Anthony Schatteman | Petit ami / 2017

two faces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Schatteman (screenwriter and director) Petit ami / 2017 [14 minutes]

 

Vincent (Thomas Ryckewaert), a handsome man in his late 30s or early 40s has rented the poolroom of the Petit ami gay hotel for the 3-day Christmas weekend where Jasper (Ezra Fieremans), a 20-some year-old who looks more like a teenager meets up with him in Belgian director Anthony Schatteman’s 2017 short film Petit ami.

     It is clear that Jasper is an experienced pleasure boy who when the two encounter each other Vincent immediately fucks standing like an animal in rut; the two hit it off, the younger offering the other the lovemaking and, at moments, the enjoyment he appears to be desperate for, Schatteman and cinematographer Ruben Appeltans’ camera lushly capturing their erotic activities which are the focus of this film. Champagne, pizza, and sex in bed, pool, and everywhere else, in fact, seem to resolve the problems faced by Jasper’s obviously desperate Christmas weekend customer. But even the boy who whips up a good time in a mean holiday cannot help but feel some sympathy for a man who, he gradually discovers, has left his wife and two daughters for the comfort of an almost teenage kid.

     The promotional entries for this film all seem to suggest that Jasper discovers the “secret” that Vincent is hiding; but even the laziest of sleuths would have been able to quickly deduce that Vincent has missed this family celebration because of his sexual ambiguity or, at the very least, he is replacing the obviously failed marital relationship with the substitute that may lie at the crux of his familial problems.

      And Vincent's overhead telephone conversations along with Jasper's reading of the beginning of a letter addressed to the man’s wife do not, thankfully, fully explain the reason for his john’s 3-day reservation nor his sudden decision to cut it off now that he has resolved some of his emotional turmoil.

      The depth of this superficially beautiful film lies in how much each viewer is willing to plumb the possible explanations for Vincent’s Christmas fireside absence. Has his wife suddenly discovered his sexual desires and sent him packing? Has he himself, having obviously lived in a kind of closeted marital hell, finally determined to leave those he clearly loves behind? Has he broken up with his wife for other reasons and is merely using this despairing weekend as an opportunity to explore alternative forms of lovemaking or seeking out what he has often done of business trips and covered up through the years?

     Any of these time-worn and predictable narrative solutions, which at least engage our minds, would explain Vincent’s almost brutal introductory rape of Jasper upon their meeting, and his gradual softening as the experienced prostitute applies his sexual balms. What is perhaps somewhat more interesting is how Jasper’s own inner feelings are altered despite his outward charming engagement of his customer. And it is apparent that by the time Vincent is willing to send him packing that he is not sure that he truly is ready to leave, that he has developed a kind of sympathy and perhaps even a bit of love for his customer not permitted in his profession.

       Schatteman’s long focus on Jasper as he leaves in the early daylight a day earlier than scheduled is fascinating when compared with the boy’s nighttime arrival two days previous.

       In the earlier night shot he seems to be wistfully looking off into space, his lips expressing no obvious emotion, the creases around his mouth, although almost straight, are very slightly raised as in a would-be smile. He is, in full, enigmatic, a boy without seeming empathy or even emotional depth, ready to move forward, we soon discover as he enters the hotel where he meets up with his customers, to do whatever is required of him without question or judgment. In a sense he truly does look here like a teenage boy, a bit wide-eyed and open to the world if, we can well imagine, worn out by what he has already at his young age witnessed and experienced.

     The second image shows the man, dressed just as he was two nights earlier, but his eyes glancing away to the left, which transforms his whole face, including the equivocal position of his lips, into what appears as, even if it actually is not a slight frown. Whereas in the first frame his face is represented as a near circle, in the second daylight photo we observe a more ovalene head, which hints at an elongated, less open expression. If nothing else, the second boy is less eager, less sure of his actions, or even of the meaning of those actions. There is a slightly circumspect look, in general about what the camera catches in Jasper’s countenance by the end of the film.    

