Daniel Hagberg | Naken (Naked) / 2013

leavin’ on a jet plane

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Hagberg and Mattias Pollak (screenplay), Daniel Hagberg (director) Naken (Naked) / 2013 [29 minutes]*

 

Erik (Oscar Sperlich) gets a message from Anthony (Henrik Gustavsson) about “last night,” apologizing for how things got strange. It is clear already that something happened sexually between them that the ostensibly heterosexual Erik doesn’t want to deal with. He doesn’t answer Anthony’s message suggesting they get together and talk but heads immediately—as all closeted heterosexuals must—to his go-to girlfriend, Rebecca (Caroline Jörnsved), an open-minded individual always ready for a fuck.

    Later, Anthony tries to waylay him at school, again suggesting they talk, but Erik seems not to even imagine a reason why they would talk, brushing him off, asking him where his girlfriend, Elin, is. There is clearly now way he’s going to talk about whatever happened at the party.

    But something is clearly happening to Erik. He calls Anthony’s phone and leaves a message that “I don’t know what you’ve been imagining. You mean nothing to me. And I don’t want to see you anymore.”

    Yet, when he sees Anthony with a girl, Isabella (Magdalena Sverlander) hanging on him, trying to distract him from his gaze, we can perceive that Erik is troubled. Again, he calls Rebecca for sex.

    Meanwhile, Anthony’s co-called girlfriend, quite obviously dissatisfied given his lack of attention, suggests that perhaps they can spend more time together before he leaves, the first time we discover that Anthony is headed off for London to take a course away from his Swedish University. Since he won’t even talk to her, she is about to head off out of the relationship until he stops her, hugging her in apology.

        At a party, even Erik’s friend Pontus (Max Nilsson) tries to tell him that he has seen a complete change in his personality, and wonders what it’s about, offering him an open ear and his loving friendship if he’s willing to share with him want’s going on. But Erik denies that anything’s happening.

    Later at a nightclub, a guy in the toilet (Johan Badh) asks how his previous night was with Anthony, obviously having observed their early attraction to each other. Erik tries to laugh it off, to even pretend no knowledge of what the guy at the other urinal is asking: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

    The guy backs off without further pursuing what he’s observed.

    But once more Erik is quite obviously disturbed, telling his friend Pontus that he’s heading off as he trudges once more home in a gesture of denial.

    This time his call is no longer to Rebecca but to Anthony; but it is Anthony who in this instance doesn’t answer as he sits on the couch attempting to make it up to Isabella. The two men seem trapped in their own refusals to face what they feel for one another.

    Later Anthony attempts to call him back, but Erik is in the shower. Finally, Anthony leaves a message to say that they really should talk since he’s leaving the day after tomorrow. He has to leave to figure out who he is, he insists, but adds: “I didn’t want it to be this way. Call me.”

     Anthony is in the bathroom blow drying his hair when a friend calls telling him to hurry up and bring Isabella to the party. Isabella picks up the message, but then discovers another message, another voice, Erik’s. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You fucking faggot! Do you really think there’s something between us? [You can hear Erik panting, perhaps even crying.] What happened means nothing to me. I don’t want to see you ever again.” As she walks into the bathroom, Isabella realizes that she’s lost Anthony forever.

     It is not the party for Anthony we now observe, but one which Erik is attending, Pontus still trying to hook him up with a girl named Lisa.

    Inevitably, Erik goes off to a room with Lisa where they kiss, strip, and begin to make love. But he can’t stand Lisa’s grasping hand, pulling it away from his head and neck again and again, before sitting up in utter frustration. Again, he leaves the party alone.

     This time he doesn’t seek solace with Rebecca but goes directly to Anthony’s apartment, asking for him to let him in. He saunters in like an angry kid, wandering for a moment up the narrow hall before turning to Anthony to tell him: “You ruined my life!”

    Within seconds they are pushing and pulling at one another, intensely kissing, stripping off their clothes, and almost leaping into bed. They are almost violent in their lust. They snuggle up against one another after sex, Anthony asking him to see him tomorrow before he goes.

Slowly, almost languidly, Erik returns to Rebecca’s apartment, she surprised to see him, he mostly making small talk. Finally, he declares that they need to talk, asking her eventually if she’s happy with their relationship—clearly an on and off affair, with no real commitment of love. He mutters that he’s been thinking about their relationship, and she asks, point blank, have you been seeing someone? Again he denies any other relationship. He claims he just wants to know if they both want the same thing.

