cruising for
eternal love
by Douglas Messerli
Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem
(screenwriters and directors) Tino / 1985
The French queer intellects, Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem’s, campy film Tino—released
six years after their significant essayistic work Race d’Ep (1979)—is
certainly not one of their most important endeavors, but it’s still fun to
watch, and at moments quite chilling, as a wealthy American tourist couple
played by journalist and gay activist Douglas Ireland and noted French actress
and singer Myriam Mézières buy the services of a young Tunisian boy, Tino
(Khaled Mahmoud).
After a brief salute to all things Mediterranean, including the
cultures, the architect, the religions, the shipping, even the water itself—as
well as prostitution— Myriam is seen in a chauffeured automobile rumbling
across the beach sands where it stops a feet away from several young men
playing beach soccer. Once they spot the car they rush towards it, each of them
hoping to be invited in for whatever pleasure, perhaps even a role as a gigolo
for the beautiful American woman. But a particularly beautiful young man, Tino,
finally pulls his friends away, Myriam taking a careful look at his
“qualifications.”
Taking off her sunglasses, she salutes him
as her “Gabriel,” her “angel,” and quickly asks him to get in. When, soon
after, she attempts to take him into her Tunis hotel, she is met by the hotel
security guard who attempts to eject the young man from entering—“we have our
reputation to think of”—Myriam screaming and shouting at him in defiance, the
way some wealthy Americans behave everywhere they go. The scene reminds of the
earlier 1975 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fox and His Friends,
where Eugen and Fox pick up a local Arab boy in Morocco, also refused entry,
this time into hotel restaurant, the hotel management assuring them that have
their own male escorts for such occasions.
In this case, the insistently loud American wins, she and her husband,
Henry, soon pulling the half-naked boy onto the terrace to have drinks,
hilariously served up by the waiter with Tino’s soccer ball. And before long
the two have literally moved him to a vertical position of the beach where
Myriam is busy rubbing suntan lotion across his abs before slipping her hand
below in to his swimming trunks.
The couple soon after take in an evening
film, evidently a production about the Roman emperor Hadrian’s infamous lover,
Antinous the boy Hadrian who as Myriam reminds her new pickup died
young—interestingly, given the role water plays throughout this short film, he
inexplicably drowned in the Nile, Hadrian himself, like the couple, also being
an inveterate traveler—and who Hadrian, still desperately in love with the boy
turned into a god in both the Egyptian world, associating him with the cult
Osiris, the god of the dead (also associated with the mud of the Nile) and in
the Greek world with its Dionysian cult of fertility, madness, and hedonistic
sexual activity, the last two of which, at least, are roles Tino does indeed perform
with the couple, who equally claim his sexual favors.
After attending the film starring David Bowie, it is Tino himself who
begins to imagine himself in the Roman epic that winds its way through this
sordid tale, he seemingly finding as much pleasure in being desired by Henry as
he does by his more mundane sexual encounters with the wife.
To my knowledge, Bowie never made such a film, but it is great fun, and
almost a natural jibe given that at the time of Soukaz and Hocquenghem’s film
the singer was rumored to have had many a bedroom fling with Mick Jagger and
recently performed with him in Dancing in the Street (1985). The Italian
title, The Living God is, of course, another comment on Bowie—about the
adulation of one of his fans as much as the singer’s own ego—but is obviously
what Tino would like to be, particularly given his self-perceived good fortune.
Other than constantly stroking the boy, Henry seems mostly a man of
coarse words, and in Tino’s imaginative world shouts out his demands that the
boy become a sacred god, while his wife mostly sits and sulks, particularly
when Henry is around.
Early on in the silly “swords and
sandals” episodes, the co-director Guy Hocquenghem, performing as a
Roman associate of Hadrian’s takes Tino into the coronation room where he is declared
his true beloved, with the boy even willing to dance like a woman in front of
his emperor, a role quickly taken over by Henry’s wife to re-establish her
reality as a true woman in a world of mostly young men fawning on
Hadrian’s/Henry’s every move.
