Camila Jiménez Villa | Tijereto (Flycatcher) / 2011

a romantic weekend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Camila Jiménez Villa (screenwriter and director) Tijereto (Flycatcher) / 2011 [21 minutes]

 

The beautifully visualized work by Columbian director Camila Jiménez Villa is, on the surface, a sort of quiet puzzle of a movie.

     Natalia (Jimena Duran) and Daniel (Nicolás Cancino) have sub-rented a room in a house where a writer Marlon (Nelson Camayo) has been writing for the six months. Indeed, that seems to be nearly all the couple, who plan to spend only a romantic weekend there, know about him. Daniel finds it strange, to be alone on an island all that time without any companionship, and is seemingly wary about him during most of their stay.

     We watch the couple as the calmly boat into the island with Marlon greeting them and briefly showing them around the place, pointing out their bedroom, the bathroom where he warns them that water is scarce, before he asks them basically to hold down any noise, presumably since he will be working on his book, of which we learn nothing.

     Nearly the entire movie, in fact, seems to be fairly placid. Natalia and Daniel go to the beach, where Natalia goes in for a swim, tossing off her swimming top and tossing it back to him, before him she does the same the bottom of her bikini—very much to the consternation of Daniel. Nothing untoward happens.

     At dinner, Daniel seems to be cooking, but Marlon quickly comes to assist him, seemingly taking over the preparation of the meal, grabbing just a puff of Daniel’s cigarette as the couple head off to bed, leaving him the rest of the smoke. We see the couple snuggled up later in their bed.

     The next morning Natalia rises early, camera in hand, stopping by Marlon’s room, the door just slightly ajar, to take a picture of him as he lays asleep, his naked ass free of the cover.

 

     She then moves outdoors and continues to take photographs. A little later, as she swims once more out toward a large house on a neighboring land mass, she encounters Marlon, who explains he’s been fishing but has been unable to catch anything.   

     She jokes that he has “vampire” teeth, he playing along by asking if she hadn’t noticed that there are no mirrors on the island.

    Later they play a game of Jenga, Marlon cleverly removing one of the lower blocks and placing it on top, with Natalia dexterously following. Daniel topples the tower.

      Marlon suggests another round, but Daniel argues that after swimming he’s tired and retires, while Natalia stays up, talking to their host, trying to get him to tell the story of what he’s writing without success.

      Suddenly, he leans toward and kisses her. The tension between the two is obvious, and the kiss is returned.

      In the morning while rubbing her back, Daniel notices a scratch on her shoulder which he asks about. For a long while, she says nothing, but sits up, gradually muttering something about “last night,” and finally after a great deal of coaxing and worry on Daniel’s part, admitting that she and Marlon “hooked up.” Daniel is still unclear what that means; did she kiss him or fuck him? She doesn’t reply, but only asks him to forgive her.

      Furious, Daniel stands, going on the search for Marlon who he finds in the ocean, quite near the shore. He shoves and pushes him, attempting to slug him, Marlon fighting back. Quickly, however, the warfare turns into a kiss, Marlon grabbing Daniel’s cock through his underpants. There is a pause and a brief renewal of the kisses before Daniel pushes away, the two men in the next frame seen sitting a short distance from each other on the beach.

     In the next frame, the couple are quietly packing, a strange silence having overcome them. It appears they are both preparing to leave, yet they appear at odds, Natalia asking, “She we go?” and when she receives no answer, following up with, “Well, I’m going to start heading out then.” It seems almost as if she were leaving without her former lover.

    But Daniel also is seen leaving soon after, picking up a fallen Jenga block and putting it on the table, before joining Natalia at the waiting boat.

     The trip away from the island is made in complete silence, with Daniel finally taking out a cigarette and trying, without success to light it. Natalia attempts to help cover his cupped hand to prevent the wind from putting out the fire, but only when Daniel turns away, back toward island, does the fag catch afire.

     Clearly, both Natalia and Daniel have found out something about themselves, Natalia perhaps that she is not as happy with Daniel as she imagined she was, and Daniel that perhaps he is far more interested in men than he ever before imagined, and is most intrigued by Marlon in particular.

