Mauro Bolognini | La notte brava (The Big Night), aka Bad Girls Don’t Cry and Night Heat / 1959

desperate embraces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay, based on his novel La ragazzi di vit), Mauro Bolognini (director) La notte brava (The Big Night), aka Bad Girls Don’t Cry and Night Heat / 1959

 

Out of the Neo-Realist Italian films of the post-war 1940s and 1950s, grew an amazingly powerful new Italian cinema in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s that dominated world cinema. These works by Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Mauro Bolognini, and others—cutting through the underlying neorealist grids of the romantic—asserted political and satirical issues that undercut whatever spiritual and nationalist subtexts remained in the earlier works.

     With the economic redevelopment of the post Fascist-Italy and the gradual crumbling of the pre-war wealthy and noble Italian families, along with the immigration to the cities of a vast number of young rural males and their families, a deep rift had grown between the old and new wealthy and those who felt themselves as outsiders in their own society. The tensions between the often handsome and well-dressed poor youths who now dominated Italian street life and the sons and daughters of the decadent noble families who associated with the younger nouveau riche grew so intense that it became a palpable force that spilled out into the nightlife of Rome, Milan, and other major cities.

       At one end of the spectrum Fellini, Antonioni, and Griffi explored the decadent and aimless worlds of the wealthy, while Pasolini and Bolognini centered their works primarily on those seeking to find a way to survive day by day in a world in which there were so few jobs available that they posed as determined drifters; throughout his career Visconti shifted from one end of the spectrum to the other. Together both of these groups of filmmakers expressed the terrifying angst and meaningless of life in Italy throughout the 1960s and the effects of Italian Fascism long into the next decade.

     In a world in which everyday survival meant fluidly moving between ephemeral possibilities of finding money, food, and love Pasolini and Bolognini, in particular, were fascinated by the transitoriness of both male and female sexuality wherein the male macho and female heterosexual poses often slipped in between pitched battles of those of the same sex and strong couplings of female solidarity along with male-on-male sex. The street boys wrestling each other all day sometimes fell into each other arms in exhaustion by night, while females working basically as competitive whores both off and on the streets cuddled up to one another in consolation in their off hours. Accordingly, these works along with nearly all of Visconti’s films are of most interest to LGBTQ audiences, although Fellini and Griffi often veered outside of their basically sexually normative—if you can describe Fellini’s and Griffi’s depictions of male and female couplings as representing anything close to “normal”—representations of love.

       Somewhere between Fellini’s celebrity-struck decadents in La Dolce Vita (1960) and Pasolini’s rollicking and fighting homeboys in Accatone (1961) stands Bolognini’s gangs of beautiful young street thieves in La notte brava (1959). One might argue that this trinity of films represent almost all the ideas that were later expressed in myriad ways in the Italian films of the 1960s.

       La notte brava shares more of the turf of the Pasolini work that is to be expected given that the film’s script was written by that director based on his novel La ragazzi di vit (1956); but Bolognini, against Pasolini’s advice chose known actors to perform in major roles instead of using unknowns as the screenwriter desired. Moreover, his cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi’s languid gazes of the work’s almost too-beautiful-to-be-believed male leads, despite Pasolini’s gay sexuality, might surely have rubbed the younger director the wrong way given that it removes them from the ordinariness of everyman status. Indeed, if the script demands us not to like these petty criminals we instead grow to sympathize and even empathize with their empty lives pushing the film in the direction, I argue, of the French New Wave.

     Oddly, given Pasolini’s narrative talents, one might easily recut most of the seemingly pointless “actions” of the story to be shown in a different chronological order, each “event” representing, as it does, just another small attempt to get through another frustrating day.

     Strangely, although none of the central characters engage in what might normally be defined as work or a regular “job,” the prostitutes Anna (Elsa Martinelli) and Supplizia (Antonella Lualdi) and the two petty thieves Ruggeretto (Laurent Terzieff) and Scintillone (Jean-Claude Brialy) work harder than almost any factory employee to make ends meet. And since all might be described as “self-employed,” they have to do battle with one another as well in order to survive. In short, it’s not easy life to scrounge up enough money each day for dinner or an evening’s sexual pleasure. 

