Monika Treut | My Father Is Coming (aka Out on a Limb) / 1991

the harsh world of self-discovery

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruce Benderson and Monika Treut (screenplay), Monika Treut (director) My Father Is Coming (aka Out on a Limb) / 1991

 

The plot of this fetching gay/lesbian fantasy has been played out dozens of times in LGBTQ+ films. A son or daughter has moved away to the city—in this case a female German immigrant to New York City—and suddenly, without notification, the conservative father, mother, uncle, aunt or other family member shows up on the doorstep, requiring the offspring to suddenly reconfigure their living conditions and pretend a marriage or some other relationship in order to maintain family peace.

    In this case, Vicky (Shelley Kästner), a young German-born woman working as a waitress with dreams of acting, finds her entire world about ready to disintegrate when her German father Hans (Alred Adel) shows up at her door, intrigued by her own reports of his daughter’s success in theater and her marriage, smuggling sausage he has brought from home. She quickly demands her gay roommate Ben (David Bronstein) play her husband, who himself is eager to move out with his Latin boyfriend Tito (Israel Marti). Meanwhile, Vicky herself is unsure of her sexual identity, particularly given her experiences in the new world in which she has encountered so many different sexual beings; all which provides a great deal of farcical hiding until the almost clueless father himself gets involved with the St. Mark’s crowd that demonstrates he may not be as uptight and sexually conservative as his daughter presumes.

    The film begins, as do so many of works in the genre, with the father already at the airport calling to announce he will be there soon, while in this case Vicky is working at the restaurant, even late for that job because of an audition to play a demanding German tourist whom the director characterizes as a kind of Nazi, not at all the role for our discombobulated and charming immigrant.

    Hans, as one might expect, is rather shocked by the neighborhood of closed up and boarded buildings to where the taxi driver and delivered him up depositing him somewhat like his luggage on the side of the street along with plastic-wrapped garbage.

     Vicky’s Hungarian friend Christa (Dominique Gaspar) meets him on the stairs of her apartment, and immediately whisks Hans off to her sister’s apartment to refrigerate the Bavarian sausage he has brought along for his daughter, explaining to the now more-than-curious Hans that Vicky is at work.

     “Doing a matinee?” he inquires, Christa pausing a second, before responding, “Something like that.”

     Before we know it Hans is enjoying his sausages with Christa and her sister, proclaiming that his sausages are probably nothing like anything they have previously tasted, but quickly receives his first lesson in New York charm from the sister: “This is New York. You can get anything in New York if you have enough money.”

      Returning home, Vicky finds her father’s message and immediately calls Ben, demanding that he come home as soon as possible and “look butch.”

      Meanwhile, when Hans asks if you can drink the water, Christa gets up, pours him a glass of tap water and serves it up to him, suggesting that perhaps his daughter will be getting a little worried about his not showing up to her place by now, merrily showing him on his way.

      When he does finally reach Vicky’s apartment, he cannot but comment that it looks far worse than he imagined. “What does your husband say?”

      The daughter can only plead that he not criticize her life.

      Hans has brought her a miracle of German technology, a small area vacuum. And immediately after Ben arrives, hugging his pretend wife and declaring “Hi Daddy” before they both simply break down in laughter from the whole ridiculousness of everything, including the old man’s appearance. Later, the father safely shuffled off to bed, Ben sits watching a gay male stripper on the TV, begging to go out since it’s Latin night at his local bar.

     Things get quickly more combobulated soon after as Hans, a “health nut” attempts to take his daughter swimming at Brighton Beach, and starved he attempts to take her to a lunch stand in the beach, demanding to know what “Kunisches” are in German to a German Jew purveyor. Vicky tries to lure him away before he truly gets into trouble, trying to explain to him that they won’t be served there.*

     In fact, throughout the entire movie, there is almost an oversensitivity to how the Germans are perceived in the US as still be Nazis and difficult and obnoxious people, perhaps experiences which Treut herself experienced, but which I never perceived in New York culture. And it is particularly disturbing given the almost full innocence and ignorance of the very Bavarian father, who rather flatfootedly moves through the city investigating all sorts of corners one might never have imagine, including, during a moment when he accompanies his daughter trying out for a New Age Erotic film, when he encounters the performer Annie Sprinkle, almost accidentally getting himself involved with Annie and the commercial for which Vicky isn’t chosen for a female role.

