Arthur Penn | Night Moves / 1975

circles

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alan Sharp (screenplay), Arthur Penn (director) Night Moves / 1975

 

Gene Hackman has almost made a career out of playing doleful outsiders who attempt to bring meaning and order into a world they are afraid to enter. Particularly in Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterwork The Conversation and in the following year’s Arthur Penn-directed role of Harry Moseby in Night Moves, Hackman conjures up a world where no one and nothing can be trusted—from one’s wife to the walls of one’s apartment. What appears to be truth is almost always a series of lies projected into the world by interlinking acquaintances, who, for often inexplicable reasons, would just as soon destroy one another. Welcome to the post-Watergate world where a heavy dose of paranoia simply makes good sense.

     In both of these works, and particularly in Penn’s study in despair, people tend to gather round one another in terrifying circles, a bit like buffaloes defending themselves from attack, and to separate one of these beasts out from others results in a kind of herd collapse, resulting in a series of destructive and deadly actions.

     Working as a cut-rate version of the soon-to-be extinct breed, the touch American detective, Harry focuses little energy on the comes committed by the figures he encounters, but concentrates, instead, on their location in time and space and their reasons for behaving as they do. And in the sense, accordingly, although he obviously believes order can be restored, Harry is oddly amoral. Life is seldom improved by his actions: indeed, because of his fear of involving himself with others, he often does not even carry through with what might be seen to be the goal of his tracking. Years ago, as a young man, he tracked down his own missing father only to watch him briefly on a park bench, action like all the other old men. His very action, he realizes, has resulted in nothing.

      In Sharp’s and Penn’s dark tale, Harry is recommended by his fellow friend, Nick (Kenneth Mars) to take on a case that involves bringing back for actor Arlene Iverson’s (Janet Ward) daughter, Delly*—a Lolita-like figure who’s recently gone missing. It’s not clear that Arlene is particularly worried about her incorrigible charge as much as the fact that her divorce settlement determined that she must live with her daughter until she reaches the legal age of her trust fund; without the girl, Arlene has no income. She’d prefer, it’s apparent, to take the detective into her bath rather than send him out into the world to chase down Delly (Melanie Griffth).

     Nick, we soon after discover in an argument Harry has with his wife, Ellen (Susan Clark) has attempted to hire our detective hero for his own quite successful company. Nick is clearly proud of his success, symbolized by a display cabinet of priceless pre-Columbian sculpture, growing more and more expensive every day, he explains, since the Mexican government has begun to attempt to protect them for exportation—one of our first clues in this twisted tale that things are not what they seem.

    But Harry obviously prefers to work alone—for far less money. Harry’s wife, moreover, runs a successful antique shop with her co-worker Charles (Ben Archibek), a gay man not unlike Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop (1984). In short, we quickly perceive something is amiss in Harry’s personal life, wherein both his best friend and his wife work in a world from which he has chosen to exclude himself. In case you haven’t guessed it, gay is still quite evil in this 1975 film.

    Yet, despite the arguments by critics such as Vincent Canby and Robert Ebert that the plot is so impenetrable the it is unnecessary to complete unravel it, I think we already seen the circular patterns that lead to a comprehension of Penn’s bleak tale.

     Arlene suggests he check out a young mechanic, Quentin (James Wood), who had hung out with Delly. The surly mechanic, who has worked as well for the film studios, has evidently taken Delly on a shoot with him to New Mexico, where he was abandoned by the young girl for a stunt pilot, Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello).

    On a film location, Harry questions Ellman, and also meets up with stunt coordinator Joey Zigler (Edward Binns) where he observes Quentin working on Marty’s stunt plane, despite their declared falling out over Delly.

     When Harry discerns that the two men have also had affairs with Delly’s mother, he suspects that Delly may be working her way through her mother’s former lovers; and, after a tip from Ellman that Arlene’s second husband, Tom Iverson (John Crawford), Delly’s stepfather, is now organizing charter flights in the Florida Keys, Harry heads out of town—but not before discovering that his own wife has been having an affair with another man, Marty Heller (Harris Yulin). 

   His voyage, accordingly, combines a journey of both his mind and heart, allowing the problem-solving part of his life to fill in for his marital problems over which he has no control.

     In the Keys he discovers Delly living along with Iverson and his girlfriend, Paula (Jennifer Warren. The clever and fast-talking Paula makes it almost immediately clear that Delly’s presence is causing serious riffs in her own sex-life with Iverson, and when Iverson finally returns from a flight, he suggests he has been having difficulty in keeping his hands off his own step-daughter. Delly, meanwhile, attempts, without success, to seduce the detective, in part to protect herself from having to return home with him.