    The film begins with a pitch-battle fight between Anna and Supplizia who seem to be fighting over the territory of a man the other intruded upon the evening prior. Soon the girls are “hired” by Ruggeretto and Scintillone, but not as one might suspect for sexual gratification, but rather, as even the girls quickly figure out, as decoys to cover their actions in case they meet up with the police.

      Having stolen four police rifles they hope to sell them to a middleman, Mosciarella (Mario Meniconi) but catch him at the very moment when he is in the midst of a funeral for his mother. Despite their continued insistence, he whispers between displays of sobs, “Tomorrow.”

      Our two inept robbers, desperate for money, however, cannot wait. A cousin of the grieving son Gino “Bellabella” (Franco Interlenghi), having overheard their pleas, agrees to skip the funeral and take them to another jobber if they share a percent. But his connection has just been dispossessed and has no money to pay for the loot.

      Bored and tired of their “customers’” ineptness, the whores propose they visit a friend of theirs in an isolated house just outside of the Rome city limits, owned by a deaf mute, with another prostitute, Nicoletta sprawled out nude in his bed. Only she, apparently, can communicate with him, making the deal for yet another percent, and counting out the substantial amount money as she deposits it into one of their hands.

     On their way back into Rome, the trio of males now determine to stop in a field and a small grove of trees supposedly to enjoy a romantic interlude, which the girls realize will end up in their being dumped. Yet oddly, each male taking one of the females off into their separate space, do enjoy a moment of quiet companionship simply talking to one another.

      The boys finally make their run, but before they reach their home destination they discover the women have taken the money stashed in the glove compartment. By the time they return to their former Arcadia the prostitutes have split.

       Seeking the women out on the streets they run into another “gang” of three equally pretty boys and, after the trio attempt to steal a camera from their car, engage in a street fight only to join up in order to allude the police who have been called to end their skirmish.

       Throughout Bolognini’s work the camera keeps returning to derelict wastelands in the midst of the vast apartment complexes of the urban landscape (a contrast that is repeated in the films of Fellini, Pasolini, and Antonioni as well), and it is now in just such a space that the six males, replacing the former gender-mixed sextet, go to finish off their macho melee. But the tone suddenly shifts here, as if finding themselves in some sort of remnant of nature they are temporarily mollified and returned to a semblance of humanity. They meet a couple of small boys attempting to lug a large wing of a small plane down from a hill, hoping to take it to a junk collector to bring home a small bit of change to their parents just so they might eat. Surely it reminds them of their own youths, and one of the new members of the group decides to help the ragazzi load their find on a small wagon, handing them some bills for their efforts.

   The original trio of Ruggeretto, Scintillone, and Bellabella decide they like the three new companions and they all agree to adventure out into the night together, soon spotting a small wagon asking for paid blood donations. Together, they correctly estimate, they’ll make enough to eat or at least store up on alcohol.

     Bolognini never shows us the immediate results of that blood-letting but he can well imagine what it must have consisted of since the film’s longest scenes are devoted to the camera panning over the beautiful open-shirted and half nude bodies sprawled in various after-sex poses in a large room of a Roman villa where one of the group obviously is employed, the wealthy tenants away for a few days.

     In all the descriptions I read about La Notte Brava in English only one mentions this essential scene of the film. But without comprehending it, Bolognini’s film makes little sense. For here we have suddenly opened up a door to discover Fellini hiding behind it, revealing a Rome behind the curtain of Italian masculine bluff. Throughout this film, women are “used” not primarily for their sexual abilities, but as fronts, companions, and images of what the good life looks like, as decoys to cover up the secret joys of male camaraderie. There is no way to describe the scene the director’s brilliant cinematographer lays out before our eyes for several long minutes: if these men have obviously consumed a great deal of alcohol they are even more sotted from mutual sex.

