Marvin Lemus | Vámonos / 2015

dressing a corpse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Erick Castrillon and Moira Morel (screenplay), Marvin Lemus (director) Vámonos / 2015 [13 minutes]

 

Vámanos is a comedic gem about death; yet this is no Ortonian hoot, with side glances, winks, and whistles, but a serious study in how to release even a dead body from the chains of normalcy that threatened to delimit and delete it during its life.

    For unknown reasons, Mac (Vico Ortiz) has died before the opening credits, and her mother, Rosa (Norma Maldonado) accompanied by Hope (Jessica Camacho) enter a high-end clothier to pick out the proper funeral attire for the dead Latina.

    Without much ado, Rosa quickly chooses a dark purple dress for her daughter, while Hope selects a pair of black pants and a white blouse, trying to show it to the mother before she purchases the dress. But Rosa, obviously of strong will and clearly great disdain for Hope, dismissed the younger girl’s choice as shopping attire, while hers is the appropriate attire for a funeral. She also wants to purchase some hair extensions.

     Hope tries again to convince the older woman that the outfit she has chose is color coordinated and has a more appropriate flow, but even as she attempts to explain her choice to the impervious mother, another woman appears, offering her condolences in Spanish to Rosa. Rosa quickly introduces the girl as Esperanza, “Margarita’s friend.” ‘Oh, I see,” replies the sympathizer, as Rosa almost roles her eyes in obvious disapproval of the younger woman.

     At that point Hope loses it, hurrying off to a small dressing room to gather herself and her own grieving. But Rosa is already at the cubicle door, demanding to know what the girl is doing in there and insisting that they need to go immediately.

     Hope begs just for a moment.

    But suddenly she turns and shouts through the door: “You didn’t even know Mac. You didn’t even know your daughter. You have no idea who she was!”

     Rosa responds: “She is my daughter and she will be buried in a dress. And if you don’t like it you are welcome to not attend.”

     We have witnessed this kind of homophobia time and again in LGBTQ cinema, most notably in Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) wherein the companion of the dead son is not even invited to the funeral.

     In the next frame of director Marvin Lemus’ film, Hope is now settled down in her living room, late at night, with a couple of best friends, Del (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) and Luz (Briana Kennedy), who are sharing stories about club life. Hope, sitting apart from the others, a glass of whiskey in hand, recounts the time when Mac came back with a broken ankle. One of the friends suggests she busted it on a stairs, but Hope sets her right by explaining that Mac broke it because Rosa and made her wear heels to her cousin’s wedding. “Heels, a dress, make-up, all that shit. She was humiliated. And so she got wasted at the reception just to get through the night. And then she fell and busted up her ankle.”

    Suddenly, one of the friends decides that she cannot let things happen as they are planned, demanding the others just trust her: “Go put your shoes on.”

    Within minutes they are in a car with Hope in the back seat not at all sure she wants to be involved in their vague plot. One of them goes to Hope, demanding she join them, “Come on, Hope, we got to make this right.”

    Hope is not at all clear about what they are talking about or planning.

    They drive to the funeral home, the two friends rushing off and easily breaking into the place. When Hope perceives what they’re planning, she is horrified, demanding they leave immediately. She wants no part of their lunatic actions.

    But the two women exit the car and move quickly to the back door of the funeral house.

    Hope sits frozen in horror as she awaits their return, in the interim, taking out her turquoise and silver wedding ring and putting it back on her finger, recalling her wedding to Mac.

  Soon the women rush back to the car, having successfully broken into the freezer room where Mac’s body lies in wait, dressed in the costume her mother has purchased. They plan to return when they gather their wits and rethink their strategy; but at this point Hope takes over, leaving the others behind.

   She too breaks in and gathers up her fortitude to face her dead friend who she encounters lying on a table with long hair and that dreadful dress Rosa has determined she should wear. Her first words are “Oh baby, what have they done?”

    She grabs a paper towel and gently wipes away the makeup and lipstick. She pulls off the hair extensions. And slowly turning the corpse on its side, she unzips the purple dress, removing it from the dead body, heaving in heavy sighs of sorrow and yet relief in her acts.

    She unzips her bag, and carefully takes out the white shirt, tie, and suit coat in which Mac was dressed for their marriage. We see images of the couple and finally realize that Mac was a butch Latina with short hair who preferred male clothing.

    Hope slips her wedding ring on her finger and leaves the place, purple dress in hand. This time they had her the keys as she slips into the driver’s sea. “How did it go?” asks Luz. Hope turns to her with a huge grin on her face as they drive off.

    The body now resembles the woman who once inhabited it.

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).  

 

Segev Gershon Green | Adam / 2013

clueless

by Douglas Messerli

 

Segev Gershon Green (screenwriter and director) Adam / 2013 [23 minutes]

 

This film begins quite predictably with a mother Ronit (Michal Yannai) who is finding it difficult to communicate with her teenage son, Adam (Moti Lugassi). The only thing quite odd about this narrative is that her son is still playing with dolls, two male dolls in fact, through which he creates scenarios between himself and another school mate, Jonathan (Shahar Roth) who inevitably tell one another that they are good looking and would like to have a relationship.

