Roberto Fiesco | Actos impuros (Unclean Acts) aka Lewd Acts / 1993

toward the light

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julián Hernández and Roberto Fiesco (screenplay), Roberto Fiesco (director) Actos impuros (Unclean Acts) aka Lewd Acts / 1993

Robert Fiesco's first film, Actos impuros (1993), translated alternately as Unclean Acts or Lewd Acts ( prefer the latter) is a highly disturbing but utterly beautiful film. In some respects, it is not even a coherent narrative, but is a series of "acts," just as its title suggests, that have no real explanation.

     Julián Hernández’s script was based, reportedly, on “el estrangulador de Tacuba,” the 1942 Mexico City strangler who lived in the Tucuba district, Gregorio Cádenas. Yet Cádenas who killed four women, at least one with whom he had sex, strangled no men, and certainly was not the handsome Lucifer-like figure like Oscar (Oscar Trejo Lara) who stokes the fires for the baths in which he works. Unlike Cádenas, moreover, who presumably suffered from a possessive mother which, according to the psychiatrists of the day, led him to hate women, this murderer knives and strangles men and women equally without any apparent reason.

     We do see him having difficulty completing sexual intercourse with the neighboring woman, Leticia (Yoatizin Hernandez), someone to whom he is clearly attracted, particularly since he takes her to a local carnival and, before sex, briefly dances with her (a favorite tool of sexual seduction in Fiesco’s films), their reflection captured in a mirror almost as if it were a TV set. And we can imagine that he kills the male showering in the baths—a murder we never actually see him commit, only perceiving that he has done so by his cries as he digs the knife he apparently used into the walls of his apartment building—due to his apparent attraction to him as he watches, again in a mirror showing the water dripping down the attractive stranger’s naked torso, a scene that, as film commentator Rick Powell has observed, João Pedro Rodrigues might have borrowed for his O Fantasma. Clearly this would-be macho figure is somewhat sexually confused. And we can speculate that he lashes out when he discovers himself precisely in that state of mind.

     But this is simply speculation. Oscar is a loner, without any clues around him to suggest his past, future, or even present. When not in bed or in the showers, his life is spent shoveling coals into the burner which keeps the showers hot.

      In fact, in this film, no one even seems to be aware of his killings. And the focus of this movie is not on the act of killing—we only note it when in the midst of his attempts of having sex with women, their hands and bodies fall slack. As I report above, we never even witness the male’s knifing.

     The real fascination of this film lies in the beauty of the working class building in which he lives, in the shadowed and dappled lights that reveal swaths of blues, reds, yellows, and, even more importantly, the beauty of his hairy brown buttocks in the midst of sex. Unlike Fiesco’s later short film, Trémolo (2015) where the director erases any sense of voyeurism in our observation of the handsome young male bodies, here we are purposely turned into voyeurs, wondering at all times whether Oscar can relieve his sexual frustrations or unable to, will strike out again. There is almost an element of sadomasochism involved, a suggestion that heterosexual sex and homosexual desire will almost always result in death, standard tropes of literature since the beginning of time.

      The beautiful landscapes with which we are presented—almost reminding me of a rawer version of the richly colored shades of the later films of Gregory Markopoulos—almost stabilize the violent sexual encounters we observe, as if the monster of this tale might only be able to balance himself by identifying with the landscape he might be able to calm down his demons.

     And in fact, something like that does seem to occur at the film’s end when, after killing the woman he most seemed to love, he throws away his knife, later “picking up” a male with whom he has sex. Their lovemaking is fairly ambiguous, and it is hard to tell whether or not he successfully ejaculates, although he does appear to do so. In any event, despite his hasty departure, he leaves the man he has just fucked alive, as the camera follows him down a heavily shadowed staircase moving out toward the light. Of course, we cannot know whether he has finally come to terms with his homosexuality or just grown tired, as apparently Cádenas did, of his horrendous acts. But the landscape, if nothing else, suggests a sort of resolution.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

Will Willoughby | Jerome Lawrence: Just Off Broadway / 1993

what my heart forgot to say

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerome Lawrence (scenario), Will Willoughby (director) Jerome Lawrence: Just Off Broadway / 1993

 

Today, quite expectedly, I was sent a short film short by Will Willoughby of a very special performance I produced at New York City’s Algonquin hotel for playwright Jerome Lawrence from 1993.