 

     Critic Paul Travers expresses it quite straight-forwardly:

 

“Bolognini then treats us to a grandiose exhibition of male bonding which culminates in the film’s most notorious sequence, an all-male orgy in a swanky Roman villa, of the kind no doubt de rigueur two thousand years previous. Bolognini spares us the sordid details but from the homoerotic signals being fired in every direction, it is obvious that heavy consumption of alcohol is not the only vice to have been indulged in.”

     Actually, the director doesn’t entirely spare us as “the sordid details” as the camera slowly pans across the sated bodies, with Bellabella sentimentally sobbing over the fact that he has missed his great-aunt’s funeral while spending the evening amusing himself “like a bastard.”

    One rubs his chest and moves his hand across his crotch. Another calls up his girlfriend to describe those laid out before him, attaching animal names to each. Scintillone moves over to his friend and lays down next to one rubbing his nipples and chest through his half open shirt, putting his hand to his arm before beginning a sentence with the words that any gay man might use in an attempt to describe his feelings to another male who he is uncertain will want to hear of his love: ”I don’t know how to say it.... You may not understand.”

     What he is really about to say, however, is even more queer, given the circumstance. Explaining that he has no money despite having even attempted to work, he is asking for some money as if he were also a prostitute requesting after the fact the pay the handsome lover had promised for sex. The friend hands him over several bills as Scintillone again places his hand upon his arm, the other continuing to rub his chest.

    Ruggeretto meanwhile explores the villa, discovering in a back bedroom a girl sleeping on a bed. Pulling back her cover, he discovers a stunning nude who wakes up wondering if he is her brother, obviously one the boys that Ruggeretto has just fucked. The two engage in sexual banter as she dresses, apparently in her employer’s wardrobe since it quickly becomes obvious that she works in the house as the maid.

    Ruggeretto would obviously love to spend more time with her but their tête-à-tête is interrupted by Bellabella who announces, he has just stolen the wallet containing a large sum of money from their host. The three meet again after racing away from the villa in a small square, where after promising to share his ill-gotten purse, Baellabella and  Ruggeretto—who wants to return the money so that he might again meet up with the lovely maid—engage in a slug out, with Ruggeretto finally winning. When he turns back, however, to pick up the wallet he finds it missing, Scintillone having stolen it and run off. 

     Scintillone tries to hook up with his ex-girlfriend Rossana (Rosanna Schiaffino), using some of his new money to buy everyone drinks before he discovers her with her new boyfriend Eliseo (Franco Balducci) at a dancing joint. He dances with her, plotting to meet her at her home a short while later.

     When they finally meet up he takes her to an expensive club where only the wealthy go, but as they attempt to enjoy their newfound wealth, the maître d’restuarant arrives to tell him that all the tables are reserved. When Scintillone refuses to leave, he is thrown out and the police called. He is arrested as Rossana retrieves the stolen wallet, Ruggeretto coming upon the scene just in time to steal back the stolen wallet and take Rossana, as he puts it, “to life.”

      They visit a couple of clubs and end up in an expensive restaurant about to close for the evening. This time a bribe buys them a late-night dinner all alone and the return of the band so they might dance. They joke about how they might be treated if the servers knew how poor they were; and recognizing that tomorrow they will need to struggle all over again just to eat, Rossana proclaims “One night in a year is enough.”

      Ruggeretto pays for the taxi back to her house, before asking the cab driver to drop him off near his home, paying with almost the very last remaining bill in the wallet.

     He sits on a nearby wall and drops the last scrap of money to the trash pile below where, in the opening credits we might have spotted it if we had known what to look for.

     Bolognini’s film, indeed, demands that kind of attention to detail. For in Ruggeretto and Scintillone’s world it is not what is said nor to whom it is said that matters. A “girlfriend” or a “boyfriend”—in fact, any “friend”—or “lover” are just words. In the end, loving involves anyone with whom in your daily desperation you can grab a quick embrace before moving on. Living is something you try to do day by day.

