Nathan Keene | Disarm / 2010

fear of the possible self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Will Faulkner and Nathan Keene (screenplay), Nathan Keene (director) Disarm / 2010 [18 minutes]

 

The central figure of Australian director Nathan Keene’s short film Disarm (Tris Tyler) begins the work by standing on his bed, his hand down his underpants while watching TV porn and shouting at a business associate on the phone. A Grindr pick-up, a young boy (David Ryan Kinsman), after knocking on the hotel door, enters the room.

    The older man hangs up and calls the boy over to him. For a few moments they tussle as they kiss, alternating as they force themselves on the top of one another, the younger boy finally kicking the older one off. The elder comes back with his fist in the air ready to beat the kid, but only growls “No one fuckin’ kicks me.”

      The young boy is about to slink off, but the older man calls him back for a drink. So begins a discussion between the two beginning with the elder asking how many guys the young trick has a week, and the younger asking the elder’s age. After establishing his superiority of the quantity of boys he has each week, the elder demeans the still puny younger boy for going to the gym to work out 5 times a week, arguing that he’s just burning off his body mass.

      Asked if he has a boyfriend, the younger argues he doesn’t want one. Life should be an endless party, he argues, a bit like Cabaret’s Sally Bowles. But his life of going out clubbing on weekends and getting fucked while sitting home the rest of the nights to wait for the weekend doesn’t sound like much fun as the elder points out.

      Indeed, our young trick has never had a boyfriend. The younger can’t imagine having one guy, “it would get fucking stale.” The elder admits that he’s had a few boyfriends but they haven’t lasted “cause my minds always racing.” It’s just a vicious cycle, he admits.

      Asked why he clicked on his site, the younger man argues that he likes masculine looking men. “Skinny, queeny guys annoy me.” He goes on to tell the story of a young gay boy at his high school whom he describes as a pansy, flailing his arms with a fem-lisp.

      The elder asks if straight boys beat him up in high school, but the younger says he had a girlfriend even though he knew he was gay. What isn’t being said is that he had the girlfriend as a cover and that what he saw in the effeminate boy was a vision of a possible self, a fear of what being gay might really mean for him.

      The older man asks him what he’d like to do, meaning what career, but the younger hardly has a clue, even though we’ve established that he’s 22. He asks the older one what he does, the man responding, “Guess.” The boys responds “business,” to which the elder argues he chose it because of the money, but admits it’s boring. When the elder again asks the younger what he actually wants “to be,” the boy responds vaguely, “To be like you.”

      The conversation turns back to the subject of fighting, the elder observing that as gay men they are supposed to charm their offenders, the younger arguing that he would fight a gay man if necessary.

      The elder cuts to the core, responding that it’s just because he wants to be “straight.”

     “I just want to be a man, what’s wrong with that?” to which the elder argues, “What the fuck is a real man anyway?” And soon after he tells the younger, “Acting like a straight won’t make you a man.”

     Noticing a scar on the elder’s body, the younger asks where he got it, but the older man refuses to discuss it, saying only that he got it in a fight. And finally, the younger boy admits he fought the gay boy in his school.

    “Did he fight back?”

     “Not really.”

    “Did you hurt him.” The younger kid shakes his head. “He was a fem, there was a whole group of us.”

     The elder berates the younger for his actions arguing that he was probably the only one who knew what the other boy was going through. He finally recounts his own story. “I was beat when I was 16 until I went unconscious. That’s how I got my scar.

     “I had feelings for my best friend. But when I told him, he wouldn’t reciprocate, not at all.” The elder admits that it resulted in him finding hard to get close to people, that he pushes them away.

       The younger responds that “It’s easier to cut yourself off.”

      And suddenly the elder comments: “You know I can’t remember when was the last time I did this with someone.”

       “What?”

       “Talk.” The man calls the boy over to him, trying to discern what color eyes he has.

       “So we gonna fuck?”

       The man leans back, obviously no longer interested in the kid.