She interrupts him to say she wants to keep it simple. While she is out of the room making coffee, he takes out his cellphone and again listens to Anthony’s first message about how things turned strange and they need to talk. It appears that the message itself has become a sort of lifeboard of hope.

        We see Erik sending another message the next morning. It is clear that the man has never had a truly intense relationship with anyone before, and is now heartbroken that what has now come to mean something will soon be stolen from his life.

    This story, of a deep love suddenly making itself apparent to a character at the very moment he is about to lose it, has long been a trope of heterosexual films. How many trains and planes have left the station and been tracked the runway without the lover showing up or with the lover watching in wan despair off without any possibility of calling him or her back. In Casablanca, Rick loses Elsa in this manner twice, through train and plane. But at least he is left with a potential male lover in Louis Renault. In this film, and in such other queer versions of this trope, such as the film, Last Summer which I discuss above, there is no one left to replace the lost lover. Love is discovered too late to claim its reward.

In Naked Anthony is left only with Erik’s message, “You mean a lot to me.” And his response “I’m going to miss you” is so meaningless and clichéd that it registers almost as a slap in the face.

What both men truly feel is perhaps so deeply profound that it cannot be spoken. Like Isabella, Rebecca, who has overheard the message, realizes that there will probably be no further relationship, however simple, with Erik. Erik is actually saying goodbye to his gay lover and his heterosexuality both.

    Anthony’s later message from English that “everything’s going to be okay,” sounds almost like rejection of the passion the two previously exuded. They have both given away the deepest part of themselves.

     Hagberg’s Naked is what one might describe as a difficult movie to watch. But then so are all the films of this genre, which I might almost be summarized by the two lines of John Denver’s popular song of 1966: “…I'm leavin' on a jet plane / Don't know when I'll be back again.”

 

*The title of this work should not be confused with Jose A. Cortés Amunarriz’ Desnudos (Naked) of this same year.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

Tavo Ruiz | Recuerdo de una tarde en la azotea (Memory of an Afternoon on the Roof) / 2022

exorcism for enchantment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tavo Ruiz (screenwriter and director) Recuerdo de una tarde en la azotea (Memory of an Afternoon on the Roof) / 2022 [9 minutes]

This film might be described as a kind of exorcism for a sexual enchantment; yet the movie itself is also a kind haunting, being something that the viewer takes home with him long after the actors, Leonardo Castell and Paulino Razo in this instance, have faded from screen, making one feel that there is no possible recovery from the enchantment of that long ago afternoon.

    One of the young men (Castell) returns to the roof of his Mexican apartment building to confront the ghosts of that long-ago event, the day on which his best friend (Razo) had just broken up with his girlfriend, Mary.

   The friend, obviously suffering from the breakup was, at least as the haunted man remembers it, crying when he kissed him, something magically occurring between them that at least possibly, resulted in sex. At least in hindsight we see the friend almost naked, walking off only in his underpants.

    Our memory-haunted young man evidently wrote a love letter to his friend which got into the wrong hands, resulting in a brutal beating from his father, ending in the horror of never being able to meet-up with his friend again.

     That poignant afternoon on the decaying rooftop, filled with rusting sinks, wired lockers that make the scene look more like a prison-cell than a rooftop with a city view, and with long winding paths that led to stone walls, was obviously a kind of surreal manifestation of the real city below, where the magic of that event could never have occurred.

    With tenderly ethereal music by Alejandro Karo and Mayra Lepró, writer/director Ruiz’s  memory piece is played out with a kind of eternal longing, the magically enchanted young man running off after the kiss taunting his new lover with words, “if you find me, I’m all yours.” The fear is, of course, that he might never be found, that love will disappear after the rooftop experience. And, in reality, the fear has come true. Yet for that boyhood lover the real cures is that the experience will never leave his mind: as he puts it, “I see you everywhere.”

     Just as in his 2021 production of Eden, Ruiz in Memory of an Afternoon has given us a glimpse an Edenic world from which his characters have been ousted and to where they can never fully return, but are forever haunted by their memories of it.

