Søren Green | Oktober Dreng (October Boy) / 2018

the gay gaze

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tomas Lagermand Lundme and Søren Green (screenplay), Søren Green (director), Oktober Dreng (October Boy) / 2018 [29 minutes]

 

14-year-old Thomas (Elias Buddde Christensen) begins his first days in his new Copenhagen school, having just moved to the city with his mother. He soon meets up with Emma (Esther Marie Boisen Berg), who notices he likes to draw and suggests they might spend some time together sketching—a clever way to meet the new boy.

    Mads (Noa Risbro Hjerrild) also meets the new boy in the locker room where, watching him sketch a drawing on his wrist, asks him if he might give him a temporary tattoo on his arm. Just out of the shower, his arm isn’t entirely dry yet, and he asks Thomas to blow on it. Little does Thomas seem to recognize that the battle for his attention is already underway.

     When they meet up to share drawings, Emma wants an arm drawing as well, but Thomas claims he doesn’t have his proper pens, she asking him to visit her again when he can do the tattoo.

      But it’s when Thomas meets up with Emma’s older brother Mikkel (Jacob August Ottensten), a young artist whose drawings Emma has borrowed to show them as her own to Thomas, that things truly begin to change for the 14-year-old. Danish director Søren Green’s camera makes it clear that the younger boy is immediately attracted to his crotch and the hair around Mikkel’s navel. And when the older boy invites him to the Academy, after praising Thomas’ drawings, Thomas is drawn into new possibilities without him perhaps even being aware of it.

 

     Even a trip to the bathroom, after which he spots the naked Mikkel pulling on his pants, clearly sends him head reeling, although actor Christensen deadpans the entire situation, only his eyes widening with the wonders he observes.

       In his bed, he now has images of Mads, and he soon becomes best friends with the cute boy of his own age. But eventually he does draw an image on Emma’s arm as well, while she vaguely describes a childhood transgression of her and a friend watching “13 Reasons ‘Why,’” an episodic film evidently which her parents might not have permitted. He kisses the girl, perhaps more out curiosity or an attempt to prove his heterosexuality than any attraction. They fall onto the bed, but Thomas quickly turns away, perceiving the girl is not what he really wants.

      Surely, she recognizes it is a lost cause when he asks, “Can’t we just lie her for a bit?”

     Meanwhile, however, word has gotten out that he’s “been with Emma,” presumably suggesting that he’s had sex with her, making him somewhat popular, at least with Boas. Conflicted as he is, Thomas says nothing to deny it, which gets him an automatic invitation to the party of Boas’ house when his parents are out of town.

    While having a reputation of having slept with Emma makes Thomas popular with the boys, however, Emma is described as being “slutty” by her girlfriends and finally confronts Thomas believing he was the one who spread the rumor. Soon after, Thomas quickly leaves the party.

      The several images that Green flashes of a train in motion convey not only Thomas’ own trip from the party to his home, but the sense of changes he is inwardly undergoing, the blur and confusion of his own emotions.

      Mads finds him sitting in the subway station drunk, and helps him home.

     The next day, Thomas visits Emma to apologize for not having said something to the others, for not having denied what was clearly a rumor. Apparently, she accepts the apology and together they visit Mikkel’s show. The film ends with Thomas staring at Mikkel, the older boy appearing to recognize the younger boy’s gaze of desire—but whether he can or will or even wishes to respond is unknowable. What is clear is that Thomas has to come realize where from now on intends to look for love.

      For some years now, Green has been making small, quiet movies (An Afternoon in 2014 and An Evening in 2016) which deal with young adolescents trying to come to terms with and, more importantly, verbalize the queer feelings they suddenly encounter, fearful of expressing their new emotions to their closest friends, let alone sharing them with their peers in which might end in abuse. October Boy is the best of these to date.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2023).

