Sean Devaney and Brandt Miller | Behind the Blue Sky / 2009

love restrained

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sean Devaney and Brandt Miller (directors) Behind the Blue Sky / 2009 [5 minutes]

 

This very short work that lists no writer and whose actors are hidden under the traditional blue death head-wrappings (khadag) of Inner Mongolians to hide their identities, is not truly a narrative as much as it is a visual ode to the land and hidden queer people of the Chinese controlled country.

 

    With a score by the Mongolian folk-rock band Altan Urag, the film explores the love between two Mongolian boys, one, so we gather from the brief scenes of a city, is urban, while the other is from the truly beautiful outlying country.

    The country queer shares his experience of goat herding as well as a vision of wild horses on the run through the rugged green mountainous landscape.

 

   They come together at several locations, under a large electric tower, in a disserted field, and finally in a bedroom where they briefly remove their blue veils and kiss one another before making love. 

     As their love-making continues, we soon see a knife about to slit a goat’s neck, and in the very next moment men enter their room pulling one of the men away from the other, and hauling him off. 

 

    As the ode comes to a closure, both men are now seen wandering alone, the city boy seemingly locked out of his own urban world by walls constructed of wooden slats. Interspliced with these scenes of the men now alone are images of former Soviet monuments, remnants of the Post World War II Communist world before the Chinese Communist Party conquered the region, turning it into an autonomous region. A small part of Outer Mongolia still exists under Russian control.

     What we perceive is that these actors are wearing the khadag not only to hide their identities, but as a symbol of their spiritual and sexual deaths.

     This film was created for an exhibition of the Mongolian National Modern Art Museum.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Hugo Kenzo | 外賣仔 Delivery Boy / 2019

finding his way through the door

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Kenzo (screenwriter and director) 外賣仔 Delivery Boy / 2019 [15 minutes]

For reasons a bit inexplicable, the young Hong Kong delivery by ChunHo (Cheuk Piu Champi Lo) has fallen almost desperately in love with one of his customers, an expat lawyer living in Hong Kong, Eric (Phillip Smith) who several days a week orders up the dumplings from the stand for which he works.

    He literally dances down the street in delight in imagining a relationship with his heartthrob.

    As ChunHo makes clear to his friend Jasper (Thisby Cheng), he is determined the next time he meets up with Eric to begin a conversation, but each time he knocks, the lawyer is on the phone in exasperated conversation with his major client, presumably George (Mike Leeder), a crude CEO who has no patience for any human niceties and demands every document immediately, even when it’s been sent.

    Jasper warns him that it’s always dangerous to cross cultural lines in Hong Kong, to even imagine that the white elite will take the Chinese citizens of the city seriously.

     Finally, ChunHo, through the accident of witnessing Eric’s bag of fruit break open and helping him to retrieve the bag’s several lemons, wheedles his way into his customer’s apartment, expressing his sympathy for Eric’s frustration over his employment, and in a kind of wild presumption, telling him that he too hates his job, suggesting, somewhat facetiously, that they both quit and start up a band.

     When Eric—a bit startled by the delivery boy, engaging him in this imaginative conversation, but enjoying the boy’s logic nonetheless—suggests that it might be a disco group, Eric drops the needle on a record already on his player, a 70s disco song. The next step is to find a name for their nonexistent group, and Eric finally makes a dinner appointment with the young delivery boy to discuss the matter.

       Once more, Jasper, fearful that his dear friend will have his heart broken, warns him against the meetup, but now the Asian boy is convinced that he has his love’s attention, even though he is still not sure that he is even gay.

        When ChunHo arrives at the apartment, however, he finds a sign on the door announcing to arrivals to follow the music to the rooftop, where, as the boy soon discovers, Eric is throwing a well-heeled party. Obviously Eric has forgotten about their date, and is rather startled at the boy’s

appearance. His client George suddenly appears beside him demanding to know who the young kid is, Eric reporting that he is his delivery boy, George immediately holding forth that he should create a service to deliver booze, it would make fortune, he insists.

       So does ChunHo get permission to remain, but obviously, knowing no one of this almost totally white community, feels more than a little uncomfortable.

       When he finally follows Eric and others back downstairs, he finds George and Eric arguing about the fact that they’ve run out of vodka. George, seeing ChunHo on the staircase, immediately demands that Eric send him on a run for Vodka and other bottles of liquor. Not quite knowing how he should respond, Eric capitulates to the bully, handing ChunHo a large bill and sending him, as if he were his own personal delivery boy, on a run.

      Angrily and emotionally crushed, ChunHo takes the subway back home, crying his eyes out before his friend Jasper.

      A few days later, while at work, ChunHo again gets a dumpling order he is to deliver to Eric. He refuses and convinces Jasper to go in his stead. When Jasper arrives at the door, he hands over the dumplings telling Eric off for his dreadful behavior, Eric begging him to tell him how to reach ChunHo, insisting that he has been trying to contact him for days and is sorry for what happened.

