Aiman Hassani | خطا Khata / 2019

an error

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aiman Hassani and Britt Snel (teleplay), Aiman Hassani (director) خطا Khata / 2019 [48.40 minutes]

 

Centraal was a 2019 Dutch TV series of six episodes all centered around the Rotterdam Central Railway Station, the various works were concerned with a wide range of figures religious, desperate, lost, or simply wandering through the vast station. Episode Number 4, Khata, aired on November 8, 2019, and written by Aiman Hassani concerns two Moroccan-born brothers, young and very young, who work the station as male hustlers.

     In Arabic “khata” means an “error” or in this case the horrible mistake made by both the elder brother Hatim (Nizar El Manouzi) and his gentle sibling Kamal (Akram Tanna), first of all for having somehow—their personal histories are never explained, although we see an example played out through Kama’s friend, Milo—having gotten involved in hustling with the brutal pimp Danny (Chris Peters), but more specifically given the events of this narrative, for Kamal’s having come to take male sex serious and falling in love or at least the idea of love with one of his clients Jacob (Tobias Nierop).

    As we see time and again in several of these “working boy” films the biggest mistake boy hustlers make is getting to like their work, identifying as homosexual, and actually seeking out love. These three sins are enough to doom and even destroy a young male prostitute, and it is the story of how that happens that director Hassani attempts to convey to audiences who surely had previously no idea even about how these young men and boys are used in the public facilities. The Rotterdam station is one of the central hubs of Europe; even I have traveled through its corridors on my way to and from Paris, the city which later becomes Kamal’s symbol of true love and escape.

      Let me just begin by expressing gratification that in Hassani’s work we finally get a fairly honest presentation of the ugly business which so many US films have seen to present as a joke or a simple matter of the wrong occupational choice, fit only for the stupidest of good-looking boys. Let me also say that the three times I watched this made-for-TV 40-minute film at moments I could hardly bear to watch it, and later knowing what was about to occur I had to turn if off for a period to time before getting up the fortitude to continue with the tragic series of events.

    In the case of Kamal, who is the central figure of Khata, it was clearly his brother Hatim who introduced him into sexual “slavery” perhaps somewhat innocently when his kid brother complained about never having spending money or perhaps, more likely, he was the only neophyte he knew when Danny and his bosses demanded an offering of new blood. Even Kamal seems to be unable to realize that in introducing his best friend Milo (Sem Ben Yakar) to Danny he is betraying everything that friendship might mean and sending a young man his age to his doom.

     One cannot help but compare Hatim’s sacrifice of his brother to the alter of hustler money to the relationship of Charley Malloy (Rod Steiger) to his younger brother Terry (Marlon Brando) in On the Waterfront. But Hatim does not just ask his beloved brother to throw a fight which eventually marries him to the waterfront mafia-controlled unions, but worse, literally tosses him into bed with the pimp to be raped and bound into the slavery of prostitution.

     In the similar “showing him the ropes” party which we observe the innocent Milo even imagines he’s attending a kind of all male slumber party where, treated like an adult when offered alcohol and drugs. But before he can even begin to comprehend what is happening, Danny has begun to grope him and soon, with others pinning him down, rapes the boy, someone filming the action. In Milo’s case Kamal tries several times to intervene but is tossed away by others as if he were a rag doll. When finally, he can no longer bear his friend’s screams he retreats to the bathroom where he reexperiences his own “introduction” into the hustler’s life.

       The filming of the event is crucial, as soon see. Throughout the film Danny has threatened Kamal, often in the car with his brother Hatim saying nothing, for not handing over enough money. It is not that he has kept record of the boy’s sexual encounters, made mostly in the single toilet cabins in the Rotterdam station via phone transactions between passing travelers who arrange to meet up in the portable-like toilets to have their cocks sucked. But that Kamal, although regularly active at first, has been hiding some of his earnings, we don’t know for what purpose but we can only imagine for an eventual escape from the world in which he is trapped.

       More importantly, one customer with whom he hooks up, an architect named Jacob, not only pays him for a longer period, but demonstrates seemingly genuine love for him, taking him to bed after sex and holding him like a lover. Over several encounters the two bond, one rainy night Kamal even remaining in bed with Jacob for the entire night, lying to his mother that he has stayed over at Milo’s house.

