Eugene Kolb | Brad / 2025

exploring alternatives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene Kolb (screenwriter and director) Brad / 2025 [8 minutes]

 

30 year-old Greg (Alex Kramer) has fucked up his relationship with his wife Kacey by sleeping with his ex. Kacey’s kicked him out and is currently not responding to any of his phone calls. What’s a loser like Greg to do but move back in with his elderly parents, Amelia (Ellen Boscov) and Jack (Neil Fleischer)?

    He visits their small two bedroom suburban bungalow, expecting to be accepted, at least temporarily, back into the household and his old room. But, at first, no answers the door bell, even knocking doesn’t seem to work.

    When the door finally opens a handsome man, dressed only in a bathrobe appears, asking for Greg’s name. The stranger, whom we so discover is named Brad (Felipe Di Poi Tamargo) is joined by Greg’s mother at the door, she also dressed in a bathrobe, and not readily able to explain to her son who the man with her at the door is.

    Greg charges in to talk to his father, hearing a thud in the bedroom. He rushes forward only to discover the kinky 21st century staring him in the face. His elderly father, dressed in S&M leather, ball in his month and hands tied behind him has fallen over from whatever position he was previously sitting, lying, standing, and hanging in. As Amelia and Brad rush forward to lovingly check out Jack’s condition, they announce to their son that Brad is their new boyfriend. Greg, if he has any knowledge of the brave new world into which he has just stumbled, has to conclude that his parents have now entered into a polyamorous relationship with a young man with whom they play out S&M games.

   Moreover, once they discover the reason for their son’s visit, although sympathetic, they are not at all ready to abandon their new lives and love in order to allow their lug of a son to move back in with them.

    They have to admit that at the moment they don’t have a lot of space, but his mother does finally offer him the living room couch.

    Horrified, Greg rushes back to his clunker of a car and tries to call Kacey, but her message, “Leave me alone asshole,” is not at all encouraging.

   Returning to the family living room, Greg is beside himself, unable to make sense any longer of everything that’s happened, particularly being a misogynistic loser no longer welcome at home.

   Brad, however, knows just how to handle the situation. When Greg closets himself in his old bedroom, Greg comes to console him, knowing just what a shock everything must now be to him. He gives him a warm, long hug reminding him that things aren’t as bad as they look. Perhaps he can get back together again with his wife, but for know he simply has to concentrate on himself and his own problems. Greg, now in tears, clings tightly to the reassuring stud, his parents peeking it and recognizing that, indeed, Brad now has it all under control.

    “Let it out. Let it out,” Brad invokes like as if he were an expect grief therapist.

    “I fucked up with Kacey,” Gregg sobs.

    “No, it’s okay,” Brad reassures him.

    “What if she never takes me back?”

    The appreciated hugfest goes on for a while before Gregg steps back to realize that he now is sporting an obvious erection. What now?

    Surely, Brad will have an answer for that just as he has provided so much new joy and pleasure to Amelia and Jack. Maybe the couch isn’t so bad.

     This suburban fable turns the American dream on its head before tossing it out the window. Soon all anyone will need is a truly handsome Brad.

   Eugene Kolb’s perverse little comedy, in the tradition of Joe Orton, is a hilarious spoof on contemporary sexual mores that stands along Marty Supreme and Honey, Don’t of this same year in its frenetic audacity.

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

 

Andy Mukherjee | The Invention / 2013

may the force be with you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andy Mukherjee (screenwriter and director) The Invention / 2013 [15 minutes]

 

Brad (Matheus Hernandez), in bed with his wife (Fiona Alexander), is having difficulty sleeping. A noise or perhaps just a sensation is bothering him and he rises, turns on the living room television and watches a few programs, flipping through the channels.

     Suddenly he discovers himself on a male porn site and quickly attempts to switch to another station, but the control unit doesn’t work and he is forced to turn it off. A piece of paper on the coffee table seems to indicate that he has recently lost his job and suggests a new place of possible employment, which he visits the very next day.