       Perhaps this cannot properly be described as an LGBTQ film, but given that it’s a performative celebration of a gay man, directed and produced by gay men, and starring at least four homosexual performers, along with a great many gay men and women in the audience, I’d suggest this is interesting in the same way that the amateur film by the members of Los Angeles The Brownstone bar in Always on Sunday was or the way in the lesbian bar performances in Mona’s Candle Light are fascinating. 

       Yet I never imagined upon beginning the multi-year project of writing about LGBTQ films that I might have been involved directly in the creation of one of them. In order to describe that strange, circuitous route to LGBTQ filmmaking, I need first recount a series of friendships and events.

      Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s my companion Howard N. Fox and I became acquainted, probably through Marjorie Perloff’s soirées, with Bill and Jeannie Fadiman. William Fadiman, who as a young college student at the University of Wisconsin had created the literary game “Poetic Posers,” published regularly in the New York Herald eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he married Jeannie and from the 1940s to the 1970s supervised script development at several major studios, including Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM), Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures (RKO), and later Columbia, working as the assistant to RKO and MGM Head of Production Dore Schary. Among Hollywood regulars it was known that to get to Schary you had to go through Fadiman.

     In 1970 he was hired as literary consultant at Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, and contributed regular book reviews to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. He contributed book reviews to The New York Times Book Review, the New York Herald Tribune, Saturday Review, and the Nation. He also produced Bad for Each Other (1953), Jubal and The Last Frontier (both 1956), and Rampage (1963).

     The Fadimans invited us a few times to restaurant lunches and dinners at their house. At one point Bill asked me to read the manuscript for a novel he’d written, Shivering in the Sun. It wasn’t, to be honest, a particularly good work, written in a kind of noir style with a rather sleazy plot about Hollywood agents, a subject he knew well. But I did help him to get it published and distributed outside of the Sun & Moon imprint.

     At the party for the book’s publication, which, if I remember correctly, was held at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, I met his older brother Clifton—well known as a former editor at Simon & Schuster, the book review editor of The New Yorker, the literary judge for the Book of the Month Club, and, most notably as the radio and later CBS Television host of Information Please!—who, in turn, introduced me at the party to Jerome Lawrence.

      I knew very well who Jerry Lawrence was having read and seen several productions of stage and television versions of his and co-writer Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, Auntie Mame, and The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. The very first Broadway theater ticket I bought was in 1969 for his and Lee’s (the latter to whom Jerry introduced before his death in 1994) Dear World a musical based on Jean Giraudoux's play The Madwoman of Chaillot with songs composed by Jerry Herman and starring Angela Lansbury (who won a Tony for her performance), Jane Connell, and Milo O’Shea.

     Soon after, Jerry invited me to attend an LAOpera production of The Makropulos Affair with him. And a few weeks later he asked me to lunch at his splendid Malibu home where I first met his assistant and later production executive for his and Lee’s work, Will Willoughby.

     Jerry and I talked briefly about Sun & Moon reissuing Auntie Mame or Inherit the Wind, but those discussions didn’t go far since his previous publisher were not ready to relinquish rights. Moreover, he was far more interested in my publishing his new novel, A Golden Circle. I read it and found it be quite charming, but it really didn’t present itself as a typical Sun & Moon title, devoted as we were to contemporary innovative writing, particularly international in perspective.It took me weeks of contemplation before I finally agreed to do it, mostly because of by sentimental attachment to his and Lee’s previous works.

     Little did I realize, however, that Jerry was the perfect author in that he had utterly no fear of self-promotion. He immediately arranged for a reading in Los Angeles for which he engaged actor Holland Taylor for a reading at Brentanos Bookstore in Century City; the event was sold out. And soon he came to me with the proposal to hold a huge celebration of his book in New York at the Oak Room of the famed Algonquin Hotel in which some of the novel’s events occurred, a sacred place that no longer exists.