Alf Collins | How Percy Won the Beauty Competition / 1909

how to get ahead

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alf Collins (scenarist and director) How Percy Won the Beauty Competition / 1909

 

Gaumont Studios England was first located at what was called the Camberwell’s Dog Kennel, Hillywood in 1898. Eventually, after building a new studio years later, Gaumont bought out its French originator and become the largest studio in England.

      Among one of its earliest actors/directors was Alf Collins who did a series of films, many of them with him performing as a woman or, as in How Percy Won the Beauty Competition of 1909, as a man portraying a member of the female sex.

      The entire story and plot is quite conventional for early comic drag works, and lacks little subtlety or structure, although there are some excellent long shots and few surprises along the way that are not typical of US filmmaking.

      In this case the handsome Percy (Collins) begins the film by reading the newspaper and noting that there is a 100 £ award for winning a local beauty competition. Obviously he could use the cash, and immediately heads off to Fox’s wigs, coming out of the store looking like a handsome woman of the Edwardian era.

      In the very next scene, a group of women sit on chairs before the judges’ table, each of them numbered, as the camera carefully scans their faces. Most of the women are well dressed having given particular attention to their headwear, and several of them are quite handsome if a bit more elderly than one might have expected for a beauty pageant. What also seems to be out of the ordinary is that Percy is not the only male in the gathering, but two other men also appear in women’s attire.

      The judges call up each of the “women,” one by one, to the table, finally awarding the first prize, along with the sack of the 100 £ to Percy. The rest of the group are clearly ruffled by the judges’ decision and, as the winner attempts to walk down the stairs from the location of the contest, they await him on both sides of his path, one woman rushing him and pulling off his wig to reveal his true sexuality at the very moment that the judges also are exiting.

       Terrified of the consequences, our hero momentarily trips before he quickly stands and leaps into a run, all the others chasing after, irate about the circumstance.

       He jumps fences, travels down steep embankments, enters a house unbidden, exists it, and races down several streets, the others all following, the women taking several rolls while the two males in drag, following behind, who take more serious dives and pratfalls, at one point crashing into an outdoor café table, taking its patron with them, obviously unused to their female attire.

       At several points it appears that the group has trapped him, but time and again he escapes until suddenly he meets up with a high wall, an apparent dead end. He pauses, clearly fearful of having to hand over his winnings and perhaps being beaten in the process. But suddenly he moves out of the camera frame and returns with a tall ladder, placing it against the wall and quickly scrambling up its steps before, just as the others come into site, to pull the ladder up after him and toss it to the other side. Back on the ground now opposite of his pursuers he laughs in derision at their attempts. He was won through his beauty, his fitness, and wits, having bested them all. In the end, accordingly we do know how Percy has won the beauty competition but know very little about why.

       It appears that this film is he only one of Collins’ film to have been converted from celluloid to the internet or DVD format, and none of them appear to be available in the United States.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022). 

D. W. Griffith | Pranks / 1909

straight crossdressers interrupt gay lovers

by Douglas Messerli

D. W. Griffith (director) Pranks / 1909

 

D. W. Griffith’s short film ostensibly is simply what its title suggests, a series of pranks played out by two boys (performed Robert Harron and Jack Pickford) who while a fighting heterosexual couple are both out swimming in their own spots in a public park, enter their dressing cabins and switch the clothing, putting the male’s togs, belonging to Tom (Arthur V. Johnson) in Ethel’s (Marion Leonard’s) cabin and vice versa.

   

      Ethel has already chastised Tom for showing his affection publicly, which scandalized the two women who evidently keep the hotel in which they are staying. But now she is even more angered by discovering not only someone has taken her clothing, but has left behind Tom’s suit and hat. Of course, she can suspect no one else but Tom himself, just as he suddenly must perceive her as vindictively forcing him into her dress. Their frustration with one another is not established in the film, but we cannot help but sense it, nonetheless, in their angry looks and in their following behavior as they both rush, first Ethel and after her Tom, back to the hotel.

       It the movie were to stop here, with the two in their quick crossdressing runs, it would be yet another meaningless film in which drag behavior results in a few giggles by those who think such behavior is as audacious as the two matronly hotel ladies of Victorian USA feel about young people demonstrating their love in public.

