Jonathan M. Guttman | Miles Apart / 2002

the days of wine and daisies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keith Humphrey (screenplay), Jonathan M. Guttman (director) Miles Apart / 2002 [19 minutes]

 

Miles (Brad Schmidt) agrees to return home with his lover Jeffrey (Craig Burke) for Jeffrey’s sister’s wedding. But he clearly does so with deep feelings of trepidation given his past encounters with Jeffrey’s waspy bitch of a mom, Darleen (Kathleen O’Neel Toleedo)

     As they are met at the station, he hands Darleen a small bunch of white daises he has brought her, recalling that daisies are her favorite. She dismisses them—it is only yellow daises she likes—and utterly ignores his presence, focusing all of her attention on her beloved son, while leaving the luggage to Miles as if he were some sort of servant.

     In her son’s room they will sleep in bunk beds in a room she has conveniently made so unbearably hot that they will have to sleep with the door open.

     Basically, she goes out of her way to ignore her son’s companion, the two in a relationship, it appears, of several years.

     The dinner was to have included Jeffrey’s sister Kathleen (Megan Hamaker) and her fiancée Steve, who not only finds a way to escape that dinner, but actually never appears in the movie, even at his own wedding—which I presume is an exaggerated in-joke about just how much he has needed to escape the presence of his mother-in-law.

      Before Darleen joins them, Jeffrey and his sister chat, she admitting that in some remarkable manner she has managed to escape revealing the fact that she and her future husband have been living together for years. Fortunately, Miles and Jeffrey concur, they are lucky to live in another state.

      Dinner being served, Darleen suggests that the atheist Miles say the evening prayer. He readily agrees to do so, thanking God not only for the blessing of Jeffrey’s family and the upcoming wedding of Kathleen and Steve whose love is as pure as Jeffrey’s and his own—immediately and rudely interrupted by the mother who declares an end to all such conversations, even if heaven-sent. “This is not the time and place to bring your life-style to the dinner table.”

     For the first time Jeffrey reacts, leaving the table with Miles, and later even rejecting his mother’s statement that she will forgive her son for his behavior. Jeffrey argues it is she who needs to ask for forgiveness. And soon after, through the necessary open door, Darleen hears the conversation between her son and his lover, as Jeffrey finally opens up about his years of resentment for his mother’s inability to accept him and the man he loves.

     Miles wisely explains that it is not he who she is rejecting as much as it is the truth of her son being gay. People are expendable for her, but deviations in her wasp notion of reality are absolutely intolerable, so the film suggests.

     A few glasses of wine later and a stroll through memory lane through a childhood scrapbook seems to set Darleen straight—or perhaps we should say, leads down a different curving road.

   At the wedding, we see Jeffrey dancing with his mother, still unable to forgive her continued dismissal of the man he loves, and Miles—the man, as always, forced to be remain apart from Jeffrey in his mother’s presence—dances with the bride, who admits that her mother is a genius at pushing all the right buttons to make everyone hate her.

      But suddenly Darleen asks if she might cut in. We wonder whether, if she dances off with Miles, she might be plotting another series of rude rejections, but it is her daughter with she dances, leaving Jeffrey to dance with Miles in their first real moments together since their visit to hell. We notice that the yellow daises have been filled in now with a few white daisies. Suddenly we see Darleen, all in smiles, with a white daisy in her hair and she compliments her son on making a “smart move.”

     If this little film of the horrors about conservative values posing as the dismissive affectations of class-structure lacks all credibility by its “feel-good” ending, we can’t help but liking it nonetheless for purportedly teaching the society bitch how to become a real human being by accepting her son’s sexual identity. It’s remarkable what a few glasses of wine can do after a long-deserved upbraiding by your beloved son you’ve accidentally overheard describing your dreadful behavior.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Jordon Firstman | The Disgustings / 2014

stand off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Drew Droege and Jordan Firstman (screenplay), Jordon Firstman (director) The Disgustings / 2014 [13 minutes]

 

Evidently Jordon Firstman’s directorial debut—not mentioned in his Wikipedia entry—The Disgustings represents a type, both heterosexual and gay, but much nastier in the gay queen rendition of character which we all know, even if in real life I’ve met no one quite like it.