    He is still an enigmatic figure and we realize that whatever we may be reading in his face represents only a second in time, not necessarily a dramatic or permanent change of being. But there it is nonetheless facing us, the boy who might pass for a teenager and the twentyish youth who has just spent two nights picking up the spirits of a dejected man who it is apparent, as he writes in the short, never-sent note to his wife, was “not able to live up to whom he should [italics mine] be.”

    Has the boy helped him to transition into what clearly will be a new life? The film does even attempt to explore that. But any empathetic viewer might hope that Vincent can gradually convert the “should” into a someone who “would” or “will” be, or at the very least an acceptance of what that being “is,” gradually converting a failed past into a present that can imagine a more successful future.

     In this instance, it appears—at least superficially—as if the young prostitute might have helped point his brief encounter in that direction.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2021).

 

 

Micah Stuart | Johnny / 2016

his first kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brandon Lloyd [as Brandon Crowder] (screenplay), Micah Stuart (director) Johnny / 2016 [19 minutes]

 

Sam (Tony Abatemarco) is an older man who, for first time in his life, picks up a male prostitute, Johnny (Brandon Loyd), a handsome young man nearly beyond his prime as a hustler. But he is perfect for Sam, who after he signs in at the motel desk and checks out the bed springs and pillows, all the time carefully watching his young man get undressed, momentarily stops him—as Johnny moves toward him, grabs his necktie, and pulls Sam toward him for a kiss—“It’s my first time.”

     Johnny gently kisses the man and kisses him again more passionately, pulling briefly away. “Now it isn’t.” As Johnny undresses Sam you can see and almost feel the waves of pleasure pour over his body as he finally gives into a passion that he has clearly been resisting throughout his life. When Johnny bends over Sam’s naked body, you can almost see the older man shake with joy, waiting as if hypnotized by the sheer sensuality that he has been resisting for decades. To call Sam closeted would be to suggest he’s been living a gay life under cover; Sam, however, has been dead and now is suddenly awakening sexually to something he has attempted to deny since his birth.

     In a moment, Sam switches places, topping Johnny and enjoying what almost appears to be the most pleasurable orgasm of his life as he rests his hand on the young man’s neck with a slightly brutal release of years of pent-up emotion. When it’s spent, Sam stammers out the words, “Thank you” with so much feeling of gratitude that you realize just how meaningful this “first kiss” has truly been for him.

     The moment over, Johnny stands, goes the sink, quickly rubs his cock and ass clean with a towel and swigs down water to clear out his mouth. Unexpectedly, perhaps because of Sam’s quite exceptional behavior, Johnny comes back to the bed, briefly tousling with him and laying for a few moments next to his elderly client as Sam strokes the boy’s face.

     Suddenly, Johnny tells of a nearly forgotten incident when as a child, playing with his best friend David he suddenly asks Sam if he’s been in a fight? From Sam’s nod, we gather than he has. But Johnny says he has only been one fight—who he suddenly begins inexplicably to choke, his hands held around his neck. Despite the desperate scratches inflicted to his hands and arms and even, so he recalls, a slug just below his eye, he couldn’t let up. He, who was apparently seen as a weak boy, never felt to powerful, so in control. His whole body shivered with heat.

      Finally, he passed out, later coming to.

      “What happened?” asks Sam.

      “Nothing,” his mother came to pick him up. But things between them were never quite the same. A short while later, David was killed. Attending another school, he was beaten up by older kids and “things done to him,” apparently in attack, it would seem, because David was perceived as being queer. It was just before Christmas, Johnny recalls.

      Sometime after Johnny begin to no longer care about things around him. At 13, almost 13 qualifies, he left home, never to return.

      When Sam later suggests his parents must have suffered over his absence, Johnny insists that he never heard from them again, that they evidently made no effort to seek him out.

       Sam is honored to have had Johnny share his nearly forgotten story, and suggests, as Johnny prepares to leave that he might spend the night. The hustler scoffs. Might he be interested in dinner? Where does he live? All ridiculous questions, Johnny implies, as he puts on his shirt and hurries off in the early twilight.

