Lucas Morales | Rendez-vous avec Diego (Date with Diego) / 2021

the difference of the viewer’s position

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Morales (screenwriter and director) Rendez-vous avec Diego (Date with Diego) / 2021

[53 minutes]

 

Noah (Cédric Gueugnon) is gay and out, yet he hasn’t had sex or even met up with anyone he might like, and his friend Lou (Flore Destieu) insists as a 17-year-old about turn 18 it’s time to join an on-line gay dating group—a more youthful version of Grindr—and stop being a virgin.

      Noah is still unsure about the whole thing, but Lou swears that her brother is “on a sex run,” and she immediately downloads the site, Crusher, onto Noah’s cellphone.

      If at first he finds the greetings of some of the customers (“What you lookin’ for sweetie”) and the pictures they show (a large erect cock) often are more than little off-putting, he finally connects up with the seemingly perfect guy, a high school senior like himself named Diego. At first they’re both a bit shy about showing photos of themselves, Diego suggesting he’s not yet out to everyone. But since Noah reminds him that’s basically the purpose such sights, he finally sends a picture.  

     And when he sees Diego’s photo, he’s sold, waiting anxiously for each new message, and even trying hard to take a good photo of himself, giving up on a face-on shot for side views of his face  to send to his new friend.

    Before long they’re talking every day, sharing the kind of personal things about themselves they might with a good friend, talking apparently about their fears, their school experiences, their dreams, etc.—the sorts of things all young gay boys share with one another. Lou is little afraid that he’s jumping in too quickly, but it was she, after all, that pushed Noah in the pool so to speak.

    Meanwhile, we catch glimpses from Diego’s real homelife, events which apparently threaten his hidden identity with his family as his sister picks up his phone, wondering if he has a picture of his new girlfriend. He’s understandably furious with her, which makes them wonder what he might be hiding. Yet the father will permit no one on his phone, not even his wife.

    When Diego’s fellow students try to get him to show a picture of his new girlfriend, he refuses, suggesting he’s not really in a relationship. So we suspect that he is even more closeted than Noah. 

      Diego, it turns out is attending school in Perpignan, while Noah is in Argeles, only a half-an-hour away. And, of course, that leads Noah to suggest that they might see each other sometime. “Why not?” responds Diego. Soon they are sending numerous emojis of hearts to each other every night before bed.   

     Meanwhile, in Noah’s class the teacher is talking to them about the Platonic notion of beauty, and asks them to question what beauty is and where does it exist: the very questions that he will soon have to work out for himself.

      For he soon makes an appointment to meet Diego at the town’s old theater where Noah knows none of his friends are likely to visit and will be basically empty at the time he’s arranged. He looks forward to the event, obviously, but also is terrified, or as he describes it to Lou, stressed out about it. “What if he doesn’t like me?”—the fear of everyone who dates for the first time in their lives.     

     Diego, however, doesn’t show up, and Noah is furious, returning home depressed. His lovely parents try to break through his wall of silence, his father even visiting him in his room to suggest as few parents in these kinds of movies do, “I’m here for you if you want, son.” But the boy just wants to be alone.          

     When he finally hears from Diego, the other begins his conversation with “Can we talk?” suggesting perhaps that there is something more than the obvious fear involved in his absence. He suggests that perhaps he is not ready “to be out right now,” describing himself as stupid. “Please understand that this is really hard for me. I got scared. Really hard.”

      Noah’s response is appropriate: “Fuck you! I have feelings for you Diego. I’m not the one to judge, I’m like you.”

       In any event, the two boys make it up finally and eventually plan another time in Diego’s home turf.

       On the day of the event, Noah takes a bus to the small restaurant on the outskirts of town Diego has chosen where he waits.

      We see Diego planning to leave the house, but at the last moment he is told his mother needs the car. Furious, Diego steals his father’s bicycle, now assured he will be late. Back at the restaurant we see the appointed hour pass by, Noah growing more and more angry and despondent simultaneously, finally telling Diego via cellphone that if he doesn’t show up by the half-hour he will leave.

