Ofir Raul Graizer | Tfilah Be Yanuar (A Prayer in January) / 2007

bread, love, and abandonment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ofir Raul Graizer (screenwriter and director) Tfilah Be Yanuar (A Prayer in January) / 2007 [12 minutes]

 

The short film was Ofir Raul Graizer’s senior film offering at Spair School of Film, long before he went on the make the remarkable feature The Cakemaker, ten years later (2017).

     Like his later film, however, this work is high nuanced and quite subtle, and also involves a lot of work on baking, in this case, despite it being Sabbath, a loaf of Challah, generally served on the Sabbath, and in this case for a small celebratory lunch with Yaron (Yaron Green) and his lover Nati (Ofer Regirer), his lover who has long lived with him on their farm in Israel.

     Although this beautiful loaf, made carefully from scratch by Yaron, is a gesture of love, the man himself is not at all happy when Nati arrives, ready to finally offer some help, Yaron arguing that he has never helped with anything before.

     As he endlessly kneads the dough into the proper elasticity, it is clear, in fact, that Yaron is angry, not only for all those days Nati has left him alone while working on his religious studies, but, in reaction, as we soon discover, for Nati’s decision to leave the farm and their almost paradisical relationship for further religious studies elsewhere. In short, he is abandoning, as certainly required, his loving gay relationship, in order to become a religious man.

     Yet this warm afternoon, he also wants once more time to share his love with Yaron, and almost forces himself on his friend who finally cannot resist abandoning himself to their sexual delights, before he moves the table on which he was made the bread into the sun with its flowering trees nearby, to share his final offering of their domestic life. Certainly, this early short work, reveals, as critic David Hall points out in his review on Gay Celluloid “far more passion between them, than that of the gay relationship depicted in Graizer's impressive debut feature.”

    If you watch this film again after perceiving the story, the whole lovely sharing of the bread becomes an almost tear-jerking experience before Nati walks away, on his way to the nearest bus or trains station, one imagines, to take him away forever.

     When Nati leaves, Yaron puts on a recording of what might be the least expected song to record the sorrow of a Jewish boy, Schubert’s Ave Maria, perhaps one of the most Roman Catholic songs imaginable. But there Yaron is clearly an outsider in his sexual behavior from the Jewish community.

     In the distance, we see Nati walking on his way, but then suddenly stopping, pausing, and just perhaps deciding to turn back to love instead of walking away to his religious identity. We don’t know what his actual decision is. Graizer’s work is far too subtle to answer the pushes and pulls of this relationship, which after all clearly doesn’t eventually knead easily to an elastic relationship of chemicals. But the prayer is there, in the bright January Saturday sun of an Israeli settlement, where Yaron awaits just such a possible miracle of his lover’s change of mind to match his heart.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Stanley Kubrick | 2001: A Space Odyssey / 1968

the lone star

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (screenplay), Stanley Kubrick (director) 2001: A Space Odyssey / 1968

 

As I have made it clear in several of my writings, I am not particularly a fan of Stanley Kubrick, who, since he has a near-cult following and is beloved by many directors for better than he is, such as Martin Scorsese, probably doesn’t matter. Large crowds came out to see an exhibition a few years by at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, including my affable nephew-in-law, visiting from Iowa, who adores Kubrick, so he reported.

     I did not particularly enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey (nor I might add other Kubrick favorites) when it was first released, and when I watched it again yesterday I found it, as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. described it to be “morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long.” And for once I fully agree with Pauline Kael, who characterized it as “a monumentally unimaginative move.” I might add that it is filled with absolute “kitsch.” Put me in a room with Kubrick classics along with films by Terence Malick and I would surely grow quickly mad.

    I am particularly offended by his use of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, parts of which Kubrick uses in several early scenes; moreover, I detest Johan Strauss II’s The Blue Danube, which this film repeats for what seems like an eternity during the spaceship docking. Nor am I drawn to bedrooms in the style of Louis Quatorze. Men jumping around in ape suits don’t much excite me, although I will say I found them rather convincing. Monoliths, have something vaguely to do with human evolution, do not register any awe to my way of thinking. And for in-camera manipulations and light and color, I’ll take Stan Brakhage any day over Kubrick and his crews. The few banalities uttered by most of the cast offer little entertainment value or evidence of acting.

    The models are fairly interesting, particularly the rotating space hotel with its modernist red Olivier Mourgue Djinn chairs. But these do not a good move make.

