Casper Andreas | Ett sista farväl (A Last Farewell) / 2013

the intolerable silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casper Andreas (screenwriter and director) Ett sista farväl (A Last Farewell) / 2013 [13 minutes]

Erik (Tomas von Brömssen) is an angry old man. We first see him sitting at his computer, but unable to write, irritated with the of his daughter, Malin (Liv Mjönes). She is pregnant, but he is cruelly dismissive of her, lecturing her even for asking if he has some herbal tea since she’s not supposed to drink coffee. 

    He is rude her, impatient for her to be gone.

   All of this seems difficult to explain until she reveals that she has just been to her papa’s gravesite, which Erik has evidently failed to visit.

   And gradually we begin to realize that Malin is the daughter of two gay men, one of whom, Leif (Iwar Wiklander). We also begin to perceive that his anger with Malin is that she has bought the pills Leif requested to take his own life. How could she do that to his own lover, her own papa?

    The rudeness continues until she is forced to leave. And suddenly we now realize another reason why Erik desires to be left alone. In her absence he begins a conversation with his dead companion, furious with him for having committed suicide so that he might no longer suffer from the disease which would kill him in a few months.

     Erik argues that he would have looked after him, cared for him and, despite Leif’s suggestion to the contrary, he would not have felt put upon, would have gladly nursed his husband into his grave.

    Leif continues to argue that is not Malin fault for doing what he asked. Yes, he admits, he did not end his life for Erik’s sake, but for himself, he was in pain and afraid. And the decision he made was a selfish but necessary one.

     Moreover, he counsels Erik, he cannot be angry with Malin for the rest of his life. Surely he will be delighted with the grandson, unable to resist loving the child.

     Speaking to the vision of Leif in a chair, he suddenly realizes that it is empty, and that he now lives alone even though he will always sense Leif’s presence in his life. Leif’s voice suggests he somehow go back to writing, about the two of them and Malin, that he find a way to say farewell.

     Before she has even returned home Erik calls his daughter asking if she might accompany him to the grave the next morning. The healing has begun.

     This lovely short Swedish film reveals what all gay men who have been in a long relationship must surely feel with the death of the other. In this case, Erik has a daughter they shared. If I were to survive Howard, or were Howard to survive me, the utter loneliness would be nearly unbearable, the sense of emptiness profound and debilitating just as it is for Erik. We have both willed our bodies to a research center, so there will not even be a grave to visit to symbolically say goodbye.

    At least Erik will son the voice of a crying grandson in the house and perhaps live long enough to speak to him and share with him his love of his other grandfather. Without that the silence will be nearly intolerable. I am certain I will fill the room with meaningless conversations to Howard until death silences me as well.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

Douglas Messerli | Battlefields / 2025 [Introduction]

battlefields

by Douglas Messerli

 

It was fascinating to me that in March of 2026, at the very moment the US President had almost single-handedly taken a nation to war—with the help, of course, of the Israeli militarists who have long been seeking to find a major world power to help them wipe out one of their most potent enemies without any stated reason except for his personal dislike of the Iranian government, and, most importantly, having received not a single congressional vote or any evidence of major support from the citizens—that four of the titles I first saw were all about doing large-scale battle on national landscapes.

     For Ryan Coogler’s Sinners the war involved an uprising of Mississippi Delta blacks simply seeking out their private enjoyment after their long days of working the cotton fields, interrupted by Irish vampires, serving as a threat of assimilation and destruction to their culture, and ending in an outright rebellion of the last survivor against the Ku Klux Klan, emblem of the white bigotry that had destroyed so many black lives for centuries. If it was a valiant fight, it was alas, as history has shown, a losing battle.