        Jacob—so taken by the “otherness” of the Moroccan boy’s skin and hair that it comes dangerously close to being a racist-like adoration of outsiderness—invites Kamal to join him on a business trip to Paris. What this film doesn’t entirely make clear is that besides hustling, it appears that Kamal is also attempting to attend his regular school classes, something surely required by his middle-class family. How he can manage this and still keep up with his meetings at the Rotterdam Centraal Station halls is rather hard to imagine, but that appears to be the fate of many such boys. It is evident that he cannot simply run away for a few days with Jacob to Paris. Yet he promises that he will join him at another time, and he believes in that possibility almost as a token to the time when he can leave his terrifying world behind.

       Clearly Kamal’s focusing on a single customer, particularly when he is holding back some of the bonus money the wealthy Jacob is providing, does not please Danny. It is apparent that either Kamal is refusing to hand over his earnings or is not sufficiently doing his job. And it isn’t difficult for someone like Danny to discover what is at the heart of the problem. 

        Recognizing that his worker has become a “faggot” (in Dutch he simply describes the boy as a “homo”), Danny threatens Kamal if he does not come clean, rid himself of his “love affair,” and return to business as usual. Hatim also pressures him to stop the affair, while the impossibly still naive boy explains to his brother that his client has promised to take him to Paris. When Hatim warns him of the consequences, Kamal briefly reminds his brother, in a scene that parallels Brando’s moving reminder to Steiger in On the Waterfront, that it was he, his own brother, who destroyed his life: “I could have been something. I could have been a contender.” Here Kamal simply pleas that they both find a way to get out of the lives in which they have become entrapped; but we observe that Hatim has, in a sense, turned into a voice that merely parrots Danny’s warnings. He has become part of the underworld system.

        In an attempt to find solace from the brewing storm of his life, Kamal attempts to hook up again with Jacob, but only gets a recorded message in response. When he visits Jacob’s house, the architect is in the midst of an august gathering for his mother’s birthday, and quickly shuttles the boy out the door, shocked that he would attempt to meet up with him without warning.

       Suddenly we recognize that despite all of his beautiful ministrations to his sexual toy, that Kamal is not truly worthy in his mind to be a part of his “real” life. Even if they have enjoyed sex alone in the night in a new office building that he has designed, by day he could never been seen with a Moroccan boy at his side. In Paris, Kamal would be kept safely in a hotel room or permitted only to walk the streets alone.  

    When Danny threatens Kamal with the tape of his own initiation rites, hinting that he will reveal it not only to his parents but his school mates and everyone else who know him, the boy becomes unstrung, grabbing up the computer containing the film, and runs. Out of breath, he pauses on the street, throwing the laptop to the concrete, kicking it, and pummeling the machine of horrific communication again and again, only to hear his phone ring where he perceives a long list of reactions by dozens of friends and acquaintances who have now witnessed the film of his sexual “coming out.”

        By the time he reaches Jacob’s house, he sees his former lover attempting to wash away the graffiti someone has painted across his windows in retaliation, apparently, for his sexual relationship with Kamal. As the boy attempts to seek out solace from the only one who ever showed him caring physical love, Jacob rejects him, pushing him nearly out of the door as Kamal himself tears off his shirt to reveal the body the man had once so gently caressed—all to no effect, Jacob insisting he leave immediately.

        Running into Hatim on the street, his brother pummels him with anger and bitterness, as Hatim attempts to calm and hug him to. They motorcycle back to their motel-like abode only to find the door lock changed, their own parents having locked them out. Kamal pounds pointlessly upon the door, demanding that his mother and father let them in. When his mother finally halfway opens the door, we comprehend that no entry back into family life will ever be possible for either of them.

        As the credits role, the viewer might almost miss seeing the now drugged-out Milo crossing the terminal to sit at one the tables to check his cell-phone for sexual his connections.

        I don’t know what the reaction of Dutch families was when this film appeared upon their TV screens. I’ve looked for information in an attempt to try to see if the film, set within several other seemingly more whimsical Rotterdam train station stories, had any effect on Dutch society, as surely as Grodecki’s Mandragora did on the Czech scene. This film, like Grodecki’s notes that what we have seen was based on real events, but then disclaims, as such movies always must, to any specific events and individuals, denying any connection with true beings or lives. Somehow there seems to be an error, a khata ( خطا ) in the film maker’s logic. Obviously if it was based on “real events,” it was also based on “real” individuals, surely now only ghosts, destroyed by the society which could not help them to survive.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).

