José Oldenburg | Sing / 2025

the fan

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Oldenburg (screenwriter and director) Sing / 2025 [8 minutes]

 

A street performer (José Oldenburg) in New York City has just performed a song on a subway platform, observing a leather jacketed man with a mohawk haircut across the tracks. Riding back to his stop he notices the same fellow (Pedro Elias) seemingly having caught the same train. When the singer gets off at his stop, the other trains him down the street, the singer stopping in his tracks, and turning to ask him “Excuse me, are you following me?”

    Instead of simply replying in the negative, the man in the leather jacket asks, “Do you want me to be following you?”

    “No, replies José, “What kind of question is that?”

    “Then I’m not following you,” responds the apparent stalker.

    But the singer needs some proof, demanding his address, and finally, just as oddly, demands he provide some ID, all of which Mr. Mohawk is only to read to provide.

    “Are you always this tense?” the stranger queries him.

    “Pretty much so,” José admits.

    “Well, if you want me to be chasing you, then I’m chasing you. If not, then I’m just walking home.”

    What else is there to do but to take the follower home, kiss him, and make him at home.

    Later, after their kissing session, the leather boy asks him to sing something, but José suggests, rather shyly for a street performer, that he gets nervous.

    But finally convinced, the singer takes out his guitar and sings, mostly in Spanish:

 

    “I want you to say that you will listen

      That only for now you’ll be quiet

      I’m scared, I see you packed your things

      It’s between you and I [sic], a tale of two

      Who cares what they say, please

      Don’t leave me on my own…”

 

    The singer breaks off there.

    The next morning José wakes up to an empty bed. But in the kitchen the mohawk man is fixing eggs, brewing coffee. He has not run off into the night.

     As they sit on the stoop after breakfast, the leather boy asks him he he’s been to a local performance spot, insisting that he try out his song there.

     But the singer seemingly refuses, remaining home to try to complete the song he sang the previous evening, writing lyrics down, but still happy with his own performance. Frustrated, he takes and nap. But then dresses, picks up his guitar, and again catches the subway.

    We then see him singing a song in a small club, perhaps the place where the mohawk friend had suggested, since he is in the audience. Frankly, it’s not a very remarkable performance, but the audience seems pleased, and afterwards, the leather boy walks him a ways, asking how the performance felt.

     Our singer is happy that at least he gave it a try. “It worked out,” concludes our mohawk man.

    What this very amateur but basically pleasant film is trying to say, I have utterly no idea. Perhaps, that you have to take chances? That the mean New York City streets are actually filled—as Judy Holiday convinces Dean Martin in the film musical The Bells Are Ringing (1960)—with very nice people who just need someone to dare to say “hello”? That it’s good sometimes to be followed home—just as the starving hero, Pontus, of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, retold in the 1966 film by Henning Carlsen, follows a woman he dubs a woman he names Ylajali? That you can’t judge a man by the way he looks and dresses?

    If nothing else, we’ve discovered through the rather silly little ditty that José sings that he is lonely, and that he wants someone to come home with him and stay, just as the man with the mohawk haircut as done. Maybe he’ll come and spend the night again with the singer, who will wake up to such a breakfast already prepared. It could be that the moral of this tale is simply that you have to sing for your supper—or breakfast, or love.

    This work might make a nice double feature with the short Audition film of 2015 by Adam Tyree.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

Lawrence Johnston | Night Out / 1989

monster of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lawrence Johnston (screenwriter and director) Night Out / 1989

 

Years before gay marriage, Australian director Lawrence Johnston’s film revealed that monogamous gay couples can live in as conventionally restrictive and deadening relationships as heterosexuals. In fact, if Johnston’s Night Out can be believed—a work I’d argue is as accurate about certain kinds of gay relationships as possible—it can be even worse.

     The film begins with Steve’s (David Bonney) birthday, a few friends gathered with his lover Tony (Colin Batrouney) in their house to celebrate. It is apparent from the first scene in the movie, where Tony intensely kisses Steve in the kitchen, that the couple are very much in love, even Steve admitting to a friend as he enters the other room that “I’m loved.”

