Simon Anderson | Morning Is Broken / 2015

i don’t want to be this way

by Douglas Messerli

 

Simon Anderson (screenwriter and director) Morning Is Broken / 2015 [11 minutes]

 

The most common homophobia does not emanate from others but from the self for those who have somehow by their parents, by the society in which they live, or through the attitudes of peers and friends been convinced that being homosexual is not only wrong but that having such desires is untenable, representative of the worst imaginable behavior. Feeling love for other men, for example, is not simply seen an issue of having desires that do not represent the majority of human beings, but is perceived as a kind of disease against which one should be inoculated or, if it has progressed, cured.

     There is no end to the way normative heterosexual society has made clear that any LGBTQ behavior is abnormal and should be controlled, or worse, even the expression of such feelings should be censored by the society and self, but even an individual with no religious feelings or family pressures to conform to heterosexual norms, may have a strong sense of regret for his or her inability to live out the societal pattern of love, marriage, and children—even while realizing that those possibilities are now available for many LGBTQ individuals as well.

     We don’t know why the handsome young medical student Sam (Matthew Tennyson) came to be so confused by his own inner feelings. But as Simon Anderson’s beautifully filmed work begins we quickly become aware that we are witnessing that very last moments of a wedding celebration at a British county house in which Sam’s older brother Roland (Jack Hawkins) has just married Rose (Elisabeth Hopper), evidently a large celebratory event after which only Roland’s neighbor Nick (Nigel Allen) and his brother Sam remain, still drinking as they probably have been throughout most post-wedding celebration, Nick chugging on a beer, while Sam sips on his glass of expensive scotch.     

     For a few moments Roland joins them before finally being called inside by his bride, leaving the last two guests by themselves. Roland has introduced Nick to Sam, describing him as someone who buys vintage cars, refinishes the autos, and sells them at high prices. The young Sam clearly also loves, according to his brother, all things vintage.

      The two accordingly have something to talk about, but Sam is clearly very shy, Nick moving closer to him so that they might talk, with Sam jokingly declaring that the seat next to him is taken—a clue perhaps to his own fear of bodily contact.

     They talk about meaningless things, Sam suggesting Nick try a bit of his scotch, and Nick wheedling the information from Sam that he is studying medicine. Sam disparages the whole wedding affair, scoffing at the event, and Nick suggests he has something to show him, his newest acquisition, a beautiful vintage automobile.

      Asking him if he’d like to try out a ride, Nick takes him to his own nearby home, letting him wander the rustic farm site while he goes to fetch a couple of more beers.

        The countryside is beautiful and almost by instinct Sam wanders to a nearby stream where a boat is moored. Joining him, Nick wonders if he might want to take it out for a bit, and Sam readily agrees, Nick steadying him as they settle into the small rowboat.

        Nick rows a ways out, and Sam wonders if he might give it a try, Nick, putting his hands over Sam’s, attempting to explain that one rows toward oneself, dropping the oars ahead before pulling back toward the body.

        Suddenly in the midst of the lesson, Sam leans slightly forward and kisses Nick on the lips, Nick immediately responding by leaning fully forward and planting a deep kiss on Sam’s lips in return. But at the very same moment, Sam pulls back, shouting for him to stop.

        Nick quickly pulls away, but Sam continues in his protestations, begging him to not touch him and to bring in the boat. Flummoxed by Sam’s behavior and not having the oars in his hand, Nick simply tries to reassure him that he had simply made a mistake, but the young boy grows even more distraught, finally jumping into the water, swimming the few feet to the dock and running away down a country lane.

       Nick brings the boat in and chases after.

       Briefly catching his breath, Sam continues, clearly not even knowing to where he’s head.

If there was ever any truth to what early psychologists described as male hysteria, Sam is an example of it, unable to even control his emotional response.

     Nick finally catches up, grabs him and pulls him to the ground, attempting to reassure him that nothing has happened and nothing else will. As he falls, Sam whimpers out the words, “I don’t want to be this way,” itself an enigmatic statement since we do not know if the boy is suggesting that he doesn’t want to feel his homosexual attractions or that he doesn’t want to have the uncontrollable reaction that he has just undergone. Perhaps it is both.