 

Los Angeles, April 24, 2021

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

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun) / 1978, released in the USA in 1979

explosive relationships

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pea Fröhlich, Peter Märthesheimer, and Kurt Raab (dialogue and screenplay), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun) / 1978, released in the USA in 1979

 

The first of Fassbinder's so-called BRD Trilogy (the Bundesrepublik Deutschland series that includes Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss) The Marriage of Maria Braun is clearly one of Fassbinder's most brilliant films, but also, one of his most puzzling.

      The story itself, concerning the rise after the end of World War II of a young German woman (splendidly portrayed by Hanna Schygulla), who has survived during the war by trading her body for necessary commodities, is quite transparent—a story told perhaps hundreds of times in post-war literature. But Fassbinder's characters seem more complex, or one might say "confused," than typical stereotypes upon which these figures have been built. The most puzzling aspect of The Marriage of Maria Braun is the marriage itself, which begins, significantly, with an explosion of gunfire, presumably by Allied forces. As we discover the woman of the title, we grow increasingly confused by what she has seen in her husband, Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch), and why, after only one night of true marriage, she still so strongly loves and supports him throughout the film. After that one blissful night, Braun is forced into the German military and is believed dead, until one day, as Maria is about to bed her major customer (and father of the baby in her womb), a black soldier named Bill, Hermann shows up, having been released from prison.

     Nearly speechless by what he has witnessed, Hermann lashes out against Maria—whom we have already discovered, despite her sexual activities, has been a loyal wife—she assuring him of her innocence and her love by promptly knocking her American over his head, killing him. Unable to bear the proceedings of her trial, Hermann confesses to having killed the soldier himself, and is promptly returned to prison.

     Maria, leaving her crowded family home, sets out by herself to make a success, with the hope of building a home and financial future for her husband when he is again released. The attentive viewer already perceives that she is doomed to succeed, for Maria, a brilliantly capable woman, has learned the art of seducing men in order to control them—most often, surprisingly, for their own betterment. Trapped on a train in second-class, Maria pushes her way into first class where only one individual sits, a French industrialist, Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny).. Before they have reached their destination he has already fallen in love with her and made her his "personal assistant."

     Despite the outcries of Oswald's unimaginative "bookkeeper," Senkenberg, Maria brokers a  deal with an American companies for new machines, and Oswald's somewhat moribund company is suddenly in the position to become part of the economic miracle of Konrad Adenauer's post- World War II's government (through the film we hear snippets of his speeches). One of the great joys of this movie is watching Maria as she gradually grows into the job, transforming herself both emotionally and physically into the capable and wealthy businesswoman she was determined to become. She has even predicted the changes of her own body and personality. Before Oswald can ask her into his bed, she determines, as she later tells him, to have an affair with him.

 

          Karl Oswald: You were different last night.

          Maria Braun: Last night I slept with you. Today I'm working for you.

          Karl Oswald: Afraid someone will think we're having an affair?

          Maria Braun: I don't care what people think. I do care what you think. 

                  And you're not having an affair with me. I'm having an affair with you.

 

     In short, although sex is necessary to her very survival, that is not only how Maria succeeds in her course of action. For despite her open sexuality and obvious intelligence, she is still utterly in love with her husband of the past, visiting him in prison regularly each week, and working with a lawyer for his release.

     What we gradually began to perceive is that Maria's success—and by extension post-War Germany's success—is intrinsically tied sentimentally to the past. While outwardly they completely abandon the old world, accepting with gleeful greed and desire its new materialism, the German people are deeply tied to older relationships such as those of Frau and Ehemann, husband and wife, managers and labor, etc. It is not so much "love" that ties them to the past, but the rites themselves, the positioning of the themselves in the society. For Maria, however, that role is tolerable only as long as she is in control, is the one on whom the house and finances are dependent. She has purchased a kind of mini-mansion for the day when her husband will return and she will be able to live out the "romance."

