Jacques Molitor | En compagnie de la poussière (With the Dust) / 2008

a matter of life and death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Molitor and Xavier Seron (screenplay), Jacques Molitor (director) En compagnie de la poussière (With the Dust) / 2008 [19 minutes]

 

Luxembourg filmmaker Jacques Molitor’s With the Dust is another of the early 21st century short masterworks, a highly complex film that involves issues of youth, aging, love, sexuality, and even possibly murder.

     Molitor’s work borders, in fact, on the horror genre, and this gay love film often moves in that direction. Good friends Michel (Thomas Coumans) and François (Guillaume Dumont) have a kind child-like interaction in which it’s clear that François is love with his friend. But obviously they have been friends for so long that it’s not truly evident that Michel even comprehends the full extent of their relationship.

     During the days, they basically play, stealing kitsch lawn ornaments and hanging out at their ramshackle cabin in a swimming hole. It is almost an idyllic world in which, even if he doesn’t quite cross the sexual lines, François can come close to playing out a fantasy relationship and pretend to have a sexual life with Michel.

     That is until one day two young women show up at the pond, particularly Alice (Anne-Catherine Reigniers) who almost challenges Michel to come close to her, swimming off only at the very last moment. Alice and Michel meet again the next evening at an art opening where François either has a self-portrait or someone else has painted him, his thin torso being exposed, along with his balls, almost as a painterly joke. While Michel is a conventionally beautiful blond, François has what you might describe as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty.

      Expecting his friend to go home with him, Michel hangs on at the part a little longer to talk with Alice, severely disappointing François, who leaves in a slight huff.

     During the late nights or early mornings, Michel works as an assistant to Benoit (Jean-Jacques Rausin), who loves to eat chips and play loud music under his earphones as the two shave and drain the liquids from the dead bodies left them. It is a rather gruesome activity with Benoit hinting at some necrophiliac interests, although we never actually witness these.

      After working Michel takes a dip in a local pool, an old man sitting each morning on the edge to watch him a bit a ghoul.

      The next evening, François again hopes Michel will show up to an event they have been evidently handing out fliers for; but once more Michel spends his free hours before work with Alice.

      And we watch the cycle repeat, Michel at work among the corpses before his morning swim. But this time when he arrives back at their cabin, Michel is crestfallen, hurt evidently by Alice breaking off their friendship. François takes his friend’s head to his breast to comfort him, but the gesture quickly turns to kissing which Michel not only does not reject, but after a brief let up returns for several moments before the feel of his friend’s hand moving below his belt frightens him, as he pushes his away and jumps up, leaving François panting for more.

 

  That evening, everything seems different in the morgue. Benoit gets a phone call and asks François to finish up.

       Meanwhile, we see François meet up with Alice in the Pond, at first simply roughhousing with her, pushing her head under before she pops back up to the surface to do the same to him.

     The camera juxtaposes this swimming event and Michel at the morgue, as he now somewhat shockingly leans over an older man he is about to place in a preserving tank and kisses him gently on the lips for a few long seconds.

       François’ pushes of Alice are becoming a little more serious, she finding it more and more difficult to escape his embrace. To further encourage her or, perhaps, just out of interest, he begins to kiss her, continuing the maneuver under water in what may be either be fully engaged kissing or an attempt to hold her under long enough so that she might run out of breath.

      Michel is now at the pool, also inexplicably sitting at the bottom at the deep end, as if contemplating something. When he rises again and swims off, he looks over at the old ghoulish man and, almost as if challenging him, asks “What?”

      Clearly both boys, François and Michel, have made some new perceptions and decisions of which they only hint without making their intentions entirely clear. But Michel might be imagined to have perceived that his refusal to share in the love of his best friend is ridiculous given the briefness of life itself with which he is daily faced. Does he perhaps love François more than he imagined.

       Frightfully, one could imagine that François has determined to rid himself once and for all of any female competitor, to take put her quite literally out of the way so that he alone might be able to return to those momentarily passionate kisses with Michel.

       Whether or not Michel will return to François for more life-giving kisses or Michel might one day soon find Alice upon his morgue table is left to the viewer’s imagination.

 

Los Angeles, June 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

Larisa Shepitko | Крылья (Kryl'ya) (Wings) / 1966

flying off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valentin Yezhov and Natalya Ryazantseva (screenplay), Larisa Shepitko (director) Крылья (Kryl'ya) (Wings) / 1966

 

World War II Soviet fight pilot Nadezhda (“Nadia”) Petrukhina (Maya Bulgakova), now 41, heads a frustrating life in the post-war Soviet bureaucracy. Although she is awarded for her job as at a principal at a trade school. Some of her students do not appreciate her leadership, and one in particular claims he detests her. Few of the and even her own adopted daughter comprehend the sacrifices that she and others of her war generation have made for the county and see as still necessary.

