David Hastings | Grid / 2018

a beautiful lie

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Hastings (screenwriter and director) Grid / 2018 [26 minutes]

 

Hasting’s short 2018 drama takes us back to the early 1980s when AIDS was described as Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease, a time when not all doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers were yet totally aware that what came to be described as AIDS was not spread by airborne particles or simply touching a diseased individual.

     In a sort of prologue to the piece, Doctor Andrews (Ernest Vernon) explains to a nurse just hired, Angie Wordsworth (Charlie Clarke), that the patient with a red ribbon would round the door handle of his room was dying, but that he personally felt that he was a true failure in not being able to find any way to help cure or even relieve the terrible symptoms the young man inside, Daniel Cole (Steve Salt), was suffering.

     Other doctors would have nothing to do with him, and nurses were terrified of even entering his room. The boy later tells Angie that he can hear them outside his door drawing straws to determine which one has to enter and care for him each day. None of them will touch him without gloves.

     Dr. Andrews spends as much time as possible simply sitting with his patient and speaking to him, and now reassures the new nurse that he is convinced the disease is not communicable through air or touch. He asks her to similarly care for this dying boy by simply spending his last hours with him, chatting and perhaps even presenting him with the letter he was clutching close to him when he entered the clinic.

     Angie turns out to be a more than kind woman, who uses endearments such as sweetie, and love in describing him—the first time Daniel has heard these words addressed to him for ages. Asked about his lover, he points to his head where he now lives, he having died apparently some time before. His parents have not visited him and there seem no longer to be any friends willing to make the voyage to his room.

     Gently, she administers to him, attempting between his heavy coughing, to ask him questions about himself and his previous life. What she sees is a still somewhat handsome but emaciated boy covered with large Kaposi lesions, afraid but still seeing god through the cloudy vision that is left him. When she hands him the letter he brought with him to the hospital, he explains that he can no longer read, and begs her to read it to him. It is clearly from his mother and father.

     She peruses it quickly before attempting to read it, as we get a glimpse of some of the sentences which beg him to stop writing them and insisting that the disease is God’s punishment for his behavior. The homophobic letter represents hate mail insisting that they want nothing more to do with him.

     The kindly nurse, however, lies, recreating a letter that apologizes for the difficulty his parents have had in the past with dealing with his sexuality, but declaring that they now send their love and wishes to him, hoping that he might find comfort and possibly a cure. Angie quietly creates the kind of letter that such a young man might wish for at the moment of his death, such a beautifully mendacious creation that makes one realize that the truth is not always superior.

     Delighted with what he has just heard, he suffers a small coughing fit, as Angie stands to get him some more water from a faucet just a few feet away. When she returns the boy, now sweating intensely, suffers a wonderful hallucination, imagining it is his mother who has returned to see him just before his death. She sits, announcing “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.” Holding his hand and calling him darling, Angie soon perceives that Daniel is no longer breathing.

     Although this British work cannot match the truly profound cinematic works such as Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs (1985), Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies (1985), John Erman’s An Early Frost (1985), and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), made during those early AIDS years in some cases by men who themselves would soon die of the disease, Hastings’ short work of 2018 briefly returns us to that terrible time when hundreds of young men lay dying in beds without any friends or loved ones around them, and when even doctors and nurses were terrified of making contact with them as human beings.

    These individuals not only suffered, as Angie explains to Dan, for no cause of their own making, but suffered an even worse fate because of the blind prejudice and hate of the world around them, along with governments that had so little sympathy for their conditions that they resisted supporting the research it would take to discover drugs to alleviate their suffering; even today similarly denying funds that might even cure the disease which now know is not spread particularly by gay men but through all forms of sex.

     These days, it appears, no one any longer wants to hear of the disease that has killed approximately 44.1 million (according to 2024 statistics) and has infected another 40.8 million people worldwide who are still living with the disease. The current US government has recently cut of funds, yet again, to the African continent where the disease is still most active, and ceased further research funds at a time when a cure is rumored to be imminent.

     Thank heaven for such films that continue to remind at least a few of us of what occurred and what remains to be done.

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

 

 

 

Alicya Eyo and Sophy Holland | Brace / 2015

seeking normality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jake Graf (screenplay), Alicya Eyo and Sophy Holland (directors) Brace / 2015 [30 minutes]

 

For many in the LGBTQ community, sex is complicated, particularly when it comes to gender. It is, after all, the same-sex attraction of homosexuals and bisexuals that has created such a bugaboo to the heterosexual majority over so many centuries that is the source of so such unabating prejudice and hate. But as British filmmakers Alicya Eyo and Sophy Holland reveal in their short film Brace that problem is minor compared with the complications of their central characters, Adam (performed by the film’s writer Jake Graf) and Rocky (Harry Rundle) surrounded by a fine supporting cast.