 

John Jarboe | Blythely Oratonio in Blythely Ever After / 2020 [TV video]

the night she sang opera in drag at a karaoke bar

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Jarboe and Stephanie Blythe (screenwriters), John Jarboe (director) Blythely Oratonio in Blythely Ever After / 2020 [TV video]

 

As part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series at The Appel Room, popular Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe takes on a drag role, one of the many “beards” she’s played throughout her long career, Blythely Oratonio, a somewhat intemperate tenor who she first met while selecting mustaches for one her roles and later encountered again for a full evening at a karaoke bar, in what Blythely describes as one of the best nights of his life. Backed by up his band, The Fluffers, his non-gender performing “Birdies” (Messapotamia Lefae and Sav Souza), and his “Flowers” (Hailey McAvoy and Margaret Tigue), Blythely plays a gay man who not only knows his Grindr inside out, but throws out various gay slang terms, some of them so crude that most opera singers might not even whisper them in the dark.

     As critic Brady Schwind observes in BroadwayWorld:

 

“Bearded, bejeweled, and ready for battle in a Trojan headdress, it's patently clear from his first entrance that Oratonio, in his first American Songbook appearance, like the best of all opera heroes (and antiheroes) will take no prisoners. But lest we forget, tenors are also sensitive, fragile creatures; the inflated symbol of importance in an art form steeped in such an antiquity of tradition, it's continually pegged as a likely candidate for extinction.

…. Such a presentation, at first blush, might be the kind of grand and over the top drag exploitation, you'd expect from (at best) The Box or (at worst) America's Got Talent. Oratonio, with his band The Fluffers, merges expected mind-bending classical vocals with (what's become rather boilerplate) anachronous cross over pop anthems likely on heavy rotation at your local karaoke bar. Imagine Pavarotti doing Rick Springfield's ‘Jessie's Girl’ as a Mozartian baroque and you get the idea of the musical vocabulary and running gag of the evening.”

 

      As one might expect from such a figure, Blythely goes back in time to tell of his childhood attractions, which elicits “Jessie’s Girl,” to far more broad-minded pursuits, discovering his true self. Early in the hour-long concert and chatfest, Blythely sings passages from Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” that are so perfect, I wanted to hear him sing the entire piece, but as he prone to do throughout, he quickly intertwines that work flawlessly with the call of another clown, singing from “Vesti la giubba” by Leoncavallo.

     Barry Manilow’s “Could Be Magic” alternates with Puccini’s “Recondita armonia,” and Delibes’ beautiful flower duet, sung by his “Flowers,” becomes an occasion for several testimonies from celebrities, including Stephanie Blythe herself, as well as the tenor taking a few deserved bows.

     Surprises in Blythely’s choices of music abound, as when he sings, quite stunningly, Toni Tennille’s and Daryl Dragon’s “Gentle Stranger,” and the next moment drifts off into Offenbach’s “Barcarolle.”

     But despite the musical wonders Blythely calls up, it is often his personal revelations that tug deepest on the heart, particularly when he describes in graphic terms the moment he realized, on the toilet no less, that he could he can no longer “carry an expiring maid while singing a high D.” Elsewhere, Blythe, as herself, has admitted that after menopause, “my voice started moving lower and lower, and I’ve worked to develop this lower range. It’s a natural progression because of hormonal changes, and I’ve chosen not to fight it.”

      And there is throughout Blythe’s Blythely’s choice to explore the sometimes fluid shifts of sex and gender of operatic characters, as Schwind points out, such as the macho Valkyries and the loving male duo of “Nessun Dorma." Blythely’s operatic songbook, indeed, has no reason to exclude a glam rock musician such as David Bowie, whose “Changes” she sings quite admirably, or the opera-loving Freddie Mercury,* who himself pushed his music toward the oratorio. She closes her show, in fact, with his “We Are the Champions,” with the audience’s full knowledge that the “we” of which Blythely sings are far more diverse than the more conservative opera-goers might ever imagine that pronoun to be.

     What I would now truly like to hear is a full night of Blythely singing Broadway tenor solos.

 

*Mercury first met Spanish opera singer Monserrat Caballé in 1987, and in 1988 released an album with her, Barcelona.

 

Los Angeles, May 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

 

Zarrar Kahn (Hamza Bangash) | آوارہ کتے راتائن نو نکل دے (Stray Dogs Come Out at Night) / 2020

trapped

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zarrar Kahn (Hamza Bangash) (screenwriter and director) آوارہ کتے راتائن نو نکل دے (Stray Dogs Come Out at Night) / 2020 [11 minutes]

 

There is a difference between the listed director of the film itself and its representation of IMDb and Letterboxd, one claiming Hamza Bangash wrote and directed this film, the other Zarra Kahn. They are both one and the same, a Pakistani filmmaker now living in Canada.

