Sahra Bhimji | Chemistry / 2022

the well-known chemistry of opposites

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kaylynn Barley and Sahra Bhimji (screenplay), Sahra Bhimji (director) Chemistry / 2022 [11 minutes]

 

Waleed (Christopher Batres) is what you might describe as a shirker student, the kind who, without paying attention to anything his chemistry teacher is saying, allows his cellphone to ring the very moment his black-board buried prof recognizes that he speaking to a class of students by asking a question. All Waleed can seem to notice is another boy, Liam (Garrett Hannigan) staring at him in disbelief.

     The personable but discombobulated Waleed has not even heard the professor tell them of their next assignment, and attempts, after class, to get the information from Liam, who disparagingly tries ignore the eager classmate, turning away when he suggests they might meet up to talk about the assignment and even do an experiment or two together. Liam is off to the library, which Waleed, in jest, pretends to have not even know of its existence.

     In the very next frame, we see Liam asleep in the library, being told it has just closed. The presumption is that he has been working so long and hard that he has finally fallen asleep.

      But in the very next frame, in full daylight, Liam leaves the library where, once more in runs into Waleed, who claims to have just gotten out of another class. I’d suggest that director Bhimji has a problem with continuity here (no college library that I know of closes in the middle of the day—although it may be that Diablo Valley College is the kind of commuter school where everyone leaves campus by 5:00) and, perhaps, equally has a problem with a rather unbelievable situation where the two boys meet up again. Even Liam wonders whether Waleed might be stalking him.

      We do know, however, that Liam has been working in the library since he has just submitted his assignment on line. Even Waleed is a bit wowed, complementing his peer by suggesting that he’s “really awesome, and…very studious, and will probably be transferring to someplace like Berkeley or Harvard.” Liam interrupts, “Stanford.” But still the shirker asks him out to dinner.

       Liam admits that he’s “super broke,” but Waleed offers to pay as long as he lets him pick the restaurant. Liam, however, requests vegetarian, and the always agreeable Waleed declares that he too is vegetarian—as of today! Off the two go to dinner.

      We watch the two leave the restaurant, obviously thoroughly enjoying one another’s company and coming together in a manner that we suspect is sexual as well. But Liam asks if Waleed has actually submitted the assignment, since it is now due in an hour.

       “Such a downer dude, we were having so much fun,” is Waleed’s response. Liam’s response makes it clear that the two have, in fact, quickly become more than buddies as he take’s Waleed’s hand and suggests maybe he can come over and help him out.

 

      Waleed, however suggests Liam’s place since his will be messy, but Liam counters that he doesn’t mind messy. the two moving in for a kiss.

        But almost immediately, Liam backs off. “Actually, that’s not going to work.” As he drops Waleed’s hand, the boy wonders if he had done something wrong, offering him to give a drive home, Liam responding that his car is close by. We are as confused at what is now transpiring as is Waleed, Liam thanking him for dinner and rushing off.

        A moment later, however, all is made clear as we see Liam drive to an isolated spot, and paste up pieces of cardboard on his car windows. Obviously he is one of those students hardly able to afford paying for his education, living out of his van.

        Liam undresses, cleans his face and mouth with tissues, and finally down to sleep, the sounds of sirens, walking feet, arguments etc. filling the night. If you’ve ever slept in a car or in an apartment near an open window in a highly urban neighborhood, you know the sounds.

        But then there is a tapping on the car window itself, something truly frightening to the boy.

       A voice calls out, “Is everything okay? Liam, it’s me.” Now we are certain that Waleed has been stalking his new friend. Liam rightfully insists that he step away from the car.

        Waleed obeys, but explains that he will call him when he reaches his own auto.

        “Why are you here?” Liam angrily asks.

        “Why are you hiding in your car?”

        “Why do you think?” Waleed, as we’ve noted, is no deep thinker.

        “Oh shit, I just realized. Are you sleeping in your car?”

        The question would be funny if the truth behind it wasn’t so very sad.

        “It’s just temporary, okay. I’m just between places.”

        “…I’m so sorry. I’m an idiot. I thought you were hiding from me.”