     Given his long theatrical career and the fact that he was now approaching his 78th birthday, I think it saw it as not only an opportunity to promote his new publication, the beautiful book with the famed Gustav Klimt painting Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer on its cover, but to celebrate his own career. His idea was splendid, I felt, except for the outrageous expense that a poor, independent publisher like Sun & Moon could ill afford given the costs for renting the legendary Algonquin room, arranging for drinks and hors d'oeuvres for 50 or more guests, the flight, and room costs. In the end we decided to split the expenses, with the guest list and invited performers to be Jerry’s responsibility while the publicity, photographer, and personal traveling costs would be my tasks. Jerry quickly lined up a programme that might have led many Broadway producer to weep with joy while providing my editorial assistant and me with a list of invitations to mail out to a bevy of theater and social celebrities.

      I added some of my favorite New York poets and fiction writers and all of my New York-based playwrights, and, since I almost always ran into Eudora Welty every time I visited that hotel, when I spotted her sitting in the lobby, I invited her as well; she did not attend.*

     Jerry and I both arrived separately a few days before the event, staying in the Algonquin itself, I in the Thurber suite. The first night Jerry and I dined at Sardi’s, where actor Jack Klugman stopped by our table to greet Jerry. The second night we dined, with Michael Tilson Thomas and his companion/now husband Joshua Robison, the latter of whom was Jerry’s nephew. At the time Thomas was the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and later became conduction for the San Francisco Symphony.

     We had arranged to hold this one-night Off-Broadway musical (on 44th Street, just off Broadway) to occur when theater celebrities might be in town to attend performances of the  nominees for the Tony Awards. tempting them with our own star-studded cast.

     After drinks and appetizers Bobby Short was to play a little piano music before I took the floor to introduce myself as the “producer” and to describe the event. I begin by telling them all how wonderful it was to see all my friends once more, although I had never before met most of them. But I knew them, I insisted, through having memorized the Burns-Mantle Playbooks back in Iowa since the age of nine or ten. I had imaginatively seen their every play and heard their music on recordings. I’m somewhat embarrassed now when I look back that I must have sounded a bit like the usual queer stagestruck kid. But they accepted it in good spirits. Besides, I’d paid for the dinks.

     It is at this point when director Will Willoughby’s film begins with two well-known theater legends, Michael Feinstein with composer Jerry Herman as his personal accompanist, taking over. Feinstein sang, appropriately from the musical Mame based on the Lawrence/Lee original play, songs he had just recorded for his album of The Jerry Herman Song Book. Why Feinstein felt he needed to change the pronoun of “If He Walked into My Life Today” to “she” I can’t explain. Obviously, he was uncomfortable with the suggestion that he might be singing a kind of love song about another male, but Mame was singing the song about her young nephew who she’d raised, not a torch song to an ex-lover, so I don’t comprehend the pretense of singing about a past romance.

     Over the few days of rehearsal, I’d gotten to know Feinstein, who hated early mornings and was often rather grumpy when having to arrive to the hotel to practice before noon. But after he had completely awakened he became a spirited and charming man who I grew to like.

     The great jazz pianist Bobby Short followed as Willoughby reveals in his film. Short begins with reporting that he and Lawrence share a friendship with Jean-Baptiste Adoue III (perhaps the son of the former mayor of Dallas) nicknamed Tad, who evidently strongly supported Short’s “pet project,” the Duke Ellington Memorial Fund. The song he plays in honor of both Tad and Jerry, is devoted to Ellington. During his performance Will’s camera pans over to catch me, beaming with joy while listening to Short’s music.

     From Chapter 9—which takes place in the very room in which occasion is located—E. G. Marshall, Jane Alexander, and Tony Randall now read from Lawrence’s A Golden Circle, Marshall playing Alexander Woollcott, Alexander performing as Rachel, and Randall mouthing all the other characters. Randall is particularly funny as Dorothy Parker, reacting to Woollcott’s suggestion that the actress use only her first name by snipping “it’s merely circumcising the superfluous.” The presiding member of the famed Algonquin Round Table also appears in Auntie Mame as the gentleman who taught Patrick Dennis how to properly serve gin and tonic. Jerry must have had a special fondness for him.