      We watch the boy we believe to be Diego at last enter the restaurant at the very moment Noah stands to leave, the boy walking past Noah to greet a girl who has been impatiently waiting for him. It is not Noah’s Diego, but another individual’s date. And as Noah walks past another booth where an older man (Evan Delot) is sitting he suddenly realizes that the message he is sending Diego asking how he could do this to him twice, is being received on the older man’s cellphone, as the truth is horribly revealed.      

       “I don’t want to hurt you,” pleads the man.

       “It’s not possible. It’s a joke, right?

       But, of course, it isn’t a joke but the terrible truth. He shouts out to the man: “Don’t come any closer or I’ll scream,” quickly leaving the room, while the man breaks down in tears.

         A few moments later they meet up again outside to where Noah has retreated.

      “Would you have talked to me if I’d showed you a real picture of me,” he asks, Noah honestly responding, “Of course not, look at you, you’re at least 70.” “61,” the man corrects, the boy who shouts out, “It doesn’t matter, I’m fucking 18.” Noah calls him a pervert, but the man reminds him he never asked for a nude picture. The man keeps expressing his sorrow for behaving like he did, but attempts to justify it nonetheless by suggesting “There’s nothing worse than growing old and to know it’s almost over. And to know that you’ll never be young again. Not even able to communicate, to flirt.”

       But Noah is right to declare he has been playing with him, in tears asking had he thought of the consequences, of his lying to the boy, deceiving him on his first entry to the world of love. “How am I supposed to fall in love again, you fucking crushed me.”

        The man, whose name is Diego, used a photo of a boy he found on line, claiming accordingly that is has not lied about everything.

        As far Noah is concerned he lied about everything that matters, he has destroyed this boy’s young love, used it, perverted it just as Noah insists. His being sorry, his claim that he attempted to stop it without having the courage, even his sense of guilt is meaningless. As Noah says, you have no idea how I feel right now.

       “And how about me?” Diego asks. “I fell for you. We were simply two people talking to each other.”

         “Just to be clear, this is the last time we will ever speak to or see one another again. Or I’ll tell my parents and the police.”

       The man insists he will never hear from him and that he has never done it before. “I felt I was attractive for some days. One day, you’ll be like me…. You start by lowering it one year, then two, then a decade….until you have no limit unfortunately.”

       But Noah answers correctly: he’ll never do that he insists. Certainly not after what has happened to him. “I’ll never put someone through that like you did for me!”

      Strangely, however, the man has the last word in arguing that Noah is a nice boy and he hopes he finds someone soon. He also knows that the boy will resent him for the rest of his life. It’s only natural. “But I’ll be forever grateful to you. Thank you.”

        And the two leave, Noah screaming for him to “Fuck off.”

       We also see the boy we mistakenly believed was Diego talking to his girlfriend, evidently someone with whom he had been in a relationship, but with whom he had broken off, now realizing he truly loves her.

     Much as in Call Me by Your Name, Noah is in too much pain to return home by himself, but obviously not over a love enjoyed and lost, but for a love he never had. And as in Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film, it is a painfully quiet journey.

       So much for Platonic love. For youth love is based on the beauty seen and recognized up close, not imagined, even if Noah has forced him to do just that.

       Back at home, his mother, like his father previously, reminds him that they will always be there if he wants to talk. But how can a boy share the sadness Noah has just experienced with his parents?

       In his philosophy class, the teacher continues with the lesson: “So how can we see the difference between creating real things and creating their image? Simply by the difference between the viewer’s position and the one of the represented object.”

     Fortunately, the lesson is interrupted by a knock on the classroom door, the new transfer student whom he has previously mentioned having finally arrived. Noah looks back to where the new boy Lino has been seated, and Lino quietly waves at him.

     In this sad film, French director Lucas Morales works his way cleverly around the use of a great deal of cellphone texting, while imbuing his scenes with a sense of remarkable framing and a strong color palette which, along with his intelligent script, helped to make this short independent film feel highly professional.

