Robert Bresson | Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent soufflé où il veut (A Man Escaped or: The Wind Blows Where It Likes) / 1956, USA 1957

if only my mother could see me now

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Bresson (screenwriter and director, based on the memoirs of André Devigny) Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent soufflé où il veut (A Man Escaped or: The Wind Blows Where It Likes) / 1956, USA 1957

 

If there was ever evidence that Bresson’s films are unlike anyone else’s, one need only watch his A Man Escaped. On the surface this is one of hundreds of a genre of prison escape movies and part of a smaller genre of “escape from the Nazis” films. Generally, these pictures center their interest not only in the methods of the escape but on the incredible adventures surrounding their heroes’ larger-than-life accomplishments, displaying loud scores and casts of dozens, while focusing on the startling exploits of those who achieve the impossible.

    Bresson’s black and white film certainly has some of these elements, but everything is played so absolutely straightforwardly that he almost (purposely) loses the elements of adventure; he uses music from Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor, and his central actors, instead of being known actors, are, as in most of Bresson’s works, unknowns, first-time actors chosen from the society around. In this case the protagonist, Lieutenant Fontaine, is played by a doe-eyed French student (François Leterrier). We know from the very first image of this film, wherein the director focuses—as he does in so many of his works—on a prisoner’s nervous hands as he is being taken away with other prisoners in a car. At each slowdown or possible street impediment, Fontaine’s left hand quietly reaches for the door handle (he has evidently been able to free himself from handcuffs), but after several reaches it appears he has lost his nerve—until the car nears a tram when the young Fontaine suddenly springs from the moving auto. A car following behind, quickly recaptures him and he is returned to the prisoner’s vehicle. Soon after, in retaliation, he is severely beaten, blood flowing from several facial wounds across his white shirt, an article of clothing he is forced to wear throughout the rest of the film, appearing as a kind Christ-like figure, flayed and whipped by his tormentors.

       Filmed in the original Fort Montluc prison in Lyon where Devigny, the real-life figure behind this film, was imprisoned, Bresson’s cinematic immersion in details is far more in evidence than any dramatic story-telling; but that very focus on Fontaine’s knocks against the walls, the heft of his lithe body to the high-ceilinged window, his intense attention to the cell door, and, later, the careful fashioning of metal and cloth ropes and hooks, in Bresson’s concentration on the utterly material manifestations, creates perhaps more tension and sense of adventure than were he to fully invoke, as in a film like Stalag 17, for example, the detailed stratagems of the actual escape. Here everything is done in secret even as we witness events, which blend in with the daily activities such as the morning ritual of bathing and emptying slop pails between whispers and slips of paper messages in and out of pockets. Despite the constantly prying eyes and the commands for silence of the Nazis, these men somehow manage to piece together information of each other’s plans and the conditions of their lives. Similarly, the audience must link up, at times, the smallest of gestures to be able to comprehend the actions of both the hero and others. Why are Terry and two other men permitted to walk alone in the open as they are in the early scenes? Why is the elderly man in the room next door so unresponsive? Why is Orsini so determined to achieve his early escape? Why are others so determined to stay where they are? Everything is inexplicable, and in a world where men are being murdered every day (an opening note tells us more than 7,000 were put to death in this prison) everyone is possibly a spy or, at least, someone determined to prevent the punishment all must endure if one of them were actually to “breach the wall.”

      Once Fontaine perceives that the cracks between the heavy wooden panels of his cell door are hitched together with a softer wood, we observe him, nearly endlessly, whittling away those connective pieces with the end of a spoon. But even then, we cannot begin to comprehend how he will, even if he might wander freely within the prison walls, escape. Orisini’s early attempt—which ends in his death—reveals moreover, that there are two walls to be scaled. And, in this sense, he has given his life to possibly save Fontaine’s.

      The more we observe Fontaine at work, however, the more we begin to perceive that he might never actually make his attempt to escape. Despite warnings from the others that time is short, Fontaine waits, fashioning yet new ropes and cables, replacing the door sections he has removed with dyed paper so that authorities will not notice his destruction of his determent.

