Mikel Ledesma | Losing Your Flames / 2014

afraid and afraid

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sara York (screenplay, based on a story by Mikel Ledesma), Mikel Ledesma (director) Losing Your Flames / 2014 [31 minutes]

 

Mikel Ledesma’s moving short 31-minute film Losing Your Flames belongs not only to the “coming out” genre but to the increasing group of what be described as LGBTQ educational films. Sone of the films, aimed at frightened and confused LGBTQ youths. These such as Thai director Tanwarin Sukkhapisit’s feature film It Gets Better (2012) and US director David Tjen’s short of the same title (2014), attempt to counsel and console young viewer to not give up hope or even how to deal with occasions of bullying and punishment. Others such as the charming short by Mark Marchillo, The Curse of the Un-Kissable Kid shows even younger teenagers not only how to avoid bullying but to be patient about finding the right same-sex person who may show up simply out of the blue. Works such as Joel McCarthy’s Why Does God Hate Me? (2011) take on the religious prejudices young queer people often encounter.

      A subset of these educational projects, however, such as German director’s Limus Krömer and Benjamin Fürst’s Hör zu (2017) and Ledesma’s Losing Your Flames focus on the stories of how bullying and homophobia destroyed young folk destressed by losing their best friends, their families, and sense of general sense of self-worth. What one has to wonder, however, to whom these later films are addressed, given that seem to offer up warnings viewed primarily by those who have or are suffering similar problems, not by the heterosexual bullies and homophobic family members who might be moved by such films to alter their behavior. One suspects that, in fact, these films, which often end in suicide, serve as group memorials for those who suffered and could not bear to up to difficulties they faced for being labeled as a queer, fag, or freak. Only in the best of these “after the fact” stories, such as Alan Brown’s O Beautiful (2002) does the queer get his revenge.

     The central character of oddly titled Losing Your Flames, Chris Steadman (Dalton Edward Phillips) is involved in a closeted relationship with his fellow school mate Greg (Mikel Ledesma) and perhaps has had sexual relations with the school jock Zach (Elvis Clark) who he later describes as being bisexual. Living in a small, religious town filled with close-minded people, Chris nonetheless feels that if he is careful enough about his sex life with Greg he can stay under the radar long enough to graduate with incident—the sentiments, one suspects, of thousands of small town LGBTQ individuals throughout the world who, weighing the freedoms of “coming out” with those of staying in the closet, who have determined that silence is the best solution.

      Perhaps that often works. But just as often, particularly in the age of social on-line sharing and the easy access of cell-phones, it fails, as it has for Chris, whose “girlfriend” discovers on his cellphone a love message from Greg. Bitter about the discovery that she has been dating a “fag,” Lindsay (Jori Gill) immediately goes on a campaign to show the message to everyone at the party she and Chris are attending, and within minutes, Chris is confronted with his fellow male “friends” and their dates who egg on Zach, obviously the most popular of their set, to beat up the “lying faggot.” Although he attempts to cool down the situation, to protect himself from discovery, Zach is forced to hit Chris, the other males immediately piling on to severely beat the boy.

       By the time he returns home, even his parents have heard the news, answering with the worst that Chris might have imagined, throwing him out of their home. With no place to go, Chris breaks into the local church just to ponder the situation, riling against God himself for offering no help, and admitting his shock that not one of his former friends have stood up for him despite the fact that he is the same boy he was a day earlier and, in any event, there is nothing he can do to change who he is. In a dialogue with God that reads more like a prayer, Chris admits to being “afraid and afraid.”

      He calls his friend Greg, but there is little he can do, particularly since Chris is not completely forthcoming and will not even reveal his whereabouts. Confronting the track star Zach with his betrayal, Chris gets the answer that he himself might once have proffered: the choice is between accepting the brutality of the group or losing his scholarship for school. No one in his conception of the world in which he lives would support a bisexual sportsman.

