Daniel Castilhos | Fedra (Phaedra) / 2020

vortex of guilt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Castilhos (screenwriter and director) Fedra (Phaedra) / 2020 [25 minutes]

 

In all the original myths, plays, and commentaries about the beautiful young second wife of Theseus, Phaedra falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus. She attempts to seduce him into her bed, but he refuses, either because of the fact that she is his stepmother, and more commonly in the myths, because he has pledged a commitment of chastity to his favorite goddess, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt as well as chastity.

 

     Either because of Phaedra’s own sense of betrayal or in some versions became of Aphrodite’s jealousy, Phaedra tells her husband that her son by his first wife attempted to rape her. In all versions, whether through the hands of Aphrodite or through Theseus’ revenge, Poseidon or some other god or goddess frightens Hippolytus’ chariot, sending them into such a frenzy that the young beautiful boy is dragged and torn apart by his own horses.

       In most versions Theseus discovers Phaedra’s lie, she killing herself over her treachery.

      In Brazilian director Daniel Castilhos’ uncut version from 2020, Hipolito (Marlon Schuck), called Lito by his mother Fedra (Mariana Boni), is a gay boy in love with Angelo (Thomas Ghelen).

       As in the original, Lito’s father and Fedra’s husband is away concerning his shipping business for long periods of time. He has married the 19-year-old college student after his wife, Fedra’s sister, died in an unspecified accident. The poor beauty, accordingly, is not only new to marriage but locked into a relationship with an older man who doesn’t spend much time with her. In that sense, it is the worst situation imaginable for a young teenager at the very age when she should be out exploring life. Teseu has tried to encourage her to join him, but she argues that she must continue her college studies.

     Equally frustrating is that with his father away, her son-in-law is busy parading his boyfriend Angelo through the house, kissing him openly, and having passionate sex with him in his bedroom—all of which Fedra not only observes but purposely listens to through the doorway.

      Even worse for her is the fact that her aunt Enone (Anita Dal Moro) comes for an apparently open-ended visit. Enone is an outspoken woman, quite free-thinking who openly comments on Lito’s beauty, suggesting even she would go to be with him were it possible. Surely her niece should take up with Lito and leave an old man like Teseu to herself. Enone, may be heterosexually open-minded, but when Fedra tells her that Lito is not interested in women, and that he is having an affair with Angelo, the aunt is quite taken aback, suggesting that surely this is just a passing phase since it would be a shame to waste all that beauty on sex with a man.

      Angelo, himself, is quite outspoken about Fedra’s beauty and at one moment when the boys are playing in the swimming pool even flirts with Fedra. Actually, he simply treats her like the attractive young woman she truly is, suggesting she attend the swimming meet in which Lito is competing. But it is Hipolito seems jealous of his lover’s attentions to the girl, and we realize in his discomfort about his young mother that there are obviously other feelings about her that he is hiding, whether they be a kind of disgust over the choice of his mother’s sister or, as we soon discover, his own heterosexual urges is not made clear.

 

     But in the very next scenes, as Fedra watches her step-son step naked out of the shower, turning to leave, he grabs her and brings her into his bed for sex which she clearly enjoys.

      Guilt almost immediately sweeps up these two individuals into a vortex not entirely of their own making. Lito refuses to answer Angelo on his cellphone, while Fedra breaks down into tears in the shower.

      In a kind of antiphon, the two central characters admit their “crimes,” Lito confessing his acts to his lover Angelo, who at first his shocked by his acts but when, for the first time his friend insists that he loves him and they he had sex for the first time ever with a woman out of a sense of the forbidden, finally suggests he leave the house and move in with him. If Hipolito may feel that he does not deserve Angelo’s offer given what he just admitted to, it doesn’t take him but a few moments to agree, soon after pulling a suitcase down the stairs and jumping into Angelo’s waiting car.