     If Bresson might ever be said to have been influenced by Kierkegaard, it is in this work. Clearly, despite his determination, Fontaine does not yet have the faith to make Kierkegaard’s famous leap into belief, is unwilling to give himself up entirely to the uncertainty of escape. And it is this “crisis of faith” that makes Bresson’s prisoner so very different from any other such figure portrayed. He is a tortured hero who may not live up to our attentions to him. Despite his intense belief in freedom and his great ability to manipulate the tools that will help him achieve that freedom, he waits and waits—almost until it is too late. Called to the German headquarters he is told that he has been found guilty and will soon be shot.

      Upon return he is terrified that he will be transferred to another room or that, in his absence, his cell may have been searched. Fortunately, neither has occurred, but an even worse crisis soon occurs when he given a young cell mate, a 16-year old boy, Jost (Charles Le Clainche) who has deserted from the German army. Has the boy been put there to spy on him, to find out his secrets, or even as a source of temptation? Fontaine has no choice but to consider the brutal possibility of murdering his young roommate to carry out his self-defined mission. And facing that existential choice he wastes yet another day.

     However, with yet another pillow available, he can braid together even a longer rope and, at the last moment, reveals his intentions to Jost, who, after some hesitation, agrees to join him. Together the two work more quickly than he might have alone, adding to their hooks and ropes yet new links that might help them in their hour of the escape.

     We recognize almost immediately that by putting a young boy in his cell, Bresson has also introduced a subtle sexual element, and much as he did in Pickpocket, where the art of stealing billfolds and other objects is equated with the gay act of cruising. So too, has Orsini also been transformed suddenly into a potential male lover, his “secret” being suddenly something he will have to share or destroy the other to keep it quiet.

     The intelligent blogger, Brooks Peters of An Open Book expresses the issues quite lucidly:

 

“This unspoken language [the language of “stalking” as in Pickpocket] is also at the heart of A Man Escaped. For what begins as a simple prison film, of a single man’s plot to escape, suddenly takes a dramatic turn halfway through when a young man, a changeling, is dropped into his lap, so to speak. The boy, a satyr-like waif, Francois Jost, is an enigma. Half Resistance fighter, half German turncoat, he embodies the duality of Vichy France. A mere 16, he is filthy, disheveled, and infested with lice, but not enough to be undesirable. Bresson cleverly cast a handsome young man, Charles le Clainche, without any acting experience, whose vacant, yearning glances suck you in. It’s a child’s face, but also a punk’s mask. Could he be a spy? A plant? Or is he like Parsifal, the “naive fool”? Could he be the condemned man’s soul mate, his brother in arms, who helps him find the Holy Grail?

     We are left wondering, just as the prisoner too wrestles with his dilemma. Should he trust this mysterious stranger with his deep, dark secret? Ironically, it is because of the urchin’s lack of artifice that he is embraced, and accepted. Jost admits to having just a few lice, which surely a Nazi spy would never do. A liar would never be so fair, so lacking in guile. He’d be all or nothing, not ingenuous. Jost’s naivete is Fontaine’s ticket to freedom. And vice-versa. The boy is propositioned. Will you come with me? Or must I kill you? The youth chooses life.

      A partnership is signed, not with a pen, but with a regard, a nod, a supreme gesture of submission: “Yes.” From there, the pace picks up. The static quality of the first half of the film is replaced by a state of ramped-up drama, of action. The rope, made out of sheared bed linens and clothes, serves as a tightrope, and ultimately as a lifeline.”

 

     The escape itself is also like no other presented on film. Instead of adventurous and clock-driven swings over the walls, Bresson presents Fontaine’s and the boy’s escape as a game of cat- and-mouse, a thing of process that is made up by the two as they go along. Having breached one wall, they wait several hours before moving forward, in which time Fontaine almost seems to have lost his will once again, but during which he carefully observes the patterned movements of the guards, who march just a few steps in one direction before turning to march in an equal number of steps in the other direction, revealing, in their regulated militarism, a place just beyond their patrol where the two might alight.