 

     Complications dictate that Harry stay in Iverson’s shacks for another day, and he agrees to join Paula on a swimming trip with Delly that afternoon. While swimming near the boat, Delly spots the wreckage of a small plane wherein sits the decomposing body of the former stunt pilot, Ellman.

     Distraught by the event, Delly is comforted by the two, as Paula marks the spot with a buoy, which she appears to report to the Coast Guard when the return to camp. Later that night Paula joins Harry in his bed, but soon after disappears when Delly screams out for a nightmare.

     The following day, he returns Delly to the California home of her mother, observing that Quentin has already turned up at the house and that the two, mother and daughter, are already arguing.

     Yet another circle has been rounded.

    Harry finds his wife missing, and breaks into the Malibu home of Heller where he finds his wife Ellen. She joins him at their home, and together the two attempt a kind of rapprochement, interrupted by the news of Delly’s death in an on-set automobile accident.

     Apparently she has been killed in a car driven by the stunt coordinator, Joey, who shows Harry clips from the accident. In one of the clips, Harry spots Quentin working on the car just prior to the accident.

     In a visit to the supposedly grieving mother, Harry finds her sitting poolside, drunk, while revealing that she will now inherit the girl’s trust fund. Harry’s indignity for her lack of feeling leads to her demanding that he leave.

     Unable to drop the case since he now perceives that he has been used as a pawn in the affair, he returns to Florida, where finds the mechanic, Quentin, dead in Iverson’s dolphin pen. Encountering Iverson, Harry accuses him of having murdered the kid, which leads to a fight between the two older men. When Harry knocks out Iverson, Paula explains that the plane they had found had never been reported because it contained a valuable pre-Columbian statue smuggled out of Mexico, and that her sexual encounter with Harry was simply a ruse so the Iverson might check out the wreckage spot..

     With Iverson’s accomplice in hand, Harry now returns to the spot where the plan was buoyed. But as Paula dives in to retrieve it, a plane suddenly appears out of nowhere and moves toward the boat. As Paula attempts to return to the surface with the loot, the plane moving in as the pilot shoots at both Harry and Paula. She is killed and Harry, seriously hit, watches the plane crash nearby, recognizing the pilot through the cockpit window to be the stunt coordinator, Joey.

      Unable to move, Harry attempts to manipulate the boat’s throttle, but only manages to pull it half-way before he collapses, the boat beginning the slow arc of a circle, at the very moment that he surely realizes, like the chess game he plays over and again—the move of the knight to checkmate in three quick moves over and again to capture the prize. His efforts to make a sense of reality have been all for naught, having played a game that he did not even know he was playing.

     Finally, the circles come together to draw in a noose, having involved both his friend Nick who collects the pre-Columbian art and his wife Ellen who sells it. The gumshoe has no place in a world of high stakes art; as he states early on in this film, he can only watch the “paint dry,” far too slow for the dizzyingly corrupt world that circles around him and others.

 

*The filmmaker’s father’s aspirations were to film epics such as “Samson and Delilah.” Certainly his daughter, Delly, might be described as a femme fatal devoted to sheering the hair of any likely Samson.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2015; revised April 27, 2026

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2026) and My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).

Michiel Dhont | Holiday / 2019

family reunion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michiel Dhont (screenwriter and director) Holiday / 2019 [24 minutes]

 

Flemish director Michiel Dhont’s short film Holiday is not so much a film with a plot as a series

of images which establish an atmosphere, basically filled with unknowable emotions of frustration, expressions of slights, personal dismissals, and resentments that any family build up over the years.

      The elders have all learned, long ago, to ignore the others’ comments, to hold back their anger, and go along with the pretense that an annual family get-together entails. But the younger Maurice, now 26, is just at the age where he is not yet ready to give into mass amnesia of family behavior and old to outwardly express his pent-up emotions. Tijmen Govaerts as Maurice is represented by a face of distress in varying degrees of horror as his grandmother, mother, brother Louis, aunts, uncles, and cousins all behave in a manner that makes him feel as if he has entered another planet, just close enough to what he knows, however, to provide him with a nightmare of a weekend.