        Liam assures him he’s fine, but begs him not to tell anyone, the dilemma all such students surely face, yet something that is nearly impossible to fully hide.

        Waleed admits that he has also lied when he has told Laim that he has his own place. “I live with my parents, Liam responding that he had figured that out, but that “sounds kind of nice.” After a long pause, he adds, “Mine are asses.” We can only wonder, did Liam parents disown for being gay?

         Waleed, always the comic, continues, “And my grandparents, and my three sisters…and two cats, which I’m allergic to.”

          Liam laughs. “Okay, maybe not so nice then.”

          Waleed adds that his family is super conservative. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to come out to them.” After a long pause, he adds, “Unless like we get married!”

          “We’d probably have to elope or something.” After another pause, Liam asks, “So, what? Is it past your curfew?”

         “Oh, way past my curfew.”

      Liam suggests that there’s still 22 minutes left until the assignment is due. On the phone, he explains how to open the assignment to begin the work. But we suspect that eventually he might invite the terribly tardy son into van to share his bed for the night.

       For once, both young men—the shirker and the far too serious-minded student, a comic and a young man living a drama he shouldn’t have to face—might come together to share a few joyful sexual moments in the night. That’s the well-known chemistry of opposites.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

William Haddock | Billy and His Pal / 1911

disconsolate billy

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Haddock (director) Billy and His Pal / 1911

 

We’ve seen dozens of films of this genre: a young boy looks up to and admires an older man who becomes an idol for the youth. This was, indeed, one of the central themes of cowboy buddy films which often bordered on the homoerotic with a soupçon of pederasty. Even otherwise totally innocent films such as Shane are totally comfortable within this trope. But with just a little bit of scratching we can see it clearly for what it is, a sublimated desire to be closer to or in a deeper relationship with the hero, symbolically “marrying” the other in the attempt to take on the values and mannerisms of the beloved mentor.

     One of the strangest works of this genre, however, occurs early on US film history in William Haddock’s 1911 Billy and His Pal. Either in order to attenuate the sexual implications of such a male-male relationship or even, rather perversely, to accentuate them, the hero of this short film of 15 minutes is played by a woman in male costume, Edith Storey who idolizes the cowboy Jim (Francis Ford).

      Filmed near San Antonio, Texas this film tells the tale of Billy—who the intertitles, obviously by mistake, refer to as Bobby—who, basically happy to serve simply as the lanky cowboy’s gofer, is sent to the local general store to pick up some tobacco.

      Just previously, Billy/Bobby has witnessed Jim saving a young woman from the unwanted attentions of a dark-clothed Mexican as she attempts to mount her horse, and now, at the store the boy overhears the resentful man plotting with others to do Jim in. Quickly purchasing the pouch, the boy rushes back to tell his hero of what he has just learned.

      In the meantime, however, Jim has been tied-up and kidnapped by the gang who drags the cowboy to a crag at the bottom of a cliff with the intention of dropping a huge rock from the cliff-top upon his body below.

      Billy arrives back to the spot where he has left his pal, discovering him missing with only a discarded tobacco pouch and a hat of one of the malefactors left behind. Hurrying into action, Billy/Bobby rushes to a nearby ranch, evidently owned by the woman to whom Jim has previously attended, rustling up a posse of cow-punchers and explaining the situation to Jim’s woman friend.

       Anxiously, they rush to the spot to which Billy has sent them, saving Jim just as the huge boulder comes crashing down from above. They round up the Mexican villains and send them off to their deservèd punishment, while Jim returns to courting the woman, leaving his younger pal alone and disconsolate for having lost his best friend by saving him.

       Who wrote this obviously racist tale is unknown, just as we are today uncertain whether or not Haddock directed it. But the company that produced it was not American but of French origin, the story of which is worth mentioning.

       I quote Frank Thompson’s “Film Notes” from The National Film Preservation site:

 

“At the dawn of the 20th century, the films of French filmmaker Georges Méliès were among the most popular in the world. And the most pirated. Unscrupulous American film studios regularly took Méliès’s films, obscured his trademark, and sold the works as their own.