       In any event, after pausing for few moments, Nick asks if Sam’s okay and suggests he drive him back to his brother’s. The last words of the film are Nick’s: “Nothing has happened here. Okay.” Nick begins to walk back to the car, as Sam looks back, seemingly ashamed for his behavior but also truly terrified—with the kind of terror I meant in using that word in this essay’s first paragraphs—by the truth of his own feelings.

        This 11 minute movie, given its lush cinematography by Crain Dean Devine of the stunning English landscape, cries out for further development. The leads are beautiful and would make a perfect gay couple. But this is not a movie about what might be in the future. This work is grounded thoroughly in the personal horror of Sam’s present, at a time when perhaps Sam is reaching an age that such behavior, instead of representing the difficulties of a young man trying to come to terms with his identity, hints that it is not the morning that is “broken,” as the title suggests, but the man himself who has become a broken vessel who will soon find himself unable to be mended.

      This film seems to argue that there will always be some who cannot and will not participate in the awakening of sexuality. Some gay figures such as the beautifully sculpted athlete John Dixon beloved by Get Real’s hero Steven Carter, will never be brave enough to accept their differences from others. Sam may also be just such a disappearing figure, lost in a landscape because he has no way of accepting his own existence in place.

       All that we can hope is that the absurdity of this event might make him further ponder his fears and help him to recognize that he will never be like his brother with a new bride calling him into the marriage bed, but that the romance of the moment—two beautiful men leaning toward each other in a rowboat to explore each other with a kiss—can be just as fulfilling.

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2022).

 

Mark Herrier | I Like Mike / 2004

team player

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jay Spears (composer), Mark Herrier (director) I Like Mike / 2004 [3 minutes]

 

This loveable short film is quite improbably sung by a coach/choreographer (Jay Spears, both actor and composer) who makes it quite clear, along with his team, that he “likes Mike,” the catcher. It’s also apparent that his appreciation of Mike goes quite beyond the normal notion of liking someone, as he and his players go ever further in their praises of the teammate, involving Busby Berkeley like displays of their terpsichorean abilities as they lay down on the field, forming various male versions of the Berkeley female adoration of men, islands, bananas or whatever else his women were lauding.

     The lyrics are strong and clear in their campy allegiance to the rather sky catcher, who nonetheless can only appreciate his full admiration by coach, team, and, after three minutes of praise, perhaps even the viewer of this slightly ridiculous very short work. This macho world makes it clear that they are no different, perhaps, in their love of a man than any other gay boy, even if they can express it only in general appreciation:

 

I like Mike, what’s not to like?

He’s the best darn thing to come down the pike

in a good long while. I like Mike.

….

He’s got the leather, got the lumber. He’s a true All-Star,

a permanent pirate in his muscle car.

He’s always playing hardball, that’s my Mike!

 

Mike’s got an attitude bordering on gratitude,

all the big boys makes them cocky.

Mike holds his own cause he’s short but his’s stocky.

   “Ball player, boyfriend,” sing the other players as their continue Mike’s praises. “What’s not to like,” after all, “He’s best darn thing to come down the pike in a good long while.”

    How anyone could even begin to complain about the coach and team praises about a team member who pleases everyone, is unimaginable, no matter how you might interpret this campy little gem.

    Here we perceive openly what we’ve always known, that team camaraderie always borders between admiration and actual love.

    The film ends with the whole team piling onto Mike for a group “hug,” which looks very much like a potential orgy.

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Los amigos raros (Weird Friends) / 2014

echoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Los amigos raros (Weird Friends) / 2014

 

 The last of this collection of Pérez Toledo might almost seem out of place with the others included. Certainly, it is very different from the short works which proceeded it. An hour in length, Weird Friends is more a litany of the directors’ closest acquaintances—the word “friends” does not quite define their relationship to him—than being an expression of queer love as were the others. In this work, 8 years before the director’s death, he explored the life and relationships of a film director named Sam (Adrián Expósito) who quite suddenly and inexplicably commits suicide.

     Although the character is clearly not Pérez Toledo, who, unlike the beautifully trim and physically healthy Sam, spent his life in a wheel chair. Yet, like the feature’s director, Sam has won many awards for is direction of short films, and seems to have the special ability to attract and captivate individuals, events and qualities that we can also ascribe to Pérez Toledo. Sam, like so many of Pérez Toledo’s figures is also gay (bisexual in this case), and is imbued with a sexual mystique that makes him popular with both men and women. And like Pérez Toledo he directs the film that serves as a kind of wake while he is still living—thus living out the desires of so many individuals at least as far back as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn who wished they could attend their own funerals.