   

Los Angeles, December 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025)

Yasujirō Ozu | 東京の合唱 (Tokyo no gassho) (Tokyo Chorus) / 1931

a voice of the many

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kōgo Noda (scenario, based on an adaptation by Komatsu Kitmura), Yasujirō Ozu (director), 東京の合唱 (Tokyo no gassho) (Tokyo Chorus) / 1931

 

Appearing in Japan in 1931, the silent film by Yasujirō Ozu, Tokyo Chorus, was unavailable in the US until 1982, and was released by Criterion only in 1928.

    For that version of the film, composer Donald Sosin created a new score. But for inexplicable reasons, every time I attempted to activate the music on the Criterion disk, it failed to function. And I finally watched the film in complete silence. Seeing the film in that way, however, made me even more aware of Ozu’s brilliance as a director, since what his simple images conveyed was for more emotional than if it had been accompanied by music.

    Although, clearly this early comedy is not one of Ozu’s great works, it nicely dovetails with his later concerns about family life and the relationship of father to son, an issue which would haunt Ozu’s films. And like Ozu’s later works, much of the action is shown from the perspective of its hero trying to calmly sit on a tami mat to receive his simple tear or dinner. Ozu’s works are filled with eating scenes, and his 1931 work is no exception, as its late scenes occur in a small restaurant, owned by the former drill commander at the military academy where Omura Sensei (Tatsuo Saito) tortured the move’s hero, Shinji Okajima (Tokihiko Okada).

 

    The very first scene of this film shows the gangly military boys under his command, generally goofing off between maneuvers, with one of their members arriving very late. The narrative then fast-forwards to a scene in the Okajima household wherein his son and daughter are playing, the son, in particular, dissatisfied with his current toy of a ball. He wants a bicycle like all of his classmates have, and needles his father to get him one, which forces Okajima—now a poor insurance worker—to have the boy ask his mother, a stay-at-home woman, Sugako (Emiko Yagumo), who is nursing yet a younger child.

     On this particular day, Okajima is expecting a bonus, and with his wife’s blessing will spend it to buy the bicycle, a small trinket for his daughter, and a new necktie for himself.

     Bonuses are handed out, as each clerk tries to discover the figures without their fellow clerks knowing the amount, a stock comic scene that includes several trips to the bathroom, one clerk losing his letter in the urinal.

     With the news of salary bonuses, however, also comes the information that one, more elderly employee, Rou-Shain Yamada (Takeshi Sakamoto) has just been fired, evidently for selling two policies to customers who soon after died, one of an accident, the other of an illness. Struck with the unfairness of the situation, Okajima demands his fellow colleagues speak up for their elderly co-worker. Yet none of them is willing to stand up to their boss, and when Okajima bravely attempts to do so, he is summarily fired, his bonus revoked.

    The remainder of the movie concerns the trials and tribulations of this suffering family, as the young boy, with childlike anger, reacts to the disappointment of having no new bicycle. His parents finally determine to buy him one despite their lack of money, and the mother and her other children must now undergo even deeper poverty.

     When Okajima’s daughter suddenly grows ill, the family unable to pay for the required hospital visit, Okajima secretly sells his wife’s beautiful kimonos. The gentle scene in which Ozu portrays her sadness (an incident which brings her to tears) is quickly balanced with her and her husband’s recognition that to save the child’s life they have no other choice.

     Further indignations greet Okajima and his family when other children refuse to play with their son, his wife must make due with meagre dinners, and the formerly young and good-looking Okajima is thrown into the world of Tokyo’s thousands of unemployed. At one point, having met up by accident with his old military tormentor, Sensei, he is forced to carry banners announcing the existence of the elder’s restaurant.

     When Okajima’s children and wife spot him at work, Sugako’s humiliation is made apparent, as she chastises her husband for falling to such a low position. When he explains, however, that his old drill sergeant has also promised to find a position for him, she joins in with her husband’s attempt to draw more customers to Sensei’s eatery featuring curry rice made by his wife.

     Somewhat like the 1950s Hollywood film, White Christmas, Ozu’s movie invokes Okajima’s former classmates to band together to help save their former officer’s investment by celebrating a large dinner party in the small restaurant and each paying their share, with the formerly late arrival again arriving long after all the others. The event is a great success, during which Sensei receives a message that, through his ministrations, Okajima has been assigned to teach English at a school in another prefecture.