     Méliès sent his older brother Gaston to the United States to enforce his copyrights. Gaston arrived in New York in November 1902 and immediately placed an ad in the trade papers announcing his uncompromising attitude toward protecting his brother’s work, reading in part, “…we are prepared and determined energetically to pursue all counterfeiters and pirates. We will not speak twice; we will act!”

     Eventually, Gaston began making his own moving pictures. In 1910, looking for a warm, sunny place to film during the winter, he moved his company to a farmhouse in San Antonio, Texas, near a health resort called Hot Wells Hotel. The makeshift studio was dubbed the Star Film Ranch and over the next year the company made more than seventy one-reel films, westerns, comedies, and romantic tales of old Mexico. Some were released as Méliès Star Films and others—including this one—were released under the name American Wild West Film Company.”

      In 2010 this one-reeler was discovered in New Zealand where it had apparently been re-issued for a British Commonwealth audience as Bobby and His Pal. Restored, the film now represents only one of five remaining of those produced by Gaston Méliès’ company.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2020

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

Anonymous | A Range Romance / 1911

a double outing

by Douglas Messerli

 

unknown filmmaker (screenwriter and director) A Range Romance / 1911

 

One of the most fascinating of early cinema “gender exploratory” works, A Range Romance shares the Western setting of two other such films of the same year, William Haddock’s Billy and His Pal and Frederick A. Thomson’s Kitty and the Cowboys. The latter of these is simply a comic drag piece, but Billy and His Pal is far more complex, featuring in Edith Storey’s characterization of Billy an almost transgender figure hopelessly in love with the cowboy Jim.

 

    A Range Romance, however, takes it quite a bit further. Bob Adams, fed up with his wife’s anger, going beyond the limits of most of the hen-pecked husbands presented in comic films of the period, leaves with his daughter for the Western range. He dresses his little girl Bessie as a boy, in part to protect her in a world, as we later observe in William A. Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928), where women alone in the wild were always sexually threatened; but perhaps also simply to allow her more opportunities other than the kind of slavery of hard work and baby-bearing that marriage demanded from frontier women. It also seems clear, through his reaction when Ethel finally “becomes” a boy, that Bob simply would have preferred a son, perhaps since he’s so easily left his wife, even prefers the company of men.

      All of these possibilities play an important role when the film fast-forwards to ten years later where we see now cowboy Bob and his experienced partner arrive at a ranch seeking jobs. They’re hired on, and almost immediately the handsome foreman takes a liking to the young, slightly less rugged new hire. In a very short space of time, we observe him taking on the new boy as a kind of mentor and soon after, hardly being able to keep his hands off the kid.

      Kino, the film distributor that has released a restored version of this film, describes the work as “A Brokeback Mountain for the silent era.” But it isn’t quite that. First of all, these two “males” have a true opportunity to get to know one another before leaping into sex, and, of course, one of these guys is actually a girl. I’d say it’s closer to Barbara Streisand’s 1983 film Yentl or, in closer historical perspective, Paul Czinner’s The Fiddler of Florence (1926) in that the attraction the older male feels for the younger seems overwhelming but still strangely queer and disturbing—the tension between the contradictory feelings being perhaps even more frightening than simply realizing that one is attracted to the same sex. What the foreman likes about this young cowhand is that he has many of the features, in his youthful mien, that appear to be feminine, just what society in general teaches us are negative qualities.

     And this 1911 film doesn’t quickly resolve that confusion. Although an intertitle declares “Her Sex Discovered,” we’re left free to discern when that “discovery” takes place, whether it occurs immediately after the title card when the foreman soon begins to compare the size of his hand with that of his cowboy’s and to actually express his deep affection, or more gradually. Certainly, the young cowboy resists his friend’s first expressions of admiration and love, and even after seemingly being swayed by his cajoling, both determine to keep it secret, checking around them to see if anyone else might be observing what almost becomes their “first kiss.”

 

    The question remains why, if he’s actually discovered his sex, can’t they kiss first and explain it immediately to others who might catch them in the act. Why, if he immediately admits his gender to him, does he still resist expressing his own love or even accepting the foreman’s attentions. Surely at his age, it can no longer be because of his father or even the deception that he’s so thoroughly woven among the others. And surely, given what we soon learn after they marry and bear a child, that “she” now willingly takes on the traditional roles demanded of a wife, his earlier indecision can’t be for fear of losing his male stature.