      Without hope and anyone else to turn to, Chris sneaks back into his own home while his parents are out, and hangs himself. We get a brief glimpse of the community’s grief and perhaps recognition of their own guilt at the funeral, but we can’t be sure that this isn’t Chris’ own imaginative view of what will happen after his death since the director keeps toggling the film back and forth between Chris contemplating suicide and its aftermath.

      Unfortunately, this film—with its poor soundtrack, its far too heavy reliance upon its musical score, and confusing scene that almost toys with the viewer’s emotions as the director seems to be undecided whether or not his hero will or will not kill himself—fails to deliver what began as good intentions. It appears that writer Sara Lock and director Ledesma themselves were uncertain about what they were trying to tell us. Did they really want to suggest that Chris could find no way out of his tragic dilemma or might he come to a fuller recognition that, just perhaps, things do get better—a cliche I myself detest since obviously they don’t get better for the countless young boys and girls who, kicked out their homes for revealing their sexuality, are forced to fend for themselves in societies that are often even more brutal that the narrow-minded ones from which they have escaped.

     One wonders why they never brought Chris’ lover Greg back into the scene. Mightn’t he, in his love, be able to reach out to help his boyfriend? Might not his parents, who have accepted Greg’s sexuality, be able to offer Chris at least a temporary home, a sanctuary where he could bring matters back into better focus? It appears that in their character’s time of crisis, even his creators opted out?

      Yet the story they tell, we recognize, is a very real one. And year after year, even in a century where members of the LGBTQ community can marry, in most states adopt children, and be recognized generally throughout much of the world as individuals not so terribly different from the heterosexual majority, there are hundreds of younger and even older queer beings who feel they have been pushed forever into the corner of hate with no way else but death to escape.

      One feels that if the general script for millions of LGBTQ individuals has been rewritten, somehow an ever great number of individuals in both smaller and larger communities never got the notice or were simply caught in the terror of difference that consumed their fathers and mothers.

     I also do wish the creators had created a different title.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2022 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2022).     

   

Søren Green | An Evening / 2016

before or after

by Douglas Messerli

 

Søren Green and Tomas Lagermand Lundme (screenplay), Søren Green (director) En Aften (An Evening) / 2016 [9 minutes]

 

Obviously meant as a follow up to Søren Green’s 2014 film En eftermiddag (An Afternoon), En Aften (An Evening) is only a slightly longer work that takes us to the moments after the two boys of the original, Frederik (Jacob Ottensten) and Mathias (Ulrik Windfeldt-Schmidt), have now sexually consummated their relationship.

     We don’t know if this is their first time together—a direct result of that afternoon meeting when they attempted to sound out one another’s sexual interest—or the ending of one of many of such sexual sessions they have shared. All we do note is that Frederik seems to be troubled, the fact of which Mathias notes, but seems fairly unconcerned. Frederik was moodier even in the first short film, and now seems to be worried about the state of things even more than in the first work where he received the happy news via text from their mutual girlfriend Amalie (Julia Wentzel Olsen) that Mathais was very much interested in him.

      All we can glean is that Mathias seemingly knows how to lure his friend out of his funk, gently touching and stroking him, although at one point Frederik pulls back. And most important, all seems to be fine once he suggests they call for a pizza with all the toppings.

       There are two interruptions in their troubled after-sex moments, however, which matter very much in terms of their ongoing relationship, but which we can’t tell whether they are flashbacks or a slip for a few minutes into the future.

       The first appears with Frederik and Mathias sitting on a table which appears to be in the schoolyard, Frederick in the same shirt which he has put on in the earlier scene, waiting, so he tells Mathias for Amalie to stop by. Frederick seems disturbed by what he sees as her intrusion, suggesting that Frederik seems always be with her. A pizza is again ordered, and the boys charmingly spar a bit, as Frederik replies that Amalie’s not his “type,” Mathias replying that he couldn’t get her even if he wanted. The two engage in a mock fight the way young boys who enjoy one another’s company often do, engaging in wrestling simply as a subconscious way of being able to put their hands upon the other.