    Very little except his uncle Luc’s (Jan Hammenecker) snide comment about his earring is actually directed toward him. And even Luc’s comment, “You have earring?” might be perceived simply as an observation where it not that clearly Maurice has faced just such uneasy “observations” for years from loud and provocative uncle, and comes with what are his apparently conservative values. Moreover, as Luc well knows, men have been wearing earrings by the time of this event, for years.

      Throughout the weekend, Maurice finds dozens of such small asides and behavior patterns that build up almost to an unbearable tension with which, although we cannot always be fully unsympathetic we have all been through at family gatherings at a certain age that drove us nearly crazy.

     Maurice reminds his mother that they had all agreed to invite no in-laws, yet Luc has brought his wife Isa (Circé Lethem). Maurice, on the other hand, even apologizes to Isa for his aunt Chantal’s (Sofie Decleir) crude comment about the fact that Isa is too old to bear a child. Isa simply says that she knows Chantal too well to take it seriously. Yet she continues to confide in Maurice about her and Luc’s attempt to have a baby, when Maurice knows that long ago his uncle was sterilized. His mother warns him not to intrude upon other people’s private fantasies.

      At another point, Maurice feels it necessary to stand up for his gay brother Louis (Oscar Willems) when at the dinner table when his uncle Joris (Dries Notelteirs) asks Louis, “Don’t you regret you can’t have children,” Maurice responding, “Being gay doesn’t mean you can’t have children.” The family once more quickly covers over their tracks with a simple, “Joris didn’t mean it like that?” “Like what?” one wants to ask, and “What then, did he mean by the question?” But nothing in this family is ever fully discussed.

 

     Maurice finally gets furious when he discovers that Luc has taken Louis out in Maurice’s car to give him a driving lesson. Maurice quickly joins the party, playing the role, quite literally of backseat driver. But Luc apparently is a staunch believer of live and let learn as he continually allows Louis to grind the gears and he is unable to learn the proper procedure of changing gears. Luc, moreover, attempts to turn brother against brother as he continues to tell Louis to ignore Maurice’s instructions. Maurice finally gets out of the car, orders his brother out, and insists the two walk home alone, leaving Luc to return the car.

       Even his attempt to be nice to Isa as he encourages her to buy a pair of cheap sunglasses for herself, is rebuffed. As she drives home with Maurice in the car, she gets out for a moment to take a call from her sister, obviously reporting that it appears she has cancer; returning to the auto she complains how she resents that when her sister calls it becomes an immediate demand to answer. She too evidently cannot acknowledge the sad news she has just been told.

     The final assault is when a younger cousin Roxanne (Melody van Gompel) decides to perform a dance before the assembled family. What begins as a seeming cheerleader routine turns moment by moment into something closer to a pole bar stripper routine, as the young teen tosses off her sweater and heaves her body up and down upon the floor to a song with lyrics which keep repeating the word “pussy,” “soft pussy.”

      By the end of the weekend, it is clear that Maurice has come to the point that so many of us have with regard to family life, realizing finally that such family reunions are made in hell. For the moment Maurice feels such a complete alienation that in a few years, he too will be able to utterly ignore the absurd behavior of those who remain of his family at just such future events, where they will perhaps be able to tease him about his righteousness.

      In that sense, I believe one must understand Michiel Dont’s beautifully realized work as less a dark family satire filled with lies and secrets than as comedy about coming to terms with family life.

     I can’t tell you how many times when dealing with just such events I felt very much in the same position as Maurice.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Matthew Puccini | Lavender / 2019

between tragedy and camp

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matthew Puccini (screenwriter and director) Lavender / 2019 [10.34 minutes]

 

Throughout the 1940s-1960s, when it was the dominant expression of how fiction and poetry should be read and written, Robert Penn Warren’s and Cleanth Brooks’ New Critical Theory argued for the use of natural, realistic images, actions, and symbols which enacted by and within the lives of characters objectively revealed without authorial intrusions created works that most profoundly affected readers. Short tales, in particular, had a rising and falling action, ending usually in a cathartic experience that revealed both to the character and the reader the significance of the proceeding events. Fiction was driven primarily by character and plot in a rising and falling pattern that resembled the fluctuations of human thoughts and actions. Structure was primarily linear, paralleling the hero’s revelations as he moved through the experiences that defined the work of fiction. Longer works, accordingly, were defined primarily as romans or romances (translated into English as “novels”) that were centered on an individual character’s transitions through the objectively presented mimetically presented landscapes.

