Manfred Noa | Helena: Der raub der Helena (Helena: The Rape of Helen) / 1924 || Helena: Der Untergang Trojas (The Fall of Troy) / 1925

passion / betrayal / treachery

by Douglas Messerli

Hans Kyser (screenplay, based on The Iliad), Manfred Noa (director) Helena: Der raub der Helena (Helena: The Rape of Helen) / 1924

———Helena: Der Untergang Trojas (The Fall of Troy) / 1925

 

This 3 hour and 20-minute film released in two parts by its producer Bavaria Film, was long thought to be lost until an almost complete copy was discovered in Lausanne, Switzerland which, along with forgotten copies in film archives in Rome, Madrid, and Moscow, allowed the Film Museum München to issue fully restored DVD copies which included the tints used in the original.

     The sheer magnitude of sets, costumes, and casts might have challenged even D. W. Griffith’s epic films Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, and Noa is far more cinematically experimental than Griffith, with the kind of cinema tricks that would be further explored later in the decade by William A. Wellman, Fritz Lang, Jean Epstein, James Sibley Watson, and Melville Webber. Yet the retelling of the complex narrative of The Iliad is surprisingly linear and straight forward in Noa’s script, with only a few major changes of events from the original, namely that, after the bird of Adonis visits Helen (Edy Darclea), declaring that she has been chosen to be the female representative of the Spartan Spring celebrations, her husband Menelaos (Friedrich Ulmer) is only too happy to show her off before the entire city as the celebrant that award the crown of victory to the winner of chariot race, presumably himself. So vain is Menelaos that he cannot even heed Helen’s own fears that appearing so openly in public may bring problems to a marriage in which to claims complete happiness.

      Her visions of what the future may lead to reveal Paris’ image, a face so beautiful that she almost willingly goes forward with her plans which will lead ultimately to the betrayal of her marriage vow.

      Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the Trojan capitol, Paris (Vladimir Gajdarov) dreams, revealing his own visions of Helen and events that he could otherwise have not imagined. What the shepherd boy cannot know is that he is the child of the Trojan King Priam and Queen Hecuba whose birth foretold the downfall of Troy in dreams to both Hecuba and the seer Aesacus.

      In a world of dreams, signs and prognostications, Paris (similar to Oedipus) is handed over to the chief herdsman Agelaus to remove the child and kill him, an act that like Priam and Hecuba before him, he could not follow through, raising the beautiful boy as his own son.

      The story is not revealed in full in Noa’s version, but we know enough that we realize Paris is part of the Gods’ plans, particularly when in his dream he is asked to choose between the three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite—the goddess of love bribing him with the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helena. Who might resist? The very next day, in Noa’s retelling, Paris is on his way with a sacrifice of his and Agelaus’ best calf to the Spartan island wherein lies Adonis’ shrine at which Helen must spend the night.

      The images of Paris’ dream and voyage are some of the most memorable of Noa’s film, each of them more fascinating the one just previous.

    

 So far, as anyone with knowledge of Homer’s work or the ancient Greek mythology might have expected, Helena is a heterosexual fantasy. Yet back in Sparta, as the men prepare for the chariot race which Helen, the director focuses for a rather long while on the relationship between Achilles (Carlo Aldini) and Patroclus (Carl Lamac). Presuming the relationship between them was a result of the customary Greek paiderasteia relationship between an older and younger man, Ancient and modern historians have endlessly argued which was the older erastes (lover, protector) and the younger eromenos (the beloved), Aeschylus, for example placing Patroclus in the role of the eromenos, while Plato saw Achilles as the younger loved one.

     Noa basically presents them as being of the same age, and thus suggests that their relationship is a romantic one, or at the very least that Patroclus is only slightly younger than the more-experienced and better muscled Achilles. No matter, Achilles spends a great deal of time showing off his musculature to his friend, while just before the race begins, wherein they appear together in the cart, hardly keep their hands off of one another.

 

     Should one happen to miss their physical expression of the sexual desires, Noa relates Menelaos’ own fears that the buff hero Achilles will surely outrun him in the race, and asks Tersites (Rudolf Meinhard-Jünger) what he might do about the possibility of his wife having to offer the crown of victory to another man. The elder Tersities assures him that it will be no problem, and as Achilles and Patroclus ready themselves in the final moments before race begins, taunts the hero, “Since when does Achilles fight for a woman’s wreath?” suggesting that it is only for the male gender that Achilles poses and fights. Offended by the suggestion, he throws a small discus, hitting the old man without truly harming him. But he does unloose the horses, and bows, temporarily out of the chariot race.