    On the way to the appointment, as he attempts to find the building he encounters several males, all whom for those of us with gaydar fully operating seem to be gay, one man in particular stopping and looking back to stare of Brad, suddenly bringing a large smile of contentment also to Brad’s face. Has he suddenly “gone gay?”

     Much of The Invention seems as purposely vague and out-of-sequence as is the marvelous invention of the boy Brad has run into on the street, Kevin (Carl Leroy).

   The next few scenes, for example, seems to be at the front desk of an apartment building or perhaps even a hotel, where Brad is now the night concierge. He receives a call from one homeowner or guest that there is noise coming from the room above which will now allow the caller to sleep.

      Brad checks its out, knocking without an answer. He opens the front door with his building keys, but finds no one within, simply another door which appears locked with indeed a strange noise coming from within. Brad puts his ear to the door, now hearing voices, one of which is clearly speaking of leaving, an act which apparently results in sex. Inexplicably, Brad begins to feel sexually intrigued by their carnal moaning, eventually dropping to the floor with apparent sexual lust as if he too were in the midst of an orgasm.

      Again we see Brad at the front desk, Kevin struggling with a huge box he is carrying, demanding that the front desk guard help him. Brad does so, and carries it upstairs to the very same room, this time the door easily opening for Kevin as he and Brad carry in the box.

      Brad is fascinated by a machine that is lit up, an invention Brad suggests that will completely alter the world for the better. As Brad says that he must leave, apparently to return to his position, Kevin asks him to stay and makes a sexual pass, which Brad forcibly rebuffs.

     The night clerk is again at the front desk in the next scene, Kevin struggling with the same box. Events are repeated in detail, but this time when Kevin comes forward with a kiss, Brad greets it fully, stripping off his clothing, and docilely moving into position to get fucked, his sounds of pleasure being the very same as those of the first of these scenes. And indeed, as the camera crosses the barrier of walls, we see Brad outside the door highly intrigued by the sounds of Kevin and Brad’s lovemaking.

      I’m sure how we can precisely interpret the seeming out of sequence scenes and the simultaneity of the third. Perhaps it is simply an aspect of the invention’s ability to transform

straight men into beings that they never before imagined themselves being, transporting them into a different time-space continuum. But I’m sure that this film cares deeply about a sense of coherence considering that the narrative seems quite pleased with itself by simply representing a machine that can turn straight men into hot gay lovers.

      But then, we also have wonder if perhaps there is no such machine. Perhaps just the thought of it permits the straight man to grant himself what previously he could not. Or perhaps the three instances represent three alternatives for the man unsure of his own sexuality.

      How that might change the world or possibly make it better is not explored, let alone the deeper consequences of altering the straight world into one of homosexual desire.

      The British short was shown at the Short Film Corner of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

Laura Scrivano | The Language of Love / 2013

amour is a masculine noun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kim Ho (screenplay), Laura Scrivano (director) The Language of Love / 2013 [10 minutes]

 

Student writer Kim Ho’s brilliant monologue filmed by Australian director Laura Scrivano is among the better short LGBTQ films of the second decade of the 21st century.

     The monologue, framed in the duration of a written French-language exam moves outside the moment and the reality of the room only through the central character Charlie’s (Kim Ho) imagination, as he attempts to explain why he’s having difficulty on keeping his mind on the exam while at the same actually fulfilling the requirements of the exam, to “describe your best friend”—even though we hear what he might have written in French in his own English voice with numerous asides that obviously wouldn’t be included in such an test essay. But the “rub” or all the difference in the world, in this case, is that he is asked by the exam question to answer in the form of a letter, which in this instance turns his comments into a gentle love story that, in fact, seemingly cannot be expressed in any other manner.