      With careful and quiet maneuvers, the duo slip down the final wall, no music to accompany them until, as they walk away, free men, into the fog, the Mozart music is repeated. The young Jost expresses the utter joy of their achievement. Peters nicely summarizes the first moments of their freedom:

 

“And then the moment of climax. “Jost!” the man exclaims, clutching the boy to his side, pulling him tight in a spontaneous embrace, their bodies so close it’s almost a kiss. Savoring his triumph, the man does not fall to the ground, or cry out “Free At Last,” or “Vive La France,” or even “Thank God!” His only sound is the name of the boy he has rescued. The man he loves. "Jost!"

     Yet, Bresson cannot resist closing off an expectations we might have a further expression of passion. The boy blandly responds: “If only my mother could see me now,” perhaps the most poignant and personal of any response possible.

      For Bresson, clearly, it is the truth of his story that matters, not its exceptionality. That someone did actually escape tells us everything we need to know about the human spirit and its possible survival. Leave love to the dreamers.

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2013).  

 

Paul Wegener and Carl Boese | Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, or How He Came Into the World) / 1920

the word

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen (screenplay, based on a novel by Gustav Meyrink), Paul Wegener and Carl Boese (directors) Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, or How He Came Into the World) / 1920

 

Paul Wegener’s third Golem film—the 1915 version, The Golem, and the 1917 The Golem and the Dancing Girl both lost—is a film of contradictions and oppositions, beginning with Rabbi Löw (Alan Steinruck), who, although he is a noted Rabbi, wisely able to advise the Prague Jewish Ghetto of the 16th century, is also a Cabbalist, working with magical and Devilish powers slightly beyond his control, powers which even he keeps secret from the community and family. And even though the Holy Roman Emperor Luhois (Otto Gebühr) is about to order a closing and diaspora of the city’s Jews, he himself has worked with Luhois on creating the Emperor’s horoscope. In order to protect the established community which the Prague Jews have been able to create, Löw himself convenes with the demon Astaroth, and later, in a display of noted Jewish Patriarchs summons a performance from “the Wandering Jew,” Ahasuerus, which merely reiterates the condition which Luhois would place the Jewish community once again.

       In his attempts to protect his community, the Rabbi creates a monster in his clay figure, calling the figure’s existence into being through the magic of the word, the “shem”—in this case the magic word “Aemaet,” the Hebrew word for the “truth.” But even “truth” in this film is a two edged sword, for the truth is that Frankenstein-like creature, The Golem, can be used for good or evil. Although Rabbi Löw attempts to use the “monster” for good by threatening the Emperor and his court, the Golem returns home with a more threatening personality, which the Rabbi’s cabbalist texts reveal may soon become dangerous.

      Even the bearer of the Emperor’s decrees, his gap-toothed knight Florian (Lothar Müthel), represents an amazing duality: on one hand he is a dazzlingly empty and effeminate lackey, pleased that he has even received the attentions of the Emperor, but he also falls, somewhat inexplicably, in love with the Rabbi’s dark-haired daughter, Miriam (Lyda Salmonova), who herself is a would-be obedient child, at first in love with the Rabbi’s assistant, Famulus (Ernst Deutsch), but is quite quickly taken with Florian, and, secretly disobeying her father, meets with the love-stricken knight.

       Although Famulus is an utterly obedient assistant to the Rabbi, he also turns traitorous when he discovers that his would-be lover, Miriam, has spent the night with Florian, suddenly reanimating the monster, from whom the Rabbi has removed the magic amulet which gives him life, while placing the “word,” the monster’s animating name, to the Golem’s chest in order to command him to destroy Florian.

      In short, each of this film’s characters, in their dualistic behaviors helps to destroy the very community in which they live and hope to protect. The very powers which each of them possess—magic, rational knowledge, sexual allure, and Godliness—are abused in order to protect their society and themselves, and in that sense, they all unknowingly work against their own values, using their traditions to help undo the very things that they believe to be positive.