      Only when the others have gone round once, and Achilles again witnesses the beauty of Helen, does he determine to retie the chariot to the horses and participate in the race.

      Of course, Western commentators from the Elizabethans to the present have gone out of their way to point out that Achilles was also attracted to women and that both he and Patroclus’ married women, debunking for some the idea of their homosexual love. But obviously even the ancients comprehended bisexuality, and as we shall see in most of the movies from 1887 until the mid-1960s, homosexuals generally kept a lower profile if they were perceived to follow conventional heterosexual marital patterns. But for the ancient Greeks, more importantly, to be married and have homosexual affairs was not at all a contradiction but a common pattern of behavior. Sexuality was not perceived as a structure of closure but of openness. There is absolutely no contradiction in Achilles’ love for Patroclus and finding Helen so sexually attractive that he might wish to flirt with the possibility of bedding her. And Noa does not blink in this possibility when as Achilles finally wins the race, Menelaos grows angry that the young hero will have the honor of escorting is wife by boat to Adonis’ shrine where she will spend the night alone in order to bring the god’s blessings upon the Spring season.

      But, of course, she does not spend the night alone since Paris arrives, the two fall deeply in love with each other’s beauty, imagined long before by each of them, and sleep together, breaking every vow and code of the ancient world imaginable. When morning arrives, and the boat returns to take Helen home, the soldiers discover that Helen has been raped, the older meaning of that word suggesting that Paris has abducted her and carried her away to Troy.

      By the oaths Menelaos himself and others have taken, nearly all the men of Sparta must now fight the Trojans in order to get her back.

      Troy, having offended the gods in many ways by this time, is suffering a plague against its infant children, a cyclone destroys one of goddesses’ image, and a lightning bolt destroys another’s. The seer predicts a fate that even he dare not speak aloud. Priam, seeking out a new god to protect his city, finds it in Aphrodite when a mast from Paris’ presumably destroyed ship is brought back, the image of the goddess featured upon it since it was stolen from the holy shrine. But even then the gods do not seem avenged. Lions are eating the Trojan cattle and sheep. And Priam, realizing that Paris has died on the voyage home, finally confesses to fact that he has saved and raised the royal son.

      A lion hunt is ordered up, while simultaneously we discover that Paris and Helen have survived having struggled ashore only a few miles from Troy itself. Paris takes her back to his shepherd’s hut wishing and praying for a kingdom he might award to her. In the midst of this island upheaval, Agelaos discovers Paris is alive and is introduced to Helen. When the lions are ready to attack both Paris and his shepherd father, Helen stands as a sacrifice, strangely calming the beasts, after which all return in celebration to Priam and Hecuba, even the King and his wife now delighted to see that their son, brother to the young Prince Hector (Carl de Voght), is alive.

     

     This time when Aesacus warns once more of Troy’s fall, Priam has him shackled and imprisoned as Troy begins to celebrate. But it is already too late. The Spartans fleet has arrived, and the battle begins, with Hector soon near death. Paris of Iliad with his bows and arrows instead of his sword and armor, is hardly a warrior, but in Noa’s version he rises up for the challenge, leading those still within the walls of Troy to join him in battle, the crude Trojan navy somehow managing to rout the Spartan ships and saving his brother.

 

    At the end of Part I of Noa’s film, the Trojans finally have a great deal to celebrate.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2022

*

 

 

     If Part I of Noa’s epic film is highly entertaining and simply fascinating with regard to how he has adapted Homer to the screen, Part II, The Fall of Troy, has to be one of the greatest of psychological dramas of all of silent film history.

      Even at the beginning of the film, the Greeks are described as being highly demoralized after years of battle with no major success, and a plague has begun to take life of some of their soldiers. The desire to return home, the central subject of The Odyssey, begins here on the shores of the Trojan empire.