       Alone again, Sam takes out his billfold, opening it to a snapshot of what appear to be his wife and young son, about the age when Johnny must have left home. The image ties them together somewhat, as Sam breaks down in tears, apparently having left them some time ago, or they having left him if he revealed his hidden desires to his wife.

      Johnny, stopping for a final cigarette on the motel balcony, replays the scene with his childhood friend that we have previously witnessed in his mind. But this time everything is in reverse, the fallen globe uprighted, the hands removed from the neck, the broken stack of blocks reconstructed, and something missing from the first frames, his friend David, bending towards him as he attempts a kiss. This, we suddenly realize, was Johnny’s first kiss, his almost terrorized reaction, and the violence he has never since felt. His first kiss, unlike Sam’s first male kiss, was something that he was not yet ready to accept, and has regretted it ever since, perhaps making his behavior somewhat right by seeking out thousands of kisses just such as the one he has planted on Sam’s lips.

       I’m not suggesting that Johnny lives with a deeply hidden sense of guilt, but simply after that first “fight,” he has never needed to battle with his feelings of same sex desire ever again. He has grown to want and return that kiss and sought it out so endlessly in his daily life that he has nearly forgotten where the feeling first emanated. David has been there always as a kind of hidden elective affinity, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe might have put it, the lodestone of his life. And this night he has passed the first kiss on to another, even if he is only an old man who has almost let his life wither away before accepting it.

       I have now seen this movie 3 or 4 times, and I realized that the wonderful acting of Lloyd and, particularly, of Abatemarco has brought me back to it. The simple chordal composition of composer MadFlags adds resonance to this simple but emotionally effective movie.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2021).

 

Yoshitaro Nomura | ゼロの焦点 (Zero no shōten) (Zero Focus) / 1961

future meets past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shinobu Hashimoto and Yoji Yamada (screenplay, based on the novel by Seicho Matsumoto), Yoshitaro Nomura (director) ゼロの焦点 (Zero no shōten) (Zero Focus) / 1961

 

A newly wed woman, Teiko Uhara (Yoshiko Kuga), suddenly discovers that she does not truly know her husband, Kenichi (Koji Nambara), after he disappears on a short business trip only one week into their marriage. Yoshitaro Nomura’s Zero Focus begins slowly and politely, as the executives of the company for which Kenichi works, reach out to Teiko in an attempt to find out what happened to her husband.

     Traveling from Tokyo to the snowy north of Japan, Teiko attempts to uncover clues to where her husband is or what happened to him. Only a couple of suicides have been reported to local police, and neither of the dead men match the appearance of her husband. Was Kenichi even capable of suicide? A company spokesman refers Teiko to the home of Sachiko/Emmy (Hizuru Takachiho) and her wealthy husband, who had entertained Kenichi several times.

     Visiting them at their home, she recognizes the building as the same as picture on one of two postcards she has discovered in one of her husbands books before her travels. Yet this visit also ends in a dead end.

    Police suggest that Kenichi may have gone to a village, Noto, somewhat further north, and Teiko makes that arduous trip as well, even visiting a famous cliff nearby where many suicides have occurred in the past. There she recognizes a second house pictured on the postcards. Without further leads, however, she returns to Tokyo, leaving Kenichi’s brother Sotaro (Kō Nishimura) to further pursue clues.

     What Sotaro knows, and Teiko does not, is that Kenichi had been living 10 days of every month with a former prostitute, Hisako/Sally (Ineko Arima), who he first met when he worked as a vice cop during the Occupation. Sally was a woman with whom he had intended to break off all relations in order to take good care of Teiko. Sotaro also travels to Noto, but is killed there, having evidently been poisoned.

     Gradually the quiet and obedient Teiko comes into her own, a bit like Agatha Christie’s Mrs. Marple, without her eccentricities. With steely resolve she sets out to discover the truth about her husband’s disappearance and his brother’s death.

      Returning to Noto, she confronts Emmy about the missing and death people, positing a version of events quite close to the truth: arguing that Emmy, herself a former prostitute whom Kenichi recognized, killed Kenichi, pushing him off the cliff and then killing Sally, fearing that one of them might attempt to blackmail her and destroy her wealthy marriage. When Sotaro visited, she poisoned him as well.