      But Griffith goes beyond conventional drag humor, almost intentionally challenging his audiences to take everything a step further. Ethel first runs past a couple of women sitting together closely on a bench sharing a map or a brochure. There is no suggestion that these two properly dressed ladies are doing anything else but sharing information, perhaps planning a car trip or a hike, but they become aghast at the woman dressed as a man wearing a straw hat, and are even more startled by seeing a man in full woman’s attire including a sun hat, hats which neither of them needed have donned as part of their costumes.

       It is the next couple, however, that makes this 5-minute film so very fascinating. First Ethel almost trips on a pair of full-fledged pansies canoodling in the grass; they stand up, one waving his right hand in a stereotypical gay manner and responding to what he sees with words which although we can’t hear we can almost observe him mouthing, “Hey, come back!” delighted, quite obviously by what he recognizes as queer behavior.

       Both are even more stunned by the arrival of a man in drag, this time one of two “fairies” (Billy Quirk and Henry B. Walthall) crying out quite passionately, “don’t go!” They turn to one another in both pleased wonderment and startlement.

        Clearly, Griffith has gone far beyond the unspoken sexual barriers of cinema of his day, and now must right the situation by returning Tom to his proper heterosexual position as Ethel’s protector. A masher (the published synopsis describes him as a tramp), seeing obviously a miss who’s willing to take chances, tries to accost her, Tom coming across the struggling couple and knocking the masher/tramp out. The two, seeing each other in their own attire recognize what must have happened, quickly patch things up, and return to heteronormativity despite the fact that they remain momentarily in drag. 

        In her commentary on the film, Laura Horak argues that the importance of this film is in how it presents public parks as “a free space for expression,” arguing that while the men lying together in the grass are coded as pansies, “there’s no hiding or fear of them being queer in the park.” She contends that in this moment in queer history public spaces belonged equally to them before they were “kept inside and policed.”

     Frankly, I see that view as nonsense. At no time in the first part of the century would queer behavior have been openly allowed in a public park. And we have plenty of evidence in films such as almost all of Chaplin’s works, as well as those of Laurel and Hardy, and, in particular, in Hal Roach’s 1917 short, Clubs Are Trump, that the police in public parks were quite actively on the lookout for those who fell to sleep on benches or in the grass, men who seemingly bothered women, and, in particular, men who appeared to pay astute attention to others of the same sex. In Roach’s film, Luke and Snub are seriously pursued by the police for their friendly hugging, not even a gesture of gay love but simply a reaction to their mutual nightmares. And to my knowledge, gay behavior was as much against the law in 1909 as it was in 1950.

      That doesn’t mean, of course, that gay men never attempted to find an out-of-the-way corner just as the two homosexuals in this film have found; and at this river resort there appear to be no policemen. But certainly, the idea that there was no fear of hiding about being queer in public doesn’t to seem match the world I have read of and seen through movies. Indeed, had it been openly permitted, we might have seen many another movie about this very subject; yet to my knowledge, Griffith’s film may be the first and only open expression of gay love in public in the three decades of the 20th century I cover in this volume.

       The unusual absurdity of what happens in Pranks might almost be headlined as another kind of political prank: “Straight cross dressers interrupt gay lovers.”

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Pedro Almodóvar | Matador / 1986

professional killers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesús Ferrero and Pedro Almodóvar (screenplay), Pedro Almodóvar (director) Matador / 1986

 

Perhaps it is best to begin talking about Pedro Almodóvar’s fascinating 1986 film Matador by describing what it is and isn’t. It is certainly not quite like anything seen in Hollywood movies, even if you strain to point to psychological criminal-horror films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, although they certainly share the same closet with Almodóvar’s work. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet of the same year, moreover, shares some of the film’s DNA.

