Atakan Yilmaz | Merhaba Anne, Benim, Lou Lou (Hi Mom, It's Me, Lou Lou) / 2024

returning home to face the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Atakan Yilmaz (screenwriter and director) Merhaba Anne, Benim, Lou Lou (Hi Mom, It's Me, Lou Lou) / 2024 [20 minutes]

 

This short film by Turkish filmmaker Atakan Yilmaz begins with its young hero, Hakki (Onur Gözeten), performing in drag in a gay night club as Lou Lou, draped in ropes of reflective glass beads, but still sporting his handsome moustache. He is a sensation, featuring a fluorescent band of light upon his body as he dances. This young university student survives by playing out his homosexuality in the clubs, a reality which he has entirely hidden from his family—except as we later learn, from his mother.

    In Istanbul, he is fine, living out the nights at the bar and with his best female friend, Pamuk (Eylül Dursun), who we see in an early scene as they move off into the night by a taxi driver (the handsome, hirsute director) who Hakki is convinced he peeking in the rearview mirror at his female friend, but who might actually be just as interested in the earringed Hakki, truly himself a sight to behold.

     But at that very instant, Hakki finally takes a call from his sister reporting to him of his mother’s death.

     The rest of this film suddenly settles down into the provincial world from which he has escaped, and his family’s oppression. After 3 years absence this only male offspring must now face the responsibilities his patriarchal society expects him to embrace.

     Picked up by his uncle, Hakki is driven immediately to the cemetery, told that he father decided not to even wait for his son’s arrival for the funeral. And when he finally visits the funeral party, still under way, an aunt declares his mother died in grief over him.

      One might not even imagine a more horrible experience of a young man returning to mourn his own mother. And Hakki cannot even participate in the traditional funeral burial activities, where evidently he is supposed to enter the hole which has been dug for his mother’s coffin, presumably accepting him into the space in which he stands.

         Hakki becomes so traumatized that his uncle finally pulls him out of the gravesite.

     Showering after the event, he suddenly perceives that his toenails are painted bright red, and attempts to remove the coating, but a knock on the bathroom door interrupts his activities, and he is forced to face the grieving family members.

         At the after-funeral meal, we observe his father Ibrahim (Nizam Namidar) demanding his son tell his sister that the Imam has run out of rice and to immediately bring some more. Everyone in this house is clearly a slave to the father’s demands.

     His sister Emine (Yasemin Çonka) is not at all amused by the requests, smoking a cigarette and adjuring her brother at the same moment for wanting a cigarette and for smoking in the house. She is clearly hostile, furious for his inability to simply pick up the phone and answer her calls. “Mom spent days at looking at your pictures,” she informs him. A cramp in his leg, a sock pulled away suddenly reveals his painted toenails, of which he sister at first doesn’t even speak. “My girlfriend did it,” Hakki insists, “It was just a joke.”

      “She has a weird sense of humor,” his sister responds.

      Finally, after everyone has left, his uncle advises him to pass the exams, suggesting that they will find a good job for him. But even the sister whispers that perhaps it is better to stay at their house. But Hakki claims he’s fine. They too also leave, and the outsider is left alone with his father.

      With a series of short, unfriendly comments, he father finally retires.

      On the phone with his female friend, Hakki suddenly discovers a hand-knitted sweater in the gay-rainbow colors.

 

      The next morning, with his father at the breakfast table, his son appears in the sweater, explaining it was a gift of his mother’s. And he explains that his mother had suddenly appeared in Istanbul one day, visiting him. He went in the room, dressed in something like he is now, and she started crying. He explains that he didn’t know what to do, now that the truth was out. She told him everything was over, that his father was going to kill him. “You wouldn’t. I knew you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do it because it was the life God gave.”

      His mother got up, kissed him, and said “You are my child.”

      “Did we do it Dad? Did we kill mom?”

      He tells his father that he will return to Istanbul that night, but all he asks is that he first take him to the cemetery.

      In the last scene Lou Lou is again dancing and singing, this time his traditionally dressed mother standing in the crowd, smiling, encouraging him to be him/herself.

