Volker Schlöndorff | Der Fangschuß (Coup de Grâce) / 1976

the dark center of the human heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jutta Brückner, Margarethe von Trotta, and Geneviève Dormann (screenplay, based on the novel by Marguerite Yourcenar), Volker Schlöndorff (director) Der Fangschuß (Coup de Grâce) / 1976

Volker Schlöndorff’s 1976 film Coup de Grâce is a thoughtful, visually beautiful film that is also somewhat frustrating in its refusal to present a specific viewpoint. We know what the issues are: the old military order of the defeated Prussians against the new Bolshevik revolutionaries is at the heart of this Latvian-based film. In 1919 a detachment of German Freikorps soldiers is stationed in a chateau in the town of Kratovice to fight Bolshevik guerrillas. The soldiers have set up on the estate of Konrad de Reval (Rüdiger Kirschstein) and his sister Sophie de Reval (the wonderful Margarethe von Trotta).

      In the film’s first scene we see the return home, against the background of warfare, of Reval with his dashing childhood soldier friend, Erich von Lhomond (Matthias Habich). Sophie, her elderly grotesque Aunt Praskovia (Valeska Gert), and even the retainers are delighted for their return. And Sophie, who has been a long-time friend of Erich is even more delighted since she has long been in love with him.

      Despite his gallant treatment of her and her aunt, it quickly becomes apparent to anyone who knows anything about human behavior that Erich and Konrad are very much in love, Konrad insistently pounding his now battle-scarred piano as he stares in Erich’s eyes.
       Even the ghoulish old Aunt, who must be carried down to the dinner table seems to be more aware of the situations going on around her than the love-stricken Sophie, who attempts to entrap Erich in numerous ways, offering him food, coffee, poetry, and, of course, intimate situations to prove his love for her.

     The frustration for the young woman, who has had to bear many of the terrors of war simply to save her home and the soldiers within—many of whom are dying from Typhus—is obvious. Rockets, launched at the estate, are a regular occurrence. Secretly, Sophie has been visiting several of the village’s Bolsheviks, most notably a local seamstress, whose son is an important figure for the revolutionaries, who loans her books.

     Unlike the novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, where the violence of the war (a different war in fact) remained at a distance, Schlöndorff’s film shows us the gritty ugliness and its true meaningless up close, reiterating the pointlessness of both sides of this battle. Eric seems to have no difficulty in ordering up the deaths of discovered or even suspected revolutionaries, and allowing their bodies to rot.

     As he continually evades Sophie’s attentions, she turns to other men on his watch, at first the handsome Franz (Grigori Loew), and, when he is killed, taking up with Volkmar (Mathieu Carrière). The overlaying images of a kind of cheap series of love affairs with the constant dangers of a meaningless war might almost remind one of George Bernard Shaw’s great play Heartbreak House which was first performed in the very years that this film takes place. Like that play, a great deal is made of turning off lights or, at least, covering the windows so that the enemy can’t see the target, a command that time and again Sophie refuses to obey. At one point, to prove the necessity of the action, Eric takes her outside of the house, a lamp in his hand, which results in a direct hit on the estate’s stables. His very absurd show of bravery, however, only convinces her that he truly does love her—this despite the fact that she has witnessed her brother and Erich playing in the snow like two school children who can’t keep their hands off one another.

     It is, finally, Volkmar that makes it clear to her that in their brief weekend trip to Riga, the two men finally consummated their relationship. One can only wonder what has taken them so long. And the director reiterates their “distant” manly love by discretely pulling away from nearly every scene in which Erich might demonstrate his love of Konrad, revealing quite clearly that Erich’s love is far more conservative and chaste than any a typical heterosexual being might experience.
     Sophie’s choice—to hint at another film that quietly rumbles through this one—is to join the revolutionary forces and, as Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis argue in their essay on this film, reassert this as another narrative alternative, an anti-patriarchal, feminist perspective, that counteracts the Prussian patriarchal values. Sophie does this even presupposing the results, her capture and eventual death from the hands of the men she once passively nursed. And her demand that Erich von Lhomond, himself, put the bullet through her head is a recognition that in his inability to love her, he had already destroyed her life long before.