       Amalie comes up to the screen without them knowing and watches for a moment.

     The scene then switches back to the brooding, after-sex scene, which makes the schoolyard clip seem all the more like a flashback, connected by Frederik’s call for pizza.

       There is another such intrusion, however, which picks up where the other left off, this time the boys discovering Amalie’s presence and Mathias going over to her to talk momentarily about her evening plans to attend a movie. He suggests a romantic film for her to see.

      Eventually Frederik joins Mathias, he and Amalie greeting one another, with her responding, “You look cute.” Frederick asks what she means, Amalie replying, “You look cute together.”

      Frederik angrily reacts, “We aren’t cute,” storming off with Mathias following, wondering first what he’s doing and soon after, where is he going. Frederik turns back for a moment to answer: “I just can’t do this,” turning away and walking off with Mathias starring after in confusion.

     If this is a flashback, obviously, then the situation has, at least, been temporarily resolved, although Frederik’s behavior hints that he still having problems perhaps accepting himself as one of a “cute” gay couple. But if it is a continuation of his troubled, after-sex brooding, we can only imagine that the two may never be able to actually be a couple, that he is simply not ready for a relationship. The result may be similar, but the fact that they have been able to come together after recontextualizes the entire situation.

       There is no way of knowing. And perhaps their sexual encounter has only reified his lack of surety. But a great deal depends upon whether this is simply his reaction to what has happened to them or a pattern of behavior with which Frederik has learned to accommodate. I think that because the two intruding scenes are filmed in bright sunlight and the after-sex scene is titled “en Aften” that we must presume they have somewhat resolved their problems and may be moving into a new future.

      But they are young boys, after all, and, particularly in Frederik’s case, with a full-out commitment to his sexual desires may still be something for which he is not yet ready.

     Interestingly, in the first film it was Frederik who was constantly texting Amalie, while in the second it is Mathais.

    Whatever, one must admit, they do make a cute “couple,” which someday they might recognize is not a put-down but an expression of their beautiful youth.

 

Los Angeles, June 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Bertrand Bonello | Saint Laurent / 2014

remembrance of things past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bertrand Bonello and Thomas Bidegain (screenplay), Bertrand Bonello (director) Saint Laurent / 2014

 

Bertrand Bonello’s film Saint Laurent was the second Laurent film of 2014. Whereas Lespart’s version, while certain revealing many of Laurent’s excesses, focused more on his career, this second “unauthorized” movie, digs in its heals about expressing the tawdrier aspects of the great designer’s life.

        As opposed to the elegantly appointed offices of Yves Saint Laurent, where during the day Laurent (Gaspard Ulliel) and his employees, dressed in white lab-coats, work endlessly to make runway deadlines, his night-time activities—if this film is to be believed—was a dirty world of grungy gay park sex, drugs, and light (or maybe not so light) S&M, particularly when Karl Lagerfeld’s boy-toy Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel) enters Saint Laurent’s life. Mostly, however, these night-owls seem to spend most of their lives lounging about while watching others pretend to have fun, or just lying about on divans while popping pills and swigging down bottles of gin, scotch, and champagne. Despite the garish colors of his film’s night world (reminding some critics of the films of Luchino Visconti, perhaps because Helmut Berger—Visconti’s long-time lover—plays Saint Laurent as an old man) most of Bonello’s scenes seemed to be to be overlong and boring, even with the various stunningly beautiful models such as Loulou de la Falaise (Léa Seydoux) and Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade) on his arm.      