     The scene in which he accidently encounters Annie in the female bathroom where he escapes in an attempt to clear off a liquid Coca-Cola bottle exploding upon his pants, is truly hilarious, where the almost completely mindless Annie is appreciate that men and women can come together in shared bathrooms, showing him that his rubbing of the spot near his penis is better to be blotted up, as she stoops down, full breasts in his face, to accomplish the act.

      Vicky meanwhile discovers a truly hunky and attractive man attached to Annie who in a truly narcissistic manner keeps looking at himself in the visor, explaining that if he doesn’t keep look he will forget who he is. Yet he finds comfort with Vicky, and begs to come see her at the restaurant.

     From there it gets even more ridiculous as Hans explores sex shops, gender-bending events, discovering through Annie what transsexuals are, and even visits a local fakir, while Vicky tries a singing career that Christa’s sister describes as pure passion, “even without a voice.”

     And before long Ben is teaching Hans how to properly moisturize his face: “Don’t pull so hard, you lose elasticity.” After all, “daddy” has a hot date with the most beautiful girl in New York, Annie.

     Meanwhile, the beautiful new man Vicky has met, Joe (Michael Masses) meets up with her for a short luncheon visit, trying to explain to her that her body is there simply for what she wants it to do. But soon after we discover that Joe, previously Joan, is also transexual, of which Vicky is not aware.

     Soon after we see Vicky and Joe passionately making out in a car.

     A few frames later Vicky is attending a lesbian bar with her cooking partner from the restaurant, Lisa (Mary Lou Grailau), who has been steadfastly a support through all this difficult time and the surrounding turmoil. Ben is there with Tito as well. But this scene is dominated by the remarkable drag singer Mario de Colombia.

    It is now Vicky’s turn to sing, obviously unable to even begin to match the previous performer. Fortunately, she performs it as a sprechstimme performance, a spoken song instead of sung. She now works as an actress instead of someone auditioning, singing almost directly to her friend Lisa, ending “I guess I’m ready to love you now.”

    Hans comes home from his obviously successful date with Annie to find no edible food in the house, but also his daughter in bed with Lisa. He picks up his coat and walks out. He leaves and she simply returns to her lovemaking.

     When she explains the event to her local Hungarian friends, afraid that she even might lose her job for her chronic lateness, they suggest they can also use her on their sexual phone line, which has become terribly successful.

      Hans meanwhile is off to the sex shops and the (I feel quite necessary) encounter with the fakir. Vicky, meanwhile, meets up again with Joe, who wonders, now that she knows his transsexual, whether she still likes him. She admits, “even more,” while walking away but suggesting he call her. Commentator Jason Drews on Letterboxd hoped that the love triangle between Vicky, Joe, and Lisa might even continue; but we know it probably will not. Vicky has come out even to herself as lesbian. If nothing else, radically changed in every manner from the first scenes of this open-minded, totally accepting film.

      Vicky, finally visiting the bar Eileen’s just to get plastered after all that his happened, meets up with her wandering father. He begins the conversation: “I finally thought about it. What it was like between two women.” He goes no further, he simply accepts her for who she is, no explanation needed. She explains that Ben and she are not married, and he responds that he never imagined they were.

       Startlingly, a woman turns toward Vicky, asking if she is indeed the “diva from the club?” Her father now recognizes her as a local celebrity. He pulls out an envelope with a great deal of cash and hands it to his daughter as a gift, declaring it was from his agency, but nonetheless, after reading the contract realized that they had ripped him off. She smiles, even giggles, knowing that is, after all, the American way. And simultaneously realizes how innocent and truly open-minded her own father is. Together, they toast to America!

      In the last scene, Hans is on his way back to Germany, telling Annie again that she is the best person he has ever met, and worrying over his daughter. But everything has changed, not only their personal relationship, but their perceptions of the possible expressions of their own beings and sexualities, something that would never have been possible without this farcical get together in the impossible, confusing, dangerous, destructive, accepting, and inclusive USA of the 1990s. Might we ever again find a time so crazy in its contrary permissible realities? I doubt it. The hardball of the new century never permitted quite so many personal contradictions, doubts, and possibilities of other realities.