    The only reason that I bore watching the film again was the wonderfully intelligent Hal 9000, an early version of AI intelligence, who has a kind of nervous breakdown (or perhaps one should say a “circuitry breakdown”) right in front of us because of what he begins to see as his own fallibility and possible “destruction.” As Allan Turing—the only real reason why I reviewed this film—predicted: “by 2001, we will have full intelligent machines,” even if human error may have given them some flaws. He was off only a few years.

       Unlike the bland humans played by William Sylvester, and, later, by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, Hal speaks loudly and reasonably—at least at first. And only he knows that their secret mission to Jupiter (it was originally to have been a voyage to Saturn, but the designers could not get the planet’s rings right) is all about. Neither the only survivor, the Dullea character, nor the surviving audience members ever quite find out what the mission was to have been: maybe just to check out he even larger monolith that exists on Jupiter.

    Hal, much like the replicants of Blade Runner (1982) goes awry because he cannot deal with his own mortality, making him even more human than the homo sapiens in this work—who after all, Kubrick suggests, in their collection of spacecraft and nuclear weapons, are not much different from the apes who learned to wield clubs. Hal is wily, lying about a malfunctioning part, refusing certain commands, while willfully performing others. He can even read lips!

     But Hal also has a crush, so to speak, on Dullea, finally allowing him reentry to the space capsule, while recognizing that he has done wrong, apologizing and promising to be good, then pleading for the astronaut not to kill him. It is indeed touching, and more than a little gay, when having lost nearly all of his marvelous memory, Hal sings the first song taught to him, “Daisy Bell,” for Dave Bowman, the Kier Dullea character, almost sung as a love song.*

      I remind my readers of the lyrics:

 

There is a flower within my heart

Daisy, Daisy

Planted one day by a glancing dart

Planted by Daisy Bell

[Chorus]

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do

I'm half crazy all for the love of you

It won't be a stylish marriage

I can't afford a carriage

But you'll look sweet upon the seat

Of a bicycle built for two

 

      After his death, who needs all of that technical artistry and mysterious goings on in a neoclassical bedroom? Or even a gigantic embryo floating back to earth? Hal, Turing’s invention, was the star of the show.

 

*MGM executives were evidently worried that HAL 9000s voice originally sounded far too gay. Even they recognized the potential that eventually became obvious.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2016).

Pat Mills | Babysitting Andy / 2007

is andy still crazy?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pat Mills (screenwriter and director) Babysitting Andy / 2007 [11 minutes]

 

Andy (Tatum Knight) is a precocious nine year old, more of a tomboy than a girly princess who bedevils her proper parents with questions like, as we first encounter her at the breakfast table, “what does ‘fellatio’ mean?” Her father (Stephen Bogaert) insists she is not old enough to be told, while her mother (Linda Kash), although obedient to her husband’s decision, suggests they just tell her and get it over with. But he recalls the “rim job” incident, which evidently created quite a stir previously within family life. Certainly, Andy knows what that means. The young girl is also a sugar addict.

     Finally, the mother determines to tell her daughter, but almost as soon as she begins she cannot find the proper words to explain it, and the child again is at a loss of what this word must mean that no adult is willing to share with her.

      But also at that very same moment, the mothers goes into labor, immediately calling her brother Paul (Thomas Michael) and his lover Nelson (Ryan Kelly) to come babysit Andy while she rushes off to the hospital.

     At first, after their last experience with Andy, Paul refuses at even this momentous moment. But obviously he and Nelson cannot let his sister down no matter what kind of monster Andy is.

    The two show up, but unbeknownst to us, we perceive that both are physically challenged, wheel-chair bound men. Paul’s first question: “Is Andy still crazy?” says it all. And yes, the nine-year-old kid is still crazy.

   What we also have never before seen is the house itself, made up of numerous open, rail less, stairways, the worst possible house on earth for well-chair bound people. Andy greets them in her fort, which she insists they cannot touch, with a supersoaker gun filled with, as we later discover, cat pee.

      While they are trapped, she sits on the steps, sniffing her magic marker pen, taking out a cigarette to smoke, and eating a full bowl of the sugar her mother has refused her. Paul gladly accepts the cigarette, which when Nelson comments that he thought he long-ago quit, he answers he still smokes on special occasions, such as when being harassed by a nine-year-old.