     It is that split in her personality, the ability to move forward while linking herself to the myths of the German past, that makes Maria so attractive. We have only to consider her sister Betti's inability to encompass those necessary changes to understand why her husband, Willi, returned also from the front, can no longer stand the sight of her. Unlike Maria, she cannot intellectually alter her life; she is only the Frau, now growing fat. Even their mother (Gisela Uhlen) is more sexually and intellectually adventuresome, her greed for life being revealed even in the early scenes of the movie, as she says:

 

               Mother: It's wrong to give all you love to only one person, Grandpa. If you

                            don't have potatoes, you eat turnips. When the turnips are gone,

                            you eat gruel. But every girl loves her one and only. He goes to

                            war; five months later he's dead; and you mourn the rest of your

                            life. Does that make sense to you, Grandpa? It drowns you.

    What Maria does not know is that Oswald, frustrated by her refusal to marry him—which would certainly mean a release of that control and a rejection of certain deeply held beliefs from the past—has discovered her marriage, and made an agreement with Hermann that, if released from jail, he will travel to Canada, leaving Maria to Oswald for the brief time he has left before his death.

     In some ways, The Marriage of Maria Braun gives us the template for a character like Petra van Kant. Had Maria lived, she might certainly have been a kind of independent neurotic, like Petra, who has given up on men. But Hermann's return with his revelation that he is now financially able to support her, usurps her power at the very moment that she is told, through Oswald's lawyers, that she will his inherit money; however, he has given its control over to Hermann. She has been merely a pawn in trade between the two men.    

     Intentionally or accidentally, depending upon how one wants to evaluate her anger, her fury at the discovery of the truth, Maria leaves the pilot-light on her stove upon lighting up a cigarette. The explosion, when it comes, is inevitable and seems to me to have been destined; we have already witnessed several scenes of her dissolution as a caring being. Only if she had broken from all ties to the old German society, might she have survived. But sentimentality, an idea of behavior, tears her and her world apart. Yet Fassbinder's film, ironically, ends with a false sense of achievement rather than failure, as the German soccer team of 1954 beats Hungry, winning the World Cup Soccer Match for the first time. Out of the ashes of people like Maria Braun and her husband, a new country has risen.

    

Los Angeles, September 10, 2010

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2010).

Andrzej Wajda | Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) / 1958

 

a stuporous dance of death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerzy Andrzejewski and Andrzej Wajda (screenplay), Andrzej Wajda (director) Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) / 1958

 

Wajda's masterwork, Ashes and Diamonds, begins in a seemingly bucolic world, with two men, Maciek Chelmicki (performed by the gifted actor Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski), lying on the ground near a small country chapel. A young girl is attempting to open the chapel door, and asks their help. Slowly the men, clearly exhausted, are roused, Maciek, in dark glasses, taking a long while to awaken. Suddenly another man signals them, a car is coming, and we recognize that we have misread the peaceful scene. The girl is sent off, and, as the car comes into view, Maciek and Andrzej ready their guns, brutally murdering driver and rider.

     It is, as we discover later, a botched murder; the two killed were factory workers, not the Communist party leader Szczuka, whom the assassins were ordered to kill. Entering the nearby provincial city on the last day of World War II, the two meet up with a local contact, the secretary to the city's mayor, who gives information, but refuses to participate in their activities. While reporting on their success, Maciek overhears of the arrival in small hotel of Szczuka, and realizes their mistake. There is no choice now but to finish the assignment, Maciek checking into a room next to Szczuka's.

     Szczuka is in town to celebrate his return from the Russian front and the appointment from the mayor to a ministry position. The banquet is to be held in the hotel itself. Maciek and Andrzej seek out the hotel bar, where Maciek discovers a beautiful barmaid, Krystna (Ewa Krzyzewska), and proceeds with a kind a crazed flirtation with her that in his behavior reminds one of a mix between the American actors James Dean (Cybulski was later described as the "Polish James Dean") and Marlon Brando. He is clearly toying with danger, daring the world about him, a world where he has daily had to face death.

