Juanma Carrillo | Andamio (Scaffolding) / 2012

getting to know the neighbor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juanma Carrillo (screenwriter and director) Andamio (Scaffolding) / 2012 [14 minutes]

 

Generally, those of us who live in highrise apartments look out from windows to the world around us, rarely do we look to the side to our very next door neighbor. In the high rise at the center of Spanish director Juanma Carrillo’s film, scaffolding is suddenly erected around the entire perimeter of the building wherein live Eduardo (Paco Blázquez) and David (Domingo Fernández). For six months their views are suddenly removed and they have little choice but look within and askance.

    Now suddenly as Eduardo, a rather cranky publicist comes out to his balcony covered in green and blue plastic, the only thing he can see is his neighbor David, a rather shy literary student who, as opposed to Eduardo’s complaints against the landlady and the owners, attempts to get a little sun in the space between the plastic and the doorway, and imagines that he can see the beautiful sea and even hear its waves.

     Eduardo gently mocks such a poetic viewpoint with the observation, “What luxury,” but he does also introduce himself.

   Eduardo already has a name for his neighbor: “bookworm,” since he’s always reading, David commenting that Eduardo is always smoking. Eduardo, however, replies that he can give it up, while David suggests he would never want to abandon his major activity. Eduardo, however, quips that, of course, he will have to when he finishes it; but David merely reminds him that he will read another, and even offers to loan him his book. And this slight war of words, does begin to bring them together.

    Before long they are playing cards on their shared balconies, drinking wine, and truly getting to know each other.

   And then one evening, as Eduardo enters his balcony to water his plants, he notices that no one is home next door, there is no sign of David. And soon after, the scaffolding begins to be torn down.

    The next morning Eduardo takes a phone call on his now very sunny balcony, explaining to the caller that they are taking down the scaffolding and that he couldn’t be happier, promising to be in the office right away. But as he turns to go, he also notices a copy of the book David has promised to loan him, producing a smile on his face.

     As Eduardo returns home in the evening, he calls up to David, who explains he had been visiting his family for a few days. Eduardo thanks him for the book. And now we see, as David quickly fixes his hair, that there is something between them; a relationship that might or might not become sexual has transpired. Eduardo seems less fussy and critical and David far less bookish and shy.

    When Eduardo does finally appear he again expresses his delight that scaffolding has come down, while David explains that he rather liked it.   

     He goes on to argue that if nothing else it really helped the two of them. For months they had lived next door with nary even a hello when they passed on the stairway. “I think it’s been good for us.”

     Eduardo is not at all sure of what David is suggesting, describing it as “extreme,” but it does clearly make him think. For a moment he leaves the balcony, David wondering if his forwardness has perhaps lost him his new friend. But almost immediately Eduardo reappears, turns, smiles and welcomes him with the words: “Come in.”

     This lovely little comedy adds depth to a career that has included such earlier films as Cannibals, Wall, and Fuckbuddies. His feature directorial debut, Un efecto óptico (An Optical Effect), premiered in 2020. Sadly, Carrillo died in August 2024 at the early age of 46.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

 

 

Jules Herrmann | Liebmann (aka The Strange Summer) / 2016

the invasion of the hun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Herrmann (screenwriter and director) Liebmann (aka The Strange Summer) / 2016

 

German teacher Antek Liebmann (Godehard Giese) suddenly shows up in a small picturesque French village (shot in Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, in Picardy) where he rents a room from a local friendly elderly couple Antoine (Alain Denizart) and Giselle (Denis Lecocq), who live next door. Another neighbor, renting from Antoine and Giselle, Geneviève (Adeline Moreau) lives with her young daughter Morgaine (Morgane Delamotte) next door.

    All seem quite friendly, particularly the single and attractive Geneviève, who greet the German who, however, doesn’t speak French well and clearly prefers to remain to himself. When he expresses the need to relax and be alone, Antoine assures him he has come to the right place, as long as he doesn’t enter the nearby forest wherein evidently there are numerous hunters ready to shoot anything on sight.

