Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen | Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) / 2003

consenting when you can’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen (screenwriters and directors) Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) / 2003 [17 minutes]

 

Based on a true situation in Norway, Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) concerns a young 15-year-old boy, Olav (Tord Vandvik Haugen), a little less than two months shy of his 16th birthday. Olav lives in a nicely furnished group home (a Norwegian teen orphanage) in an apartment with two other boys his age, in a small Norwegian town.

     The film begins with Olav showering, another boy brushing his teeth, and a third roughhousing, pretending to hump the towel-clad Olav when he gets out of the shower, obviously suggesting that these boys, if not gay, are quite sexually aware. Olav, it appears, is on his way to a date, and greets the rather dour house mother, Susanne (Toril Martinussen) on his way out.

     He crosses through a large field where he hears a mewling kitten, and finding it, picks it up to comfort it before proceeding to his destination.

    What we don’t know is that this charmingly innocent boy is responding to a personal advertisement placed in the local newspaper purposing a sexual encounter with a 30-year-old man.

     Per (Even Rasmussen) awaits in his local Quality Inn motel room for the boy, who has written him that he is of age. The age designated for sexual consenting homosexual sex with an older male not in a position of trust and authority in Norway is 16—an issue, it appears, for some anxious young Scandinavian boys. In Denmark the age is 15, and even a 14-year-old boy in Lasse Nielsen’s film Happy Birthday (2013) can hardly bear to wait the few weeks until he turns 15 enabling him to have sex with his hunky older neighbor.

      In any event, Olav and Per meet up, have enjoyable sex, and after, almost like delighted schoolboys discovering their sexuality, begin to play games, Per stalking the room under a blanket searching out the boy who keeps delightfully coming closer before withdrawing.

       At that very moment two policemen show up, finding both of them frolicking naked together.

      The man can barely comprehend what has just happened, as the boy is quickly forced to dress to be taken away by Susanne, who we later discover, has followed him to the hotel, spotting him going into the room and reported the event to the police.

      Per is handcuffed and taken away in the police car, later to be found guilty of child abuse, despite the fact that it was Olav who made the initial contact and claimed to be old enough to consent.

      Evidently the real “Per” was found guilty and imprisoned, something directors Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen found troubling. Krutzkoff Jacobsen is quoted: “I’m not saying everything that happened was all that ’precious,’ but I can’t help wondering what the hue and cry is all about” since the boy was only 56 days shy of being of age and that he had initiated the sexual encounter.

     What’s more, as I mention above, had he been living in Nielsen’s Scandinavian sister country Denmark, the boy would have been of consenting age. The film, accordingly, brings into question some of the difficulties and, one has to admit, the absurd arbitrariness of determining legal sexual age for young men and women between 14-18.

     Clearly, given the terms established in the film, there was nothing that occurred in that room between the two males that might be described as abusive or criminal except for the societally imposed determination of age, which, in fact, may represent the true criminality of the situation. I don’t know what a sentence of child abuse means in Norway, but for a US citizen is results in a life-long punishment that often keeps those involved, no matter of what age, from living in most neighborhoods where children reside or visiting any institution or place in which children gather. And in far too many cases it means being outcast from the society for the rest of one’s life.*

   This film’s title, incidentally, comes from a work by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, whose character in his controversial novel Powderhouse describes an experience of having sex with an underage boy as representing “precious moments,” but obviously, in this case, the intense value of those moments were not worth the elder’s freedom for much of the remaining life.

    

* I might just remind the reader that in the US, legal age limited by relationship (the older male not serving in a position of trust and authority) varies from state to state from 16 to 18 years of age, with numerous variants allowing for sexual relationships with males and females who share their age groups. In California, the state in which I live, for example, the crime of "unlawful sexual intercourse" defines any act of sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 18 who is not the spouse of the person. There are no exceptions; all sexual activity with a person under the age of 18 (and not their spouse) is a criminal offense. So if a 15-year-old willingly has sex with a 17-year-old, both have committed a crime, although it is only a misdemeanor. Harsher sentences are doled out for individuals who significantly differ in age.