      As Moeller and Lellis hint, Erich, the only survivor of this debacle, might surely later be one of the gay Nazi Sturmabteilung brownshirts so brilliantly portrayed in Visconti’s The Damned.  But in Schlöndorff’s far more evasive work, we have no clear indication of his future. Sophie simply becomes another rotting, stinking corpse, left behind in a meaningless murder by a man who has no clear understanding of why he murders. Perhaps Erich, despite his brief love with the weak Konrad, has no heart. Or perhaps it is a heart so wounded that he can no longer feel for human beings. Was Sophie’s revenge just as meaningless? Surely, Erich has no regrets, but has himself become a cog in the ever-moving engine into the darkest centers of the human heart.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2017).

 

 

Juanma Carrillo | Caníbales (Cannibals) / 2009

burned up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juanma Carrillo (screenwriter and director) Caníbales (Cannibals) / 2009 [19 minutes]

 

In the 19-minute film, accompanied a low grinding score as if it were some kind of horror film, Spanish director Juanma Carrillo takes the viewer into a world that many heterosexuals may not know of, the world of cruising. This cruising ground is a rather open park evidently 10-minutes outside of Madrid.

    The central figure goes to the park in search of something that is not quite apparent until the very end of the film. What we do see in this short film is dozens of men wandering the space, some waiting until they can hook up with another, some already involved in sucking, fucking duos, threesomes, or in one case a foursome. Many are young and cute, others old and shunned. Like the gay world in general, they represent all kinds of individuals, some lean and appealing, others tough, brawny, and even brutal looking.  

 

     The camera, like the voyeurs who also wander this park, takes us through what becomes almost a maze of these individuals, revealing one by one, men showing off their bodies or those already engaged in sex—reminding me a bit like the “can you believe it” exploitation documentaries of the 1960s such as Mondo Cane, directed by the team of Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, and Franco E. Prosperi.

 

      For a gay man, the hunt for sexual gratification in a world where the only other primary “hunting ground” is their local gay bar, is actually somewhat alluring despite the film’s evil-sounding title. These are not, even metaphorically speaking, cannibals, but rather men seeking pleasure, and although the behavior of these men might seem distasteful to many, gay men have long realized that sometimes a part just filled with men ready to openly engage in sex if preferable

to heavy-drinking meat-racks of gay bar life.

      Carrillo’s film, however, as we eventually discover is a moralistic fable. The wanderer, whose eyes are witnessing this forbidden world, we finally discover is a woman on the search for her husband, whom in discover in the final fames on all fours getting fucked, having just sucked off another man who leaves soon after spotting the intrusive female.

 

     Through the burning photos of married couples displayed throughout the credits, the film seems to suggest that the entire park was made up of married men, cheating through gay sex on their wives. In some respects that may be partially true. These men clearly do not feel comfortable to visit the local gay bars, and the public bathrooms that once served as anonymous gay sexual undergrounds have mostly been closed and reconceived to discourage gay sex. For men who have been unable to come out and have either willingly or through their families forcibly entered into heterosexual marriages, such parks are their only alternative sexual outlet.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).

Lindsey Haun | Coming To / 2015

 

an odd choice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Roth, Lindsey Haun, and Tony De Marco (screenplay), Lindsey Haun (director) Coming To / 2015 [5 minutes]

 

Tony (Jacob DeMonte-Finn) wakes up naked in a hallway; the only items upon his body consist of a cock ring (so reads the promotional commentary) and a sequined scarf. He knows only that he probably overdosed, evidently an event he’s encountered before—although he later recalls that he hasn’t used drugs in over 7 months. But where he is in this strange building—which he soon perceives in an apartment complex—how did he got there, and what happened that left him in that stairwell are all wiped from his memory. His only sensation, a terribly strong one, is the need to urinate.