      Both Daryl (Drew Drogege) and Pierce (Jordan Firstman) are the kind of best friends who believe themselves to be so superior that no one on earth can possibly come close to their intellectual, aesthetic, and social superiority with lines such as “Anyone who is comfortable with his shirt off can’t be trusted,” and “I’m about to yell because their coffee tastes likes pasta.” At one point Pierce cannot even believe that the unshirted boyfriend of a female friend “actually introduced himself to me.” Eyes constantly rolling in response to the insignificance of all others, they even take pleasure in their own nasty quips for being both “strange and specific.”

 

   Throughout the short 13-minute film the couple puts down a waitress (Erin Rye), who has evidently delayed in getting them a drink of water (“You know I don’t come to brunch to be ignored and then judged for being ignored.”) and, later, a friendly Yoga Girl (Linsay Nyman) who is so sweet and willing to communicate that she doesn’t even quite recognize their utter put-down of her when then command her to get lost. As Daryl summarizes, “You know I feel like as a nation insecurity is our biggest disease. It’s like a fucking epidemic. You know it’s like why do you fucking hate yourself so much that you can’t spend 24 hours without someone around you? I mean like I’m always alone and I’m always fine. Ask, always, almost anyone.”

     Even at the gay bar when a stranger approaches Pierce, telling him he really likes his outfit, wondering where he works out, he turns on the strange willing to buy him a drink, suggesting that he doesn’t recognize the face, and even asking his friend Daryl whether he knows “this person.”

For a moment, Pierce actually pauses—hinting at a possible crack in his dismissive foundation—to ask whether or not he might let the “person” buy him a drink. But Daryl quickly convinces him to say “No,” which does, bidding the cute guy goodbye, and pointing out the fact that both of them have full drinks. “Leave this world,” they command him, as if they were a solar system of their own which no other star dare to tread.

     The moment the boy walks away, Daryl turns to his friend with a hissy whisper, “Oh my God, disgusting. Some people have no tack.” “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” Daryl commiserates. Pierce suggests that he feels totally shaken up—as well he might since no one dares to intrude upon the nasty duo. “It’s so weird. He was so aggressive. Did you notice how aggressive he was?”

      And with that, the two create a magnificent melodrama about what might be seen by most as their lucky moment, ending with a cute boy to go home with: “I mean I feel like I was basically just raped.”

      “Yah, he did.”

      “He did rape me!”

      “I just watched a rape. I almost watched a rape. Which is worse than rape.”

      The two leave, returning to their own apartments and beds, neither of them being able to sleep at night. Which explains, perhaps, the regimen of pills we have seen on the countertops of their bathrooms and on tables near their beds. Neither of these two men, who cannot even be described as active gay men, might ever discover someone of their mental, aesthetic, and social acuity since they are impregnable in their narcissistic haze.

      If it’s funny to watch them, it also hurts, since even if such types don’t really exist, we are fearful that they just might, and we have all experienced people who feel intellectually and socially superior to us who we can imagine having just such ridiculous conversations. We want to stay away from such individuals, and they want us, fortunately, to stand off, fearing the possibility that someone might possibly break through the walls they have erected so as never to have deal with real life.

 

Los Angeles, August 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024)

Alexandra T. Steele | Like a Brother / 2002

hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Thell (screenplay), Alexandra T. Steele (director) Like a Brother / 2002 [12 minutes]

 

Alexandra T. Steele’s short film of 2002 Like a Brother seems torn about which direction it wants to move. On the one hand there is Nate Christy (Damien Midkiff), a skinny, pimpled young teenager who is quite obviously awed by his next door neighbor and sometimes friend, the school basketball player Andy Thomas (Ryan Honey). But then there are the problems at home as in the very first scene of the film we overhear what appears to be a violent fight between the Christys, with Nate’s father storming out—apparently permanently, since Nate later tells his neighbor that his parents are getting a divorce.

      The Christy family and their neighbors the Thomas’ evidently join one another on a lakeside trip every Labor Day, which in the film is the very next day—coincidentally only two days away from when I watched and am now writing about this movie. Despite the tragedy now facing his mother, Nate still begs for her permission to join the Thomas’ in their Labor Day celebration, clearly because of his obsession with Andy.