      Marshall was a long-time favorite actor of mine having played in Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film 12 Angry Men and for several years in the early 1960s starring in one of my favorite TV dramas, The Defenders. The day after this performance, Lawrence, Marshall, and I took a taxi across town to do a reading from A Golden Circle at the West Side Barnes & Noble bookstore. To my surprise my friend, poet Hannah Weiner, who I hadn’t seen in years, showed up to that reading.

      Jane Alexander had just that year temporarily given up her acting career to become President Clinton’s choice to head to National Endowment for the Arts.

       Randall, who was married twice to women, played the gay coded partner to Rock Hudson in several of Hudson’s films, the “friend” to whom Hudson turns time and again for comfort while battling with his various wives (often played by Doris Day) and girlfriends. Randall also played a kind of gay-coded figure in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple acting the role of a man who was more at home in the kitchen and cleaning the house than interested in playing poker with the guys or trying to seduce the local twin sisters. In truth, Randall, despite being deeply closeted, was well-known in Broadway circles as being gay, and back in the days when it was fashionable, regularly threw gay-boy parties. But like Anthony Perkins and others, he longed to have children and entered late in his life into a heterosexual relationship with Heather Harlan, a woman he apparently loved with whom he had two children. He was married to his first wife, Florence Gibbs from 1938 to her death in 1992, the year prior to the Lawrence event. We still tend to think of sexual orientation as being a binary situation when it is often a fluid series of pushes and pulls in different sexual directions.

        Upon the completion of Lawrence’s text, there is great applause, but at this point, as I come forward to introduce more acts, the film inexplicably stops. Will assures me he has other footage from the event, so perhaps some day soon we shall have a more complete record of the Lawrence celebration.

        I believe the great flautist Paula Robison followed. One of the founding members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Robison played annual concerts for 30 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also giving regular performances at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. At the time of this performance Robison had teamed up with Brazilian performers, playing in a trio with Cyro Baptista and Romero Lubambo to create what she described as “Mistera Nova.” They went on to perform together for 10 years. More recently she has recorded major works by Arnold Schoenberg and Morton Feldman. She is Joshua Robison’s sister and Jerry Lawrence’s niece.

        Michael Feinstein returned to play and sing more musical  standards, in the midst of which he invited a member of the audience, the legendary composer Burton Lane, to perform a couple of numbers. Lane, known not only for his great stage musicals Finian’s Rainbow and On Clear Day You Can See Forever, but for his contributions to over 30 movie musicals including Fred Astaire’s Royal Wedding, was also the one who first discovered Judy Garland. Finian’s Rainbow played a special role in my youth as I performed in it in high school and later at the University of Wisconsin as a chorus member and dancer. The musical director for the University of Wisconsin production was Vance George who would later work with Michael Tilson Thomas as Choral Director of the San Francisco Symphony.

       In the rather large gathering for the Jerome Lawrence: Just Off Broadway evening were playwright Robert Anderson (Tea and Sympathy), John Handzlik (the original actor who played Patrick Dennis as a young boy in Auntie Mame), poet Charles Bernstein and artist Susan Bee, playwright Mac Wellman, actor Michael York, restaurateur Vincent Sardi, Jr., playwright Len Jenkin, actor Marian Seldes, playwright Jeffrey Jones, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, orchestra manager Joshua Robison, and a large number of other celebrity figures which my now elderly mind has wiped away from my memory, alas. I do recall that just before going on stage, fiction writers Wendy Walker and Tom LaFarge called me to say they were unable to attend.

       Also in the audience was a woman who I had sat next to in the airplane on my trip from Los Angeles to New York. Discovering that she was making her regular semi-annual pilgrimage to see New York theater, I whimsically invited her to the Lawrence special. At the end of the evening I asked what she thought about the presentation. “It’s the best play on Broadway, I swear” she intoned, shaking her head in wonderment of the experience. I had the same feeling; maybe we should have moved the whole piece over just a couple of blocks the next night and begun a Broadway stint.