      But Charlie has a problem, as he admits, in expressing himself. He can do all the grammar questions, but to express himself naturally in French is still difficult. And that was the aim, to speak fluently in another language in taking the course in the first place—although, he admits, the original aim was to “pick up chicks by sounding like a Frenchman.”

      He briefly comments on the difficulties of any language: “You can know all the words in the dictionary, but that doesn’t make you fluent in the language. He points to the French word “baiser” which generally means “to kiss,” but it can also mean “to fuck,”—and although he doesn’t mention it, “to caress,” “screw around,” or even “commit adultery.” But almost immediately his mind turns to the subject of his best friend, Sam, with whom he does everything: “eat, piss, etc.,” they might even have sat in the schoolroom together but the teacher put the students in alphabetical order which placed Sam right in front of him, so that in order to see the films shown by the teacher he has to keep peering around the edges of his best friend’s head. But even this somewhat comic image immediately turns serious when he mentions that Sam’s parents are getting a divorce, and that Sam comes to school, “all morose. …He smiles and all that, but you can see it in his eyes. He’s hurting pretty bad inside.”

      So begins his spoken essay that quickly shifts from a short series of what almost might be described as arpeggios about school life before he suddenly interrupts himself with the straight-forward admission, “I’m in love with Sam. I’m in love with my best friend. I don’t know how it happened. I just…somewhere along the line of listening to his secrets and seeing how hurt he was I realized how much I care. I want to hold him and tell him everything’s going to be okay.” And just as suddenly Charlie suffers a kind of panic attack, the room completely emptying out in his imagination, as he struggles to continue his tale.

      Even during the French films, he admits, he gets distracted by the back of Sam’s head, by his desire to touch his cheeks, press his lips with a kiss (as in “baiser”). In this young man’s world everything has been upended by his sudden rush of new emotions, of desires he’s never felt before and can’t express even to himself, let alone to the one he loves and now in another language.

      One of the clearest pieces of evidence concerning our culture’s continued hetero-domination is expressed in Charlie’s statement that he googled “how to tell your friend you love him,” and all the results came back with statements on much make-up to wear. Whether it’s true or not, it is how young gay people perceive the heteronormative world. And surely the fear about telling someone of the same sex that you love him is far more problematic than the problem of coming out to one’s parents. “I wouldn’t dare say a word to him. I mean, how would I even start? ‘Heh Sam, hope your parents haven’t murdered each other yet. I’m gay, are you gay? You want to cuddle or something?’”

       He admits an overwhelming fear. For him it’s not because Sam is a boy, but that he just happens to be one. “And I can’t figure out whether that’s wrong…or special.” The signs of his true love reach the surface of his externalized inner expressions when he comments that he truly wants what’s best for his friend. But that he wants him for himself as well, that he wants to be part of what is best for him.

      Perhaps, he contemplates, the best thing to do would be to keep his feelings inside, to squash them. Yet Sam opens up to him, he trusts him, and Charlie ponders, “Shouldn’t I do the same?”  This short masterwork nears its end with Charlie’s wise comments: “You always hear people say that it’s weird and it’s just not normal,” speaking presumably of gay love. “But isn’t that the point of love? To transcend normalness and become something special.”

      By film’s end he realizes that he has to take “the punch,” to open his mouth and tell his beautiful friend how he feels, and so he begins his French letter. He will probably pass his exam if his teachers are not prudes; but if such a letter is passed on to his “beautiful boy” no one cannot know the result. But that too is one the necessary chances people in love must take.

      This film not only received excellent newspaper and magazine reviews, but was selected as the best short in a couple of Queer Film Festivals and personally endorsed by actor British gay actor Stephen Fry, who called it “Amazing.”