    So too did blacks and whites lead a rebellion this time against the political right and wealthy industrialists in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Here a Weatherman-like radical group, the fictional French 75, worked, often successful, to free immigrants detained by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), blew up corporation headquarters, and robbed banks to sustain their activities. The military right of the US came down upon them with full force,

almost totally silencing them. Yet their worst enemy was simply time, as the first generation of radicals grew into middle age, and drugged and drank themselves into oblivion. Yet even hidden away in a small California town, the “hero” and his daughter still came under siege, in this case because of a personal vendetta by one of the military rightists who having fathered a black child and who was seeking entry to one of the most elite racist organizations that made even the Klan look like a small town operation. If “Rocketman” Paul Calhoun / now renamed Bob Ferguson is not precisely an innocent, his daughter Charlene/Willa (the offspring actually of the mad military racist Lockjaw) is guilty of nothing but existing; and the new battles that all must suffer this time round are simply those of protecting the future from the brutal hate Lockjaw and the American industrial complex represent.

       Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent focuses in on another national landscape, that of Brazil under the 1970s military dictatorship, filled with corrupt police forces and spiteful industrial chieftains who, almost in reverse of One Struggle After Another, turn innocent researchers, outspoken women, immigrants, gay people and others into rumored political dissidents so they might have recourse to murder them. Unlike the former political activists hiding out with new identities in a safe town in California, the stragglers who have made it to the underground safe house in Recife have done nothing but attempt to live good everyday lives, only to find themselves described as Communists, queers, and other kinds of outsiders who must be destroyed to save the fascist government. The battles they must undergo are daily struggles just to survive, and, in the end, that survival also entails the next generation, since they will surely lose out in the complex plots against their living.

     Finally, in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, the young hero of the work seems to be battling the entire nation, his working-class Jewish family and neighbors, bigoted Southern whites, a mafioso figure, and the affluent elites—as well as the worldwide Table Tennis Association—just to get his chance at the American dream of becoming the world ping-pong champion. One by one he wards them off only to also get caught up with a man who describes himself as a vampire. And like the others I describe above, Marty realizes that despite all of his desperate battles, his dream also represents a lost cause, having finally been defeated by the powerful forces which control his world.

      All of these works, every one of them representing moral individuals who attempt to defeat the evil forces of self-interest, greed, and hate, lose most of their battles, recognizing that in the worlds that they inhabit they will always be outsiders. And, accordingly, all four of these works contain, as James R Dubro has described them, “queerish” figures. Vampires, by their very definition, represent in their attraction to all sexes for a source of blood, serve as stand-ins for bisexual or queer individuals, desiring to consume and take over the bodies of both males and females with whom they come in contact. The number of male on male bodies in Sinners alone suggests a bloody orgy more than zombies feasting on the living. And in Marty Supreme the vampire pen manufacturer is more interested in actually paddling the behind of the young Marty that in getting behind him in support of his table tennis career.

      Some of the first for whom militarists and fascists come when pretending to crack down on “so-called” moral turpitude (usually a cover for their own truly immoral behaviors) are members of the LGBTQ community, actions which in The Secret Service are satirized by the press by describing them as attacks of the hairy leg now on the loose after having been found hanging from the jaws of a tiger shark.

    In One Battle After Another the younger generation for which the central figure fights, Charlene/Willa may have found a way to escape the sexual and gender-related predatoriness that dominates the older generation by refusing to define themselves and their friends in those terms, arguing for their own non-binary categories.

     The sad thing that keep haunting me, however, while watching all four of these films was that we come out of the theater facing no more of a morally defined world than when we entered. In one of their cases, no matter how many battle these heroes won, they lost the war, being outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the forces of evil.

     Leaving the theater I still had to return home to the news of Trump and his numerous minions in government and across my nation who were ready to whip up a chaos of divisiveness and hatred instead of seeking to serve a united people with empathy, care, and hope.

     There was a reason, I believe, behind the selection of his year’s best film by the American Film Academy being One Battle After Another and the Cannes Film Festival chose Mendonça Filho as best director. These films revealed the battles that most of us were engaged in now almost every day of our lives.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2026).