     Certainly, there are memorable episodes such as when Saint Laurent’s beloved dog Moujik woofs down a bottle of spilled pills and dies, and the moment when Saint Laurent’s business partner and former lover Bergé (Jérémie Renier) is forced to retrieve Saint Laurent’s badly beaten body from a field of rock piles where he has clearly snuck out to have sex with Arab boys. But for the most part, using Renier primarily as a silent witness-bearer and fixer-up, Bonello insists that the designer and his empty-headed pretty boys and girls speak in banal sentences, such as when his lead mouths, as he stands in his Marrakech garden, “this smells exactly like it does in Oran” (his Algerian birthplace) or when he admits “I’m only 33 but feel like I am a very old man.”  Certainly, the life of this jet-setter does not appear to have been much fun!

       And when we do catch glimpses at the designer’s creations, it is in the form of long stretches of the “time marches on” genre, in which models descending a long winding staircase of his atelier share a split screen listing the years as they pass across from a posting of black and white images of appropriate historical moments.

     The one long scene in which we actually do get to see parts of an actual fashion show represents the famed Ballet Russes showing, featuring costumes which one cannot imagine anyone wearing to even the most over-the-top of events.

     More convincing is the scene where a customer, Madame Duzer (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) arrives for a fitting of her Le Smoking tuxedo suit. As she suggests, it first looks all too masculine set against his finely chiseled face, but by adding a necklace, a belt, and letting down her coiffed hair, Saint Laurent brings the entire outfit to life before our eyes.

       One wonders, at moments, whether Saint Laurent, given his fairly long life-span of 71, ever slept—except for the moments he had passed out with drugs or been beaten into a near-coma. He begins the film by checking into a Paris hotel under the name Mr. Swann, a name taken obviously from Proust’s great series of fictions. When the clerk asks what he plans to do in Paris, Saint-Laurent suggests he has come there simply to “sleep.” But the moment he arrives, he is already on the telephone ready to give a long interview revealing the intricacies of his scandalous life. Later in the film, Bergé, saving his friend from that faux pas, threatens to sue the paper if they dare publish it.

      At another point in the film, Bergé stomps into de Bascher’s apartment, forcing him to break off his relationship with Saint Laurent. One can only wonder, as does the designer, what he said that so successfully accomplished that breakup. At another point, he effectively stands up to a gauche American businessman as he negotiates the return of the major part of his and Yves Saint Laurent’s company to their own control. As I wrote at the beginning of this two-part piece, I think it may be far more interesting to see a movie about Bergé than his brand-name protégé.  

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2016).

Jan-Dirk Bouw | I Love Hooligans / 2013

hating the self that loves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan-Dirk Bouw (screenwriter and director) I Love Hooligans / 2013 [13 minutes]

 

I Love Hooligans, an animated short film by Netherlands filmmaker Jan-Dirk Bouw, is a work with which it is hard to sympathize—although there is no indication that the director or the documentary-like character is particularly seeking anyone’s sympathy.

       Hooligans, if you don’t already know, are rabid soccer fans who not only cheer on their team with profanities, mostly homophobic, about the other team’s players and the referees, but who after each game—sometimes even before—seek out supporters of the opposition to beat them up, particularly if the “hooligans” team has lost the game.

     Presumably there are “hooligans” on both sides of the stadium, aching to confront one another. But the film presents the viewpoint only of the central narrator’s team who seem to enjoy their slugfest with any and every supporter of the other team they encounter. We never see the results, but we know from the newscasts over the years that several such victims have died and many such attacks have resulted in violent melees with numerous individuals hospitalized.

      What is even more strange in this cartoon telling is that the narrator is gay, an almost unthinkable fact given the intense homophobia of the hooligan friends. Our narrator admits, in fact, that just to survive he knows he must never reveal his own sexuality to his friends, even though some of his mates may be good looking. He not only must repress all his gay feelings, remaining completely closeted during game season, but must participate in their homosexual slurs, using his own inner identity as a cause for hate of others.

      Although he doesn’t talk about these possibilities, I should imagine that even apart from his boozed up and drugged affairs with his buddies at soccer games, he must be constantly careful that he doesn’t run into any of his hooligan peers while entering a gay bar, being seen with another gay man, or openly participating in any gay activities in which he might sexually desire.

