Rodrigo Almeida | Como Era Gostoso Meu Cafuçu (How Tasty Was My Little Cafuçu) / 2015

how they lost it at the movies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rodrigo Almeida (screenwriter and director) Como Era Gostoso Meu Cafuçu (How Tasty Was My Little Cafuçu) / 2015 [14 minutes]

 

Two Brazilian queers are on their way to a party hosted by “some rich fag,” reports the one first (Jean Santos) to his friend (Thiago Merces). There’s food, drinks, and maybe some hookups with the other partygoers, but the friend is a bit skeptical since he’s afraid he won’t know anyone there. “Chill out,” says the guide, “Chill, Miss Honey. You’re already there, all dressed up, mug beat up.” Besides, he reports, evidently from a vast experience, “Those rich queens aren’t scary. Barking bitches never bite.” This entire conversation occurs while screen in black, the opening scene resulting in an explosion of bright color.

    This piece is hard to describe since it’s all about the Portuguese slang and street language of these two street boys as they wait by a bus stop, talking about their sexual conquests along with outrageous statements about their own queer culture and the heterosexual culture at large. A few select quotes will have to provide the sense of their discussion. All you need to know is that a “cafuçu” is a Portuguese gay slang term meaning a strong man, often ugly or poor, but still with a good body ready for sex. A “pedreiro cafuçu,” for example means a handsome, sexy bricklayer.

   

        “There was this time I would go to this gas station nearby with a friend. We would stay there just staring at the cafuçus playing hot or not.”

        “Whenever the bus collector came asking for the fare, I would picture his cock. My uncle would show up, I’d picture his cock. If it was large, small, medium, big head, bushy.”

         “They’re all homophobes, you know? Italians are all homophobes.”

         “This reminds me of this married cafuçu I used to hook up with.”

         “All that repression, all that fear, the lies…”

         “Shit will get real when they come up with a bomb that only kills certain types of people. Like, a bomb for the gays, a bomb for the straight, a bomb for women. One that only killed rich people would be sickening. Can you imagine? One that only kills politicians and evangelical Christians would be wonderful. The born again, all cray cray running away from the bomb.”

     Their bus arrives and they’re off to the “Sausage party,” the sign on a small billboard reading as they enter: “hoje festinha de arromba.”

     Once at the party the two continue to talk pretty much in the same matter, sharing stories, filled with outrageous camp terms, about how they were approached by various cafuçus or how in the midst of everything they were attacked on the run. The quieter and far more beautiful of the two of them spots a tough boy he once had sex with, but when the camera pans over there is simply a slim boy in glasses dancing all by himself.

   They drink heavily in the richly colored neon-lit room, suddenly looking out of the city, even commenting on the beautiful view, the other responding, “Yeah, but this music sucks.” He gets up and changes the record to a “brega” song—in this case about a female lover who attends the wedding of her previous boyfriend to fight for him—as they continue to relate their various past sexual encounters, their dreamboys, their fantastic past adventures.

 

    But soon it’s morning and time to leave, and they stroll down the avenue back home continuing in the same manner, recalling the good booze, the bubbly champagne and in their campy conversation recounting experiences with doormen, a secret boy across the room, and others they had supposedly at the party they just attended.

     Once again their pass the little building where a man is now changing the title on the signboard to the words “glans gang,” and for a moment the screen goes black, coming up again with a man with a rope around his neck and a leather mouth-and-face gag. On the side stand our friends, now naked except for high heels, the tall, more handsome of them with a whip in hand.

     As if by this time we hadn’t guessed, the little place they entered for the party, now an S&M den is a gay movie theater where they live out their imaginary sexual lives, which spills over to their daily encounters as they walk the streets, stand for busses, and wait out their lives in a world that has no room for them.

    Even though the shorter one insists he won’t go back to any parties there again, we know that these two effeminate gay men have no where else to go in the favela world in which they live. The world of these truly cheesy gay films are their only way into a fantasy world that they create for themselves.

   But there were moments at the “party,” when the camera caught the profiles of these two men that I will always remember, when these coarse-speaking queers became, just for a moment, absolutely beautiful.

       

*A brega song is a popular musical style in Brazil wherein the subject is about a dramatic encounter about love. The genre is also described as a “struggle song,” in which the romanticism approaches tacky or disgustingly outrageous behavior.