     The boy angrily gets up to leave, fed up with the older man’s lack of sexual interest, the elder shouting out, “Fuck you. You’re just like the rest of them!” Apparently, the kid did not comprehend one idea within the elder’s communications.        

     The boy pauses a moment outside the hotel room door, but then quickly walks off. The elder turns back on his porno station.

       But as the boy makes his way back to the car he does, in fact, rehear some of the elder’s comments, particularly how he is attempting to hide his own effeminacy, his own “fem-lisp.” He sits for a moment in the car staring at himself in the car mirror. There is a knock and the window. The elder stands there, the boy rolling down his window, the older man leaning in to kiss him before walking off.

        Although writers’ Faulkner and Keene’s dialogue is fairly unbelievable as a realistic event, it is nonetheless a rather moving exploration of gay men who are still caught up in the myth of masculinity and sexual performativity. And if the conversation itself is unconvincing, its representation of gay types who persist in performing basically heterosexual values within the gay world is quite accurate. In a sense, these men, although they outwardly declare their gay sexuality, are inwardly still battling with their fears and sufferings they carry within almost as a scar of their own somewhat unsuccessful coming to terms with their youthful sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Søren Grinderslev Hansen | Sidste Kys (Please Stay) / 2009

the scream

by Douglas Messerli

 

Søren Grinderslev Hansen (screenwriter and director) Sidste Kys (Please Stay) / 2009 [4.48 minutes]

 

Søren Grinderslev Hansen’s short comic melodrama, Please Stay, which I might have translated as “The Last Kiss” given the original title is Sidste Kys, begins with a seemingly strange disclaimer from the director: “Dear You Tube. This is a fiction. The penis is not real.” I’ll come back to that.

      The scene begins with what sounds like sex between two lovers, ending in orgasm, with the words “I love you.” But almost immediately after a voice, presumably the other, announces, “Mikkel, it’s over.”

      After the initial shock, Mikkel (Allan Hyde) answers, “How long have you felt this way?” receiving the answer “For a while.” Obviously “their” relationship has come to an end, unexpectedly for Mikkel.

  

      Is he seeing someone else? Anders, Thue, Nikolaj? Doesn’t he know that he sees how excited his friend is when he walks into the room? He does realize that he’s straight?

       When the other declares they’re just not a good match anymore, Mikkel insists, “We’re the perfect match. You’re a part of me.”

       The other voice insists that things have changed, “You’re not twelve anymore.” And they argue about Mikkel’s inability to change, his friend suggesting he’s in a rut.

       But suddenly Mikkel reveals his right hand, covered in plastic wrap, and we begin to suspect that perhaps something else is going on that we had not counted. Particularly when the voice wonders why he won’t share him with others, Mikkel angry that he wants to sleep around. Obviously the unseen “other” in this comic “dialogue” is Mikkel’s own penis, reprimanding him for not having come out, for being attached only to himself through his hand.

       The penis finally insists that he “wants to come out,” to which the intransigent Mikkel can only reply, “We can’t do that.”

        But the other insists that if he doesn’t “share him” that simply can’t be together any longer.

        Like any lover fearful of his loss, he demands his friend “stay.” But the answer is obvious: “Then let me out. Tell the world about me.”

        It’s the same old story, Mikkel insisting that if he told his parents about them, they’d disown him. “They’d kill me at school. My life would be over.” Sadly, these are the logical excuses made by all boys of his age who cannot deal with the possibilities of peer rejection and homophobia in general.

        But what are the alternatives, the real alternatives, the director asks indirectly, by playing out the absurdity of a solution that does not involve sexual openness.

       His final cry, an absurd one—“people would think I was insane!”—is answered even by his inner voice with the truth: “You are insane. …Talking to your own dick.”

       The only solution for someone so insane as to not accept his sexuality, is to entirely abandon one’s sexuality suggests the director. Mikkel pulls out a grater and apparently dares to do what he threatens since the final image of the boy is of a mad scream.

      But then it is madness, isn’t it, not to be able to love the way you were born to love?