       Yet the would-be lovers, fellow directors, and actors who gathered around Sam, were certainly not all complementary—at least as how the director himself describes his substitute echoes. Sam seems to hold within a deep sadness, perceived particularly by the women of the group, Lídia (Laura de la Isla), Paloma (Andrea Duro), and his friend from childhood with who is willing to father a baby, Chris (Violeta Orgaz). Indeed, Chris’ relationship with Sam appears to be the healthiest because, as primarily a lesbian, she demands less from him, even assuring him that he won’t be expected to care for the child she bears. Lídia and Paloma seem particularly oppressive in their demands upon him, Paloma even searching through his cellphone to determine if he’s seeing Lídia on the side.

      Both of these women are sent away, but keep coming back, unable to control the love they feel for him. And some of the men, in fact, feel similarly, certainly Óscar (Ventura Rodríguez) and Rod (Dani Herrera) are disappointed. if not as demanding, that he will not see them for sex on a regular basis.

     Gero (Nestor Losán), who most of the group imagine is also in love with Sam—Lídia going so far to force them in a sexual threesome for a night—discovers that he is not really that physically attracted to Sam, which perhaps allows him to work more felicitously with the director and serve as conduit to him for others. And Gero also realizes that it is impossible to compete with Sam. “I was content with whatever he didn’t want.” He continues with one of the most profound comments about relationships with famous friends: “Over time, you realize that there are people who were born to shine. And then it’s the rest of us, who perhaps are lucky enough if we can help those people shine.”

      The actor Gabi (David Mora), perhaps because he is more openly critical of his friend and less overwhelmed by him, receives more attention and is cared for far more tenderly by Sam than are most of the others. Clearly, they do not a sexual relationship, Gabi announcing to him that he just discovered that he has AIDS, probably transmitted through an orgy at a Villa that he has attended a year before that sounds a great deal like Pérez Toledo’s later 2017 feature film Foam Party.

      But all of them sense his sadness and his attempt to cover his fears and sorrows with a shield of disinterest in deep commitments, despite the fact that he draws people to him with precisely that promise of neediness in his demeanor.

    In some respects, Weird Friends—“weird” perhaps because they are loyal to him despite the diffidence with which he treats time—is a character study, not only about Sam but about the figures who populate his world, Rod, Lídia, Gero, Óscar, Paloma, Gabi, Cris, Joan, and Manu, who are all willing to perform as well in a drama but a dead friend still very much living who has put their own descriptions of him into their mouths. At one point, we see Sam asking one of them, in an outtake, to describe what he feels about him, promising to use at least some of the lines. And one wonders if Pérez Toledo also engaged his actors in such a manner, telling them something about him which he reworked into the descriptions of his characters Sam.

      If nothing else, the layered referentiality of this work creates a kind of echo effect wherein we’re not sure whose voice we are hearing, Sam’s friends, Pérez Toledo’s script, or the real director’s actor friends reflecting on the qualities of the man who manipulates their words and actions.

      And, in that respect, this is a perfect work to close a series of short works about love, since this piece reveals a love that far transcends the issues of sexual relationships, tracing as it does why we remain with people with whom we sometimes find it difficult to even be in the same room with, let alone to sit down and attempt to communicate with them, or share their bed. In watching this film, one thinks of figures such as Federico Fellini, Werner Rainer Fassbinder, or Orson Welles, where dedicated friends served more than simply actors, but lived their lives with one another and shared the mess of the director’s life.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Reivew (March 2023).

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Hidroalcohólico (Hydroalcoholic) / 2020

because of grandma

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Hidroalcohólico (Hydroalcoholic) / 2020 [5 minutes]

 

Hydroalcohoholic of the same year, 2020, also explores gay sex in the days of the pandemic of 2020-2022. In this film Rafa (Adrián Expósito) shows up at Javi’s (Julian Jaramillo) door. Both boys are masked, but Javi even wonders why Rafa is there, particularly when he carefully outlines his fears. He brings his grandmother groceries each day and would be horrified if she caught COVID from him and died. He even questions Javi about his activities. It’s troubling enough that he has been out with a few close friends, but the fact that he still goes to the gym, one of the most dangerous of places, gives him further pause.