     Has Marlon simply had sex with Natalia in order to wake up Daniel and, perhaps, catch him? Or is the island itself a sort of trap for those of any sex, with Marlon being a kind of loner vampire ready to prey on any visitor who sets foot on Tijereto—the name also of a species related to kingbirds, who inhabit South America and dine mostly on insects and fruit?

     Jiménez Villa’s work does not explain motives, but simply shows a series of human acts of sexual consequence. Make of it what you will. What we do know is that Natalia and Daniel will never quite be the same placid heterosexual couple again. If nothing else, the couple has had a “romantic weekend,” just not of the kind they had expected.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

Michael Landry | Nice to Meet You / 2020

a gay film with only heterosexual kisses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kyle Clements, Brandon Michael Haynes, and Michael Landry (screenplay), Michael Landry (director) Nice to Meet You / 2020 [11 minutes]

 

If you are interested in seeing what a gay movie looks like with only a formerly heterosexual couple, then you should immediately switch on your computer to watch Michael Landry’s short film, Nice to Meet You from 2021.

    Here the formerly married couple, the Michaels, Sarah (Teri Wyble) and Grayson (Michael King) meet up at Bear’s (Hosea DeMarzino) pub to sign their final divorce papers.

    When Bear, greeting them, exclaims that it has been a long time since he’s seen them, asking if Sarah is pregnant yet, she responds, with the kind of perky, sarcastic delivery that Julia Roberts is famous for: “We actually started sleeping with other people, well one of us has.”

    “Cool, cool,” says Bear, as Sarah orders up a couple of shots of whiskey, Bear vaguely continuing, “My condolences, congratulations….”

     They down their shots, she “for old times sake,” he stating “It feels weird doing this in our old place.”

      As they begin to play pool, she finally makes the first jab, asking “So, how is he?” Grayson hitting back with “You want some foreplay first,” she responding, “Oh, foreplay, you know what that is?”

      Clearly this is not going to be a very pleasant meeting, since it’s is now obvious that Grayson has left Sarah having discovered that he is gay.

       Perhaps the deepest dig of “the dagger,” as Sarah herself describes it, is the question of whether or not the mysterious “he” makes her ex-husband happy. And after several more shots at the pool table and a few more jabs, he casually comments “He does.”

      Much of the oddly off-kilter film consists of remembered moments of the couple’s love life, including sex scenes that usually in a gay film would feature the gay couple.

      In a sense these love scenes both mitigate the anger she feels and also explain it. The heart of her anger might be said to rest in the following early banter:

 

      Sarah: Well, it hasn’t even been a year yet and you have a boyfriend.

      Grayson: And who long was I supposed to wait?

      Sarah: What’s the self-life on misery? I’ll let you know when I find out.

      Grayson: And when will that be?

      Sarah: When I stop feeling like a failure.”

    That is, indeed, the heart of this sad little tale, that just as parents blame themselves for they child “becoming” gay, so too do wives, who felt themselves in temporarily loving company, feel somehow that they are responsible for their husband’s discovery of his sexuality.

     Throughout these essays, I have often blamed the gay husbands who knowing that they were gay convinced themselves that they could resolve their sexual confusion through marriage, or simply not wanting to face their own conflicted feelings bowed to the forces of heterosexual conventionality. But in this film, the gay male who has escaped the hetero marital bonds explains that sometimes the male simply can’t even place themselves properly in their worlds. Grayson tells Sarah:

 

      “My entire life, I felt wrong and broken like I didn’t have a place in this world. And then, this one night I met this brilliant ambitious force of nature.”

     He is speaking of course of Sarah, who made him feel for the first time in his life that he was truly seen, providing him with the thing he had never had, validation.

     What we forget, as Gertrude Stein puts it in The Mother of Us All, “men are selfish,” but they are also “such poor things,” who need the help, sometimes, of women to make them feel alive. As young boys they have often so delimited in their perceptions of the world through their various interchanges of sloppy camaraderie and competition (usually played out formally in sports) that it is only a member of the female gender who can open up other possibilities of behavior to them. At least, so conventionally raised men believe, particularly if they feel sexual and social pulls that are deemed unnatural in their closed-off society.