     Jenni Olson, writing in her The Ultimate Guide to Lesbian and Gay Film and Video observes: “In some ways My Father Is Coming is a tale of cultures clashing and the immigrant experience, but in many others it is about sex and the body. For both Vicky and her father, New York becomes an escape from the intellectual traditions of the fatherland into a world where appetites and sensory experiences take precedence.”

     Yet today, we might argue, Berlin is the place, much as in Wiemar Republic, where one might escape the narrowness of vision present in the USA.

 

*I have to admit that perhaps most of us are simply unaware to the residual prejudice that still exists throughout the US for both German speaking individuals, and German-accented Jews. I was amazed when my editor just a few years later than this film, Perla Karney—who as a young girl after the war had lived in the camps which Americans erected to project German-Jews from continued prejudice in Germany—who on a trip to New Orleans, was treated quite dismissively in the major hotel where we had made a reservation and in the local shops, something I would never before might even have imagined. I saw it immediately. They would talk to me while totally dismissing anything Perla might ask or suggest. I was outraged by the end of our stay; and New Orleans in those days, where also the wife of one of my sales representatives was brutally pummeled by a random passer-by on the streets, shocked me. On my previous trip to New Orleans nothing of that sort happened.

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

Wenona Byrne | Saturn's Return / 2001 [TV film]

putting the past to rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christos Tsiolkas (screenplay), Wenona Byrne (director) Saturn's Return / 2001 [26 minutes] [TV film]

 

Lovers Barney (Joel Edgerton) and Dimi (Damian Walshe-Howling) are on a voyage of return, making their way from Melbourne to Sydney, an 11-hour car trip that takes them three days. On the way Dimi stops to visit the old border migrant camp at Bonegilla built near Victoria for the post-World War II immigration boom.

      It’s estimated that 1.5 million Australians are descended from migrants who spent time in that camp, which saw riots in 1952 and 1961 for the lack of better jobs and working conditions, mostly staged by Italian and German migrants. Dimi’s father evidently as spent his early years there.

      Their goal is Barney’s home town of Sydney where he plans to visit his dying father, a legend of sorts who as an aged hippie who traveled in better years to Nepal and India. At least Barney’s father’s stories are of good memories, Dimi observes, hinting that his own father’s memories of Bonegilla were not at all pleasant. Barney’s father has begged his son to return for his final days.

       As they stop in a caravan rental spot for the night, they engage in joyful sex which they boisterously photograph.

       Barney’s father Dan (Harold Hopkins) is not in good condition: “Lungs are fucked. My kidneys are about to cave in. I’ve got a discharge coming out of my arse. My ears. My dick. I’m scratchin’ all over. And I can’t shake this cough. But apart from that, I’m doin’ all right.” The old man comments on Dimitri’s great eyes. And “Great butt too. Tight.”

        Dan’s plans appear to entail an assisted suicide. And he wants Barney there to be by his side. All of which somewhat shocks Dimi who admits he had “no idea that fathers could ask such things of their sons.”

        As Barney suggests that he gets someone to move in with him, Dan ignores his comments, telling him that he wants his son to become the executor, although it doesn’t entail much. Barney suggests that even he and Dimi will stay on with him. But Dan continues to ignore their suggestions. The boys take up smoking again, discussing their options into the night.

        In the morning, Barney shaves his father, revealing a handsome man under the white whiskers. But there is no comment from Dan.

       Dimi relates the history. That Barney was 13 when Dan first got into LSD, providing the boy with a truly “fantastic” birthday. The boys also visit Sheila (Tina Bursill), Barney’s estranged mother. The only thing she wants, she claims, is a grandchild. She suggests he find a nice female surrogate, but Dimi hints that perhaps he wouldn’t want to be the father. And Barney argues that they’d have find a woman who put up with Sheila as a mother-in-law. Dimitri argues that the last he’d need is more family. But Sheila totally loses it as the boys share a kiss, quickly revealing her utter homophobia.

       A true argument about the past ensues, Barney recalling that all he remembers is waking up late for school with syringes all over the place. Of going across the road to borrow money from evangelists to pay the family bills. At one point she even brings in Dimi’s Greek family, he interrupting that she doesn’t know his mother. The wounds of Barney’s family life are beginning to be revealed, and the reasons he lives near Dimi’s family in Melbourne becomes increasing apparent. Even his own seemingly more conservative views begin to make sense as we see the wounds left by their hippie life-styles that didn’t exactly embrace the full of family life, the way Dimi’s Greek family continue to.