      Yet he can’t resist being with the boy with whom he’s evidently communicating on the internet. He unzips his bag and brings out a small bottle of watered alcohol to rub on his own and his friend’s hands. As he does so, the action itself becomes sexual and the two rub their most accessible body parts together in almost in a frenzy.

      It brings Rafa to suggest they might have sex, but with masks on—just for his grandmother’s sake—meaning they won’t kiss. Javi impatiently describes it as surreal, but is ready to proceed only if, for a just a moment, the other boy removes his mask just to get a glimpse of the “real thing.” Slowly Rafa removes his mask, as does Javi, both revealing beautiful smiling faces, something surely these two will remember as they rub their entire bodies together for what may be for the first time since the quarantine.

     But first Rafa demands a dose of hydro-alcohol, but the application will surely be fun at that.

     “This is going to be very weird,” comments Javi. 

     “Everything is weird these days,” Rafa responds.

    Strangely, given the circumstances, it almost appears as if sex has again become something of a tease, an experience that demands the decorum and restraints of another age previously abandoned.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023).

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo | La cuarta cita (The Fourth Date) / 2020

sexual frustration

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) La cuarta cita (The Fourth Date) / 2020 [6.22 minutes]

 

Pérez Toledo’s 2020 film was obviously shot during the early months of the COVID crisis, and the two males of this film, Rubén Bernal and David Mora, are forced to meet up on line for their “fourth date,” only the first evidently having been in person.

      They joke for a while, comment on one another’s clothing and appearance, and express their frustrations for their situation, one of them even more anguished than the other because he evidently cannot speak loudly, having either roommates or family in the next rooms. He is also particularly dissapointed that they didn’t have sex the first evening when they met. But both are obviously in need of a full sexual encounter.

     They finally decide to engage in sex on line, but feel it’s so outré in this day and age, something someone might do in 2007, but not in 2020. Nonetheless, they show off their packages, try to talk “dirty,” and attempt to determine who goes first. But it all seems so ridiculous and removed that they end up in giggles instead of orgasms.

       Both are so attracted to the other, but the distance makes what they really seek impossible: an exploration of one another’s bodies. The first finally dares to tell the other why he wouldn’t have sex that first night, whispering it before speaking the words for fear that his admission he feels “that it’s stupid to have sex the first night with someone you really like” might mean that the screen will go black. This is, after all, the age of one night stands, of the Grindr world where you call up someone else, meet, have sex, and return home sexually satisfied—not the world of dates and giggles which these two have now been forced to “reexperience” like something from the past.

       But the second one, demanding once again to see his friend full face, does not disappear, but sighs in despair, “Fuck! Why did I have to meet the perfect guy just before having a national quarantine due to a pandemic?"

     The other bashfully responds, leaning forward: “Did you say the perfect guy?”

     “Just don’t get too excited, eh?”

     This is one of the first short films to directly confront the problems of what in some countries amounted to a two-year or more hiatus in most gay and heterosexual contact for the numerous younger unmarried individuals. If AIDS meant entirely new ways of approaching sex, so too did the COVID crisis, meaning that young people of now two generations have had to put a stop to their normal sexual activities, a far more serious problem than the self-censoring media will ever admit it to be.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Admirador secreto (Secret Admirer) / 2015

pairing off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Admirador secreto (Secret Admirer) / 2015 [7 minutes]

 

Carla (Sandra Martín) is getting messages from a secret admirer, someone who loves her and apparently knows a great deal about her, but will not provide his name. Her three male roommates (Miguel Ángel Bellido, Yerai León, and Ventura Rodríguez) have varying notions of what to do about it. One suggests it’s gone far enough that it’s reportable; another thinks that it’s certainly not dangerous, given the friendliness and love expressed in the letters. The first friend believes that she’s being stalked and that all secret admirers are ugly.

             From left to right, the negative friend, Carla, the second friend Javi, the silent 3rd roommate

     The second friend wonders whether she recognizes the handwriting as being one of her classmates’. But he writes in capital letters, obviously, to change his handwriting.

      The second thinks that overall, it’s nice: “He knows your name, he could add you on Facebook… He could text you on Whatsapp and be a nuisance. However, this guy is gentleman, he writes nice things.” He likes him.

      But the first friend disagrees, arguing that it makes no sense to write how you feel.