       Indeed, given the extent of his suppressed desires, one finds it even difficult to imagine how he might even know that he is gay. He does tell us that he wishes life were different, that he longs for the warmth and security of love.

       But since his primarily love is the game, and the game as he lives it, having almost “inherited” the passion from his parents, denies any possibility of his expression of other love. He is locked into an inescapable conundrum. And even he realizes that when he dies it will have to be in the arms of his buddies while attending a match at the stadium.

       One wonders, do these brutal buddies love and protect one another. I’m not even suggesting the idea of sexual love, but simply the impulse to care for and help to keep safe another who wears the same colors. Perhaps, like gang members there is a deep fraternal love that may border, as it does sometimes in street gangs, on homoerotic love. But our narrator obviously must push even those feelings away for fear that he might get carried away, lose his footing as a presumed heterosexual filled with hate.

       Bouw seems to be asking the question how two such pulls, the deep bond of team pride which is expressed in hatred, and the private desire for another male body to hold can be experienced in the frame of one man. And I suppose our narrator becomes interesting in the very fact that he admits that he carries the emotional baggage of both within himself. But frankly, it’s hard to care knowing that if you ever met up with him or his friends on the street wearing the wrong colors on the right day, you might be dead or at least severely hurt.

      One can only say that in this character we meet someone who has to hate himself in order to love a sports game, not someone I could readily embrace under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and which hints, perhaps, at why stereotypically so many gay boys are disinterested in team sports. Is violence inherent in such games? Is male hatred at the heart of the intense bodily contact of soccer, US football, wrestling, rugby, etc.? The hooligans seem closer to fascist support groups rather that what’s at the heart of such male-on-male encounters.

     In his defense, director/writer Bouw created this work, he reports, in order to promote a constructive dialogue about the issues surrounding soccer/football, wherein it is nearly impossible to discuss the reality of either players or fans being homosexual. But perhaps if Bouw had selected a less toxic figure upon which to focus, a player or a less rabid fan, he might have opened the discussion further than it can go in the framework of a hooligan who seems more committed to violence than his sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

Tina Mascara and Guido Santi | Chris & Don. A Love Story / 2007

dying with chris

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tina Mascara and Guido Santi (screenwriters and directors) Chris & Don. A Love Story / 2007

This movie was a touching tale of Isherwood’s and Bachardy’s relationship from their first meeting at Will Rogers State Beach in October 1952 to the time of Isherwood’s death of prostate cancer in January 1986. What both Howard and I immediately perceived was the intense self-consciousness of their relationship from the start, an inevitability, perhaps, since the two men were an openly gay couple in a period that was often intolerant of homosexuality, and, more importantly, they shared an age difference of 30 years. Bachardy, moreover, looked so boyishly young with his crew cut hair and gap-in-the-tooth grin that the relationship might easily be interpreted as—and may have symbolically been (Bachardy was, in fact, 18 years of age)—a kind of pedophilic encounter. Even Isherwood’s landlord, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker, whose research helped shift the medical field away from seeing homosexuality as a mental illness, could not tolerate the young Bachardy living with Isherwood in her guest cottage! Others in Hollywood were more outwardly hostile.

     Yet Isherwood’s astounding connections with the Los Angeles elite—including figures such as Igor Stravinsky, Bette Davis, John Ford, Joan Crawford, Montgomery Clift…the list of his friends is extensive—meant a new and exciting life for the young boy, although Bachardy also recognized each evening, as they returned home from events, that he was perceived of as just a pretty thing attached to his lover. As I have mentioned several times in these volumes, it mattered little when I came to Los Angeles that I had a PhD and had been a university professor; as the Contemporary Art Curator’s “lover,” I might as well have been a homeless man.