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2025

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

       

Yudho Aditya | Pipe Dream / 2015

sizing up the opposite sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Max Rifkind-Barron (screenplay), Yudho Aditya (director) Pipe Dream / 2015 [15 minutes]

 

Peter Epstein-Takahashi (Eric Tabach) is one of those contemporary boys you hear about who is lucky to have two dads. Like most of the two-dad, two-mom kids—at least those presented in such gay films—Peter is heterosexual, and, in this case, although he is a clumsy, slightly confused kid, he has a girl, Lucille Stone (Elise Metcalf) who is attracted him and makes an appointment so that they can meet up, presumably to have sex.

    Like most girls, she is far more experienced than her potential boyfriend and is ready to proceed with sex, meeting up with him in the bathroom and even texting him: “Can’t wait to finally unwrap your candy.” Moreover, she has other male admirers, most notably the handsome jock, Ethan James (Zachary Roozen) who can’t comprehend why she would be interested in Peter when she could have him; after all he’s running for Homecoming King. But Lucille makes it quite clear that she’s not at all interested in Ethan, confiding to Peter that not only does she dislike Ethan but he has a very small…endowment, or was Peter nervously repeats back, “Ethan has a small snake?”

   Pete’s fathers, Charlie Epstein (Zachary Steinback) and Charles Takahashi (Vic Chao), perceiving that he’s now receiving regular texts from his girlfriend, whose name they only vaguely know, probe him, “Honey, is she your special…,” no Peter insists, they’re not dating, the other Charles interrupting to say, “Sweetheart, we get it….You want to get it on, no strings attached?” “That’s fine,” both men concur. The Charlies are delighted that their son has found a girlfriend, and being liberal gay men they want him to know that they are completely open to his experimenting with sex—as long as he wears a condom.

   Yet in the very next moment they’re into their own youthful memories about going bareback in 1985 when leather was in, Charles recalling, “You tied me down….” Peter is a little grossed out.

   Later, they offer him up a gift of an entire box of gay friendly colored rubbers.

   But Peter’s problem is that he is not at all sure he’s got the proper penis size to put into a condom with a girl like Lucille. In the silence of his room he enters a gay porn site just to check out the size of cocks—where, of course, every penis is as large as they get; not at all reassuring to a young teenager. What’s even worse is Dad Charlie E enters his room unannounced to bring him a sandwich, backing out immediately when he sees that what that his son is entertaining himself, but a little worried now that Peter hasn’t told them everything. “Is there something you want to discuss?” he asks, perceiving that his son has been visiting a gay porn site.

    Things quickly escalate when Peter gets up the courage to visit a porn shop where he buys a vacuum pump that is touted as enlarging one’s penis. Forgetting about his date with Lucille, he sneaks back into his room to try it out, but at that very moment she shows up at the front door, with one of the Charlies answering it and sending up to his room, announcing “Peter your nice ‘not girlfriend’s’ here.”

     The poor boy, penis still in the pump, quickly wraps a blanket around himself and immediately begins to apologize that he has an exam to study for and a SAT test to prep for and….. She offers in every case to help. What can he do but insist, twice, that he works better “alone.” In anger, she turns to go, he following her trying to explain that she doesn’t understand, she, now downstairs, demanding that he make her understand. “We planned this, I was supposed to come over,” she argues.

     When she turns to go again, he calls after her, calling her, to his fathers’ shock, “a slut.” Now by the door, she opens it, reporting “Your ‘not girlfriend’s’ leaving.”

      Charles T calls out “That was fucked,” the other Charlie scolding his husband to watch his language. And on they go like any gay couple is likely to do until finally their son demands they both shut out.

      Charlies claims to know what is going on, explain to his lover that he caught Pete jacking off to gay porn yesterday. But finally, their son denies he was jacking off, explaining it wasn’t gay, that it wasn’t even porn. But the friendly fathers again make things worse, responding “It’s okay. We accept you for you.”

      “I’m not gay, okay?”

      Fine, they both agree going back to their magazines.

      But Pete, finally getting up his nerve, begins to stutter: “They’re something, something,” finally just dropping the blanket to display his cock caught in the vacuum tube from which he can’t extract his penis. “Can you help me?” They have no answers, hoping that he has not thrown away the instructions.

      What else can her do the next day but find Lucille, follow her when she attempts to speed away from him, and admit he’s been an insouciant asshole, and what’s more “I’m just like Ethan.”

       She turns back, he continuing, “It’s true. It’s like the state of Rhode Island, a minni mushroom, a hangnail…or a breath mint only it doesn’t small so good, it’s tiny.” He admits that he never thought that someone like her would want to be with someone like him.

