Em Weinstein | In France Michelle Is a Man’s Name / 2020

gift to a son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Em Weinstein (screenplay and direction) In France Michelle Is a Man’s Name / 2020 [12 min.]

 

In France Michelle Is a Man’s Name has played in several gay festivals across the country, picking up many awards in the process. I was fortunate to be able to see this short film in the Los Angeles-based AFI Film Festival in 2020.

     The events in this 12-minute film are devoted to approximately 4 sequences, the last of which representing the central substance of the entire. We begin with the central character in transit, having stopped evidentially to urinate in a highway men’s room. A trucker (Tim Blough) stands at a urinal, hearing the flush of one of the stools in one of the cabins as the trans man Michael (Ari Damasco) exits, the trucker nodding toward him as if in some secret recognition of approval, almost as if to acknowledge “You’re one of us.”

     Michael soon reaches his parent’s house, being greeted fairly openly, without any of the familial discomfort that we might expect. We do sense, however, when Michael’s mother (Olga Sanchez) refers to his son as “Michel,” that Michael’s birth name may have been the French equivalent of that name Michèle, and we sense in her insistence on using the French root of the name her inability to make the complete mental transformation that Michael’s father (Jerry Carlton) seemingly has.

     Like most US families they sit down for a meal, say their prayers, and eat, with Michael’s father asking for his son to join him the next morning on a trip into town. We presume it’s simply a run to a store or grocery to pick up a few supplies or foodstuffs, a generous attempt to be near to his son who apparently is now living away from home.

      But it is that visit to the local hamlet that reveals so much that is both terrifying and ritualistic about the American male experience. The stop he intends to make is not for household goods, but for an odd sort of entertainment, in which evidently, he regularly participates, found in the grungy strip bar on the village main street.

       There local males slobber over their beer and the awkward gymnastics of the somewhat overweight pole girls, yelling out their appreciation for their special talents on cue. Yet Michael’s father has a special gift in store for the son, it appears, he is now happy to welcome into his formerly hidden life. He whispers something into the bartender’s ear and before Michael can even acclimate himself to the new world into which he has just been initiated, the pole dancer comes toward him ready and willing to perform her best lap dance.

       The confusion, startlement, and pain Michael feels about what is being played out upon his own body is quite apparent, and the voyeurs that we have instantly become naturally try somehow to make sense of it just as we are sure Michael is attempting to do as well. Is this “gift” a true olive branch, a ritualistic reach out to the son he now suddenly can claim in order to bring him closer through acknowledging that Michael is now due the patriarchal awards that come with his masculine identification? Or, we equally wonder, is this a kind of inverted punishment for Michael’s attempt to claim those rights or even a test to see if Michael is truly worthy of the rewards of becoming a man?

       Certainly, he must realize that Michael’s identification as a male is not precisely the same as his father’s, that the very transformation that he has made along with all of its societal, cultural, and psychological dismissals and apprehensions brings with it a different and perhaps far more refined perspective of manhood.

      Of course, we cannot know precisely what Michael is thinking. Perhaps he is somewhat comically delighted by his father’s bizarre “present,” perceived as a way of bonding with his offspring in a way he could not previously have. He could even be delighted to have his father’s resounding acceptance through the only way the elder knows how to express it.

      In fact, how the viewer/voyeur interprets these actions tells us as much about ourselves as it defines director/writer Em Weinstein’s character.

      Weinstein’s film, in short, is profound in the sense that it makes no attempt to explain the phenomena but only attempts to represent it, an event, I believe, that might only happen in rural USA.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

 

Maddie Barnes | Sand / 2020

on the beach

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maddie Barnes (screenwriter and director) Sand / 2020 [10 minutes]

 

Jaimie (Joel Fossard-Jones) and Curtis (Johnny Gutteridge) are two British boys who live near the sea, and spend most of their time at the beach. These two adolescent boys are clearly gay and in love with one another, having evidently grown up together.    

      In between their bouts of sun-bathing, swimming, splashing, and wrestling, they kiss, and appear to be at near perfect equilibrium in their lives thanks to one another’s support and caring.

      Yet Jaimie well knows that at 17 they are still open to change (“You’re 17, nothing’s forever.”), and that their relationship may not even last. Yet he is deeply hurt when he hears that Curtis has been with a girl, and even more angry when he sees his friend at the beach kissing her and pretending not to even notice his existence.

      Curtis attempts each time to apologize, but he also lies, insisting that there’s nothing really between them when Jaimie has observed their pretense of near rapture. But his friend insists he’s experimenting, since despite their close loving friendship he still doesn’t feel “normal.” Although he tells Jaimie that he’s in love with him, he admits, as Jaimie prods, that he has told the girl the same thing.