     The age of consent in Iowa, the state in which I grew up, is 16, with a close-in-age exemption for those aged 14 and 15 who may engage in sexual acts with partners less than 4 years older.

     In the state where I went to university, Wisconsin, the age of consent is 18 and there is no close-in-age exception. There is, however, a marital exception which allows a person to have sex with a minor 16 or older if they are married to the minor. If the minor is below 16 both sexual intercourse and any sexual contact are a felony; sexual intercourse with a minor 16-17 by a perpetrator who is not married to the minor is a Class A misdemeanor. At 17 I would have committed a Class A misdemeanor for having sex with someone of my own age, a crime of which I am certain I was unknowingly guilty during my Freshman year or, even worse for having sex with a couple of my teachers, putting them in jeopardy as well.

     In the District of Columbia, where Howard I lived for fourteen years, the age of consent is 16 with a close-in-age exemption for those within four years of age. In thirty-one states the age of consent is 16, in six states it is 17, and in thirteen states it is 18.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2021

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

Lawrence Ferber | Birthday Time / 2000

a kiss is never just a kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lawrence Ferber (screenwriter and director) Birthday Time / 2000 [18.33 minutes]

 

Birthday Time begins in the high school men’s room where two boys, Christopher (nicknamed Toffer) (Cory Grant) and his friend Jonathan (Mark Pacitti), are crowded into a toilet stall exploring one another’s bodies. When Christopher attempts to meet the boy’s lips in a kiss, the other turns away, at that very moment another student entering the room which allows his timid friend to escape. Toffer looks off in disappointment. On his way out of school, a young man kissing his girlfriend calls the boy “fag” as he passes, so obviously Toffer has not attempted to hide his sexual identity.

      On his way home from school, he stares longingly into the local gay bar Flapjax, catching the watchful eye of the older bar tender. Clearly the boy is not sexually of age in New York state (the legal age is 17)* or able to consume alcohol (the legal age is 21). He is eager, but utterly disappointed.

       Back at home we discover his mother in their back patio. Evidently on Sunday her son will be celebrating his 18th birthday, and his mother asks if Jonathan’s coming to the birthday celebration, to which Toffer replies: “I don’t think we’re going to be friends anymore.” 

       Despite this boy’s own acceptance of his sexuality, it is clear that his schoolmates do not share his open viewpoints, giggling over the fact that he reads in his evening drama class from Oscar Wilde’s Salomé; and it’s clear from the speed with which he reads his lines that he is nervous in openly displaying himself as a gay individual in front of his peers.  

     That evening he again stares into the gay bar, observing a couple in the midst of a kiss. Spotting only the young bartender, Toffer bends down and speeds through the room into the bathroom where he encounters an older man pissing behind him. The man gradually extends his hand to grab the boy’s ass, and startled, Toffer spins around, the elder equally startled by how young his prey is. Claiming he’s drunk, the man apologizes, but it appears he might still go through with a kiss were it not for the sudden intrusion of the older bartender who insists the boy leave the premises. “Get puberty and come on back,” lisps the barman.

       This time when Toffer returns home, he discovers his mother packing. She’s gotten a freelance job in Pittsburgh and she has to leave until Sunday. She asks if he remembers a boy from New Jersey, Scott, Toffer describing him, somewhat dismissingly as a “jock.” “Yeah, but he’s a nice kid,” she insists. In any event she has asked his father to look after Toffer until she returns, her son protesting that at almost 18 years of age he doesn’t need a guardian. She is not up for an argument. Before she leaves she introduces him to Scott’s father Tom (Simon Woolley) the same man he had previously encountered in the Flapjax bathroom.

       Tom seems somewhat appalled when he recognizes the boy he has been asked to look after, while Toffer now has other designs.

       The moment they are alone, the elder again apologizes, claiming he was drunk and, after pondering what Toffer might have been doing there, suggesting he avoid “those kind of places until he’s out of school,” presumably meaning to wait until he graduates, yet another of the several age and time limits imposed by adults upon youths.