 

     As he enters the hallway of the building, he randomly tries doors, all of which are locked. One door opens, the man inside demanding he leave immediately, even his request to use the bathroom met, understandably given his nakedness, angrily denied.

      Suddenly, as his piss trickles onto the hall floor, the idea comes into his head that he’s in Koreatown in Los Angeles, that he may have been drugged, and that he needs to look for Room 1104.

 

    Entering that room, he discovers the bathroom door closed, a shadowed figure showering within. Who is the man in shower? He remembers meeting him and even liking him, but has no comprehension who he might be. On the table in from the couch where he now sits is a wide variety of drugs, in power and pill form, along with a wide variety and drug paraphernalia. The scene reminds him of nearly every apartment in which he has taken meth.

      He calls someone named Joseph, either his companion or good friend, explaining that he doesn’t know where the fuck he is. Joseph tells him that he can’t “go down that road” with him again. But he orders him to put his pants, shoes, and shirt on and leave the place, presumably reporting on the phone where he is once he glimpses a street sign.

      Tony remembers now that they had spent the entire day snorting lines of crystal meth, mixing the meth with GHB (Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid) and squirting it up their asses. Codeine, Xanax, and other drugs followed. He now remembers as well, getting off on the bus on Western and Olympic. He remembers snorting the first line. And then, so he reports in the continued voice over, “I remember Mike. He said he could tell I wasn’t happy. And I told him he was right. And I remember feeling safe.”

      As the elevator doors begin to close, he suddenly pushes them open and returns, one assumes, to the apartment from which he has just attempted to escape. Clearly, feeling safe—despite all the evidence that the stranger’s apartment is no safe haven—is more important to him than kicking his habit. Obviously, he does not feel “safe,” whatever that means in this context, with Joseph. And it is hinted that he sees his relationship as part of the reason he has returned to drugs.

      One doubts that in an apartment filled with the drugs and apparatus we witnessed he will be able to go straight, but that evidently is not the issue. It is still more welcoming than his own home, far preferable to waiting to be picked up by his companion and taken to his Silverlake home. Is there violence in his home? Has he been threatened because of his addiction? We know even less than Tony has known awakening naked in that stairwell. For that matter, we don’t even know if Tony is gay or that Joseph even represents someone with whom he is in a relationship. But the choice our gradually awakening hero has made seems almost to be a matter of life or death. Perhaps he has chosen the latter.

     As thought-provoking as director / actor Lindsey Haun’s short film may be, it seems that if she and her writers had provided us with just a little more information, we might have been able to care about this character’s decision, if nothing else. As it is, we can only shrug our shoulders and say, “well that seems an odd choice.”

 

Los Angeles, May 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Jake Jaxson and R. J. Sebastian | Meet the Morecocks / 2015 [TV movie]

feuding cocked-up boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cilantro Che Guevara and Jake Jaxson (screenplay), Jake Jaxson and R. J. Sebastian (directors) Meet the Morecocks / 2015 [34 minutes] TV movie

 

Even as I began these volumes, I realized that it would be difficult to completely exclude pornography from my discussions. And over the decades it has increasingly become difficult to isolate the two, particularly given the gradual acceptance and embracement of pornography by audiences, both male and female. In a few cases, porn films have become cinematographically superior to numerous narrative features, and as in the example under discussion here, narrative, documentation, and promotional videos have become blurred with cinematic sex acts. Although most LGBTQ films and shorts do not focus on the genitals, sexual acts are regularly portrayed and even genitalia are increasingly featured in independent and even traditional studio filmmaking.   