    Geneviève is a bit more intrusive, particularly her young daughter who soon after Leibmann moves his room furniture into different locations and gets a good rest, attempts to impress and entertain the quiet man with every hula hoop trick she has ever learned.

    Liebmann uncomfortably moves back inside, realizing that any public sunbathing will be amount to an invasion of his privacy, which it is clear—if nothing else—that he very much desires. The Hollywood Reporter critic Boyd van Hoeij describes him as “bone weary,” since it is also apparent that he is attempting to escape some terrible incident from his past.

    Letterboxd commentator Michael Scott expresses it quite clearly: “….Liebmann [is]…an awkward, seemingly apathetic, loner who is dealing with an undisclosed, life-scouring incident. He’s upped and offed to rural France and he just wants to be left alone to sort his shit. How deep that shit runs is the source of much of the film’s angsty anti-comedy.”

    And we soon recognize that there may be even darker elements at play when, despite the warnings, Liebmann insists upon entering the forest, where he is quickly shot at. He later enters in the dark of night, and eventually, after a short fall, discovers a rifle hidden in the grass. As Geneviève soon also warns him even stranger things are happening in the forest since two bodies have already been discovered, evidently the work of a serial killer.

    Even though he at first turns down the invite of his landlords to dinner, he relents and together with the couple and Geneviève spends a pleasant evening enjoying simple peasant French cuisine.

   Herrmann’s oddball character, we quickly realizie, isn’t necessary mean or truly frightening, as he soon begins a friendly relationship with Geneviève and Morgaine, joining them on a picnic, and at one point when Antonine his temporarily hospitalized, picking up Morgaine from school while Geneviève attempts to nurse her landlord back to health.

    Later Geneviève takes him to a performance at the nearby Artist’s residency and feels hopeful enough about his intentions that—one of the numerous genre shifts this film makes—performs a sort of mock cooking show as she explains how to make her Le Gateau enchanté (the magic cake), obviously in hopes of further capturing any amorous attentions Leibmann might wish to show, particularly after one night when drunk he collapses, with her in hand, into a nearby bush.

     Perhaps that cake is magic since Liebmann, meanwhile, has taken a job at the local antique store, and when a young man, Sébastian (Fabien Ara) purchases a bed, the new employee is forced to help him move it to his house, where after their hard work they both fall into bed embracing and enjoying lovely sex. They later meet up again in Liebman’s room.

     For a while, it appears that the two have become a couple, and if nothing else his invitation to Sébastian to his own room makes it clear to his female neighbor that her would-be lover is, in fact, gay.

     But even here, Liebmann quickly pulls away from any permanent relationship, obviously haunted by events back in Germany. Critics have described these incidents as terribly oblique and have dismissed the comic moment of genre shifts (a brief history lesson by Antoine on the German attempts to invade France and the whiff of the horror genre in the serial killer, who turns out to be none other than Antoine, who with his wife often cared for Geneviève’s daughter Morgaine) as confusing and experimental.  

     Actually, I find them quite charming and a kind of tonic for Liebmann’s dark mental meanderings. And when Liebmann’s sister Ines (Bettina Grahs) Ines shows up, we quickly perceive that her brother’s inner demons are a result of the murder of his male German lover.

     True, as van Hoeij observes, “the two talk in the shorthand of siblings, referring to past events and character traits in quick half-references because they know each other well enough to understand what the other means.” But I don’t see their conversation to be at all “muddled” as The Hollywood Reporter critic argues. It’s quite clear by now that somehow Liebmann’s ex was murdered, and he has escaped to help himself heal. Despite the fact that Ines argues that it’s time for him to return home and face the simple truth of what happened, Liebmann doesn’t feel at all ready and almost angrily sends off beloved sister home.

     Meanwhile, he rejuvenates his relationship with Sébastian while still remaining friendly with his female neighbors. And finally, in a moment of pure genius, he perceives a way to express the horror that he has suffered through art.