  

      She agrees, and the celebration seems to be going well, with the two boys joyfully fishing out on the lake, the far more mature Andy, with shirt removed and suntan lotion spread across his well-developed chest and back suggesting that his friend join him to get a little sun. Having been working on sit-ups to develop himself—which apparently have had little if any effect—Nate is shy about removing his shirt, but does no nonetheless. Andy, like many a teenage boy talks about the size of his own cock and those of the basketball players with whom he showers, marveling at one of their penis’ which he describes as being like a snake. Obviously devoted to his body, he spends long moments admiring his own pectoral development, showing of his chest and back muscles as he rubs on the lotion.

        When the two determine to go back, the anchor seems stuck, and Andy leans into Nate’s backside as together they attempt to pull it up. In the process, Andy’s face comes near to Nate’s and for a moment it looks almost as if he about to kiss him, Nate immediately and eagerly responding with an attempted kiss as Andy pulls away, Nate still caught up in the moment shouting out, “I love you.”

      After a pause, Andy attempts to resolve the situation by adding “…You mean like a brother.”

      At first Nate, stunned by the shifting of the situation is speechless, but when Andy repeats the words, agrees, yes, “I love you like a brother.”

      And so ends the event except the quietude of both boys on the trip back home. Obviously something has happened that Andy cannot quite forgive and Nate cannot forget.

      The next day at school Andy stands in the hall with a couple of his athletic mates talking when Nate suddenly sees them and comes directly up to Andy, asking how he is. The boys glance away, obviously wondering how Andy even knows the dork, and Andy greets Nate coldly. When Nate turns away to leave, one them can be heard saying “He’s a little faggot,” Andy responding, “I’ll set you up man.”

         Nate turns back to confront these bullies, asking the one, “Do you want a date?” There is a moment of silence until Andy’s friend says, “Fuck off you little faggot.”

         Nate argues the way all gay boys have attempted to explain themselves since such school ground battles first came into existence, “I’m not a fag, tell them Andy, you know!” evidently presuming his “brother” will now defend him.

         “Tell them what?” replies the coward.

         Andy’s friend turns to him incredulous, “What do you know?”

        Andy’s reply is the ultimate in denial: “I dunno, he’s just some stupid neighbor kid.” He even stands further against his “brother,” commanding Nate to go home.

       Surprisingly Nate, enraged by the situation, calls Andy “the faggot” beginning to repeat the litany of “Greg’s pecs” and “Russ’s cock,” etc. The result is that Andy begins to beat him, and even when Nate’s down on the ground continues to kick him, harder and harder as if possessed, until the two other boys attempt several times to pull him off.

       Blood running from his mouth, Nate mutters “I hate you,” Andy suddenly totally broken by what he has just done, hitting his own fists upon the metal lockers, as Nate continues, “I hate you.”

       So Steele’s movie ends, with utterly no resolution and little hope that any reconciliation can take place. It appears Nate has lost a “brother,” a friend, and a father all within a few days. But what do the two have to do with the other we have to ask? We might feel more sympathetic with Nate given the terrible realities he now must face alone. But we certainly didn’t need yet another tragedy in is life to feel that. And we don’t know Nate well enough as a character to even imagine what his reaction to these terrible hurts will now be.

       This film leaves us only with the pain of denial and feelings on the part of both boys of self-hate. And, of course, we might add Andy’s own denials not only of Nate but of his own possible sexual feelings to which we won’t admit to himself.

        Dozens of films previous to this have made it clear that behind bullying often is the peer pressure to confirm to homophobia. But where does this film, having made that fact evident yet again, want to take us? Apparently, there’s nowhere else to go when you’ve reached hate.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

Brian Sloan | Bumping Heads / 2002

various confusions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Sloan (screenwriter and director) Bumping Heads / 2002 [22 minutes]

 

Beginning with the 1993 film he made to complete his Master’s degree in the New York University Film program, Pool Days, US director Brian Sloan quickly rose to notoriety on the gay film circuit for his next two comic short films he wrote and directed, the one discussed here, Bumping Heads (2002), and his 1997 wedding farce, I Think I Do, which I’ve suggested might be seen as a precursor of the next year’s first of the variation B of “coming out” films. Since then, Sloan has worked on less successful TV series and written books.