      Earlier, in the bathroom, they had been playing a game of creating ridiculously portentous porn films. She now replies: “You know, Insouciant Asshole sounds like the most portentous porn title ever, doesn’t it?” She smiles, walking away, Peter following after.

      This cleverly written short film truly takes us into new LGBTQ territory, where things are no longer centered at all upon the gay couple, but on the straight son who is facing the problems of intelligent, well raised straight boys face the world over, an insecurity of their sexual prowess, and a lack of clues of how to approach the opposite sex. This is finally a gay film that has truly grown up.

     Much like William Brandon Blinn’s 2012 film Without a Mom, which focuses on a male teen also with two fathers, the boy coming home heartbroken over just having broken up with his girlfriend, gay films are finally beginning to move away from the overwhelming feeling about how the heterosexual world has impacted them and beginning to perceive how the LGBTQ community impacts the straight world, how we can be important as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and trans people to the cis heterosexual society in which we live. I have always argued that the straight world needs “us,” the LGBTQ community, perhaps more that we need the dominating straight patriarchally based societies that have generally failed.

     What we offer other than the important element of sexual “difference” is so very important not only to our own sense of worth but to what we can give to the world in general. Even if it’s just helping a young boy remove a vacuum pump from his penis, and rebound into a world where he doesn’t need to worry about his sexual organ’s size, well that’s a small start. From our endless wit to our outsized sense of drama, from our almost inborn feelings of empathy, to our learned experiences of survival we are a community that now needs to begin to contemplate not just how to tell ourselves and others who we are, but truly come out of the closets as citizens of the world who offer perspectives of living most heterosexual people can’t even imagine. But first we have to begin to identify these, from very smallest as in this film and Blinn’s earlier fathers/son dilemma, but to the largest of political and social problems our cultures now face.

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

Rupert Goold | Judy / 2019

the ungluing of hollywood stars

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Edge (screenplay, based on the stage play End of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter), Rupert Goold (director) Judy / 2019

 

Hollywood movie producers and directors love displaying the ungluing of Hollywood stars. Witness Nora Desmond’s slow dance into madness in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the drowning suicidal death of Norman Maine in A Star Is Born, the rise and fall of the Marilyn Monroe-like figure in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1958 film The Goddess. And there are truly dozens of

others, to say nothing of the numerous bio-pics of theater and film writers, lyricists and composers whose lives come apart for various reasons on the screen. It almost seems like the film moguls’ and producers’ fantasy come true, finally gaining the upper hand while they “suffered” in public anonymity.

     Fame and success are gleefully brought down in these Hollywood standards, each performed by quite powerful stars themselves: Gloria Swanson, James Mason, and Kim Stanley. Predictably, you need a star to portray a star, even if all of these remarkable people also seemed to similarly encounter a decline in their careers after playing their larger than life characters.

     Yet, what these three examples had in common is that they showed or at least hinted at (in the case of Norma Desmond) the reasons the stars rose to fame. In each of these films there was an arc, even if just imagined, showing how they had become such legends, which, in turn, made their falls even more tragic.

     Not so in the movie I saw with my husband Howard the other day in celebration of his birthday. Judy, directed by Rupert Goold, simply presumes we all know why Judy Garland is so important, and—except for brief moments of her encounters with Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery), a young somewhat look-alike Mickey Rooney, and her horrific mother, Ethel Gumm (Natasha Powell) constantly feeding her daughter drugs to make her sleep and get her up—we get very few glimpses of how this great legend reached her heights.

     Accordingly, as a script this is a fairly moribund tale, based on Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow (which Howard and I also saw). These are the final months in the life of this amazing singer, focusing on all of her failures: drugs, alcohol, and the worst taste in men that one could imagine, particularly if you are a heterosexual woman desiring normal sex.

     Garland might be said to have chosen men with whom to have affairs and marry that were the very people who helped to bring her down. The list is long: Artie Shaw (who later eloped with Lana Turner), David Rose (who at the time was married to Martha Raye, but whom Garland later married), songwriter Johnny Mercer, and even Orson Welles (married at the time to Rita Hayworth). Her husbands and later lovers, who also included Vincente Minelli, Sidney Luft, Mark Herron, Peter Allen (who later married her daughter, Liza), and Mickey Deans (portrayed in this film by Finn Wittrock)—two of whom were gay or bisexual (Minelli and Allen) and the other three whom she accused of beating her. As her British handler, Rosalyn Wilder, liaison for the English performances Garland made at Talk of the Town—a figure played by Jessie Buckley in the film—described Garland’s death at the young age of 47:

 

“And to found like that [dead from a drug overdose] by that ghastly Mickey Deans is just awful. We’ve had people here who have not been well, but that was a big star and we could see how badly Mickey Deans was treating her. You really wanted to get hold of him go, “Go away!” It was like rubbing sale into a wound. She didn’t need that. She thought she did and she didn’t.”