      Her big question remains: what does ‘fellatio’ mean?”

      When Paul once more refuses to answer her question, she runs off back up the multiple staircase, up to something, as Paul suggests, either eating sugar or smelling her marking pen. From on high she now drops an egg on Paul’s head. Paul, wheels over and grabs her cardboard fort, demanding she put down the eggs. Threatened with her fort’s destruction. Finally, Nelson picks

up the supersoaker gun, and demands she put down the eggs and that his lover put down the fort. Do you promise to put down the eggs if I tell you what “fellatio” means? he asks her.

     Nelson, on discovering what he has in the gun, is now himself disgusted. Why can’t you just tell me what it means. I’m going to find out when I get older, why can’t you just tell me now, Andy reasons.

      But when he begins to explain it, Paul again objects, and Nelson picks up the gun again and forces them both to empty their hands, Andy of the eggs, Paul of the fort he holds over his head.

      Nelson begins the difficult task of explaining that fellatio is when a man puts his penis in someone’s mouth…and almost immediately, Andy shouts out, “Oh my god, a blow job?” totally disappointed that such a mysterious word is simply another name for what she already well comprehends. Why didn’t you all just tell me that?

      Nelson, a bit startled, asks “You know what a blowjob is?”

      She looks directly at him and responds; “Hello. Haven’t you ever heard of the internet?”

     Of course, if she’s that smart she might just as easily have looked it up for herself. And frankly, I don’t believe the whole story. Who with an iota of intelligence would ask two wheel-bound gay men to care for a monster of a child in a completely inaccessible space? And if her parents had already comprehended that she knew what a “rim-job” was, how could they not suspect that she would quickly be able to assimilate the word fellatio?

     We now see her bringing down a mattress from upstairs, and destroying her cardboard fort just so that she might create a ramp to bring them upstairs, have evidently determined that her uncle and his lover are, after all, real friends. And she tells them that she is now determined to become a lesbian, because she finds the whole idea of fellatio to be really gross, no offense.

       In short: cute yes; believable no.

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Jean Renoir | Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment) / 1959

queer by definition

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Renoir (screenplay, based on Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Lewis Stevenson, and director) Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment) / 1959

 

Jean Renoir’s exploration of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story takes the previous Hollywood motion picture route of creating his Hyde, named Opale, and his Jekyll, Dr. Cordelier, to be heterosexual fiends. His is not, as I see it, a LGBTQ movie.

     There is a moment in his film, Le Testament du docteur Cordelier, when the mother of a young man brings his case before the famous psychiatrist—just after Cordelier (John-Louis Barrault) has narratively admitted his “immoral” attraction to his young nurse—explaining that her 18-year- old son has been behaving perversely because he has been sleeping with their maid, in which we wonder whether or not the doctor, in fact, is toying with the possibility of finding a way to further corrupt the boy through his own sexual involvement. The “crime” seems so absolutely ridiculous, even by 1959 standards of moral rectitude, that when the doctor arranges for a time to meet with the boy we have to wonder what he might be planning, particularly given his own backroom activities. Why arrange to see a boy who seems to be a perfectly healthy heterosexual kid?

       But it comes to nothing. We never find out what happens or even if he actually meets with this “patient.” Does the good doctor actually believe he needs “curing?” That his actions are indeed “perverse?”

       In fact, Cordelier’s problems seems to be that he is so psychologically confused that he has mixed up normal heterosexual desire with perverse desires that must be kept under control, despite the fact that the nurse is far more ready to have of sex with him than he with her gives us some idea of the delusions which lead to his attempt to develop of a formula for releasing all feelings of transgression.

       The crimes this Jekyll, Cordelier commits as Opale, are so truly monstrous that they make that the S&M-like scratches and whip-marks of the Hyde of the 1931 and 1941 US films seem almost benign. Even the murders of Hyde in the Hollywood films are far more logical representing as they do women and men that stand in Hyde’s way or may possibly expose him.

       Except for the case of his psychiatric competitor Docteur Séverin (Michel Vitold), a man nearly as possessed as Opale, Opale kills seemingly a random men or women, even in the terrifying early scene in this film, attacking a young child—a scene that could never be realized in a US film of the period, not even perhaps in 1959.

