Derek Jarman | It's a Sin / 1987 [official video] | It's a Sin / 1989 [Wembley Stadium concert video]

two sinful manifestations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pet Shop Boys [Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe] (composers and performers) Derek Jarman (director) It’s a Sin / 1987 [remastered, official video] / 1989 [Wembley Stadium live concert video]

 

Let me begin in my comments on one of the greatest hits of the synth group Pet Shop Boys by focusing on the official 1989 video relating to their album Actually.

    In this version of It’s a Sin, directed by queer filmmaker Derek Jarman, the original song extended its lyrical themes with far more action than the lead singer Neil Tennant usually performed. In this version Tennant is under arrest in an Inquisition-like setting, led to bonfires and other spots by his jailer performed by composer Chris Lowe who is attached to his fellow performer by a metal chain.

    Various elements of the montage include a group of bored and sinning monks and several women reenacting various personifications of the seven deadly sins, in particular gluttony, lust, sloth, and greed, with a figure with long green fingers representing greed, and the actions of the judge (actor Ron Moody) symbolizing both wrath and pride.

     Arguably, in this vision, the endless sins which Tennant recites that he has been told he is guilty throughout the St. Cuthbert’s Grammar School education, does not necessarily include homosexuality. At this point, Tennant had not yet openly admitted to his homosexuality (not wanting to be defined by his sexuality, Tennant actually came out in a 1994 interview in the UK gay lifestyle magazine Attitude), and the sins of the song seem to be of a general sort, unless it be represented by the frieze of closely gathered young monks:

 

it’s always with a sense of shame

I’ve always been the one to blame

For everything I long to do

no matter when or where or who

has one thing in common too

 

It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sin

It’s a sin

Everything I’ve ever done

Everything I ever do

Every place I’ve ever been

Everywhere I’m going to

It’s a sin

 

At school they taught me how to be

so pure in thought and word and deed

They didn’t quite succeed

For everything I long to do

no matter when or where or who

has one thing in common too

 

    After an angry complaint about the song from his former grammar school St. Cuthbert’s, Tennant declaimed the comments of a school staffer as being cowardly in commenting anonymously about a former pupil, citing the embarrassment of his own parents, who still lived in Newcastle, the site of the school.

    In a 2009 interview, moreover, Tennant commented:

 

“People took it really seriously; the song was written in about 15 minutes, and was intended as a camp joke and it wasn't something I consciously took very seriously—sometimes I wonder if there was more to it than I thought at the time—but the local parish priest in Newcastle delivered a sermon on it, and reflected on how the Church changed from the promise of a ghastly hell to the message of love.”

*

 

   The far more interesting performance of this work, however, is the live Wembley Stadium performance in 1989, also directed by Jarman.

    Here Tennant appears in a campy exaggeration the holy red robes of an Episcopalian Bishop, almost literally in drag, altering his role in the original video as being simply a prisoner of sin to being a person of authority both describing and proclaiming Tennant's boyish sins.

 

   In this rendition, the seven deadly sins are much more comically realized as masked and papier-mâché-headed of a pig (gluttony), a green-skirted woman (envy), etc.

 

    While Tennant basically stands and occasionally strolls upon the stage, Lowe is kept busy performing at the synthesizer.

   

     Most importantly, the projected visuals do not just repeat the images on the stage, but flash obviously gay-boy figures upon the screen, and eventually through a wrap-around scrim surrounding the performers in the flames of hell. The sins here are being punished through the tortures of the church, but through the hell-fire of Satan himself.

   Here, it is clear, that homosexuality is most definitely one of the sins of which Tennant has been accused, as the partially nude gay boys dance along with the montage of images awash in flames.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

George Barbakadze | The Bridge / 2005

love torn apart

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Barbakadze and Fleur Cooper (screenplay), George Barbakadze (director) The Bridge / 2005 [8 minutes]

 

Long before the current United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) attempts to rid the US of as many people of color without (and sometimes even with) citizenship as they can round up, ICE still created havoc with many families, particularly young couples not yet married who had arrived in the US to begin a new life, sometimes one being accepted for a green card while the other was rejected.

    One day, one of my best students came to me with just such a problem. He had fallen in love with a beautiful Swedish woman, but they weren’t yet ready for marriage, and despite his father’s governmental connections (he had been a US ambassador to several countries), Immigration had denied her permission to remain in the US any longer. “What should I do?” he asked.

    I was a strong believer in advanced education, convinced that without it capable young men and women would be strongly delimited in their futures. But his love for this woman seemed so powerful that I could only advise him to follow her back to Sweden. “After all, I said, you can always get an education a little later, but if you miss the woman you love, you may never find another like her.”

