Luis Buñuel | Tristana / 1970

a revenge comedy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julio Alejandro and Luis Buñuel (screenplay, based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós), Luis Buñuel (director) Tristana / 1970

 

It continues to annoy me that many critics perceive the great filmmaker Luis Buñuel as a basically immoral rebel fascinated by sadomasochism. In reviewing his 1970 film, Tristana, the usually level-headed Roger Ebert even goes to far as to write:

 

“The subject matter came out of his lifelong obsessions. His favorite subjects were sado-maschoism and anticlericalism ever since his first movie with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (1928), and in the late flowering of his work in the his 70s he became undoubtedly the dirtiest old man of genius the cinema has ever produced.”

 

     While it is clear that the director was virulently anticlerical, given the tradition of the Spanish church leaders their involvement with the military right and continuation of the most patriarchal of cultural values, his position might be seen as a thoroughly moral one. And, yes, a great many of his films seem fixated on sado-masochistic situations, particular Virdiana and Belle de Jour, the latter of which also stars the heroine of Tristana (the beautiful Catherine Deneuve), but it is not Buñuel, I would argue, who is trapped in these often morally reprehensible situations as much as it is the characters of his works, all products of the corrupt societies he clearly exposes in his films, particularly in works such as Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

     In the 1970 film Tristana, Don Lupe Garrido (Fernando Rey), is ostensibly a model figure of the 1920s in Toledo. A liberal man of a wealthy childhood, Don Lope is a polished aristocrat without aristocratic affectations, himself refusing to work because of the evils of industrialism. His intellectual support is for the down-trodden and working class, and he later hires the street urchin, the deaf, trouble-maker Saturno (Jesús Fernández), whose mother, Saturna (Lola Gaos), works as his cook. His not notable public problem is that he is slowly running out of money, and must sell some of his cherished possessions to support himself and his staff.

   Don Lope’s secret problem regards his attitude toward women. A staunch supporter of open sexuality—he has sex only if he can get the woman to agree, an unusual position in his day. Yet as a hedonist dandy who believes in open relationships, he refuses to be tied down by marriage, often the only position a woman might enter in order to survive.

     Left an orphan, the young Tristana is adopted, through the directive of her dead mother, by Don Lope, and at the age of 19 is sent to live in his house. Although he first treats her as a loving daughter, as the innocent girl begins to flower into adulthood, he grows more and more lustful, finally “receiving” her permission to rape her through a kiss. What he cannot or will not comprehend is that given his role in her life and the lack of alternatives for the girl, she has little choice but to accept the sexual advances of the old man, although she increasingly finds him abhorrent. As she tells her confident, Saturna: if only he had been able to keep the relationship as a familial one she might have loved him and been able to serve her as a dutiful daughter.

     As it is, she increasingly seeks a way out of what he defines as an “open” relationship. Ignoring his desires, she daily takes walks through the streets, eventually meeting a handsome young artist, Horacio (Franco Nero), with whom she quickly falls in love.

 

    After several trysts, she determines to leave Don Lope and run away with Horacio. Despite Don Lope’s discovery of their relationship, and his attempt to challenge Horacio to a duel, the two manage to escape to the city and have an apparently happy relationship for at least two years, without marrying, since, influenced by Don Lope, she too now believes that love is more important than the patriarchal institution that binds women to their spouses.

     When Tristana develops a leg tumor, she inexplicably insists that Horacio take her back to Don Lope, who now has come into a large inheritance through the death of his hated sister. We later discover that Tristana’s insistence that he return her to the man she once hated, however, may have been a test of Horacio’s own love and his ability and commitment to care for her.

     As it is, she moves back to Don Lope’s house, as the two omen arrange for a kind of ménage à trois, as she meets regularly with both Horacio and Tristana, while the old man ludicrously hopes to bring her back exclusively into his own bed, particularly since Tristana has now had her leg amputated. In short she is trapped, at least symbolically, within the relationship. Unable to deal with her amputation and with the increasingly angry woman she has become, Horacio soon leaves her, returning to the city.

      Bitter about the way she has been treated by both men, Tristana has slowly found a way to rule his house, particularly since the aging Don Lope no longer has the strength to opposer her. Don Lope is even enticed to attend mass with her, finally submitting to marriage. Soon after, Don Lope, a long-time hater of the Catholic clergy, even invites the priests into his house for cocoa and sugar, while they attempt to coax him into leaving money for the church.

