Raz Bar David Varon | לילא אחת ביאפא (Layla Achat BeYafa) (One Night in Jaffa) / 2014

a night on the town

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raz Bar David Varon (screenwriter and director) לילא אחת ביאפא (Layla Achat BeYafa) (One Night in Jaffa) / 2014 [24 minutes]

This is a sad film, where Layla (Tzachi Zeev Look), a transexual woman, just offered hormone therapy by her doctors, decides to celebrate a night on the town. Her constantly snacking mother, sitting on the living room couch (Miriam Cohen) vaguely attempts to dissuade her, but Layla, putting on her best shimmering dress, desperate to get out and find whether her new identity will lead to any success in a Jaffa gay bar.

     It does not. The bar is filled with ruffians, gay men, and people totally disinterested in such a beauty. She pushes her way in through the door keep, but almost as quickly leaves the establishment for a much needed cigarette break.

    In this neighborhood, young rough men sit smoking and drinking, one of whom Layla, a bit in desperation by this time, approaches. He is Or (Ori Levanon), who seems harmless enough and is rather attractive, and before long he shows a willingness to return back home with her.

     By this time, Layla’s mother is already sleeping, as they walk by her sleeping body to the transgender’s woman’s room, she explaining that her mother does not permit her to bring back the men she meets.

      Or, perhaps a bit rambunctious, willing joins her, but soon after begins to describe her as a male, and appears more interested in her penis than acknowledging her own identity. It becomes quickly apparently that he likes transgender women more for what might be described as “role playing” that observing their new identities. She protests, but he threatens her, and before she can even begin to complain, he turns her over and basically rapes her, fucking her in the butt. He quickly dresses and leaves.

     Layla, shaken and frightened, not only by the evening’s event, but for what might be her future, sits down before her still sleeping mother and attempts to cuddle up to her, desperate for love that she now knows won’t be at all easy to find in her new world.

   It is a shattering preview of the difficulties transgender women find throughout the world, but particularly in such patriarchal and religiously closed-off worlds as Jaffa is, or that matter, how life is still for many transgender individuals throughout the USA.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Shota Kalandadze | Associations with Wagner’s Music / 2006

work-out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shota Kalandadze (screenwriter and director) Associations with Wagner’s Music / 2006 [5 minutes]

 

It is hardly surprising that the self-described eroticist, Georgian director Shota Kalandadze’s appropriation of the music of Richard Wagner, Associations with Wagner’s Music, employs its short 5 minutes mostly displaying homoerotic images, primarily of young sports figures boxing and participating in a mass Judo session and, most significantly displaying their mostly nude bodies in the shower.

   Relying primarily on selections from Wagner’s Ring cycle, Kalandadze begins with boxers, gradually scrolling up his images so that they reveal, bit by bit, a man showering with other men standing by the ready next to him.

      Eventually the scroll produces a female image, her breast shining in the sunlight of a window as she is transformed from a black-and-white figure to one in color, a massive Judo gathering following which suggests not so much eroticism as it does the programmed calisthenics of sports marathons, particularly those of Hitler and other fascist regimes. But these Judo performers are anything but uniform in their movements, and even this scene turns erotic as some men decide to strip off their shirts and begin their own regimen of set-ups.

 

    The upward scroll of the film clips returns us to the shower room for an even more slightly revealing homoerotic scene, which gradually reveals a smile upon the composer’s imposed face.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024). 

 

David Dean Bottrell | Available Men / 2006

ultimate bloodbath

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Dean Bottrell (screenwriter and director) Available Men / 2006 [15 minutes]

 

David Dean Bottrell’s short film, Available Men from 2006 has got to be one of the funniest short comedies ever written. But for me to successfully convey the cleverness of the work I’d have to read back the full script, and even then you’d need the original cast to properly bring it off.

    The situation is pure farce. Steve (Brian Gattas), a handsome young gay man who has been having some difficulty in finding someone who wants what he desires, a serious, long-term relationship. His psychiatrist has suggested he get out more often and just “be himself.” He’s scheduled a meeting for a blind date named Robert (Jack Plotnick), a truly mild-mannered shy gay CPA from Glendale also seeking a serious relationship.

       At the same hotel bar, Rob (Richard Rucccolo) an agent who in the past year has lost several of his writers and actors—and his wife—is truly desperate to sign up a truly strikingly beautiful ex-cabdriver who’s written a new hot Hollywood script, Ultimate Bloodbath. He’s never read the script nor seen the writer Stephen (Kostas Sommer), who along with Steve is already sitting at the bar waiting for their appointments.

      Obviously, there’s a mix-up, Rob convinced that Steve the gay man is his date, and, soon after, Stephen presuming the agent who’s after him is Robert.

       In a sense, the situation is straight out of 18th century comedy, as the languages of both the actor and agent sound so similar to gay sexual jargon that they might be misunderstood and more desperately and far more coarsely speaking about the things expect from a gay relationship. The agent Rob, so desperate for a client, recounts the times when one of his partners has wanted always be on top, and, stressed him out, but meeting every day at lunch time to demand more and something bigger, etc. But he’s loyal and will “ride that pony over the finish line, you feel me?”

       The actor/script writer Stephen makes his own demands on Robert, that he not only provide him occasionally with an Asian hooker but that he wants “to be paid. A lot.”

      “Paid?”

      “Why the hell else would I get in bed with one of you guys?”

      The agent confides to Steve that sometimes it gets hard, on rare occasions, and when it does it get hard, “I’m your man..”

      You get the idea.

      The accountant Robert is the first to react, forcing the writer to put down his cellphone, as he takes off his own glasses, and looks him in the eye. He reports that he is “a level 8 Brazilian jujitsu Black Belt master, ranked 139th in the world. If there were any justice, I would take you out behind this building and beat the living shit out of you, you stupid, soulless, arrogant, little bitch….”

       He gets up to leave, pretty boy Stephen following after, pleading “I want to be with you, you got balls. I want to be with you, I want to be with you,” running after the escaping gay accountant.

       Our unsure gay boy Steven follows suite, saying that he thought that he had problems but hearing the sense of desperation in Rob’s pleas, he now knows that he is fairly healthy. At one point in his diatribe, he asks Rob what is it he really like to do it life. The man replies, after some thought, to open a bookstore.

       So, we are told, Rob now works at Round-N-Round Records and has a new girlfriend. At a party Robert and Steve met each other, fell in love, and are desperately now happy. Stephen’s screenplay never came to be filmed. He’s now looking for something else.

       See the movie; I can assure you you’ll laugh a lot—aloud.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).