     Iqbal (Mohammad Ali Hasmi) and his uncle Khurum (Adnan Shah Tipu) work as masseurs for a living in Karachi after leaving Iqbal’s wife and family at home. By the time this film begins, Iqbal is suffering from what appears to be AIDS or some other sexually-contracted disease. He desires to go away for a weekend of enjoyment with his supportive uncle to the beach.

     His loving iron’s his clothing, makes sure he takes his pills, watches films on his cellphone with him, and basically supports him. But both know it is a losing proposition, that given their jobs as sex workers, Iqbal will certainly die.

     Their first few moments on beach consist of Khurum attempting to discover which client it was who made his nephew sick, and insisting that when he finds out he will thoroughly punish and even kill him. We immediately feel like his theory of revenge does not make for a reliable comfort for the sickly Iqbal. Khurum tells his nephew that he will not do it with a client without a condom, but the younger man jokes who would want to do it with an old prostitute like you.

     And things gradually shift as they order up tea. A dog comes up to them, the gentle Iqbal feeding him, while the gruff uncle screams at the dog to leave, commenting that the police are rounding up wild dogs and shooting them. They never go after the thieves or drug smugglers but are only too ready to kill stray dogs, he intones. And his laugh somehow lightens the tone of what has just proceeded.

      And suddenly in the very next scene they are riding on a camel that is obviously a feature one pays for on this beach, the uncle singing an old song, his nephew joining in. It is finally a beautiful scene, a true representation of their love and shared experiences, particularly given their demeaned lives as men who have left their families to engage in same-sex work. So much is expressed of their lost joys and frustrations in these few moments of ridiculous activity, riding a camel among the waves of an ocean like grabbing a horse carriage in Central Park, as if we didn’t live truly in the age of automobiles and jets. It is a beautiful sentimental gesture, freeing the men momentarily from the degradation of their lives.

      His uncle Khurum advises him to return home to his mother and wife in the village, but Iqbal knows quite well it is all bluff; with his disease he cannot return home, announce it to the village, take his medicine and live on for as long as possible. Their lives have rendered them as untouchables. The is no going back.

     The unthinking, clearly misogynistic uncle even goes as far as suggesting that his wife Saima should share his own conditions, she too she be infected and he will send her medicine alone with his. It may be only a joke, but even Iqbal is not up to his absurd humor. It is actually an ugly statement reiterating how they cannot go home.

     Iqbal demands the end of their camel ride and walks angrily off. He frustratedly makes clear he cannot go back as a gun falls out of his robe, Khurum now quite distressed by the situation, perceiving quickly why his nephew has obtained the gun. He pretends it may be to kill Khalid, the possible source of Iqbal’s illness, but he knows all too well that it is meant for his nephew himself, not at all about his silly version of vengeance. As Khurum begs him for the gun, he argues that all his uncle can think of is himself. He has asked for just a single day of joy and his uncle cannot even provide that. But even then, walking on further down the beach alone, his symbolic image of the stray dog roaming the same beach with high rises in the background, Khurum follows him, as the boy now sits smoking a cigarette, his uncle reprimanding him for smoking, suggesting it will be bad for his health.

    Iqbal, does not strike back with the sentence that immediately comes to be: “What health?” But all this older man can suggest is that he too smokes, his nephew should offer him one; but when the young man offers up his own cigarette, Khurum refuses it, making it quite obvious that he is even fearful of sharing the same saliva of his supposedly beloved nephew.

     In the next frame it is already dark, and Iqbal decides to stay a while longer, sending his now quite unwilling uncle in the taxi back to the hotel alone.

     As Iqbal sits alone on the beach, the stray dog at his side, he finally takes his gun out and puts it to his head, but as he breaks down in tears he cannot pull the trigger. Yet he attempts again, the gun locks and will not shoot; he puts it down angrily, pulling the trigger once more and this time accidentally killing the dog.

     Yet, we all know he will be next, either through suicide or his own illness.