    At moments, the now chaste Tristana, sexually toys with her servant, opening her breasts to him as he works beneath her balcony, forcing him to back off into the woods to masturbate, an act which throughout the film he has comically accomplished in long-closed sessions in the bathroom.

     When one night Don Lope cries out while suffering from a heart attack, Tristana comes rushing to his side, pretending to call the doctor and, when she determines he is near death, opening his bedroom window to the cold night air, careful to close it again shortly before the doctor arrives to pronounce him dead.

    She is now the inheritor of Don Lope’s estate. In short, Tristana, the former victim, has gradually become a sort of feminist heroine now in control of what in her culture is nearly always held by males: money and an estate.

      But for what purpose, we are led to ask. Was it worth all the suffering and pain she has had to undergo to reach this position? Although Tristana, at film’s end, is in control of her own life, she now has no one to share it with, and she will likely live out the years in the kind of better coldness we have witnessed in Don Lupe’s sister. Revenge is hers, but it is a comic revenge in which Tristana as ended up as a kind of stock figure, the former beauty having been transformed into an angry beast.

     Although Tristana has won the battle of the sexes, the director reveals that since she has lost her moral ground in the process, she remains unable to find happiness and remains as frustrated as she might have been serving within the confines of the patriarchal world which she has bested.

    

Los Angeles, November 1, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2013).

Hendrik Schäfer | Double Income, Kids / 2019

gay guys normalized

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hendrik Schäfer (director) Double Income, Kids / 2019 [documentary]

 

German director Hendrik Schäfer grew up in the Berlin world where, he comments, “There…seems to be a general consensus that our overpopulated world doesn’t need any more people. So, growing up as a gay man in Berlin, the natural assumption was the belief you would be childless your entire life.” But upon moving to Tel Aviv, he found a radically different expectation, in which for cultural, social, and religious reasons that a great many gay Israeli men were very much seeking to have children.

     

“In Tel Aviv I was confronted by a very different assumption. Over and over again, I heard gay men clearly expressing their desire to become fathers at some point in their lives. It seemed being gay was not to the exclusion of beginning a family unit, to the contrary.”

     Schäfer’s 2019 documentary Double Income, Kids, accordingly, follows the experiences of one gay couple living in Tel Aviv as they plan for and reorder their lives awaiting the birth of two children, implanted with each of their sperm, in a surrogate mother in named Krista, living in Portland, Oregon.

     The earliest portions of the film are devoted to simply explaining how artificial insemination from two different sperm samples takes place, what are the chances of the sperm fertilizing the egg, and what are the dangers from the surrogate mother. In daily touch with the doctors, it first appears that one egg seems to be surviving while the other’s survival is in question. Since each doner, Motty and Alon have chosen a different sex, the survival process becomes unintentionally a kind of statement about the sperm providers. Fortunately, both eventually survive, and after a scan of the fetus it reveals that both eggs in good shape; the men can now share the news finally with their families. Alon’s mother is ecstatic while his less-accepting father remains basically silent.

     Eventually, the film introduces us to both families, Motty’s family evidently having spent time in the USA before immigrating to Jerusalem, seeming to have far more open and relaxed attitudes than Alon’s parents, uncles, and aunts. But Motty’s family also seem to lack the intense closeness to their relative than Alon’s family.  

     What the film doesn’t thoroughly reveal is that the reasons for Motty Garcia and Alon Gvili’s choice of using an international surrogacy agency and an American woman is that in Israel the issue of same-sex surrogacy became a hot political concern a year before this documentary when in 2018 Israel’s parliament, as Bob Bahr from the Atlanta Jewish Journal writes, “with the determined support of ultra-Orthodox political parties, denied access to surrogacy to same-sex couples and single men, while at the same time supporting it for single women and heterosexual couples”—this despite the fact that “the country gives broad legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, and gays are allowed to serve in the military.”

      At one point they mention that the cost of the US surrogate birth was about 600,000 Israel shekels (about $185,000), the average yearly household income in Israel being about $36,000. So  the choice to have children for these men is a substantial investment. We never learn, however, how these two men are employed.

      Bahr reports that after this film was released, the Israel Supreme Court decided unanimously that the ban on same-sex surrogacy was discriminatory, and in February 2020 ruled that gays, lesbians, and single men should have the same access to surrogacy services as the government provided to heterosexuals. On July 11th, however, the high court again banned surrogacy for same sex couples and single men.