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

Álvaro Martín Sanz | El Adorable Inquilino (The Adorable Tenant) / 2013

putting his money on the man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Álvaro Martín Sanz (screenwriter and director) El Adorable Inquilino (The Adorable Tenant) / 2013 [17 minutes]

 

What’s a poor idle slob, who’s recently lost his job and his girlfriend, to do when he wakes up in bed with a gay man in a wig who insists they have had a delightful night together fucking. The slob (Edgar García) orders the uninvited tenant (writer and director Álvaro Martín Sanz) out of his house, but as the delightful guest reminds him, he has his ring on his finger—a tacky dimestore ring explains his guest, telling him he’s welcome to take it off, except that it’s stuck—and serves him up lasagna for dinner.

     The slob keeps trying to tell him he’s not gay, but the tenant responds, “And the Pope wears black.” He tries again to explain that he’s never done anything like this before, his new friend explaining “They say that someone who’s drunk shows his real self.” According to his future husband, it’s all a matter of the subconscious.

     It’s hard to throw someone out after they make you a delicious lasagna dinner, but when he returns to your own bed in your own pajamas, that going too far. The guest insists it’s all right; he needs his sleep after the previous wild night of fucking. The lights go out, and soon after the tenant is screaming in pain and delight; “You see, it’s all subconscious!”

      And the next morning, with breakfast in bed, two eggs staring their sunny sides up into this sleepy face; what’s a man to do but to eat what’s on his plate. And then, all day this adorable tenant works hard to clean up the dozens of tossed off beer cans and bottles, the left-over pizzas, the junk on the floor crawling with cockroaches. He even vacuums. And suddenly the scrawny, effeminate boy who’s been offering up all these services even begins to look like a beautiful female to the idle loafer.

      Soon they start going out together to visit spots around the city. The tenant cooks him up wonderful meals each evening of all sorts of Spanish delights. It doesn’t take long for the new companion to come out of the shower without any pajamas, the now well-groomed male pulling a bottle of vodka out of his bedstand and swigging down a few belts before subconsciously performing their nightly pleasures.

     But now he/she’s complaining about the man’s habits of watching football day and night. And then there’s the news that soccer player Leo Messi’s priceless wedding ring is still missing, stolen from his house a few weeks earlier, its value approximately ten million euros. The picture of the suspect looks strangely like the slob’s new companion, described as a psychopath.

     At dinner the tenant announces that he’s bought a new lubricant like the one used by mechanics to help his lover to remove his ring. And suddenly like his old girlfriend, the original resident’s new boyfriend is complaining about his constant drinking and refusal to help out with any chores in the house.

     For once, the former idle slob takes an active role in the relationship, suggesting how beautiful it might be if he never removed the ring from his finger, that indeed they might marry. Wouldn’t that be nice? Even the tenant must tentatively assent to that.

     If nothing else, Spanish director Martín Sanz proves that it is often the heterosexual male who is truly passive, not effeminate homosexuals, even if keeping up a relationship with them is tricky. The tenant has easily gotten what he seemed to be looking for, but does he truly want it?

     This clever moral fable is worth watching through a couple of times at least.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

 

 

Alex Bohs | Mum / 2013

sharing the silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alex Bohs (screenwriter and director) Mum / 2013 [11 minutes]

 

William (David Thomases) has suffered, evidently, some traumatic experience regarding a brutal street attack. We never completely know what that trauma consisted of, but its effect is evident throughout the film as William swims back and forth in a public pool, sits in a basically unfurnished room in his house, paints walls—he evidently works as a house painter—and generally closes himself off from life. We get constant glimpses of the bar and dance scene in which he was previously involved, but everything in this film is very much like the first few scenes which are almost completely under water.

     We sense sounds and occasional voices but we cannot clearly hear them and what we witness might as well be through the lens of underwater goggles.

      All that changes one day when William finds himself in the pool lane next two a handsome young man Thomas (Jake Cohen) who, without speaking, challenges William to a quick series of swimming matches across the pool. When bad memories again challenge William, however, he quickly hurries off to the locker room to shower. But when he returns he finds a single sneaker in his bag, a note tucked within not only commenting on his attractiveness, but scheduling a meet up at a local bar. A bit like a Cinderella story, he is to bring the sneaker back to the man with the one naked foot in the bar.