       The more mature of them, Jaimie, assures him that he is the most normal of anyone he’s knows and that their own love, if were to survive, is also normal outside of the “twisted” world of their high school friends and families. But at the same time Jaimie is hurt and knows that his friend may need more time to work things out, so he refuses to talk with him for a full month.

       Once more, Curtis tries to assure him of his devotion, explaining that the love he has felt for Jaimie was so overwhelming that he simply had to know if he could experience such feelings with girls as well. Jaimie repeats that there’s nothing wrong with experimenting, and welcomes him back by running off to the water’s edge just as they did in the first scenes, turning back to call, “Well are you coming?”

       Curtis runs toward him, and their friendship seems to have remained intact. But not everything is the same. And both of them know that. Even if they do remain loyal to each other, changes are obviously in store for them upon graduation. And even the deepest of adolescent love doesn’t always translate into a permanent relationship.

       We share Jaimie’s pain, but we also perceive that he is the wisest of young men, able to give of himself while realizing his current’s love limitations.

        Nothing much happens in this film, except for the brief moments of the two boy’s separation. But the maturity and naturalness with which this film treats its young homosexual couple is as beautiful as the movie’s stark black and white images. Few films ultimately are accepting about the differences of each of its lovers as is Barnes’ small cinematic gem. And even if the maturity with which Jaimie seems to comport himself might seem almost unbelievable, it is certainly something we want to believe, that there are young people like him who finally are able to see through all adolescent trauma to realize who they are and want they might want in life.

 

Los Angeles, May 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

Sam Feder | Disclosure

finding their way in often hostile worlds

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Feder (director) Disclosure / 2020

 

Documentary director Sam Feder has done something special with his 2020 film titled Disclosure. For one of the first times on film, he has brought together a rather large number of trans women and trans men—an opinionated, sometimes angry, but always well-spoken group of actors, directors, historians, and others involved in TV and film, including Laverne Cox, Susan Stryker, Alexandra Billings, Jamie Clayton, Chaz Bono, Alexandra Grey, Yance Ford, Trace Lysette, Jazzmun, Mj Rodriguez, Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Elliot Fletcher, Brian Michael Smith, Sandra Caldwell, Candis Cayne, Zackary Drucker, Lilly Wachowski, Ser Anzoategui, Zeke Smith, and Leo Sheng—to help explain to the some 80% of US citizens who have never met a transsexual person what their lives were as they were growing up and, later, transitioning, and how they continue their lives today.

      There are so many interlinking issues and specific examples here that I would be loath to name all of them without seeing this film at least 10 times. But we can summarize the major of them.

       One of the most painful of this groups’ experiences is that, particularly in transitioning, they were greeted on subways, busses, and even in the streets as beings for the general public to laugh at.

      Indeed, they argue, being transsexual has always, in the American consciousness been seen as cartoonish, ridiculous, and simply funny. After all, those comedians who used transsexual tropes such as Flip Wilson and Milton Berle—while often fascinating to these young and confused sexual beings while growing, with them perhaps even a bit fascinated how and why these men would so readily don dresses and imitate the gestures of the opposite sex—quickly grew to comprehend that for US citizens the very idea that a man might actually, temporary as it was, become a woman, was laughable, something so ridiculous that the bark of hostile laughter (as Henri Bergson, in his book Laughter, might have put it) was the only way they could imagine to respond.

      There was always, in the American heterosexual (cis world, or individuals who were happy with her birth sexuality) an absurdity in the transsexual attempts to transform themselves into beautiful women or handsome young men (both which many of these figures truly are), particularly among feminists who mocked their applications of heavy makeup, lipstick, sometimes extravagant wigs and hair additions, since many feminists were working against, in their minds, these very feminine stereotypes.

       When these transsexual figures, moreover, actually had the opportunities to play out their true sexualities on the screen—and despite the fact that major roles, such as in Transparent were still reserved for heterosexual men and women playing as if they were transsexual—the roles centered primarily on murder and/or fatal diseases. One of them recalls how she, quite by accident, performed as a transsexual woman in movies back to back, being done away with similarly in each film. They took the work simply because there was such a dearth of roles in which they were encouraged to audition for.

       Many were particularly angry about Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game starring a truly beautiful transsexual woman, Jaye Davidson (who was nominated even for an Academy Award), but who, in the script, after revealing herself to her naïve and somewhat confused heterosexual lover (she had previously given him a most fulfilling blowjob) had to endure his rush to the bathroom and insistent vomiting, as if her very presence was suddenly something that was so unbearable that he could literally not stomach it.