     If Nadia is well-known as a wartime hero, many nonetheless mock her continued commitment to Soviet society, her involvement on numerous committees, and her other cultural activities. Her daughter Tanya, recently married, did not even bother to consult with her mother before the wedding, and Nadia only meets the groom long after the ceremony. She does not approve.

     Ukrainian-born director Larisa Shepitka gradually reveals Nadia’s pain of being trapped in the stultifying system—as critic Adam Bingham has noted—by both looking at her character and her actions and by following her gaze and witnessing her inner thoughts, spectacularly conveyed from time to time throughout the film by her memories of flying, diving, and rolling through the skies. If she has previously made great sacrifices, her life was at least exciting and meaningful, whereas her current dedication is not only unappreciated but merely reiterates the drab world of the Soviet 1960s.

     Although this movie does not openly suggest that Nadia may now be lesbian, it certainly hints at it in the vision of her short, cropped hair and her standard attire of a striped suit and coat, making her look rather mannish. And at one particular occasion as she pours out her soul to a local female bartender, over a beer, after she has been refused in a restaurant without a male companion, makes clear Nadia’s comfort with those of her own gender. As the two commiserate, she reveals that she used to sing. As Brian Eggart in Deep Focus observes, “…the two women, lost in the moment, begin to dance as Nadia unleashes her voice. It’s a rare scene of bliss. All at once, she realizes that a group of male onlookers has gathered outside, and the two women halt their brief escape.”

     These women live in a patriarchal world that is most certainly not comfortable with two women fully expressing themselves particularly in what might be perceived as a lesbian manner.

      The student who most detests her is also visiting the bar.

     It is not that Nadia, moreover, has not had her days of heterosexual passion. Once in love with a fellow flier Mitya, she saw his plane about to crash and sweeping down toward attempted to awaken him without success. Actress Bulgakova shows us without the script having her say it, that her character is hurt by the contemporary world which seems to have lost the high ideals of her generation. While she was once the equal of the men with whom she fellow, in this new world she is not even permitted to enter a restaurant without a male at her side.

     What is quite amazing is how the young Shepitko, in her first feature film after graduation from Russia’s State Institute for cinematography, so wonderfully perceives the generational struggles and the disappointment of the course her countrymen and country have taken. Without specifically criticizing Soviet authoritarianism, Shepitko, time and again, makes it clear that things are falling apart and that its citizens have basically given up on their ideals. Nadia’s sexless friendship with a local museum director almost parallels he daughter’s Tanya’s seemingly loveless relationship with her new husband. And the hostility of her young student who is beaten by his father at home, symbolizes a generation that is tired of having to look up to the heroes of the past, which Nadezhda herself represents. It is not truly she who he detests, but all of those seemingly promised a world that never come.

    Every now and then, simply to retrace her life, Nadia returns to the local airfield, where the young pilots all greet her, recognizing her as a former flier. In Wing’s last scene she watches as a couple of small planes take to the air. Another small plane remains on the tarmac, and, when the men’s attention has been directed elsewhere, Nadia clumsily climbs into the pilot’s seat.

    When the workers see her, they jokingly applaud her, and, as they move the plane into the hanger, tell her they will take her on a flight. In fact, as she surely recognizes, they are gently mocking her since it is only a land-based voyage. But as the plane nears the hanger, the engine suddenly comes to life, and the plane turns back to runway and takes off, the other pilots and workers chasing after it. Nadia has found her wings again.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 17, 2026).

 

 

Anthony Aguiar | Cypress / 2013

the camera often sees what the eye cannot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Aguiar (screenwriter and director) Cypress / 2013 [8 minutes]

 

The logic of supernatural cinema usually argues that although ghosts might be visible to the human eye, they do not appear on camera. Clearly late 19th and early 20th photographers dealing with the spiritual didn’t get that message. But most filmmakers did, representing objects being lifted into mid-air, spectral hues looming in the distance, but seldom depicting ghostly images. American director Anthony Aguiar also doesn’t subscribe to that logic. In his film, an amateur photographer, using a Super 8mm camera discovers his ghost only in the viewfinder when the camera is whirling.

    Our cameraman (Kyle Glasow) of this almost silent film (we do hear ambient sounds including the camera accompanied by a lovely score by Red Bennett), visiting the views of Millard’s Peak in October 1979, decides to explore on camera the nearby stand of trees, what appears to be a birch forest. 

     Suddenly he spots a man standing in small clearing between the trees. Pulling the camera away, the vision disappears. He reappears when he returns to filming. He looks around him, as if searching for someone else to verify the strange occurrence. There is no one there.

      The vision smiles and gestures for him to follow. Almost like playing a game, the ghostly figure runs forward a bit before turning back to make sure the man and his camera are following.