     Fedra meanwhile, admits to her auntie that something terrible has happened, an event which Enone quickly intuits when she sees Lito moving out. Unlike Angelo’s expressions of continued love, she demands her niece immediately deny the whole thing, that if something comes up, she should put the blame on him.

     Something, so to speak, does come up, as Teseu returns home that very evening to find his young wife, having taken drugs, dead in the bathtub.

      If we have long felt the unsettling chords of José Florēncio’s music track throughout this teleplay, we now feel a different kind of nauseating feeling. If as Vito Russo long-ago taught us most queer individuals have had to die for their sexual acts in the end, so too through cinema history have women been forced to die for the sins of the male hero. To replace the pattern of homophobia with a somewhat misogynistic ending does not resolve the problem—although we all know that if Enone tells what she knows to her brother they may be further vengeance.

      Perhaps Castilhos felt that in killing off his Fedra he was evening the balance for all those centuries in which the innocent Hipolito had to die for his young mother’s mendacity. If nothing else, the gay man’s acceptance of his lover’s failures, shows at a way out from all those centuries of macho reaction in response to sexual infractions other than overpowering guilt, vengeance, and suicide. Queer people have always suggested to heterosexual beings that sex is nothing more than what it is, not something that enslaves one to another.

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Daniel Castilhos | Meninos Tristes (Blue Boys) / 2016

real ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Castilhos (teleplay and director) Meninos Tristes (Blue Boys) / 2016 [45 minutes]

 

One of the numerous television mini-series about social and political issues that appear in Brazil and many other South American countries, Meninos Tristes, in 4 short sessions, revisited the commonplace theme of schoolboy bullying for mostly gay boys. As the regular reader of my essay / reviews will know this is one of the hundreds I have written about over the years, but this one being among the most extreme and tragic in its ramifications.

     If the casual reader might wonder why this subject is repeated in so many films, I would immediately suggest that it is not an issue of popularity but of the continued need to educate and hopefully change a situation that is evidently getting worse as the LGBTQ+ community finds its international voice. The bullies of every society seem to get more terrorized in their homophobic fog than they were decades ago when one simply whispered such issues, young gay men and women being left to themselves without any knowledge that he or she was not entirely alone.

       This work subtly reasserts, moreover, that homophobia itself often stems from the fear of those who are themselves unable to accept their own nascent desires, proving to themselves that they could not possibly be gay by hating others who they suspect of being or are openly queer.

       In movie after movie, young gay men are beaten and terrorized every time they walk down the hall or walk home after school. But Blue Boys reveals, like many others, that the terror often doesn’t end there. In the case of the handsome Andre (Vinicius Machado), he is not only attacked at school and elsewhere by Marco (Luiz Kumer) and his fellow thugs, but at home must face a righteous religious mother, Olga (Suely Pinheiro) who, swayed by the uneducated counseling of her pastor, makes things worse for the boy, who has already made clear that he is being tortured at school. Moreover, Castilhos has written-in an almost campy monster of a sister, Priscila (Renata Selmo) who is nearly as hostile to homosexuality as Andre’s classmates and shares as about much empathy as she might have for cockroach; she’d be happier if someone would just come and get it out of her way. I wonder if there is any hidden meaning in the fact that she is busy throughout much of the film reading Harry Potter?              Like most 17-year-old closeted gay boys, Andre has a best female friend Manuela (Ana Victoria Camargo) who is there for Andre as some of his worst minutes, but in the end, she seems more concerned about the decorations she’s planning for the school prom.

     Compared with most such boys in this situation, Andre certainly does have problems. Beyond the threats and the incomprehension of his situation at home, Andre is truly attacked, this time with a baseball bat, escaping only before it is about to be used. His fears lead him to attempt suicide through an overdose of pills. Fortunately, his mother returns home from church in time to demand her daughter call 911, who stands there for a while before doing so, as if she’d prefer not to be bothered.

