Zach Robinson | Two Beers / 2022

a special day

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zach Robinson (screenwriter and director) Two Beers / 2022 [6 minutes]

 

Two down and dumb janitors, Graham (Ben Tjaden) and Adrian (Matthew Bullerdick), bored, are wrestling when one asks the other about whether he’d do gay porn. The other responds that, yeh, he probably would if he got paid enough.

    The conversation quickly shifts to drinking just two beers, the perfect amount for a buzz.

     For another moment they discuss the causes of albinism, Graham admitting that that he’s colorblind, and quickly move on to him mentioning that he has now broken up with his girlfriend, Ashley. The two briefly celebrate their eligible bachelorhoods with a chant.

     Clearly, this short comic work doesn’t quite know where to take these to not very bright workers who have evidently long been longtime friends.

     They go back to their mopping. That is until Graham mentions that today is kind of special day from them.

     For Adrian it just seems like a normal Tuesday, which quite upsets Graham who refuses to believe Adrian can’t recall that it’s 20 years since they became friends. “It’s our fucking anniversary, man!”

     But before Graham can get too upset he discovers what he suddenly realizes might be a bomb. The plant lights go dim and the place is relit in a kind of blue-tinted glow.

    Rushing back and forth, Adrian discovers that the fire doors are locked.

    Graham realizes that his cellphone isn’t working.

    Adrian’s only suggestion is that, just perhaps they should try to diffuse it.  

    Since there are only 3 chords they randomly make a decision to cut one of them.

    As they count to three, Adrian with a cutter in his hands, Graham closes his eyes and quickly chants, “Ashley, I broke up because I don’t like girls. I’ve always liked boys like you!”

    Adrian cuts the chord, and the lights flash back on.

    After an extended pause, Adrian turns to his friend: “Wait. Really?”

    “I just said that because I thought we were gonna die,” Graham lamely lies, turning his head away from having to face his friend.

    Adrian: “Because I feel the same way.”

    Graham turns back toward Adrian, a smile on his lips: “Really?”

    This film is quite clearly a lame one-liner that is so thin on plot that it has to stretch out a three minute routine to twice it’s size, and even that is perhaps a little bit too much to endure.

    These clowns should drop their mops and go out for those two beers.

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

 

Rodrigo Bellott | Unicornio (Unicorn) / 2014

on the town

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rodrigo Bellott (screenwriter and director) Unicornio (Unicorn) / 2014 [31 minutes]

 

Even before the credits in Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellott’s startlingly beautiful Unicorn (2014), we realize just what lengths the members of the German/Bolivian Mennonite religious community at the center of this film will go to punish those members who break their interpretation of Biblical laws. The police and an activist-reporter (played by Lorena Sugier) arrive to force the release of the grown young man, Isaac (Doug Porter), who has been locked away in a padlocked box for more than 8 weeks, so his father insists, for stealing a chicken and using a cellphone. He also describes his son as mentally ill, a far more telling appellation.

     But once we see this strapping hunk of flesh released from the small box, we realize that there are deeper reasons for his parents and the community’s fears. He is truly like the mythical symbol of difference, a stunningly beautiful man who might represent all the gay boys featured in International Male and the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues. 

      Once freed from the box, Isaac is no better off, his entire family refusing to speak to him. Indeed, much of the film is silent, luxuriating instead in the beauty of the landscape and the picture-pretty farm life which is a pure expression of this community’s hard work and faith, despite their obvious bigotry and, in this case, outright homophobia.

      From a trip into the nearest city, Santa Cruz, we get a glimpse of the lovely unicorn’s dilemma. All about him in Santa Cruz are lovely young boys who are equally attracted to the plain dressed Mennonite who speaks only German, while they speak only Spanish. But they know better than to interact with him, actions that would lead perhaps to their own punishment, but even more certainly in further punishments for him.

     At one point while a brother naps, our beauty runs off into a field where he retrieves hidden treasures, a magazine and urban clothing buried deep in the soil. If we suspect that the magazine Hommes might serve the purposes of masturbation, we soon learn it is even more sacred to him for its demonstration of various male haircuts, which the moment he attempts to escape he shows to a barber.

      A local milk dealer has helped him escape, and his first stop is the social activist who helped get him released from his home imprisonment. But she is rightfully nervous that they will find him in the hotel in which she puts him up, and promises to meet him the next day at noon to get him transportation to a further destination.

      For his one night in town, the beautiful boy not only gets a haircut, but visits a Santa Cruz dance bar, there encountering desirous eyes, but where no one dares approach, not only because of the language difference but the cultural chasm that also exists. Finally, it is the local milk-dealer’s son Fernando (Eric Robles), to whom he has given his room number, who approaches him. For one evening, the two spend a truly sumptuous night enjoying the delights of the flesh.

