Bill Sherwood | Parting Glances / 1986

the bigamist, or dickens and mozart play “spin the bottle”

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Sherwood (screenwriter and director) Parting Glances / 1986

 

     I’m not very fond of ranking films or making sweeping statements that pit the many wonderful cinematic works I’ve witnessed against each other: yet I have to admit that Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances is one of my very favorite LGBTQ movies, not only of its decade but of all time. In its loosely focused vision of an era early on in the AIDS crisis, its exuberant overlay of various genres, and its larger lenses of comedy and drama, of sentimental realism and a cynical surrealism, of monogamous relationships and hedonistic gay sex, and of intense living and graceful dying Sherwood’s narrative almost inevitably frays at its edges but is strengthened by its very refusal to tie all its ends into a nice tidy package. People come and go, dart back, and fade out simultaneously in this fairly honest portrait of what it was to be joyfully alive in the dark days of the early 1980s—wherein then President of the US, Ronald Reagan, attempted to ignore and deny everything going on around him. This work is almost Dickensian in its embracement of the best and worst of its time.

      Proof of what I’ve just expressed may come in my realization that if I were simply to relate the plot of this work, it would make absolutely no sense. How do you explain a perfectly happy gay couple in their 20s living in New York City, Robert (John Bolger) working as a health administrator and Michael (Richard Ganoung), a freelance editor would-be writer whose relationship is about to be torn asunder by Robert’s willing—we eventually discover—assignment to two years in Africa. Life with his lover for this blow-up like model for good health and the body beautiful, it nonsensically argues, has become too easy and predictable, and accordingly a bit boring.

     Michael, on the other hand, doesn’t see it that way at all, particularly since he is caring for his former lover, who, quite the opposite of Robert, is a holy mess of contradictions: Nick (the marvelous Steve Buscemi) is a slightly elfin, ill-proportioned yet irresistibly adorable man, dying of AIDS, who would verbally chop you at the knees if you described him just as I have. A successful rock musician who loves the opera albums, mostly Mozart, Michael buys for him, Nick lives in a messy sprawl of derelict objects, including an entire wall of TV screens and other recording devices, alternating his precious time by working on his musical compositions for his traveling band and creating tape-recordings of his last will and testament, notifying his friends and family of the money—with which he is well endowed through the success of his recordings—he plans to leave or refuse them.

      His ratty, darkened, cock-roach infested apartment is the polar opposite of Michael and Robert’s sun-drenched pre-Ikea haven. And those oppositions spill over to Nick’s behavior and personality. If Robert, to express the film further in Dickensian terms, is Scrooge’s handsome nephew Fred of The Christmas Carol, Nick, is the Tiny Tim of the work—even though at moments he alternates as Scrooge, at one point in the film being visited in his waking-sleep by the specter of an old friend who warns him of what’s in store if he doesn’t change his ways.

     Yet if Parting Glances is Dickensian in its narrative thrust, it is Mozartian in its tone—an important element in this film given the fact that Sherwood was once a classical music student of composer Elliott Carter. As The Washington Post critic Michael Wilmington astutely observed:

 

“The whole movie is keyed to its musical underscoring (from disco to opera, Bronski Beat to Brahms) and, as you might guess, the music helps shape the story. The tone is slightly Mozartean: You’re reminded a little of The Marriage of Figaro seen through the prism of the Requiem, a mixture of deep sorrow and brilliant melody. (At one time, Sherwood throws in a gag nightmare inspired by Amadeus [the same scene I interpreted as an interpolation of Dickens].)”

 

     If Nick is the suffering Tiny Tim in Dickensland, he is perhaps Papageno in the Mozart world, the failed birdcatcher who nonetheless wins the prize of a faithful wife. In this case, the faithful wife is Michael, who, we realize, despite his desire for a permanent relationship with Robert, is still deeply in love with his ex-companion, Nick.

     Indeed, nearly everyone in this work loves Michael, the man trapped in between losing his two lovers, past and present. The young cute record store clerk, Peter (Adam Nathan) and his long-time lesbian artist friend Joan (Kathy Kinney) are nearly desperate for his company, and his other friends still can’t comprehend why he has settled down with the walking, talking ad for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Since suddenly Robert is leaving him and Nick is near death, who might Michael transfer his love to next? Accordingly, the real theme of this world of “parting glances” is what the future will bring.

      Neither the world that Robert’s friends inhabit nor that in which Michael’s friends live, both of which Sherwood portrays for us in the two going away parties given in Robert’s honor, seem desirable for the loving and caring “bigamist.”

