Aiman Hassani | خطا Khata / 2019

an error

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aiman Hassani and Britt Snel (teleplay), Aiman Hassani (director) خطا Khata / 2019 [48.40 minutes]

 

Centraal was a 2019 Dutch TV series of six episodes all centered around the Rotterdam Central Railway Station, the various works were concerned with a wide range of figures religious, desperate, lost, or simply wandering through the vast station. Episode Number 4, Khata, aired on November 8, 2019, and written by Aiman Hassani concerns two Moroccan-born brothers, young and very young, who work the station as male hustlers.

     In Arabic “khata” means an “error” or in this case the horrible mistake made by both the elder brother Hatim (Nizar El Manouzi) and his gentle sibling Kamal (Akram Tanna), first of all for having somehow—their personal histories are never explained, although we see an example played out through Kama’s friend, Milo—having gotten involved in hustling with the brutal pimp Danny (Chris Peters), but more specifically given the events of this narrative, for Kamal’s having come to take male sex serious and falling in love or at least the idea of love with one of his clients Jacob (Tobias Nierop).

    As we see time and again in several of these “working boy” films the biggest mistake boy hustlers make is getting to like their work, identifying as homosexual, and actually seeking out love. These three sins are enough to doom and even destroy a young male prostitute, and it is the story of how that happens that director Hassani attempts to convey to audiences who surely had previously no idea even about how these young men and boys are used in the public facilities. The Rotterdam station is one of the central hubs of Europe; even I have traveled through its corridors on my way to and from Paris, the city which later becomes Kamal’s symbol of true love and escape.

      Let me just begin by expressing gratification that in Hassani’s work we finally get a fairly honest presentation of the ugly business which so many US films have seen to present as a joke or a simple matter of the wrong occupational choice, fit only for the stupidest of good-looking boys. Let me also say that the three times I watched this made-for-TV 40-minute film at moments I could hardly bear to watch it, and later knowing what was about to occur I had to turn if off for a period to time before getting up the fortitude to continue with the tragic series of events.

    In the case of Kamal, who is the central figure of Khata, it was clearly his brother Hatim who introduced him into sexual “slavery” perhaps somewhat innocently when his kid brother complained about never having spending money or perhaps, more likely, he was the only neophyte he knew when Danny and his bosses demanded an offering of new blood. Even Kamal seems to be unable to realize that in introducing his best friend Milo (Sem Ben Yakar) to Danny he is betraying everything that friendship might mean and sending a young man his age to his doom.

     One cannot help but compare Hatim’s sacrifice of his brother to the alter of hustler money to the relationship of Charley Malloy (Rod Steiger) to his younger brother Terry (Marlon Brando) in On the Waterfront. But Hatim does not just ask his beloved brother to throw a fight which eventually marries him to the waterfront mafia-controlled unions, but worse, literally tosses him into bed with the pimp to be raped and bound into the slavery of prostitution.

     In the similar “showing him the ropes” party which we observe the innocent Milo even imagines he’s attending a kind of all male slumber party where, treated like an adult when offered alcohol and drugs. But before he can even begin to comprehend what is happening, Danny has begun to grope him and soon, with others pinning him down, rapes the boy, someone filming the action. In Milo’s case Kamal tries several times to intervene but is tossed away by others as if he were a rag doll. When finally, he can no longer bear his friend’s screams he retreats to the bathroom where he reexperiences his own “introduction” into the hustler’s life.

       The filming of the event is crucial, as soon see. Throughout the film Danny has threatened Kamal, often in the car with his brother Hatim saying nothing, for not handing over enough money. It is not that he has kept record of the boy’s sexual encounters, made mostly in the single toilet cabins in the Rotterdam station via phone transactions between passing travelers who arrange to meet up in the portable-like toilets to have their cocks sucked. But that Kamal, although regularly active at first, has been hiding some of his earnings, we don’t know for what purpose but we can only imagine for an eventual escape from the world in which he is trapped.

       More importantly, one customer with whom he hooks up, an architect named Jacob, not only pays him for a longer period, but demonstrates seemingly genuine love for him, taking him to bed after sex and holding him like a lover. Over several encounters the two bond, one rainy night Kamal even remaining in bed with Jacob for the entire night, lying to his mother that he has stayed over at Milo’s house.

