Suni Shankar | Next Scene / 2020

just beyond the script 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Suni Shankar (screenwriter and director) Next Scene / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

We’ve all heard of “couch casting,” when a director chooses his cast members of the basis on how willing they are to have sex with him previous to his hiring them. Or at least, he suggests that he might hire them if they are willing to check out his couch.

     Pakistani director Sunil Shanker, however, takes this one step further in the almost comic, but also quite troubling work, Next Scene in which the story involves a young man Sami (Ali Junejo) who is having difficulties with his wife (Meher Jaffri) due to his questioning of his sexuality. We observe the first scene of the drama, where is wife returns home to find her husband Sami wrestling on the floor with a dummy. He attempts to make up a story about how the activity is a test to keep his wits sharp, but she seems to recognize it immediately as representing some other struggle, another being with whom he is wrestling for his very identity. The acting seems to be quite convincing.

  Yet the director (Sunil Shanker himself) steps in to point out, speaking primarily to the male figure, that something is missing in the scene, vaguely discussing issues of “retreat” and “advance.” Neither of the actors quite understands what he is suggesting, but fortunately the director is interrupted by a telephone call from his wife who wants to report some family event concerning one of his children. He attempts to explain that he is working on the movie and can’t talk to her now, signing off with a quick “I love you.”

      We watch next a later scene wherein Sami’s wife finally begins to suspect, given his lack of attention to her, that he actually is gay, accusing him of becoming what they have evidently been working to prevent. Again, the acting seems quite satisfactory, but once more the director intervenes, positioning himself between the two on them on the couch, suggesting they need “to experience it,” that they need to find the “perfect connection,” “one of the most wonderful things in life.” “Sometimes it’s okay to be. It’s all about letting go,” he says in English as opposed to Urdu with which the characters alternate in their conversations both on and off the screen.

     Clearly, he seems to be talking about something he himself is undergoing as opposed to the actors in relation to the script. And in the next scene, performed with him and Ali in bed, he appears to attempting to actualize his previous directions about advancing and trying to find the perfect connection by making love to the character Sami. Evidently, the scene is about Sami having made the decision to engage in gay sex, the other character being played by the director himself. He leans over the man with whom he has apparently just engaged in sex, and comments, presumably from the script, that he is in love with him. But then he repeats Sami’s name several more times, beginning to shift into an even more intimate moment that is apparently off script, Ali insisting that he needs a five-minute break.

      Off the set with the female character, Sami declares he’s not doing the “next scene.” We don’t know the sexuality of the actor, but we do most definitely know that the director has at several points crossed over between the fiction of the story and his personal feelings to make it impossible for his actor to continue in his performative role. To do so would be to enter into a reality into which he—unlike the character he plays—is definitely not ready or willing to proceed, to take the final step just beyond the script and make what the director describes as “the perfect connection”

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

 

Linnea Ritland | Amateur Dramatics / 2019

role switch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Linnea Ritland (screenwriter and director) Amateur Dramatics / 2019 [7 minutes]

 

A practice session before casting of the school production of Romeo and Juliet is just breaking up, Charlie (Kenneth Tynan), his girlfriend, and her friend packing up to leave, as they say goodnight to James (Louis Lin) who has clearly decided to stay on a while later in the auditorium to practice.

     He walks to the headlights and begins Romeo’s love scene with Juliet:

 

“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

 

    James shouts out the lyrics like the rank amateur that he is. Unable to put any true feeling behind the lines, it is as if he were struggling to even understand the words he speaks, let alone reveal his wonderment of the vision before him. Suddenly, Charlie has returned and stands behind him, commenting on how bad the performance is, and insisting that he can do better.

     James is peeved, understandably, by his peer’s comments, particularly since he perhaps knows that Charlie, also up for the role, is a far better actor. But Charlie insists he’s not trying to interrupt, and thinks it’s “cute” that James is soldiering on. But there’s no point to a performance without someone watching, he argues.

     The would-be Romeo suggests that if Charlie wants to be the audience, he has to sit quietly and just watch. Once again, James shouts out his lines, Charlie unable to withhold a giggle in the background.

     He apologizes and moves toward James, suggesting he should imagine something that he wants most in the world but cannot have. James quietly contemplates that possibility as Charlie stands beside him face to face. “Now the thing that you want is right in front of you. Desire it.”

     James begins over, this time softly, in awe almost of what he has evidently thought of to himself and maybe actually seeing it before him—although this is pure conjecture on our part. But his acting is so immediately improved we must imagine that something has transpired within.

     Charlie now moves behind him and provides him with a shoulder rub to further relax him, as James speaks the lines now quite wonderfully. But Charlie ruins the moment by suggesting that by acting in that way, James will certainly be in the cast with him.