     As Grayson admits, his ex-wife finally made him feel worthy of love.

     But those other “pulls,” the final realization of who such men really are eventually forces them to make a decision to either pretend to remain in what now becomes a failed marriage—accompanied by lies and cheating as they attempt to find momentary fulfillment with men—or a painful rupture such as has occurred in this short film.

     Yet the devastation for the wife is nicely summarized by Sarah, who admits she is, after all, happy for her husband. “You get to start a new life. I have to start a new life.”

      But here they are, having despite their beautiful memories, anger, resentment, having to sign the divorce agreement in a bar where they once shared happier times.

      And in this movie we see something that films such as Making Love (1982) doesn’t quite fully reveal, how in the freedom of discovering a new self, the divorced husband and his now aggrieved wife also have to say goodbye to someone they truly loved.

 

     It’s just too bad that they couldn’t have introduced themselves to one another at their first encounter with the full truth and honesty that they can at the end of their relationship. But then, there would have been no relationship, no memories of the love that once existed.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

Lindsay Anderson | if…. / 1968

a society needing to die

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Sherwin (screenplay, based on a story by David Sherwin and John Howlett), Lindsay Anderson (director) if…. / 1968

 

I first saw Lindsay Anderson’s Palme d’Or-winning film upon its original release in 1968, I guess even before Howard and I met. Once again, I don’t think I completely comprehended its full sense of satire as I did this time around; but I do remember my curiosity (along with some excitement) about the predatory sexual behavior that the sixth form (final year) students imposed upon the younger boys, the “scum,” as they describe them. Now I recognize it for what it then represented: pure pedophilia.

      The British private school system which Anderson portrays is what I have always disliked about the English. The social and psychological hierarchies in this fictional “College” is based, in part, on those institutions of the society at large. The older torture the young, and all torture the weaker and the fresh. Indeed, we see this horror played out from the eyes of a young innocent, Jute (Sean Bury), who on the first day of the new term cannot even find out where he is to sleep, and needs to be taught by his elders how to address all of the often brutal seniors, and faculty.

      US high schools also embrace some of these bullying tactics, but if you’re clever and skittish as I was, you might escape them. But in a nightmare world where any moment the “Whips,” seniors and Housemasters represented most horribly by Robert Swann as Rowntree and Arthur Lowe as the Housemaster, along with several others who regularly bugger the beautiful young boys. It is made quite clear that if you are a good-looking young boy in this school you will eventually, and maybe often, be forced into the beds of the seniors, housemasters, and even faculty.

     This is a breeding ground, as so very many British films have made clear, of homosexual behavior that—given the British laws of the day—one will later have to deny. One need only go back to E. M. Forster’s Maurice or Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to perceive how prevalent this was. If you lock up hundreds of testosterone-heavy boys together, engaging them in a violent prison-like existence, what else might you expect?

      The alternative to this is represented most clearly by the smirking, cynical, and dismissive Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and his small gang of friends, Wallace (Richard Warwick) and Johnny Knightly (David Wood), including a local female pub-worker (Christine Noonan)—although even Wallace has his eyes on the young boys, particularly the lovely Bobby Phillips (Rupert Webster), whom we later see laying in his bed with Wallace’s arm around his shoulder.

       On a day of escape (requiring permission from the elders), Travis and Knightly steal a new motorcycle, rushing out into a neighboring village where they meet the Noonan character, where Travis imagines, in a surrealist-like encounter, that the pub-worker appears nude, a scene which, in order to portray, given the British censors, Anderson had to scrub away the genitals of all the boys in the shower scenes at the school. The misogyny and hypocrisy at the heart of this film, were played out as well by the English authorities.

      A bit like Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite—Anderson admits the influence of this 1933 film, and even showed it to his writers, David Sherwin and John Howlett—yet far more violently, Travis and his small gang, uncovering a secret trove of weapons in this militaristically dominated school, turn them upon faculty, “Whips,” and family members equally on the College’s Founders’ Day celebration, executing many of their torturer’s over the years. The establishment is brought down, a least temporarily, by the outsiders.