 

Los Angeles, June 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Paul Wendkos | Gidget / 1959

gidget goes yiddish

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frederick Kohner Gidget (New York: Berkeley Books, 1957)

Gabrielle Upton (screenwriter, based on the novel by Frederick Kohner), Paul Wendkos (director) Gidget / 1959

 

My Green Integer editor, Pablo Capra, grew up in Malibu near Topanga Canyon, so it might have been natural for him, I imagine, to grow up as a surfer; in truth, he tells me, he discovered one of his passions only in at the age of 20, after he had returned to the US from a lengthy stay in Austria, the homeland of his father. His small press, Brass Tacks, primarily publishes works about and by Malibu figures, and one of his best-selling titles is a book on the surfing culture. It figured, accordingly, that among his friends was the model for the popular book and movie Gidget and all the Gidget Goes—fill in the blanks—that followed. Pablo often encounters her when he attends surfing events.

     For several years now, I have been aware of the fact without thinking much of it. But just recently he mentioned to me something that took me a bit aback. Having read my piece about my early friendship with Isaac B. Singer, Pablo casually mentioned one day that Gidget—whose real name is Kathy—had also met Singer and cooked him a vegetarian meal. Her husband, Marvin Zuckerman, so Pablo told me, was a professor, a scholar of Yiddish, and had translated, with a friend, an older collection of somewhat raunchy Yiddish sayings, which they titled Yiddish Sayings Mamma Never Taught You. They’d already gotten a quote for the book’s cover by Henry Miller, and wanted one, as well, from Singer, since he was one of most well-known and last of the great Yiddish writers. Seeing that Singer had been invited to speak at a Ojai summer camp for Conservative Jewish college-aged women, Zuckerman went to the leaders of the camp and got himself invited to the weekend events, where he chaired a panel on Yiddish poetry.

      In Ojai he met Singer, gave him a copy of his Yiddish Sayings, and offered to drive the writer back to Los Angeles to the airport, on the way inviting him to lunch at the Zuckermans’ Pacific Palisades home. He called his wife, Kathy, who invited her own and Marvin’s parents to join them as well.

      The occasion, so I have since been told, was a joyful one, if not terribly eventful; but it did lead to Singer composing a short comment for the cover of their book and resulted in the elderly author reading the Gidget novel, writing back that he thought it was a far better novel than Nabokov’s Lolita.

     But before I even read about their encounter in an article by Zuckerman, I was astounded by the very idea of Singer meeting the original Gidget, a kind of absurdist collision, it appeared to me, of high and low culture, of old world wisdom crashing against the rocks of American pop. Of course, I had not really bothered to reckon with the fact that Gidget was no longer a boy-loving teenager but was now a handsome woman, a few years older than me. Amused by my reaction, Pablo brought me a copy of the original novel, signed “Surf On! Love Kathy Gidget Kohner,” the cover announcing not only that the book was written by Kathy’s father, Frederick Kohner, but that it now contained a forward by Kathy Kohner Zuckerman. The back cover described the story as being about “a girl’s coming-of-age in the summer of 1957” (one of my very favorite childhood years) and suggested that Gidget (named Franzie in the novel) was “part Holden Caulfield, part Lolita.” I now had to read it.

    So between studying the two tomes on the monstrous Holocaust murderer, Adolf Eichmann, discussed in “Opposing Banality” in that representative of My Year volumes, I quickly devoured the rather charming, semi-biographical story of young Kathy falling in love with surfing and the boys who somewhat reluctantly taught her.