     Bumping Heads begins with a sense of confusion which, in fact, permeates the atmosphere of this entire 22-minute movie. The confusion at the center Sloan’s third short film has absolutely nothing to do with coming to terms about one’s sexuality and everything to do with coming to terms with whom you’re actually in love. There is a dizzying confusion for the viewer and for the two central actors both from the first scenes of this short film when Chris (Craig Chester) has just been checked into a hospital by Gary (Andersen Gabrych) for a head injury he received in a fight he precipitated in the “Love Lounge” of the local gay bar.

      He’s received a huge bruise to the head and the doctor wants to keep him in the hospital until she can get a scan to check out his neurological condition. But he already seems more than bruised, fighting with is friend, Gary, blaming him, in fact, for the entire incident. Gary describes his a “drama queen,” and you might well imagine that to be the case if it were not for Sloan’s gradual revelation of the situation between them.   

     Even the doctor imagines they are boyfriends, but in fact, as Craig later corrects her, they are just “friends.” Gary has a boyfriend in Los Angeles, a long ways from where they live. We later discover the boyfriend—through a memory of a party to which Craig was invited—is a beautiful model named Robert (Ned Stresen-Reuter) to whom Craig has been speaking, having just asked how he knows Gary. That shock alone sends Craig into a spin, having never heard the boyfriend even mentioned, let alone told that he would be at the party.

      Bit by bit, as they each tell the story of their “relationship”—to their individual therapists as it turns out—we discover why Craig blames his young friend and why Gary insists on staying at the hospital until he’s released. Indeed, they have a history of “bumping heads,” as it were, the first time they met at a party resulting actual collision as they both bent down to fetch a beer out of bucket. But, in fact, they have been butting up, if not bumping up against one another ever since. Gary continuing to invite out his “friend” as Chris attempts to move the friendship gradually into the territory he isn’t quite ready to admit, where Gary might be described as his lover.

      It takes the doctor to perceive their true relationship. If they describe themselves as only friends, they have behaving more as a couple despite the boyfriend down in Los Angeles and despite Chris’ insistence that he doesn’t want anything more out of Gary than friendship. The very fact that by film’s end they are both talking about one another to their therapists reveals that the physical friction between them is caused by their unspoken desires.

      Indeed, we discover that the concussion Craig has received occurred because he discovered Gary in the “Lover’s Lounge” about to have sex with a stranger and could not control himself from punching out the “intruder,” who slugged back far more effectively. It is only now that Craig finally admits that he is not protecting Gary as a friend, but as a potential lover. He has completely fallen for the boy who doesn’t want, so he says, to enter into a sexual relationship with him.

      We imagine that eventually Gary will also wake up to the fact that the reason he keeps inviting his “friend” to join him is that he also has fallen in love with Craig.

       But what the audience also comprehends—what these “friends” do not, the doctor doesn’t seem to perceive, and perhaps even the writer/director won’t admit—is that they are not really right for one another. The young cute, slightly effeminate Gary, who is trying to become a milliner, a hat-maker, is all surface, while the elder Craig is a deeply intense lover whose dark good looks often get missed by those who love the superficial. As one commentator on the IMDb site rather crudely put it: “the appeal of the character played by Gabrych [Gary] eludes me. He's not particularly charming or appealing, just rather shallow and dumb. As a result, Craig Chester's character [Chris] looks even more ridiculous for pining over somebody so vacuous. And there's the matter of why Chester was going to throw a punch. It's too bad that society is trained to think that people like Gabrych's character are so cute and desirable, when it's Chester who, with the nice mature look and handsomely lined face who really should be the object of desire.”