      The Trojans, however, are no better off, exhausted and frustrated by the continual battles of war, some of the court demanding that Helen simply be handed over to the Greeks to end the war. Obviously Paris loudly protests, pleading to his father Priam to continue to protect his lover. But Priam has already begun to show signs of a Lear-like madness, handing over the decision to a court of his close advisors. In the midst of their deliberations Helen herself appears, her beauty immediately altering any negative feelings, as they vote unanimously to continue to protect her.

      I should interject the fact that, while we know that anyone performing the role of the most beautiful woman in the world cannot live up role, and given that beauty is always a slippery designation, Noa and his associates might have chosen a more conventionally beautiful woman to play Helen. Edy Darclea is willowy and lithe and has a rather “classical,” look whatever that means. But to be honest Vladimir Gajdarov’s Paris is far more beautiful than his consort.

      The decision to stand by her, however, represents one of several later such incidents to blame Paris and Helen for the death and desolation facing both sides, not all of them ending so felicitously. Meanwhile, as the Trojans gear up for yet another attack, Helen is able to convince Paris not to participate in the battle, particularly given his inexperience as a warrior and her own Greek ethnicity. Andromache (Hanna Ralph), Hector’s wife, is less successful, given the fact that Priam’s only other surviving son is the hero of the Trojan forces. His mother Hecuba, desperate throughout the entire work to protect her sons, asks Helen to intercede, hoping that she may be able to convince him to remain at home.

      Helen makes her case and almost succeeds, Hector at first refusing but finally breaking down in a long embrace indicating that he too has fallen in love with her, which forces him to realize even more fully how much he must resist his feelings and return to the battlefield. In one of the most subtly significant moments of silent film, when he leaves Helen, the door remains slightly open as Andromache stands outside watching Hector leaving in a rush, one might almost say of embarrassment, with Helen heaving in shock and sorrow in the back.     

     Andromache, at first, simply attempts yet again to convince her husband to stay, holding up their child as evidence of what she sees his true responsibility, to be the boy’s father. And the child himself refuses to be held by the hero until finally Hector removes his helmet to hold him.

 

    But in the end he becomes more determined and leaves Andromache and his son’s side. Andromache now turns to Helen to ask if her husband loves her, the Greek beauty, and Helen’s silence reveals everything to the wife, who must now settle with the fact that her husband has betrayed their mutual marital vow.

      Betrayal becomes a major theme, indeed, in The Fall of Troy, as back in the Spartan camp we see Agamemnon (Karl Wüstenhagen) and Menelaos arguing over whether or not to kill Helen for her betrayal of his love. Menelaos is still torn, unsure whether or not she is truly responsible—as well as being inwardly guilty for having dared to show her off like the “trophy” wife she represented to him. But when Achilles, still seeking his infamous wreath from Helen’s hand, demands the right to fight Hector to the death, Menelaos insists that it is his right only, Agamemnon, his brother, agreeing, which basically eliminates the Greek’s best hero from serving any role other than a soldierly footman. And in his pride, Achilles suddenly refuses to even participate in the upcoming struggles, ultimately betraying his own country and his fellow soldiers.

    His “friend” Patroclus, in Noa’s rendition, attempts to calm Achilles down and convince him that as the best of the soldiers he must suit up for war. The director represents this in a series of loving strokes of Achilles’ body that comes just shy of showing the two making love. Certainly, cinema had never quite shown previously two males in physical contact while nearly naked.*

     Obviously, neither Vito Russo, in 1981 or even second edition of his The Celluloid Closet in 1987, nor Richard Barrios as late as 2003, had encountered this work or surely they would have cited it for its important homosexual revelations. In this instance, not only does Patroclus “feel up” his friend, but when Archilles calls for women and wine in order distract him from the sounds of warfare, and a woman dances enticingly over Achilles’ body, Patroclus turns away in an obvious huff of disgust, while Achilles, observing his behavior, sends the women away.

      What Noa makes far clearer than Homer, and which shall soon have great significance, is that this is a tale not only of a great heterosexual passion, that of Paris and Helen, but of a crucial homosexual love of Patroclus and Achilles.

       So Hector goes to war, while Achilles stays behind, the Greeks being pushed back to their ships and even some of their boats being burned by the Trojans. Time and again agents from the battlefront beseech Achilles to rethink his decision and to join in the battle to rout the Greeks as only he would be able. But Achilles stubbornly refuses to participate.