      William arrives at the bar, but clearly has second thoughts about the encounter immediately upon entering, and disappears. He now finds a small picture in his sneaker, begging for a second chance. When he finally meets up again with Thomas at the pool, he discovers that Thomas is himself a mute, who signs to him, having given him also a book which one might presume is a book about signing for the deaf.

    Nothing special is made of Thomas’ being hearing impaired, and indeed it seems in perfect keeping with a film that has not contained a full spoken word and is filled only the ambient sounds of the world around the previously isolated William. But now William is clearly ready to take a second chance with Thomas as the men kiss, perhaps allowing William to rejoin the human race.

    Chicago director Alex Bohs’ Mum is far too opaque to fully engage its audiences, but it presents a touching episode in life a gay man that is certainly worth viewing.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Bryan Scot Cooper | Leanne Is Gone / 2013

sex as an expression of grief

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesse James Rice (screenplay), Bryan Scot Cooper (director, with Annie K. McVey) Leanne Is Gone / 2013 [22 minutes]

 

Just out of rehabilitation for heavy drug abuse, Dylan (Jesse James Rice) determines as part of his continued rehabilitation to visit his sister in California, who had invited him to stay with her and her husband Sean (David Hemphill) when he was able to leave the rehab center.

     In the meantime, however, his always stable and supportive sister has committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. Quite inexplicably, Dylan still makes the voyage across country to visit her apartment and stay for a few days with her quite obviously distraught husband.

     I should imagine that if I had just lost my wife and was visited by my brother-in-law only recently recovered from heavy drug use, I might be a bit agitated by his entry into my life. Sean certainly is, a man who in some ways is killing himself faster through his consumption of scotch than Dylan might have previously been destroying himself with cocaine and heroin (we can still see the needle marks on his arm).

      The two growl at one another for a day or so, until Dylan begins to suggest Sean stop his endless boozing. Angry, Sean orders him out of the house as he grows violent. But immediately regretting it, he apologizes, soon after breaking down in despair as he explains what happened between him and Leanne. Basically, it boils down to one event: she found him in bed with someone else. That “someone else,” he soon reveals was not a woman, but a man. And Leanne never spoke with him after that occasion.

   Dylan, who has also pent up his emotions, having lost the only connection to family with whom he has felt safe, now attempts to comfort Sean, the two in their pain and anger, attempting to help soother one another’s pain, quickly find themselves in an embrace, a deep kiss, and sex, a sudden and strange relief from the hate, perhaps even homophobia, that they both come to realize lay underneath Leanne’s calm and helpful exterior. If nothing else, as Dylan points out, she was selfish for her refusal to reach out and communicate one last time, to seek out an explanation for both of their hurtful behaviors.

      In the last few moments of this powerful and somewhat taboo film, Sean rises from the couch on which they have both fallen asleep, explaining that he’s going for a walk, needing some fresh air. Dylan asks him, point blank, “Hey, you’re not going to kill yourself or anything?”

      Sean leaves, but Dylan quickly rises, dresses, and joins him. Together perhaps that can get through their misery about their inabilities to express their sorrow and love to Leanne.

      If the general plot is perhaps a bit creaky and unbelievable, the issues of guilt and sorrow are well expressed, and the acting by the duo of Rice and Hemphill in Cooper’s short film is excellent.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

Sarah B. Downey | Platonic Solid / 2013

sharing difference

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mindy Rae (screenplay), Sarah B. Downey (director) Platonic Solid / 2013 [20 minutes]

 

Madison (Mindy Rae) and Parker (Alex Klein) are both intelligent and witty young high school graduates in the Midwest who can’t wait to begin their studies in Los Angeles, Madison looking to become involved with film finance, and Parker hoping to become a lawyer. They move in together and even play at imagining a future, Parker somewhat humorously demanding four sons.