       And we now begin to comprehend what the “return” of the Saturn, the planet that takes 29 years to revolve around the sun truly means in the context of Barney’s return to Sydney and his family. She reminds that she has spent years apologizing for what she didn’t do as a mother, arguing that he should let his father do what he wants, namely is decision to kill himself.

       Without soap-opera antics, this intense film suddenly has laid an entire family history before us, revealing the scars it has left behind, made even more fascinating that our view is through the eyes of Dimitri (in the form of screenwriter Christos Tsiolkas), the outsider to the events laid forth, a man clearly overwhelmed by his own familial difficulties.

        Dimitri’s father, we now learn, was in Bonegilla shacks in 1967, Dan, who’s been watching their tapes of it, commenting that he’s never even heard of it: the common statement of so many individuals of every country who no nothing about the difficult times of those trying to enter their culture and become part of it, while also hinting at the true obliviousness to those of the counterculture of the 1960s who professed love without comprehending what it truly involved on a social and even political level, including being openly gay. He obviously also watched their caravan sexual events. “But I didn’t find it much of a turn on.”

        The tension between the two young men is beginning to be felt. The two worlds they represent has collided in ways they can’t even explain. Dimi can’t even get Barney to take him out for his birthday celebration on a night on the town. Angry, he storms out, making a call home, reporting simply that he visited Bonegilla. There is nothing else to share except that Barney’s father is truly ill. But he call is clearly a symbolic plea for his own return to familial normalcy.

       Suddenly Dan is freezing. When Barney asks Dimi to get him a blanket, he claims to know no one name Dimitri. Evidently they had planned a dinner with Sheila for that evening, and Barney is now ready to call it off. But Dan insists that it not be cancelled, a dinner he had demanded as obviously a kind of last supper. 

       At a restaurant, replete with an Egyptian belly dancer, Dan both drinks and smokes, neither of which he is now permitted to do. Dmitri toasts him as a champion, while his son and ex-wife demur. Dan asks Sheila if she’s ever heard of Bonegilla, to which she also replies in the negative. “The kids made a video of it. I don’t think it’s your kind of movie, love.”

        Back at home Dan puts on some of his 1960s music and lists his favorite albums of the period. He has some good taste, naming the Beatles’ The White Album and everything by Otis Redding.  When he begins a coughing jag, Barney reaches for his pills, but Dan insists he won’t need that. Sheila puts down her wine glass, unfolds a small cloth she has brought and asks Barney to get her a spoon. In the package is a syringe and packages of heroin.

      Dani rises, and Dan goes over to hug him goodbye. Dan, Barney, and Sheila enter into a small, curtained room on the side.

       Rewatching the film he has made in Bonegilla, for the first time we see that Dani has sprayed one the white empty, decaying buildings with red paint, spelling out the words: Eleni + Demit 1967, presumably the names of his parents.

       Meanwhile, Barney leaves the small room, the overdose having been successful, returning to the living room and hugging his lover close to him. Both have resolved their familial pasts to the best of their abilities, having laid rest, in a literal and largely metaphorical sense, to the dilemmas these younger people have suffered through their parents from the previous century of so very much hate, destruction, sorrow, bitterness, emptiness, self-centeredness, and general absurdity.

       Over the years, I have proposed that some of the best short, independent films were made in the first decade of the 21st century, at a time when the issues of the later 20th century were colliding with the concerns of the new century before they became overwhelmed in the terrible realities of international politics, disease, and general rightest Trumpism. Australian director Wenona Byrne’s Saturn’s Return is certainly one of these memorable films.

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Tim Burton | Ed Wood / 1994

artful deceivers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (screenplay, based on material in Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey), Tim Burton (director) Ed Wood / 1994

 

Ed Wood, like most of Burton's figures is a true outsider, a born loser without the ability to capably write, to create narrative, or direct either theater or film, as well as being apparently unable to artfully think—although he clearly loves the films, or at least the image of Orson Welles. In a sense Wood is the apotheosis of Burton's outsiders, less skillful than Edward Scissorhands, without the burning revenge of Sweeney Todd, nor the ghostly cleverness of Beetlejuice's Maitlands, he is a product of and believer in the American Dream, and, accordingly, is so removed from reality that he perceives himself as a true winner. Wood is an American optimist in a long line of such figures dating back at least to Poe and Melville—a confidence man who swallows his own story.