      Given what we know of the world of such religious patriarchy, it seems a bit unbelievable that Hakki’s father seems to finally come to terms with his son’s sexuality through the embracement of his only son by his wife, but we can only hope for such a resolution and this film’s fiction allows that dream; and we can only devoutly wish it so.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (July 2026).  

Juan Sebastián Valencia | Café Perseguido (Chasing Coffee) / 2023

his date for the prom

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Sebastián Valencia (screenwriter and director) Café Perseguido (Chasing Coffee) / 2023 [20 minutes]

 

Columbian-born Juan Sebastián Valencia’s (Kisses for Kevin, Magico) is almost a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the famed Juan Valdez Columbian Coffee ads. In this work Joaquín (Andy Múnera) and Rubén (Mauricio Flórez) work together picking coffee on a Columbian plantation.

     Obviously, the two have worked together for a long while, Joaquín since childhood by the side of the elder Rubén, even as a child playing kissing games that have seemingly developed into what is now a strong gay relationship.

     The only problem is that Joaquín is about to graduate high-school, the evening of the day which we witness being his Prom night. Joaquín has been encouraged with the completion of his education and having saved up some money through his job to move to Bogotá. But having fallen with love Rubén, and loving the beauty of the landscape, what he truly wants is to stay on and buy up enough land that he and Rubén might create their own smaller coffee farm.

      Even more important on this particular day, when he is so alive and filled with the emotional feelings of love that he even claims to see colors across the landscape, Joaquín wants Rubén to be his date to the Prom.

     The elder tries to make him perceive that that is impossible, that it would destroy both of their reputations and probably lose the elder his job. He also attempts to make his young lover perceive that there is no future for him in the coffee fields, that he should move to  Bogotá—where he promises to occasionally visit him. If there were to begin a farm, he argues, the plantation owners would soon squeeze them out of the market.

     But Joaquín’s young enthusiasm and his pure love, both of Rubén and the countryside cannot be deterred. For several years, the two men have played a private game called “chasing coffee,” whose full rules and methods are never fully revealed to us. However, whoever wins the game gets to choose where he wants to be kissed, in a sense making a winner out of both parties.

     This time, however, Joaquín is playing for something much bigger. If he wins this game, he argues, Rubén must attend the Prom with him as his date.

     Since Rubén almost always wins their games, he finally agrees to the bet.

  Valencia’s works have almost always involved a sense of magic, and Chasing Coffee doesn’t disappoint as watching his young lover race through the fields with him on the chase, Rubén himself suddenly begins to see a hazy dust of colors that surround his beautiful young lover, blues, reds, and whites, all set against the endless green of the landscape.

     Joaquín wins the strange game. When the boy asks what Rubén wants him to do, the elder replies, go to your Prom—where I’ll accompany you. We need to celebrate the fact that we are soon buying a coffee farm.

     There is some silliness in this fantasy, of course, even its argument that gay liberation has found its way even into the hills of the Columbian coffee-bean pickers. But it is so charming that it is difficult in our laughter, not to wipe away a tear.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Victor Fleming | Red Dust / 1932

even in the jungle

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Mahin (screenplay with help by Donald Ogden Stewart [uncredited] based on a play by Wilson Collison), Victor Fleming (director) Red Dust / 1932

 

Reminding one a little of another film about life on a rubber plantation, William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), in which the cheating wife of a rubber plantation owner in Malaysia, Bette Davis, shoots her lover for his betrayal, Red Dust ends with Mary Astor shooting rubber plantation head Clark Gable in Indo-China (now Vietnam) for similar reasons. All that heat, sweat, monsoonal rains,  hard work, and maybe just the milky sap dripping from the trees obviously stirs up melodramatic emotions.

       Fortunately, the central couple in Victor Fleming’s 1932 film, Dennis Carson (Gable) and Vantine Jefferson (Jean Harlow) don’t quite take their feelings quite so seriously—although Dennis almost gets hooked by the proper lady airs of Barbara Willis (Astor) until, discovering just how much her young husband, Gary (Gene Raymond) (a man even his wife Jeanette MacDonald realized was gay or bi-sexual when she found him in bed with actor Buddy Rogers)—a couple clearly unfit for the tropics—loves his wife, he puts on his halo and becomes a momentary saint by denying his love for her and returning to his fellow kind, Saigon (specifically pronounced “Saygone” in this work) prostitute Vantine.