     Frederick Kohner, a screenwriter, is no J. D. Salinger, just as his Gidget is no Holden Caulfield. Although told in a vernacular first person, Gidget’s tale reveals that as much as she may have felt like an outsider, she nevertheless wanted very much to be part of the culture around her, one slightly less worldly than the life of her own parents, Jewish Czech émigrés, represented. Even less happens in the novel—at least until the last scene—than in the movie, perhaps, in part, because her father wasn’t able to successfully describe the process of learning how to surf, a central feature of the Gidget franchise. Franzie tells terrible whoppers to her parents in order to sneak out each day to the beach, gets “lousy tonsillitis,”  falls “desperately” in love with Moondoggie (who in real life, it turns out, was our artist friend, Billy Al Bengston), and, in an attempt to make Moondoggie jealous, hangs out in the older “great Kahoona’s” hut. Uninvited, Gidget nonetheless attends an evening celebration described by some of her friends as an “orgy”—a word she doesn’t know the meaning of—which goes awry when several of the celebrants take torches in hand for a midnight surf and accidently start a canyon fire that threatens disaster akin to the Malibu fires of 1956 and 1958 (there were also big fires in 1970 and 1982, and in 1993, my friend Jerome Lawrence, who lived a short distance from the beach on Las Flores canyon, lost his beautiful canyon home and all his theatrical memorabilia). The Zuckerman’s lost their own home, including all Marvin’s precious Yiddish collection of books in the 2025 fire of Pacific Palisades and Malibu.

     The day is saved in the fiction by a miraculous downpour of rain that immediately puts out the flames! The novel ends, accordingly, with Gidget almost becoming involved in a calamity and, later, being the cause of an intense fight between the great Kahoona and Moondoggie. Either event might have landed her and others in jail. 1957, however, was a far different time than the one in which we now exist. Despite her scrapes with danger, Gidget remains as virtuous and innocent as the “nice” tom-girl portrayed by Sandra Dee a short while later.

     The movie script by Gabrielle Upton (Gillian Houghton) understandably ditches the heavy drama of the fire, focusing instead on Francie’s (the name the movie gives to Sandra Dee) attempts to make Moondoggie (James Darren) jealous, with the younger surfer fighting the Kahoona, while simultaneously becoming aware that his hero is not someone who truly deserves to be admired. Ironically, the two teenagers later meet up through parental connections, and fall in love all over again, while discovering that Kahoona is a kind of fraud, who now will work in the off-season as a pilot instead of traveling off to Hawaii or Peru as his legend has it. Cliff Robertson as the Kahoona, in fact, saves this film from its juvenile sentimentality by hinting at far darker aspects of life. A loner who parades as a hero before teenage boys, the “big” Kahoona (he is no longer referred to as “great” in the film version) obviously gets his kicks out of serving as friend-cum-father to these surfers who obviously feel out-of-sync with the rest of their lives.

      The movie, moreover, unlike the book, actually attempts to explain surfing by showing the rush Gidget gets from the sport. The long shots (with veteran surfers such as Miki Dora and Mickey Munoz) of the surfers against the waves—as opposed to the cheesy closeups in which the cast is required to pose in silly grins with arms spread out pretending to balance against a backscreen—truly do reveal the art of the sport played out in the natural beauty of its arena. There are moments when the ocean of Southern California really does look like the paradise it always promised visitors to become.

     In the novel, the fire required the Kahoona to forever abandon his hut; and in real life, the publication of the novel and opening of the motion picture made the sport so popular that today, so I am told by Pablo, the year-round surfers openly resent the hundreds of their fellow kind, somewhat nostalgically imagining the pre-Gidget days. By the time you read this, I will have likely lived up to my promise to spend a few hours at the beach to watch Pablo “shoot the curl.”

     As I read this short novel, moreover, I also quickly began to perceive that Kathy Kohner, growing up as the “girl midget,” was also a member of Hollywood royalty. Her father had received an Oscar nomination for his 1938 screenplay of Mad About Music, and wrote several other screenplays, including an adaptation of Knut Hamsun’s fiction Victoria (which would surely have interested Singer). Her uncle, Paul, worked in the 1930s as head of the Universal Studios European division, and in 1938 founded one of the most important Hollywood agencies, representing figures such as Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Greta Garbo, David Niven, Ingmar Bergman, Maurice Chevalier, and Lana Turner. My dear friend, Ken Sherman, worked for Kohner until the great man’s death in 1988, when Sherman founded his own organization, representing Woody Allen and others. Paul Kohner’s daughter, Kathy’s cousin Susan, acted—preposterously as a light-skinned Black girl—in Douglas Sirk’s famed Lana Turner vehicle Imitation of Life. Susan’s sons, Chris and Paul Weitz, in turn, produced American Pie and About a Boy, and acted together in one of my favorites, Chuck & Buck. Paul also wrote and directed In Good Company, American Dreamz, and other works. I write of Imitation of Life and Paul Weitz’s interview of his mother at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in My Year 2009.