      But Lynch lacks much of Almodóvar’s sense of camp and humor, and certainly does not share the Spanish director’s nostalgia for technicolor films of the 1950s, nor his colorful style. And no one is able to create such a psychosexual soap opera that includes obsessions with murder and sex involving an absolute crazy cast of secondary figures all equally obsessed with other issues.

     The film appears to be centered upon two individuals, the first of which is Diego (Nacho Martínez) a major bullfighter of national importance who was maimed by a bull and now walks with a limp. Since his mishap he has begun a school to each young would-be matador’s, including the beautiful young man Ángel (a young Antonio Banderas). The second central figure is María (Assumpta Serna), a lawyer who, unbeknownst to Diego, has been a long-time aficionado of his work, but presumed that he had retired after his accident from the art of “killing.”

 

     From almost the first moment of the film we realize that is precisely what these two figures, Diego and María, share. For Diego “the kill” has been transformed into a sexual obsession wherein he can enjoy sex only by watching films in which women are being strangled, stabbed, maimed, or destroyed in some other manner as in the slasher films he nightly watches such as Jesús Franco’s Bloody Moon (1981) to which we observe him masturbating early in the movie. To have sex with his girlfriend Eva (Eva Cobo), he requires her to play dead. As we discover later in the film, moreover, he has already killed off two of his female students, burying them in his own yard.

      María, as Almodóvar shows us in the earliest frames of the film, has intense sex with men whom she stabs with a sharply pointed hair pin in the back of their necks at the moment of orgasm, murdering them at the moment of their most intense pleasure, a bit like Latrodectus mactans (the Black Widow living in the Southern Hemisphere). The sex Almodóvar captures was apparently unsimulated, just as it looks to be.

     Although María has long been a fan of Diego’s, they meet only after a series of very strange events regarding Diego’s student Ángel.

     Ángel—the son of an absurdly cruel fanatically religious Roman Catholic mother Berta (Julieta Serrano), whose every move, it appears, is centered upon her bizarre view of religion— has remained a virgin despite the fact he is now in college studying agronomics. He takes classes with Diego without his mother’s knowledge, one day staying after to receive some advice from his mentor about how to seduce a woman, admitting that he has yet to have had sex.

 

     Diego also has vertigo, triggered when he looks up at clouds, but which is often accompanied by inexplainable psychic episodes. He has, indeed, seen María murder her last victim he what he describes as his dreams. While talking to Diego, Ángel experiences an episode, asking for water so that he might take his pill.

       Meanwhile, the two continue to discuss women, Diego using the metaphors of a bullfighter to describe how to approach women and manipulate them; it is pointless to describe Diego as a chauvinist since, as I have suggested, he prefers his women dead or dying. In the middle of their conversation, however, Diego asks Ángel, almost nonchalantly, whether or not he likes guys.

        The young man, clearly fearful of just such a possibility, immediately reacts that he is no fag, and becomes privately determined to prove it to Diego and to himself as he proceeds that very evening to attempt to rape Diego’s girlfriend, Eva, who happens to be a neighbor of Ángel and his mother. Ángel grabs Eva as she is walking home in the middle of a rain storm, clumsily pulls her up against a car, pulls out a knife, and quickly ejaculates—evidently, according to Eva’s later discussion with the police, on her legs, unable to even penetrate her before coming.

        Eventually, he apologizes as she pushes him away. When Eva turns to leave, she slips on the mud, falls, and cuts herself, blood oozing from the wound. We quickly discover that Ángel also cannot stand the sight of blood when he passes out.

        Later that evening at the dinner table Berta insists, as one of the rules of Ángel living at home, that he attend confession. Ángel agrees and even meets with the priest, but disappears before entering the confessional booth, hightailing it instead to the police to confess to his rape of Eva.