      Although there is nothing outward sexual about the situation, the ghost is a cute man and his constant luring the other on, the looking back to make sure he’s following, etc. all have the appearance for any gay man who has met up with another in the woods of being a sexual invitation to what the other seems to know about a special “place” where they might engage in sex. Mostly vacant public parks were (and perhaps remain) a natural spot for gays to meet up in a world that had too few places for gathering, particularly rural males.

     But here, the chase ends at fallen tree, where the ghost turns back, looking sadly, moving directly toward to photographer and suddenly putting his hands up to his eyes representing great sadness or even tears.

     Quickly looking around, the photograph discovers a white flower nearby and picks it, handing it to our ghost whose face now produces a smile. The ghost takes it and smells it, a moment of seemingly impossible transition between the present and past, the living and the dead. The cameraman reaches out with a hand to touch the specter’s head and does so, proving as the flower appeared to that the other is not fully imaginary but a tangible being in space.

 

     But eventually, the boy turns back and walks straight over to the fallen tree and crosses under it, the camera apparently running out of film at the very moment or perhaps simply unable to continue for other inexplicable reasons.

     The photographer crosses under the tree as well to see the boy now dead, half buried in dirt. The living man turns away in horror. When he turns back to look again he sees the boy is still holding his white flower in his hand.

     Is this a vision of his own past, of a relationship wherein his partner has died? Or is this a vision of a future in which he has already killed by refusing to permit himself to fully follow his impulses which the ghost has able to engage him? Was this simply an accident where the ghost of the body appeared to him in order to help a stranger find it and put it to rest in a coffin? Perhaps it was the ghost seeking love that he could not find in his life, but now satisfied by the gift of the white flower, the flower itself in many cultures being associated with death and phantoms, is free to return to his body.

     The ending, obviously, is meant to be ambiguous. As the director has expressed in an interview with MarBelle on the internet site Director’s Notes: “The short’s ending was always supposed to be ambiguous – I’ve always felt that an ambiguous ending is really a gift from the director to the audience, in a way like saying ‘I trust in you to complete the story.”

     And, of course, there is no way of knowing whether or not this is truly a gay story. It allows the viewer to read the work in his or her own manner.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

    

Katy Dore | Odd Bird / 2019

the land of duck hunts and turkey shoots

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katy Dore (screenwriter and director) Odd Bird / 2019 / [9 minutes]

 

You have to love Katy Dore’s film Odd Bird if for nothing else but its totally unbelievable audacity.

     Clark (Michael Varde), a gay boy with a lover at home, has descended by into his conservative ranch family home to retrieve a childhood manuscript in which he artfully depicted himself as a comic book-like figure named “odd bird.” Based evidently on his current drawings, a major company is interested in possibly publishing it.

     The second reason, and perhaps even more important for the handsome young boy, is that he is determined to tell his tough country mother and her boyfriend, Gunner (Jacob Peacock) whose incessant slaps have tortured Clark through his youth, that he is gay.

      It seems like a very dangerous proposition, particularly when, even near to his mother’s ranch, he is stopped by local good-ole-boys and checked out even before he reaches the vicinity of his own former home.

      They let him pass, but his call back to his boyfriend is almost desperate. Can’t he just turn around now and head back home? His boyfriend (the voice of Brennan Murray) reminds him of the deadline of the possible comic book publishers.

      He knocks on the door, as both the seemingly rough Gunnar and his tooth-shy mother come out to greet him on the porch, have been warned that he had something important to share with them. As is the wont of movie-created gay boys admitting their sexuality, he stutters and stammers, but finally openly admits to his being gay. His mother, momentarily, is angry. She spits out her worry that she was afraid that he had cancer or had lost his university scholarship. But the anger quickly converts into laughter from both her and Gunnar as she reveals that she’s known her son was gay since he was three-years-old. As for that lipstick he put on his mouth as a child, it wasn’t even hers, and she sent packing was so that we would never again touch his son.

    Clark grabs the manuscript and rushes back to home, phoning his lover on the way to suggest he come for a visit, where they might experience a duck hunt or a turkey shoot.

      So Dore declares, everything is just fine in the good ole USA when it comes to nervous gay boys. They most certainly can go home again.

      I don’t believe her. And, despite my strong dislike of stereotypes, why would any sane gay boy want to pick up a gun, go into a “hide,” and shoot down a lovely duck? Or want even to join in a turkey shoot? This is a fantasy to make you believe that we’re all just a grand loving community, which in the days of Trump, particularly, can be described as just plain hoodwinking. Any place in which, while driving down a road I might stopped and challenged on my way home is not somewhere I would want to be. The “oddbird” will surely be accidently shot in the next Turkey roundup.

 

Los Angeles, May 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).