      The impending birth of their children, which in the film is presented almost as a count-down, causes the couple to undergo some major changes, the first of which is perhaps one of the most devastating, as they plan to move from their beloved Tel Aviv to a more child-friendly town nearer also to Alon’s not entirely gay-embracing parents. As they begin the packing, it becomes apparent that Motty, in particularly, almost wishes they could start all over again.

      Much of the film concerns their moving into their new home and redecorating it for the two future inhabitants; but we also witness them practicing for the rituals of diapering, nursing, and simply caring for their newborns along with reading books on child rearing. The closest they come to an on-film argument concerns how close to the presumed birthdate they should arrange for their Portland house rental, since they both hope to be there in the hospital room to share the actual births of their children. One is clearly in favor of renting early, while the others calculates the amount of time it will mean being away and the cost.

     We never discover precisely how that argument is settled, but they actually do miss the birth since, suddenly they get the call that Krista’s water has already broken early, the children on their way.

     The two men rush to the airport, and we can almost share their anticipation as they are made to wait boarding and then, await their luggage upon arrival. When they finally catch a taxi to rush to hospital they watch pictures of the two newborns on their cellphones, kissing one another in the joy of suddenly having become fathers. In the ugliest moment of the film, the cab driver demands them to stop kissing or he will demand they leave the auto. It is a greeting of the two to the US that speaks, all over again, to the notion of the “ugly American,” and in this day and age seems to be utterly homophobic.

     But the negativity of that scene is quickly forgotten as the two men, reaching the hospital, are greeted with total friendliness and given their children to hold. But even here, particularly as the film progresses, we sense an odd arrangement, as each of the men seem to care for and hold only their “own” child. One wonders, if fact, if this will truly be a fully integrated family or to gay men living together, each to raise their own child. There is something strangely patriarchal and almost territorial in that behavior.

      The issues becomes even a little more uncomfortable when we follow Alon to a local Portland synagogue where his male child undergoes the circumcision. I have always been against circumcision, my feelings made more complex by personal events.* But to actually have to observe a full cutting of a baby’s genitals, where one puts his finger covered with a lick of wine in the child’s mouth, while holding the baby’s arms tight so that child will not move while the mohel cuts, is something most unpleasant, and despite the fact that the rabbi attempts to describe it in terms of the Jewish tradition and an entry into community, it appears increasingly to be a brutal tribal custom.

     Along with the ritual immersion in water of the two babes, a Jewish tradition which neither I nor my Jewish husband had ever heard about, the two also share time Krista and her family, making certain that she also is able to hold the children; photographs are taken so that later they might explain to their kids who their birth mother was.

     Returning to Israel, the babies are, of course, celebrated by the families. And in a rather surprising ending, the two gay men decide to finally marry—an event we might have presumed had already occurred. There is something touching, however, in the wedding celebration being witnessed by their two newborns, and the fact that the celebration is part of a larger embracement of not only the couple but the family they have begun. Speaking at the ceremony, Motty’s mother explains that when she found out her son was gay, she immediately accepted him for who he was. But her main worry, that he would not be able to live a “normal” life, remained with her. She now expresses her joy at the fact that she is now speaking at her son's wedding, in the presence of his two beautiful babies, marriage and child-rearing obviously being her definition of normality.

     Once again, we are reminded that these gay men are embraced back into their families with even greater willingness now that they have grandchildren of their own blood, and their sons have embraced the idea of the large community into which they were born.

 

*At age 13 or 14 my parents were convinced by their local doctor that I should be circumcised for cleanliness’s sake. My 1947 year of birth probably represented one of the last years in which men weren’t standardly circumcised in most US hospitals at birth. My parents, terrified of speaking about anything even slightly sexual, did not tell me of that operation. I went into the hospital to have my tonsils removed. My tonsils were removed, but not only my throat hurt upon waking up, but when I looked at my penis, I was startled to discover large stains of mercurochrome, and a slight pain between my legs. At the same time, my anesthesiologist had clearly given me a slight overdose of ether, the drug applied in those days, and for at least a couple of weeks after I had ether dreams, which I associated with my unannounced circumcision. I’ve forgiven my parents a great deal over the years, but this was something I could never quite get over, that they had decided for me about cutting away the skin surrounding my then developing penis without even explaining the fact seems, even today, unforgiveable, despite their sexual shyness and medical ignorance.  

 

Los Angeles, October 3,2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023). 