     That same evening, however, Steve is heading off on a business trip for several days, suggesting that he’ll just get a taxi to the airport, while Tony insists that he drive him. But even as they say their goodbyes at the drop-off stand, we sense that Steve is uncomfortable about publicly expressing his love as he keeps pushing away his lover as he attempts to kiss him goodbye, finally breaking away so that he doesn’t miss his plane. Although this registers even on first seeing this work, one chalks it up to the times, when two gay men kissing in public was still not a common site, and made many of that and earlier generations somewhat uncomfortable. And with good reason; AIDS had quickly made gay men over into a new generation of freaks and monsters who some people feared carried disease that could spread even by sharing the same room, the same air.

     But there is a sense of dissatisfaction and loneliness about Tony, as, after returning home, he quickly dresses and goes out to a local bar for a few drinks. On his way home, however, he stops at what appears to be a series of semi-closed off spaces, perhaps part of the public bathrooms or just a sea-wall near the ocean, and there is fucked by a hot young man (John Brumpton). Their encounter is one of the hottest gay sexual scenes of 1980s filmmaking.

     Just as they finish up, however, they are attacked by a group of brutal gay-bangers, who corner Tony and beat him brutally. They also take him to automatic bank-teller, threatening him with further mutilation by knifepoint he doesn’t reveal his code. Tony finally does, but the machine seems to be out of order. And they throw him out of the car, stomping on his body again before speeding off. He spends most the of the night passed out on the streets and wakes up in a hospital, one of their friends from the night before visiting him.

     Tony is badly hurt, with deep cuts on both sides of his face, and serious wounds to his chest and neck. But his major concern is that Steve should not discover what he has done to end up in this situation. And when Steve returns, worried about his lover’s condition, Tony tells him that he’s simply been mugged on his way to a local grocer, and they’ve stolen his billfold and half-beaten him to death.

     But somehow, despite how clearly Tony is still suffering, Steve holds back his disbelief, continuing to make sense of the event. And when, a day or so, latter, the man with whom Tony had sex shows up to return his discovered billfold, it’s clear to Steve that his lover his not telling him the full story.

     When finally Tony reveals the truth, their relationship changes radically as Steve suddenly feels, somewhat rightfully, that he has been betrayed through Tony’s lies. But there is also a sense, as Tony himself puts it, as his having deserved the beatings and near-death experience he encountered. And Tony suddenly realizes that the intense love he has felt for Steve, the repeated intense kissing sessions have come primarily from him, that perhaps he has overwhelmed the other in a relationship that Steve has not totally wanted. It is suddenly as if all this time Tony realizes that he has been, a least symbolically, raping his friend. Steve even admits that he has difficultly expressing his feelings, that love as an act is not easy for him.

       What this dark drama begins to reveal is that Steve has never been the sexual being, the sensual gay lover that Tony as tried to make him out to be. His passiveness, his standoffishness, and even, one might describe, his prudishness reveals he is perhaps still not totally comfortable as a gay individual.

       The film ends with Steve taking off into the night on bicycle, following the same path his lover must have taken as he found his late-night partner who offered him what he cannot. There is much brooding and long determination of whether he can return to Tony or not. But the more terrifying scene is when the gaunt, almost Frankensteinian individual Tony has become turns his pale face in a silhouette for the camera: we suddenly know that the relationship is over, his physical needs having overpowered what his partner has been capable of. He has become the monster of his lover’s worst fears.

        This film, which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, is perhaps one of the most significant gay dramas of the period, with also an incredible score which includes Liza Minelli singing Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind,” and songs by the Pet Shop Boys.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

William Friedkin | The Birthday Party / 1968

belle of the ball 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter (screenplay, based on his stage play), William Friedkin (director) The Birthday Party / 1968

 

It’s interesting that Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was written at about the same time that Günter Grass’ novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) was being composed,* for the Pinter play features a character—a kind of surly man-boy figure, Stanley, who is treated almost as a child by his dotty landlady, Meg—who, like Grass’ man-child Oskar Matzerath, is given a tin drum—an absurd birthday gift from Meg, who claims, with her usual illogic, to have chosen it because the former piano player didn’t have a piano. And somewhat like Grass’ fiction about the infantilization of an entire populace, Pinter’s play, as I read it, suggests that if you accost any down-in-the-heels Brit with issues having to do with the Irish and the Jews he will quickly turn into a driveling idiot unable to communicate in any way other than a newborn’s babel.