        I never had the opportunity to tell Jerry that and how much his special celebration had meant to me. And until I received the short film from Will this morning, I had only vague memories to remind me of that special evening. I had hired a photographer, who you see snapping shots in the film who sent us negatives, which I passed on to Jerry and Will, waiting for their decision on which ones and how many we should order. That week Jerome Lawrence’s lovely mansion went up in the flames of the 1993 Malibu Canyon fires, taking the only negatives with them. In the months and years following, Jerry became increasingly ill, and although we did another few readings in Los Angeles (one special event in Malibu with performers Martha Scott, Burgess Meredith, Jerry and Will and Carol Channing in attendance), I didn’t seem him much after that. And suddenly today I was reminded of Jerry Herman’s closing lines from “If He Walked into My Life Today”:

 

                              And there must have been a million things

                              That my heart forgot to say

                              Would I think of one or two

                              If he walked into my life today?    

 

I hope I’d immediately shout out, “Thanks for the memories, Jerry,” just as I must thank Will for helping me to sustain them.

 

*I wrote my Master’s thesis on Eudora Welty, several chapters of which were later published in academic journals. Accordingly, I attended a couple of conferences on Welty’s work, one at William and Mary College where I first met Welty. Over the years, consequently, Welty had come to know me at sight, although I’m not sure what she thought about my publishing activities. At one point she greeted me with the words, “Oh, yes, you’re the one man that edit’s that strange little magazine.” Why Sun & Moon was strange or, at over 250 pages, why it might be defined as “little” I can’t explain, but obviously it didn’t meet with her more conservative Southern values. And by 1993, of course, I had moved quite far away from the context in which her writing existed, although I still very much admire everything she wrote.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2021

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

Gus Van Sant | Even Cowgirls Get the Blues / 1993

born to direct traffic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gus Van Sant (screenwriter, based on the novel by Tom Robbins, and director) Even Cowgirls Get the Blues / 1993

 

Gus Van Sant has directed some rather remarkable LGBTQ+ films in his career to date, but unfortunately his basically lesbian cowgirl tale, based on the novel by Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is not among them.

      Presumably Robbins’ 1976 fiction was meant to be a satire, and certainly Van Sant must have felt he was making fun of some major aspects of US patriarchal-dominant culture. But what specifically either of the versions are actually satirizing I’m not certain. American notions of all things normal concerning the body, behavior, and sexual desires along with the centrality in such a normalized culture of all things commercial presumably are the obvious targets, as well as the US government’s trigger-happy response to anything under its ordinance with which it fears others may be tinkering. But do we really need an entire film to tell us yet again that we are an over-commercialized culture, that feminine hygiene matters more to us than our female’s freedom and well-being? Does it take a girl with blessedly ample phallus-sized thumbs to make it evident that our culture cherishes the standardized notion of all human body parts with which the central figure of this film, Sissy Hankshaw (Uma Thurman) is gifted with the exception of her first digits of each hand?

      And must we send out an army to surround a ranch where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service suspects that cowgirls are holding up whooping cranes from their regular migration flights to prove to us that many an official bureaucrat is quite mad. Even the film’s resident feminist Delores Del Ruby (Lorraine Bracco) has to wonder whether you can truly prove women are the equal of all men by feeding the cranes brown rice laced with peyote, and hence making them perfectly happy to stay put instead of hurrying off.

      This film obviously believes that it is necessary in order get through the wooden heads of the American public, metaphorically speaking, by taking a battering ram to a fly—something which the film does symbolically a couple of times by cracking a whip and later popping a gun to rid the room of that species. Those instances along with the characters’ seeming abuse of chickens—dozens of them having been spun through the air 20 times each in order to hypnotize them—and bellowing cows—fortunately we don’t really see the entire herd getting shot in order to replace them with goats—might indeed have sent an army of Animal Humane Society inspectors along with the fictional Fish and Wildlife protectors to this film’s set.

      Finally, does Van Sant truly believe that he is doing the lesbian cause any good by pitting it against a nelly drag queen named “The Countess” (John Hurt) who can’t stand smelly women, and who serves to represent our culture’s mad desire for dirty money? This film seems to try to do everything it can to break up the rainbow coalition. Even bisexuals like Chrispin Glover and Sean Young’s characters are represented as rapacious brutes who scare off poor confused Sissy just as she was getting into the swing of it all during her stay in New York.