     Although it is clear that Sugako and Okajima are not exactly happy to leave Toko, they so in good spirits, promising to return to Tokyo when the can. And so Ozu’s “comic” film shifts gradually into a darker film where, as in so many of his works, the loving characters must face up to the difficulties pre-World War II Japan was facing, along with the realities of keeping their families out of harm’s way.

     Ozu’s characters generally sacrifice and even suffer in order to maintain a kind of familial status quo which often works against them escaping the harsh realities of the culture at large. Yet their actions help to make his films—despite their often assertive belief in Japanese cultural traditions—something to which we can all relate, particularly those who, over the generations, have come to the US and other countries to make a better life, no matter how difficult their own experiences, for their children. In order to succeed, Ozu seems to reiterate time and again in his films, one must sadly give up one’s youthful dreams.

 

Los Angeles, Halloween, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2016).

Johanna Alfaro and Jaíme Cortez | Tenemos que Hablar (We Need to Talk) / 2012

going gay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Johanna Alfaro and Jaíme Cortez (screenwriters and directors) Tenemos que Hablar (We Need to Talk) / 2012 [17 minutes]

 

A seemingly happy heterosexual couple, Mateo (César Durán) and Victoria (Giselle Calderón) meet for lunch in Salvadorian directors Johanna Alfaro and Jaime Cortez’ 2012 film Tenemos que Hablar (We Need to Talk). As the couple enjoy their streetside lunch, two of Vicky’s gay friends spot them and embrace her, the more gregarious of the two announcing that it’s his birthday and he’s celebrating that evening at a trendy gay San Salvador bar.

      Vicky immediately agrees, but the handsome Mateo, when the two are again alone, demurs, saying that it’s simply not his scene and he feels uncomfortable in such spaces, hinting that it may be a gay bar open, as most gay bars are these days, to all interested parties.

       His girlfriend insists that she has to go and it would be impossible for her to be there without him. And, just to please her, he is finally convinced.

 

      At the bar, just the kind of place we might have imagined it to be, Vicky suddenly dances with another girl as Mateo dances with other boys. Somewhat unexpectedly, but also not without any sense of exceptionalness, she kisses the woman with whom she is dancing. And Mateo similarly kisses the boy, Diego (Walberto Galego), with whom he is dancing.

      Over the next few days we witness brief interludes which makes us aware that Vicky is seeing her friend Varonika (Jeanet Rodríguez) and that the two are growing closer. Mateo is also seeing Diego but is still most uncomfortable with their relationship, pushing away as he is equally drawn to him in the process of gradually coming out.

     Finally, Vicky faces off with her homophobic mother, who is not only shocked by the news but threatens her with damnation, her and her husband’s own health, and finally with outright hatred.

      In the next scene we see both Vicky and Mateo phoning one another with both insisting “we need to talk.”

      Vicky finally moves out of her family home with the intent of moving on, leaving evidently her new love even behind. Although she has previously argued with her mother that being lesbian was not an infection which you can simply “catch,” she now speaks of being the cause of her mother’s illness and talks about the incident at the bar as if it were the cause of her shift in sexuality, arguing, quite illogically, that if only she’d listened to Mateo and not gone to the bar everything would be different.

     Yet clearly she knows and talks about the fact that Mateo is now in a rather permanent relationship with Diego, even hoping that his mother will be more accepting that her own. We see the male couple curled up comfortably in bed.

      It seems unfair that the gay male couple in this story appear to have come to terms with their sexuality, while Vicky, the representative of the lesbian desire, feels all the guilt. But perhaps that is the directors’ point. Women get none of breaks that society allows males, not even when it comes to homosexuality. Although in truth we know that in most cultures lesbianism is generally far more acceptable—when it is admitted to—than is male homosexuality.

      This is the first El Salvadoran gay film I have encountered, and was fascinated with it just for its existence. What again becomes clear through a film like this, another product of university film school, is just how much film studies around the world have contributed the remarkable explosion of LGBTQ short filmmaking that has entirely altered the gay cinema scene.