 

     At Robert’s bosses’ dinner party, we meet the sleazy elderly Cecil (Patrick Tull) married to the ever forbearing Betty (Yolande Bavan). Cecil presents himself as a smug effete, who dines on gourmet food, drinks fine wines, and chases young boys who he pretends Betty never notices. He dotes on Robert and out of his jealousy for Michael’s relationship with him almost incessantly provokes arguments with his employee’s “roommate,” a designation he retains to keep the true nature of their relationship from his “innocent” wife, and which she, in turn, employs to pretend to her husband her ignorance. Theirs is a world of hypocrisy and lies. And we are not at all surprised later in the movie, while Robert is waiting for his plane to Africa, that Cecil shows up determined to accompany him at least to Rome, having left Betty for a final fling with young Sri Lankan men; Betty, who is the source of the couple’s wealth, admits to Michael that she is happy to have finally gotten rid of him. Is it any wonder that Michael cannot abide dinners with Robert’s associates? Without assigning literal roles to them, we certainly might still associate this power couple with Sarastro and The Queen of the Night

     Yet Michael’s friends offer a society that is nearly as unsustainable. Joan (Kathy Kinney) may be a lovely, ballsy woman upon whom one can always rely, but hardly anyone wants the art she creates, symbolically the love she has to offer.  The invitees to her party are the societal “hanger’s on” The pompous corpulent queen and Monostatos of the event, Douglas (Richard Wall), who living off of his ill-gotten Wall Street gains, is currently writing a gay science fiction film script— explaining Michael’s current editing job—that sounds a bit like the 1982 film about alien sex monsters Liquid Sky and dozens of intentionally campy LGBTQ Sci-Fi works of the current century. The German duo of decadent performance artists Liselotte (Nada) and Klaus (Theodore Ganger) perform for the partygoers, with Liselotte later observed having sex in the shower with a young female attendee.

      Peter—a Narcissus about to bud—meanwhile corners Nick to find out more about Michael, and without knowing that Nick and Michael were former lovers, declares his love for the Tanino of the night, revealing in the process his banal aspirations to become the next Great Gatsby.

     When the insensitive Peter also displays his sympathy for Nick’s having acquired AIDS, the “victim” hurriedly slinks away from the party, while Tanino goes in search of his Pamina, who, hidden away on apartment roof, has gotten soused with a female friend.

      I assure you, in describing the above events, I wasn’t snorting Joan’s cocaine.

     The very next morning reality returns, as Michael, angry again for Robert’s abandonment—however temporary—of their relationship accuses his current lover of escaping so that he will not have to face Nick’s death.

     No sooner does the now lonely Michael turn back to everyday life, attempting to edit Douglas’ horrific script, than Nick calls to report that he is “on the Island”: “Can’t take it anymore, Mike. This is it.” What “it” might mean is anyone’s guess, but obviously Michael fears for his birdcatcher’s life. He immediately books a bi-plane to fly out to save him, but the feathers he wears in this third act of Sherwood’s crazy tale, are not those of The Magic Flute but of the Indians he and Nick has portrayed in raiding Douglas’ Fire Island estate years earlier, the memory of which we have witnessed a few frames before this. So have we moved from Dickens and Mozart into boyhood games such as “Cowboys and Indians” and, as we soon shall see, “Pin the Horse on the Donkey” or “Spin the Bottle,” in which the latter, if you recall, the spinner must kiss the person to whom the bottle points.

     Before Michael can even board the plane to save Nick, Robert has disembarked his plane, returning home to plant a kiss on the surprised Michael’s neck and—long before that possibility was imagined—to save his gay marriage. Happy as he is the reconciliation, Michael must fulfill his mission and takes off for a Fire Island trip that reverses all those many gay films that featured the fun, drugs, and sex of the summer gay paradise.

      The beach in the cold light of the “off-season” is barren except for a leather-coated, denim wearing Nick; smoking a cigarette, his James Dean-like visage reminding one a bit like a winter-stranded version of Warhol’s 1965 hustler standing at water’s edge staring off into the horizon. After it’s established that he’s okay, Nick seems determined to play a geographical game, pointing outward to ask if Europe is in that direction. Michael corrects his misconception, and the game continues with Nick’s attempt to fix the direction of other continents, Africa, and South America.

      Nick finally demands that Michael participate in his version of “Spin the Bottle,” blindfolding and spinning Michael to point in a direction of their next journey. Michael spins, accompanied by a musical muzurka, pointing finally to Europe. Nick’s response: “Ah, Europe’s too poofy. [Putting on his sunglasses and beginning to walk away] How ‘bout we go visit Robert in Africa.”