      Tom declares, since they have cleared their air of any confusion, they might return to their normal child and adult positions. But the boy interrupts him to ask a personal question, just as quickly getting embarrassed by what he’s about to say and backing away. Tom encourages him to speak freely, but the question shifts everything back to where it was: “What is buttfuck like?”

      “Go do your homework,” responds the astonished adult.

      But that is just the first of sexual declarations, innuendos, and seductions that the boy has planned for his Saturday stay-in during which he determined to discover what being gay truly means, spying on Tom as he showers, leaving the door open several inches as he himself showers so that Tom might watch him (a treat of which, we observe, Tom takes advantage), and essentially torturing the poor closeted father of his supposed jock friend Scott. 

      At one point, Toffer sits on the couch with Tom, unwrapping and eating a banana as he inches closer and closer to his guardian in the process. Tom attempts again to talk reasonably with him, trying to explain that although he admittedly “likes to play around a bit,” Toffer has no business being in a place like Flapjax.

       Toffer, in turn, summarizes his problem: although he’s tentatively explored gay love, he’s almost 18 and hasn’t yet been kissed. Reminding Tom that in the bar he was about to kiss him, he lays out his terms: “I want my kiss god dammit!”

       When Tom refuses he calls him “a closet queen.”

       “Stop it!”

       “Then kiss me!

       “I can’t”

       “Then have a drink.”

And so it continues throughout the day as the boy attempts to break down all of Tom’s defenses.

      When Tom wonders whether the boy going out at all, Toffer answers: I”m going to get my kiss from you or I’m twirling straight back to Flapjax without any underwear on.”

      You might almost describe what takes place after as a kind of sexual showdown, as each of them is seen, the clock ticking away, peering into mirrors, Tom checking out his greying temples and Toffer his facial features, the latter kissing himself intensely in the mirror, presumably as practice for what is he will be facing by sundown.

      Tom finally dares to enter the boy’s room. They share small talk until Toffer wonders whether or not he should grow his hair longer or keep it short, inviting Tom to feel it. When he again refrains, Toffer challenges him: “You sure you don’t want to feel my hair...or have a drink?”

        After more chatter, Toffer gets right down to the issue: “Am I not your type or something? Am I too young or too gay or something? Why won’t anybody kiss me?”

        Tom answers seemingly with wisdom: “You should get your first kiss from someone who loves you. Do it right.”

      “He [presumably Jonathan] won’t kiss me, and you won’t kiss me either.” After a pause, he continues, “I’m ugly, I mean I’m so fuckin’ gay and I’m going to be 18 and even retarded people who can’t read get kissed. I went in there because I wanted to get kissed.”**

         Tom answers, “Count on me, you don’t just want a kiss Toff.” He strokes his hair, and we know what’s in store, particularly when Tom declares that it’s not the boy’s birthday yet, whereupon Toffer sets the clock ahead.

         When his mother arrives home the next morning, her son is still in bed, Tom evidently  having left. She knocks on her boy’s door wishing him a happy birthday. Get dressed, she demands, “Don’t you want your present?”

     Christopher lays back in his bed with a large smile on his face, making it clear that a kiss is never just a kiss.

    

*Although this film clearly appears to have been shot in New York where the legal age of consent is 17, meaning that the character would be 16 about to turn of age, somewhat explicably, but perhaps simply to quell any criticism of a 16 year-old-boy behaving as Christopher does, the movie establishes that the boy is 17, turning on 18, which he and others describe as the age of consent. In more than half of the US states the legal age is 16.

**It’s interesting that the desire to be kissed, which quite obviously stands for a whole set of other sexual possibilities, is also the great desire of the character Ben in Adam Salky’s 2005 film, Dare, perhaps another example of a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality in a much less painful way than the standard plot of the “coming out” movie generally requires. He too wants to simply kiss someone before he graduates from high school.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2021 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).