The couple, with Tino in their party, are soon on they are on their way
to Greece.
It is in Greece where he explains to the boy, probably without his
comprehension, that the two, husband and wife, have agreed early in their
marriage to share everything. Besides he’s pretty sure, he brags to his wife,
Tino prefers boys, “after all he’s an Arab.” “I tell you what,” he shouts out,
“you take the front I’ll take the rear...the butt!”
Confused by their bickering about him, Tino again imagines his role in
Hadrian’s Rome, the man who apparently had sexual relationships only with boys
and never with his wife. Once again, he does not seem to mind the ugly Hadrian,
any more than the unpleasant Henry pawing him. After all, he has been exalted
in his performative roles!
Only when Henry refuses to join them in their exploration of a ruin,
does Tino join her in full heterosexual behavior, fucking her as she stands
against the ruined pillars as, with the cornball sexual pun, fireworks light up
the sky.
But the sexual interlude ends badly, with Henry slapping his wife to the
ground and verbally abusing her, as somehow she has performed it purposely to
embarrass him in front of a crowd.
Again Tino imagines himself in Hadrian’s
court, this time undergoing what appears to be a ceremonial marriage to
Hadrian, a veil over his face, perhaps suggesting their being initiated
together into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Furious, with the ceremony, his wife
after belittling the activities, stalks out. And soon after Hocquenghem playing
the same role in which he earlier brought Tino into the court, appears with a
dagger in his hand in an attempt to kill Antinous, again perhaps a reference to
the jealousy of Hadrian’s other possible lover Lucius Ceionius Commodus.
Without Tino moving a muscle, the competitor for Hadrian’s love falls dead,
Antinous/Tino being celebrated for the deed.
The next scene in the contemporary world of the trio places them in
positions that seem to indicate a closure to their affair, as if the party were
over, the celebration having left them in a kind of drunken limbo.
It is New Year’s Eve we soon discover, and the location is a subway,
maybe in New York, since Myriam discusses with Harry the absurdity of walking
down 5th Avenue with the apparently sleeping boy. They pour champagne over him
and he awakens, as they finally turn to catch the next arrival. But before they
can do so, three men, obviously also from Tino’s country, seeing him with the
couple, go to him and berate him and plead with him to give up his shocking
behavior. The drunken trio dismiss them, Tino blowing a party puffer into their
faces; the other three turn and enter the subway car stopped before them.
Suddenly we see Tino running for the same subway, the doors having just
closed, and him attempting to get inside. He follows the car as it pulls away,
moving blindly with it until he hits a pole in his path and falls to the floor,
his forehead bloody from the crash, forcing us to wonder if he is now dead.
Most definitely La commedia e finita!
Obviously, the filmmakers suggest, things do not go well for those who
take up with such horrifying consumers, who eat up people the way they might
swallow up the food and customs of different cultures merely for the thrill of
the momentary difference. In a sense Henry and his wife are merely sexual
cruisers, out for the thrill not for the eternal love Hadrian felt for
Antinous.
It may be useful to recall what Guy Hocquenghem wrote in his 1973 essay,
“The Screwball Asses” in Recherches, a selection posted in this context
by Dorothée Perret on the blog PARISLA:
“The cruising machine has
established an impenetrable border between what turns us on and what makes us
think. This border is perhaps a defense mechanism against the intrusion of
relations of power…
Constructed like capitalism against death, the cruising machine… instead
of being madly in love with what is present, it desires what is absent, it
always desires the next object, it constructs itself on the establishment and
sacred assumption of lack, according to the absolute criteria of consumption…
If I leave my house to enjoy the weather, to buy bread or go see a
friend, and if I come upon a boy that I like, gay or not, I am blissfully
enjoying the present. But if I leave my house every night to find another queer
by cruising the places where other queers hang around, I am nothing but a
proletarian of my desire who no longer enjoys the air or the earth, and whose
masochism is reduced to an assembly line.
In my entire life, I have only ever really met what I was not trying to
seduce.”
Los Angeles, February 28, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (February 2022).