       Two weeks in Africa, without Robert, might be the perfect solution to Michael’s dilemma about where his future might lead him.

       So beautiful is Sherwood’s tragi-comedy that one would have loved to see what he might have accomplished later; he died of AIDS, however, in 1990.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

    

Damon Laguna | Headlock / 2020

the fine art of forcing another person to lay on his back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Damon Laguna (screenwriter and director) Headlock / 2020 [16 minutes]

 

Diego (Alejandro Akara) is a high school wrestler, whose father just happens to be the wrestling coach. Even when Diego wins, he is criticized for having momentarily been on his back, and a dinner he is told to be careful in eating his full meal since he is not allowed to gain weight. We can’t quite tell, at first, if Diego is resentful about wrestling, his father’s absolute control over him, or both.

     We do perceive, even in these very early scenes, that he is close to his friend Travis (Eduardo Alexis Peña), his friend calling him “baby Diego” and both listening at other ends of the head phone to music on Travis’ machine.

      Everything else appears to be centered around his physical condition, as he runs early each morning, checks out his body in the mirror, and practices wrestling with the other members of the team as if it were a dance, the coach shouting out “Tempo, tempo, tempo,” instead of a struggle for bodily control of the another.

      Travis is clearly popular with all the other boys, whereas, simply because of his day and night regimen, Diego is quiet and removed. But it’s clear in the showers, that Diego is overwhelmed by the handsome body of his friend, who tries to convince him to attend a party that night.

 

      But finally, after a later phone call, Travis convinces him to join him: “Come on, I want to sit with you.”

       We don’t precisely know what those words mean until we actually see the two boys leaving the party to sit on a nearby stair case on East Los Angeles, looking toward the startling beautiful nighttime skyline. There in confides in his friend that he has a feeling and he knows the feeling is right, but he can’t positively get himself to react to that feeling. “Every time you don’t go with it you’re pretty much lying to yourself.”

       Travis argues, using a metaphor from his first night of wrestling, that the fear of the unknown just holds you back. Those simple, coded sentences, are enough to bring the two into a near kiss, just at that very moment, friends from the party interrupt.

       Suddenly Travis pulls back, demanding to know what Diego is doing and slugging him, as he shouts “Get off.” Travis, alas, is doing what any boy threatened with being outed does to deny his involvement, even attacking his best friend to protect himself.

      The results for the less self-protective Diego, however, are devastating, as he loses his next wrestling match, and discovers a stack of male physical magazines in his locker, a fellow team player responding “I figured you could use those instead of getting off on us.”

        Diego attacks the young man, an assault stopped only by the sudden appearance of teachers, in particular Diego’s father, the coach, who wants to know “What’s going on?”

        If there was ever a being trapped, metaphorically speaking, placed in a “headlock,” it is Diego, who cannot escape his father, the sport, nor the sexual situation. He is trapped so it seems.

        Diego walks away without answering.

        The father looks down to see the mags from Diego’s locker spread out on the floor.

        The boy retreats to his bedroom, now even allowing his father entry and refusing to answer his ringing cellphone.

        Suddenly, as in the most romantic of rom-coms, there’s a knock on Diego’s bedroom window. Travis lifts the window from outside and crawls in, totally wet from the rain. We have entered the fine fantasy of gay romance.

        He puts out his hands to embrace his former friend, Diego quickly battling them down. But Travis breaks down in tears and in only a few moments Diego is embracing him, having surely to realize the temporary cowardice with which his friend reacted in his fears. The two finally get their long-delayed kiss.

 

     Come morning, Diego’s father knocks before entering his son’s room to find them both in bed. Unlike some hysteric fathers, however, he simply leaves, Travis soon after, having dressed, walking past him as he escapes the house.

         Either times truly have changed or author/director Damon Laguna is perfectly willing to ask us to provide a willing suspension of disbelief as Diego tells his father that he “can’t lie anymore.” “I just wanted you to be proud of me.”

         Unlike my ex-coach father, who surely might have denounced me on the spot or even turned to pretend that I no longer existed, this coach hugs his son to him assuring him that he loves him always.

         Diego leaves his house to find Travis waiting for him as they head off to school, this time presumably to deal with their homophobic peers as a pair, one of them most popular boy in the class. What can they do but recognize that that’s how it is these days.