Douglas Messerli | Crossing the Divide [Introduction]

crossing the divide

by Douglas Messerli

 

Over the past several years I have been on the lookout for films which might reveal whether or not the process of young gay and lesbian people “coming out” was truly easier that it had been for my now agèd generation. Obviously, the young people in films made after 1990, for example, have a large advantage in simply knowing that there are other LGBTQ people out there, even if they have never met them. And, in general, cultures have grown more open to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and—far more slowly—transgender individuals and their expressions of love.

      Yet, over all, it appears that most contemporary filmmakers perceive the process of a young man of age 16 or 17 coming to terms with a minority sexual bent to be as difficult an undertaking as it has been decades earlier, and sometimes as in Olivier Lallart’s 2019 French film  PD (Fag) or US director Scott Sullivan’s 2020 short Red, things had grown even more difficult for young LGBTQ people simply because they were more easily identified by their peers and open about their sexual differences. Even young people who had not yet come to terms with their sexuality were more likely to be defined as “different” by their fellow dominant normative peers. Conversely, if I may have been perceived as queer while growing up I was never described as a “fag” and completely cut off from my fellow classmates; my differences may have caused me to shy away from them since I did not find many of their social activities compatible with my interests, but I was never completely shunned. And I enjoyably shared their company when it came to activities such as playing in the band, singing in the chorus, debating, and performing in dramas.

       In my generation, moreover, there was a kind of shell of innocence that if one did not quite yet identify as being gay, it freed one from commitment to or relationship with an unwilling or self-hating closeted individual such as we see in Red and numerous other post-80s “coming out” films. By the time I actually “came out” in college, long after others seeking a gay high school sexual partner, I found dozens already in waiting, so my experience may not be typical. And I also recognize given the hormonal changes of adolescence, particularly in today’s highly sexualized environment, it is far more difficult to keep one’s sexual urges on hold.

       That does not mean, moreover, that I didn’t fantasize about others in my formative years; perhaps I was the gay boy so closeted that others were frustratedly thwarted by my behavior. I can imagine one such instance. And I know for certain that I was the cause of frustration to a couple of heterosexual girls, something that isn’t fully represented in film but might be a fascinating topic of ancillary importance to LGBTQ filmmakers: “how does the rejection of a gay boy or lesbian truly effect their straight counterparts who have fallen in love without knowing about their “other’s” sexual urges.” What does loving a gay man and woman mean for a heterosexual girl or boy when she or he discovers the truth? Surely hurt and anger cannot be the only emotional scars. Does such a relationship ever result in an investigation of a straight person’s own sexuality? It can’t be that only gay men and women feel the necessity of pondering those issues.

       Nonetheless, I have noticed some evidence that the whole process of “coming out” in queer cinema is becoming in some instances a non-issue; and perhaps the “B” pattern of “coming out” films—boy falls in love with boy as they struggle to come to terms with the fact within themselves and in relationship to their peers and family—will soon transmogrify into something quite different. Increasingly, for example, I have noticed a great number of short and even feature films dealing with individuals who find the process less a personal problem or even a concern with those of their own generation, than it is a frightening standoff between them and their parents and older relatives, perhaps another variation of the genre—a phenomenon I shall soon have to explore since the resultant pain this causes is still quite significant. And their companions, unlike those of the previous generations, are far less tolerant about those who determine in connection with their families to remain in the closet.

       At the same time, however, I have also noticed there have been a number of recent gay short films released in which, if there are any problems at all, it has less to do with sexual difference than it has with other desires and impediments unrelated of the LGBTQ identity. Perhaps the generational problem I note above might almost be seen to also be an extracurricular concern, despite its significant effect upon the individual’s sexual transition. But in several of these new films there seems to be utterly no major impediment regarding sexual identification and desire.

      I have already written about a few of these films, some examples being US director Brian Tognatti’s Just Ask Him (2020); Icelandic director Runar Þór Sigurbjörnsson’s Hann (Him) (2018); Dutch director Jiels Bourgonje’s Turn It Around (2017); US director Ly Tran’s Rose Canyon (2017); and earlier, the comic “coming out” farce by French filmmaker Françoise Decaux-Thomelet, Enceinte ou lesbienne? (Pregnant or Lesbian?) (1996). One might describe these films as simply a matter of coming to recognize the new openness, sometimes resolved with a simple change of a pronoun in describing one’s desires.