     It gradually became clear that it wasn’t at all so strange that Singer and Gidget had met. My own friendship with him, as the result of a course at the University of Wisconsin, was far odder, even though I had read most of his writing at the time of the course and we shared a deep admiration for the writing of Knut Hamsun (despite the abhorrence of Hamsun’s political views).

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2015

Reprinted from My Year 2015 (unpublished and My Queer Cinema blog 2026).

Chen Kaige | 邊走邊唱 (Life on a String) / 1991

a vast canvas of simple profundities

by Douglas Messerli

                 

Chen Kaige (screenplay, based on a fiction by Shi Tiesheng, and director) 邊走邊唱 (Life on a String) / 1991

 

 “It’s hard occasionally to divine the precise meanings of Chen Kaige’s lush, mystical fable….” Geoff Andrew wrote in Time Out up this film’s first showing. Similarly, The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin described the work as being “cryptic,” and later argued that “The events that occur in Life on a String are not easily described in anything less than the metaphorical terms in which the film maker...has conceived them.” And other critics had an equally difficult time in comprehending the “meaning” of what they recognized as a stunning brilliant visual work.

     In fact, the ideas presented in this film are just that: metaphors that rather that point to rather than enumerating profundity. Told by his master that only after he breaks the 1,000th string of his instrument will his sight be restored, Chen’s film follows the man, now known as the Saint (Liu Zhongyuan), as he nears that goal. The sanxian-playing Saint now has his own disciple, a young blind boy named Shitou (Huang Lei), who although loyal to his master, is also at the age when his inquisitiveness and sexual yearnings are becoming problems.

     In the very first scene we see him temporarily running off from the Saint, inquiring of villagers questions that hint at profundity while actually expressing the simple questions of a boy desiring to understand a world which he cannot imagine: “Why is empty space white?” “Why is the ocean blue?”

     In fact, what we perceive in Shitou is a kind of mirror image of how the old blind man has come to be perceived as a saint, challenging the world about him with the sense of the outsider, daring to investigate what seems obvious to all others, and entertaining and calming the warring locals such as the Sun and Lee clans with his sanxian and his metaphorical narratives. He is a saint less because he is wise than because, as an outsider forced to wander this barren world, he has survived.

    Through Shitou we can imagine him suffering from the human urges, vanities, and confusions of all beings; and through those joys, trials, and tribulations we perceive, at film’s end, that Shitou as well has gained in wisdom, surely destined to become the next generation’s Saint.

    Chen’s major metaphor, that we are all forced to follow our lives as if attached to strings—required to play out life, like a game, the best we can—is hardly an original and particularly profound message. The irony that the Saint has mistakenly imagined that the final break of the 1,000th string will result in some recompense, is the error of all who live in this world imagining that there will be a reward in another after-life. Indeed, Chen seems to suggest, it is this life that truly matters, even if we are unable to embrace its full beauty and horror. The prescription that lines the bottom of his instrument is nonsense, an ancient text incomprehensible to the contemporary pharmacist; and the Saint, like everyone else, is destined to live out his life with the “raw deal” he has been given by fate.

      In counterpoint to the rather thin “message” of his film, however, the director uses his remarkable artistry to create a visual landscape filled with original and eccentric figures that displays the complexity of life we often miss in our everyday activities. Chen has been intentionally ironic in allowing his audience to experience an absolutely sensual spectacle that his central characters cannot witness. A bit like a tourist guide, Chen trails his camera over vast hills and mountains, desserts, waterfalls, and plains in which warring families gather to destroy one another.