     Entering the Artist’s building late at night, he picks up a piece chalk, and falling and lying in various positions throughout the building, up and down staircases and in several different rooms outlining the boundaries of his own body. Beside the chalk drawings he leaves various of the genre paintings that have lined the walls of his rented room.

     The large conceptual art piece makes clear that his lover was killed in a mass shooting that only now is he able to share with others through the creation of the art piece, in the process ridding any feelings of guilt that he has carried with him from Germany.

     By film’s end, it is clear Liebmann has found a new life with his French friends that permits him to now laugh and smile again. And in the film’s last image we observe Liebmann, Sébastian, Geneviève, and her daughter all skating hand-in-hand on an abandoned airplane runway.

     I found Herrmann’s film to be a small masterwork in dramatic comedy, and I look forward to seeing her earlier works of cinema as well.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

    

 

Wrik Mead | Camp / 2000

staying alive

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (screenwriter and director) Camp / 2000 [12 minutes]

 

Unlike so may of Canadian director Wrik Mead’s wonderful shorts, Camp has no coy humor and serves as a totally serious documentary about the arrest and murder of German homosexuals during Hitler’s reign.

    It begins quickly with almost abstract images of male flesh, representing the bars of Berlin in the Weimar Republic, some of the most open gay and lesbian friendly places on earth. Almost immediately in this compressed recounting, they are closed with new laws against public lewd and sexual behavior, where now suddenly even a look at someone for too long but result in arrest and imprisonment.

     175ers (named after the law against homosexual behavior had remained in place even during the last days of the Weimar Republic, but had basically been ignored) were now arrested and offered freedom if they identified others. But, of course, the promises of freedom were never kept. In fact, an amendment to the law regarding public hygiene offered castration as an alternative. Up to 100,000 homosexuals were arrested, and 15,000 sent to camps; but the narrator tells us that those numbers are probably far lower than reported since up until the early 21st century, the survivors were still seen as law-breakers. The conditions at the camps, as we all know now because of the stories from Jewish Holocaust survivors, were horrific, although it’s rather unfortunate that Mead does not at all mention that the camps were mostly created for the extermination of the Jews.

     And unfortunately, as well, Mead spends several moments of this short with a bar-like slot, a man behind it mostly blinking. But he follows up with the narrator commenting that homosexual were not “systematically eliminated” like other groups. “It was believed that their behavior could corrected. Can a homosexual be fixed?

    The screen shows a knife cutting the words in blood across a man’s chest: “hard labour isolation,” followed by brief cuts to images of prisoners struggling in the camp before returning the man’s chest with new words being cut across his lower chest and abdomen: “torture, beatings, hormones.”

     Again we watch prisoners in the midst of their sufferings before the screen returns again to the bloody body where one more word is etched in blood: “castration.”

     Homosexuals, we are told, were often ostracized from the other prisoners and were not allowed any communion, although the narrator claims this was not so bad since otherwise their were often beaten by other prisoners as well as camp commanders.

    To keep the homosexual prisoners from masturbating they were not allowed to sleep at night with their hands under the covers. If they were found breaking the rules, some were dragged out into the cold snow naked, water poured over their heads. Those who did survive, were often denied treatment in the clinic.    

     The longest sequence of this 12-minute work shows a shivering, naked man sitting on his bed, while another naked man crawls toward him, the two simply touch and hugging.

     While the pink patch is actually stitched into a prisoner’s skin, the narrator reads a letter from a prisoner home, explaining that he in now in a hospital, which is several ways worse than the camp because of constant surveillance. He wonders can he ever be free of the stigma.

     The entire landscape that Mead shows us at the end as turned pink.