      The Golem, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is, by itself, an innocent force gone mad, a product of mankind’s own failings, a reverse-Christ who comes into being not to redeem mankind but to reiterate its fall from grace.

       The saviors of Wegener’s fable can never be the knowing adults of this world or even its would be wise men, the several patriarchs called together in beautiful ceremonial gatherings again and again; but are the innocents, the children whom at film’s end gather round and run from the Golem. The young girl who remains, so unknowing that she does not even understand that she should feel horror and run, seems, as in Frankenstein, to momentarily enchant the monster, who picks her up into a possible hug of joy or death—we can never know what it might have meant. Simple curiosity and wonderment leads her to grab the amulet from his chest, rendering the Golem incapable of further action, returning him to a thing of clay, a being no longer with a name that might animate him. The child (Loni Nest), in her simple speechless act, has rendered “the word” meaningless, saving the world which the adults has so terribly transgressed.  In this Jewish fable, the savior becomes the continuation of the species rather than a godly intercession into human life.

        That this profoundly perceived work about Jewish survival was directed by Paul Wegener, who later, historians report, collaborated with Nazi supporters, is yet another of the film’s remarkable contradictions. The filming of The Golem, with its German Expressionist flourishes, represents a high moment in German cinema to which it could never return.

       Much has been made by queer critics of the fact that the “golem.” like so many cinematic monsters, exists outside of the bounds of the normative, and accordingly, confounds and confuses the traditional roles of sex and gender, particularly those preached by the patriarchs.

       The Golem’s attraction to Miriam, pulling her through the streets by the hair, mimics, in fact, Florian’s inexplicable love for her and almost hints, rather comically, at the later film monster King Kong. But most importantly, the film is an early Jewish fable that foretells James Whale’s later version of Frankenstein. And like all monsters, the Golem is the harbinger of disorder and chaos, representative of the world that has lost its moral purpose, reflecting the very men who created and manipulated him for their own purposes. Although he temporary saves the Jewish community from destruction, he ultimately destroys their world himself, and at the end they are left with their expulsion from the city they once inhabited. Although Famulus forgives Miriam for her sexual misdeed—engaging in intercourse with Florian—they, like the others of their community are doomed, at film’s end, to leave and wander to a land elsewhere.

 

Los Angeles, February 16. 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (February 2014).

 

 

Mike Hoolboom | 1+1+1 / 1993 [Panic Bodies, Part 4]

important adjustments

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Hoolboom (director) 1+1+1 / 1993 [3 minutes]

 

In the penultimate film of Hoolboom’s great Panic Bodies, as Geoff Pevere commented: “A pixilate couple plays dress-up and undress-up as Earle Peache’s industrial-strength audio track pulsate and ebbs with churning tides of sound.”

     But I far prefer Hoolboom’s own comments:

“Devils fall in love in Seattle in a black comedy of sex, machines and flight. Photographed a frame at a time over three days, 1+1+1 shows us the wordless tale of unlikely lovers, the first appearing as a hovering devil in flight, excreting a vegetable life, while her's clock-spitting, bathing-besuited figure lifts weights in a frank measure of indifference. Their touch promotes a shimmering aura of light, a celestial forcefield which they lash against, finally retiring to the kitchen with a clutch of tools to fine tune desire. Could I fix you? Donning each other's clothes, they fly off together to the strains of Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz.”

 

   What is truly remarkable about this 3-minute piece is it’s interchange of the abstract and the naturalistic as this heterosexual couple, once inhabited by the devil’s within themselves, attempt to readjust to their lives, the female (Katherine Ramey), in particular attempting to literally take hammer and nail, pliers, and many another tool to readjust her failed companion (Jason Boughton).

     It only works when they can literally change genders, and comprehend what each other might desire, which at the very moment sends them flying off in the universe with new purpose.