    He followed my advice, and today, living in Sweden, they are still married some 50 years later.

   Such problems were often were even more difficult (and probably in the US are now even worse, because they can marry) for gay men and women who couldn’t marry. After all, ICE had no interest in bringing queers into the good ole USA!

    Before same-sex marriage was permitted in most Western countries, these difficulties weren’t limited to the US, but occurred in nearly all nations, whose departments of immigration’s decisions of who could stay and who must leave seemed sometimes like a throw of the dice.

    Australian filmmaker George Barbakadze, in his short film The Bridge, tells of just such a couple, Luka (Glen Upton) and Niko (Andre Cunningham), young Georgian gay men who escaped from their homeland in response to its homophobic attitudes.

    Luka has arrived in Sydney first, followed by his friend. Perhaps because he is an architect, so it appears, he soon receives a letter announcing his permanent residency in his newly adopted country.

    The two begin enjoying their life together, Luka constructing his dream home for the two of them and Niko involved with his works of pottery. But one day Luka returns home to find Niko gone; he has received a rejection from the immigration authorities, and to save his lover and himself from a sad series of farewells, has decided to leave immediately leaving only a letter to explain his disappearance.

   The problem with this short work is that there is hardly any dialogue or even developed interplay between the two lovers. We know so little about them and their lives that the only thing we can be sure of is the film’s assurance of their love and the fact that they have been torn apart through governmental bureaucracy, which continues to sadden Luca for the rest of his life.

    This is an important issue, but to recognize the effects it has upon individuals who only seek to find a safe place in which to love one another, we first have to understand them and their love for one another, something that Barbakadze’s eight-minute work does not provide.

    Moreover, it would be interesting to know what happens to people like Niko who must return to a country not at all sympathetic to the reasons why he escaped. Was he arrested and put into prison or even worse?

    Although his director has taken on a truly troublesome and profound issue, he hasn’t done it any service by delimiting his tale to occasional languishing looks between the two men and the moody score by Alies Sluiter. We need to understand more about their lives, hear their voices, however accented they may be, and observe them showing the love we are led to believe exists between them. The old literary saw about showing instead of telling in this work is entirely appropriate. They need to show us more than their coming and going for us to understand how cruel these immigration departments often are in their generalized treatment of individual lives around the world.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

 

Lisa Steen | Stepdaddy / 2019

invitation to dinner

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anna Greenfield (screenplay, based on a story by Lauren Blumenfeld and Max Jenkins), Lisa Steen (director) Stepdaddy / 2019 [7 minutes]

Wyatt (Max Jenkins) has invited his friend from long ago, Patricia (Lauren Blumenfeld) over for dinner. Apparently they have gone to school together, when she had somewhat of a crush on Wyatt, even though she knew he was gay. She still describes their acquaintance as somehow “being together,” and from what he mentions, rather contentiously over the increasingly difficult dinner conversation, it is apparent that she has at one point attempted to suck him off, knowing full well at the same event that he was attracted to a boy at the event. 

    When she suggests that he has never been able to take criticism, after describing his terrible performance at a karaoke bar, he bitchily responds: “I forgot that you drink wine like you give head—with tiny, sharp little fangs that hurt my foreskin.”

    Meanwhile, he has moved forward with his life as a macrame artist—hardly a stunning career— while Patricia can only respond that she has moved away from her intended career.

    Hurt by the way conversation has brought up former contentions between them, she is ready to drive home drunk, pausing in the doorway just long enough to tell Wyatt that the only reason she has accepted his dinner invitation is that she has frozen her eggs, and knows no one other than him whom she might invite to be a sperm donor.

    But at that very moment, her own father (Peter Gallagher) shows up at the door, Patricia being quite confused, but then imagining that Wyatt has called him to give her a ride home. Almost immediately, however, she finds it strange that he would have her father’s telephone number. And it quickly becomes apparent that the person who Wyatt has told her he is seeing is her own father, who now has the difficulty of explaining that he and Wyatt, having in love, are about to marry, meaning that Wyatt will be her….the final word is never spoken, since it is, after all, the title of this very devilish and humorous short film.

     Unless she wants her stepfather to also be the real father of her own children…well that’s for her to figure out when and if she makes it back to her own house sober enough to evaluate the new situation.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Brittany Alexia Young | Munchies / 2025

i’m sorry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brittany Alexia Young (screenwriter and director) Munchies / 2025 [11 minutes]

 

You realize that you are truly an old man of many generations earlier when Newfest features a film where several vulgar teenage lesbian girls (Caroline Buddendorf, Regina Chueva, and Brianne Jackson, and Yamini Nambimadom) get stoned, verbally attack one another, and “sort of” make up saying “I’m sorry,” and by agreeing they’re all now starved for sweets and snacks.