       Given the absolutely loosely stitched patchwork quilt of a plot we’re forced to follow on Sissy’s cross country picaresque meanderings, perhaps we should simply call this film a kind of “cut up,” which perhaps explains the momentary sighting of William Burroughs among the cast of dozens of the well-known literary and theatrical figures who dart in and out of Sissy’s life.

    Keanu Reeves, for example, is set up for a date with Sissy only so that he might act out an asthma attack. He is accompanied by Ed Begley Jr.’s Rupert evidently so that he can simply carry the stricken lad home and lay him safely on the couch. Buck Henry plays a doctor who likes to sculpt noses into...we can only imagine what; he cuts one of Sissy’s thumbs down to size with the unfortunate consequence of her no longer being able to get a car to stop on her endless hitchhiking adventures. Ken Kesey plays Sissy’s disappointed father. Roseanne Arnold acts like a gypsy who tells Sissy to expect a great many women in her life. And Udo Kier gets to teach Sissy how to whoop it up like a crane in order to discover bottles of feminine hygiene spray in a nearby nest. Edward James Olmos shows up as a mariachi band musician who is forced to watch the cowgirls pull down their pants in order to take over the ranch (don’t ask).

      At least Noriyuki “Pat” Morita gets to play a real character, named, unfortunately, The Chink, a kind of cave-dwelling wise man whose major insights are centered around the sounds Ha-Ha, Hee-Hee, and Ho-Ho. A Minnesotan boy fleeing his encounter with the “Master,” proclaims The Chink pulled out his wanker in front of his girlfriend. But Sissy doesn’t seem to mind his gentle ministrations whatsoever. And given the lecturettes we get as dialogue throughout the rest of the movie, perhaps his simplified verbal expressions are all for the best. Surely they make more sense and at least give an indication of what the director might want from us.

     The only character who is given any real depth is Bonanza Jellybean (Rain Phoenix) who runs the cowgirl tribe and falls in love with Sissy, who equally goes for Jellybean even if she is a little unsure of the whole thing, having some commitment to “The Countess” who after all sent her to this insane Oregon Rubber Rose Ranch. The best scenes of the film are when the two gals fall into each other’s arms or just sit up every once and a while to try to explain life to themselves. These two clueless beauties seem made for each other.

       But just to prove that queer film critic Vito Russo was right, Van Sant via Robbins original story makes sure that his only real sexually queer character gets shot dead in the end.

       Meanwhile “The Countess” who Sissy almost kills, comes back to life, and inevitably falls in love with his surgeon, who as a couple will the ranch to the remaining cowgirls. But there is no picture doctor on earth that could possibly breathe new life into this rotten raspberry of a movie. And you’d need to provide an entire mountain of peyote to make me watch it all over again—although I suspect there might be some cult lovers up to that task.

 

Los Angeles, December 14, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).

Reid Waterer | The Kiss on the Cliff / 1993

quiet desperation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reid Waterer (screenwriter and director) The Kiss on the Cliff / 1993

 

One aspect of gay life that is seldom spoken of is how many young people having trouble “coming out,” never manage to leap that hurdle and live the rest of their lives often unhappily in exclusively heterosexual relationships. Filmmakers and their audiences simply find it much more fulfilling to track young people who gradually come to terms with their sexuality or even to portray LGBTQ individuals who are forced to live in and yet survive homophobic societies. A person whose  sexuality is never quite determined confuses both queers and straights, and suggests to heterosexuals, in particular, that there may be any number of their kind who would have happier in LGBT relationships. The Q factor, or the eternal questioning individual is to most of society a troubling being who hasn’t been able to make a final decision on how to express their sexuality.

      While we can point to many films in which characters have come to the realization of their sexuality later in life—Geschlecht in Fesseln (Sex in Chains) (1928), the comedy series La Cage aux Folles (1978), and Making Love are focused on just such figures—and a similar number of works in which the central character lives a hidden LGBT life while pretending to be exclusively heterosexual—there are many sad stories such as the 1962 Ohio man in Caught (2011), and even of characters who joyfully lead double lives such as the dead husband of The Ignorant Fairies (2001)—there are very few queer cinematic expressions about those tortured beings who never experience the sex they are inwardly seeking.