        Jacob—so taken by the “otherness” of the Moroccan boy’s skin and hair that it comes dangerously close to being a racist-like adoration of outsiderness—invites Kamal to join him on a business trip to Paris. What this film doesn’t entirely make clear is that besides hustling, it appears that Kamal is also attempting to attend his regular school classes, something surely required by his middle-class family. How he can manage this and still keep up with his meetings at the Rotterdam Centraal Station halls is rather hard to imagine, but that appears to be the fate of many such boys. It is evident that he cannot simply run away for a few days with Jacob to Paris. Yet he promises that he will join him at another time, and he believes in that possibility almost as a token to the time when he can leave his terrifying world behind.

       Clearly Kamal’s focusing on a single customer, particularly when he is holding back some of the bonus money the wealthy Jacob is providing, does not please Danny. It is apparent that either Kamal is refusing to hand over his earnings or is not sufficiently doing his job. And it isn’t difficult for someone like Danny to discover what is at the heart of the problem. 

        Recognizing that his worker has become a “faggot” (in Dutch he simply describes the boy as a “homo”), Danny threatens Kamal if he does not come clean, rid himself of his “love affair,” and return to business as usual. Hatim also pressures him to stop the affair, while the impossibly still naive boy explains to his brother that his client has promised to take him to Paris. When Hatim warns him of the consequences, Kamal briefly reminds his brother, in a scene that parallels Brando’s moving reminder to Steiger in On the Waterfront, that it was he, his own brother, who destroyed his life: “I could have been something. I could have been a contender.” Here Kamal simply pleas that they both find a way to get out of the lives in which they have become entrapped; but we observe that Hatim has, in a sense, turned into a voice that merely parrots Danny’s warnings. He has become part of the underworld system.

        In an attempt to find solace from the brewing storm of his life, Kamal attempts to hook up again with Jacob, but only gets a recorded message in response. When he visits Jacob’s house, the architect is in the midst of an august gathering for his mother’s birthday, and quickly shuttles the boy out the door, shocked that he would attempt to meet up with him without warning.

       Suddenly we recognize that despite all of his beautiful ministrations to his sexual toy, that Kamal is not truly worthy in his mind to be a part of his “real” life. Even if they have enjoyed sex alone in the night in a new office building that he has designed, by day he could never been seen with a Moroccan boy at his side. In Paris, Kamal would be kept safely in a hotel room or permitted only to walk the streets alone.  

    When Danny threatens Kamal with the tape of his own initiation rites, hinting that he will reveal it not only to his parents but his school mates and everyone else who know him, the boy becomes unstrung, grabbing up the computer containing the film, and runs. Out of breath, he pauses on the street, throwing the laptop to the concrete, kicking it, and pummeling the machine of horrific communication again and again, only to hear his phone ring where he perceives a long list of reactions by dozens of friends and acquaintances who have now witnessed the film of his sexual “coming out.”

        By the time he reaches Jacob’s house, he sees his former lover attempting to wash away the graffiti someone has painted across his windows in retaliation, apparently, for his sexual relationship with Kamal. As the boy attempts to seek out solace from the only one who ever showed him caring physical love, Jacob rejects him, pushing him nearly out of the door as Kamal himself tears off his shirt to reveal the body the man had once so gently caressed—all to no effect, Jacob insisting he leave immediately.

        Running into Hatim on the street, his brother pummels him with anger and bitterness, as Hatim attempts to calm and hug him to. They motorcycle back to their motel-like abode only to find the door lock changed, their own parents having locked them out. Kamal pounds pointlessly upon the door, demanding that his mother and father let them in. When his mother finally halfway opens the door, we comprehend that no entry back into family life will ever be possible for either of them.

        As the credits role, the viewer might almost miss seeing the now drugged-out Milo crossing the terminal to sit at one the tables to check his cell-phone for sexual his connections.

        I don’t know what the reaction of Dutch families was when this film appeared upon their TV screens. I’ve looked for information in an attempt to try to see if the film, set within several other seemingly more whimsical Rotterdam train station stories, had any effect on Dutch society, as surely as Grodecki’s Mandragora did on the Czech scene. This film, like Grodecki’s notes that what we have seen was based on real events, but then disclaims, as such movies always must, to any specific events and individuals, denying any connection with true beings or lives. Somehow there seems to be an error, a khata ( خطا ) in the film maker’s logic. Obviously if it was based on “real events,” it was also based on “real” individuals, surely now only ghosts, destroyed by the society which could not help them to survive.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).