      But the next morning nearly the entire male Mennonite community descends upon the city, and our innocent, perhaps imagining that his new “urban” attire and haircut may hide his identity, but more likely simply daring his family and the others to kidnap him, appears on the street. They not only capture their missing member, but string him up and hang him upside down on a tree near where he had buried his treasures of clothing and the magazine.

 

   Death usually occurs in such hangings after about 20 hours. It appears at one moment that his sexual friend returns, unable to bring him down from the tree but at least comforting him. And if so, perhaps he will go for help in order to save his new friend. But it is just as likely that the scene we observe is the hanging boy’s hallucination, the one thing he has of true love in his life to remember as he suffers his way into a terrible death by brain hemorrhage.

     The film ends with such a terrifying image of beauty captured and destroyed that if it weren’t for the cinematic wonder of it, we would have simply to turn away.

      Bellott, a leading force in the small Bolivian film industry, has directed several films in the past few years, Sexual Dependency, Who Killed the White Llama?—an odd road comedy—Blood-Red Ox (a queer horror film), and Perfidia, his first feature in English. Unicornio appeared throughout the world in LGBTQ film festivals.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).

Lorenzo Caproni | La tana (The Den) / 2015

the games men play

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lorenzo Caproni and Fabio Marson (screenplay), Lorenzo Caproni (director) La tana (The Den) / 2015 [15 minutes]

 

Italian director Lorenzo Caproni’s 2015 short film The Den reminds me a great deal of the Israeli film Summer Vacation (2012), in which a man with his wife encounters on his vacation at the beach and hidden gay lover whom he can’t abandon, despite the presence of his wife and children.

     In The Den, Christian (Daniele Mariani), visiting the beach for a couple of days with his wife Barbara (Laura Sinceri) and son Giovanni, suddenly meets up with a friend from his past, Luca (Emanuel Caserio). He introduces him to his wife, who wonders when they met up. Both agree they used to play at the beach together as children.

     Both Christian and his family and Luca at the nearby campsite, and Luca quickly slips Christian his room number, 5A.

     But unlike the cheating couple of Summer Vacation, whose coupling involves nothing more than lust, Christian is involved with Luca in a far more nefarious way.

     Christian quickly finds a way to temporarily abandon his wife—he suddenly decides he will cook the evening meal, and leaves the beach to shop and prepare the ingredients. He quickly makes a beeline to cottage 5A wherein Luca awaits him, ready to be tortured into a manifestation of BDSM love. He’s reading for the usual S&M abuses, licking Christian’s boots, sucking his balls, licking his ass, getting spat on, etc. But in this coupling things goes much farther, mostly involving ropes.

     Before Luca can even wink at their campy rendition of youthful romance, Christian has stuffed a sock in his mouth, tightly tied him up, and left him on the floor of his room while he goes off to really cook spaghetti and clams.

     The next day even Christian’s son is not entirely safe as, watching Giovanni play in the sand, the father suddenly usurps his child’s play bucket and begins to pack it up with sand, bringing it back to his son clearly reminding him of a game he once played as a young man with Luca, perhaps burying him (an image that also, strangely enough, plays a role in Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon’s Summer Vacation).

    The musical score throughout consists of a sound like knives clicking together or in this scene, a kind of primal drum beat, making it clear that Christian is compelled to behave in this semi-violent manner, that it is a force from within that beyond the seemingly normal and loving relationship with his wife and son, might at any moment devour him.

    He immediately returns to 5A, unbinds Luca, pulls the sock from his mouth a feeds him a drink of water and pours the remainder on his face while now verbally abusing him. After even further physical abuse he does finally rest his ass on Luca’s face. It is clear that he is so disgusted by his homosexual desires that the only way he can engage in them is to turn the other into an animal demanding physical engagement and abnegation. Finally, he brutally face fucks his “prisoner.”

    Meanwhile, we watch Barbara either literally or mentally wandering the sandy dunes near the beach, obviously in search of her husband’s recent actions and apparent compulsions.

    Back on the beach again with his wife and son, Christian finally claims he has to leave a night early, that work calls him home, obviously seeking a way to be free o his family to spend at least one night with Luca alone.

   Barbara wonders whether or not his work partner, Paolo cannot simply wait another day for Christian’s return to the office.    

    “Maybe,” Christian responds.

    Meanwhile, it is clear that Christian has again tied up Luca and left him alone in the pains of ropes and muzzle. This time when Christian returns he finds Luca sick, unable to even eat what Christian offers.

    Back at the beach again with his little family, Christian suddenly looks up to see what appears to be an escaped Luca, shirt torn, and looking grisly, walking toward him. Luca lies down on the sand near him.

    For the first time we actually hear a chord of music before it returns to its primal silent and distant beat. The “affair” between the two men may have be temporarily resolved, but the compulsions remain in the heart of this supposed “family man.”

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).