     In fact, Jonathan, clearly a heterosexual dating a girl, does not really even know of Adam’s existence. Accordingly, Adam begins to write him a long letter telling him of his love for him. He’s scared— as well as he might be—to tell him, but he’s convinced that they would make the perfect couple. Besides, he argues, in his written narrative, he’s the only one might make Jonathan truly happy. All others will be jealous of them. And at the end of his computerized letter, he hopes Jonathan feels the same way about him.

     Frankly, I’ve never before seen such a naïve character in a film. Innocent yes, I can remember how innocent and unaware of feelings about love I was at that age. But I was not delusional as Adam appears to be. I imagined that such a desire was totally aberrant to all the boys I admired; although over the years I’ve discovered that I might have been somewhat mistaken; not everyone had been kept in the dark about sex as I had been. But Adam seems truly unable to perceive the nature of those around him, as if he’s been set down upon a planet in which he’s never even heard a heterosexual male talk about the opposite sex—or others of his own gender for that matter.

    We might imagine a young dreamy-eyed boy writing such a letter, but this one actually sends it. “Thanks for letting me know. Talk tomorrow,” Jonathan writes back, the young boy having evidently been taught some serious lessons in ironic mendacity.

     By this point in the film, only 4 minutes in, I was terrified of what might come next.

    Apparently even the director was afraid to show us precisely what happened. The next day we see the mother on the phone in conversation with her presumably divorced or estranged husband begging for money simply in order to survive, when a door slams signaling the arrival home of her son. She yells at him for slamming the door, but quickly recognizes that he has returned home with a black eye.

     Her demands to know what happened, lead nowhere. The boy’s answer is that he simply fell. She immediately leaves the room and returns with a towel and some water, caring as best she can for the swollen eye.

     She asks him if he was beaten, but he denies it. She asks him to explain it, but he refuses. That is common for those who have been bullied, fearful for even explaining to adults what’s truly happening on the immediate level, that their son or daughter is being maltreated because of a differences—most often sexuality or social behavior having to do with normative notions of gender.

     Before Adam knows it, the internet is filled with the news of his being gay, with further threats from Jonathan and his friends. Adam’s solution is to skip school and go shopping for more male dolls. He hangs out the next day as well in the local shopping mall, observing two young males engaging in sex in the bathroom, who wonder if he wants to join them.

     But clearly this clueless young boy is not yet truly ready for sex. Love is all a romance, sex is undefinable, a simple rubbing of one body against the other as he does with the dolls.

     Finally, the school principal’s office calls to question if Adam is all right, explaining to his mother that he has not been to school since the “incident.” It is now in her court, and her behavior will help define what is about to happen.

     She enters his room, searching through his drawers and finding the dolls. At that moment, he returns, startled to find her in his room. She challenges him, demanding to know what he’s doing with the dolls, even questioning whether he might be stealing them from little girls. She calls him a liar when he answers her question of where he’s been with the words, “at school.” When he refuses to explain what is happening, she begins to gather the dolls up into a trash bag, but when she pulls the dolls from his hands, he begs her to leave “Jonathan!”

     “Who’s Jonathan?”

     “I love him.”

     But the answer receives only a slap in the face. The mention of his love is met with hostility even from his mother.

     After quietly pondering the situation, Adam dismembers one of his favorite dolls, beheading him and tossing the others away as well. He holds, finally, only the one that he calls Jonathan. Going online only to see more crudely created pictures of himself as a subject of mockery, he fantasizes that Jonathan suddenly appears, asking him to get ready. Alas, we know too well where this is leading.

     His fantasy Jonathan dresses him and kisses him.

    At work in a hospital, the mother receives a cellphone message that says only, “I’m sorry.”

   When she attempts unsuccessfully to reach Adam, she drives home, an extremely troubled look on her face. She rushes upstairs and pushes open the door of her apartment, racing to Adam’s room

where she finds his hanging body, which no amount of resuscitation can revive.

   This film describes itself as part of “a multinational effort to keep the conversation of teenage bullying alive,” with apparently Israel, Indonesia, and the US involved in its making. And if one is at all caring, there can be no argument about the good intentions of such educational works.

     My only wish is that they had made the teenager who was so awfully bullied a bit more believable. As it is, he seems less like a queer boy and more like an alien child from outer space. We know that schools do not have a very good track record of resolving such problems and often exacerbate such problems, but if knew of such an “incident,” why didn’t they further investigate what truly happened? And how could the mother, supposedly a doctor or nurse, not have perceived that a teenage son still playing with dolls needed some immediate psychiatric attention? Or simply logical perceive that the black eye, a doll named Jonathan, and a secretive son added up to a severe problem?

     Or why not just create a more typical situation, where the child is not even fully aware of his difference, but simply senses it as the others torture him for what they imagine his sexuality to be?   