      Obviously, this represents a personal opinion, not a communal assessment of the fictional situation. But I certainly agree with unsigned “reviewer.” While Gabrych might be the perfect young mentor to help a high school boy like Chris Stafford in The Edge of Seventeen (1998) come out sexually, the character of this film, Craig (Chester, the actor of Swoon, Frisk, and Kiss Me Guido) needs an intelligent and passionate mate, not a cute trick who, when he puts a few drugs into his body, falls into the arms of whoever is standing next to him. As he responds when the doctor wants to give him an X-ray to “make sure his brain is working,” “I can assure you, it’s not.”  Perhaps the frustration that Craig feels is not simply because Gary won’t take the next step but that he knows the boy he’s got a crush on shouldn’t be his solution to his loneliness.

 

Los Angeles, March 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Diego Lerman | Tan de Repente (Suddenly) / 2002

an lgbtq domestic comedy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Diego Lerman and Maria Meira (screenplay, based on a fiction by César Aira), Diego Lerman (director) Tan de Repente (Suddenly) / 2002

 

Argentinian director Diego Lerman’s first feature film Tan de Repente (in its English version titled Suddenly) is an amazing debut work that has continued to haunt me in the week after viewing it.

     The events of the film do unfold quite “suddenly,” yet the significance of those events unwind in the mind quite slowly as the characters, who at first seem to be mere types, gradually shift into far more complex figures whose early impulsive acts are revealed to be a cover for far more complex issues of sexual behavior and even gender. Ultimately there is a complex sexual fluidity among nearly all the film’s characters which is beautifully and subtly performed by its actors.

      The heavy-set, not very beautiful Marcia (Tatiana Saphir) is quite clearly unhappy with her body and life. She works in a lingerie store, which might be the very worst place to be trapped for a woman of her dimensions who must sell sleek and lithe undergarments. She identifies as a heterosexual who has just broken up with her boyfriend; and we can tell that surely this has not been her first abandonment by the male species.

      Unable to find love she buys a new dress and a pair of sunglasses, consumer goods to replace a broken heart. The clothes are ridiculously in bad taste and the glasses offer only a momentary feeling of self-pleasure. She is, in short, the kind of woman abused by even her own heterosexual friends represented by Toni Colette in P. J. Hogan’s 1994 film Mariel’s Wedding.

      Yet, in Lerman’s film love is right around the corner—no matter how odd that corner is—in the form of two punk lesbians, Mao and Lenin as they call themselves (Carla Crespo and Veronica Hassan). The moment Mao sees Marcia, she is almost desperate to embrace her into the joys of lesbian love—although strangely enough both claim not to be lesbians.

      Within hours these two biker chicks kidnap Marcia and, discovering that she has never ever seen the ocean, ferry her away via various forms of transportation (including a willing truck driver) to the sea and on to Lenin’s Aunt Blanca (Beatriz Thibaudin) who with her wrinkle-lined face and strong traditionally masculine manners (a woman who has perhaps grown beyond sexual desires and identity, now a kind of “blank”) that she might be conceived of as a kind of transgender figure. One of the best scenes in the film is when she visits an elderly female friend and they tipple down an entire bottle of liquor.

      Lerman seems to be a bit unsure of whether or not he wants to continue his film a kind of road trip, featuring beautiful black-and-white abstract images of endless highways and their dividing lines; yet, we soon discover that he has determined to turn his always surprising movie instead into a kind of domestic comedy.

      Marcia, now able to leave their company if she wishes, is intrigued enough by the adventurousness and dangerousness of the sudden events in her life, that she stays, now actually longing for the sex that Mao provides. The aunt rents them a room in a house that also includes a male tenant, Felipe (Marcos Ferrante) who, quite obviously, is an intrigued gay man. Yet somehow this little gathering is not at all presented as particularly voyeuristic or sexually perverse.

      Although she is a bit confused when Mao leaves her bed, she soon realizes that her friend will return with the pleasure continuing. Felipe may be a bit interested in the lesbian relationship, but politely closes their bedroom door after stumbling upon the scene. Lenin, meanwhile, develops a close friendship with the elder aunt, one that clearly had been missing with her own mother.

      In a sense, Lerman’s film becomes an almost paradisal view of a mini-LGBTQ community, wherein the members are so entirely tolerant of one another that tensions ease and the sexual danger of the film’s early scenes are quickly converted into a kind of domestic bliss as each member learns to respect the territory of the others.