      It appears to me that only at the dinner table where Bessie suddenly encounters her long-lost mother, Mary, just hired on as the new cook, and after Bob has identified himself to his wife, that the cowboy is willing to publicly reveal his/her sexuality, seemingly astounding the foreman, whose wide-eyed wonderment suggests he is hearing that she is truly female for the first time, Bessie flexing her muscles just to show that she was the same person as the cowboy they all thought her to be.

 

      If so, it is quite apparent that the ranch foreman has been completely willing to make love to another man, younger and more effeminate that he perhaps, but a male nonetheless. And I’d argue that the film quite purposely encourages that confusion throughout the long scene where it is apparent that the two have fallen in love and are willing, no matter the details, to engage in a relationship.

       As critic Laura Horak notes about the work, summarized by the blogger BL Panther: “we see how queerness and empire building are not mutually exclusive. She [Bessie] can dress like a man because of the drive to expand. The need for labor in The West facilitates [Bessie’s] queer play. In this unregulated and wild space, new identities could be taken on and played within. Just as imperialism will always resolve at the feet of the patriarchy, so does the film. A Range Romance may be a bittersweet tale about how cinema forestalls queerness….” before necessarily appeasing the censors.

     Finally, this film is fascinating because it represents what one might describe as a double—albeit heteronormative—outing, as a child of her parents and as a person of another gender other than what she had so long pretended to be. It might be safe to say that this is the very first “coming out” film.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Michael Varrati | Infested Hearts / 2022

the kingdom of infestation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Varrati (screenwriter and director) Infested Hearts / 2022 [17 minutes]

 

A great many people suffer from entomophobia, the fear of insects. Fortunately, I don’t, but my husband is absolutely terrified by most crawling figures, demanding me to immediately come into room where he spots them to kill the beasts. I do kill the cockroaches, even the sink-bound ants, but refuse to harm to crickets and spiders, who do so much good and whose lovely voices and beautifully designed webs fascinate me more than troubling me with a sense of infestation.

    In Michael Varrati’s short, black-and-white filmeeee 2022 film, however, something far more serious is happening. It begins almost unperceptively, with a powerful slap to Ethan (Ben Baur) male partner, Dean’s (William Lott) knee where he has just spotted a small beetle crawling, a moment after he has embraced him. Naturally, Dean demands an explanation, Ethan describing the huge bug he saw crawling up his leg. But there is now no sign of it.

     But even after the explanation Dean no longer desires to “cuddle,” suggesting he needs to get up early anyway.

     This is how it begins, with a small beetle in the room. But soon after, in the middle of the night, Ethan perceives a small bug crawling in and out of his nose.

     Seemingly the very next day, Ethan asks if the book Dean is reading is the same book as he was reading on the couch the other day; but Dean points out that the incident was four days ago. Somehow time as been lost.

     Dean suggests that they should have a couple of friends over for dinner. He argues that they barely go out anymore, that it would be a good think to socialize again. But Ethan seems distressed at the couple coming “here,” into his own house. Previously, in the first scenes of this film, Ethan’s voice has expressed a problem that he seems to have about issues of “safety”: “The problem with safety is that once you know it is contingent on another, you never really had it in the first place.”

     If nothing else, Ethan seems somewhat agoraphobic and perhaps anti-social which is often a related issue. His comment further suggests that he suffers from the problem “I can’t remember when we’ve had ‘others’ here,” as if having friends over hinted at something like a foreign presence.

      Even Dean sees his friend as being somewhat “weird.” And just as suddenly, Ethan spots a spider on his lover’s hand.

      As he brushes his teeth, Dean responding erotically, Ethan suddenly spots an ant on his brush. But when they book look again, there is nothing there as in all the previous times when he has spotted bugs on their bodies.