    

      This film, like some others, also includes an openly gay boy, Diego (Arthur Paz) who is not only friendly to Andre, but is determined to get him into his bed and make him is boyfriend. And it is his comments that help finally to get the terrified and pouting Andre to realize that he too has the right to love and even have sex. Indeed, the most pleasant moments in this film are when the two boys finally do get together and almost fall in love, Andre, even at those moments, fearing what might happen in the future.

       And with good reason. Worried for her son, Olga is plotting with her spiritual leader how to move the family off to Brasilia for service in the church, hoping to involve Andre—who is clearly a nonbeliever who refuses to even attend church—in a closer relationship with God that might save him from his abnormal desires. She may think of the move as simply a beneficial involvement in community, but underneath the soothing words of her pastor we can small the walls of a gay conversion camp.

     But the worse is yet to come. After their love-making, when Andre leaves Diego, Marco, evidently having planned a sexual outing with Diego, rapes him before beating and knifing him to death. After his caring teacher Mariana (Cheri Vivan) and his mother gently report the news to him, Andre asks for some time alone and going upstairs opens a drawer wherein his mother evidently keeps a gun. At the last moment of the film, we hear it go off.

      The last 5-minute segment begins 9 months later, during which time, apparently, a very much changed Andre—now bearded with tatts—has been locked away in an asylum, evidently for his own protection. We watch him in the shower, fighting fiercely with an imaginary revenant of Marco, the doctors quickly putting him under sedation.

       Another 3 months pass, and a more serene Andre is about to be released in another week as the doctor tells him that today is visiting day, and his mother will be with him for breakfast. The movie ends there, and one can interpret it easily as the beginning of a new life for which Andre hopes, or alas, a repeat of the old if his mother has not yet come to realize her own culpability. Presumably Andre has learned how to forgive her and put to rest all the other real ghosts.

      When I was visiting the Soviet Union during its very last days in 1991, my poet friend Arkadii Dragomoschenko told me that in Russia the word for gay boys was the Russian equivalent of the words “blue boys.” I wanted to tell him that in such a culture as his, much like that of Putin’s Russia and the current situations in Poland, Hungary, The Philippines, Egypt and numerous other African nations such a description was certainly appropriate given the situation of both their spiritual and physical beings, their souls feeling as “blue” as in the black musical expessions, and their bodies often being beaten black and blue.

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

David Amberg | Together/Apart / 2022

a life in pieces

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Amberg (screenwriter and director) Together/Apart / 2022 [7 minutes]

 

In David Amberg’s animated short film, two young men Michael and Alex (Alex Redd and Eric Roberts) meet up at a party and afterword's make out in a nearby empty lot. There, despite Alex’s

fears, Michael encourages they continue with their kissing. Thugs, at that very moment, appear with a bat, resulting in a gay bashing in which Michael is terribly hurt.

    Two years pass, and the couple is still together, but Michael is still having serious issues, nightmares and a sense of not being fully whole and ready to engage in public expressions with Alex of love. This particularly morning, in fact, one of his eyes escapes, Michael trying to cover up the problem quickly with an eyepatch, despite the little eye bulb’s appearance at the breakfast table.

    It is their second anniversary, and Alex brings up the possibility that after two years they might be thinking of getting married. That sudden possibility truly puts Michael into a spin, as he admits he is still terrified of openly expressing their relationship. At that moment his heart falls out and goes running across the room to join the eyeball. Rushing to a doctor, they are told to simply ice on it, as he leads his heart out the door on a leash. Things are definitely not going very well for their anniversary.

 

    His hand, in fact, soon follows the other two as they escape, Michael insisting, in a ridiculous pun, that he can handle it as he goes chasing after the missing body parts. One can only wonder what such important body parts, the eye, the hand, and the heart, are seeking. Following them down a narrow alley, he meets up once again with the shadow of a homophobic gay basher upon which all his body falls into pieces, obviously a metaphor for the survivor’s mental condition.