     Both men have been part of the Polish underground, and now hope to defeat the rising Communist influence. Yet neither Andrzejewski's original novel, nor Wajda's film, sides with the partisans or the Communists. Although a formidable and bureaucratic-like figure (no match for the appealing Maciek), Szczuka has fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and later warns of the dangers of "having power."

    Andrzej is called away for further instructions, while Maciek determines the best moment to kill Szczuka is late at night, when the man has fallen asleep. In the meantime, he continues to woo Krystna, eventually seducing her into his room, where the couple celebrate their youth and sexuality at the very same moment that the banqueters celebrate their political futures and the townspeople the end of the war.

    Throughout the long night, we begin to see that nothing in this celebratory world is quite right. Through Wajda's brilliantly surreal imagery, we witness a wooden image of Christ hanging upside down in a bombed-out church, a white horse loosed upon the streets. While Maciek and Krystna discover love, the banqueters grow drunker and drunker, ultimately throwing over any remnants of respectability and civility.

   In this whirlwind of change, bringing both a corrupt new leadership and hopeful love, the young assassin is confused. He has never before disobeyed an order, but is now seemingly ready to give up his previous ways for the new possibilities of life—a life of young idealism he has never had the opportunity to experience.

    Yet the system in which he has been living will not permit escape. Andrzej returns to remind Maciek of his duty.

    As Szczuka awaits a car to take him to his son, arrested with a group of failed partisan rebels, Maciek shoots, killing Szczuka; the body falls forward into his own arms so that the two appear to be embracing death together, symbolizing the pact that the Polish people will ultimately make with the Communist forces.

     Inside the banquet hall, the participants, worn out and drunk, demand the orchestra play Chopin's Polonaise in A flat: while the tired musicians perform a rendition that is hardly recognizable, the celebrants enact what appears more like a stuporous dance of death than a spirited polka, a kind of dance that is played out years later in Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994).

    Attempting to escape the city, Maciek, spotted by troops, is shot. Stumbling forward he finally reaches the dump at the town's edge, collapsing and convulsing, little by little, into death. Krystna, the diamond of his world, is forced to join in the devil's dance.

     Wajda's great film may not openly take sides, but by comparing the death of the beautiful Maciek with the surreal Polonaise, we know that Poland's future will not be a thing of beauty, that the ashes of World War II will fall over anything that shines.

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2009).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).

Phillip J. Bartell | L.T.R. / 2002

making mistakes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phillip J. Bartell (screenwriter and director) L.T.R. / 2002 [16 minutes]

 

If one learns nothing else from Phillip J. Bartell’s L.T.R.—an anagram for the words “long-term relationship”—it is that no beginning couple should ever attempt to describe themselves in such a relationship and, above all, never allow a highly skeptical documentary filmmaker to stick a camera into one’s everyday affairs.

      When I met my companion and spent every day of the first week in each other’s apartments and beds, moving in together at the end of that period, neither of us ever quite imagined that we would become a permanent couple—now in a marriage lasting 53 years. We fought like dogs for the first two years, and although we made up all sorts of rules regarding our sexual fealty, we fortunately did not completely obey our own strictures. A relationship is a process that is difficult to evaluate while establishing the definitions and boundaries of what one means to the other.

     But these two boys, Michael (Cole Williams) and Riley (West Mueller), both immature and clearly inexperienced are convinced that they have found true love and share numerous values, as well has feeling that they are engaging in spectacular sex. First love has a way of exaggerating such feelings. A day seems like a month, a month like forever.