     With its often desperateness to speak of alternative truth, to reveal LGBTQ life as something of moral worth, its anger and outrageousness of the outsider, its assimilation of comic responses to societal exclusion, and the resultant campy expression of reality through winks, nods, and complexly coded messages, homosexual, bisexual and transsexual narratives fortunately seldom obeyed these critical restrictions, creating a far more fascinating plethora of voices, ideas, and realities than realist novelists and short story writers could even imagine.

      It’s not that all fiction writers beloved by Warren and Brooks wrote nothing of value: among the New Critical heroes of the 20th century were Henry James, William Faulkner, Ford Maddox Ford, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, and the early works by James Joyce to name only a few.

      Very few of the LGBTQ cinematic works I have reviewed in these volumes, however, would have met with critical approval of the New Critics. Their prioritization of sexual identity alone would likely have disqualified them from the New Critical pantheon, let alone their often soap operatic-like plots filled with radical and unexpected events and characters so outrageous in their actions, words, and demeanors that for many ordinary observers they might appear to be unbelievable. Filled with directorial intrusion, moral outrage, outré costuming, nudity, and perverse humor, LGBTQ filmmaking was the anathema of New Critical Theory and helped in tumbling its academic walls.

       Imagine my surprise, accordingly, after watching a little LGBTQ gem by Matthew Puccini titled Lavender from 2019. This film was so very unobtrusive in its expression that, at first, I shook my head it a brief whirl of confusion, pondering for a few seconds what I had just seen really meant—so used had I grown to having the directors of these films make it quite clear what they were saying, despite the complexities of their works. So little of the film’s meaning had been conveyed through dialogue that a viewer not used to having characters argue out their ideas might have wondered what actually happened by film’s end.

       Puccini’s beautifully filmed story took place primarily in a lovely brownstone house with two quite happily married good-looking men, Arthur (Michael Urie) and Lucas (Ken Barnett), who begin the film singing Irving Berlin’s “Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon” which the couple perform with loving attention to a young man sitting next to Lucas on the piano bench. It’s a perfect song to reveal the warm and loving the relationship between the men and the younger boy, Andy (Michael Hsu Rosen) with whom they clearly are polyamorously entwined.

     The director never reveals how the two met the boy or even tells us precisely how intensive their relationship to Andy is (the film’s “Kickstarter” synopsis suggests they met on the computer dating site Grindr), but given their gentle hugs and kisses, their general concern for him, and the fact that he is sleeping over at their house each night, we know that Andy has been made to feel loved and comfortable as an important figure in both their lives.

      Their stylish apartment with contemporary art of the walls obviously intrigues the attractive kid of apparently biracial parentage. What is clear in the way he stares into the paintings and objects of their rooms is that he has entered a privileged white world he previously could not have imagined and that, along with their clear adoration of him, he is a bit overwhelmed.

       Moreover, as anyone can imagine in such a situation there are tensions that arise simply given the situation. These are only hinted at in Puccini’s film, but a scene in which Andy wakes up early in the morning to find himself lying a bit apart from Arthur and Lucas asleep in an embrace says a great deal about the fact that, although he shares their physical love, he still is kept apart from their far deeper commitments with one another. He brushes his teeth, dresses, and returns to his own apartment via taxi with a somewhat troubled look upon his face.

       It’s strange after all of these years to suddenly realize that I myself have been in two such polyamorous relationships (I had no such name for these situations in those days) when I was 20 or 21 and was living in New York. And I recall that although one felt the responsibility to like both of the partners equally, there was in both cases one who was more attractive and, quite frankly, sexually active. And although I went out of my way to try to balance my attentions, I am sure it was quite obvious to the other which of them I preferred. Did they resent each other or argue after my departures? They never needed to tell me, in either case, when it was time for me to move on.

       Something similar happens to Andy when he brings Arthur a birthday present of a program for the play The Changing Room signed by the entire cast; he awards the boy a deep kiss, followed immediately after with Lucas wrestling him into bed as he fucks the kid alone.

       Tensions, we recognize, are rising when the boy hears the couple quietly speaking in the next room, although we hear nothing that is said. And the next morning when he awakens both men have risen earlier. After a shower, he packs up the few possessions he has in their apartment and prepares to leave what we quickly recognize will be permanently, he kissing both and congratulating them for what they have, as they, rather teary-eyed, watch Andy walk out the door. Clearly they have told him that the time has come for him to go. Yet the viewer has to fill in the blanks, to imagine what has gone on in the background. Everything is presented without directorial determination of what we make of the events we have witnessed as uninformed voyeurs.