     Finally, realizing the severity of the situation, Patroclus begs his friend to allow him to go dressed in his armor, perhaps enough to frighten off the enemy, Achilles reluctantly agreeing.

   Seeing Achilles on the war field, Hector immediately demands a duel, and the two begin the bloody fight, Patroclus revealing his identity when his headwear falls off, but nonetheless losing his life to Hector’s sword.

     The Greeks bring Patroclus’ body back to Achilles’ tent where the great warrior breaks down in a torrent of tears and sorrow, realizing that he has betrayed his lover as well. His laments are surely some of the saddest of film history.

        The Trojans have won the day once again. The cost for Achilles and the Greeks has been far too much. As the victorious Trojans return to the city, Hector has been left upon the field after his encounter with Patroclus. Achilles rushes to the battleground encountering Hector and challenging him, in revenge of his lover’s death killing the Trojan leader quickly, before tying up his body to his cart and racing back to the Greek outpost.

        We can point to this very moment, the death of his son and the loss of the Trojan’s greatest soldier, as the moment when Priam first proves his insanity, not only lamenting the death of his son, but raving, demanding to once more visit Aesacus, who has been imprisoned now for eight long years (our first indication of just how long these wars have been going on). Priam insists that Aesacus predict a different future for him and his beloved city, but when the prophet refuses, insisting it is fated, he further punishes him by cutting out his tongue, and finally killing him.

       When the first Greek prisoners are brought behind the Trojan walls, Priam insists that Helen place the laurels upon their head, the signification of their capture and deaths. She challenges him by not only refusing but reminding him that she is Greek (some of the prisoners have hailed her as their queen), he threatens her with imprisonment.

       Priam, Andromache, and Hecuba travel unarmed—even their route littered with the bodies of the dead—to plead with Achilles for the return of Hector’s body; he at first refuses since his sorrow for Patroclus’s death has not been slacked. He finally agrees only if Helen tosses down from the city’s walls the crown that was to have been his, so that he might now place it upon his beloved’s bier. 

       They agree that he will approach the city walls upon witnessing the smoke from the funeral pyres for Hector’s cremation. His captain warms him of danger and demands he accompany him for protection. But Achilles resists his advice.

       Priam, meanwhile, has become truly treacherous, creating a deadly poison into which he dips the arrows that he demands his son Paris shoot at Achilles when he arrives. Given Helen’s pleas, once more Paris refuses to be involved, but this time Priam will not be crossed, pronouncing, since Paris refuses to kill Achilles, any man who accomplishes the feat shall have Helen in marriage.

       Torn between his love of Helen, the family honor (both the contradictory commitments of revenge and the pledge to not harm Achilles on this visit), and Helen’s pleas to resist Priam’s command, Paris turns once more to the impulses of Aphrodite, taking up his bow and shooting the arrow into Achilles’ heel, betraying not only family honor but Helen’s love.

       At first Achilles is merely amused, perceiving his foe as a bad marksman, but he soon realizes that the arrow has been dipped in poison—no mention in Noa’s version of Thetis’ dipping of him as an infant into the River Styx to protect all but the heel by which held him.

      With the death of Achilles, Paris has suddenly lost Helen’s love, and for his hateful challenge of Priam in response, is himself locked away in the dungeon. There is no indication that Helen finds love for him again, even when late in events, freed from prison through Hecuba’s machinations, he accepts death rather than being separated from Helen.

       What is apparent is that the now treacherous Priam is mad. And in that madness he orders the gift of the clever new Greek leader Ulysses, the Trojan Horse dedicated to Athena, be brought into the gates, even dismantling the doors to do so.

       While the Trojans celebrate their victory, Priam is haunted by ghosts of destruction of which he had been warned. Helen is captured, permitted to live by Menelaus and taken off to be returned to Sparta, while the city is ransacked and burned, its men killed and its women enslaved, all of which Noa spectacularly portrays in frames tinted in red.