     In fact, Ed Wood is so pathetic in his lack of vision that he is absolutely crazy, the way all great poets, as William Carlos Williams insists, "must go crazy." And in that fact he is as loveable and endearing as any American hero. Johnny Depp, who could probably charm the Devil himself—and perhaps already has—is a perfect actor for Wood, confidently smiling his way through all adversities (even without his dentures) as if he had been immersed in Dale Carnegie theology. His pathology, in fact, represents a kind of religiosity; he is utterly unable to see anything but the bright side of life. Facing a negative review of his first directorial effort of a play he has written, Wood observes:

 

                   Look, he got some nice things to say here. "The soldiers' costumes were

                   very realistic." That's positive!

                  

To which his gay, cynical friend, Bunny Breckinridge (excellently realized by Bill Murray), replies: "Rave of the century."

     Later, when told by a producer that his film was the worst he has ever seen, Wood comes back: "Well, my next one will be better."

     Such utter faith may be a kind of madness, but it, nonetheless, draws people to him, even though every last one of his friends are unusual and perverse. Evidently Dolores Fuller—who died this year in May—was, as she described herself, quite conventional. In reality, she evidently loved Wood, helping him immensely in his career, but was uncomfortable with his transvestism and was determined to have a successful career herself. She did just that, writing several songs for Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, and others. Burton correctly perceived, however, that the character in the film had to be a kind of foil for all the other strange figures with whom Wood surrounds himself, turning Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) into a kind of revengeful, shrewish scold who, herself, was a failure.

     Given Wood's friends one wouldn't blame anyone for reacting as does the film's version of Fuller. Wood, a heterosexual transvestite, clearly surrounded himself by gay and transvestite figures such as Bunny Breckinridge, whose great desire throughout the movie is to have a sex operation—"Goodbye Penis!" His attempts are hilariously unsuccessful.

     Wood's attraction to actor Bella Lugosi—particularly at a time in Lugosi's life when, seen as a has-been, and when he was addicted to morphine—is nearly inevitable, as the chance meeting quickly turns into an affable friendship, Lugosi (skillfully performed by Martin Landau) finally finds someone who will pass no judgment upon him and give him his last feeble opportunities to act.

     There is something fateful, moreover, about Wood's strange entourage including the absurdly inaccurate psychic Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), the Swedish professional wrestler Tor Johnson, Maili Nurmi (Vampira), and Conrad Brooks, who played in Wood's early movies and almost every really bad B movie after. Wood's inversion of the outsider, his perception that the unusual was a kind of normality, the one gift that would help him in his artistry, clearly served as a magnet to the strangest of beings. The idea, moreover, that Wood could convince a pragmatic huckster such as Georgie Weiss and churches of the Southern Baptist Convention to support his outrageous projects is testimony to his dynamic personality. In real life he cannot have been that far apart from someone like Depp in his convincing performance.

     That the films he directed—spliced together with stock footage, bad sets, bad acting, and near-illiterate scripts, may have been some the worst films ever made—were conceived, out of such a passionate desire for filmmaking, that, in the end, they are somewhat redeemed, artful creations even in their own clumsy artlessness. That is, I suggest, Burton's major theme here, as in most of his films portraying losers such as Wood, the physically challenged such as Edward Scissorhands, and even the dead as artful deceivers.

     In this instance, Burton has accomplished his goal less with fantastical images than with a kind of realist euphoria, transforming the black and white world that serves as a backdrop usually for dramatic or even tragic events into a kind of comic ecstasy. Even Howard Shore's score, with its references to Wood's original films, gets into the spirit of things, zithering up Theremin chords that tickle the eardrums.

     In the end, one wishes that the world was more like what Wood wants it to be. After just having suffered a terrible premiere of his failed movie, Wood asks his current girlfriend, Kathy O'Hara to get married:

 

                          Edward D. Wood, Jr.: Right now. Let's go to Vegas.

                          Kathy O'Hara: But, Eddie. It's pouring rain and the car top

                                   is stuck.

                          Edward D. Wood, Jr.: Phooey. It's only a five-hour drive and it'll

                          probably stop by the time we get to the desert. Heck, it'll

                          probably stop by the time we get around the corner. Let's go.

 

How can you not go along with him? Edward D. Wood, Jr. is a solid lunatic, just what the world most needs.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2011 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2011).