Arthur Cahn | Herculanum / 2016

the charm

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Cahn (screenwriter and director) Herculanum / 2016 [21 minutes]

 

There is something about Arthur Cahn’s short film Herculanum that is so very simple and pure that it seems almost elegant.

     Léo (Arthur Cahn) as made an appointment to meet up with Marc (Jérémie Elkaïm). They find that they have a few things in common, Marc being original from Strasbourg where Léo’s grandmother runs a bakery, which Marc remembers from his youth.

    They like what they see and quickly get down to a wonderful experience of sex in which Léo cums on Marc’s chest. As Marc showers, Léo wanders the apartment, liking what he sees. And soon after Léo suggesting that they meet up again.

     Marc is perfectly agreeable to another encounter, but explains that he will be traveling for a short while to Norway with his boyfriend. Even though Marc has mentioned that he has a lover on his Grindr page, someone Léo has missed it, and there is a clear sense of disappointment in the fact.

     Nonetheless, the two do meet up a few weeks later after Marc’s return, this time at Léo’s apartment, and once more they enjoy their sexual experience, this time discussing their unhappy experiences in dating, Léo focusing on his most recent “date,” obvious a hook-up made, in part, because he has found Marc to be unavailable.

    Yet, nothing dramatic occurs here. It is not even that Léo, who later admits that he is not unhappy as a single being, only that he misses certainly shared experiences, like going shopping on Sundays.

     And the couple get together one more time, this time sharing a bed for the night. In the dark they each share their vocations, Marc being a writer, and Léo being a Paris tour guide for Italians.

     It also comes out that Marc has broken up with a lover even though they were soon to have gone away on a trip to the Pompei region, he having even purchased a suite to surprise his ex-lover.

    Léo, whose father is Italian, had once guided people around Pompei and Herculaneum, the later the better preserved of the Vesuvius disaster spots. In Herculaneum, couples were killed in a matter of minutes as a cloud of fire spread out over the city. He and his female friend had imagined histories and names for some of the preserved couples killed in the disaster.

    Marc imagines how if today a volcano like Vesuvius were suddenly to overtake the city, that they too might be seen as a couple, spooning in the dark. Léo cuddles up to Marc in the “spoon” position as they fall asleep.

    We have no way of telling whether or not this affable couple might find themselves as a couple. It doesn’t matter. They enjoy one another’s company and sexual companionship. Yet, of course, Marc’s statement has imagined them as a couple, and perhaps they might take on the role in real life as well. But there is not certainty in anyone’s future. And in the recognition of that that fact, this couple save themselves the drama of the desperate desires of young lovers. These are adults, open to what might happen, without enforcing imaginary scenarios upon their own lives.

    But the very fact that such calm and reasonable figures have found one another, is a kind of miracle in a world in which most individuals make impossible demands.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

 

 

 

 

Lee Knight | A Friend of Dorothy / 2025

inheritance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lee Knight (screenwriter and director) A Friend of Dorothy / 2025 [21 minutes]

 

Lee Knight’s short A Friend of Dorothy is a charming, if rather predictable, comedy about the meet-up of youth and old age, vaguely similar—although without any of its dark, unpredictable oddities—to Hal Ashby’s 1971 comedy, Harold and Maude.

     What the IMDb scenario doesn’t make clear is that this film, although basically a sweet eccentric British comedy, has the potential to be something far more raucous, particularly given the fact that the central figure, Dorothy, an 87-year old widow devoted to theater, is played by the vivacious and funny, potty-mouthed Mariam Margolyes, who played in dozens of significant character roles before she became famous through her portrayal of Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter series and through her appearances on the Graham Norton Show, where she has made her lesbian identity quite clear. Her lawyer Dickie is played by actor, writer, and TV and internet host Stephen Fry, an openly gay actor.

    Moreover, the young teenager with whom Dorothy makes friends, a 17-year old black teen named JJ (Alistair Nwachukwu) is apparently gay, who when he discovers her drama library, pulls down Martin Sherman’s play Bent, a work about gay men in a Nazi Concentration camp—this despite the fact that he has never even heard of the work Dorothy first mentions, The Wizard of Oz, let alone heard of Judy Garland. Discovering that despite his parent’s desires that he play football—the soccer ball he was kicking having accidently gone astray in Dorothy’s backyard, the reason for his visit—that he really would like to be an actor, she pulls down the play The Inheritance, Matthew López’s 2018 work inspired by E.M. Forster’s Howards End about three generations of New York gay men after the AIDS epidemic, to have him audition for her.

    His reading is so moving, in fact, that she encourages further visits, and the two become fast friends, he shopping for her and pulling off the lid her prune cans, she sharing her knowledge of theater, and both of them actually caring for one another in a manner that neither of them have previously experienced.

     We learn little of JJ’s family, but we do discover that Dorothy’s son has moved to “the other side of the world,” leaving her only a distant, self-serving, and dismissive nephew Scott (Oscar Lloyd) who visits her on occasion mostly just to check in on the condition of the house, which he hopes will be left to him or his father, and to encourage her to seek out an assisted living space. Smug and fatuous, he clearly has no true interest or even love for his dotty auntie.

    The work is too short to fully develop the relationship between her and JJ, but we sense that in the few weeks of their friendship, something in both their lives has changed, making them more alive and richer for the experience, suggesting that while he helps and listens to her, she offers him the kind of cultural inheritance very much at the center of López’s play—and incidentally the kind of quick introduction to culture that the “raconteur’s” rent boys offered to Jim in Steve McLean’s Postcards from London which I saw, by coincidence just a day earlier, and which was released the same year as López’s play.

     The last scene takes place at the lawyer Dickie’s office, as Scott suddenly finds himself at the same table with JJ where Dickie is about to read his grandmother’s will. Scott’s selfish nature immediately raises his ruff, leading him to wonder why a black man who he sees as simply a visitor of an aunt who, as he puts it, “has lost her marbles” is sitting at the same table. Dickie, however, strongly argues that his client most certainly had all her wits about her when she changed her will.

    We suspect, of course, that she has left everything to JJ. But Dorothy is far wiser that that, knowing that if she had done so Scott and his father would simply have drowned the innocent young boy in a lawsuit. She leaves the house to her son, and wills her nephew 50,000 pounds.

     But she leaves her entire library to JJ. Satisfied with the endowment, Scott hurries off, delighted to give up the dusty books to her auntie’s so-called “friend,” his fears allayed. After he leaves, Dickie hands him one particular book, The Inheritance, in which JJ later finds a note from Dorothy suggesting he pursue his dream of acting, with a check lying beneath it for ₤50,000. The beautiful last photo of JJ looking off into his future ends this lovely fairytale.

     This film was nominated for the short film category of 2026 Academy Awards.

*I might also suggest that Scott reads somewhat as a nasty gay man, wearing a pink tie early in the film, and declaring, after a phone call demanding he hurry to a meeting, “Well, fuck me up the bum.” Yet he is likely to marry a woman simply to please his business partners. And, obviously, we could now even imagine that JJ might be a closeted gay boy

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).