 

*The obvious exception to this statement was the film attributed to Bernard Natan, the 1920 short movie Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly, which showed both male / male, female / female, and heterosexual cunnilingus sex and copulation, with all body parts exposed. But that film was basically underground and not shown in popular theaters as was Noa’s film.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2022 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

Matteo Garrone | Gomorrah / 2009, USA 2009

cemetery of garbage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, and Robert Saviano (screenplay, based on the book by Roberto Saviano), Matteo Garrone (director) Gomorrah / 2008, US 2009

 

Given the rhyming title of the Neapolitan crime group Camorra, Gomorrah is a rambling narrative of five different sets of characters in and about Naples, all of whom can be tied to the notorious gangs of that region, and all of whom are destined to kill or be killed themselves.

     The film centers—if there can be said to be a central focus—on a young boy Totò (played by Salvatore Abruzzese), a wide-eyed urchin living in the vast apartment compound Vele di Sampi where most of the film's action takes place. Totò's mother survives through a small grocery, and as a delivery boy for her, Totò visits various units of the apartment complex, getting a close-up view of more violence and suffering than any child should have to endure. Like other, slightly older children of this world, he clearly sees the violence around him as a natural phenomenon.

     Two other boys, Ciro and Marco, soon to be young adults, play a kind of theatrical game of imitation, miming scenes and imaginatively recreating the events of the American gang movie Scarface. When these boys later discover a cache of guns and other weaponry hidden by the Camorra at a nearby farm, they turn their games into deadly action, shooting up the empty backwaters of their neighborhood. Garrone's film relies more on memorable images than upon a coherent story, and one of the best of these is a scene in which the two boys, stripped to their underwear, meaninglessly shoot off their Uzi's in mad imagination of the day when they will overtake the local Don—a wretched unshaven and (so the boys claim) unclean thug whom it is not hard to imagine is a vulnerable as anyone else in this hellish spot.

     Garrone refuses to glamorize any part of the Camorra. Hardly anyone, not even the wealthy gang leaders, live better lives than anyone else. And most characters are trapped in the confines of small, dark rooms, allowed to continue living by small financial handouts provided by the Camorra, some of which is put right back into the Camorra economy through the purchase of coke and heroin or a trip to the local sex club—the only pleasures this world seems to offer.

     One of the major figures we fellow, in fact, is the money runner, Don Circo (Gianfelice Imparato), who, like Totò, is privy to each household as he delivers mob money to those deemed worthy of support. His job may seem, at first, to offer some sense of purpose or even power, but we soon discover, like everyone else, he too is forced to live life at the edge with the possibility of being killed by rival ("secessionist") gangs and being hated by those to whom he delivers the money for the mob's penurious offerings. As one recipient shouts each week, how do they expect me to live on this? Don Circo's attempts to leave the mob ends in another round of murders. 

      Even the local haute couture designer, given a contract to produce several gowns—including one, we discover later, that will grace the body of actress Scarlett Johannson on Oscar night—lives in near-destitution and all-night working sessions. His top dressmaker lives so poorly that he is willing to sell his knowledge, night by night, to the owner of a local Chinese dress factory, who sneaks him in an out of the shop in the trunk of his car. As a so-called "traitor," he too is nearly killed, and escapes with his life only by leaving his previous occupation behind, becoming a truck driver.

     Perhaps the only man who seems to live life a little better than the others is Franco, who with his new assistant Roberto, plans to turn an empty quarry into dumping ground for garbage that will cover over a bed of dangerously toxic containers of chemicals. When one of the truck drivers delivering the barrels has a mishap, bleeding and fearful of the chemical's effects, Franco unflappably orders the regular drivers out of the trucks, temporarily leaving the scene to bring back young street boys who are more than happy to drive these mammoth machines down to the pit where they will be dumped. When a local farmer, who has previously sold Franco land offers him pears, Franco kindly accepts them, but once on the road demands Roberto dump them: they are polluted like all the land of Campania thereabouts. Roberto (perhaps a stand-in for the author, Roberto Saviano), refusing to rejoin Franco in his determined destruction of the region, is perhaps the only individual in the film who escapes unscathed—although in real life Saviano must live in hiding, fearful of the mob's wrath.

      It is inevitable, accordingly, that the young, innocent Totò must ultimately be entombed in the Camorra's codes of behavior. Hit by a secessionist group, a younger fringe of the Camorra followers determine to kill the mother of a rebel. As a delivery boy, Totò is the only one for whom she will open her door. Desperately trying to remain uninvolved in these treacherous acts, Totò will not answer their query: "Are you with us or not?" But as he knows, there is no ground in between, and he has no choice but to call the woman out to her murder.