    It’s clearly affecting their sex life, their everyday relationship. In the middle of the night, Ethan observes dozens of small insects crawling across his lover’s chest. And no matter how he cleans his chest and body with soap, the insects keep appearing. We overhear a conversation from Dean to his mother trying to explain that they’ve had two exterminators come out to check their house. Something, he has to conclude, is wrong with Ethan’s mind. But what is it? What does this bug infestation actually mean.

     Ethan cannot explain the problem, even as Dean tries to relieve him by assuring him that “Nothing is here but us.” But, as Dean describes it, it is worse: Ethan will no longer look at him anymore, will no longer touch him. Even Dean has to ask, despite he being with Ethan day and night, might he be on drugs?

     Dean asks the question we all might wonder, does Ethan still love him?

     Ethan’s only answer is, “Look, I have to ask you to understand. There is something terrible going on here.”

     And Dean can only respond, “Yes.”

     Their very next conversation regards what Dean had heard about Ethan’s previous relationship, how he’d invented reasons to push him away. And now, he feels, the same pattern is repeating itself, despite Ethan’s denials.

     Ethan insists he still loves Dean, but “they’re everyone, I can’t sleep, I can’t focus.”

    Dean is insistent, “They don’t exist. And you want to know I how I know? Because if you thought this house was infected. I you thought the problem was bugs and not me, you’d leave. Seriously, if you love me, let’s just go.”

     But Ethan can’t, he insists. He cannot leave the house despite what he is experiencing within it.

     “Because where to you think the bugs that get inside come from?”

     Dean leaves.

     The entire house becomes infested, inside and out. Even the refrigerator has bugs crawling around the bowls of leftover food.”

     “He once told me that there was no one here but us. But what I didn’t understand at the time, they didn’t come from outside like I thought. They were always here. …If a certain kind of bug is always there when we die, don’t we see them waiting, biding their time inevitable moment. The answer, of course, is shockingly simple. They’re already in us, hitching a ride as we go from broken moment, to broken moment, laying our infested hearts bare.”

      From AIDS myths of self-infection, to the long history of gay tales that convince us that we as gay men are ourselves infected, to the kind of myth that Kafka tells in his horrific story of otherness in the tale of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, some gay men have not been unable to separate themselves from the monsters that others perceive them to be just for being themselves.

     This is the story of infested beings who cannot allow themselves to perceive that their love is not evidence of a world inherited by the kingdom of infestation.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2023

Reprinted from My World Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

Pedro Almodóvar | Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) / 1983

beloved obsessions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) / 1983

 

What’s a seedy cabaret singer to do when, after bringing her lover a new batch of heroin, he immediately drops dead? Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) pulls out a calling card left her by the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano) of an eccentric religious mission, Redentoras humilladas (the Humiliated Redeemers) and seeks entry to the order to escape the police.

 

    If the set-up might remind you a little of Barbara Stanwyck’s situation in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire (1941) or even of Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act (1992), be not afraid. These sisters, having a long history of offering shelter and redemption to fallen women have picked up the “dark habits” of the previous prostitutes, drug addicts, and murderers who have made their home previously in the little convent in which they reside, a place now very much in disrepair. And the Mother Superior, a great admirer of Yolanda, provides her with the order’s very best room, formerly inhabited by another wayward girl, Virginia, who became a nun and ran off to Africa only to be eaten by cannibals.

      Virginia was apparently the daughter of a wealthy man who for years subsidized the convent, but he has died and his wife, the totally selfish and mindless Marchioness (Mary Carrillo) is just announced her attention to stop their subsidy, which along with the significant drop in their number, will surely doom the convent. Those who remain, having given themselves ugly names to remind them of their sins—many of which they still actively participate—Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave), Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), and Sister Snake (Lina Canalejas) are delighted to have since an obvious sinner among their midst, their first new visitor in a long while.

      The Wikipedia entry very nicely summarizes the sisters’ contributions and perpetual moral turpitudes.  