     Adam, in married relationship with a woman, is having difficulties sustaining his relationship, and clearly is ready to shift his sexual interests to the gay world, having been secretly cruising the gay clubs for some time.

     We recognize early on that there is more to this story when Adam’s father reacts to the news with the words, “Jesus Christ, now you’re a bloody poof,” and accuses him of continually dropping bombshells on them.

     But as we watch Adam move into the world of London gay club life, we are distracted as the new freed gay man meets ups with a cute boy named Rocky. At first, Adam is someone distant, but as he encounters the new boy again an attraction begins to develop between the two as Rocky, admitting he’s from up north and new to London, suggests that Adam and he go for a tour of the city. As they do so they quickly begun to find themselves falling for one another.

     Again, we sense something deeper going on when as the two (who make up a kind of “brace” in hunting terms) visit a bar where a customer begins to react negatively to seeing two such queer boys together, Rocky seeming to be more than a little sensitive about the situation. And we can only wonder whether or not he too is new to the gay world. Some of his overreaction may have to do with the fact that, as we discover, he grew up in foster homes, and therefore never had parents to help him build up the kind of defense mechanisms traditional parents require. I had never before perceived that our some of our first realizations that the differences one is feeling will eventually have to involve one’s own parents serves almost as an inoculation against all the later outside reactions to one’s sense of queerness. For the young Rocky being openly gay in the world is a bit like opening himself up to all the fears and hatreds he has not previously quite imagined and certainly not had to immediately endure.

     In this case, Rocky must soon face the very worst that this communal homophobia has to offer. The first incidence seems of minor importance. As the two boys go walking down the street, Adam suddenly pulls Rocky into an alley to give him a long kiss; but Rocky pulls momentarily back, suggesting that there's something important he has to tell him first. Adam claims that they all have secrets and that's important they first just get to know each other, refusing him the opportunity of telling him what Rocky feels is important. “Let’s just get to know one another first, like normal people.” Their kiss seems to resolve any difficulties.

    An evening later begins with Adam having to tell his ex-wife, who has planned to join the “boys,” that, having forgotten she was joining them, he’d planned on going to an all-male bar Mamba, so she won’t be able to join them. She wishes them a “great testosterone-fueled night,” a statement for more ironic than it seems on first viewing.

     But after their night they are confronted at another quick food stop by a real brute and his friends. As Rocky stands up in defense, he calls him a “fucking queer,” and forces him to sit back down before living with his pack. As Adam and Rocky separate for the night, Rocky encounters the gang again in a back street and is brutally beaten so badly that he ends up in a hospital.

   

     Meanwhile, having not heard from him for days, despite a good-night kiss, Adam is afraid “he’s just off me,” worried about the fact that he can’t contact his new friend, his phone having been switched off. But a telephone call from a hospital where his name has been found in the wallet of a patient named Sarah Gibbs soon reveals Rocky’s whereabouts.

     Of course, Adam knows of no Sarah Gibbs but still visits the Royal Park Hospital the next morning to discover what it’s all about. The nurse (played by co-director Alicya Eyo) replies, when he upon suddenly seeing Rocky lying in the bed why he is in here among all the women, “Because she is a woman. She’s one of those transsexuals. She hasn’t got a penis and that’s a woman in my book.” Suddenly Adam denies knowing “her,” and quickly leaves only to stop for what is now evidently the perquisite vomiting required of males who discover that they have been kissing and contemplating love with a woman who is really a man (as in Neil Jordan’s 1992 film The Crying Game) or in this case with a man who has been involved with a woman he has thought to be a man. I presume that there is a great deal of humor on Graf’s part in reversing the situation, although even that soon turns more complex.

      Regretting his behavior, he returns to the hospital only to find Sarah has released herself from care. “I’m looking for my friend. He was in this bed,” the nurse replying “He? More like it? We all saw what she done to herself. Freak of nature if you ask me.”

      “Where is he?”

       “The young lady has gone.”

       Such medical disdain for transsexual individuals is far too common.

     When he attempts to make contact again with Rocky, he wants nothing to do with Adam, having heard his denial of even knowing him to the nurse. He relates how earlier in his life he was attacked for being a “tranny” and now he’s beginning “queer-bashed,” and he’s sure that now Adam will leave him as well.

     But Adam assures him he’s not leaving, even though Rocky himself admits to feeling he’s a freak. And the relationship picks up again, the two getting on quite nicely. In a gay bar restroom, they begin to kiss, this time Adam attempting to pull back as Rocky pushes forward, moving his hand down to feel his cock only to discover that Adam is also transsexual.

        The next day when Rocky confronts Adam about his own reaction, he attempts to explain: “All my life I just wanted to fit in. …I wish I were like you. I want to believe that things are changing and that people accept us, and if we have each other we’ll be okay. All I want more than anything else in the world. I just want to be normal.” And having said that, he walks away to find his personal version of what he believes is “normal.”

