Manfred Rott | Bacchanal / 2006

desire and fear put to rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manfred Rott (screenwriter and director) Bacchanal / 2006 [12 minutes]

 

On one level Bacchanal, directed by the Austrian filmmaker Manfred Rott, but performed entirely in Czech, is an absolutely ridiculous amateur theatrical revisit of the Dionysian myth, yet on another level it is a kind of wondrous and almost frightening realization of the internal that through the ceremony of these unknowing devotees of Dionysus brings inner to desires into reality.

   A young erudite man (Lázaro Bermúdez), perhaps a theater student, keeps quoting throughout the first third of this play information about Dionysus, declaiming lines such as “You are the whirlwind of mighty change, destroyer of great cities; perhaps he is preparing for a performance of Aristophanes’ The Frogs in which Dionysus is a character.

    Meeting up with his best friend (Tomáš Milostný), he continues his spiel as the two wait for the arrival of his girlfriend Klara (Petra Mošovská). When she arrives, she demands he stops, but he merely continues, she walking off in apparent boredom. Both boys follows. But the young student continues pontificating, “The powerful loving ones, the keen of perception…” she finally walking completely away, the friend noting “Such are the lovers of Dionysus.”

    Finally, the boys decide to bicycle off to their woodland escape near the river without Klara, the two of them lighting up a bonfire. “You want her back?” asks the friend of the Dionysian didact, he answering only “She’s a bitch.”

    Perhaps seeing this quiet moment as an opportunity to speak his mind, the friend begins a sentence which we imagine might be his confession of love to his thespian friend: “For a long time I’ve been wanting to tell you something…,” but almost immediately his sentiment is drowned out with more vague talk of Dionysus, although we might read his comment—“Dionysus is the reality of nature hidden deep within the body, blood burst, desire, and naked fear”—as a kind of acknowledgement of the sentiment his friend is about to confess.

    At that very moment, however, Klara returns, this time prepared, as she argues, for a proper bacchanal. She pulls out a bottle of wine and costumes, a kind of priestess robe for herself, and short Greek-style togas for the boys.

    As she begins to portentously call up the spirits of the powerful god of wine, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theater, insisting that she and her boyfriend are possessed of Dionysus, Milostný’s character begs her to stop, and wanders off.   

    When he returns, torch in hand, he finds them sprawled out on the ground intensely kissing one another, and watches for a short while, obviously entranced but simultaneously hurt.

    Yet only a moment later, Klara reaches up and pulls him down to her former position, he now kissing the Dionysian thespian, the two of them obviously engaging in sex.

     In the morning the boys awaken, still lying closely beside each other. It’s clear what all desirous and fearful gay boys need a gracious facilitator like Klara to put into action what they find so difficult to express.

     What formerly seemed ridiculous has now come to represent a real sexually transformative event.

    

Los Angeles, October 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Dean Slotar | The Absolution of Anthony / 1997

finding the right man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dean Slotar (screenwriter and director) The Absolution of Anthony / 1997

 

A young, unhappy gay boy of 16, Anthony (Joe Quintero) simply does not know how to explore the sexual world in which he had become defined. He spends most afternoons and evenings in bed

randomly calling up men to demand that they share their love for him and desire for his body.

     Needless to say, this doesn’t work very successfully, especially when his unknowing uncle with whom he lives constantly attempts to regain control of the phone.

    Out on the streets for a few hours, Anthony discovers a seemingly local homophobic basketball player Joe (Gary Cohen) who seems to be willing to test the waters.

     Meanwhile, the local priest, Father Carson (Victor Garber), knowing of the boy’s torment, offers to talk with him at any time.

     Obviously, Anthony’s mode of communication, hand on crotch while demanding that the other person on the phone tell him that he wants him, doesn’t achieve his goals when he calls up another unknown before finally calling the priest himself, who also must hang up on him.

     But suddenly Anthony awakens with a new sense of possibility, as he rises early, seeks out the basketball court and meets up with the kid who is willing to have sex with him.

     This is not a great movie, but is an intense exploration of a self in the making, a young man who is attempting to absolve himself from his intense demons.

 

Los Angeles, June 1 (2025)

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

Kat Holmes | Just Friends / 2025

where to from here?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Art Bezrukavenko and Chris Stanley (screenplay), Kat Holmes (director) Just Friends / 2025 [7 minutes]

 

In this wordless 7-minute movie, two friends (played by Art Bezrukavenko and Chris Stanley) do almost everything together from playing video games, their daily runs, workouts, and dining at their favorite of Zillions Pizzas (who obviously paid well for their movie plug). Almost everywhere they go Chris snaps a picture of Art.

    But then something begins to shift as Chris spends more and more time on his cellphone, just look at, but perhaps also texting women. What we perceive is that Art has begun to fall in love with Chris, and as the latter increasingly begins to beg off of their games, shy away from their group selfies, and doesn’t even show up for their daily runs, Art begins to feel apparently more and more like a grieving lover who’s lost his life-long companion.

    The final straw is when he spots Chris eating in a restaurant with a blonde-haired girl. He knows it’s over, even if the intertitles, who have been quoting Shakespeare all along, add a quote from Hamlet: “We know what we are but know not what we may be,” which I suppose gives at least a faint hope for a shift of Art’s sexuality.

     Meanwhile, stay tune; this is the second of the pair’s film. Maybe they’ll even find their voices?

By the way, how do these two “friends’ manage to live in a high-rise apartment with a view of the Manhattan skyline?

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema review (October 2025).