poor boy
by
Douglas Messerli
Tamer
Ruggli (screenwriter and director) Cappuccino / 2010 [16 minutes]
In
Swiss filmmaker Tamer Ruggli’s 2010 film Cappuccino we encounter yet
again another sort of coming out and semi-homophobic film, not really one or
the other since our young hero Jérémie (Benjamin Décosterd) has hardly had
enough experience to either fully announce his homosexuality, nor does he
encounter the intense bullying that we have encountered in so many other films.
The problem with Ruggli’s Cappuccino
is that it consists only in a slight event that may be of great importance to
the shy teenager who dreams of having passionate sex with his beautiful
classmate Damien (Anton Ciurlia), but is so truly insignificant on the larger
scale that we have difficulty to totally emphasize with his now-standard
tearful admission to
his more than sympathetic and loving mother, Gina (Manuel Biedermann) that he
likes boys, not girls.
Damien is one of those “straight” boys, always more knowledgeable about
sex than any gay kid, who is perfectly willing to take advantage of the boy he
immediately perceives has a crush on him. He quickly agrees to meet up with Jérémie
in order to get an easy blowjob. What can a gay boy do but oblige, even if it
isn’t the deep romantic encounter or even the remarkable fuck he might have
wished for?
He’s just happy to have been offered up
the chance to suck up the semen which he declares tastes somewhat like the
sweet drink his mother offers him every morning, cappuccino (not what the
English translation declares to be “coffee”). But when he goes to kiss the self-satisfied
recipient of his homosexual gesture, he is immediately pushed away and called,
indirectly in this case, a “fag”: “I’m not a fag!”
Compared to a gang of boys or even one
straight homophobe threatening to beat you every day, the expletive seems negligible,
something he even might have expected. But for Jérémie, it dashes nearly all
his young dreams and hopes, leading him to such a flood of tears that when his
mother merrily bounces home in her sequined gown, she still discerns his wet
cheeks.
She offers him one of her cigarettes and
hugs him to her inquiring about how his date with a new girlfriend has ended in
such a fuss, while he, letting loose with a new flurry of tears, admits the “she”
was actually a “he,” and…well, in this case he doesn’t even have to explain his
dilemma as she quickly swallows him up in her arms.
All we can say is, “O the travails that
still await this poor mamma’s boy.”
Of course, we feel for him. But we might
have suggested he watch a few other coming out films before making his first date.
Hopefully, that’s what young boys can now share that in my generation was
impossible.
I couldn’t even imagine that a straight
boy might have enjoyed, now and then, a good gay suck. Or that such “gay boys”
often pretended they were straight, even to themselves. And certainly neither
my mother or father would have held me in their arms while I cried out after
having been described I was a fag. There was nothing to do but take the
beatings, run away from bullies, and pretend that everything was “normal,” when
you knew inside everything was all fucked up.
Los
Angeles, June 16, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).
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