     Although this is a truly moving film about a subject that needs far more attention and recollections, Mead is not, if this is evidence, a brilliant documentarian. There have been far more moving and intelligent recountings of the gay prisoners in the camps, including the Martin Sherman play made into the 1997 movie by Sean Mathias, Bent. And it is crucial, it seems to me, that the Nazi attack on the gay community, as horrific as it is, is always presented in the larger context of the 6 million European Jews that died in the Nazi camps. No one, moreover, hardly even mentions, anymore, the death of the Romansch people also perceived as dangerous outsiders.

     Yet, it is important and fascinating to watch how the brilliant filmmaker Mead approaches such a serious gay subject. And it is important also, that the Nazi treatment of homosexuals not simply became a footnote to the far more devastating Holocaust.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

Dorothy Arzner | The Wild Party / 1929

no time for men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Hopkins Adams and E. Lloyd Sheldon (screenplay), Dorothy Arzner (director) The Wild Party / 1929

 

Already in the 1920s a certain amount of authorial and directorial coding with regard to LGBTQ issues was taking place. William A. Wellman, for example, embedded his tale of male love in Wings (1927) within the narrative of war-time camaraderie, a nearly perfect fit that covered for their obvious visual affection and kisses. For the everyday movie-goer, not acquainted with the classic literature itself, even Manfred Noa’s presentation of signs of male sexual desire in Helena (1925) were easy to embrace by even the most devout homophobe within the context of wartime heroism and the kind of deep friendship that often develops between men living and fighting together day after day. It almost seemed to explain the island retreat at the end of the two former Legionnaire friends in Clarence Brown’s The Flesh and the Devil (1926) and certainly detracted our attention from what the sailors visually showed us in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). A close male friendship, particularly when a slightly younger man claimed to admire and want to emulate an older friend as in Brown’s A Woman of Affairs (1928) stood as good cover for a passionate love relationship and sexual boyhood friendships such as that in Jean Epstein’s Finis terrae (1929) which were even more opaque to audiences disinterested in looking deeper or unable to read beyond narrative declarations of heterosexual normativity.

     With women it was even easier to cover any possible lesbian interest. After all, females were known and still are for their communal gender involvement, and even in the Victorian age deep love of the unsexual kind expressed between women did not raise eyebrows. So for a lesbian director such as Dorothy Arzner it was not terribly difficult to code her 1929 talkie The Wild Party by gathering around the central character Stella (Clara Bow) several college chums who make up a group named the “Hard Boiled Maidens.” Recording their conversations with a boom mike, Arzner could present a rather complex narrative of young heterosexual desire while still cloaking any same-sex desires in the language of female friendship, distracting those who did not wish to recognize the depictions of the lesbian relationship between Stella and her hard-studying and non-partying opposite, Helen (Shirley O’Hara). A bit like Eisenstein, Arzner’s film shows us one thing while telling us something else. And for those who are most attracted to normalcy, that “something else” was for more disturbing than the open heterosexuality of these young girls, even if in their sometimes scandalous behavior might appear shocking for the time. Their heterosexual naughtiness was far preferable to the darker secrets that are played out before our very eyes.

     Film critic Luke Aspell perceptively writes: 

  

“As well as social space, Arzner also creates romantic interpersonal space, most strikingly in the naturalistic choreographies of homoerotic body language between Stella (Bow) and Helen (Shirley O’Hara). Just as Bow’s performance often seems plural in its transitional quality, a detailed physical performance accompanied by speech rather than an integrated speaking performance, so the scenes between Stella and Helen have two distinct, simultaneous meanings. As dialogue scenes, they are discussions of heterosexual activity; as images, they are depictions of a lesbian relationship.”

 

     This would be far more difficult in a silent film as in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, who was able to show us another reality only by his intense intercutting, sometimes blurring what we might imagine we are seeing by allowing us to glimpse only in an instant or two a man coming up behind and standing close to another or two men moving together as in a kiss. But with the use of a boom microphone, Arzner was given far greater freedom by allowing us to hear many voices speaking at nearly the same time in conversation which in its college girl banter sings the praises of the male body while sometimes hugging close the female friend.