       But perhaps, just for that very reason, because Opale is so absolutely wild and uncontrollable, he is, particularly as Barrault performs him, almost comic. If in the US films there is an odd sense, left over perhaps from the Stevenson work, of Hyde being a still compelling being—even if he appears as a hairy monster—in Renoir’s work Opale is not all “attractive,” but somehow charming and oddly appealing, nonetheless. 

      In his complete “freedom” from all sense of moral duty he stands almost as a healthy alternative to the people around him, the ordinary street people who gang up for moral retribution and Cordelier’s circle of friends whose views are so narrow that they seek to protect each other from even seeming to be involved with the real world, particularly working to keep their friend Cordelier’s name from in any way being connected with Opale, to whom his lawyer Maître Joly (Teddy Bilis) fully knows Cordelier has left his entire estate.

      If nothing else, Opale serves as a wonderful counterbalance to a world in which everything is a sin and all behavior must be controlled.

      Opale, in Renoir’s hands, is almost a Beckettian fool, behaving so very bizarrely that all normal people naturally avoid him; it is he who comes after them just because they are so absolutely terrified of anything out of their narrow limits of defined normality.

      It appears that most critics read this work as a sincere lecture by Renoir of the disaster when the natural is separated from the intellect, when raw desire is segregated from rational decision-making.

      From this perspective it is understandable why these critics might perceive Barrault’s performance as being extreme and “lacking balance” as film commentator Tom Milne ends his otherwise quite perceptive description of Barrault as “prancing, twitching, moving with the animal grace of a dancer...creating an extraordinary, chimerical figure whose intrusion into the real Paris streets lends them a bizarre, unsettling air of menace.” For him and others, Barrault takes those qualities, however, beyond characterization. But for me that is just the point. Opale is outside the limits and definitions of the world in which he discovers himself. He is so far beyond rationality, that no one can even begin to make sense of his actions, let alone explain his possible whereabouts, or even remember what he looked like.

      Moreover, except for the physical pain Opale seems to suffer, this variation of a wolfman seems perfect happy in his perfidious behavior, almost pleased with himself, a bit cocky in his seeming imperviousness. Barrault looks truly more pained with the suave smile of Cordelier at his dinner party than he is walking like a mad Charlie Chaplin down the city street, ready to knock the first person he encounters over the head as many times as possible with his cane.

      In short, his behavior almost seems to be justified by the tightly restricted beings who surround him, forever attempting to impede his motions.

    In that sense, finally, although this Hyde, Opale and his Jekyll-like creator Cordelier seem to be locked into normative heterosexuality, we can certainly agree that Cordelier is closeted and Opale is the figure he has released. The closets of Cordelier’s own studio are constantly being open and closed, just like the doors to various rooms of Séverin’s clinic. Trucks and cars arrive en masse upon which the doors are opened to show policeman exiting and entering. Clearly, this is a world in which things are kept behind doors, and letting them out generally represents danger.

    Whereas the friends and staff in all of the Anglo variations of Stevenson’s tale behave with incredible restraint and rational behavior, here people gang up in groups demanding justice, the police are called the moment danger is sensed, and even while their master suffers locked away in his laboratory, his servants all seem to be having their own mental breakdowns, unable to simply stand up and do something about the screams and shouts they hear emanating from the outbuilding. Everyone in this work appears to be suffering from a kind of hysteria, certainly Docteur Séverin and, at times, Joly. Only Opale, despite his utter unpredictably, seems slightly sane, able to carry through with action.

      If there is no question that his actions go beyond social, political, and cultural bounds they are at least actions, not the gestures of individuals unable to imagine even how to move or proceed. They are certainly queer, but liberating by that very sense of being apart from all normality.

      In short, if Renoir’s version of Hyde is not sexually queer he is in every other sense. And, in that fact, he at least is interesting. Joly’s final insistence that Cordelier, lost in the body of Opale, must suffer his fate in punishment for his deeds speaks volumes for the society that has forced Cordelier to seek out such an alternative in the first place. And even the would-be obedient Docteur defies Joly’s dictum, destroying Opale so that he will die looking at least like the man he desires to be even if that version of himself could never live up to what was expected of him.

      And in that sense only, Cordelier “gets away” with all of his crimes. He has freed himself from the consequence of having attempted to escape. 

      In the end, we have to wonder whether the “horrible experiments” to which the English refers were not less horrific than the terrible restrictions the society itself has put upon its own existence. Even before Opale’s manifestation, Cordelier’s world was one where nearly every kind of variance in behavior was queer by definition.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).