Hao Wu | All in My Family / 2019

telling the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hao Wu (screenwriter and director) All in My Family / 2019

 

Documentary filmmaker Hao Wu packs a great deal of emotional drama into his 2019 documentary film, All in My Family. While the movie attempts little to demonstrate how he might have come out in a sexually unliberated China, it focuses on simply the family dynamics in a way that perhaps expresses far more than the entire cultural spectrum. How does one, after all, open oneself up to sexual differences in a culture that does not permit such expression, but, more importantly, is based on the notion of male privilege and the continuation of male dominance through marriage and patrimony? The male son of any upcoming Chinese family represents its definition, its achievement, and its future—particularly as in Wu’s case when the son is an obedient highly intelligent young man doing well in school? He represents all the mostly less-educated family members dreams of.

      If you recall, the central characters in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) did not deal with it very well, lying, impregnating a bride who the young gay man married only to please his family, and dishonestly moving forward by adopting, with his gay boyfriend, the child he has fathered, while basically ignoring the woman he had used as a ruse.

       Wu, after admitting his sexuality to his quite domineering and always critical mother, revolts through the Chinese underground music movements, and ultimately escapes to New York City, finding love with his partner Eric.

        Given the particularly Chinese, Chengdu (formerly Shanghai), world, one would think that such a film might seem quite alien to American audiences; but actually, given Wu’s mother’s aspirations, her constant insistence upon cleanliness, and her continued attempt to dominate their lives, it had a great deal of relevance for me. The father here is more tolerant than the mother (an opposite situation in my family), but the fiercely determined mother, although worlds apart, was my mother as well, insisting every moment that her children were not quite living up to her demands—although as in this case, underneath the harsh routine, a truly loving being who found it difficult to express it through most of her life.

       The family to whom he comes “out,” is determined to keep his sexual identity quiet—that is until they travel to New York and meet Wu’s far calmer and accepting husband Eric, and, more particularly, when the couple decide to have two children, almost simultaneously, through surrogate mothers. The result is a son and daughter, who make everyone now realize that Wu can never escape being the “best son,” and must return with children and lover in tow to China, mostly to put them on display to an unknowing family, particularly his grandfather.

       He and his sisters and the one knowledgeable aunt attempt to strategize how to explain that he is traveling his Eric rather than a “secret” woman to whom he has been married. Filming all this in a direct manner, Wu—suggesting that he was, perhaps hiding behind his camera—reveals his own fears and alienations as well as the pain his parents and, later, when the situation begins to unravel, his aunts and other relatives admit to.

     His mother genuinely and quite touchingly demonstrates the ideals she had for her son, which she cannot comprehend have actually been achieved. As Wu himself describes the situation in China at the time of his upbringing, he could only find one book—obviously an out-of-date American psychology text—and that one described his desires as psychologically deviant. That he survived the journey in such a repressive society is nearly amazing. Yes, he admits, and the Americanized Eric confirms, he is often angry. But then, why shouldn’t he be?

     Yet suddenly confronted with raising two infants, Wu gradually begins to realize just how much one has to give over one’s life in raising children. And even though Eric does not appear at the first meeting with the grandfather, it is fairly apparent that when his husband shows up, the old man is not entirely oblivious, even at age 92, that no wife will ever appear.

       Indeed, the entire family comes to a kind of difficult acceptance, as one by one, Wu asks them probing questions—inquiries I’d like to have addressed to my own parents as well. Yet as his sister admits, this is what being a family is like. And even his mother recoils when he suggests that she and his father fought everyday: that is what families do. “You fight with Eric too!” He gently responds, “But not every day!”

     By film’s end we see that Wu has grown up from his rebellious past to an acceptance of the difficulties of family life, hoping that his own son and daughter will be able to find family love despite its extreme failures. We do perceive that he will attempt to raise these children in a more open and loving way. When asked by his mother, “What will you tell your children when they ask about their mother(s).” he responds: “I will tell them the truth. They have two fathers.” I am sure that is a difficult stretch for a Chinese mother to comprehend. But then it would have been just as difficult, had it happened, for my Midwestern parents. Marion, Iowa and Chengu, China are perhaps not so very far apart as we might imagine.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2019).