“The nurturing Sister Damned compulsively cleans the convent and coddles all the animals under her care, including an overgrown pet tiger that she treats like a son, playing the bongos for him.  The ascetic Sister Manure is consumed by thoughts of penitence and corporal self-sacrifice and cooks between LSD hallucinations. She murdered somebody and as the Mother Superior lied under oath to save her from jail, she is very devoted to her. The over-curious Sister Sewer Rat gardens and secretly, under the pen name Concha Torres, writes lurid novels about the wayward souls who visit the convent. She smuggles the novels out of the convent through her sister's periodic visits. The unassuming Sister Snake, with the help of the priest, tailors seasonal fashion collections for dressing the statues of the Virgin Mary. Her piety is a cover up for her romantic love for the chain-smoking chaplain. The mother Superior is a heavy drug user and a lesbian, whose charitable work is a means of meeting needy young women. She admits, ‘From admiring them so much I have become one of them.’”

       Yolanda quickly makes friends of the nuns and, as one might expect, the Mother Superior almost immediately falls in love with her. They enjoy their time together consuming coke and heroin until one day Yolanda determines to free herself of drugs, which for the Mother Superior only confirms her sinfulness.

      During her withdrawal, Yolanda turns to Sister Rat for friendship, trying to keep the Mother Superior out of her bedroom and, a bit abstractly, out of her private affairs.

       Now faced with Yolanda’s rejection and more threats of closure, having failed with a blackmail letter revealing information regarding Virginia and the Marquise, the Mother Superior decides to go on an even greater mission of drug trafficking to order to keep her order up and running.

       In danger, now, of losing the order, the nuns determine to throw a special celebratory party of their Mother Superior, convincing Yolanda to sing at the affair. In a far less traditional manner than in Sister Act Yolanda and the other sisters sing in honor their leader, with the Marquise herself in attendance.

       Having helped the Marquise to obtain a letter from Africa informing her about her long-lost grandson who has been raised by apes, the selfish old woman has become fond of Yolanda and Sister Rat, grateful for their help. And when at the end of the party The Mother General, visiting the order, announces that the convent will be dissolved, the Marquise invites Rat and Yolanda to live with her.

       Sister Damned decides to retreat to her native village, leaving her pet tiger to Sister Snake and the Priest, who now openly in love, determine to start their family with the tiger as their son.

       Only Sister Manure remains behind to help Mother Superior to recover from all of the disasters facing her, the end of the order and the loss of Yolanda. But then, it appears, she soon has larger matters regarding to drug smuggling to attend to. Perhaps she will find a new vocation which might put her in a better financial state.

       Originally, so the story goes, Almodóvar was asked by multimillionaire Hervé Hachuel, to create a film starring his current girlfriend, Cristina Sánchez Pascual. Setting up a new production company called Tesauro Production, he commissioned the Spanish director to produce a film. In Frederick Strauss’ book, Almodóvar on Almodóvar (Faber and Faber, 2006), the director himself has described what story he had created:

 

“I came up with the story of a girl who drives both men and women wild, a girl who sings, drinks, takes drugs, occasionally goes through periods of abstinence and has the extraordinary experiences one would never have, were one to live a hundred years....”

     And later: “While writing I had in mind Marlene Dietrich's work with Josef von Sternberg, especially Blonde Venus (1932), where she plays a house wife who becomes a singer, spy and prostitute, who travels the world living a life of never ending adventure.”

 

     Dark Habits was Almodóvar's third film, a work rejected by the Cannes Film Festival and treated as a scandalous affair by both members of the Italian and Spanish press for it’s supposed sacrilegious treatment of religion as well as its blasphemous and anti-Catholic views. From the director’s point of view, it represented a change in tone from his two previous films, wherein the characters’ emotions, by which they are fully driven, are presented more clearly. Yet he did not see the film as anti-religious as much as a representation of figures who had moved away from God, directing their energies more towards those suffering and in misery, particularly women—the major subject of numerous Almodóvar works. Their actions, the director argues, in some respects echoing the views of Luis Buñuel and even Robert Bresson, is closer to the original and truer visions of religion both in their ability to love and even become themselves sinners in order to fully appreciate the nature of sin. And like Buñuel, in particular, Almodóvar chose the comic, clothed in lurid Douglas Sirkean color, as the best representation of their extreme and eccentric undertaking.

     Today, many critics, including myself, feel it to be one of the best of Almodóvar's early works.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).