      Bachardy admits throughout the film to having been “made over” by Isherwood, following his advice on everything from clothing to social behavior, going so far as to assimilate Isherwood’s British accent. Even the choice of his career, a portrait artist, was suggested and encouraged by his lover-cum-father. It is amazing, accordingly, that this couple had as few problems in their relationship as they had—although the rift between them in the early 1960s evidently led Isherwood to consider what life might be like as “a single man”—concerns expressed in his fiction of that title in 1964.

     My only complaint about the Guido Santi and Tina Mascara tribute to the two men was the dramatization of several scenes by actors, which, combined with the reels of actual early film footage taken of Isherwood and Bachardy, led one to believe that he was witnessing an actual event instead of an enactment. Do we really need to see a blurred couple holding one another upon a bed to understand Bachardy’s terror in being over drugged by Paul Powles in Tangiers? I also could have done without the cartoon animation involving the two animals by which the couple characterized themselves, a horse and a pussycat.

      But, particularly in the last scenes concerning Isherwood’s death, where Bachardy tearfully tells of the time when he devoted himself to caring for the author, while also daily sketching him, we comprehend the depth of their love, as the artist describes his actions as a kind of “dying with Chris,” going so far as to sketch Isherwood’s corpse.

      Given both Isherwood’s and Bachardy’s love affair with the camera—in his youth, Don and his brother Ted appeared at Hollywood openings in suits, snapping pictures of each other with the stars—it is perhaps understandable why, in the Fall of 1985 when I met these men, at a time when Isherwood knew of his prostate cancer and complained his body was betraying him, preparing him to die, he had grown tired of being photographed. Was Bachardy drawing him daily even then? Clearly, Chris was no longer interested in either being a camera or being the subject of it.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2008).

Eric Smith | Irene Williams: Queen of Lincoln Road / 2005

you can’t say i’m dull

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Smith (director) Irene Williams: Queen of Lincoln Road / 2005 [23 minutes]

 

Eric Smith, who graduated from New York Law School in 1982 and passed New York bar exam on his first try, had already created the E. G. Smith Socks company, creator of “slouch sock,” the loose sock that was particularly popular with Japanese schoolgirls in the late 1980s and 1990s.

     Like many a New Yorker, he enjoyed traveling to Miami Beach for weekends and short stays. During one of his visits in January 1995, while sitting on Lincoln Road, he noticed an elderly woman, then probably in her late 70s, walking past him from one end of the road to the other, where she worked.

     Smith recalls: “One day I noticed this little old woman dressed in hot pink. And then I noticed the next day she was there in lime green. And then the next day in orange, and then at that point I thought, ‘I want to meet this person.’”

      He not only met her, inviting her to tea the next day, but developed a close friendship with her over a decade, getting to know her quite well. Irene, whom he describes as an unintentional feminist who had been living in Boston, left her life there, moved to Miami alone and opened up a stenography, notary, typing service where she was sought after for her notable skills at creating resumes for those in search of jobs and lawyer briefs. For a brief while she was hired by Orson Welles, writing about him after her employment ended, “All I can say is that I never worked for someone so difficult, and I feel like I'm released from bondage."

       Irene was also a strong and rather truculent individual who, if she didn’t like something about a person, immediately told him or her, a trait that helped lose her many a friend. When her sister’s husband died, the sister invited to the funeral only on condition that she wear black; according to Smith, in his interview with Alicia Zuckerman in WLRN in Miami, “Irene showed up at the funeral in fire engine red patent leather from head to toe with like go-go boots, to boot. And that's how she went to the funeral. So she had her way. She was not going to wear black. And that was Irene. She was a rebel.”

       The most notable thing about Irene, however, was her daily attire, which is what first caught the eye of Smith, which led to their relationship and his role of what he and friends describe as a “hag fag,” a gay man who’s attracted to elderly celebrities. Smith, in turn became for him a kind of gay icon. The film Smith shoots of Irene is mostly a long fashion show of Irene’s hand-made creations which she sewed with patterns and no past experience, but which looking stunningly fresh and original in the second wave of the mod-style of female dresses and accoutrements.