     Once again, Aspell’s comments in his essay in Film Issue are provocative:

 

“Freed to move the microphone over and between her actors, Arzner creates an aural social space, and, despite the camera’s comparative immobility, can also follow mobile group conversations, as when the ‘Hard-Boiled Maidens’ gather around Stella (Bow) asking her to tell the story of the spoons in her luggage. The gradation between intelligibility and unintelligibility is relatively subtle; whereas crowded voices were often being used during this period purely for the novelty of their sound (frequently run, unsynchronised, over silent footage), the voices in The Wild Party are always distinct and embodied enough to carry narrative significance; as Sara Bryant notes, the sound of ‘women collectively chattering, singing, and laughing’ creates ‘an unruly acoustic experience that, at moments in the film, prompts from male characters ineffective disciplinary responses… or mild fear.’”

 

      The story of the “spoon,” for example, is crucial one in the narrative plot since it establishes how Stella accidentally met a man on a train, returning in the night after a bathroom visit to a berth she thought was her own in which she finds a man, James ‘Gil” Gilmore (Fredric March), who turns out later to be her anthropology teacher at Winston College where she is enrolled. Indeed, it is her relationship with him, first as an enemy, then as her savior, and finally as her lover and confidant that appears to be central to the entire film in terms of its heteronormative plot.

      His attempt as a teacher to tame the wild and thoughtless young girl who gets into trouble is the first signs indeed that he is interested in Stella. When she and her “HBM” friends get turned away from a class dance for their skimpy costumes they drive to a nearby roadhouse where they are accosted and she kidnapped by drunken men, which for all practical purposes constitutes the heart of the film. It is those actions, after all, which allow Gil to come to her rescue, admit his love for her, and ultimately to win her over to become his wife, promising at film’s end to whisk her away to Malaysia where together presumably they live happily ever after in an exotic and fulfilling world of adventure and love.

      But even as Stella tells what at first seems a nearly nonsensical story of the spoon (awarded to her as a “teasing” medal for her possible attempt to “spoon” or make love to him), the action of the girls around her tell us something different from where that narrative will take us.

    Helen, a studious girl, is hoping to win an award for the outstanding student which will pay for her continued education at the school, spends most of her time, unlike Stella and the other girls studying and typing up papers. Yet the moment she appears in Stella’s busy room just before she tells the story of the spoons, Stella goes to hug her and tease her face with a puff, actions with which she does not engage with any other girls. Throughout this movie, in fact, Stella can be seen hugging her roommate, something one might not necessarily notice—these are after all young girls who signify their many emotions through their bodies—except Stella seems to grow calmer and less girlish around Helen, and behaves toward her differently from the others.

      Helen, in turn, seems to have utterly no interest in men and obviously is desperately fond of her roommate. Were this film to be in color we can almost see her blush with pleasure each time she meets up again with the vivacious and beautiful Stella. At one point, when Stella teases her about spending all her evenings hard at work studying instead of searching out a man, Helen makes it quite clear that she has “no time for men.”

      The wild night at the roadhouse is without Helen. But at a later party in one of their boyfriend’s mansion, after she has cajoled and insisted that Helen join her in the fun, Stella is insistent at an early hour to return back to the dorm as she has promised her roommate. But this time even Helen seems to be enjoying the outing, particularly after Stella has saved her from the arms of a drunken boy who Stella and the others have “dizzied” out the door—dancing him in so many circles that he literally stumbles out the front door and collapses—and hooked her up with George (Jack Lunden), a boy who evidently Helen is attracted to, in part because of his kindness and decency.

      After agreeing to stay later at the party, Helen and George walk off to the beach where they remain for hours, simply sitting together innocently enjoying the moon and the feelings they have for one another.