    In the play these two quite maddeningly “dilemmas” arrive to face the down-and-out ordinary English bloke in the form of two frightening boarders, Goldberg and McCann, who enter the filthy seas-side home of Meg and Petey in order to menace and verbally torture the spiritually sour, somewhat intellectually challenged Stanely by ripping up columns of the local newspaper and reconfiguring them into unreadable pillars of words and images and peppering him with inane questions and meaningless riddles such as “What have you done with your wife?” and “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

     A birthday party for Stanley—who insists it is not his birthday—follows, where he, the near “bonkers” Meg, and the sex-starved Lulu are plied with plenty of booze and temporarily blinded by the villains who switch off the lights, insist that the celebrants play “blind-man’s-buff,” and, finally, destroy Stanley’s glasses. The very process, it appears, of being forced to celebrate with such enigmatic forces sends Stanley over the edge—a bit like Tennessee Willaims’ sexually abused Blanche DuBois—as he is bundled off, presumably to bedlam if not to his death.

     Ten years after its London premiere—a production which apparently so confused and scandalized the British public that it closed after only 8 performances—US filmmaker William Friedkin determined to film the work.

     The result is a fascinating movie that, with regard to the actors’ ability to convey Pinter’s stunning turns of language and logic, proceeds quite excellently. Dady Nichols as Meg and Roger Shaw as Stanley are particularly brilliant, and, as the two would-be villains close in upon their confused and unsuspecting prey, Patrick McGee as McCann and Syndey Tafler as Goldberg show of their thespian talents as well.

     To the complaint of some critics, that the work is not cinematic enough, I would argue that Friedkin has done a credible job portraying the sense of increasing claustrophobia with his camera jumpily cutting across the surfaces of the filthily cramped rooms, particularly the kitchen and living room where most of the action takes place. Although there are some references, as in Joseph Losey’s The Servant, the fun-house possibilities of mirrored images, for the most part Friedkin relies more on the fitful creak of his seemingly held-hand camera.

     The central problem with the Friedkin production is perhaps that it is too artsy, particularly in its extended scenes during the enforced black-outs, wherein it appears that Friedkin determined to up the ante by briefly imitating Stan Brakhage and other film experimenters. Friedkin’s genious has always been his ability to take slightly exploitive and poorly written works of pop literature and turn them into works of higher art, as in The Night They Raided Minsky’s, The Exorcist, The French Connection, and To Live and Die in L.A. By attempting to transform an art-house classic work such as Pinter’s play into a kind of formal experiment in cinematic language he distracts from the most important thing that the playwright’s work offers: the spoken word, which Pinter deliciously tortures in this work even more than his criminal one-night boarders intimidate their pre-determined prey.

    If the denizens of this nightmare flop-house cannot cope with the realities of their world, it is because they have no language in which to express it. While Petey shouts out to the devasted Stanley as they take him away, “Don’t let them tell you what to do,” we know that that is precisely the problem with Stanley, Meg, and Petey himself; their cliché-ridden language utterly determines how they behave and what they do. Their identities are limited by their delusions of themselves, the play ending with the truly blinded Meg (who does not even know that her beloved man-child has been taken from her life) suggesting to Petey that during the drunken melee of her last evening, “I was the belle of the ball…I know I was.”

 

*The Birthday Party premiered in 1957, while Grass’ novel was published in 1959 and translated into English in 1961.

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).

Leo Mena | Putito / 2014

the day the fun stops

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Carlos Henríquez (screenplay), Leo Mena (director) Putito / 2014 [4 minutes]

 

Leo Mena’s very short film Putito almost reads like an ad for becoming a male prostitute. The young Chilean street hustler of this film castigates his mother for arguing that he should think of the future and sacrifice.

    She doesn’t like the fact that my job is so easy, he argues, doing something he enjoys and gives so much pleasure. A being paid for it as well!

  Throughout his short monologue we see our “Putito,” José Carlos Henríquez, walking through the streets or taking the subway or bus, sometimes with his friend El Marquez, on his way to and from various appointments where he has sex and sometimes shares drugs.

  Most of this work is filmed in garish reds; there are club dances, drugs, and several images of cocks coming inside and out of our boy whore.

  What harm he is doing, the Putito begs to know? His mother wants him to crawl up upon the cross of sacrifice, while he is simply enjoying life. What could be wrong with that?

   The deepest this little film gets is forcing the viewer to respond to that question, in some respects a truly profound one offered up by almost every young person who can’t imagine that there might come a day when the fun stops.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).