     Arguably, there is even a sub-genre already developing around these films that proposes that “coming out” is nothing of great significance with a little help of the older generation. In at least five works I’ve observed young men of ages from 14 to17 who have been perfectly ready and willing to jump into the sack with someone of the same sex, but can evidently find only mature men who are ready to kiss and make proper love to them as opposed to simply shyly exploring their bodily territories; these youngsters are clearly beyond the touching-feeling-masturbatory exercises played out in school toilets, bedroom sleepovers with friends, or gropes in their classmates’ autos. US director Lawrence Ferber’s Birthday Time (2000), Norwegian directors Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen’s Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) (2003), Australian director Jonathan Wald’s What Grown-Ups Know (2004), Danish director Christian Tafdrup’s En forelskelse (Awakening) (2008), Danish director Lasse Nielsen’s Happy Birthday (2013) and Dutch director Vincent Fitz-Jim’s TommyTeen18 (2017), all concern young boys absolutely ready to make the leap into total gay sexual pleasure the moment they turn of legal age or are accepted by older men as lovers.

     If these films present new difficulties and barriers to be dealt with, at least they have little to do with the confusion of sexual identity and the individual’s inability to accept his burgeoning desires. If in our time of cultural hysteria concerning all things to do with pedophilia clinical psychologists have been chary of and even punished for exploring the idea that on many occasions it is the younger underage individual who encourages the elder to enter into sex. Yet LGBTQ filmmakers have repeatedly suggested that this was precisely what happens, their characters having few second thoughts about engaging in sex with older men.**

     Sometimes far more difficult for a young person suddenly discovering that he or she is sexually and emotionally drawn to members of the same gender, particularly in small towns but even sometimes in larger schools, is that there is no one immediately to turn to for either support or, even more importantly, for sexual exploration. Some cannot even find another gay person of their same age. In a class of about 140 students, I was long convinced that there was not another gay person among my peers.* Is it any wonder then that often individuals look to older people who they might identify as possibly being homosexual to help them not only to comprehend what their feelings mean or if they might arouse such feelings in others, but to understand how to fully engage in same-sex situations. It may seem a strange question, but it’s an inevitable one when there are no models: what do you do in to show your love in gay sex? As a commentator in Nic Sheehan’s 1985 documentary No Sad Songs noted, as a gay man you come to learn what many straight men never do, that you have an anus. Exploring gay sex with an older boy, the young hero of David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen (1998) is pleasantly shocked to find himself being “rimmed” during one of his first gay sex encounters. Young boys often need help in coming out even if they have learned to accept their sexuality. The joys and pleasures of homosexuality has not yet made it into many classrooms.

 

*I have since discovered that at least one of my female classmates has long been in a lesbian relationship and one of my male friends in my class at least experimented with a gay relationship.

**I should mention that I discuss a very similar subject in my essay and gathering of films in 2008 titled “The Gap between Desire and Apprehension: The Problem of Man and Boy Love.” However, this earlier essay focuses on the age gap of just a year or two from when sexual activities will be legal, whereas that later essay concerns the much large issue of legal and illegal man/boy love.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau | Drôle de Félix (The Adventures of Felix) / 2000

off to visit dad

by Douglas Messerli

 

Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (screenwriters and directors) Drôle de Félix (The Adventures of Felix) / 2000

 

The joyful and carefree Félix (the wonderful Sami Bouajila) is laid off from his job as barman on the ferries from Dieppe to Newhaven, England, a company downsized because of the building of the Chunnel (the Euro Tunnel) which permitted train and car access from Calais to England. Living happily with his lover Daniel (Pierre-Loup Rajot), Félix takes his severance with aplomb, and determines just to relax for a few days, watching his favorite soap-opera to which he’s become addicted due to the fact that it is so popular with many of the ferry’s daily riders.