        At one point in the film, Irene describes the elderly women in her building having nothing better to do all day that to wait in a nearby gathering place to see what she was wearing as she passed by. At least I have them some pleasure, she observes, while clearing feeling dismissive of anyone who has nothing better to do with her time.

        Only a few short years later, Annie Liebowitz and Versace were doing shoots of her home-made designs. But while Versace sold outfits in a store which Irene and Smith visit in the film for $1,800 dollars, hers often cost less than $10, sometimes repurposed with material she bought at discount stores such as Marshall’s.

        Smith summarizes her sense of style:

 “…She would choose bright colors, from head to toe: from the hats to the shoes, to the bag to the umbrella to the glasses and all the accessories. And these clothes were made out of terry cloth, out of fake fur, out of all these kind of wacky fabrics that she customized. They were all handmade and one of a kind -- and pretty do-it-yourself, not like haute couture, but in her own way, made with a lot of skill. No patterns, all by instinct. …So she had this outfit that was made out of avocado fake fur. I think there was a bag, a coat and a hat, and maybe some other little accessories. And she was telling me that she loved the color and she loved the fabric, but the only place she could find it was in the bathroom accessory department. So the hat was made from a commode cover, or toilet seat cover (laughing). And she turned it into her hat!”

 

        By the time their relationship ended when Irene was beginning to suffer from dementia, she had almost fallen in love, it appears, with Smith, fully enjoying their visits together whenever he vacationed in Miami Beach.

        During one of their encounters, she told Smith, “When I lose my memory, it’s the nudist colony for me.” And indeed, he was told that in the assisted living quarters where Irene came to live, they have difficulty keeping clothes on her. Perhaps without her wardrobe, her hats, and her sewing machine she simply felt she had nothing appropriate to wear anymore.

        As she says early in the movie, “What you can’t ever say about me is that I’m dull.”

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Michael Brynntrup | Ipanema / 2003 and Blue Box Blues / 2004

reality lies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Brynntrup (director) Ipanema / 2003 [3.30 minutes]

Michael Brynntrup (director) Blue Box Blues / 2004 [8 minutes]

 

Since 1982 German conceptual artist and filmmaker Michael Brynntrup has been exploring philosophical issues, taboos, and how reality is created, questioning quite literally, often comically, how we come to define what we perceive in the world around us. Other than his numerous art exhibitions which interact with his filmmaking and his longer mock-historical films such as his 2-hour Jesus — The Film of 1986, he has accomplished this mostly in short films, several of them with homosexual contexts and implications.

     Ipanema and Blue Box Blues from 2003 and 2004 represent two tonally different pieces that challenge our notions of reality while also involving his fascination with doubles (Brynntrup was born a twin whose “other” was stillborn) and self-identity.

     In Ipanema the director takes the popular 1962 Brazilian bossa nova song with by music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes. Using the English lyrics of Norman Gimbel, Brynntrup transforms the classic for what he describes as a “lip synch” Karaoke video. The film does display the lyrics in blue which in time to the rhythms of the music turns lavender with each passing word. The music is strummed on an electronic-rendering of a guitar, but no lyrics are sung unless we at home jump in to play the Karaoke singer—although if it played the LGBTQ film circuit I am sure that whole choruses of audience members must have joined in.

      Moreover, the “tall and tan and young and lovely” girl is not at all passing by the two males in this case (Tiaago Grandeza and Gerard Raffray), on her way to the sea, but sitting inside her car as the muscular, bare-chested hirsute gay boys, their blue jeans slipped low upon their hips, thoroughly wash and clean her vehicle, one of them twice positioning the spouting hose next to the part of his body with a similar function to shower the car with water.

      If you have chosen to join in, moreover, the girl to whom you are singing is a drag queen, who unlike the girl in the song most definitely does recognize the two boys, doing everything possible to get their attention, including displaying her shapely legs in purple stockings and, at one point, even getting up from the steering wheel, to move over nearer to one of the boys as he works.