  

      Even the police detective (Eusebio Poncela) seems somewhat amused by the boy’s confession, the female police clerk, observing his beauty, snarling out a sexist comment, “some girls have all the luck.” When the police and his odd assistant visit Eva, her mother Pilar (Chus Lampreave) attempts to block not only their entry to the house but even their ability to speak with her, arguing perversely that her daughter often gets raped and can well take care of herself. Although the police pull the daughter, nonetheless, into the station, she refuses to press charges since Ángel did not truly penetrate her and if were to try again, she’d castrate him. Besides, she argues, she has her modeling auditions coming up and doesn’t have time to deal with this.

       In short, any shred of masculine power Ángel might have derived from the event, is completely erased. Watching the police chief pour over pictures of recent missing people, however, he adds to his confession by insisting that he has killed the two missing men—because they “came on to him”—and two women, fellow students of his, to whom, he observes, he was attracted.

       It is at this point that the police assign María as his lawyer, inevitably meeting up with the bullfighter with whom she has so very much in common.

       Much of the rest of the film consists of the various eccentric secondary figures, Eva and her mother; Ángel’s psychiatrist Julia (Carmen Maura), who quickly discovers that his vertigo has to do, in part, with deafness in one ear and who simultaneously falls in love with him; and the police chief himself, who, when he visits Diego reveals his homosexuality—as Almodóvar cinematically reveals—when he cannot take his eyes of their crotches and buttocks.

       Most of the rest of the film is taken up with the chase of the matador (in this case as much María as Diego) for the bull. Like the dance of the matador’s cape, it is a give-and-take, attack- and-run affair, as the two find themselves entwined with one another, unable to escape their fated meeting. Some of the most beautiful scenes in the film involve Diego on the chase, as María, very much like Madeline Elster in Hitchcock’s Vertigo—appears, disappears, and reappears while pretending to reject the man destined to destroy her just as she is destined to destroy him.

     Because of his psychic powers, Ángel does lead the police and his lawyer María to the buried women on Diego’s property. The detective is understandably doubtful that the boy could have buried them with in front of his window without Diego’s knowledge. And María now suddenly realizes that her beloved bullfighter is still active, the two finalizing the encounter they have been anticipating. Soon after, when Ángel’s mother rather angrily demeans her son for not being able to stand the sight of blood without fainting, angry because he’s never been able to participate in ritual flagellation, the detective becomes certain that the boy is truly innocent, and is merely protecting Diego because of his admiration of or even love for him.

 

      Eva, who has conveniently gone off for a while, returns to bollix up everything, returning to Diego’s house at the very moment María and he are speaking of their murderous cover-ups. She attempts to blackmail Diego with her knowledge, hoping—despite any logical explanation—to h  old onto him, despite the fact that she can surely see it would only end in her death. But like a woman believing she might convert a gay man to heterosexuality, Eva is convinced that she can “straighten up” an actual ladykiller, insisting she is still in love with him.

      When he rejects her again, he goes to the police at the very moment when Ángel admits to Julia that he is again having horrible visions about Diego and is terrified about his well-being. The septet, the detective and his trusty assistant in the front seat, and Eva, Ángel, and Julia in the back seat, speed in the direction the boy envisions they car to be traveling, Ángel simultaneously recounting Diego’s words to María, creating a scenario in which, for at least a few moments of his life, he plays out a romantic scene unlike any other between two women and a man:

 

eva: You hear them?

ángel:  Yes, she says [turning to Julia] “I’ve never been kissed like that.

             ’Til now, I’ve made love alone.” [turning toward Eva] “I love you more than my own

             death. Do you want to see me dead?”

eva: What does he answer?

ángel: “Yes, and for you to see me dead.”

     As the five reach their destination, an eclipse which had been promised for the day suddenly materializes, and they pause to observe it. Inside, María stabs Diego before pulling his head up to watch her take a gun, put into her mouth and pull the trigger. The five would-be saviors rush into the house too late, observing them sprawled out, naked, dead.

      The police detective comments: “It’s better this way. “I’ve never seen anyone look so happy.”

      What might be a tragedy in most films, in Almodóvar’s capable hands, becomes high camp comedy as beautifully presented as a full-color fashion spread.

 

Los Angeles, November 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).