     You might say that this work is a true realization of what filmmaker Marie Mencken might have desired in order to re-create her failed partner gay partner, poet and filmmaker Willard Maas; or what Edward Albee’s Martha tries to accomplish in one evening to which we’re privy with her weakling of a lover George.

     Had they only imagined that what they truly needed was simply a mutual transgender shift!

     Critic Jean Perret, writing in Visions du Réel makes it clear, this might be the solution to many a heterosexual couple’s problems:

 

“Howling sirens and film which seems to be burning evoke the violence of war. From the ruins of the images, a man and a woman gradually emerge. Without a word but with a powerfully suggestive soundtrack, Hoolboom sets the stage for a strange dry-humoured theatre. Particularly daunting is the role of the woman who ironically delights in doing violence to the man. With its great formal inventiveness combining accelerated sequences and pixilation, this film is as jarring as the lives of many couples.”

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

 

 

 

Matias Breuer | Stink / 2024

scent of a man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Drew Beckman (screenplay), Matias Breuer (director) Stink / 2024 [11 minutes]

 

Obviously suffering from hyperosmia, the central figure of this film, called simply “The Creep” in the credits (played by writer Drew Beckman) is a gay man who literally stalks the men whose body odors and even their spit and urine draw him to them. Of course, in this case, is does help that both of the men to whom he slavishly attracted to are also handsome straight studs.

     It begins with his narrative about the attractive Levi (Karan Menon), whose looks, sweat, and finally even a piece of his spit left on the sands of Venice get “The Creep” so excited that he cannot resist from entering the man’s apartment while he showers. Once inside he almost suffocates in the sucking in the smells of the victim’s shoes before he actually enters the bathroom where Levi is showering, quickly dropping his own shorts and putting on those of his idol before taking up the man’s toothbrush, sucking it thoroughly in his own mouth before he dips it in the man’s urine in the toilet, swallows the juices and puts it back in the vessel from which he has extracted it.

     As he lays down in his victim’s bed with his head embedded in a pair of the man’s shorts, there is a knock at the door. It’s Levi’s friend Chadwick (Albert Muzquiz), another chiseled, hirsute man come to pick up his friend to whisk him off to a straight bar where they will hang with some “chicks.”

      As unfaithful to the smells that intrigue him as many a gay man who picks up a new man every night, we see him in the last scene, sitting on a green lusting over the smells of Chadwick’s shoes and socks. When Chadwick suddenly asks him to look after his things while he heads to the bathroom, The Creep quickly grabs his socks as runs off with them, clearly ready to fall into a near-orgasmic rapture.

     This film details an aspect of gay life I might never before imagined, but I am not sure I needed to know about. Yet, in gay movie after gay movie, we do see men, attracted to another, picking up their underpants to take in a good whiff, and finding it utterly pleasant to sit around a locker sucking up the smell of their sweat. It’s obviously far more common than most of us might imagine. Gay men obviously like the smell of other men, just like straight men like the smell of women (just ask Al Pacino in his 1992 sexist film directed by Martin Brest, Scent of a Woman).

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

 

Andy Nicholls | Straight Out / 2011 || Morgan Jon Fox | The One You Never Forget / 2019

coming out surprises

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andy Nicholls (screenwriter and director) Straight Out / 2011 [19 minutes]

Morgan Jon Fox (screenwriter and director) The One You Never Forget / 2019 [9 minutes]

 

Since 1980, probably more than any other topic of LGBTQ-interested films has been the issue of “coming out.” The difficulty, so complex and varied, of identifying one’s sexuality and then expressing that identification—that compulsion, that desire, that fulfillment of oneself, however you want to describe it—has over the years become one of the fascinating of topics for both creators and their audiences. By now, one might imagine that the subject has become so clichéd that directors and viewers might have bored of it, yet each year young filmmakers and LGBTQ audiences seem fascinated by the endless variations on the theme. Each “coming out” process is different, and thus almost comes to identify the character who is undergoing or, just as often, resisting the process.

