful out of some idealized vision of them. Marco is a fragile male who is attracted more to Lydia’s masculine characteristics, her ability to fiercely stare down running bulls, than to her femineity.

       What Almadóvar is suggesting, of course, is that all of our cultural notions of what males and females are is utterly pointless. These are not normative straight males or women for that matter (Alicia, for example, has been carefully taken under the wing of her teacher, Katerina Bilova (Geraldine Chaplin), hinting at a possible lesbian relationship, while Lydia has taken up the most macho role in Spanish culture; the only thing she fears are snakes. Freud might easily be able to tell us why.

       Benigno is sent to jail for his presumed perversity, and ultimately commits suicide, perhaps at the very moment when Alicia comes out of her coma, producing a stillborn. With Lydia’s death Marco no longer has a subject about whom he might write—except perhaps for his strange friendship with Benigno.

 

Los Angeles, August 26, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2019).