      Alex soon appears on the scene, expressing his deep love, while Michael explains about his fears that he never wants his lover to have to go through again. But love does heal all in Amberg’s crazy animated reality. Alex screws back Michael’s head onto his body, and the other pieces gradually come back to reassemble of their own accord. Alex picks up the heart and puts in back into the empty space.

      The last scene shows the two of their marrying and kissing in a open space.

    Amberg’s humorous rendering of the psychological problems involved after a homophobic gay attack make clear that recovering from such an event is not an easy thing, leaving the human psyche as Michael declares, in a mess; to which Alex, always the optimist replies, “You’re not a mess, you’re just…portable.”

 

Los Angeles, December 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

Jordi Estrada | Como en Arcadia (Just Like Arcadia) / 2015

come back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jordi Estrada (screenwriter and director) Como en Arcadia (Just Like Arcadia) / 2015 [7 minutes]

 

Using a simple weekend gathering of beautiful Spanish youths as his metaphor, director Jordi Estrada attempts to retell the story of the Golden Age in his short film Just Like Arcadia. It was a time when even immortals came down from Olympus to live with mortals, in which there was no jealousy, no punishment, no anger, no hate.

      We watch these older teens enjoying the day, sharing a picnic, swimming, simply showing of, quite unselfconsciously, they beautiful bodies, a time in which mortals lived like gods. Among the actors, given no character names, are Marc Lerch, Albert Martínez, Alberto Rosás, Alejandro Rosás, Kevin Ríos, Samuel Savage, and Mamadou Sow.       

     Only one in their midst, however, has eternal life, and he clearly stands out among the others. One day we see the immortal beauty going off with another boy to a private place in the forest where they spoke and get stoned, talking about their dreams and nightmares, the immortal boy obviously having no nightmares, while other is haunted by them. What happens in that cave is made purposely unclear, but when the mortal boy cries out for the other to “come here, don’t leave me alone please,” his plea can only remind us of the call of one lover to another to “come back,” so common in literary history, * a cry to return to his side in bed.

 

      At that very moment, the other boys return, as the immortal youth sits on a nearby rock naked.

The winds come, so we are told, and the mortals must move inside to the caves to live far less enchanted lives, while the special youth, robbed now in white moves back to Olympus.

       The narrator, clearly the boy who called out to his lover suggests that even now he cannot forget him.  

       Perhaps all gay men and even many heterosexuals recall such golden days of youth, surrounded by the beauty of their peers and one special boy to whom they were especially attracted.

But to attempt to characterize it as a special Arcadian-like moment seems tenuous at best, since the very same moments are always filled in the minds of youths with angst and fear, with jealousy and envy. The idea of an Edenic childhood is always popular, but I suggest those who write of such moments have forgotten their own youthful difficulties, their feelings of awkwardness of alienation. The vision Estrada presents seemed only possible, in my mind as child, for the handsome heterosexual boys who hung out together without feeling any sexual pulls for the others, without the embarrassment of being different, without the fear of being seen as an outsider.

       I know now, however, that that too was a myth. There is no time in youth when one does not fully feel like an outsider, even in escapes on a sunny weekend to an all-male get-together. They had girls to worry about, the fulfillment of bodily images, the challenges of seeking dominance. But it’s nice to imagine such a time, and those wonderful feelings when you wanted simply to call a beautiful friend back to you to stay a while longer in the heaven of your arms.

 

*Among the hundreds of such works is C. P. Cavafy’s poem, “Come Back,” which I translated below:

 

Come Back

 

Come back and lay your hands on me,

the sensate feelings of a shiver. Come back

when the body is both open and on edge—

 

when desire is driven through the blood

that the lips and skin did yet forget

what our hands reached out to grab.

 

Come quickly, return me to love.

Come back and hold me tight into night

still lingering in kisses and our touch.