     In Danish director Hansen’s short fable, I take the scream as the metaphor for the logic of boy not listening to what his own desires advise, to share himself with the world, to seek out others outside the closet no matter what pain that costs. Surely it is better than the pain of symbolic-castration, of sacrificing one’s sexual organs to the demands of normative society. And of course, this metaphor can be taken much further than a 17-year old boy trying to come to terms with his homosexuality at home in his bed.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

    

      

Floppy Peng | 中文 (ไทย) The Secret Garden / 2022

conversations in the garden of delights

by Douglas Messerli

 

Floppy Peng (screenwriter and director) 中文 (ไทย) The Secret Garden / 2022  [10 minutes]

 

The film I discuss here is neither the 2020 Marc Munden movie based on the beloved children’s fantasy by Frances Hodgson Burnett, nor Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 film version, a far better film adaptation. This strange little, very obscure work by the Taiwan director with the outrageous name of Floppy Peng is set in a not so secret park in Taiwan where gay men gather in the night to have public sex. On this particular evening a young gay activist arrives in the park with his visiting friend from Thailand in order to set up a table and chairs from which he encourages gay men to get tested for HIV, as well as to provide advice on sexual safety.

    In short, it’s as if the local gay version of The Salvation Army were daring to enter the lion’s den, only this support group isn’t trying to convert their constituents to any cause nor save them from anything—except perhaps from an unnecessary death. Here active gay men, fresh from the bushes, can come and share their fears, get tested, and discuss the myths surrounding HIV-transmission and AIDS.

    Meanwhile, the young Taiwanese boy encourages his Thai guest to take advantage of the gardens (which I have to presume is Peace Memorial Park) and explore its treasures. As he explains to his rather naïve friend, “this is a place for gays to have fun.” His friend is quite skeptical, obviously never before having participated in public park sex.

    As a young gay man prepares to visit the little ad-hoc center, the unseen sex expert encourages his friend to get lost, so to speak, in the joys of what the park has to offer.

     Our innocent twink first encounters two men engaged in kissing, closely watching before attempting to join them, when he is angrily pushed off.

    He then wanders away, encountering a young man sitting alone, drinking out of a bottle. Our innocent joins him and before you can even blush for his fearless behavior he is engaged in fellatio, providing great joy to the formerly unhappy and lonely individual. Even when he has finished swallowing the stranger’s cum and the man walks away, our friend trails behind, asking how often he visits the park.

    When the man doesn’t answer, he asks him where he lives, the man reluctantly replying “Keelung,” without the young newcomer having any idea where that might be. The major Taiwan port city which is part of the metropolitan Taipei area, but a long trip, nonetheless, to this presumably Taipei city garden. When asked where Keelung is, the man vaguely answers: “So far away.”

    But, of course, not as far away as the friend’s homeland, information which he shares to the other’s surprise. The Keelung man suggests that he wouldn’t have guessed, as if the accent he noticed and the look of the boy doesn’t fit his stereotype of a Thai.

    Our blunderingly fearless friend goes on to ask about the ring the man is wearing around his neck, the stranger again vaguely responding, “Some one gave it to me.” Actually, he explains, it’s because he wears another ring on his finger, adding, “By this time my wife and daughter may already be asleep.”

    In almost moral indignation the young Thai boy demands to know why he has gay sex. Does his wife know? How will his daughter feel about it when she grows up?

    The older and far wiser man responds, with years of resentment in his voice, “You don’t know anything. How can you understand? That’s what my parents wanted; I didn’t want to do it.” He gets up to leave.

     But the young neophyte follows him, apologizing.

    “It’s nothing,” responds the older boy. “I’m drunk. It’s time for me to leave,” the Thai boy calling after, “Can you just tell me your name?”

     There is no answer. But after several screen seconds wherein we can only imagine the man has disappeared forever, he returns to gently caress the face and kiss the lips of his fresh inquisitor.

    When come daybreak, our young Thai lad wanders back to his host, who is now closing up his stand, the friend asks: “Was it fun inside the park?”