      In this upside-down version of the heterosexual fantasy, the boys pay utterly no attention to her—just as my eyes were locked upon the beautiful boys. At the very moment when the song repeats, “She doesn’t see, she doesn’t see,” one of the boys, in his attempt to clean every last spec off her front window, blows upon it as he rubs, completely blurring any vision of her within. And so ends the video.

      In short, Brynntrup has transformed a sexy straight ballad into a gay visual feast for the eyes, from which even a drag queen is excluded. Just as the director’s 1993 film All You Can Eat defined itself as a product for “a special and limited audience namely adults,” so Ipanema defines itself for gay eyes only, demanding that you recognize that if you sing along not even the subject of your song is really a woman.

      Although even then we have to ask, might this girl be transgender and the boys discretely flirting with her, just as the girl in the song perhaps was doing with her heterosexual admirer, by pretending not to notice?

      And what does it mean in this version of the song that it is no longer the pretty girl who is in control of the situation, but the pretty men? As the objects of our desire have we also converted them to mere objects, eye-candy car washers instead of a tall, tan, young “thing” on her way to beach? And if we should begin singing as the video encourages us to do, are we singing to the drag queen or to the boys? What, we have to ask in this version of reality, is the meaning of gender?

 

To some doing a sexual photo shoot which requires you to lock lips with another human for a long period of time may seem like a pleasant undertaking. But for the two lesbians (JoE and Shannon) in Brynntrup’s Blue Box Blues it is clearly a sad and emotionally empty task.

      Their lesbian kiss is based on an apparent S&M act, a hard slap across the face, followed by an act of contrition with a seemingly endless kiss while the cameras and the cameramen with them go circling around one another and the two locked in a blue-colored space. A reshot requires another slap, an oddly sexual reassurance from the art director (Paula Rosegarthen) who seems to continue her gentle hand-petting of the more feminine of the two characters a bit longer than a friendly pat, and a long lip-lock that hardly leaves any room for breath, the camera circling round the two again like they were on the sexual prowl.

      Which indeed they are. They are not filming action, but inaction, attempting to catch the interlocked couple at just the right angle, with the right light and the facial gestures that can be achieved only over long periods of time. For the two intertwined individuals it must seem like eternity, like they have been frozen in an act that can no longer have any possible sexual excitement, let alone logical meaning.

      If the one is playing sad to the other’s contrition, by the time they have spent the full 8 minutes of the film, they both, as the title suggests, must feel blue like the scenery into which they have been cornered by the shoot.

      But there are several things that occur that do quite make sense. Why slap the other girl when it is not a live shoot. Does she need to actually suffer the pain in order to play a character who is hurt? What does she feel about the attentions of the art director, and are the two women really a couple or merely actors portraying lovers? Is the sis-identifying character repelled or attracted to the bald headed, pale-skinned women who is attempting to comfort her. Are the two really involved in S&M bondage or have they simply been asked to perform those roles? And for whom are the art director and the cameramen doing this shoot? A lesbian magazine? A magazine for heterosexual males who like the idea of a tough woman slapping a weaker one and the two making up—and out—with a kiss. Do they treat their own wives and girlfriends in a similar manner?

      Surely these girls must know that their images might attract just such viewers even if they imagine they are performing for their fellow lesbians?

      Once more, as in nearly all of Brynntrup’s films, something is wrong with the picture. It simply doesn’t fit into predictable ideational frames. What is happening seems to point to other worlds outside of the evidence placed before us. Like a detective looking inward instead of out, we must ask ourselves how do we want to interpret what we are observing.

      Finally, the cameramen and director seem to get the image they are looking for, but at what cost? And what does the image itself mean to the world outside of those who have created it?

      In both of these short films, reality it appears to hiding something, telling us a lie.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).