         The only question that remains for me is “Does Diego get quit the wrestling team?” But then, perhaps he doesn’t want to.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Review blog (December 2023).

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Accatone / 1961

dark destiny

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sergio Citti and Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay), Pier Paolo Pasolini (director) Accatone / 1961 

In 1961, when Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first film Accatone premiered, critics from both left and right were shocked, some going as far as to deem the film a “scandal.” Today, watching this remarkable movie, it seems difficult to comprehend their reactions. But if you think back to many cinematic conventions of the time, it becomes apparent that most read the film as a kind of new neo-realist presentation, arguing, presumably, through its bleak almost cynical scenario, presented an Italy made up of a world of pimps, thieves, and never-do-wells, who beat upon women and basically were self-destructive.

 

     In fact, the seemingly “realist” aspects of this film does precisely show that. The friends of  Vittorio Cataldi, the “Accatone” or “scrounger” of the title (the beautiful Franco Citti) and he are non-working pimps, thieves, and simple lay-abouts who spend most of their days (and presumably nights) at local bars in the slums outside of Rome, boasting, squabbling, and fighting one another—when they’re not busy beating up hookers and their own wives. Accatone (the name Vittorio almost proudly has given himself) is a married man, whose wife has left him; he serves currently as a pimp to Maddalena (Silvana Corsini), who early on is hit and hurt by a motorcycle, hardly able, but forced, nonetheless, to hit the streets to bring in more money. She is mercilessly beaten by three men for her involvement in the arrest of a notorious pimp, now in prison. 

      At moments Accatone and his friends seem almost like less comic versions of the figure of the American TV series of the same period, Maynard G. Krebs in The Loves of Dobie Gillis, who, whenever he encountered someone involved in labor, pitiably screeched out the word “work!”

   Yet, from the very beginning of the film we are forced to perceive these same figures as something far more noble, violent, and even sacramental than their slightly comic personas. In the very first scene, they argue about the death of one of their group who had bet he could eat three plates of potatoes and wine and then swim across the river. He lost the bet, one of them proclaims, because everyone knows you can’t eat and then go in swimming. Accattone attempts to disprove that old wives’ tale, repeating the same actions—miraculously achieving the feat, bringing him fame among the ragazzi and hangers-on throughout the region.

       Moreover, there is clearly something else going on in their daily gatherings. Although they talk endlessly about women, they are a society of men whom Pasolini’s camera endlessly portrays in frontal framing, as if scanning, over and over, their rough-hewn beauty. If Accatone is surely the most attractive, the others all present a kind of earthy handsomeness, chosen by the director from figures he actually encountered on the streets.

     The little male society, moreover, despite their heterosexual bragging, is most definitely misogynistic, and when they do fight, Pasolini presents it much like the American artist Robert Longo did soon after, as a slow-motion wrestle with one another that more closely resembles the coils of lovemaking. As in several Pasolini scripts, there is not only a completely homoerotic sensibility to their gathering, but a suggestion that they cannot exist without one another, that they have embraced one another for life. And if we never see evidence that these boys participate in group sex with one another, as a similar gathering did in Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava (The Big Night)—also with a screenplay by Pasolini—we surely can imagine it happening.

       It is for that very reason why, when Accatone even attempts to pull away, they dismiss and taunt him, as he does to himself in robbing a gold chain from his own small child in his attempt to  turn the innocent, yet willing, Stella into a whore. 

      As critic Peter Bondanella has noted, Accatone can be seen as a kind of inverted Christ, with his local friends serving as his disciples. One might even suggest that when he turns from his Magdalene (Maddalena) to Stella (Franca Pasut), symbolic of his destiny (his star), he raises the ire of his disciples. Indeed Maddalena, in this underground version of an anti-Christ’s life, becomes his Judas, denouncing him to the police, who follow his activities even closer, contributing to his death.

       For just one day, joining his brother, Accatone attempts to redeem himself through actual labor. But he, quite literally (and, of course, spiritually) is too weak. Forced to rejoin in the petty thievery of his friends, he dies in a police chase—just as his dream had vaguely predicted. 

      In the end, accordingly, we read Pasolini’s film as a kind of morality play instead of as a piece of realist fiction. Today Accatone—although just as forceful in its commendation of bourgeois and governmental leaders with regard to their treatment of the Italian peasants—appears far closer to a film such as Teorema, a kind of theorem about our needs for a Christ-like love and sexuality, than it seems to be a projection of everyday life—which, in turn, lifts Pasolini’s work from a presentation of the everyday to a cinema of great significance.

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2016).