 

 

 

Dexter Fletcher | Rocketman / 2019

look, we have come through!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lee Hall (screenplay), Dexter Fletcher (director) Rocketman / 2019

 

As my husband Howard agreed yesterday, after we viewed Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman: Instead of describing the film as most critics have as a “musical fantasy,” it is actually closer to being a “fantasia” on Elton John. A fantasia is a piece of music with no fixed form, or one consisting of tunes that many people know or recognize, which is precisely how this film reveals John's early years—his childhood as a boy unloved by either his aloof jazz-loving father or his selfish sexually-flitting mother, his early musical talents and his sudden rise to fame, his short-lived affair with his callous agent, and John's own out-of-control downward vortex into drugs, alcohol, and sex. The recent film Bohemian Rhapsody—a movie I very much liked—demonstrated Freddie Mercury’s difficulties with the first two (drugs and alcohol) but just barely incorporated his gay sexual experiences, almost hinting at his homosexuality rather than actually depicting it.

     Rocketman takes the subject head-on, even portraying a couple of joyful gay sex scenes, in which John seems utterly open to its pleasures. But then, given John's public persona, his outrageously campy costumes, and his openly sybaritic life, perhaps Fletcher’s Baz Luhrmann-like film (as The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane argued) was inevitable and necessary. As John said when Walt Disney Studios asked that he and his husband tone down their film to allow it a PG-13 rating: “I did not live a PG-13 life-style.”

     What this does to the film in general, however, is to create a structure built on a retrospective of lived events and songs that work against the emotional experiences it attempts to portray. Yes, there are beautiful moments that truly bring tears to your eyes—the moment when visiting his recalcitrant father, now remarried and with two young children, when Mr. Dwight gently picks up and hugs them, as John leaves, something he never did to his first born, Reggie (John's original name); his encounter with his is disgusting mother who claims that his birth caused her to lose her husband and, when he calls her to tell her that he is gay (necessary so he is told so that she might face the press about the issue), her only response is “I knew that hon” and “You will never be able to find love”; and, finally, when, stuffed with drugs and liquor, he attempts to commit suicide by diving into his swimming pool.

        

     Perhaps the very most painful moment is when his very best friend and lyricist Bernie Taupin (Jaimie Bell) temporarily leaves him as John pleads for him to return. Yet, because of its flashback-like structure we know that things will quickly change—after all John is still performing (even if it’s a self-proclaimed final tour) and, as the movie announces just before the credits, he has now been sober for 38 years, found love with his husband David Furnish, and is raising two boys. Along with his great wealth "who could ask for anything more?" Well, John clearly did, and so might we, watching this biopic.

    Fortunately, the infectious performances of the mostly singing cast, particularly Taron Egerton, winner of the Golden Globe’s Award for best actor in a musical—and who unlike Rami Malick in Bohemian Rhapsody does not lip-sync his songs—makes this film a joy to behold. From the moment of John’s first big break-through at Los Angeles’ Troubadour night club, where the performer almost literally defied gravity while playing the piano and singing with rock singers such as Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills & Nash (all three) and others in the attendance, anyone who loves music cannot help but enjoy the film, despite the narrative interruptions. Indeed, with songs such as “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” “Your Song,” and “Rocket Man,” who needs a back story? John’s music set to Taupin’s hot-house lyrics tells its own story of John’s desperate need for love and kindness, and his pained suffering for seldom being able to obtain either. 

     As he points out at one point in the movie, even his dearest friend abandoned him after John’s stunning Troubadour concert for a woman he picked up at Ma Cass’s party. It is clearly one thing to be celebrated on the stage, and quite another to be cared for at a party which he seems so desperately alone in the strange world of early 1970s Los Angeles.

       It is almost as if, having left the stage and when the lights have gone down, the man Elton John no longer existed, but returned to the unloved boy of his childhood. His handsome agent John Reid (Richard Madden), who temporarily lit up John’s life (the cliché is purposeful), basically used him as a money-making machine, having forced John into lifetime contracts and abusing him by demanding he perform impossibly large venues week after week. It is only when the needy boy still alive in this adult man can temporarily walk away from it all and seek psychological help that he can again move forward. As he tells the institute counselor, he has probably tried every drug in existence, and, one might add, drunk every liquor available.

      Strangely, for all this film’s honesty about his sexuality, it does not appear that John, unlike Mercury, had sex with every man he met, perhaps saving his life. Surely, he recognized this, working thoroughly with his AIDs charity. But it is clear from this film that the now 72-year-old (my age as of last week) has had to battle hard to get where he now is, stumbling like most human beings, through an obviously conflicted life to get there. His story might almost be titled what D. H. Lawrence named his book of poems, Look, We Have Come Through!

 

Los Angeles, June 5, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2019)