     Chen takes us through the throes of love, as Shitou couples with the beautiful Lanxiu (Xu Qing) who challenges him to become more independent by leading him dangerously close to the vertiginous-producing cliffs of the nearby mountains. And he thrills us with slightly absurdist rituals, as when desiring to cross and impassable river, the Saint is borne by the villagers in a boat carrying him inland instead of to the river, presumably taking him where he desires to go by moving him in another, but safer, direction. Does he know that he is being “tricked,” or is his journey simply another metaphorical statement that has no precise meaning?

     At heart, one might almost describe Chen’s film as being a kind of fantasy musical, particularly when the Saint sings his beautiful compositions (with lyrics by Chen and music by Qu Xiaosong). And it is the illogic of many musical librettos that Chen’s film shares.

     The real truths, the truly profound ones of this film are, by comparison, small ones, such as the moment the Saint warns his young disciple against women, suggesting that in his youth he suffered great torment and pain. When, soon after, he is furious with Shitou for having had sex with Lanxiu, the boy lashes out “You’re jealous!” For the first time in their relationship the older man strikes the boy. Suddenly we are made to realize the boy is right: the Saint is as human as all others, jealous not only of the boy’s young body that so attracts the girl, but jealous that the young boy might be taken away from him by others in the surrounding world.  When late in the movie we perceive that in one of her cliff-hanging moments, Lanxiu may actually have fallen to her death, we also comprehend that now, Shitou, like his master, will be made to suffer deep pain and torment on account of love.

     At another moment, after the old Saint has realized that he will never regain his sight, he returns to the small eating establishment at the foot of the falls, drinking heavily simply to relieve his sorrow. The beautiful serving woman comes to him, insisting that she drink his last cup of the wine, perhaps to help him to stop or simply to show her kinship with his sorrows. At that moment, both the hero and we simultaneously wonder if there might not also be something else behind her actions, particularly as she pulls his head to her chest in gentle sympathy. As the old man asks her, first, how many years she has worked there, and, then, how many years he, himself, has been coming to the spot, we wonder whether she might not be his daughter, a figure with possibly a deeper connection than a figure showing simple admiration for her wise visitor. She evades the questions, and Chen goes no further in answering the question he has generated. Yet it is in these kinds of intense, unanswerable emotional puzzles that we are asked explore the significance of life in this film.

     The Saint, after all, is still a man, and it is not the grand and profound generalities of life that truly matters, but the simple emotional responses each of us make every day regarding how we live, how he love, and how we die. Upon returning to the small hilltop temple where he and Shitou make their home, the Saint finally dies, without one day of sight, but with an inner vision than most of us might envy. His body is sent down river by boat on another voyage where no one can know how it will end. Shitou packs up, hiding a few coins and paper money within the base of his instrument instead of the meaningless prescription for the restoration of his sight.

     As he starts upon his voyage he is met again by Lanxiu’s brothers who have previously beaten him for his attentions to the girl. This time, however, they only grab the lute, shaking it. The first has nothing within it, and they take it from him; it was obviously the Master’s instrument. But the second rings with the coins he placed there, and they return it to him, lifting him into the air in a chair as they carry him forward for a short while. Like the villages near the waterfall celebrated by the Saint, these men move Shitou forward on his voyage in a new ritual that will surely result in his one day returning as a wiser man who can help them to see the things to which they are blind.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2015).

       

       

Faruk Manzur | Strangers / 2024

two twinks in brooklyn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Faruk Manzur (screenwriter and director) Strangers / 2024 [11 minutes]

 

Poor empty-headed twinks Albie (Mason Combs) and Lake (Colton Dane) who meet up in New York City and immediately fall in love. Albie thinks its truly “cool” that Lake has cereal every night before bed.

     They spend a night and the next day together and imagine deep feelings such as lying on the grass outside a baseball stadium to imagine the sounds of people coming and going, laughing and screaming, you know, just the world passing by. Lake likes to close his eyes and imagine it all happening around him, obviously not really interested in the baseball game.