     So are Circo and Marco lured to a country spot and shot, their bodies loaded into a forklift of a giant caterpillar truck and dumped, perhaps in the very cemetery of garbage created by Franco and his kind.

      Dramatically speaking, Gomorrah is nothing but a mish-mash of different stories weaving in and out of each other, much like the unfocused images of Garrone's background figures throughout the film. Yet the implications of these character's purposeless acts, where human life has no more or less value than a bottle fly buzzing around a room, are absolutely mesmerizing and memorable. The only time death means anything for the figures of this film is when the gun is aimed at their own heads. But as members of such self-destructive cultures everywhere, the moment they survive the heat, they seem utterly to forget—just like the boys who are told they have been transformed into men by letting a mob henchman shoot them, a bullet-proof vest pulled over them for probable protection, directly in the chest; the force of the bullet momentarily flattens them upon their backs, but eventually they stand up again to blindly face the bullets of another day. Let us hope that readers of Saviano's book and movie will remember, and help to put a halt to these internationally destructive acts.

 

Los Angeles, February 19, 2009

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (March 2009).

Philip James McGoldrick | Siemiany / 2009

 agnieszka’s breasts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philip James McGoldrick (screenwriter and director) Siemiany / 2009 [19 minutes]

 

Siemiany is a Polish summer resort village in the countryside where each year two teenagers, Andrzej (Damian Ul) and Michal (Michal Wlodarczyk), along with their families, have visited. The two boys, like most pre-adolescent teens, wrestle, swim, fish, wrestle some more, challenge each other with sexual knowledge about women—particularly of their female friend Agnieszka (Aleksandra Radwanska) who years before has shown them her budding breasts—wrestle again, and generally just hang out with one another. Occasionally they show one another their hard-ons, the result, so they claim of thinking of Agnieszka’s breasts.

     This year begins very much like their years of the past. But something is different. One of their brothers has joined a sort of gang of whom he is the leader and with whom Agnieszka, now much taller and older hangs out. Her goal when she grows up, she tells the camera, is to become a slut. The group mostly bullies their own members and occasionally shows its clout to the younger boys, particularly when the brother pulls out his newly-purchased gun—fortunately unloaded, but later filled with bullets.

      Basically, however, the boys seek to maintain their usual activities. But it’s more difficult this year without Agnieszka, and there is a growing distance between the slower maturing of the two Andrzej and meaner and growing-up Michal. Michal seems only half interested in his friend and it is not all interested any longer in seeing his friend’s dick, although at one point Michal suddenly demands to see Andrzej’s penis, grabbing him and pushing him up against the wall in what almost becomes a rape. They still sleep in the same bed and enjoy one another’s company, but Michal’s language has become tougher while Andrzej’s imitations seem only half-hearted, although they are both hated for their bluff of verbal abuse by the locals.

      One day, Michal goes missing as he explores the room of another girl, the beautiful Dorota (Joanna Opozda) who has already joked to the camera—in one of the film’s misguided post-modern interpolations—“I don’t say much in this film, I just lay here.” But when Michal goes exploring she does far more than that, slowly engaging him as she shows off her body, little by little, flirting and toying with the wide-eyed and astounded youth perhaps on the edge of his first heterosexual adventure.

       Meanwhile, outside the white headed, dyed blonde crowd of older boys decide to grab and slightly abuse Andrzej, describing his as a faggot for his longer, undyed locks. They are determined to “make him a man” by dying his hair the same blonde-white as their own heads. I am not sure what this ritual means in Polish culture, but it clearly an attempt to pull someone of difference into their orbit. Making him look like them clearly frees him from any sense of difference.

    Having undergone the ordeal, and now with a bleached white crop of unwashed hair, the boy goes in search of his friend, surely confused and perhaps frightened. But as he seeks him out in the inside of the cottage, he quietly becomes a voyeur to the sexual “coming out” of Michal, watching for an instant as Dorota undresses for his friend.    

    In the next instant we see Andrzej once more outside on the run, racing down a long empty path, escaping what he cannot comprehend but clearly senses, that he has lost his friend forever to a world that perhaps he can never enter. The difference the older boys simply joked about may in fact be real, and Andrej is obviously terrified by its implications.