      Reid Waterer’s short film of 1993, The Kiss on the Cliff, however, represents just such a situation. Beginning with an attempted kiss between the teenage Mark (Stephen Wolfe Smith) and his best friend Steve (Tom Tarantini), the movie quickly reveals the first boy’s rejection of what he was just about to consummate, an acceptance of gay love. As Mark tells his gay friend—recently outed in the small town in which they both live because of Steve’s one night encounter with a gay man—he doesn’t believe he is homosexual. Afterall he has the perfect girlfriend, and he doesn’t feel like he desires gay sex. Strangely, we discover, it is Mark who has sought the friendship with Steve, not the other way around, and Steve has not at all attempted to force him into any kind of sexual situation. He just presumed since his sexuality was known and that since Mark, as he continues to admit, sees him as his best friend that there might be some reciprocal desire.

      Anyone who has come out at a young age will immediately recognize Mark as a figure who is clearly intrigued by homosexuality, but just not ready to admit to or commit to being queer—as if a kiss or embrace might mean a life-long pledge to having gay sex or developing a deeper relationship. But, obviously, for one on the edge of such a symbolic cliff—and these boys are literally standing on the high hills outside of their small hometown—any fall into the arms of another means a total commitment to the jump into the yawning sexual space between them.

      Steve may not have pressured him, but actually does so now, arguing that he has to get out of the narrow-minded world in which he lives, to go “anyplace but this place,” and wants his friend to join him, for them to go to college together instead, as evidently most young men do in their town, work for their living. When again Mark argues that he’s just not ready, Steve drives him back into town.

      Mark clearly is conflicted, not even able to finish his meal. And his parents, suspecting the obvious, enter his bedroom before he sleeps to ask him not to keep the “bad” company of Steve, meaning, as Mark himself puts it, they don’t want him hanging out with a “fag.”

      Steve meanwhile has been forced to act out his leave-taking earlier than he expected when his father tells him that his divorced mother, living elsewhere, can no longer afford to make child support payments, and Steve’s father, who is out of work, asks him to find his own apartment. It’s raining, as it always does in times of total abandonment in gay films, and Steve, having nowhere to go even for the night attempts to call for Mark from outside his bedroom window. The musical accompaniment of Wolfe’s “I Will Remember You” makes it clear that the two, in fact, do love one another, but are destined to be parted. In the shower, Mark does not hear his friend’s calls, and Mark’s mother soon comes to the window shooing away his would-be lover.

     Ten years pass. Mark is now married to the “perfect girlfriend” and has a son, who we discover is named Steve. Steve’s father has just been buried, and Mark tells his girlfriend that he must go back to the house to talk with Steve, although she has gathered that they were never close friends and is troubled by her husband’s recent quietude, recognizing that something is wrong with the otherwise loving Mark.

      Mark and Steve meet up, sitting on Steve’s old bed, both young men, dressed in suits for the funeral, making small talk over what is apparent in their stares at one another, is still a deep longing for one another. Soon after, another young man, Chris (Sean Sendelsky), appears at the doorway to remind Steve that his family are waiting for him at the after burial celebration. Steve introduces him as his lover, and we perceive a wave of disappointment wash over Mark’s body. He has to go, he explains, his wife is waiting. Perhaps Steve might join him and his wife for dinner one night? “Does that include Chris,” Steve enquires, the silence marking the fact that the new generation of this small Wyoming town have not changed in their prejudices. We also recognize, however, that for Mark the fact that his beloved friend does now have a lover has created a chasm between them that no longer can be bridged as clearly as Mark had hoped it might be, that he might still have had one chance, not lost, to go back and relive that kiss on the cliff. An awkward embrace is all Mark can offer his friend.

      There is no way to rethink his sexuality at this point in his life. And we recognize that the silences about which his wife complained will now be a regular feature of their relationship.

       If Waterer’s film is not particularly a brilliant or even original work, it nonetheless captures the lives of quiet desperation, as David Henry Thoreau described it, that so many men who have lost their opportunities to even experiment with their sexual identities are forced to endure throughout most of their lives.

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2021

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