      Jordan, at least, somewhat redeems himself by allowing the relationship to continue and, after the male character takes on the guilt of a murder the transsexual lover committed, suggesting that the two may someday, when he is finally released from prison, take up a serious relationship with her.

      Some transsexuals, given their inabilities to find substantive roles went into what they describe as “Stealth” mode, portraying heterosexual women so successfully that, although they lived with bated breath, they were seldom questioned.

      Two years later, however, comic-actor Jim Carey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective took the trope even further after discovering the woman he loves is transsexual, not only profusely vomiting, but scrubbing out his mouth, and brushing his teeth in absolute disgust. One might argue of course that Carey and his screenwriter were also satirizing the scene in The Crying Game. Yet, nonetheless, it signaled to US males that such behavior was absolutely necessary after having been, in their minds, “tricked.”

     Although these actors do not mention it, by 1998, 4 years later, in the highly sensitive film that deals with AIDS and numerous other such issues, after Dennis Quaid seems to take an interest in the transsexual Alec Mapa, she quips, “I may be a fabulous looking broad, but I got a penis. This ain't no disco and I don't want no "Crying Game" drama.” In fact, his encounter with her is simply an assigned acting lesson. But she still gets her wry vengeance:

 

                  Lana: That was quite a story. Right enterainin’, but Sugar

                             I don’t know who you think you’re foolin’

                  Hugh: What do you mean?

                  Lana: Lana may be three sheets to the proverbial wind,

                            But I don’t believe a single word coming out of

                            your pretty, straight, little mouth.

 

     Indeed, for a group so lied to throughout their youths and young adult lives, illusion is something these women and men—despite the endless accusations of heterosexuals that they are living an illusion—immediately see through, the pretenses of the general society at nearly all moments, and judge the early attempts of Hollywood films and TV to be pitiable failures that functioned against their own attempts to define themselves.

      And many of them also equally bemoan the fact that when they were finally invited to speak on TV talk shows such Jerry Springer and even Oprah, the conversation always began with a discussion of “cutting” or even hiding their penises, instead of speaking about their outward appearance or even their daily lives. At least Oprah eventually changed the focus of her concerns.

     When it comes to suggesting cinema and TV works that truly meant something to them, they strangely enough seem to agree upon the Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs, performing an opera, suddenly is transformed into a beautiful version of Brúnnhilde in Chuck Jones’ What’s Opera, Doc? with whom even the rabbit hunting Elmer Fudd falls in love.

      Other seminal films, such as Paris Is Burning of 1990 and the 1968 film The Queen (both of which I reviewed in My Year 2020 and in my forthcoming collection Queer Cinema).

   Several named a more unlikely favorite, Victor/Victoria, in which a supposed male plays a transsexual, who is actually a heterosexual woman. But even here, they point to a moment which seems to have to be repeated in many films in when women, transsexual and heterosexual had to reveal their “true” identities by pulling open their blouses to reveal their breasts.

      Those females who have transitioned into males, they argue, are still underrepresented in the media, and few American citizens even realize that they exist. One of the reasons, according to Chaz Bono, that he appeared on Dancing with the Stars, despite his self-perceived inability to dance, was in order to represent this aspect of the community.

       Perhaps one of the most shocking of some of their observations is that, despite their desire still be accepted and sometimes loved by the straight community, the more transsexuals who rise to success, the more violent are the actions of some people in relationship to everyday transsexuals.

       In a sense, the heartfelt revelations and observations of these individuals are a brilliant introduction to the transsexual world, helping, one can only hope, each of us with little previous knowledge of their lives, to come to recognize them not only as gifted participants of our society but as a group that needs—particularly in this time of hostile actions by the government and president (who has just declared that transsexuals will be taken off the medical insurance roles during a time when they may most need it, during the coronavirus pandemic)—our support and friendship. Fortunately, the Supreme Court did just that, recently ruling that they too are protected from discrimination at their working places.

      If Feder’s film is but a sampling of transsexual issues, it is at least a fine introduction which will help us to begin seeking fuller understandings of the entire LGBTQ community.

 

Los Angeles, June 25, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2020).

Jacques Demy | L’Événement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la Lune (A Slightly Pregnant Man) / 1973

over the moon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Demy (screenwriter and director) L’Événement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la Lune (A Slightly Pregnant Man) / 1973

 

Perhaps one of the strangest comedies ever committed to film, Jacques Demy’s A Slightly Pregnant Man, stars Marcello Mastrioianni as an increasingly pregnant man with Catherine Deneuve as his hairdresser wife.