     As I have already noted in several previous essays, however, not only have there been at least two major different traditions of “coming out” films, which I have described as A and B variations—the first basically expressed pre-1980, and the other after that rather arbitrary date—but young directors have riffed on the theme in many clever ways, Icelandic director Runar Þór Sigurbjörnsson in Hann (Him) (2018), for example, suggesting the notification to parents can be as simple as leaving a handwritten message describing the proper pronoun of the person he is dating and New Zealand filmmaker Stewart Main in The New Suit (1985) arguing it’s as easy as enduring your estranged parents’ purchase of two new dress suits, then skipping the prom, to take in a local movie and meet “a tall dark stranger.” For the young boy of US director Michael Burke’s 1998 Fishbelly White it means biting off the head of his beloved chicken. To several such as Norwegian cineaste Frank Mosvold, as expressed in Kysset som fikk snøen til å smelte (A Kiss in the Snow) (1997), British director Gabrielle Russell in Keel (2004), and Danish filmmaker Lasse Nielsen in Dragen (The Kite) (2015), it begins with an impetuous but gentle kiss from a friend. To many other film creators it is a violently pitched battle taking place in the inner self or in connection with family or school mates that leaves psychological scars for years, a singular dramatic series of incidents that makes the subject so very fascinating for those attracted to expressing narrative through moving images.

      In the two examples I’ve selected to talk about in this essay the issue is so fraught with complications that the “heroes” of these films hardly dare to speak of their choices, revealing them through their acts, resulting in calmer conclusions than we might have expected. And oddly, the results, if awkwardly and comically, are rather gracefully achieved.

     The first film, British director Andy Nicholls’ Straight Out (2011) complicates matters by setting his story in a future in which society is quite the opposite of today’s heterosexually dominated world. In this Brighton of the future, the most common sexual pairings consist of men and men and women and women, the “pinks” clearly in control of a society spouting all the moral clichés that today we hear from heterosexual zealots, preachers, and even gay-friendly straight couples: dining with their new straight neighbors, Mark (Tim Pieraccini) and Sam (Murray Hecht) are surprised that the heterosexual pair who they’ve invited for dinner have been together for 19 years, almost as long as they have. They are amazed that the straight couple have stayed together as long as they have. When the straight couple subtly refer to their sex life and show a bit of affection for one another, the gay men suggest that such behavior may be inappropriate since there are children sitting at the table (“must you flaunt it?”), although the wife reminds them that “they’re our kids.”

      The gay couple’s son Elliott (Rob Leach), they announce, has just gotten a job in a sports shop. But they’re quite embarrassed that he wants to become a car mechanic (“of all things”) “and now he wants us to buy one.” When Elliott finally appears, the friends’ boy Bob warmly greets him while their daughter remains quiet, obviously attracted to him. We know, in fact, that Elliott fears he is straight; he’s called a hot line the previous evening hinting that “a friend” of his is afraid he’s straight and is most unhappy.

      He’s told by Mark to go clean up, coming out of the shower to discover the neighbor’s daughter, Jenny, in the hall waiting for him. They are in the midst of a kiss when Sam catches a glimpse of their actions, dropping a plate in complete startlement.

      In the very next scene, Elliott, seated between his fathers, explains he can’t help it, “it’s just who I am.” “Have you ever....?” “No!” the boy responds.

      “How do you know then? It’s probably just a silly crush.” But his other father, Mark, is far more outraged: “Well, you’re no son of mine. I’m going out. And when I come back, I’m not sure I want to see you. After all we’ve done for you.”

       Just like the stock heterosexual parents of the thousands of such gay “coming out” films, so do the “pink” parents behave badly in response to their son’s sexual unsurety.  

       Sam attempts to reassure Elliott that, although they are in shock, they still love him, his implorations sounding nearly as empty as those expressed by heterosexual mothers to their homosexual sons since time immemorial. “He’ll come round,” Sam assures him, as we hear Mark, on his way out the door declaring “It’s just not natural.”

      Their doctor assures them that, “well, it’s quite natural.” Some boys, I’m afraid we find are attracted to girls, temporarily, but others...well only to girls.