       But in between his affairs with both women, Fleming allows the young Gable the opportunity to pull open the buttons of his shirt and mash his sweaty face and body into both women at will, establishing his macho Douglas Fairbanks-like image (who Fleming, often himself described as a “man’s man,” worked with and directed early on) that would propel him to Gone with the Wind fame (also under Fleming’s direction, after Gable had George Cukor sacked for being a fag or, perhaps, it is rumored he knew much about Gable’s early days as a male prostitute).

      Frankly, when it came to women’s feelings, Gable (and in this case Dennis Carson) didn’t give a damn. In both cases he rejects the intrusion of women into his man-cave until he has a few drinks, gets horny, and virtually rapes them—although the recalcitrant and unrepentant prostitute Vantine is perfectly happy with the situation. But then, so too does Babs become desperate for physical contact with this misogynistic mess.

       But he does truly care about his men, and spends several days by Willis’ side when he arrives with case of malarial fever. He knows just how to deal with it, telling Willis’ wife that he’s only lost three patients. And he later is so moved by Willis’ devotion to his wife, that he abandons his plans to steal her away from him. Men are an important commodity in the jungle, while women are simply sexual stimulants, like the later craze for sex toys.

       Despite its totally racist—Dennis almost gets joy from kicking around the “coolies” and even the saintly Willis admits that you can’t trust them—and sexist attitudes, Red Dust is often fun to watch, if for no other reason than the electricity between Harlow and Gable, who give and take abuse with equal amounts and seem to enjoy the interaction. When Dennis suddenly grows prudish in an attempt to spare Barbara’s more refined sensibility, Vantine dives into the drinking barrel to take a bath in the nude, the curtains Babs has whipped up for the sake of discretion thrown wide open for all to witness. Even as Dennis comes to straighten out the situation, she dives in and out of his hands like a bar of soap, frothing up the scene with early-30s playfulness regarding nudity. Evidently, in shooting of the scene she stood up at one point totally in the nude just to give some pleasure to the hard-working crew. This Hollywood legend sounds like something Harlow truly would do.

     Married to the German psycho, as writer Anita Loos described Paul Bern, Harlow in the midst of shooting had to face his suicide, a death of which some suspected her involvement and which was later found to be related to Bern’s former and current lover’s Dorothy Millette “suicide” by jumping from a steamship—Bern later being suspected as having killed her before killing himself. Harlow missed only 10 days of shooting, however, some evidence such as a change in hairdo, left behind. But throughout Harlow remains front and center, the only figure who has utterly no pretensions and, unlike the numerous other Hollywood scarlet women of the screen, had no compunction playing a whore who loved her job, serving as the truly moral voice of the film by lying to the gullible husband.

     She not only wins’ back the love of Dennis for her fib, but gets to close out the film by reading children’s bunny-rabbit stories to the macho bed-ridden hero healing from his gun wound. Certainly we can guess where this is leading.

        What perhaps only Richard Barrios’s study of gay screen figures in Screened Out will tell you is that even in Vietnam gay sissies cooked the food and washed and ironed their “master’s” panties and pants. In this case the often hysterical Hoy (Willie Fung) plays much the same role in Dennis Carson’s household as Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy performs in Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation mansion—a much exaggerated commentator on the old masta’s and guests’ outrageous behavior; only Hoy is also clearly queer, at one point after carefully ironing Barbara’s panties holding them up to his own bulky midriff and giggling with all the glee of an effeminate Asian houseboy (see Reflections in a Golden Eye of 1967 for a later example); Harlow’s comeback: “You even find them in the jungle!” By them I presume she mean’s girly-boys, not women’s panties, but with Vantine you can never tell.