      Determined to sell his house in which his mother recently died, he packs up her possessions, only to discover a correspondence between her and the father he has never seen, having been born after his father left. Inexplicably Félix determines, while his lover is away on a business trip, to hitchhike to Marseilles where his unknown father apparently still lives. Handing Daniel a ticket for Marseilles, he promises to meet him there.

    As a gay Arab who is HIV-positive, one would imagine that this character might be somewhat chary of undertaking such an adventure, but not the almost always upbeat Félix, who packs up a backpack with some clothes and his HIV medications and purchases a new gay rainbow kite, heading off on a new adventure “on the road.”

     Almost immediately he witnesses a racist attack, two men attempting to toss a body into a river. One of the assailants, noting his observation of their activities, take after him as he goes on the run, taking brief refuge in a bar who bartender seems to know the assailant, and assures Félix that he is a good man, whole nonetheless momentarily offering him some protection. Soon after, however, the attacker catches him and begins to beat him, before Félix once again escapes. He decides to report it to the police, but observing them manhandle another Arab man, he finds himself unable to go through with reporting the incident—an act which will haunt him throughout the rest of his journey.

      Soon after he meets a young gay man, Jules (Daniel Sergue) attempting to draw Aristotle, a figure that appears on a nearby cathedral. The teen is working in the dark and not a very skilled artist. The ever-friendly Félix offers to draw it for him, himself producing a rather crude rendering as a token of friendship. The boy, however, completely charmed by the older man sneaks him into his room, where Félix, exhausted from his adventures and, we soon perceive, as a consequence of his medicines, quickly falls to sleep, much to the frustration of Jules, who obviously is seeking sex.

      But the next morning, as the two go out for breakfast, the boy spots a woman who has left her cars in her auto and, presuming that the secretive Félix must be on the run for some criminal action, suggests they steal the car. Caught up in the boy’s imagination, Félix, with his new partner in crime, does just that—until they realize that the woman has left her baby in the back seat. They sneak back to the scene of the crime, where by this time the woman has discovered that both her car and child are missing, Jules handing over the baby to a young girl with the instructions to deliver it up to the woman. Behind the wheel, the two quickly go speeding off.

 

     In another town, Félix takes Jules to a gay bar where, for the first time in his confined life, the boy gets to dance and flirt with other gay men. But Félix purposely tells a bar owner that the cute boy is underage, and the police are quickly called, the two escaping. Félix tells Jules to wait on a nearby doorstop while he gets the car, but it’s clear his intentions area to cut and run. The boy has begun to show his impatient with Félix for not having sex with him, while the nonchalant older Arab who is HIV positive has no intentions of serving as the boy’s first love.

      No matter; as Jules waits, another man with whom he briefly flirted at the bar has discovered him alone on the stoop. Surely he won’t be so shy with the eager kid, who Félix has come to see as a “younger brother.”

      Leaving the car in an open field, so that the police can easily find it and return it to its rightful owner, the adventurer continues his trek on foot.

      Now the pattern of this utterly charming film has not been determined. In his search for his long missing father, Félix will discover a series of individuals who will become like family to him, a family of fellow French folk who will provide him with a far deeper sense of joy and love than his own parents have been able to provide.

 

    He next meets up with one of the most charming of his "family" members, a hearty elderly widow, Mathilde Firmin (Patachou) who engages the seemingly idle young man, sleeping on a park bench, to help carry her groceries back to her house (they, in fact, consist of only a few items and are very light to carry), and once she has got him into the house feeding him and insisting that he help her out moving furniture the she has long thought ugly but which her own son never found the time to remove. In the process she explains her life, how she married almost out of revenge for having lost the man she truly loved, and how she never loved her husband and was actually relieved with his death. She and Félix indeed become fast friends, she insisting that he’s not really interested at all about finding his father but is seeking something us in the journey, which by this time the film’s viewer might also realize.

      As alarmingly honest and down-to-earth as Félix is filled with delight, the two make a lovely vision of grandson and “grandmother,” she helping him work around the problems of his own parents by explaining her disappointment with her own daughter and son.