      The second argues that they’ll simply see what happens when it happens, the first, obviously a man of strong negative feelings, adds, “Let’s see when the gentleman threatens to chop your neck off.”

      Carla notices that he has failed to note his apostrophes, contracting a word without putting in the proper punctuation.

       At the fifth letter the secret admirer suggests Carla may not hear from anymore, not because he doesn’t continue to admire her, but it hurts more each time. S(he) signs it “love.” The negative friend again finds him “annoying.” But this time, their female roommate observes, it wrote the letter quite beautifully, without any missing apostrophes. The second friend suggests that perhaps he is the fat neighbor and has been listening into our corrections. The first friend wonders if perhaps the secret admirer is “here, in this room.” The third, who has said very little up this this point, suggests in must be Javi, who’s a mess at spelling. Javi—the one I refer to as the “second friend”—responds, “Well, I know how to write “fuck off.”

      The next day, there are no letters, just a water bill. Facing the three again as they sit upon the couch, she asks them again whether it was one of them who has hassling her. But each one responds, “no.”

      She’s mad at herself, she confesses, for being disappointed that a man she doesn’t even know has stopped writing.

      The next day Javi is laying alone on the couch when Carla comes in announcing that there has been another letter. Javi is curious: another from her secret admirer? But the letter, this time, is addressed to him. It begins, as he reads to the whole group, with the writer feeling that when the letter is put into the slot that all is “irreversible.” The writer goes to say that he has heard that when you feel something for someone, it is better to say it than to hide it—words appropriated from the very first letter we have heard read out.  

       As he continues reading, the camera pans to the young man I have been describing as the negative friend, who mouths the words as they come out of Javi’s mouth, including the last line: “I’m in love with you, Javi.”

     Now you also have a secret admirer, Carla adds, as Javi contemplates the letter he has just read aloud. “What the fuck is this?” he asks, looking up into the faces of his friends, as the third, more silent of their members, declares “I always get confused with apostrophes.”

       As the camera pulls back, we see that for the first time the four are now paired off, face to face with their secret admirers, lovers they did not know they had and perhaps do not even desire. What they’re going to do about it is left to our imaginations.

 

Los Angeles, February 25, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Sí a todo (Yes to Everything) / 2016

i can’t say no

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Sí a todo (Yes to Everything) / 2016 [3 minutes]

 

Enrique Cervantes Carlos as the busy talker in this 3-minute episode, has already fallen for the guy he’s standing next to (Carlos Soroa) before he speaks his first words. In a record shop, a taller good-looking boy is busy leafing through the record selections as the slightly more stout but equally attractive boy next to him speaks about his fascination with the way he looks.

      Finally, the taller stranger looks his way and, observing “Enrique’s” smile, engages him with a smile of his own, signing—establishing from the onset that he is deaf—something apparently about the record selection, and then moving on to signal another message, the lover responding “I don’t have a clue what you are talking about, but it’s ok, I say yes to you to everything. Soon they are wandering about the store, strangers who seem to have immediately become good friends.

      Enrique’s character is sure that his friend can read his lips or, if not, he can write his message out on paper. When he finally is face to face together with his new friend, he asks if he can read his lips; it evident from the other’s response that he cannot. He attempts to explain: “I…like…you,” but the deaf boy seems not to comprehend the message. Enrique asks “Do you like boys?” to which the deaf boy appears to demonstrate his frustration for their lack of communication.

      In the following scene they are riding the escalator down, face to face, which should make it clear to nearly anyone that something is a bit strange in this friendship to say the least. When the shorter boy moves his hand slowly to touch other boy’s hand, however, there is no flinching. He seems to like it, given his self-reflective smile.

     Seemingly worn out, the two boys are sitting together in the next frame. Finally, the chatty friend asks for a cellphone so that he might get his new friend’s number. But it’s not until he himself pulls out his own cellphone that the other understands his request. He takes up the phone and texts: “I don’t know you very well or what you’re up to, but you’re lucky, I also say yes you, to everything.”

     Now standing, the formerly deaf boy, signals the other on.

     If I were in the constantly talking boy’s shoes, I might resist that “come one,” given that the other apparently has been deceiving him the whole time, not a way to begin any new relationship, even one as impulsive as the speaker has been. I’m not sure that Pérez Toledo, however, wants us to make a judgment about either of the two boys who have just made such a remarkable leap into love.

 

Los Angeles, February 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).