     Instead of simple childhood rebellion, however, Anderson’s film, I presume is based on the Rudyard Kipling poem of faith a belief, “If,” whose two first stanzas reveal the crux of his vision:

 

If you can keep your head when all about you  

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,  

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;  

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;  

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;  

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;  

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

 

 

     Yet, we know that even today the world Boris Johnson and the Brexiters present are merely another representation of the locked-up world which Anderson was satirizing. The faith of Kipling’s poem has been lost in the 21st Century world. The hate/love relationship with the world and their own people continues, which Anderson’s film presciently shows by its constant transition from a realist-constituted black-and-white and the more contemporary color.

     Bobby Phillips, himself, is utterly enchanted by the spectacularly-gifted gymnast Wallace so much so that he quite literally falls into a kind of heat, forcing him to remove his sweater. Yet surely, he will later be punished by the same society for his youthful love, demanding that he find a woman to replace those pangs of young homosexuality, just as Maurice was abandoned by his Clive Durham and Charles Ryder is later ignored by his lover Sebastian. Director Lindsay Anderson seems to suggest this kind of society needs to die.

    Anderson himself, however, seems to have been a repressed gay man, unable to even live up to Kipling’s Victorian-based values. As Malcolm McDowell wrote, after the director’s death:

“I know that he was in love with Richard Harris the star of Anderson's first feature, This Sporting Life. I am sure that it was the same with me and Albert Finney and the rest. It wasn't a physical thing. But I suppose he always fell in love with his leading men. He would always pick someone who was unattainable because he [the actor] was heterosexual.”

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2020).

 

 

Kenneth Anger | Kustom Kar Kommandos / 1965

two narcissi starring into a pool of metallic paint

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kenneth Anger (director) Kustom Kar Kommandos / 1965

 

Kenneth Anger’s 3.23-minute short from 1965, Kustom Kar Kommandos, is camp personified. Against the perfectly pink backdrop two handsome early 60s greasers, one in baby-blue jeans and shirt, the other all in white, lean over a custom-made car, starring into its glaringly shining surface and glistening engine parts as if, like two Narcissi, they were studying the beauty of their own faces more than the gears and pistons of the awesome machine before them.

     The boy in white suddenly disappears as if blueboy’s boyfriend had suddenly been displaced by the duties required in keep up this perfect machine. Perhaps the white buff that looks more like an angora sweater instead a cleaning chamois (or as my father used call it, “shammy,”) has replaced him. The boy in blue (Sandy Trent; did Anger himself bestow that so appropriate name upon the actor?), moves so gently and carefully across the blindingly bright rust-red paint, meanwhile, that he appears almost terrified to even touch the engine of his creation.

     Anger here is obviously carrying the metaphor of the American automobile being an extension of its owner’s cock to the limits. In his forward leaning and bending ministrations, the languid act accompanied by the 1955 hit song “Dream Lover,” sung by The Paris Sisters—

 

              Every night I hope and pray

              A dream lover will come my way

              A boy to hold in my arms

              And know the magic of his charms

 

              Because I want a boy to call my own

              I want a dream lover

              So I don't have to dream alone—

 

might as well be a straight-forward act of masturbation, even if we know that nothing at all is “straight” about our denim-jeaned hero. The young mechanical genius peers into the row of small,  soda-fountain-sized seats with lust in his eyes. Clearly the lover of his dreams sits before him, ready to spin him away to paradise.

     As if finally willing to submit he cautiously sits down in the driver’s seat, the camera following his extended legs and crotch with homoerotic pleasure as he jingles his lover’s gears in anticipation before the engine comes to growling roar and the film’s end.

     Obviously, it must mean something that this Kustom Kar looks as if, before its remarkable transformation, it had once been a hearse.

     The Ford Foundation granted Anger $10,000 for the production of this film. But obviously he spent so much on the Kar and the technicolor lighting that he only had enough left for 3 minutes of what was to have been a feature-length film focusing on the role of cars as fetish objects among young American males. Yet, I can’t imagine that anything more might have been said, unless the boy in white were brought back just in time for two to embark upon a road trip.

 

Los Angeles, March 6, 2021

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