 

Los Angeles, December 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

Lenny Bruce and Jeff Hale | Thank You Mask Man / 1971

unnatural acts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lenny Bruce (writer and voice), Jeff Hale (animation and director) Thank You Mask Man / 1971

 

Describing the “plot” of a Lenny Bruce routine is a little bit like lecturing on jazz or rapping about architecture. It can be done: Nathaniel Mackey has written several fictions about jazz that fully convey the syncopations and rhythms of the music, and I suppose a hip hop artist might be able to take on the Empire State. But every time I’ve heard a different recording of Bruce’s famed “Thank You Masked Man” routine it’s somewhat different from the last, things left out, new elements represented, the comic emphases located in different parts of the “story.” And all the oral versions of the skit that I’ve heard, now some four or five various recordings, are different, sometimes substantially, from the 1971 Jeff Hale animated short film featuring yet another version of the work. In fact—and this is important—the routine generally titled in the recordings as “Thank You Masked Man” is called “Thank You Mask Man” in the cartoon film animation.

     A masked man is simply one of many of a kind, another male wearing a mask, while a “mask man” is a very particular individual, a man who himself represents the mask, a singular being who has come to be defined not only by his costume but what that element of apparel represents. The Lone Ranger of the film is not only wearing the mask but has become the mask, the “mask man.”

     In short, the horse rider who rushes in to help his fellow citizens in peril is, in the animated version, not only alone, a man who ranges about the landscape as a loner, but is someone basically unknown to the society which he repeatedly helps and saves. He is an outsider, defined by his being apart from the people he regularly rushes in to protect.

     For that protection it is quite understandable why societal figures, the town leaders, their wives, their children, and even the local streetcleaners wish to thank him. After all, he protects them and helps them to maintain the society which they define. And surely we cannot wonder why they










 might wish to award him for his maintenance, his salvation of the normalcy for which they stand. The sheriffs and mayors who are grateful for his help would love to give him medals, it would give their wives great pleasure if he’d stay around just long enough to eat a slice of their freshly baked cakes. Their kids would enjoy personally thanking their parents’ hero. “Thank you mask man. Thank mask man,” would appear to be a lovely thing to come out of the mouths of these babes.

      But no, the mask man runs in to save the day only to escape before having any substantial contact with the citizens he protects. And frankly those perfect respectable and bourgeois folk are getting a little bit irritated with his highhandedness, with his clearly standoffish behavior.

      One citizen suggests that the mask man is in analysis, having discovered that he can’t accept love. A small town medical doctor even diagnoses part of the problem can is evidenced in the fact that he uses only silver bullets which, he argues, symbolizes Dr. Paul Erhlich’s struggle to discover the silver bullet—arsphenamine (compound 606)—that will cure syphilis. “He sees all of us, the entire society,” so speculates the good doctor, “as being infected with syphilis.” Not at all an appropriate way for their hero to characterize those whose difficulties he cures. Maybe he’s not such hero, after all, the town leaders suspect.

     

    Finally facing the gun—in Hale’s comic version both figuratively and literally—held by the local sanitation worker, they demand to know why he doesn’t hang around to accept their appreciation. The mask man attempts to explain that if he stayed around to hear a young boy say “Thank you mask man. Thank you mask man,” he might get used to it and even enjoy the praise heaped upon him. He’d possibly like it so much that he’d stay at home with the other society folks and wait for each day’s delivery of his fan mail. And then one day, when he didn’t find a single fan letter in his mailbox, someone might tell him that the Messiah had returned and made everything right again, and he’d find himself without a job, without even his identity. He’d have to go out and cause trouble, create a ruckus just so he might be required to come to the rescue. He’d have turned a good thing inside out, the savior transforming himself into the villain of the story. So that’s why, he concludes he can’t stay around for the praise. “What I don’t have, I don’t miss.”