    “No one wanted to play with me,” answers the queer novice.

    “Impossible. How could no one want to play with you?”

    All the Thai boy can say is that he’s hungry. And they head off to a restaurant to eat, our still curious young visitor asking his friend, “Hey, have you ever been to Keelung?”

   This is a curious and rather astounding short work that I’d argue makes little sense to most Westerners, but which I find not only charming in its refreshing honesty and embracement of both sexual naivete and what many would describe as gay perversity this short work involves the whole arc of the rainbow.

     Yet neither of these attitudes represented by the Thai visitor and Taiwanese native reject the denizens of the “secret garden,” but seek to get to know the symbolic “gardeners”—those men who regularly meet up in this hidden paradise—better. The two boys live at a personal level while the sexual meetings in the garden are impersonal and not at all about the friendship and community these two offer.

     In this little unknown gem—destined I’m afraid to be lost since it is not listed on any gay site or collation and is difficult to find on the internet—manages to bridge the two worlds, those seeking immediate impersonal gratification and those who might want to get to know even the names of those fallen angels who inhabit the nightly paradise just to talk or possibly help to save their lives.

    Sorry to say that most of the viewer reactions to this piece were dismissive on the US YouTube site where I found the film, mostly judging the nightly visitors to the garden as sad and lonely beings hooked on the drug of sex; a viewpoint the film itself resists and, in fact, denies, presuming there can be an open accord between individual desire and deep social interaction. In a sense this secret garden, like the one of hidden castle in the famed novel of the same name, in which the suffering child, Colin Craven, learns to walk, is a special place of curative powers, wherein the singularity of sexual desire meets up with the hope of communal integration.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

Wim Wenders | Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities) / 1974

shaking off the frost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wim Wenders and Veith von Fürstenberg (screenplay),  (director) Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities) / 1974

 

Wim Wenders Alice in the Cities begins as a rather artful study of how people from elsewhere have difficulty in attempting to comprehend what the US is all about. Today, I might add, it is difficult for even citizens of the US to understand. And I think if I’d landed in Surf City and the other Southern spots where this movie begins, I’d be just as confused and would find it near impossible to write an essay about it.

    Except for Florida, which I did not find compatible, I have never attempted to even visit the US South—although I have written about numerous of its writers. Yet I think the major figure of this tale, Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), is a man almost already frozen to death despite his early attempts to keep himself going by singing the popular 1964 The Drifters song, Under the Boardwalk. He can’t get the music or the lyrics right, and under the boardwalk wherein Philip is attempting to sing while photographing what he sees, there is little of pleasure, the surrounding world being truly bleak.

     In fact, the whole of the US in this film, which Wenders shot in unforgiving black-and-white, seems bleak. No glorious visions of afternoon sunsets or even a view of the lovely afternoon surf of the Atlantic or Bay of Mexico waters here. This is a cruel world, in which, as Philip later describes it, everything that might be of interest—with the exception of John Ford’s movie Young Mr. Lincoln—is chopped up into segments between ridiculous local advertisements, which infuriates the moody writer who has missed his Munich deadline and cannot get an advance to finish his piece.     

   The Manhattan to which he returns is a grungy, graffitied world, not the hyper-wealth tourist destination it is today. I remember just such a city, a few years earlier of the late 1960s and early 1970s and even the days when this film was shot; when Howard and I once shared a taxi with a young Southern woman on her way to his first Broadway play, when we told her that 46th was her destination, she hesitated before descending the taxi, fearfully proclaiming: “Oh no, this cannot be Broadway!”

   The gloomy Philip gets it right when he asks his New York connection, “How can you write coherently about the US?” No one can, let alone someone from somewhere else. Photographs, taken in these days with an automatic Polaroid camera, when the photo, not in clear definition, popped out the moment after you shot, taking a few moments to actually reveal the image, were perhaps the only answers to “Where was I, what did I just see?” Yet, as our moody hero laments. “They never turn out like what you’ve just seen!”