      The porn studio CockyBoys was founded in Los Angeles by Kyle Majors in 2007, whose vision of porn was limited primarily to a voyeuristic approach to sex focusing primarily on jocks, tattooed models, and all things of the Southern California culture. There was seldom any narrative, and the attempt was, in the studio’s words, to present “no complicated stories, just a great location with hot boys fucking—no lavish costumes or stupid uniforms—just cock pounding ass.” The original CockyBoys films, in short, defined just what I could easily exclude from discussion in my pages.          Three years later, however, the studio was sold to New York-filmmaker Jake Jaxson, who decided to bring the studio to New York city, making it one of only two major gay adult studios in the city’s boroughs. Instead of featuring anonymous performers, Jaxson chose to hire models, featuring their studio names such as Mason Star, Gabril Clark, Tommy Defendi, and earlier the three boys featured in this documentary-like promotional film, Jake Bass, Levi Karter, and George Alvin (who performed under the name of Max Ryder).

 

    Jaxson also attended, with his lover cinematographer R. J. Sebastian to issues of cinematography and editing. And with their mutual lover Benny Morecock and web designer, all films began by narratively placing the actors in relationship to one another, pointing out their previous sexual encounters and their personal relationships in a manner that helped the viewer to see the entire enterprise of CockyBoys to be something like a large porno family with characters that love and fought with one another along the way.

     With works like Max & Jake’s Road Trip (2013), starring Max Ryder and Jake Bass, and Project GoGo Boy (2012), for whom Jaxson hired the professional dancer Jett Black with subsequently was expelled from the Royal Winnepeg Ballet for his work in porn, the studio began drawing international attention, particularly when CBC News in Canada interviewed Jaxson and Black on a feature that ran online and on television concerning the “scandal.”       

     The same year, 2012, New York Magazine profiled an essay titled “He & He & He” about the relationship between designer Benny, the director Jake, and the cinematographer R. J. It was later adapted into play titled, “Gay Sex,” the student writer at Vassar College leading a panel discussion with the three of them about their love life and the art porn movement.

      The following year the studio received news attention again when the New York Daily News revealed that the journalist behind the essays and film about Edward Snowden and the US National Security scandal, Glenn Greenwald had been Jaxson’s for business partner.

        The next year, 2014, German editor Bruno Gmünder partnered with CockyBoys to publish a book of erotic photography, A Thing of Beauty, which lead to the international book tour that Meet the Morecocks features.

 

      Unless you’re a true fan of the porn company and its early trio of Bass, Karter, and Ryder, there’s not much of interest in this documentary. The characters and reasons for the tour and film are quickly established, the boys are eager to go with Jaxson and Sebastien to visit, most of them for the first time, London, Paris, and Berlin. Ryder, however, has just announced his movement away from being an active porn figure as he attempts to move into becoming a model and work in promotion for the company. But his hurt and anger—never fully explained—which resulted in his abandonment of screen sex is palpable as he spends much of time pouting and attempting to justify why he cannot fully join the others in displays of public affection and nudity when it is precisely that which the book signing audiences are expecting. Tensions begin to rise between the former best friends Bass and Ryder, and by the time the tour comes to an end, they have broken off communication.

       Their audiences—which Morecock and Jaxson describe as being made up of "fan girls, moms, teenagers, older gentleman, male and female couples, male and male couples, bisexuals and transgender people”—are fervent and interesting to imagine, but unless you truly love watching boys sign the coffee-table books, lounging around their bedrooms in complete chaos (porn boys evidently never pick up the clothes they cast off). and talking about and demonstrating the consumer goods they’ve picked up as trophies on route, along with watching mini-interviews Jaxson has with Bass and Ryder, each trying express their frustrations with one another, you won’t find much here to be of significant interest.

       Even Jaxson and Sebastien finally leave the two feuding cocked-up boys to themselves, going off to shoot scenes with Karter for their next film, Answered Prayers: The Banker, part one of their allegorical morality play “set against an ancient family feud and the follies of men.” The six-part series was later profiled by The Village Voice. And the same year two CockyBoys films, Fuck Year Levi Karter, another documentary film about that porn star, and the first part of Answered Prayers were selected for the 2014 Berlin Porn Film Festival.