       Andrej suffers the feelings of so very many gay boys, that he has somehow missed out in the “normal” process of male maturation, realizing that his pretend interest in Agnieszka was just that; that in wanting to display his hard-on it was Michal who was his focus, the erection the result of his friend’s touch, not some imaginary memory of Agnieszka’s breasts.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

 

Johan Vancauwenberg | Blessure (Fair Play) / 2009

a reckoning

by Douglas Messerli

 

(Roland Javornik and Johan Vancauwenbergh (screenplay), Johan Vancauwenberg (director) Blessure (Fair Play) / 2009 [8 minutes]

 

This short film reveals a situation that, alas, still happens far too often even in our presumably more open world with regard to LGBTQ+ experiences.

     Steven (Tom De Hoog) is a married man, in what appears to be a loving relationship with his wife Marie (Janne Desmet). We see her busy cooking dinner as the film begins.

      She is interrupted by one of her husband’s soccer friends, Tom (Steven Boen), who has stopped by to deliver up Steven’s locker bag which he left, so he explains, in his van. Since Steven has not shown up to their soccer games recently, he hasn’t been able to return it, and, he insists, it’s beginning to smell up his auto.

     She rushes back to her pot, inviting Tom in who surprises her by saying that he’s not seen her husband at the soccer game, since he went to play soccer yesterday.  He didn’t even show up last week, he explains.

     Maybe he watched from the side, they both cover up the matter.

     He’s on “Me time,” she explains. It’s when something’s bothering him and he needs to take a break from it all. She mocks him describing “Me time.”

     But bit by bit, we quickly discover what “Me time” is all about. Steven and Tom have been having an affair. It’s a ruse he uses to explain his time away from her and the house.

     Marie is finally beginning to wonder that if he doesn’t play soccer during “Me time,” where does he go?

     Tom tells Marie that her husband loves her; he always talking about her.

    At that moment Steven returns home, shocked, obviously, to see his lover—actually, we soon discover, his ex-lover, since he and Tom have just broken up—in his house.

    What brings you here? he asks Tom suspiciously, Marie explaining, as she continues her meal, that he’s brought the bag Steven has left with him.

      Tom seeks out an immediate exit, thanking Marie for letting him taste her excellent cooking. But Steven has good reason to walk him to the door.

       In a testy interchange, Tom explains that he’s told Marie nothing, but tells him the rest of his things are also in the bag.

     By this time, Marie is already down on her hands and knees, tossing her husband’s dirty soccer clothes into the washing machine. But she soon discovers, at the bottom of the bag, two sealed condoms and a box of unopened ones. She says nothing.

      But we watch as Steve climbs into bed with the cute boy Tom for the last time. Tom attempts to tell him that he loves him, but Steven insists that they’ve already discussed that: “I’m in love with Marie.” “And not with me,” he retorts.

      Steven insists that he does love Tom, but it’s different.

      “Then maybe you should go and love someone else differently.”

      It is as almost as if the self-deceiver has been waiting for this moment, as he sits up in an attempt to explain the obvious: “You can’t imagine what kind of situation I am in.”

     We all know all too well what kind of situation he is in. He has been lying to himself, his wife, and to his lover for a long while, particularly to himself. He probably does love Marie, but as a closeted gay man he also needs outside sex. The pulls in such a situation are intractable. There is no solution but truth, which would collapse Steven’s world. But refusing to face up to it, only makes it worse, the punishment of love perpetuated for all parties involved.

     Tom perhaps summarizes it best, if somewhat selfishly: “No, you’re just too stupid to understand that you’re never going to be happy with Marie.” It’s that realization that women in love with gay men also have gradually come to perceive, cutting their hearts open with something like the blade of a knife. But Steven is a coward, and leaves Tom.

    We now have to wonder, what has he been doing these past weeks on his “Me time,” seeking out a new gay companion? What lies was he about to again tell his wife as he entered the door, beginning his sentence, “You’ll never guess who I ran into?”

      “Bye Tom,” is all this gay deceiver can say as he walks out the door.

      And, finally, one truly wonders, as one viewer asked, “Who could ever leave a boy as cute as Tom alone in his bed?”