       He starts to date Jenny (Pepperbel), but things prove somewhat problematic. When they walk hand in hand down the street, lurking leathermen flick cigs at him, angry lesbians scream at them when they pass. Things become difficult; he hasn’t heard from Jenny since she had a school all-girl’s party. Horny, he visits a place where straight folk have sex, observing a couple busy in a steamed-up car, the man finally exiting with the woman crying out, “Don’t go,” he replying, “I have to. My boyfriend will wonder where I am.”

       When he meets up with Jenny once again, she’s with two gay women, obviously having changed her mind, or had it changed for her, about her sexuality.

        Elliott seeks out a straight bar for the very first time, but can find no one there to whom he might possibly be attracted. Surprised, he encounters the straight neighbor’s son Bob (Richard Pennifold), Elliot saying the obvious, “I didn’t know you were....” “Straight?” he responds, “I’m not. I sometimes come to these sort of places. You’d be surprised who I get picked up.”

       After a few drinks and Elliott has still not found anyone he fancies, Bob suggests they go to his place, to which Elliott, somewhat uncertainly, agrees. Perhaps, he mutters to himself, I should check out the other sex before I make a final decision. They hold hands and walk off together, Elliott having obviously regained his sense of “the way things ought to be.”

*

 

Morgan Jon Fox’s The One You Never Forget (2019) represents a much simpler series of unexpected reversals. In this case a young boy, Carey (London Curtis) growing up in a nice US suburban home, is about to go out on his first major date, his mother (Tasha Smith) attempting to pump the information out of him about who’s the girl. Carey refuses to answer, coming in from mowing the lawn to brush his teeth and, apparently, begin to ready himself for the evening’s event.

     Husband (Charles Malik Whitfield) and wife, meanwhile, recall their first date years ago. She’s still angry that they didn’t get a picture; evidently her mother did not at all approve of her dating the man she has lived with ever since. They hug. He still remembers her pink dress, while the camera alternates between the loving couple and their son Carey, now shaving. “Baby make sure you get a picture of that boy and his date, okay?” She’s on her way to work, reminding him again to “get the picture.”

      We watch Carey in a nice dress shirt put the tie around its collar. He sprays his mouth his breath freshener. His father is on the couch folding clothes when Carey enters in his suit coat, looking like a handsome young teenager dressed up for the special night.

       “Hey, look at you! Looking all sharp.”

       Carey pauses, smiling for his father’s approval. “I gotta go.”

       His dad asks if he isn’t going to bring the girl in to introduce her. “Dad, no,” insists Carey.

       “I’m not asking,” insists his father. “I want to meet our prom date.”

       “Dad, it’s not a prom. It’s a dance.”

       Before his father can even respond, Carey insists he’s got to go, and leaves the house, closing the door behind him. A car has pulled up, and a boy in a baby suit comes out, attaching a carnation boutonniere into Carey’s suit. The father peers through the window, a bit startled but nonetheless comes out, camera in hand, demanding they get back out of the car, they meekly waiting for what they can only fear will be some negative reaction.

       “What’s your name?” he asks the young boy.

       “Hunter,” the high-voiced kid answers.

       “You golfing buddies. Or is this your prom date?”

       Hunter answers, “Well actually it isn’t the prom.”

      The father has promised his wife to get a picture, and, as he reports, he’s determined to get one. They smile as he snaps the photo, handing Carey a boxed red carnation corsage, the boys sitting in the back sit of the rented limousine, ride through the streets a bit taken aback, before openly smiling, Shawn Mendes’ song “Life of the Party” playing out the credits.

        I didn’t tell you, Carey and his family are black, Hunter is a scrawny, white blond.

     Neither of these works represents great filmmaking and, to be honest, if you’ve seen hundreds of teenage coming out films, as I have, it’s difficult to be excited by the subject. But I have never lost interest in the almost always touching works of this genre, and these two have served it up with some rather clever twists.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2021 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).