     Although he might see some rocky places in their future, they basically seem to be an affable pair whom some might describe as the perfect couple.

     Yet when Parker stops by a jewelry stand to buy a bracelet for Madison, we note how the obviously gay jeweler looks at him and he back: there is definitely something of a brief interchange between them that anyone with normal “gaydar”* could detect. Immediately after, Madison, attending a club with a couple singing, gets the eye from Cameron, a lesbian, the two quickly becoming friends. And we begin to suspect what we might have noticed from the first scene as Madison and Parker participated in a drinking competition, Madison winning.

     In the very next scene, we observe the two women in bed making love, a scene with transmogrifies into Madison and Parker in bed together, Parker explaining that he simply “can’t,” apparently unable to be aroused enough to partake in sex. “I want to, I want to, I want to so badly....I don’t why this keeps happening.” Obviously, they are not the perfect couple. What might be impeding their relationship?

     Of course, we already know, but they don’t, and it’s painful watching how they struggle to maintain their “normality” despite obvious signs that something about them both is that troublesome word, “different.” In this case he simply begs her patience, “We’ll figure this out,” and they both reconfirm their love for one another. Madison will be off for a few days on a preview visit to LA.

     Parker is at a local bar when he meets the handsome acquaintance, Tyler, the man behind the jewelry counter in the previous scene. We already recognize his displacement when Parker notes that his girlfriend has moved to Los Angeles and explains that “she’s more a friend than anything else.” In any event, the two have drinks together, a discussion about sexuality where we discover Parker has still never been with a guy, and a short kissing session. Parker is clearly ready and willing to move on to the next level of self-acceptance as a homosexual.

     When he returns home Madison is sitting alone, brooding. She explains that she can’t do “this,” the vague adjective apparently meaning their moving to Los Angeles together, “getting married, sealing it with a white picket fence and a family.” She insists that she has to go out “there” alone.

        Once more they reconfirm their love, but also, as Madison argues, realize that despite the love they feel for one another that they are not “in love” with one another, perhaps making clear the paucity of that word to express both the deep love we feel for close friends and the love two people build around a marriage or long term sexual relationship.

        The next scene is in a Los Angeles coffee shop, where Madison and Cameron, the latter having evidently moved out with her, are being delivered their coffees. In come Parker and Tyler, now also obviously a couple, Madison, after a quick introduction of all, suggesting she’s “mad at him” for not calling since he’s been in LA now for two weeks.

        Tyler and Cameron leave the two together to talk, as they finally admit they had not talked about their other sexual explorations for fear of making the other feel it was their “fault.” But it now makes sense for the first time, the difficulties they were having. And they reconfirm their love, a solid platonic base from which they were able to explore other options.

        Such relationships often do not end so uneventfully. But what Downey and Rae make clear in their short narrative is that a heterosexual romance can sometimes be a good starting place from which to feel safe to explore other sexualities. Intense friendships are sometimes needed as a base from which to discover one’s true self. And certainly this wouldn’t be the first time that a gay man and a lesbian sensed that they shared something from which they could further explore precisely just what that indecipherable “something” was.

 

*Gaydar is a term used to describe what many gay and lesbians have developed to help them scout out someone who might be sexually interested in someone of the same gender, a sort of sixth sense, what be described as a kind of “radar” that is able to sense gay sexuality that is not openly expressed or, in some cases, is not even noticed by the one sending out the signals.

      There is, of course, no such thing. It is at most a refined sense of recognizing subtle signals that sometimes gay men and women send out to one another without them actually knowing or intending to. And obviously, it is not always reliable, a talent that is also open to a great deal of wishful thinking. It is close to what I have described as “dropping beads,” but that is an active attempt to explore the other, while “gaydar” supposedly picks up even passive signals, smiles, hand and head movements, the patterns and tone of voices, the expression of the eyes, how they are groomed and dressed, and of course, any clues that might be expressed in the individual’s verbal comments.

 

Los Angeles, May 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).