     James suddenly pulls away angrily, “You think you’re fucking better than me?” He walks hurriedly off, with Charlie shouting after for him to wait.

     Suddenly, he calls out Romeo’s lines for earlier in the play:

 

“If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

 

       James stops in his tracks, and takes over Juliet’s role, becoming, in effect, Juliet to Charlie’s Romeo, a role he has been playing, we now perceive, all along.

 

“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.”

 

       And like the couple of Shakespeare’s play, they put their hands together to continue to scene which ends in a deep kiss—just as it does here between the two boys. Charlie finally breaks the miraculous kiss with Romeo’s last line, which takes on a far more fascinating meaning here:

“Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.”

 

       At that very moment, we hear the voice of Charlie’s girlfriend calling as she too returns with the other girl asking if he found what he wanted. We’ll be late, she reports, as Charlie calls out to James, “I’ll text you.”

       After they leave, James walks once again to the footlights, but this time is far too stunned, confused perhaps, and overwhelmed to speak.

       The amateurs, through Canadian director Linnea’s Ritland’s script and provocation, have now become something closer to real actors or perhaps real lovers. Only time will tell which.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

Michael Beddoes | Sequins / 2019

female of the species

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amy Clarke (screenplay), Michael Beddoes (director) Sequins / 2019 [18 minutes]

 

It is the late 1990s in Blackpool, England, and 17-year-old Paul Bigsby (Robbie Gaskell) has gotten up early to put on a purple dress and a black wig to dance out a routine that given his use of earplugs, we can’t hear—along with his parents. The alarm clock, however, soon rings its 8:00 a.m. signal, and a pounding at his door, presumably from his father (Ben Willbond), insists he come down immediately or he’ll be late for school.

    His school day starts badly as usual, as the school bully pushes him to the floor in the school hallway, calling him a ponce, and then bends down as if in sorrow for hurting him, only send him sprawling further.

    In the classroom the bully again threatens Paul and attempts to trip him up, but Paul’s best friend Stacey, real name Anastasia (Nicole Louise Lewis) trips the bully Rick Hennessy (Marcus Geldard) instead, the bully now determined to truly beat up his “faggy boy” until the teacher, Mrs. Coughlin (Erin Geraghty) intrudes and breaks up the entire foray.

     Mrs. Coughlin mentions that the students can sign up for the school show, but notices Paul’s name is not on the list, noting that she has signed him up herself. Evidently, he is a known school talent, a singer who she’d like to perform some Sinatra—another reason presumably why he is not popular with the other boys.

      A rolled-up ball a paper lobbed to him by Rick shows a figure hanging from a galley with the name Paul Gaysby underneath. And an accidental meetup with Rick and his gang after school sends Paul, accordingly, on the run, as he escapes into the large neighborhood warehouse-like gay drag bar Sequins, for the first time in the world of his dreams.

     Of course, it isn’t yet open and Paul’s clearly underage, but he has no choice but hangout in a bar bathroom stall, where he falls asleep. When he awakens, the music is pounding and the drag queen Mimi Le Purr (James Dreyfus) is finishing up her banter. Her director notices a new customer sitting alone in the place and suggests she have a word with him, she at first refusing for fear of getting arrested! “So are you here to write a review for the school paper, or is this merely personal,” she quips, Paul’s face lighting up with absolute delight.

        “I wanna do what you do,” he finally stutters out. “I want to be a drag queen.”

        It’s certainly an odd goal for a 17-year-old boy in in the late 90s, and Mimi plays out her line with flair: “Personal interest then.”

        Paul begs for her to help him, Mimi responding, “Me? Be a fairy drag mother?” When he praises her performance, she relents, taking his hand and saying, “All right, come with me Alice.”

        “Where are we going?”

        “Down the rabbit hole.”

      Introducing him to the others, she says, “Girls, Mamma has a daughter,” while they shout out, “Fresh meat.”

        Suddenly to the shock of his parents, Paul is rushing off each afternoon to football practice. Only his friend Stacey is in on his deception, offering up a borrowed football kit to cover his activities.

        But a few days later he arrives at his drag-performance lessons severely bruised. Rick has gotten to him. The drag queen in male attire this time, cheers him up better than any parents attempt might succeed. With Stacey at his side, he rehearses at the club, she presuming he’s going to perform this at the school show, but suggesting that if he tried it, he’d be lynched. He’s adapted her real name, Anastasia as his drag name.

     Meanwhile, when his parents see him and Stacey in a hug they are further amazed at the heterosexual progress he has made in just a few months and are delighted by what they observe.

      But even the idea that Paul is performing at the school show is still “nancy business” to his father, who isn’t at all pleased by the idea of having to attend the affair.