     The tough Lenin, with the help of her aunt, learns how to cook; the shy Marcia is taught how to love; and the young gay Felipe mostly stands aside in simple delight of the world in which he is now part. Each of them bring a kind of gentle energy to one another, sharing dinners and pleasant conversations.

      The madness of the “sudden” is cooled into a kind of joyous family scene that none of its characters has perhaps ever experienced before.

      One of my very favorite writers, César Aira, wrote the tale on which movie is based; I can only wish that there will be many more to come (he’s written several dozen of such fascinating stories). Lerman has gone on to direct 4 films since this one, and I can’t wait to see them.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2020).

Werner Schroeter | Deux (Two) / 2002

a thousand deaths

by Douglas Messerli

 

Werner Schroeter and Cédric Anger (screenplay), Werner Schroeter (director) Deux (Two) / 2002

 

Without making apologies for my inability to accomplish what my role as a critic might entail, I must admit it is, nonetheless, nearly impossible to coherently discuss Werner Schroeter's fascinating film of 2002, Deux.

     In every sense of the word, the film is a kind of double spiral, not unlike Hitchcock's Vertigo in its structure, but without having the plot developments of the earlier work. Isabelle Huppert plays two young women, twins, Magdalena and Maria, the former of whom learns of her twin—from whom she is has been separated at birth—through the discovery of a postcard cast into the wind by her mother (Bulle Ogier) from a seaside town in Portugal. Growing up with her adoptive mother (Dominique Frot), Magdalena has apparently been the perfect schoolgirl, who later experiments with lesbian sex, while Maria has run off to Marseille to become a singer, encountering there a man (Philippe Reuter) who has connections at the opera. The two somewhat opposing identities become the focus of Schroeter's film, but once he has set the idea of the doppelganger in motion, it is hard to know whether the stunning images that he presents us with are in the past, present or the future, are the experiences of Magdalena, Maria, or even their mother, or whether they are imaginary or real.

     In some respects, it doesn't really matter, for the film is a kind of collective experience of these two your women growing up in a post-World War II environment. The pulls of this tale are, accordingly, love and death, as each of the women explore sexuality, often in obsessive ways, attempting to fulfill themselves in a world in which death is omnipresent, and is often connected to the search for pleasure. A sad young, beautiful bicycler encourages Magdalena/Maria to ride his bike, inviting her to visit him. But a few days later his body is discovered hanging, an apparent suicide. A mysterious murderer stalks woman throughout the city, leaving their disemboweled bodies with a flower upon their breasts. An apparent orgy is imagistically transformed into a mass of dead bodies, which cannot help but remind one of the gas chamber carnage of the Second World War. Sexual encounters which begin with simple flirtation, pulls growing groups of boys and girl into these women's presence as if they were magnets for sexual satisfaction.

     At a local bar, inhabited primarily by soldiers and sailors, a small Black gospel chorus is joined by a drag queen, who sings lead, as his cock dangles in and out of his black, sequined dress while full bosomed women crawl about the floor in front of them, exposing their breasts—calling up images from Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures. As we do in Smith's hilarious vision of Smith's "comedy set in a haunted music studio," so does Magdalena/Maria break out in laughter.  One of the twins cooks a roast chicken and invites a fox in from the outside to consume it; soon after he becomes her pet which she takes with her even to the opera, and who later attacks her, nipping at her throat and fingers.

   Whether or not the viewer can make "sense" (if he must make sense) of Schroeter's hundreds of beautiful tableaux, we easily recognize the psychological and symbolic power of the director's images. This is a world of deep sensuality and possible love, filled with horror and terrific presages of death. It is nearly impossible to separate the two, and the search for a wholeness of self that might steady the individual being is mostly fruitless.

    In the end Magadalena/Maria must kill off—symbolically at least—the other, accepting all that other has had to give (in Schroeter's powerful image it is represented by swallowing her vomit), while burying her to achieve peace. The incomplete being, dreaming, hoping, seeking—a romanticized vision of humanity—is all, Schroeter suggests, we have available to us. We are, accordingly, terrible failures as human beings; but, ah! what beauty our aspirations have wrought!

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2011) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).