      Normality has new and strange meanings in this world of gender confusion and fluidity. Being normal is apparently defined by someone like Rocky (played by Rundle, a cis-gender male, after Graf and Sophy Holland could not find a suitable trans male to play the role) as being with someone of the opposite sex, something Adam has also attempted in leaving his same-sex marriage for a gay man, representing a sexual world that most heterosexuals would not imagine as being “normal,” but obviously in traditional gender definitions, makes for a kind strange logic.

      Increasingly, the LGBTQ community has made clear that there is no “normality,” merely a statistical preponderance. Nature does not care about normality, but finds wonderful ways of constantly creating new desires and intersexual possibilities. Why shouldn’t two transsexual individuals fall in love and want to spend their lives together?

        As one of the most visible trans men in the United Kingdom Graf has talked about the self-hate that continues even after transitioning for transsexuals. He himself first lived in lesbian relationships before, after testosterone injections, he began to find himself attracted to men. But he now claims that his attractions are to individuals without regard to gender.

        Given its limited budget, Brace is an amazingly well-filmed and edited movie with one of the most complex and sophisticated scripts about transsexual relationships to date. Graf has gone on to work on other films and I hope others with comparable talents soon take his example in creating such interesting projects concerning such figures. 

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

 

 

Fritz Lang | House by the River / 1950

the creak of the staircase

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mel Dinelli (screenplay, based on the novel by A. P. Herbert), Fritz Lang (director) House by the River / 1950

 

The film The House by The River is a grade B melodrama (made by the near-broke Republic pictures) that aspires to be a grade A moral drama. Originally, its director—the once towering Fritz Lang—wanted to have the maid, killed by writer Stephen Byrne (Louis Hayward), to be black, which would have made an important statement of US miscegenation when he attempts to kiss (and possibly rape) her; but the heads of the studio refused to allow the maid to be of color, casting the beautiful Dorothy Patrick in the role instead. So all that Lang was left with was the Gaslight-like Victorian melodrama in which the now white maid puts up such a ruckus, possibly being heard by Stephen’s nosy next door neighbor, Mrs. Ambrose (the wonderful Ann Shoemaker), that, in trying to quiet the girl, he accidently chokes her to death.

     A failure as a novelist, Stephen has evidently been in trouble several times, forcing his elder brother, John (lee Bowman), to help him out. Although Lang and his writer Mel Dinelli don’t bother to tell us what kind of difficulties from which John has helped save his brother (we know only that he gave up most of the family inheritance so that Stephen might live the life of a writer), we might guess that the elder man’s limp may have something to do with it. Why else give his character a limp?

    Nonetheless—after Stephen lies to him about his wife, insisting that he needs help simply for

the sake of Marjorie (Jane Wyatt), who he claims is expecting a baby—the brother helps him get rid of the body in the river that swirls about Stephen’s house.

    In the first scene of the film Mrs. Ambrose, who lives in another “house on the river” next door, complains that the river keeps bringing up unpleasant things in its current, particularly, a dead cow who has been rushed down river only to show up again and again (the two directional currents make little but dramatic sense); so we know, even though the men try to anchor the girl in the sack (a large woolen bag which has been borrowed from Stephen’s brother) to the river bottom, that it will eventually wash up again as well.

    When it does, Stephen takes out a boat in a long scene of swirling waters and driftwood to retrieve it, without success. And, eventually, the police spot it. John’s long-time servant has neatly sewed John’s name into the sack, thus making it look like he has been the murderer.

     Stephen—who through the publicity of the murder, has revived his career through the sale of a former novel and is now writing about his own crime (there are shades of O.J. Simpson in this movie)—says nothing, further embittering John, as the trial proceeds. John’s maid, recently fired, testifies against him, revealing her anger over the changes she has observed in his household manner. But again, Mrs. Ambrose, intercedes, scolding the judge and court for not being able to see that the servant has testified in retribution for the behavior of the man she has formerly loved.

And John is found not guilty.

     If all this sounds a bit creaky—and it is—Lang nicely diverts our attention by focusing on the psychological changes in both brothers, particularly through Stephen’s increasing madness and his gradual abandonment of his beautiful wife, to whom John, secretly loving her for years, becomes a confidant.

    Lang, who has long been interested in deep shadows, pulls out all of his tricks, demonstrating the broiling river even in the billow of the white curtains in the Byrne mansion, a black-and-white rendition of what Douglas Sirk would later brilliantly recreate in technicolor six years later in Written on the Wind. In fact, there are several interesting parallels between that film and Lang’s noirish work.

     We know from the beginning that the disintegrating Stephen will eventually get his comeuppance, and when he returns home to fine his wife reading his new novel, which also reveals his own guilt, we are not at all surprised by the necessarily pat ending. And the trip down that path has been so dramatically thrilling and so beautifully imaged, we can almost forgive the final creek in the staircase.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).