       Red Dust, despite all its flaws and apparently for its several delights, was chosen for inclusion in The National Film Registry and made a hefty sum for MGM movies.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

Edward H. Griffith | Rebound / 1931

going for the mail

by Douglas Messerli

 

Horace Jackson (screenplay, based on the stage play by Donald Ogden Stewart), Edward H. Griffith (director) Rebound / 1931

 

Casual commentators have been hard on Edward H. Griffith’s 1931 film Rebound, describing it as having a stagey, canned plot. As it’s directed, with a script based on the Donald Ogden Stewart stage play by Horace Jackson, I suppose most viewers might see it that way. Moreover some credit this financial flop with ending Ina Claire’s film career, while the vamp of this film, played by Myrna Loy, survived.

      What I can’t understand is why they didn’t let Stewart, later one of the best screenwriters of all time (he penned the screen scripts for The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, That Uncertain Feeling, Life with Father, Edward, My Son, and An Affair to Remember, and many others despite the fact that he was blacklisted and emigrated from the US to England) rewrite his own play as a film script. Stewart was also a member of the Algonquin Round Table, the figure on whom Hemingway based his portrait of Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises, and a fairly successful comic novelist. So I have a great deal of feeling for his Philip Barry-like witty dialogue when it winds itself through Griffith’s rather mediocre and, in fact, stagey directing.

     I also think Ina Claire, despite that the fact she’s certainly no beauty, is rather wonderful in this work. As the central figure—who catches her husband, Bill Truesdale (Robert Ames), on the rebound after the girl in which he was in love, Evie Lawrence (Loy) decides to invest in marriage rather than love by marrying the wealthy but virtual walking-dead businessman Lyman Patterson (Hale Hamilton)—the wise-cracking spirited Sara Jaffrey (Claire) is highly doubtful about the benefits of marriage, particularly given the relationship of her imperious mother (Louis Closser Hale) and her loving but alcoholic father (Walter Walker), and has just herself rejected a marriage proposal when Bill surprises her with the offer. Having just batted down the matrimonial pressures of her mother and sister Liz (Hedda Hopper), and finding Bill quite attractive, she commits a mistake that she spends most of the rest of movie regretting.

      For no sooner than the married couple run off to Paris, but Evie shows up, still interested in fanning the flames of love still smoldering in Bill’s heart while knowing by this time that Lyman is so plain stupid he will never catch on.

    Sara, on the other hand, is so clever and savvy that she’s figured out the situation just by her contraband reading of Evie’s letters to Bill. The very day that they are about to celebrate their first anniversary, Bill goes to the bank for the mail and returns so late he misses the visit of Sara’s father and returns with Evie in tow, the beginning of a torture for the witty survivor of what she suddenly realizes is a broken relationship.

      If the plot is clearly melodramatic, something else is happening just below the surface of far more importance with respect to the sudden reappearance the man who had originally quipped, after asking Sara to run away with him, “Oh I’ll marry you if I have to”: Johnnie Coles (Robert Williams), the man I would argue who, along with Sara, is the figure who makes this work worth watching.

      One might almost suggest that in the character of Johnnie director Griffith and screenwriter Jackson have created one of the first coded film figures, thanks to the uncut signifiers of the original Stewart script. In one of the earliest lines of the film, Bill accuses Johnnie of wearing purple underwear, particularly when writing poetry, as well as stealing his tie, stockings, and other personal items. We might just presume that Bill’s roommate was simply the borrowing kind except for the fact that usually it is women not men who share one another’s personal items of clothing; and the purple underwear, not to say the fact that he writes “poetry,” makes it clear that our handsome young quipster is most likely not the marrying kind.

       But if we had any doubts, Sara’s rejection of his offer makes it clear that she recognizes her beloved friend as one of the many gay men of the day who, finding a woman they enjoy being around, marry them to cover the trail of homosexual activities, the perfect example being Cole Porter, even if he did truly love Linda. And the list of such literary figures is a long one, including to name only a couple of examples, Charles Ryder who marries after falling in love with Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Clive Durham’s abandonment of Maurice Hall when it is clear that he will not be able to inherit his estate without marriage in E. M. Forster’s Maurice.

       If those of us who read behind the text had any doubts, when Johnnie suddenly shows up in Paris on the one of the most unhappy days of Sara’s life, he asks where Bill is, she responding with her ready if ironic cover, “He went for the mail.” Johnnie responds: “Well, I’ve gone for the male. That’s all right.”