That is the way most of us lived out our lives with bullies.

     This film not only has created an absolutely clueless character but his been rather clueless itself in its narrative surrounding such horrific incidents. And in the end, it seems difficult to feel full sympathy for so many imaginary characters that have little relationship to our real lives.

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

Werner Herzog | Woyzeck / 1979

force of nature

by Douglas Messerli

 

Werner Herzog (screenwriter and director) Woyzeck / 1979

 

Although Georg Büchner’s 1836 play Woyzeck (not published until 1879) has been performed numerous times since its 1911 premiere, there is still no one consistent version of the play, although one might well argue that Werner Herzog’s film of 1979 is as coherent as any. For Herzog, Woyzeck, although clearly almost mentally challenged, is also a deeply confused philosopher, trying to comprehend his demeaned position in a universe while also being sensitive to the frightening natural signs and omens only he is able to hear and interpret, which also suggests an element of schizophrenia in his personality.

     This Woyzeck, like the character often presented on stage, is maltreated by the surrounding society, tortured by his military superiors for his slightly deranged appearance (who else but Klaus Kinski could look out at the world with such a totally mad stare?), is scolded by the local captain for his constantly hurried activities and his inability—as the commandant has perfected—to congratulate himself as a “good” man, and has been experimented upon by the local doctor, a perverted quack determined to theorize his paid patient into madness, in part by insisting that he live on a diet of only peas! Yet Kinski’s Woyzeck somehow seems to good-naturedly put up with all of this. Rather than suffering primarily from the societal and political inequities of his life, Kinski’s Woyzeck seems more terrorized by the metaphysical rumblings that come from within.

     As a man of nature, Woyzeck, in Herzog’s telling, is forced to stand up for himself in a world that is utterly self-controlled—revealed in the film’s beautiful images of the small town in which the events take place—and, equally, thoroughly boring. Woyzeck’s problems, and our fascination with him, emanate from the fact that he cannot control anything; not only is he hardly able to pay for food and rent, but has no control of his temperament and body. Racing through the streets like a mad hatter, peeing in public against the town’s edifices, hurrying through the activities he is forced to undertake (including a terrifyingly speedy application of a knife to throat and face as he shaves the captain), diving in and out of his own home to report is whereabouts to his wife and young son, Woyzeck is unrestrained, a born romantic locked into a petty bourgeoisie community of 17th century propriety and reason. We know from the beginning that it is only a matter of time before these two forces come crashing in upon one another.

    The only ones who seem to calm Woyzeck, and clearly the only things of which this nearly hallow being is proud, is his beautiful wife (Eva Mattes) and his son. The only time he does rush about, his eyes nearly popping from his head, is on a weekend stroll and entertainment in the town square, with his babe in arms and beautiful wife striding quietly beside him.

    We already know that she is an unredeemed whore, but Woyzeck seems either not to care or oblivious to the fact. Rather, he is proud of his little family whom he does his best to support. Marie, it is clear, is also a creature of nature, but in her case, it fits all to well within the structures of this hypocritical community. Marie is smitten with the most pompous of the local folk, the Drum Major (Josef Bierbichler), and overdressed, high-strutting ass of a man, who is only too ready to take over the most beautiful woman in town; stealing her from her husband out from under his gentle gaze of adoration, the dazzling monster might almost be described as raping her, if it were not for the fact that she somewhat passively accepts his actions.

    It is only days later, when both the doctor and captain come together in discussion and, encountering Woyzeck along the way, teasing him about his wife’s improprieties, does he apparently realize that he has been cuckolded. Rushing home, Woyzeck attempts to find some evidence of his wife’s infidelity, as if cheating and lying must be visible to the eye. He cannot comprehend that his vision of the world is the unnatural one, that the real world does not reveal what it truly is but hides it, covers its truths over just as have the captain and doctor attempted to qualm and theorize their way out of their horrible actions. The captain insists that he has become a military man to prove that he is good. The doctor sees the entire world as representing proof of whatever quack theory enters his mind.

     But the foolish Woyzeck, more of a real man of science than either of these men, must see evidence, which soon after he discovers by watching his wife vigorously dancing in the arms of the Drum Major in a local wine hall.

     The madness that Woyzeck has feared all along descends upon him, and, just as Marie cannot resist her nature, so Woyzeck cannot resist his madness, buying a knife from the local butcher in order to kill the only being he loves. The murder, although totally brutal, is presented by Herzog in restrained operatic conventions: we see only the blood, which, like Macbeth’s wife, Woyzeck cannot wash away from his body, drowning in the lake as he attempts to do so.

     Since this version of Woyzeck is tortured les by mankind that by his very nature, there is no need to suggest a trail, which, in any event, is a scene that Büchner never completed and, perhaps, never even intended in his original manuscript. In Herzog’s vision, this desolate little community would never have been able to judge a man from another time and place. Rather, let them take their perverted joy in the event, the most exciting thing that they might ever have experienced.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2015).