      On the road again, Félix encounters a robust railroad man (Philippe Garziano), a kind of older kissing “cousin” with whom he finally has sex.

     And soon after, on yet another adventurous side-trip he meets a woman, Isabelle (Ariane Ascaride), who is perfectly ready to let him ride with her, as long as he is not in a hurry, since she has to deliver up her three children in the backseat to their various fathers. The children quickly adopt the loveable Félix as their new father, explaining to him how they themselves all prefer one of the other boy’s father better than their own, and would prefer spending time on his farm.

 

     Determined not go through a town that voted rightist, Félix maps out a crazy route which ultimately takes them everywhere but where they want to go. But finally, having delivered up the kids, Isabelle knows of an expensive hotel nearby. However, the police have closed down the hotel, having captured the murderer who has chased after Félix days before. The two seek out another bed, which they share, this time as brother and “sister,” Isabelle guessing his secret, that he was the famed witness (now mentioned in national news) to the Arab’s death. Finally, Félix is forced to justify his actions, with Isabelle insisting that he still visit the police, even though they’ve finally captured the wanted man.

      In the last meet-up with such wonderfully eccentric individuals, Félix encounters a late middle-aged man fishing, not really attempting to catch fish, he explains, as to find an activity that might get him out of his unhappy home for a while so that he can think things out. Our hero, well-skilled with kites since Dieppe is the home of the national kite convention each year, shows his new “father” to entertain himself in a far more delightful manner, and before long he has the man engaged in kite-flying, certainly more exciting that throwing a line into a polluted waterway where, even if he caught fish it wouldn’t safe to eat.

 

     Arriving in Marseilles just in time to meet up with Daniel, who has just arrived by train, Félix hugs and kisses his lover, amazed that for the first time since he had known him, Daniel has shaved his small chin which always carried a beard. He is like a new man, Félix insists; but Daniel also notes that something has changed with Félix who, following the fisherman’s advice, tells Daniel that he has decided to let his father remain anonymous. The two decide, instead, to take a ferry to Corisca.

     Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s lovely fable is so filled with life and joy that it is almost a bit overwhelming, maybe a bit too bright, after having seen so many hundreds of films, long and short, with dark and fearful portraits of surviving gay life. Here, no one except the evil duo early on in this film, even question the heroes’ race, religion, or sexuality, accepting him for who he is, even with his numerous canisters filled with pills (indeed Mathilde wants just such a container for her own pills). Nothing comes between this happy couple’s love but the five day-hiatus wherein Félix discovers the family that has so long been missing in his life. Yet the adventures of this picaresque are far more interesting and engaging than any gay boy’s tribulations about coming out, any gay lesbian’s fears that she may lose her lover, or any gay man’s terror over offending his family by revealing the secrets of his sexual desires. Just as he name suggests, at film’s end we recognize just how lucky we have been to join Félix on his adventures to visit his dad.

Los Angeles, September 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).      

      

 

 

 

 

Unknown filmmaker | Can I Call You Back? / 2010 [commercial advertisement]

a fortuitous date?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Director unknown Can I Call You Back / 2010 [34 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

Two beautiful men are standing at the end of a swimming pool along with a good-looking woman.

On the far right of the picture (stage left) the man is talking: “I don’t want to seem to forward. I’m only here for a few days. Do you think we can have dinner soon?”

     The man in the center responds, “I’d love to.”

     The other man reacts, confused, “Love to…?”

     “Have dinner with you.”

     The other man again speaks: “Can I call you back?”

    We realize what his handsome friend has not, that he has been talking on the phone, hidden away in Razorwire, Oakley + Moto sunglasses, sold by Motorola.

      Do the two actually get together? It appears not, as the man speaking to his sunglasses appears to move off—perhaps to continue the conversation in a more removed spot. Indeed, we don’t even know if he is gay; perhaps he was discussing a business date.

     Too bad. I’d certainly love to have dinner with the agreeable man in the center of the screen.

     And if my interpretation is right, Moto has revealed one of the problems with their new “invisible” phone. Perhaps our phone communicator swims back to agree to the fortuitous date.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).