       The fact that Johnnie has now stuck his head out of the blind may explain why a few scenes later—long after Sara has lost her sense of grace and has begged Bill to show her the love that their marriage requires—goes down on his knees to beg Sara to divorce Bill and marry him. But even here, she recognizes his act as a ludicrous one, demands he stand up and realizes from his action just how much of herself she has abandoned for the sentiment of love. If love requires accommodation, she suddenly perceives, it should not demand a loss of one’s own identity—something her father has been attempting to tell her throughout the work with his repeated insistence that she never change.

       Sara sends Johnnie packing once more, despite her fondness for him, realizing that their marriage would be simply a travesty, while she regains her humor and wit as she begins divorce proceedings.

       By this time we’re so sick of Bill Truesdale and his silly-minded lover Evie that we wish Sara would have packed up quicker, left the house and returned to Paris where at least she might have been able to hook i[ with Johnnie for a few glasses of champagne and a plate of bon mots. But alas, convention requires Bill to ask for her forgiveness so sweetly that she remarries the lying cheat all over again, surely recognizing that as she grows older it will be hard to keep up her Djuna Barnes*-like clever patter.”

       Perhaps Johnnie’s sexuality is not truly covert enough to have kept the censors away if it had been shot a couple of years later when Joseph Breen was just beginning to catch on that his friends in the Production Code Office weren’t that keen of closing down movies. But certainly even in 1931 such an obvious queer figure would not have been allowed to communicate with the heterosexuals in this film if the Hays Office were fully aware of what the film was saying. As it is, Johnnie steers clear of nearly everyone except Sara and Bill. Few others even engage him in conversation, and for much of the film he either lights up the party by playing the piano or simply lurks outside the rooms where “normal” folk are dancing.

       In a strange twist of fate both Robert Ames, who played Bill, and Robert Williams who was Johnnie died within a month of each other within the year this film was released. I don’t want to make light of such a tragedy, but one can’t wonder whether there was something else going on during the time they served as roommates.

        

*I mention Barnes, who certainly was one of the great Paris expatriate wits, because just a year before this film, with the stage play Rebound still on his tongue, Barnes interviewed Donald Ogden Stewart with a dagger clearly buried in heart with envy for all his success, his friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, Phillip Barry and so many others, including Hemingway, and Rebound itself, a play which she had clearly seen and liked. Although she and he and been at the same parties, he was now famous while she was still interviewing him in the Theatre Guild Magazine to eke out a living. More than any other interview she ever did, Barnes shows her evil self, by the end even wondering if he wants to die, as if she might easily put him out of his pleasure if he so desired. Ogden: “No,” he answered lightly, “do you?” “We don’t mind,” we answered, stepping into the night.”

      I also have a soft spot for Stewart due to his friendship with the playwright Phillip Barry, whose Holiday and The Philadelphia Story he so brilliantly brought to film, both starring queer actors Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Sometime around 1972 or 1973 I published a satire on the Renaissance Borgia family very much in the manner of Stewart’s own satirical histories in The Washington Review of the Arts. One of the editors of Mary Swift reported that her dear friend, the widow of Philip Barry, portrait artist Ellen Semple Barry, had read my story and absolutely loved it. I was delighted.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

A. Edward Sutherland | Palmy Days / 1931

the nice girl

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eddie Cantor, Morrie Ryskind, and David Freedman (screenplay), A. Edward Sutherland (director) Palmy Days / 1931

 

Eddie Cantor’s 1931 musical comedy Palmy Days begins with the following scene:

 

    A man stands at the counter to a bakery shop.

    Man: (Rapping impatiently on the counter with a gloved hand) Young lady! I’d

         like to order a cake. I must have it in twenty-four hours. Here’s my card.

    Clerk: What kind of cake would you prefer?

    Man: A five-dollar one. A birthday cake. Chocolate. All chocolate. (Stares into

         space mooningly) I love chocolate!

    Clerk: Would you like a little rose on top?

    Man: No...make it a pansy! (He widens his eyes and bares his teeth in a “You

          know what I mean” smile, then hurries off).