     As much as I love Demy’s whimsical views of the world, always garnished with his gay sensibility, this one is dead in its tracks from the very beginning, as driving school instructor Marco Mazetti (Mastrioianni) begins to suffer bouts of nausea, a desire for strawberries, and a growing belly. A trip to the doctors, the chain-smoking and increasingly incoherent Micheline Presle, sends him to a specialist who confirms that Mazetti is, indeed, the first male to become pregnant.

     A pregnant man was once a fairly common gay fantasy. A similar “joke” was made in Rock Hudson’s film of 1959, Pillow Talk; but there it was only a passing conceit, dreamed up by the writers perhaps just to tease those in the know about Hudson’s sexuality. Hudson simply ducks into a gynecologist’s office to hide out from Doris Day, which intrigues both nurse and doctor. But here, Demy, a gay man (married to fellow director, Agnès Varda) takes it all the way, as the doctor determines his character’s pregnancy is the result of eating too much hormone-fed chicken, and Mastrioianni shares the information with his wife and friends—who greet the fact with surprising equanimity (perhaps having read only the English language title of the film in which they were cast instead of the much more astounded French title, which translates as “The Most Important Event Since Man Walked on the Moon”)—soon after serving as a national spokesman for a clothes designer determined to create a maternity wardrobe for men.

     Several men even appear envious of his experience, and soon males from all over the world are reporting similar conditions.* One artist, a friend of a woman acquaintance, admits he has always wanted to have a baby. And the women joke that from now on they will all be better understood by their companions.

      Like Demy’s previous films, all of this fantasy is drolly handed out with bright colors and an occasional song (in the title song, Legrand, in English translation asks, “Who doesn’t feel nervous in a world like ours?” And, in fact, all of the characters in this movie might feel more than nervous about their obsessions.

     But as several critics have pointed out, since there is no tension between any of the characters, the “specialness” of the event is drained from the narrative, and we are allowed little delight in what otherwise might make for a series of charged statements either in defense or opposition to male birthing. If nothing else, such an event might have shifted the whole notion of the role women play in the world and also rid us of the notions of the necessity of only male-female marriages for the survival of the species.

     Both Mastrioianni and Deneuve are so easygoing that they appear as if they are reciting their lines instead of living through a kind of miracle. The only “thrill of it all” is that with the advertising money they can now afford to rent a larger hair-dressing shop and maybe even join businesses, with a small corner of the space devoted to Mazetti’s driving school. And, yes, now the couple, living together for years with a son from a previous marriage, will at last get married.

     In the days of second-wave of French feminism and early gay liberation, and long before gays could marry and adopt children, one can imagine that Demy dreamt up this fable in order to talk about his own desires for a male-centered domestic life. His and Varda’s son, Mathieu, was born the year before Jacques made this movie.

     Yet, predictably, the movie can only disappoint, as Mazetti is finally told that his pregnancy has been only a hysterical one. And we wake up to the fact that as far as we know, no man, not even on the moon, can have a baby by himself.

 

*Billy Crystal underwent a similar trauma in the movie Rabbit Test.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).

    

Chris Bolan | A Secret Love / 2020

the joy of being different

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Bolan, Alexa L. Fogel, and Brendan Mason (screenplay), Chris Bolan (director) A Secret Love / 2020

 

It was a beautiful and also an incredibly sad experience today to watch Chris Bolan’s documentary about his great aunt, Terry Donahue, and her life-time lesbian partner Pat Henschel, A Secret Love, the title based on the famous Doris Day song from 1953:

Once I had a secret love,

That lived within the heart of me

All too soon my secret love,

Became impatient to be free

 

So I told a friendly star,

The way that dreamers often do

Just how wonderful you are,

And why I'm so in love with you

 

Now, I shout it from the highest hills

Even told the golden daffodils

At last my hearts an open door,

And my secret love's

No secret anymore.

 

     The long love between this couple, eventually lasting 70 years, is certainly beautiful, as well as their numerous memories, many amazingly caught on camera, of their long-term relationship, documented, in part, because the Canadian-born Terry was recruited to become a catcher on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League created by Philip K. Wrigley (the heir to the William Wrigley, Jr.’s fortune) and Pat’s involvement in playing hockey—an important World War II event that has been now highly archived and represented in Penny Marshall’s movie A League of Their Own. 