        In this mockumentary the couple hardly get through the third week before they discover what should have been obvious on the very first night, particularly given that Michael, the elder (21), likes to party at the clubs, while Riley (20) prefers to remain at home with a bong for a companion. Michael wants to get “gay” rings, each of which is number so that the community might determine how many gay men there are, while Riley sees the whole thing as being something like being, if nothing else, “creepy.”

       Riley suggests that they both want kids—“that’s something we have in common”—without bothering to perceive that neither of them, together or alone, is even slightly capable of being a parent. An invitation to each of their best friends, Caitlan (Aimee Garcia) and Tobias (Michael Azria), ends disastrously, with Michael only speaking with Caitlan, while Riley and Tobias roll about the floor giggling in a drug high. The evening ends with them wondering if they can continue with such different behaviors.

     When Michael invites the documentarian over to watch him making up with Riley, he finds his friend unreachable by phone, as the camera catches the wan look upon his face. (The phone from 2002 is almost comical in its a cigarette carton-size, one of the earliest versions of a portable phone).

      In his car delivering pizzas, Riley tells the camera that he doesn’t know what’s going on, that they’re both into this “thing of not calling one another.” “I just need someone more mature,” the most child-like and self-infatuated person in this film intones. He turns to the filmmaker, “Like how old are you?” The documentary maker says, “30,” and Riley pauses as if considering the matter.

       Michael is sadly contemplating why just a couple of things bring down an otherwise nearly perfect relationship. When asked what those two things are, he answers that he thinks they like to party differently—an obvious conclusion since Michael appears to enjoy the company of others, while Riley removes himself into a world of his own confused head—and they have different “energies,” an idea which remains vague, although we sense that the commitment of the relationship was perhaps mostly Michael’s enthusiasm.

       Soon after, we see Riley in bed, topless, talking, as he explains to the documentary maker, to Michael. He wants us to get together, the cameraman hissing that he thinks it’s a bad idea. He then suggests Riley should do whatever it is he wants to do.

       We can only suspect what gets revealed in the next scene with Michael and Riley attempting to enjoy a reconciliation dinner, the camera whirling away as they sit silently face to face. This isn’t working Michael finally speaks out, Riley reacting that he thinks it might be because he slept with John.

       Suddenly turning on the cameraman, apparently the “John” they are talking about, the flabbergasted Michael shouts out, “We haven’t even officially broken up yet….” He runs angrily into the bedroom and locks the door, Riley pounding for him to let him in, shouting “It didn’t mean anything.” From the other end of the room we hear the filmmaker asking “What do you mean it didn’t mean anything?”

      When Michael opens the door to let Riley in, he forces the camera and its operator out, and for two weeks, reports the documentarian, he didn’t hear from either of them. “But then Riley called to tell me that they’d broken up again.”

       Michael finally calls John again for a meeting, asking how things are with him and Riley. The relationship between them is also over. Michael wants to report that he’s fine, no longer even pissed. From this relationship, he argues, he has learned nothing—“except not to go out with immature freaks, but everybody knows that. And not to trust documentary filmmakers.”

       But finally, he perceives a truth about finding love. “I look at you, and it’s all clear. I’m going to make the same mistakes over and over again, like you are until I get it right. No, not right; just lucky.” He looks up and over to another table, adding, “That boy’s cute.” He stands and begins walking over to the cute boy, turning back for a moment to the camera, “Interview’s over.”

        If much of this film is coy and simply silly, there is an underlying sense of sadness which emanates from the realization of just how difficult any relationship is, and how even more complex and problematic it is for gay men who not only have fewer choices even in large urban areas, but are pulled still by different societal rewards and pressures that historically isolated them from long-term relationships and encouraged them to seek out sexual fulfillment over the responsibilities of family and monogamy. Sexual attraction may indeed bring gay lovers together, but it is not what primarily makes their relationship adhere. Only by letting time reveal who the other is, can lovers determine whether they might be able to remain with the other over the years.

