Jordan Fleury Kervella | Le goût de l'autre (The Taste of Others) / 2014

acquired tastes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jordan Fleury Kervella (screenwriter and director) Le goût de l'autre (The Taste of Others) / 2014 [9 minutes]

 

The “taste” referred to in this short film from 2014 is not a reference to a strange cannibalistic rite, a sort of precursor of the horrific 2022 film by Luca Guadagnino, Bones and All. Certainly, the central figure in this film Julien (François Marion) is obsessed with Alan (Teddy Bogaert), but the taste referred to concerns Alan’s interest in Verlaine as opposed to Rimbaud.

     In a brief meeting between the two, Julien begins with asking if Alan is a bottom or a top, which so offends him that he immediately breaks off their conversation and leaves, forgetting his cellphone on the table.

      From that first meeting Julien begins to imagine sex with his Verlaine, dreaming of a relationship between the two of them, the possibility of which he has perhaps destroyed. Although Alan calls him and makes an appointment to meet him again for the return of the phone, Julien does not show up but instead goes home with an older man, still imagining sex with his younger friend.

     When he finally does meet up again with Alan, it is at a poet’s bar where Alan, surprisingly, reads Rimbaud. After the reading, Julien asks to read, quoting a few lines from Verlaine, before he finally hands back the phone to Alan. He quips: I’m really not fond of Verlaine. Far too lecherous.”

      Alan smiles in a way that makes one wonder whether perhaps they find a way to meet up with one another again after all.

      This is the kind of French film that makes little sense to US audiences, France being a world where poetry is still taught to students even at an early age. And literature students do claim their favorites, read them in public ventures, and note what poets their friends are drawn to with the ability to perceive the significance of their tastes.

      Yet, despite its literary delights, Jordan Fluery Kervella’s short seems pretty empty with regard to contemporary LGBTQ content.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Chris Coats | Stay Lost / 2023

the twilight zone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Coats (screenwriter and director) Stay Lost / 2023 [12 minutes]

 

There is something about Chris Coats Stay Lost that simply rubbed me in the wrong way. The story of a young boy (Keiynan Lonsdale) just getting off work at a small-town drive-up grocery who gets a call from his father insisting that he must also take over his shift at the store, suddenly falls into the twilight zone as a 1960s curly-haired hippie (Lukas Gage, a little too old to be playing this role) is seen playing his guitar under a nearby tree. Within minutes the hippie has seduced the hard-working boy—suggesting that the boy’s father has drug problems despite the fact that we have utterly no evidence for this—into running off into an endless road trip just to get away from the difficulties of his ordinary life.

     A few minutes later, the boy has come back, having stolen his father’s truck, to pick up his new friend as they speed off to a hippie commune where the musician is evidently the most beloved of this community of endless “love and peace” living in a shanty-town world more colorful, of course, but less organized than the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. Inevitably, the truck breaks down, making a return home impossible for the boy and giving the musician an opportunity to continue his seduction of the young man.

      They begin kissing in a manner of a Hallmark card if that company had ever imagined depicting the love-children of the 1960s babbling out words suggesting their love was fate. A few minutes later they’re back on the road for a thousand and one nights of grungy sleepovers wherever they can find a spot to drop. How the couple will eat, dress, and clean themselves seems beside the point of this idyll whose goal appears to be broadcast in the film’s title.

      I too loved the musical Hair and all it stood for, but even though I lived through that period as a young boy of the perfect age to become a hippie, the idea of going for weeks without a bath and a good bed and being surrounded by all that raucous noise, uninvited company, and psychedelic color—which soon after found a perfect fit in movie musicals and ad campaigns—never attracted me in the least; nor did the dirty-haired boy fresh out of that past in Coats’ film.

      Although the hard working-boy clearly needed a break, and it was he who picked up the hippie in his dad’s truck, we might make a case that he had been seduced by an older man and kidnapped, never to be heard from again.

      The invocation to “stay lost,” almost send chills up my spine. We truly hope this young boy will eventually find someone who isn’t as lost as his hippie friend.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Marc Heustis | Miracle on Sunset Boulevard / 1977

let it be

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marc Heustis (director) Miracle on Sunset Boulevard / 1977

 

Marc Heustis’s seven minute film Miracle on Sunset Boulevard advertises itself as a sped-up version of Sunset Boulevard, but in fact has almost nothing to do with Billy Wilder’s film except that it features an aging actress shopping in Beverly Hills on Wilshire Blvd. where unexpectedly she is greeted by a fan wanting her autograph. So horrified is she in being reminded of her long ago career that she lets the wind whip the piece of paper which she attempting to sign out of her hand as she goes on the run.

     Late at night, a bit like Norma Desmond, she watches her old movies, but once again grows terrified by the process of re-living passionate love scenes from decades earlier and cries out several times (silently of course) “STOP!”

     Utterly devastated to be so continually reminded of her age, she is suddenly visited by the vision of a lovely woman who, a bit like a cartoon vision of a figure just escaped from a Maxfield Parrish painting shows up and evidently serves as a sort of mother-confident, campily reintroducing our troubled movie star to the four elements of earth, air, wind, and fire. And suddenly she materializes a young female child which the actress takes into her arms. Either the mysterious seer is pimping as a provider to agèd pedophiles or reintroducing our elderly wunderkind to her younger self, but the result is a true miracle as the actress seems suddenly entirely content as she walks off into the woods with her new child.

      Starring Gregory Cruickshank, Viva DeLuxe and Marzipan with a background mix of music by Mahler and Prokofiev, Heustis’ film is simply silly, its redeeming quality providing seconds of bearable camp. We are told it captures the spirit of the early films, of which Heustis was a founder, of the San Francisco Frameline Festival.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).