     What else can they do but rush over to their nearest convenience store, make a rush through its aisles, giggle when encountering a man with a gun named Cal (Max Castillo) attempting to rob the store, and giggle some more until he threatens to kill them.

     Eventually, they cause such confusion that he drops the gun, the toughest girl of the bunch grabbing it and holding him at bay. Well, not for long. When he moves forward demanding its return, she shoots him dead. For a second they are silenced, but perceive that behind the mask is a man who according to his wallet has a kid who he caring for, perhaps the reason for his bungled robbery.

     Rushing from the place they spot his car, inside of which is the baby, for whom, it appears, they now perceive themselves to be responsible. Why it never strikes any of them to call the police and report the truth, is not explained.

     Moreover, this terrifyingly creepy little movie was defined by the Newfest selectors as a comedy. And even when attempting to raise funds for this short disaster, the creators seemed to be oblivious to the film’s full implications:

 

“Munchies is a coming-of-age story, combining the heart of movies like Booksmart and Edge of Seventeen, with the raunchier stoner comedy of movies like Project X or Superbad. Unlike many coming-of-age films, Munchies has a Black queer woman at its center without her identity being a problem or a source of conflict. At its core, Munchies shows both the beauty and camaraderie that comes with female friendship, as well as the friction that can accompany it. The film explores the central theme that what is done in the dark always comes to light.”

 

    Sorry girls, usually one doesn’t come of age by getting stoned and killing another being, even accidentally.    

    Presuming that he/she speaks with total irony, I agree with Letterboxd commentator Koî Glasscock, who describes the plot as representing “The very relatable situation of getting high with your girlfriends and then accidentally shooting a robber and then getting stuck with his baby when he dies.” But then, since this individual also awarded the film four stars, perhaps he/she isn’t speaking ironically.

     In the Trumpian world in which we now exist, it’s hard to know. But trust me, if you have a mind and even half a heart, no matter how hungry you are, don’t trouble with this piece of tripe.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Emily May Jampel | Clean Slate / 2025

i’ll take manhattan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josephine Chiang and Joyce Keokham (screenplay), Emily May Jampel (director) Clean Slate / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

I’m up for a good black comedy any day, but recently I have watched perhaps too many so-called comedies wherein lovers and dear friends blithely do in the other for self-gain, works in which it is hard to even regurgitate a chortle let alone a full grown chuckle. Welcome to the Trump years.

     Josephine (Josephine Chiang) and Joyce (Joyce Keokham) are two non-binary friends (although the movie doesn’t quite satisfactorily reveal why it’s an LGBTQ work other than its press kit statements) who have moved together from California to New York to find acting gigs that might include an Asian non-binary figure.

    Writing in The Daily Californian, Molly Flynn nicely captures what these women face:

    

“On top of this all-too-familiar battle between success and friendship, Josephine and Joyce are entrenched in an industry that can’t even bother to discern the difference between two queer, Asian actors. As they perform their audition pieces, editor Alan Wu cuts back and forth between the two of them reading the same lines, reflecting the director’s inability to differentiate the pair. When the show’s director gives Josephine a callback mistaking them for Joyce, the short film fully displays the shocking expendability with which Hollywood perceives its talent. The endless machine of creation, production and money-making doesn’t have time to learn names and faces. Josephine and Joyce learn this the hard way in Clean Slate making their uphill battle toward fame all the steeper.”

 

    They both seem to get call-backs for the role, but when it turns out that Josephine’s is not really on the list, but her dear friend Joyce is, despite their friendly river-view chats and boba fortifiers, something in Josephine snaps. Joyce, clearly the more grounded of the two, has begun to debate whether it’s worth staying in New York just for the slight chance to get a small role. She tells Josephine that if she doesn’t land the role in her call-back, she’s thinking of taking the plane back home.

    But when, by accident of a dropped cellphone, Joyce discovers that, in fact, Josephine has been pretending to be her, and is planning to attend Joyce’s call-back, something’s “gotta to give!” And in this case it’s as simple as providing Joyce with a route to obscurity via the Hudson River in order to allow Josey a “clean slate” to impersonate her dear former friend.

    At film’s end, we’re left with only one very “would-be” actor standing, forcing us to wonder whether for Josephine it was worth killing off her best friend and, more importantly, whether or not it was worth watching this mean little movie.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).