       The following year, the thruple appeared at the Schwules Sex Museum in Berlin, exhibiting yet another photo book, Joyful Gay Sex. At the exhibition at Sex Museum Jaxon, Sebastian and their actors Tayte Hanson, Levi Kaarter, and Liam Riley participated on a panel to discuss “Romantic Porn.” By 2020, the studio had earned over 80 awards for their films.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Craig Johnson | The Skeleton Twins / 2014

the end

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Heyman and Craig Johnson (screenplay), Craig Johnson (director) The Skeleton Twins / 2014

 

The Skeleton twins, Maggie (Kristen Wiig) and Milo (Bill Hader), in Craig Johnson’s want-to-be likeable 2014 film of the same name, are both facing crises: early in the film we observe the two, on opposite ends of the US, contemplating suicide. Milo attempts to go through with it, by slitting his wrists in a bathtub of hot water; Maggie is saved from an overdose of pills by a phone call reporting that Milo, having survived, lies recuperating in a hospital. Although the two have, somewhat inexplicably, not spoken to one another for ten years, she flies to his side.

       The pair are not only unhappy in love, although Maggie is slow in admitting that fact, but they are fragile survivors. Their father has committed suicide when they were just 15, and their mother is revealed to be a ditzy New Age do-gooder who would prefer to attend a spiritual retreat than her own daughter’s wedding.

   Soon after, we begin to discover that Milo was the target of his schoolteacher’s sexual abuse in high school. Fortunately, Johnson does not make this a simple, black and white matter, suggesting that, in what is sometimes the truth, Milo not only sought out Rich, his English teacher’s (calmly but intensely performed by Ty Burrell) attentions, but enjoyed the elder’s attentions. And soon after he returns to his hometown, how under his sister’s loving protection, he seeks the man out once again. We sense the utter loneliness of Milo, who living in the wildly gay-friendly atmosphere of southern California, has apparently found no one with whom he could develop a relationship; and Milo’s ensuing pain, when Rich, understandably, is terrified that his former student has returned to cause further trouble—particularly given the facts that the former teacher, now a bookseller, remains closeted and has a 16-year-old son—helps to reveal the emptiness of the younger man’s life. The fact that Milo still seeks out his elder simply reiterates his isolation, and also helps to substantiate his feelings that, despite his visions he has had for his future, he is one of those who has peaked in high school, never able to find something later in life as meaningful. Although he has dreamt of a career in acting, he has not even been able to obtain an agent and survives by working as a waiter in a Hollywood tourist restaurant. Although the two, Rich and Milo, again begin a brief sexual relationship, Milo is soon after rejected again by Rich after he attempts to visit him at his home—to be greeted at the doorway by Rich’s son. After heavy drinking, Milo once again toys with suicidal thoughts, tossing the good luck charm of a whale (a reference to Melville’s Moby Dick, the book in which Rich had tried and failed to interest his young student) off the edge of a building, from where he himself, a seemingly doomed beast, could any moment fall.

   As the would-be healer of her beloved brother, Maggie puts up a great front, pretending to be in love with her witless, run-of-the-mill, if loveably straight-thinking husband, Lance (Luke Wilson). Yet we soon observe her courting disaster with an affair with a scuba-dive teacher. And she soon reveals, after a nitrous oxide laughing-high (she works as a dental hygienist) with her brother, that her current sexual escapade is just one of many, that she has had brief affairs with other teachers’  (similar in their roles if not their ages to the object of her brother’s first sexual encounter) of various hobbyist interests she has taken up to get her out of the house. While Lance proudly announces when he first meets Milo, that her husband and Maggie are attempting “to make a baby,” she now admits to Milo that she is secretly continuing to take pills to protect her from pregnancy. What’s worse, she suddenly discovers, is that she has forgotten to take a pill for one day, and may have missed her period.