       When Paul finally appears in the hallway where the other performers away in a red-sequined dress and red hair everyone stops what they are doing to stare, the audience as well. Robbie Gaskell as Paul is a stunning beauty.

       Meanwhile, we get a glimpse of the parents patiently sitting through some of the other “local talent” such as a heavy-set girl attempting an early rap performance. The final performance is about to begin and Miss Coughlin, who’s gotten a glimpse of the transformed Paul, suggests he’s going to perform tonight in a “slightly different capacity,” Stacey rushing in to switch the musical score of the pianist.

       Anastasia appears to the shock of all, Paul momentarily facing up the terror of their imagined reactions. But with Gaskell’s performance of “The Female of the Species” (by Thomas Scott, Francis Griffiths, James Edwards, and Andrew Parle) how can anyone not be awed? Even the bully sits like a squat little frog in the audience, speechless.

       While Sequins is certainly not a profound moment of entertainment, it is a great deal of fun.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2023).

 

Reid Waterer | Performance Anxiety / 2012

poor straight boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reid Waterer (screenwriter and director) Performance Anxiety / 2012 [15 minutes]

 

What is it with straight guys? These two heterosexual male actors, hired to play a nude gay sex scene, have so many problems when it comes to even touching each other that their private rehearsals quickly verge into the absurd if not the obscene. I don’t know many gay guys who have difficulties with touching or even kissing a female, but these two guys behave as if they kissed another guy they might immediately catch a dread disease or become gay on contact. Although it’s recognized that heterosexual boys go through a period in which close male bonding and even same-sex activity is common, these “dudes” (a word I truly distrust) can’t even bear to see one another’s penises. I wonder what they did in gym class.

     Of course, this film perhaps portrays a stereotypical view of straight men, Duke (Lawrence Nicols) in particular behaving as if to prove his masculinity he must return to the halls of his hometown high school to brag about how many makeup girls he fucks working in plays. But, except for a TV ad, he hasn’t been to get any film offers, and he admits that he’s only taken on this role because he is desperate and his girlfriend wants him to give up his acting career.

      The slightly more experienced of the two Jacob (Danny Lopes) is certainly not terrified of getting naked, having performed, so he reports, in Equus, Hair, and Take Me Out. However, when he suggests he can’t imagine why he gets these kinds of roles, I want to tell this actor (aren’t actors naturally vain?) to simply look in the mirror. And although he’s great at sucking his fellow actor’s nipples, he has equal hesitation at getting fucked, even though a pillow is placed between Duke’s penis and his rump and they’re still in their underpants. At one point the two even act out a father / son scene to get into the spirit, but quickly determine that such a kiss is too perverse to even imagine enacting.

       To even “block out” the scenes, they have to play tricks with themselves, pretending to be two Italian men meeting up again, a doctor checking on his patient’s penis, imagining the most beautiful women in the world, and other acting-school exercises to get the nerve up to kiss on the lips, pretending various wrestling positions to put them in the spirit of a good fuck. At least Jacob has a good reason for accepting the role: a friend who has lost was gay without him even knowing it. And he thought he might gain some insights about his long-time buddy by playing a gay man. It is possible that he does.

       Or course, when it comes to actually performing the scene, which we see in black-and-white, they make perfect lovers, truly convincing us of their cunnilingus and anal penetration. At film’s end, however, it is the actor who has been fucked, Jacob, who seems slightly sad that their scene is now over, running out after they hug (like straight men hug) to say goodbye in order to tell Duke that he has a “nice ass.” And Duke does…have a nice ass. But he’s off to a day with his girlfriend and hasn’t any time to get together again with Jacob.

        For some time, I wondered if these might not actually be gay men—a kind of joke on gay director Reid Waterer’s part—performing as straight jerks; but for the credits these obviously truly straight guys feel it necessary, it appears, to reiterate just how straight they truly are, thinking as they fuck, for example, that a girlfriend is waiting out in the car or arguing that, even with the pillow, the fuck really hurt. Or maybe they truly are truly gifted….probably not. They’re more convincing in the credits than they were even in the filmed shots.

      Poor straight boys. They have almost every moment so very much to prove about their sexuality. It makes me feel sad.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

Douglas Messerli | Performance Anxieties [Introduction]

performance anxieties

by Douglas Messerli

 

Given that at the heart of cinema is acting and much of its blood is stolen from the theater, one might argue that hundreds of films, in their constant reference to theater and filmmaking itself, are focused on performance anxieties. How many dozens of anxious actors, dancers, and other performers waiting in the wings in cinema history have shaken with fear, while actors hidden away in their dressing rooms have screamed out, “I can’t go on!”