    In this tripartite little fantasy, the boys seem to have found the one they have both been searching for. They go shopping and one of them finds the perfect jacket! “Whoa,” coos Lake, reassuring his new buddy that he truly likes the coat. There seems to be no problem about buying it, although we haven’t clue what either of these two peter pans do to survive.

     On night out on the town in a noisy club with plenty of liquor and drugs, Albie discovers Lake kissing another boy. O my gawd, what can you do in such a situation but leave and scream over the cellphone that the relationship is over.

     Unfortunately, he forgot his coat at Lake’s place. Late at night on a convenient spot by Manhattan’s riverside skyline, they meet up where Lake returns the coat, Albie reprimanding him for treating him like he were simply a stranger.

     Lake reminds him that, in fact, they are strangers.

     What’s a mindless boy to do? Surely he’ll cry again through another night.

    Sorry, this little film just doesn’t work for me. These nasty boys, so perfectly dressed for every occasion, just don’t move me. I was clumsy, glum many a night, and never imagined that I might meet “Mr. Right” when I lived in Manhattan. Where did I go wrong? Or, on the other hand, what did I do right to deserve such a joyous life?

 

Los Angeles, June 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

Darrin James and Aj Knight | Daisy Boy / 2021

at the brink

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aj Knight (screenplay), Darrin James and Aj Knight (directors) Daisy Boy / 2021 [10 minutes]

 

Daisy Boy is a truly remarkable fantasy film wherein a young man, Jameson (Aj Knight) again and again reimagines himself in liberating landscapes, first with a black man, Guy (Indar Smith) who takes him to a transgender/transexual bar where he is introduced as the “Daisy Boy,” a now rather obscure term that refers to “a delicate, sort, of effeminate young man.” The term shifted in the 20th century to be describes as a “pansy” or “buttercup.”

     In Jameson’s imagined bar he suddenly, with glitter on his eyelids and dressed in a yellow sports coats with a naked chest, reveals himself as a wild young beauty, able to dance (as the actor readily proves) the night away. He is welcomed by a true queen (Markus Molinari) who wonders what took him so long to show up.

     Later after that imaginary experience, he simply talks with his new friend about all of his problems, including even the necessity of “coming out” or even defining his sexuality. He hasn’t yet kissed another boy even, let alone fully figured out his identity. Yet in his dreams, he kisses Guy. But even that so real imaginative experience quickly wilts, as we find him back in his bedroom, seemingly awaiting a date.

     A car honks. And suddenly the daisy boy again comes to life again, adding the glitter to his eyes, and dancing down the street, with even the lovely postman joining in and grabbing him by the balls, to which our daisy boy objects. (This is after all a terribly “correct-thinking” version of true liberation).

     Yet, we know that our beautiful “daisy boy” is just on a new fantasy roll. Will he truly ever come out of his shell? That is, obviously, the question all young queer boys must answer at his age 16, despite his earlier insistence at the bar that he is 18.

      When you’re a 16 year-old effeminate young man you imagine all sorts of things. You wish for a world that is just seemingly a few feet away from the one in which you live. You can experience is so fully that you believe you are actually sharing in the experience. But you are thousands of miles away from the day, as Jameson wishes, to be able to kiss all the boys in his sight.

     Daisy Boy is a liberating and truly exciting jump into a gay world that keeps pulling its young hero back, the way all the restrictions we put on youth do. He is ready; he is not ready yet. He is desperate, feeling that he has already suffered a nervous breakdown. But he is simply not yet able to make that leap into the full sexual world he desires simply because he cannot yet full imagine it or comprehend its joys and dangers.

    We were all there at one time or another, I probably stood at the brink far longer than most of my gay peers. But at that age, you have no peers; you feel alone. And you can jump only when you feel ready. And then, Daisy Boy will dance his heart out.

     This exuberant short gets it precisely right, and Aj Knight proves himself to be a true charmer.

 

Los Angeles, June 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).