 

Los Angeles, April 5, 2022

Reprinted World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon | Hofesh Gadol (Summer Vacation) / 2012

lifesaver

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon (screenwriters and director) Hofesh Gadol (Summer Vacation) / 2012 [22.18 minutes]

 

Vacationing with his wife, Michaela (Hilla Vidor), his daughter Gaya (Bar Miniely), and son Einav (Ruslan Levchuk), Yuval (Yiftach Klein) appears to be totally enjoying the sea-side location. As a bronze-winning swimmer, Yuval swims long distances around the beach where he and his family have a small tourist cottage. But when his children and wife bury him in the sand with only his head remaining above the surface, he is almost drowned in the quickly returning tides. As his wife and sun desperately attempt to dig him free, his daughter rushes to other seaside visitors, two men Yiftach (Oded Leopold) and Noam (Ido Bartal) coming to his rescue.

     During their life-saving activities we observe a look of a deep interchange between Yuval and Yiftach in the process, and afterwards, despite his wife’s invitation to the two lifesavers to join in dinner, Yuval barely talks to either of them.

      As Michaela, enchanted when the handsome Yiftach dances to music from his cellphone, Noam who has stayed back with Yuval notices that the cellphone message that comes up with that song details Yuval’s recognition that his new boyfriend Yiftach has evidently had a close relationship with the man he helped to save, and that Yuval’s and his wife’s song is actually Yiftach and Yuval’s “song.”

       By the second day, we realize that indeed the married Yuval and Yiftach have long had a gay relationship, and Yuval is obviously furious to encounter his secret love at the very place where he has long taken his wife and family to summer at the end of every August. Is Yiftach stalking him? He finds it hard to believe that a gay couple such Yiftach and Noam would have chosen such a family-based location.

       In fact, Noam has left, returning back to the city, perhaps because of what he has observed on the phone or simply because he and Yiftach are not a serious couple. And as the days pass, particularly when Yuval observes his former gay friend in deep conversation with his son on a small wooden raft, things become more tense.

       When Michaela notices a small hickey on Einav’s neck, Yuval rushes over to Yiftach’s  cottage and attacks him, demanding that he stay away from his son. But later when he discovers the boy in close conversation with a local girl, he realizes that he was misled in his fears and returns to Yiftach to apologize. During that meeting, however, he confesses his continued love for Yiftach and two cannot resist a fulfilling sexual encounter.

      Yuval promises him that when they return home, he will again make contact with Yiftach, but his lover refuses, in insists, to take his friend’s “sloppy seconds.”

       When soon after he discovers Yiftach massaging sun lotion into his wife’s back on the beach, and overhears the man’s description of his own true lover whom he even compares to Yuval, he again becomes furious. When Yiftach mentions that his lover, however, is not a couch potato like Yuval, he challenges Yiftach in a race to a small rocky island offshore where the two escape to kiss and attempt to resolve the growing tension of the situation.

       It ends, however, with Yiftach finally daring his lover to make his wife aware of the situation so that she might show whether she truly loves Yuval as much as he claims he loves her. Jumping in the water to return to shore, he appears to be on his way to tell the truth to Michaela. Terrified, Yuval quickly follows midway grabbing him and bringing him down under the surface, appearing to attempt to drown him.

     As he returns to shore, it is clear that Yuval is in something like shock, which even his wife notices along with the look on his face the long scratches on his neck and shoulder. We expect the worst, but suddenly Yiftach also returns sitting back down beside them to put pull out his phone and call his number revealing that the page calls up the name of Yuval, a fact that finally Michaela herself observes, and like Noam before her must now make a decision to leave or go on pretending to be part of a perfectly happy family on summer vacation. But we can never truly know whether in so acting Yiftach has wrecked a happy home or once more served as his ex-lover’s lifesaver.

     Although Israeli writers and directors’ Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon’s short film does not introduce a new issue—there are dozens of such films of a genre I might describe as the “the married bisexual’s showdown,”* the melodrama of Summer Vacation is well presented, the acting of high quality compared with the usual LGBTQ shorts, and the cinematography of Shai Peleg quite excellent.

      As one commentator on the Mubi site where this film was featured put it, “Just scratch the surface and watch everything go to pieces in slow motion.”

 

*Other movies that similarly reveal the problem of men and women coming to terms with their LGBTQ sexualities later in their lives, at a time when the consequences are far more serious, include Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster (1991), Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1991) Ben McCormack’s Family Outing (2001), Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), Monte Patterson’s Caught (2011), Venci Kostov’s The Son (2012), Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015), Tanuj Bhrama’s Dear Dad (2016), and Maj Jukic’s My Dad Marie (2020) to name just a few.

        

Los Angeles, April 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).