      As critic Tomris Laffly noted:

 

            Gay character didn’t openly make an appearance in…Marshall’s

            celebrated feminist sports film…but there obviously were lesbian

            players in the league, as well as same-sex couples buried within

            the depths of the stories that helped inspired the film.

 

      Someday, we might even get a revelation of how many male sports players also were involved in gay relationships; but that will, sadly, still take years given the ridiculous macho of male sport activities.

      When the two women met, while playing hockey, it was immediate love, and they soon after moved to Chicago, where the couple lived for many years.

      Yet the literal facts of their relationship—although through the clips we are shown it was obviously charming as on the beach and in bed they lovingly enjoyed one another—is not as important as how they were forced to live their lives in the late 1940s and the 1950s in which they, in the closet, hidden away from prying eyes.

      Under mayor Richard J. Dailey’s governance not only were lesbian bars often raided, but women who were wearing anything that might appear to be male clothing—a pair of pants with a zipper or a seemingly male buttoned shirt—were targeted and sent to the paddy wagons for arrest.

And this couple, both with green cards given their Canadian nationalities, were terrified they might be sent home where they might not find any acceptance.

      Even the members of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League were required to wear high skirts and forced to attend “charm schools” to teach them how to be more feminine. Coming out to families often meant complete shunning and even arrestment.

    Despite Terry and Pat’s intense relationship, they determined to hide it, calling themselves, depending upon the circumstances, simply close friends or “cousins.”

      They found themselves a nice house in Chicago where the landlord perceived them to be perfect tenants, but they were forced to hide their own emotions while they daily worked for the same interior design company, refusing to even go out to the bars.

     They found acceptance by attending house parties, often with gay male friends, dancing, costuming, and generally enjoying their lives behind closed doors. These women’s closest friends, it appears in this fascinating film, were gay male couples, a true early example of the coalition between gays and lesbians, and a lovely testament to the beginnings of the LGBTQ community, all of whom found themselves outsiders in a world for simply being “different,” a quality that these two lesbian lovers proclaim as helping them to survive almost as a reward to their hidden lives.

     Is it any wonder then, that as they grow older and begin discovering health problems, that Pat, in particular—clearly the more the dominant and dour of the two—was resistant to leaving the home that they now realized they must in order to survive.

     Fortunately, Terry has a loving family back in Canada, particularly her truly beloved niece Diana, of whom Pat seems almost somewhat jealous. And Terry’s father, despite her mother’s far more close-minded values, seems quite open to her friendship with Pat, even to the point of wanting to adopt her as another daughter.

      Diana and her family members, once the couple have finally, in old age, outed themselves to the niece, wanted them to return to Edmonton, where she and her accepting husband attempted to find them a good assisted-living home. Yet Pat resisted, and the two returned to Chicago.

      As Terry developed serious problems with Parkinson’s Disease, Diana finally realized that she had to intrude, coming south to the US to break down, in a quite dramatic way, Pat’s resistance to any shift in their lives.

      In fact, this is not as much a film about lesbian lovers as it is about what happens to LGBTQ couples as age descends upon them. And, in this sense, this film nearly devastated me, quickly realizing that Howard and I might soon be facing the same difficulties. We would like to remain at home, but will that, as we begin to suffer deeper health problems, even be possible?

     Like this couple faced with the same questions, where might we go? Will we even be accepted as a couple in such elder facilities, particularly when these were of the same age of those who did not accept us when we were younger?

     Thanks to Terry’s niece’s kind intervention in their lives, they do find a quite expensive (about $7,000 each month) assisted living space nearby to their Chicago home. Their having to select and pack up their loved home treasures is itself a painful episode in this short documentary. What chair, lamp, painting, photographic collection does one want to carry with one on their journey surely into death?

     By the time they finally reach their new destination, where they fortunately do get along with the other neighbors and become lovingly adjusted to their new location, Pat is also suffering, and the woman she has so long nursed must now care for her. But here, finally, they commit to their relationship through marriage, with many of their gay friends and family members in attendance.

      Ultimately, they both realize that they need to be closer to Terry’s loving family, moving to a care-home near Edmonton, where Terry dies with Pat still apparently surviving. Evidently, Pat grew closer to Diana and Terry’s family after the death.

      This film, for me, was a bit like looking into a mirror of Howard’s and mine own futures. I had just the day before proclaimed in my “Advance Health Care Directive Kit” that I wanted to die at home. But, obviously, few get to do that. And what, after all, is home?

       For lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, and other queer folk that is a question, as this lovely work reveals, that isn’t easily resolved.

 

Los Angeles, May 6, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2020).