     The five films I write about below, however, are different in the fact that the anxiety in each instance has something to do with the anxieties of same sex relationships that go hand in hand with their theatrical butterflies in the stomach. In US director Reid Waterer’s Performance Anxiety, from which I have stolen my group title, the actors are not necessarily amateur in terms of their experience, but are most certainly in relationship to the gay roles which they are now required to enact. Their anxiety about acting has more to do with their own sexual anxieties than anything else. As do the anxieties that arise for the obviously talented film actor Sami in Pakistani director Suni Shanker’s Next Scene, in which the director, a character played by Shanker from a script he wrote, stretches the boundaries of his film in an attempt to explore his own gay sexual attractions to his lead actor. Even the audience feels some anxiety in this work, wondering where the line between the fiction of the film and the sexual urges expressed by its creator cross over into behavior that might take place off the screen—to very place to which the actor retreats.

   The young drag queen-in-the-making, Paul, is not only anxious about his first on-stage drag role, but about exposing his interest in crossdressing to all his school peers and families, including his own disapproving father in British director Michael Beddoes’ Sequins.

     In the final two short films, Canadian director Linnea Ritland’s Amateur Dramatics, and US director Juno Mitchell’s Making a Scene, the actors are all definitely amateurs struggling not only to play characters in Shakespeare’s dramas, but struggling with their own sexual desires toward their fellow actors as well.

     The amazing thing is that all of these anxious actors end up giving performances that are either quite convincing of gay behavior or somewhat resolve their own uncertain sexual desires as young LGBTQ beings—even if their stage or film acting still leaves something to be desired.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2023

Filippo Demarchi | 17 anni (Age 17) / 2013

 unholy love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Filippo Demarchi (screenwriter and director) 17 anni (Age 17) / 2013 [22 minutes]

 

Oh, the dilemmas of young love! In one of the Italian-speaking cantons of Switzerland, 17-year-old Matteo (Fabio Foiada), a drummer in the local band, quickly falls in love with the band’s conductor, a local priest, Don Massimo (Ignazio Oliva).

     Logic clearly has nothing to do with it. Matteo is certain, despite the priest’s religious vows, that Don Massimo, in his regular encouragements of the young boy and in his willingness to talk with him and asking him to join in other church-supported activities such as their soccer games and the weekend carwash, that the older man is also attracted equally to him.

   It soon becomes obvious to almost everyone that Matteo is making some sort of attempt to get closer to the priest—his fellow drummer Firat (Kevin Martinetti) imagines he simply trying to “brownnose” the older man, particularly after Matteo is awarded the position of first drummer.   

   Yet as David Hall observes on his internet-based Gay Celluloid, “the man himself is blind to the point of incredulity to Matteo’s longing looks and ways, even when Matteo all but invites himself over to Massimo’s house.”

     Finally, not finding his loved one in the parish house, Matteo even breaks into Don Massimo’s room, waiting for his arrival. The boy insists he has to talk about something important, which finally the priest realizes has to do with sex. Suspecting that the teen is having doubts about his sexuality, the priest assures him that such doubts are natural and that he should go with his own feelings.

   “You don’t have to worry, or judge yourself, or let others judge you. Sex is complicated, and love is the most beautiful thing in the world. Live your feelings your own way.” All of which encourages Matteo to hug and attempt to engage the older man a passionate kiss, Don Massimo pushing off the boy and reminding him of his priestly duties.

     The pain of rejection at the age is perhaps one of the deepest hurts that young men and women first encounter, and their reaction is often thoughtlessly destructive.

    On the day of the important marching concert, Matteo takes his place in formation as they begin their dreadful version of The Radetzky March which begins with the measured beat of his drum. But in the midst of the performance, his drumming suddenly takes on a nearly mad series of rhythms creating a nearly epileptic fit a drumming that goes out of control and takes the other band performers with it. Don Massimo calls the performance to a halt, as the boy runs off. Firat takes Matteo’s place as the march starts over again.

    Later, Don Massimo finds the isolated spot to where Matteo has run, trying to apologize and assure him that he knows how difficult things are for him. By this time, however, Matteo has realized the folly of his love and in total frustration denies any advice or attentions that the priest might have to offer. At 17, it is clear, he has realized that if he is to survive as who he is, he must reject the church itself. With God as the third figure in the boy’s would-be love triangle, there is no room for him.

     The boy is finally left along, a pariah in the community and an outsider in his own recognition of his homosexual desires.

     Swiss writer/director Filippo Demarchi provides no easy solutions for the dilemmas his lovingly filmed work has presented. Matteo is at the age when he will surely soon have to leave his small town and come to terms with who he is outside of the well-meaning gestures along with the restrictions of society and religion in which he grew up.

 

Los Angeles, September 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).