     Still, just this one time, they insist, he take with him, just as a gesture or for their kid’s sake, anything he wants. The mask man looks around and dismisses the ash tray. He looks around again, ponders, and then, comes up with a brilliant idea, “Give me that Indian over there!” Who? Tonto? Yes, shouts the mask man, Tante. Give me Tante. It’s Tonto says the surprised street cleaner, not Tante (which in Yiddish means “aunt.”*) And what do you want him for?

      The mask man: (straightening up the feather atop Tonto’s head) To perform an unnatural act.

      The street cleaner: What??

      The mask man: To perform an unnatural act.

      The cleaner: O, the mask man’s a fag. Awwww. [sticking out his tongue] The fag man. A dirty fag. You damn queer you! The mask fag man, ain’t that a kick in the ass? [to the mask man] I bet you got mascarry under that damn mask ain’t you? A damn queer. I never knew you were a fag mask man.

       The mask man: I’m not a fag. [pause] But I’ve heard a lot about it and I’ve read exposés and I want to try to see how bad it is. Just once. I like what they do with fags anyway (wrapping his arm around Tonto’s shoulder). The punishment is quite correct. They throw them in jail with a lot of men, very clever (he laughs with a slight giggle).

       “Wash him up and get him ready,” he commands as he now strides forward in a walk that might almost be described as hip-heavy strut. Spotting a pink horse with a fluffy white mane and tail, the mask man pauses: “Hey, give me the horse too.”

        The cleaner: What do you want that horse for?

        The mask man: Some act...

      The street cleaner sticks out is tongue again in disgust and almost immediately the whole town is howling out “Fag, fag, fag, fag, fag, fag, fag as the Lone Ranger, no longer alone rides off into the sunset shouting heigh-ho, proving to the whole of society that he remains a true outsider worthy of his name, a mask man willing to experiment, at least twice, in sex. And we must remember Tonto remained loyal to him to the very end.

      You have to imagine the story I’ve just shared with you, however, being performed not by a pop intellect but a brilliant verbal storyteller who uses the syncopations and rhythms of music along with the riffs of a hip-hop artist to build up a satirical high rise whose structure, like the tower of Babel, comes tumbling down with the awe of a chorus of laughter.

       For those in the LGBTQ community who were offended by the use of the word “fag,” I might suggest they go back and carefully study the structure of Bruce’s linguistic construct. It is the society, as it has been through the ages, who calls this wise loner by names, not the comedian who tells the tale.

       And what a brilliant fable it is, demonstrating as it does, just how hypocritical these desperate folk so desirous to embrace their savior into their fold are. It is, as Jacques Derrida might have put it, la différence that makes it possible for the mask man—maybe even with mascara applied to his eyes—to save them. For it has always been the outsiders who have shown those inside how to survive.

       I’d like to have seen Bruce riff on Batman and his boy Robin as well.

 

epilogue

     I should just mention that in his skit “blah-blah-blah” Bruce also draws attention to the LGBTQ community. Arrested in San Francisco for obscenity, using a word that he describes as a common homosexual practice of ten letters, the comedian forces his audience to deal with homosexuality much in the way that Tim Miller does in some of his performances. Miller often opens his show appearing naked and sitting on an unsuspecting audience member’s lap, forcing them, in some cases for the first time in their lives, to actually make bodily contact with a homosexual man.

     Similarly, Bruce turns an adjective through the telling of the story of his arrest and his appearance in court where the policeman, the judge, the lawyer, and several others repeating it over and over—Bruce coding it as “blah-blah-blah” in his recounting of these events precipitated by his calling someone, apparently, a “fucking ass”—into a verb. An unlikable person suddenly is transformed into a sexual act which requires Bruce’s audience, each time he repeats the words “blah-blah-blah,” to imagine, for many of them, the unimaginable. It’s sheer genius.

 

*In one version of the recordings (“Thank You Masked Man” of 1972) The Lone Ranger is described as being Jewish, and speaks in Yiddish, yet another version of the outsider.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2021

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