     Garland herself appeared to realize, as this film portrays, that much of her audience was gay, who not only were in touch with her heartfelt singing, but sympathized with her sexual mistakes. In Judy Garland chooses, quite suddenly, to meet up with two elderly gay fans to go to an impossibly late night dinner, which ends, after their failure to find an open restaurant, with the three ending up back in their modest flat, where even the omelet, infused with cream, doesn’t quite properly come together. Judy attempts to scramble the eggs, but nothing succeeds—a metaphor, clearly, for her inability not only to find a sexual equal, but her impossibility to find even decent housing for her beloved children.

      These men, who themselves have suffered the British laws regarding homosexuality, have survived, just as Garland has, such difficult times that they too are exhausted, unable truly to make sense of the personal love-lives—except for Garland for whose concerts they have bought tickets for every night!

    The bond is an important one: the sense of great possibilities lost in a series of systems which do not easily allow entry to outsiders, which Judy has now also become. That scene is perhaps one of the loveliest in the movie, a point where the great star crashes down to meet up with the city in which she not quite certain she is in (at one point she questions on stage whether she is in London, San Francisco, or New York) and to meet up with a couple of its everyday citizens. In her grand tour of the world, she has grown so out of touch with reality, that meeting up with these two men almost allows her to fly back to Kansas once again.

     Accordingly, this film about Garland’s last desperate attempt to regain custody of her children, Lorna and Joey Luft, is basically a sordid affair, not something one might to experience on the big screen. Garland was exhausted—even if often personally energized by performing night after night—from the results of throat surgery, drugs, alcohol, and just the human abuse of her talent.

    This movie might have been a disaster, in fact, given its sort of pedestrian presentation—despite the lovely costumes by Jany Temime and the basically beautiful set decoration of Stella Fox—if it weren’t for the truly exceptional performance by its unexpected star, Renée Zellweger. Yes, at times her performance is mannered: her quivering lips alone become a major subtext in this drama. But none of that truly matters given her all-out commitment to her character.

     Zellweger, superficially, looks nothing like Garland, and her singing is not completely in tune with Judy’s tremolo and brilliant musical interpretations. Yet, here is doesn’t matter. Zellweger is another kind of Judy, or at least becomes another one. We believe her because we believe in her acting, through the passion with which she imbues her character.

     There are certain impersonations which simply miss the mark. But Zellweger is no impersonator, but a kind of shapeshifter, transforming our vision of Judy Garland’s last months onto the screen. If she doesn’t win major awards for this role, I would be shocked.* I’ve seen her performing many roles such as Bridget Jones and Roxie Hart, both plumper embodiments, with great enjoyment; but nothing ever prepared me to see her as I did the other day.

     If her singing was not up to Garland’s standard, it hardly mattered; she met her material full on much as Garland did herself, plumping up her now very thin, older body, to achieve great resonance. She convinced me that she was a frail and frightened as Garland herself in her last dying days. Without Zellweger, in fact, this film would have been forgettable; but with her constant presence, she makes this a work to never forget. Films about great actors need great actors, and although I might never have imagined Zellweger as being such a figure, she has proven me wrong.

    Judy is as much about Zellweger as it is about Garland. This actor has now become a legend of her own.

 

*Zwellweger won the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role in 2020.

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2019).

William Wyler | The Little Foxes / 1941

southern kabuki

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lillian Hellman (screenplay, with additional dialogue by Arthur Kober, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell), William Wyler (director) The Little Foxes / 1941

 

Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes is one of those works that all Americans would love to believe is reality, even while its conventions and language rely more on melodrama and, at moments, something that would later be described as “black comedy.”

     Both the play, and even more so, William Wyler’s film version, has all the myths American pretend to believe is their history: that the new South, as opposed to the “aristocratic” plantation owners were a breed of cut-throat businessmen without a thread of the grace and moral breeding of those ladies and gentlemen of the pre-Civil War South. Women of that period were either talented but slightly dim-witted weaklings (the character Birdie Hubbard, perfectly played by Patricia Collinge, might have come directly out of a Tennessee Williams play) or strong-willed belles who had to be properly controlled (actress Bette Davis had already played just such a figure in her previous role of Jezebel and Gone with the Wind had already immortalized Scarlet O’Hara).