But Jasper can only respond with his hate for having so hurt his friend.

    Finally, Eric tracks ChunHo down, trying to explain that he has been working with such inhuman people such as George for so long, he has forgotten how wonderful and good-looking the actual people who make-up the heart of this city are. He begs the boy to hear him out, insisting he must join him for dinner since they haven’t found a name for their band.

   ChunHo eventually forgives him, but insists that he has promised this evening to Jasper with who he is planning to attend dinner with the money he’s been given for the vodka. But he will be available later in the week. For the first time Eric actually gives him his private phone number, writing it on his hand. And they kiss. It looks like the start of a true relationship, one of the first times possibly that a young man has been able to cross over the cultural and social lines of Hong Kong.

     Most of the amateur commentators on this film, we’re buying it however, one Letterboxd commentator, with the moniker CutUncut2021, noting:

 

“Short and sweet, this simple tale could easily be developed into something longer, giving more rein to young Cheuk Piu Champi Lo and his sprightly cohort Cheng, but maybe without the creepy Phillip Smith, whose charmless performance marred the entire tale.”

 

     Frankly, I’d like to see Eric and his new friend really develop a relationship and break with the class and social codes that hold back most of the relationships between the colonizers and the city’s actual citizens. If Eric was just a little less uptight and gifted, I might even imagine them really starting up a band that drifts away from disco into an eclectic mix of musical styles Western and Asian. But, like Jasper, I can’t see that really happening; the lines are too difficult to cross. But at least Hugo Kenzo’s short rom-com tried.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

     

Douglas Messerli | Deliverance [Introduction]

deliverance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Throughout these queer cinema volumes I have attempted to gather my discussions of individual films into small segments that present variations of a particular film, subject, theme, or genre, without even attempting to make these small gatherings all-inclusive or to argue that all of my small groupings actually might be represented as a new genre of LGBTQ+ cinema.

     The fact that these gatherings include films spanning several years, will certainly confuse those who prefer or are simply more accustomed to chronological comparisons; yet to delimit every film to the year in which it was released (and even then there is often a difference between when films were made and when they appeared in theaters, sometimes with several years between the two events) would result in a missed opportunity to show broader influences, connections, or simply the zeitgeist of queer filmmaking.

     Yet I must admit that even I balked, at first, at creating a small section concerning “delivery boys.” The question, first of all, depends a great deal on what the deliverer is delivering and to whom. One might argue that a broad spectrum of gay filmmaking is involved with someone delivering up sex to another waiting human being, particularly given the development of computer and cellphone services such as Grindr, where men and women await the arrival of someone else bringing them pleasure and sexual release whether it be a prostitute or just someone he or she hooked up with on the internet.

     I would argue, moreover, that sexual pornography, both queer and straight has long depended upon the arrival of new boys and girls in town, plumbers, phone installers, milkmen, animal caretakers, singing telegram performers, masseurs, and just plain neighbors to deliver something far more exciting than their specified occupations. In other words, the trope is behind almost all our sexual encounters with people we excitably encounter for the first time—family, dear friends, and even casual acquaintances generally being seen as off the grid.

    Accordingly, I have been very narrow in my definition of what the delivery boy is supposed to be delivering other than the potentiality of love. In the five films I’ve selected the boys are literally hired simply to deliver food, water, or documents, with the age, social, and cultural gaps between the two generally being seen as unbridgeable when it comes to what those who have ordered up their services and those delivering them.

     In each of these cases, at least one, if not both individuals, see their possible ability to bridge that gap as something of a deliverance, a solution that will resolve their sexual dilemmas along with numerous other problems they face.

     But, finally, the real problem (except for the Thailand-set movie) in simply getting through the front or office doors.

     The films I have chosen represent once again many different countries: the French-Canadian director Jean-François Monette’s Take-out (2000), US director Eric Mueller’s This Care Up (2003), the unknown Finnish director’s commercial advertisement for Kingis Ice Cream (2010), Danish director Lasse Nielsens Lek and the Waterboy (2010) located in rural Thailand, and Brazilian-based director Hugo Kenzo’s Delivery Boy set in Hong Kong (2019).

     None of these delivery boys or their waiting customers end up completely happy in these comic-dramas, and in Monette’s case the hero ends quite sadly, although he has, at least, become wise to her personal desires. But in each film there are moments of great possibility in the delights of the two entities meeting up that go far beyond what it is they are actually paid to be delivering, even when it comes to the ice cream the company is hoping to sell. One can also be certain that in each of these films the waiting customers are terribly unhappy with their lives and can’t wait for someone to deliver them up from their situations, just as the delivery boys, dissatisfied with their line of work, are hoping to meet the one who might deliver them from having to make their arduous trips. In both instances, these figures are waiting for the delivery to be a deliverance as well.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).