     Emmy corrects the details, but in so doing, admits her guilt in front of her husband, and so Teiko brings the murders to justice.

      Nomura’s beautifully filmed black and white work, with its excellent musical score by Yasushi Akutagawa, is a quite but excellent noir mystery, and the fact that its detective is female makes it quite exceptional in 20th century Japanese cinema. If Teiko begins as a passive wife, she ends the tale as a kind of intelligent avenger. And the fact that the murderer is, herself, a strong woman determined not to have her past life revealed, makes Zero Focus a kind of early feminist work, wherein it is the males who are ultimately weak and powerless.

       I might add my observation that so many Japanese films portray women forced into prostitution in order to survive, that it has almost become a genre unto itself.

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).

 

 

Adam Ali and Sam Arbor | Baba / 2021

the underground

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Ali and Sam Arbor (screenwriters and directors) Baba / 2021 [18 minutes]

 

The young British Libyan director Adam Ali and Manchester-based Sam Arbor have created a short tense-drama in Baba about a small gathering of queer Libyans, forced out of their homes by irate and endangered parents, live truly underground in the tunnels under the city of Tripoli.

    As the film begins the central figure of this work, Britannia (performed by Ali), as snuck back up into the city to die his hair blond. He is planning a meeting with someone in the British embassy to hopefully obtain permission for immigrant status in England as an endangered being in his own homeland. And even though he knows there are several like him applying every day, he has great hopes for beginning a new life abroad, jokingly describing how he will find a beautiful British lover and live happily ever after in his new homeland.

     The only problem is, as his friends Nour (Elysia Kozinos), Fatima (Colette Dala Tchantcho), and Yo (Usiam Younnis) remind him, his passport remains in the family home from which he was violently ousted by Baba (Al Gadema), his father. Moreover, with his now blond hair, he will stand out even more than usual in the world above ground where they must return each day to find food and supplies to keep their secret lives functioning.

     But the high-spirited Britannia is determined to break into his own home later that night to reclaim his passport, and his friends insist that they will accompany him for his protection. Such an intrusion may not only result in his own death but in the shaming of his entire family, including his beloved mother.

     At least a couple of times in short flashbacks we see the looming figure of his Baba threatening Britannia as a young child and sending him into the streets, a terrifying and nightmarish vision that the young man calls up again and again.

     When the time comes, however, Britannia attempts to sneak out so as not to involve the others; but they quickly awaken and refuse to let him make the trip home alone. They are his family now and their love for one another is in strong evidence.

     He succeeds in sneaking into the house, but cannot find the passport, finally reaching his old room, where he witnesses a small shrine of pictures and a candle his parents have erected there. He finally discovers the passport, but at that moment his father and mother are awakened. Again, they loom up like specters, but instead threatening or challenging him, Baba holds his lost child close and kisses him.

     Britannia is so confused, he doesn’t quite know how to act, as the others remind him it is time to leave both for his own safety and his family’s.

     The next day, he takes a taxi to the British embassy, the cab driver telling him that he is the second young man he has driven to the embassy on that very morning. When they reach the stop, however, Britannia does not leave the cab, but momentarily remains in the back seat contemplating what to do.

     In the end he determines, despite the odds, to bravely remain in Libya, to help in what the directors describe as “a burgeoning underground queer culture sprouting from the rubble of the civil war” in an attempt to “fortify this rare stem of hope.”

      As James Reynolds notes in Buzz Culture: “The film ends with a plea, not to action but recognition – of hundreds of people in present-day Tripoli who must hide themselves for the sake of their families. This really hammers home the bravery of those who dare to live honestly in the face of an openly hostile society.”

     Obviously, this film is yet another cry for queer rights in a world in which so many countries are still so very cruel to the LGBTQ+ community. Yet this 2021 winner of the Iris Prize doesn’t read like a diatribe, but shows us the small joys and pleasures that the lost boys and girls of Libya and found in their small circles of brave queer friends.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).