      Although the twins’ new-found kinship begins, understandably, as a rather rocky one, it soon becomes clear that the two can charm and uplift one another in ways that no others can, demonstrated spectacularly in a scene in which, Maggie having just discovered that she may be pregnant, Milo, to cheer her up, breaks into a lip-synched song, “You Can Count on Me,” that, with Hader’s deliciously delivered up dance steps and spins might charm even a misanthropic cynic. Like nearly all the actors in this dark film, he is near perfect in his role.

 

     Soon after, we get a glimpse of the twins’ childhood explorations of identity, when, for Halloween, Milo dresses as a kind of fairy princess while Maggie plays at being a cowboy. Their momentary return to the past, when they lived out their lives as beings they might like to be instead of admitting who they are, begins almost with an aura of enchantment, the duo dancing with one another in a beautifully filmed scene which invokes not only their mutual support, but their intense, implicitly incestuous connection. Twins, after all, are often intimately close: two identical twin friends of mine warned their wives that they would always be closer to one another than to their lovers; my own niece’s fraternal twins often accused one another, as small children, of stealing one another’s words.

     But that very moment in this often-sensitive film also represents the final coming-to-terms of their highly emotionally-fraught lives. When by accident, Maggie discovers through Milo’s cellphone that he has been seeing Rich, she grows furious, as we soon discover that it is her reporting of the incident years before that has not only ended the predatory abuse, an action that forced Rich to resign from his job. She sees it still as a duty she had to protect her brother, and now feels betrayed by what she sees anew as her brother’s truly deviant behavior. The two fight, perhaps with Milo truly comprehending for the first time just how involved his sister had been in the break-up of his only fulfilling relationship. The interchange of cutting remarks ends with her suggestion that, perhaps, in his suicide attempts he had not cut deep enough!

     When Lance admits to his house guest that he is fearful that he may be infertile, Milo suggests that Maggie has always been highly secretive and that, perhaps she is on some sort medication that might explain her behavior or even her inability to get pregnant. Even if only subconsciously, he is plotting what she will later call an act of “revenge.” Yet we know, no matter how innocent Lance may be, in his utter cluelessness, he is also not the right man for Maggie; and we recognize that Milo is now only doing for Maggie what she had done for him years before. Faced with Lance’s discovery of her birth-control pills, Maggie has no choice but to admit her bizarre sexual behavior to her husband, resulting—as she predicted—with the end of her marriage.

    Perhaps only now do we truly comprehend why these two have not communicated for ten long years! For not only have the Skeleton twins’ father and mother twisted their perceptions of life, but the siblings themselves have helped to bring down one another by destroying each other’s doomed romances. As Milo takes a bus out of town, Maggie enacts her suicide by drowning, tying herself down with barbells as she jumps into the local pool.  

     It hardly matters that Milo, in response to her suicide note in the form of a cellphone message, quite unbelievably rushes back in time to save her just in time from drowning. She might as well have drowned; he might as well have disappeared into the California surf.  The last scene of the film shows them facing out at the audience as a smiling couple, staring at a tank of fish, a loving gift from Maggie to the fish-loving Milo, but we know their lives are spiritually over, which no amount of their mother’s attempts at “cleansing” can ever restore.

    My companion Howard argues that the film ends with the simple hope that they will now each find the right companions, discover people who might be intelligent enough to deal with the dark and quirky currents of their lives.

    Although I wish I could agree, I can’t envision any other future for them. They are not only too tightly intertwined as twins, alas, but are doomed beings, destined to live out their lives with each other—despite occasional forays, perhaps, to seek out sexual fulfillment—side by side. Certainly, there is no one else in this film who has revealed any of the complexity of fullness of life they both desire. Rich, as he describes himself, is a “pussy,” a man afraid even to admit his own sexual proclivities. A high school friend, whom Maggie encounters, reveals the horrors of married life with children she herself describes as “shits.” These two beings can belong only to one another; specters of the past; trapped in the skeletons of their own bodies by childhood events, they have no future. Their frozen stares into our eyes signify what the movie indicates, “The End.”

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2014

Reprinted from Nth Position [England], October 2014.