     Of course, you couldn’t then and, perhaps can even less so today—particularly when you’re short of cash and have to sell your Chrysler to a cut-rate dealer’s next to Shea Stadium in Queens (another place I lived during my own bleak year in the great New York City)—experience the pleasures of any such city. Attempting to get a ticket back to Germany, he finds that the German flight-workers ae on strike, and the nearest destination he might get to Munich is Amsterdam. Another woman at the ticket counter, Lisa (Liza Keruzer), who speaks little English, and her daughter, Alice (the amazing you performer Yella Rottländer), are trapped in the same situation, and Lisa asks that Philip not only help her in obtaining her tickets, but that he stay near to her while she waits out the day until they can travel to the Netherlands.

     Lisa, apparently, is escaping a failed relationship, her husband determined to remain in New York while she feels the need to return to Germany. Because of their dire financial straits, the trio is forced to stay at a fleabag hotel—which certainly no longer exists—and, accordingly, they must share the room they have obtained.

    In any other movie, predictably, the couple would find themselves in bed together and fall desperately in love. But Wenders’ film is utterly different. Yes, they do share the bed, but Lisa refuses sex, and Philip, at any rate, seems a poor romancer, always, as he is, in a kind of eternal funk about having apparently lost his writing abilities. He “scribbles” as Alice observes, but can longer produce anything; he seems as frigid as his last name and just as unable to enter any Springtime romance. By the time he awakens, Lisa has left, ordering him by note to take her daughter to Amsterdam where she will later meet them. She apparently has business to clear up with her ex-lover.

     Philip is so passive and Alice so endearing, that he cannot do anything other than what the missing mother has demanded. As critics have pointed out, today this film would have been nearly impossible to make; the male would be immediately characterized as a pedophile, and the young girl perceived of as a kind of Lolita, enticing him at the same moment she is rejecting his intentions. But Wenders makes it quite clear that Philip, although tenderly interested in the young girl, is not at all interested in her body.

     When they arrive in Amsterdam, upon discovering that Lisa has not arrived and is not scheduled to, the film turns into a very strange road movie wherein the two set out by car to discover Alice’s grandmother, whose name she cannot remember and has only a vague recollection of where she might live. Philip lists the major German cities and villages, Wuppertal being the only one that seems plausible to Alice.

   Yet their search there turns up nothing as they rove through the streets trying to search out a spot which the young child might remember.

    A little bit like Lolita, she demands food, ice-cream, and chance to swim, and other small pleasures which the nearly penniless Philip attempts to provide her, gradually becoming convinced that he has no choice but to turn her over to the police.

    A bit like the equally independent-minded adolescent, Georges Queneau’s Zazie, she escapes the police, returning to the man who has now become her surrogate father. They’re soon traveling on a visit to the Ruhr district of German, which she now recalls is where her grandmother might have lived.

    Philip, himself, has evidently come from that region, and it becomes apparent through Wenders’ telling that perhaps they were destined for one another, Alice in order to discover a truer father figure, and he to be reawakened to life with the young uncontrollable force he sweetly has agreed to help. Somehow we grow increasingly to love these two lost souls as the movie moves toward it conclusion. And I should imagine that most viewers secretly hope that they won’t find the not-so-pleasant grandmother living in a lost two-story house somewhere in Germany.

      Ultimately, however, they are tracked down by the police; the missing mother has been found. So Wenders film comes crashing down to its inevitable ending, not so very differently from his later film, Paris, Texas, another foray into US consciousness. Perhaps, just as Travis Henderson was brought back to life by reclaiming his young son, so will Philip Winter will have shaken off the frost in temporarily adopting a young daughter in Alice.

     Certainly they are no worse for the wear in their relationship. We can only wonder, however, how the energetic and perceptive Alice might now feel about her almost lost mother. Alice has seemingly, while moving through the many cities to which she adventures, lost some of herself, as her clinging to the stranger Philip makes clear. And what will become of him? He not only has apparently lost his career, but by film’s end, the only person with whom he has bonded. Where is his home, his grandmother, even his mother and father? He has only vague photos which don’t reveal their own realities.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2019).

