Michael Alén | Oh, You Pretty Things / 2006

a not very pretty sight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Alén (screenwriter and director) Oh, You Pretty Things / 2006 [14 minutes]

 

Michael Alén’s self-congratulatory short film of 2006 does truly explore “pretty things” and spends far too much of its 14 minutes on seemingly experimental devices such a blurring out or solarizing the images and speeding text through it or simply watching its central characters devote themselves so such profound chores such as taking out a computer from a small draw, calling up his messages, and saying he’s not interested before tucking it back into its drawer. Later, he spends an inexplicable amount of time sorting through a bunch of colored jock-like underpants, appearing to find anything proper to wear.

Neither Enrique de la Paz or Robert Perez is particularly beautiful or even pretty unless you find grungy boys who leaving a New York gay bar munching on chips or later sloppily eating spaghetti out of paper trays before spending a night jumping, fully dressed on a bed as something you’re attracted to.

    They run through a subway to demonstrate their happiness of being together.

     But Robert, it turns out, is also a businessman (who looks a little better when dressed in a white shirt and tie) who’s busy for a few days. Enrique obviously choses to punish him by not showing up for several appointments on a New York “rooftop” or later at Metropolitan museum. He briefly toys with a newfound friend and blocks Enrique from his cellphone. 

   Enrique, meanwhile, does a not very well choreographed dance on a bridge near Pier 88 on 12th Avenue in Manhattan, wherein he bounces around the bridge in release of whatever anger or energy he has held inside.  

     This short film’s music by All Girl Summer Fun Band, Brian Eno, I Hate Myself, Coil, Static Shorts, Altered Images, and Everything but the Girl is also quite distracting by calling attention to themselves.

      The inflated self-description of this empty film argues: “Oh you pretty things chronicles the enchantment and disintegration of a relationship built on very different and questionable drives. Recounted through the experiences of two nameless characters in metropolitan New York, the minimal dialogue, ambient moods and sweeping music that make up Oh, you pretty things, allows the observer to interpret the unique synergy of couples and the varying perception each person has to a shared situation. The ensuing emotional complexity ultimately asks the question: what is love?”

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).