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

 

Larry LaFond | Gaydar / 2002

fantasy is better than reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry LaFond and Terry Ray (screenplay), Larry LaFond (director) Gaydar / 2002 [20 minutes]

 

US director Larry LaFond’s Gaydar is a comic movie of the old school that nonetheless is absolutely charming because of its unassuming narrative and simple intentions of entertainment as opposed to probing deeper subjects.

      Randy (Terry Ray) and Frankalina (Jennifer Echols) share nearby office cubicles, both of them on the watch for the Tom Cruise-like beauty who works in their office, Jack (Bryan Dattilo).

     Randy, a slightly effeminate male, believes that Jack might possibly be gay, and from the language the movie puts into his mouth and the hand he delivers up to Randy’s shoulder when he communicates, it might well be that he is. But unlike the many gay men—myself included—who believe they have the power of determining such things on the basis of gestures and language, Randy claims no special powers of “gaydar.” Besides Frankalina is convinced that his beautiful behind is a pair of cupcakes ready to be delivered right up to straight women like herself.

 

    Together they watch Jack’s coming and goings with a mixture of awe and perspiration, at one point when Jack seems to be particular friendly, Randy almost passing out in sexual anticipation.

      Randy is also the type of gay man who simply can’t pass up a yard sale, and during the weekend he stops for just such a sale by a gay man (Jim J. Bullock) whose lover has announced his intentions to break off their relation by packing up all of his partner’s possessions in boxes, so that when he returns home he has no choice but to sell them off quick at very lowest price.

       Deep within one of the boxes is a contraption titled “Gaydar,” a noisy machine that supposedly identifies any to whom the pointer is aimed as gay or straight. Randy immediately tries it out, the meter identifying the hunky man also shopping for trinkets at the yard sale as straight—surely a sign that the machine doesn’t really function, he presumes, until a woman, presumably his wife soon after joins him. Pointing it at Maurice’s distraught lover, the yard-salesman, the meter reads definitely gay.

       Excitedly, Randy buys the machine and takes it home, trying it out further on photos in his tabloid magazines. According to the machine, Elton John is gay, Brad Pitt is not. Melissa Elthridge, yes. But when he is about to “check out” Tom Cruise, his cat hisses so strongly that he becomes distracted, finally pointing it at the cat herself, who turns out to be a lesbian which, as he declares, “explains so much!”

      Randy becomes so distracted that when his uncle Vincent (Charles Nelson Reilly in his last film role) arrives for his weekly movie-watching evening with a Doris Day film in hand, he’s forgotten completely all about it, and bows out by saying that he’s planning on going out to a disco—something that according to Vincent he has never done before.

      Obviously, he becomes determined to check out Jack at the office, but when he attempts to do so in the parking lot he encounters a fellow employee, Dewayne (Thomas Cagle), a true nuisance who’s about to marry another employee, Marlene. As Randy attempts to train his device on Jack, Dewayne gets in his way and—much to his surprise, if not the audience’s—Dewayne registers as gay.

      Once inside the office, Randy is still determined to discover the truth, but after he shares his intentions with Frankalina, she suddenly rushes after him in an attempt to dissuade him, ending in a bodily confrontation with Jack who drops all his files, forced to bend over continually in order to pick them revealing for both what Frankalina has described as his Cinnamonbuns.

      When she finally gets an opportunity to talk with the much flustered Randy, she explains that if he settles the issue for once and for all, he will most certainly remove the joyfully imagined possibilities for the other, destroying at least one of their daily pleasures. Fantasy, she proclaims, is so much better than reality.

     Seeing her logic, Randy gives up his attempt, but she borrows the machine, nonetheless, just to check out another employee who is about, she tells him, to marry her good friend, Marlene. The film ends with Randy muttering to himself, “and I was so looking forward to giving him away,” which can be read either of two ways, as serving as a best man or friend, giving him “away” in marriage or, of course, “outing him,” letting everyone know what he already does, that Dewayne is most certainly gay.

      Nothing serious here, just good campy fun. The film, accordingly, has appeared in over 120 gay film festivals.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).