       In the meanwhile, however, Stella has heard that Gil has been shot, although not seriously, by one of the men who had attempted to molest her. Truly suffering over the fact, she ditches her boyfriend for the night—over his great protestation—and retires to another room, truly shaken up over the event, particularly because if word gets out about the reason for the shooting both her and his reputation and her stay at the college will be challenged. When she realizes it is past time to return, she is disturbed by hearing, as another girl puts it, that Helen has gone “into the wilds,” the place apparently where some girls go to make love. She seriously goes after Helen, calling her name and is truly disturbed by finding her with George so far removed from the house, even though Helen assures her it was all innocent. But we realize in this series of untypical selflessness and true concern for Helen and Gil’s welfare that Stella is indeed far more complex than she might superficially appear.

       If her and Gil’s love appears to be the arc of the story, it is in fact far less important than this event and what happens after. Helen takes up a correspondence with George, writing him that she cannot see him because she is studying hard to win the class award, and recalling the night they spent together.

     Meanwhile, impatient, after a month of his absence because of the healing wound, to find about Gil’s condition Stella again goes far out of bounds by visiting him in his rooms late at night. Stella’s class foe, Eva Tutt, sees her going to Gil’s house, follows her, and finds proof of her visit through a rhinestone bow design that has broken off of Stella’s heel as she climbed over the fence. Rushing back to the dormitory, Eva pulls the fire alarm forcing all the girls out to be accounted for by Faith Morgan (Marceline Day), the highly ethical class president.

       Stella makes it back just in time, but Eva knows her secret. Moreover, as the girls rush out of the rooms the winds of the hall blow the stack of Helen’s correspondence over the floor and into the hall itself. It is inevitable that Eva will find the very page that Helen has written about her love and illicit (although pure) experience on the beach with George.

        And it is this sub-narrative that is truly the most important, since ultimately, when Stella discovers that Eva has Helen’s missing letter and has turned it into Faith who in turn has sent it on to the faculty committee that is the most important element of the story.

      For the very first time, Stella acts truly selflessly and maturely, joining Faith at the faculty committee to claim that the letter was hers, not Helen’s, arguing that Helen is the only one worthy of the class award and would never have been involved in such an affair.

        Her act means her own expulsion from school. As she packs up, exclaiming with usual pluck that it’s time to move on, keeping the truth about her reasons for leaving from Helen, and truly suffering for having to leave Gil, we see Helen almost in tears over the reality that she will have no one at school any longer who loves her as much.

       That Gil, impressed with Stella’s actions, decides to leave school as well, showing up on the train just as Stella is about to hand over her ticket to the conductor, seems like an add-on plot maneuver, particularly his announcement that as a couple they will soon be traveling to Malaysia. Who, in a US Hollywood-produced movie ever honeymooned permanently to what was then a British colony nearby Borneo, Thailand, and Indonesia, countries where women in the movies nearly always got into trouble and seldom came back happy. This seems like something from another script like George Melford’s East of Borneo of two years later or Bette Davis’ torrid murder romance The Letter of a decade later, told here only as a bromide to hide the real story of girls in love and Stella’s sacrifice to protect their secret.

     It is interesting in hindsight that neither Rose Hobart of the former movie nor Bette Davis was happy in her Southeast Asia location or romance. Joseph Cornell later devoted an entire film (1936) to the clips from East of Borneo just to convince us how terrible Rose’s life had been, which was later turned into camp in Ken Jacob’s Blonde Cobra (1963). Certainly, it is hard to imagine Clara Bow sweltering in the evening heat as she sips martinis by her hubby’s side.

      As we might have expected, however, coding does indeed work, leaving a film open to different kinds of reading through time and alternating perspectives. As critic Richard Barrios notes:

 

“Arzner's staging, particularly of its dormitory intimacies, gives it a Johnny Arthur-like transformation of something palpably different [from what might read like a dimestore romance]. The reviews of The Wild Party preferred to remain on the subjects of Clara Bow's voice....and the general silliness of the material. Only occasionally did they single out the unusually fluent direction, and never did they speak of the uncommonly tight and personal bonds of the 1930 graduating class of Winston College.”

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (July 2022).