      As Belgian director Johan Vancauwenbergh’s camera backs away from the washing room scene, with Steven at the door watching as Marie angrily slams the rest of his clothes into the machine, we know his reckoning has finally come. For once in his life, he will have to face someone else in their time and speak the truth.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2024 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Anaïs Sartini | Spasibo (Thank You) / 2012

vanished

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anaïs Sartini (screenwriter and director) Spasibo (Thank You) / 2012 [14 minutes]

 

Clément (Clément Bayart) has just arrived in Russia for a film festival, and is pleased by his large quarters, which even includes a piano. On the telephone he tells someone back in France that he plans just to walk around, perhaps visit the Hermitage, etc.

    But as he begins to walk the St. Petersburg streets he discovers something he never expected: he has become the invisible man. As he calls out in Russian, French, and English to speak the citizens on the street, to his fellow filmgoers, and whoever else he encounters, there is no response. They hurry on talking among themselves as if he didn’t exist. “Здравствуйте!,” “Hello,” “Please,” none of the terms of greeting seem to have any effect. Even asking to know if a doorway is the entrance to the festival receives no reply.

     It seems to be worse for Clément in this 2012 film than it was for me in the Soviet days of Leningrad, where the people were discouraged from speaking to foreigners, and the differences in language often made it impossible. Try getting lost in Leningrad and seek for help, as I did.

     But here, we sense, something else is happening. Finally, as he sits near the Neva, a man (Andrei Odintsov) approaches him, speaking in Russian. Clément is amazed that he can even be seen. The stranger offers him a cigarette, and our French festival-goer smiles, responding, “Spasibo,” “Thank you.”

     When the Russian finally determines that Clément can speak English, he sits down beside him, reassuring him that “I can see you, you can see me,” but also wondering what he is doing “here.”

       I came her for a film festival, the Parisian explains, “and I vanished.”

     “Why” asks Andrei, to which Clément responds, “I don’t really understand.”

     The Russian speaks his own language for a moment, and then asks the visitor to come with him.

     What other choice does a man who is otherwise invisible have, but to go with a stranger who at least recognizes his existence.

    The Russian explains that he too vanished, on the 7th of March. “I started to be transparent in February.”

      “What happened?” the curious Clément eagerly asks.

      “I remember, I was afraid. I couldn’t do anything. The people in the street were screaming because of this. The authorities didn’t know what to do. We were just vanishing, disappearing, like this.”

      “The policeman, the government, they didn’t do anything?”

      “No.”

     As they have been walking they finally come upon the location for the Film Festival, which Clément points out to his new friend.

       “So you are an actor?”

       “Yeah, a transparent actor.”

       Andrei invites him out for the night, suggesting he knows a good bar.

       Slowly, for the perceptive viewer, this parable, like so many Russian stories, a veiled statement of moral value.

       The bar is, obviously, a gay bar.

       Back in his Nevski Prospekt Hotel with Andrei, Clément declares that he doesn’t understand. How can they see one another if other people can’t?

       Andrei suggests that perhaps they don’t want to.

      When the Frenchman asks why, Andrei answers, “Maybe they don’t want to. Maybe they are afraid.”

       “How is it possible that people don’t see me when I feel fire burning somewhere inside? …When I feel like a hole, a darkness in each part of my body?” The two men kiss.

       The time has come for Clément to leave, and Andrei has accompanied him to the train station. They hug, as Andrei sadly recounts their futures: “Soon, you will be in Paris existing again. You will see you[self] in a mirror, you will be able to speak to people, people will hear you. Tell them, tell them that here we vanish.”

     Andrei returns Clément’s “Spasibo,” as he is blurred out by the camera lens, now an almost smudged out image walking off.

      The film was evidently inspired by the censorship of another film by director Anaïs Sartini, Between Bodies to be shown at the Parisian Seasons’ Festival in St. Petersburg. That film introduced gay people in Paris. Sartini quickly filmed Spasibo in response. The Russian law which resulted in the censorship of the earlier film, and which came into force just before that film’s premiere, prohibits “the propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia among minors”—but, of course, is easily applied to filmgoers of any age.

     By coincidence, when I first begin the write about this film in mid-August 2024, I had almost finished with the first draft when I looked up to find that all my writing had suddenly vanished from the screen. I madly begin to look to all my computer back-up locations, but couldn’t find it. The writing had been completely lost. It took me several weeks to get up the energy to begin all over again.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).