     This is a truly powerful statement about gay sex work and AIDS that seldom comes out of Pakistan, but brilliantly expresses the despair of so many in his position.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Derek Jarman | The Queen Is Dead / 1986

take me out

by Douglas Messerli

 

The Smiths: Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce (composers and performers), Derek Jarman (director) The Queen Is Dead / 1986 [music video]

 

For decades Morrissey had been enticing young British and US followers with his and The Smiths performances of songs that blurred gender boundaries and toyed with vaguely homoerotic narratives. Finally in his 2013 Autobiography he admitted to having had a long term relationship with a man. Yet even then the formerly declared “celibate” hedged his sexual bets by describing himself as “humasexual,” presumably suggesting that he was bisexual or possibly tri-sexual if he dared explore relationships within the Q factors of the LGBTQ sexual community. As one entertainment outlet put it, “everyone rolled their eyes” as if to ask, “so what’s new?”

     In a sense, it doesn’t matter, for The Smiths’ work had always toyed with cross dressing and adolescent sexual angst, particularly in their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead for which the out and proud gay filmmaker Derek Jarman filmed a fascinating music video which included three songs from the recording, the title song “The Queen Is Dead,” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Panic.”

     While Jarman’s work sometimes references images suggested in the songs themselves, one might also argue that his film was basically created with a narrative logic that is not beholden to the lyrics. In general, Jarman is far less sexually explicit in this music video than he is in his own films, particularly given his images in Sebastiane of a decade earlier and Carvaggio of the same year. In the music video there is little nudity, and the intensity of the male on male gaze is kept to a minimum. Indeed in the first song, the director almost reaches back to the 60s and 70s hippie world to encapsulate the new world of freedom experienced upon the occasion of the Queen’s metaphorical death. Young children transmogrify into childish-like adults, one dressed in a striped shirt and short black pants who trips around a vacant industrial lot spray-painting the song’s title upon concrete walls. Young girls in dresses are a moment later transformed in what appears to be a young man in a long gown, suggesting the song’s lyrics about Prince Charles’ secret desires:

 

                           I said Charles, don't you ever crave

                           To appear on the front of the Daily Mail

                           Dressed in your Mother's bridal veil?

                           Oh...

                           And so, I checked all the registered historical facts

                           And I was shocked into shame to discover

                           How I'm the eighteenth pale descendant

                           Of some old queen or other

    The dancing boy in dress at one point drops the top of his bodice to reveal a woman’s breasts, suggesting that perhaps what has appeared to be a boy is actually a woman with hair closely cropped. But later, the image again appears to be a boy with a fairy flitting about it.

     Throughout this section—and indeed throughout the entire video—the royal crown spins about the young apparently cross dressing figure who embraces roses, a sunflower, and what appears to be a nettle, perhaps hinting at Johnny Marr’s song “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” not represented in the video.

      To the strains of music that suggests “We can go for a walk where it's quiet and dry /  And talk about precious things / But when you're tied to your Mother's apron / No-one talks about castration” the boy-girl begins to spin and by song’s end the young transsexual figure is rotated almost into a wild Turkish dervish, a flame lit where once was his/her face.

      My favorite song of the video (and one of my two favorites of the record as a whole) is the true centerpiece of Jarman’s tribute “There Is a Light...” To me this narrative song, about a young man in the car who is clearly enjoying the trip to someplace “Where there's music and there's people / And they're young and alive,” with another, perhaps slightly older boy at the wheel, represents all the wonderment and confusion of a first date. The song reminds me a bit of Luther Vandross song sung by Teddy Pendergrass two years earlier in Alan Randolph’s film Choose Me, “You’re My Choice Tonight,” the five syllabic phrases, “Take me out tonight,” and “You’re my choice tonight,” that ends in a molossus (three equally stressed metrical syllables) in each case assertively pleading the other provide him with pleasure. 

      But in this case the narrative goes far deeper. The boy at the center of the song is also seeking an escape from home:

 

                     Driving in your car, oh, please don't drop me home

                     Because it's not my home, it's their home

                     And I'm welcome no more [.]

 

This young man clearly has been kicked out of his own home, which suggests to me that it has something to do with his sexuality as expressed in the rest of the work. The young man with who whom he’s riding is obviously someone with whom he’s in love but is too shy to express that fact:

 

                      And in the darkened underpass

                      I thought "Oh God, my chance has come at last"

                      But then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn't ask [.]

 

So delighted is the presumably younger man that he ridiculously imagines that even if a double-decker bus of “a ten-tonne truck” [sic] crashed into them, he’d be happy to die: “To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.”