     The clerk just happens to be Betty Grable before she became a star. The man is not mentioned in any list of credits I’ve seen, and the incident and role is completely incidental to anything else about the movie; yet, as film historian Richard Barrios argues, while it is clearly a caricature, it is also evidence of how in so many of the early 1930s films before the Hays Code got serious about banning any reference to homosexuality that gay men co-existed in “a milieu where they might mingle with straights, are accepted at face value, and are neither punished nor censured.”

     If you thought, coming at the beginning of the film, it might serve as a clue to the rest of work, you’d be much mistaken. For this Eddie Cantor vehicle, although from time to time hinting at LGBTQ issues, characterizes the hero as far more heterosexually inclined than in his film of the previous year, Whoopee!, allowing him to court a young beauty, Joan Clark (Barbara Weeks), the daughter of the boss, while having him chased, much like the nurse in his 1930 film, by the bakery’s physical coach, Helen Martin (the always wonderful Charlotte Greenwood). 

      As head of the surreal workout exercises of the all-female staff of the Clark bakery, it is even hinted that Martin may be an old dyke delighted to have a daily regimen of sapphic beauties traipse before her. And indeed Busby Berkeley’s choreography of their work-outs as they sing songs such as “Bend Down, Sister” (by Con Conrad, Ballard MacDonald, and Dave Silverstein) in which that mad coordinator of terpsichorean beauties demands each of the scantily clad Goldwyn Girls bend before their coach—and more importantly for the male moviegoers’ eyes—to reveal her cleavage. And the way she sizes up each of her trainees, literally defining them by their height, curves, and other bodily features surely suggests that she has an eye for the sweet doughnut-makers she been asked to batter into good shape

     But Martin, who is also interested in the supernatural, is convinced that it’s finally time that she finds a husband. And poor Eddie Simpson (Cantor) is sent forth by his imperious and crooked employer, the spiritualist Yolando (Charles Middleton) to offer him up as a sacrifice for the possibility of having an ally implanted in Mr. Clark’s (Spencer Charters) highly successful business. Once she gets her hands on him, she not only carries him away, but rides, batters, and beats him into a shape that looks more like a pretzel than a straight man.

     Eddie escapes her pummels of love by entering the boss’s office at the very moment when has been promised, also by the scheming Yolando, a new efficiency expert. Cantor has always had a way with older men—indeed a great deal of his humor has to do with aging, ailing, and dying. A typical standup joke which he trots out in this film: “I wanted to kill myself, so I stood in front of an approaching taxicab. But it was yellow.” And before you know it, the two have almost gotten into the physical comic routine rolled out in Whoopee! of showing each other their hospital operation scars, fortunately cutting it short. He spends far more time, inexplicably, helping to teach his new friend how to quack like a duck.

      A few frames later Eddie has fallen for the boss’s daughter, mistaking her love interest for her father’s assistant Steve (Paul Page) to be meant for himself. And in interviewing some of the women servers, he is served back his patronizing comments—“You don’t drink? You don’t smoke? You don’t stay out late at night? You’re a nice girl”—with the girl asking the same questions of him, and coming to very same conclusion, “You’re a nice girl too.”

     Halfway into the movie for utterly no logical reason Cantor, as Eddie Simpson, appears in blackface—a racist habit I wish he might have been able to overcome—and by the film’s third quarter he’s reduced to drag in order to get enough laughs to counter the terrible acting and illogical plot contrivances of Yolando and his henchman. Interestingly enough it’s George Raft’s threats that encourages him to shift genders, the same influence he had on Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot 28 years later.

      There’s a great deal of running about to find the money Eddie has taken from Clark’s safe and baked into bread for safekeeping, and the mistaken belief that his marriage to Clark’s daughter is about to be announced at a party everyone in the film is required to attend; but all ends just as it should, the money is found in the first loaf he breaks open, Joan becomes Steve’s fiancée, and Eddie discovers, after all, that he really loves Helen Martin, as they quack happily into marital bliss.

       Strangely, for its utter balminess, Palmy Days isn’t the worst hour you might spend at the movies. And, as Barrios suggests, in this film you at least know that gay boys and lesbians live in the same surreal universe in which such a concept of nice girls still exists.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).