 

Ivan Shakhnazarov | Bez Slov (Without Words) / 2010

last supper

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ivan Shakhnazarov (screenwriter and director) Bez Slov (Without Words) / 2010 [15 minutes]

 

Russian director Ivan Shakhnazarov’s 2010 short film is also about a relationship between two young men (Artyom Alekseev and Pyotr Rykov), in this case both soldiers during an unnamed war, probably World War II.

     One of the ground soldiers has been severely injured, with an open leg wound in which the internal muscle is exposed; a great deal of the first part of this 15 minute work is devoted to his simply crawling through the woods to a place of safety, or at least a place he might sit up and bandage his leg.

     He finally finds a tree that seems suitable, but hears motion nearby and turns, startled and afraid, his eyes open widely as he sees a man moving toward him with a flash light. He begins to grab onto the soil again, pushing himself through the leaves in slow escape.

      Although the soldier approaching holds a machine gun and is clearly unhurt, he seems almost as frightened as the man almost near death on the ground. He turns in all directions, fearful of the slightest sounds, obviously not a terribly experienced soldier.

 

     Finally, he spots the wounded man and points his gun at him, the wounded man preparing to die. For a few moments to two remain in arrest, performing almost a frieze in the dark forest.

       The wounded soldier prepares to die, but seeing how seriously hurt the other is the soldier with the gun pauses, drops his gun lower, and pulls out a small heel of bread, offering it to the hurt man, and finally tossing it to him.

        The grounded soldier finally grabs it and begins greedily to eat, a slight smile expressed on the standing soldier’s mouth. Carefully, the wounded soldier pulls out a flask of liquid, offering it up first to the standing soldier.

       Amazed by the gesture, the soldier slowly bends to the ground, pulls off his helmet and takes up the flask. He drinks and the other continues gnawing on his bread.

    The actions of both are quietly enacted in their war-worn eyes as a momentary expression of wonderment and almost content as the healthy soldier takes out another piece of bread, the two almost sharing a symbolic last supper.      

     The wounded man, again very cautiously, reaches into another pocket and pulls out pieces of cut paper and from his outer coat pocket pulls a small bag of tobacco, rolling a cigarette, his enemy handing him matches. He lights up and smokes, passing the cig on to his momentary “friend.”

        But suddenly there are the sounds of other voices, and four flashlights attached to uniforms can be seen in the near distance, obviously from the same search and destroy team to which the healthy soldier belongs. There is a shot and laughter in the distance.

      Both men shudder with the sound of the gun, and the soldier with the gun realizes that if they approach he cannot be seen with an enemy, as the enemy looks back in horror, but slightly nodding his head, admits to the other the inevitable, drawing in a final rush of tobacco. He knows his fate and even blinks a slight acquiescence.

      The other soldier, now standing, takes out a pistol from a pocket, aims, and fires. He pauses for a few long seconds, huffing in a manner that one might almost describe as crying. He puts out the cigarette with his boot heel, places his helmet back on his head, and trudges off, as hear the boots of his colleagues move quicker toward the now-dead man.

      Certainly, in this strangely gentle moment in the midst of horror, the two have shared a few seconds of something like love, of camaraderie that is rare between opposing forces. But it is that simply of two men, two soldiers, two beings who recognize in one another their shared humanity. And as beautiful and strange as that is, it has absolutely nothing to do with sex or queer love, even if such an expression of kindness is indeed queer in the sense of unusual and odd.

       This short film is very moving, and suggests a stirring in the two that might—if the flames of such shared love of mankind were only to be fanned by universal empathy—truly change things. But that change is not, as far as I can see, a LGBTQ one, as sympathetic as most LGBTQ people might be to the greater cause of love between human beings.

      Again, one can only wonder why this excellent contemporary silent film, Without Words, has been gathered as a “gay themed movie,” (GTM) and why with only the title and the words “gay film” it shows up on internet searches as a movie posted by “Gay Motion Pictures.”

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).