       I read this work, in short, as a coming out story, about a young man forced out of his own home by his parents because of his sexuality being taken out on a wild night by the boy he clearly adores.

       Apparently, Jarman reads it similarly since he represents a handsome young man who eventually appears shirtless before finally being kissed by another boy hovering over him. The short sequences of this portion of the work are presented almost as in the thousands of young gay coming of age films that by the next couple of decades had become so popular that currently they dominate LGBTQ filmmaking.

      Here too, as in the previous work we see flames, but in this case instead of representing the end of the old regime they signify the possibility of being killed by the crash. And in a sense the young man, demanding to move forward without a return, can only imagine that he might be consumed in his young love for the driver, the male in charge. Jarman reveals the truth of this song: that it speaks not only of love but of a desperate search for a replacement of the familial love he has lost. Death would be better than going back as long as he was in the arms of the driver of the vehicle taking him to a new destination.

      As the two again kiss, the surface becomes scratched over by what eventually appears to be gains of wheat—for an instant Jarman almost seems willing to romanticize their love into a Hallmark card image—the golden stalks appearing to embody the hair of the blonde boy being kissed, and finally blotting out the faces of the two lovers as Jarman’s frame resolves into an abstraction that if one focuses long and deeply enough ephemerally reveals a series of lithe nude dancers.

      The third song, “Panic” begins, in Jarman’s vision, with an image of a cool handsome young man in a leather jacket who slightly resembles a British version of James Dean who seems to stand against and apart from everything that the lyrics are announcing:

 

Panic on the streets of London

Panic on the streets of Birmingham

I wonder to myself...

Could life ever be sane again?

The Leeds side-streets that you slip down

I wonder to myself...

 

Hopes may rise on the Grasmere

But, Honey Pie, you're not safe here

So you run down to the safety of the town

But there's panic on the streets of Carlisle

Dublin, Dundee, Humberside [.]

      While the figure smokes and stares off into the bay, we also get glimpses of derelict streets, graffiti-laden walls, alleys filled with garbage, and buildings that appear to have been shot-up by bullets. Is the young man a product of these war-torn streets?

      Yet, despite his seeming bemused attitude, a war even against the music itself is brewing as the lyrics invoke that the discos be burned down since the music that they play has nothing to do with the narrator’s life, ending, of course, with the now famed final invocation that they should

 

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ.........

     By video’s end the young man seems to almost be kissing a smoking skull, an expression of the necrophiliac relationship the man has had, apparently, to that DJ or the music itself.

     In 2019, writing on the internet site Far Out Kelly Rankin nicely summarized Jarman’s contributions to the art of musical videos and to the work, in particular, of Morrissey, Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce.

 

“Jarman’s fragmented style perfectly suits the cult-classic band The Smiths. All of the footage was shot on film; the Super 8 was notoriously Jarman’s favourite companion. There are multiple accounts talking about his early days and how he would never leave the house without it. You can tell from the first second; there’s an abundance of hand-held camera action of urban scenery. Followed by shots of punk behaviour, alarming figures and costumes, highly contrasted shots of Buckingham Palace, other places around London, the crown—and of course the Queen herself—all giving a nice salute to Morrissey’s anarchistic lyrics. Layers of film overlap, these shots cross over each other… you might not always be sure of what you’re looking at exactly, but you are definitely intrigued. You want to know why he chose each detail and what everything represents.

     All of this has happened in just the first five minutes. It’s a piece of visual art, not just a music video. Although each song and section of imagery is completely different, there are still clear themes that run throughout the thirteen-minute film. Shots of flowers, fire and angels; an eighties take on romanticism. It’s thirteen minutes of a decaying Britain, with flashes of beauty and queerness. If you love The Smiths, Derek Jarman, eighties Britain...you should give it a watch.”

      

     It would have been interesting to see how Jarman might have approached another song on the 1986 album, “The Vicar in a Tutu”:

 

I was minding my business

Lifting some lead off

The roof of the Holy Name church

It was worthwhile living a laughable life

To set my eyes on the blistering sight

 

Of a Vicar in a tutu

He's not strange

He just wants to live his life this way

 

A scanty bit of a thing

With a decorative ring

That wouldn't cover the head of a goose

As Rose collects the money in a canister

Who comes sliding down the bannister?

 

A vicar in a tutu

He's not strange

He just wants to live his life this way [.]

 

    But perhaps that would simply be too literal for Jarman’s more subtle talents. Yet I’d love to have seen the vicar slide down that bannister.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).