     All money-hungry Northerners (here played by Russell Hicks as William Marshall) were perfectly willing to collaborate with greedy Southerners to destroy what was left of the gentile Southern culture. Such myths fit perfectly with early 20th century American notions that the entire US culture had lost its stature and gentility, which both the world wars had exacerbated. Not so very different from some conservative views of the US culture today.

     The fact that the Democratic slave-holding pioneers of the American South never existed as anything that might even approximate a true aristocracy, and that, in fact, many figures of the New South business world actually transformed a moribund cotton culture into a far more civilized industrial society simply does not fit with the drama of clashing cultures and stereotyped visions of Southern belles and their beaus. The other version is simply a better story, as dramatists quickly realized. Certainly Hellman, born in New Orleans, and given her hit-them-over-the-head dramatics, knew a good thing when she saw it.

     Hellman, moreover, brought in a slightly new element with which Williams might also sympathize, the notion that the strong-headed Southern belles often had been subject to male domination and were outrightly ostracized from the business worlds to which they might have been better equipped than many of their male siblings. Certainly, that was how the stage actress Tallulah Bankhead saw and played the role on Broadway, explaining away some of Regina Giddens’ vicious behavior as simply a way of surviving in such a cruelly male-dominated world as the one ruled by Ben (Charles Dingle) and Oscar Hubbard (Carl Benton Reid).

     Whether it was Davis’ own decision or her director William Wyler’s—subject of much debate, particularly in Davis’ own autobiography—the Regina performed by Davis turned this convenient dramatic expedient on its head, making Regina a woman who might have been at least an explicably realist figure into a truly powerful villain. I would argue, given Wyler’s history of filmmaking revealing his moral indeterminacy as opposed to a clear devotion of aestheticism, that it was Davis’ decision. The important thing is that it transforms Hellman’s “give ‘em hell” theatrical into an almost operatic work (indeed Marc Blitzstein turned the play into an opera), wherein the Kubuki-like whitened face of the former beauty, transforms Davis’ character into an immoral monster of the most exaggerated of American spectacles.

    Wyler and his writers also provided us with a further melodramatic foil in the young newspaper writer, David Hewitt (an appealing Richard Carlson) who encourages Regina’s impressionable young daughter, Alexandra (played by one of my favorite actresses, Teresa Wright), to question and challenge the world in which she has been sheltered, adding to the film an even stronger “good and evil” theatricality than existed in the original play.

     Hewitt is the true “hero” in that, even though his newspaper articles seldom get published, he continues to write the truth, while the citizens of this Southern city, ruled by the Hubbards-Gibbens, are kept in the dark.

     The center of this play and the only true “aristocrat”—at least in spirit if not in any real record of heredity—is Regina’s dying husband, Horace (Herbert Marshall). If he is himself also a weakling, particularly when compared to the lying and cheating Hubbards, he is intellectually and financially the more powerful, able—at least temporarily—to stop his wife from entering into any business deal with her brothers. Obviously, he cannot control his death—a kind of murder since Regina refuses to fetch his saving medicine—and after death he cannot prevent Regina, except through leaving his entire fortune to his daughter, from seeking revenge from her brothers. But his actions, at least indirectly, reveal the truth to Alexandra in a way that nothing else might, as she realizes what her mother and her brothers have done to both her father and to the poor workers of the city.

     If the lovely Reginia of Bankhead’s performances at least achieves wealth and independence, Davis’ Regina has little left but her money. She will escape the South for Chicago without any personal future, no true grace, no remaining beauty, and few real talents other that the ability to “make a deal.” One can imagine her in a lavishly appointed home but with little of real value to satisfy her desires somewhat like today’s Donald Trump. While in Hellman’s original there is some value in power, or, at least, in the ability to achieve some status as a proto-feminist, in Davis’ bleaker portrayal, there is little solace in the life she has finally achieved. She has merely replaced her father as an even more intolerable Gorgon.

     But by doing that, Davis has, most fortunately, taken the play out of any realist context and given it a more symbolic resonance. What was American myth has been transformed into a terrifying emblem of false American values. And the film version of The Little Foxes becomes something more of legend than a conventional realist performance. Davis’ look into the mirror late in the film, has all the power of Disney’s evil stepmother of Snow White and the terrifying blink of the look of awakening in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2016).