       Even more surprisingly, when Andy returns to his apartment we discover that a cute boy is lying in his own bed. At first he turns away from the sleeping boy, but when the friend mutters some a greeting, “heh,” he turns toward him, embracing him into a hug. Obviously, his experiment in love is over and he can now return to face his own budding relationship, hoping to build it into the kind of rich marriage he has just experienced with Arthur and Lucas.

       Puccini himself seems to indicate his awareness in how his oblique, well-crafted tale lies somewhat outside of the usual constructs of LGBTQ filmmaking. He cites Andrew Haigh’s Weekend and Ira Sachs’ Love Is Strange as naturalistic precedents as well as work by John Cassavetes and the Dardennes brothers. Puccini describes his desire to give the work significance through “small, seemingly insignificant but carefully constructed moments.” But his final statement I would argue almost fully embraces the “New Critical” values which I have described above:

 

                  Lavender will strive to present a queer story that is still so rare:

                  occupying a space between camp and tragedy, where quiet

                  naturalism and tender romance, no matter how brief, are enough.

 

     His film won the Here Media Award for Best Queer Short Film at the Provincetown International Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (April 2021).

 

Mike Lemon | Touched / 2003

the forces of fate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Lemon (screenwriter and director) Touched / 2003 [25 minutes]

 

What happens when two profoundly lonely men who are strangers, one older and gay, and the second younger and questioning, take one last chance at making a sincere human connection? Based on true events in the life of the writer/director.

     One most certainly might declare this film about two Michael’s, young and old, who meet up quite by accident at a gay bar one night as being overtly sentimental, somewhat badly acted, and with it’s fairly washed out colors (the older Mike, Bob Bowersox, looks at moments like a ghost), lacking in good acoustics, and highly melodramatic. I strongly felt these failures as I watched this short 25 minute film, but nonetheless was highly moved by it.

    In part, we know it was based on a real experience in writer/director Don Lemon’s real life; but the magic of that one night, where the elder man (Bowersox) leaves his female friend, determining for some inexplicable reason to return to a gay bar he promised never again to visit, is still palpable. He even explains to Dafna (Vicki Gorman) that he is prepared to go home alone, no one in such a bar wanting to have sex with any middle-aged man. But then, maybe, he might through a miracle meet someone whom he can again make contact, to actually be physically touched.

     Even he can’t explain why he feet are taking him again to a place truly unwelcome for those over a certain age. But magic does happen that night when a beautiful young man, Michael (David Duzenski) joins him for a drink and amazingly determines to go home with him.

    There is most clearly a problem of logic here, in many respects, from just a script continuity confusion that can’t explain why Mike has arrived at the bar without a car but now has a car to drive his pick-up home.

     And even he can’t explain, after asking what the golden-haired Michael does for living—he’s a mason—why he replies that he is on a spiritual mission. It is precisely that crazy statement that attracts the angry young Michael to him.

     As we soon discover Michael is so angry that he has determined to kill someone that very night, and Mike appeared to be that perfect “someone.” Apparently his discovery that he was queer and his heavy drug abuse sought as a palliative to his feelings, has lost him his wife and child, no visitations even allowed by her parents with whom they now live who have attained a restraining order against him.

     He now lives on the street, furious at himself and his fate, and finding now answer to his situation. Perhaps life in prison would be better—those being my observations, not his.

     Strangely, Mike still keeps him near, answering in an almost amazed but also prophetic manner, assuring him that they were intended by fate or whatever it is to have met up.

     “Spiritual. Yes. I don’t even know how or why I said it. It was like, I didn’t say, but the words came out of my mouth anyway. Because you needed to hear them. I don’t know. Neither Michael. Me Either. Before you go, can I please just hold you for a while? No sex, no games.”  And, in fact, the two do hold one another, Michael breaking down into tears, as finally they lay out on the couch together just in deep sensual communication.

      Mike drives Michael to his destination, wherever that might be since he has suggested he no longer has a home, and the two kiss and hug, Mike offering him money, Michael at first refusing, but finally being convinced to may help him to survive.

     Mike drives home, now in the early morning, to call his friend Dafna just to report that, indeed, he has finally “touched” somebody, having both saved someone’s life and shared the bodily contact with another human being just for the short while that he so desired.

     These men are the survivors at the edges of gay society who often get ignored and forgotten.

    

Los Angeles, April 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).