Dominic Leclerc | Nightswimming / 2009

nightmare of pleasures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominic Leclerc (screenwriter and director) Nightswimming / 2009 [14 minutes]

 

In British director Dominic Leclerc’s haunting Nightswimming all three of the film’s central figures, Luke (Harry Eden) and Ellen (Linzey Cocker)—runaway children who break through the back door of a now closed-down Victorian swimming pool (filmed at the former Manchester Swimming Baths, now in commercial use)—and the night guard Martin (Tim Dantay) encounter each other only to discover that within the strange world of labyrinthian showers, odd-shaped rooms and an emerald-like glimmering pool, to say nothing of the sickly pea-green office in which each night Martin usually sits alone, that they are strangely compelled to behave in ways that even they will never comprehend.

     From the moment Martin meets up with the intruders, who caught red-handed, are strangely met with acceptance and permission to spend the night if they only do not destroy anything else. Indeed, Martin seems immediately to comprehend their plight, that of two would-be lovers, having escaped the confines of their heteronormative homes are still totally unable to break free of its traditional values.

      Ellen, in particular, is still quite conventional and terrified of the implications of truly having escaped with her young Romeo just for the adventure of it. The more she tries to pretend to be a tough kid of the streets, the more she makes it apparent that the ways she has been taught to behave have truly entrenched themselves in her consciousness.

      Finally able to have complete sexual freedom, she allows Luke only to kiss her, still refusing sex with him—as she has apparently for their entire relationship to date. The young sex-driven boy also still displays the chevalier manners of his bourgeois upbringing, assuring her that he will not sexually force her despite the fact that he, to put it simply in his adolescent language, is clearly “hornier than hell.”

      Both of them are also fascinated and terrified of Martin’s seemingly ever-present observation of them. Suddenly they have been thrown into world where they are objects of voyeurism, of interest for the very behavior that they have previously had to hide away from their families. In this vast night water-world you might even imagine a sinister network of cameras hooked up to Martin’s unpleasant warren to offer him the opportunity to observe their every move.

     This is, however, still a Victorian world and no such modern devices are in existence—or even necessary given the cat-walk structures of the building and the fact that Martin completely knows his way around the watery funhouse that allows him entry and views that they cannot even know exist.

     Ellen, more freaked out by the situation than Luke who is perhaps even a little intrigued and excited by the sexual possibilities, simply wants her boyfriend to hug and protect her, while he like a traditional male hunter faces what Martin immediately hinted it would be: “a sleepless night.”

     Early on he asks her to join him in an exploring trip, where once more they encounter Martin who gently asks them how long they’ve been on the road—apparently for only one or a few nights—and almost gives them permission to take advantage of the large pool.

     Once again Ellen returns with Harry to the main camp, an odd-shaped room that appears to be tucked under a staircase where they have spread their knapsack, blankets, and few other belongings, where finally she falls asleep.

     But Luke is immediately up and once more on the hunt, again encountering at half past three Martin in a locker room. The two smoke, Martin bending down inexplicably to work on an ancient air ventilator cover, asking about the boy’s relationship with Ellen. “She’s not really my girlfriend; we just hang out together,” replies Luke in the first of three “betrayals” by the trio of figures, an explanation that strangely permits his availability to other possibilities.

      Before any of those “possibilities” might even be mentioned let alone acted upon, however, we observe Martin’s breakdown, as he suddenly mutters, “This is stupid. I was just making sure you were all right. I’m married.” In this second “betrayal”—a kind of coward’s coverup—we finally perceive that if the two children might be confused by the feelings welling up within them, that Martin is far more psychologically disoriented. Somewhat like Christian in Till Kleinert’s Cowboy, he has been totally unprepared for the sexual feelings that he suddenly has for a young male. Nervously pulling on the vent as he makes this mini-confession, he seriously cuts himself, Luke, dressed only in his skivvies, taking on the role of nurse in bandaging Martin’s hand.

     A moment later, in a scene that most definitely requires full on-screen nudity, Luke is seen showering with Martin nearby standing with his back to the naked boy facing the wall as if terrified of witnessing the boy’s well-developed pectorals, penis, and well-shaped ass.

      He turns slowly as Luke, now draped in a full towel moves into his space, as he, gradually moving toward the boy, reaches out his hand to touch and caress his face, the two slowly moving their heads together in what becomes a deep embrace, while Luke begins to unzip the man’s pants ready to pull out his penis. If the children are still conditioned by their upbringing, so too is Martin a man of Victorian sexual values as he pulls away unable, just like Ellen, to engage is what he so desires.

      As if to further entice the terrified man, Luke drops his towel displaying his entire body, Martin by this time moving even further back, shakingly trying to explain his actions: “I just wanted to hold you. Get dressed!”

      Cruel as only children can be who cannot understand their own feelings which they turn against others when rejected, Luke now calls Martin “nance” and “faggot,” the elder responding in macho fashion by grabbing the boy and threatening to beat him. There might have been violence accept for the fact that unknown to them Ellen has sneaked in to watch the entire scene understandably upset and even more confused by what she has witnessed, and in fleeing knocks over an object.

       In what has now grown into almost a soap-opera of misconceived confessions, Ellen now comes to Martin to insist that she’s “not jealous. He says he loves me, the piece of shit. Well, if he thinks I’ll cry over him, fuck him.” In this third betrayal of love, the young girl confuses obviously a moment of sexual lust with a sexual relationship, now pretending to be the street tough girl by denying the love she really feels for Luke while miscomprehending the true possible consequences of lover’s sexual come-on to another man.

      In fact, it is doubtful that these sleepwalking figures will fully recall and assimilate what they have experienced in this wet nightmare.

      Besides the sun is up, and the two interlopers into Martin’s silent world are prepared to leave, Ellen asking, as if nothing of importance has transpired, if he will let them stay again some time, to go “skinny dipping.”

     Martin, looking into their innocent faces can only answer, “Maybe.”

    She leaves, as Luke turns to Martin for a moment, both humming vague apologies, with Luke closing the conversation by saying “I think I’m in love”—presumably with the now seemingly older girl he’s been traveling with. After the kids have left, Martin strips and dives into the pool to cleanse his body and, one presumes, his memories of the nightmare of pleasure with which he struggled.

     Remember this film for the next time some homophobe argues that all LGBTQ cinema is an attempt to covert young people to homosexuality.

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

 

Till Kleinert | Cowboy / 2008

autumn rituals

by Douglas Messerli

 

Till Kleinert (screenwriter and director) Cowboy / 2008 [35 minutes]

 

If I had to choose one of the films in this longer essay as representing the most outstanding aspects of LGBTQ filmmaking, it would be German director Till Kleinert’s chilling horror and love film, Cowboy (2008). In this work the writer/director combines the terrifying wit of someone like US writer Shirley Jackson with the fabulist surrealness of writers such as the Algerian-French poet, storyteller, and novelist Mohammed Dib and the US-Moroccan author Paul Bowles before him.

      The plot begins with a rather typical outsider blundering into forbidden territory that might be almost humorous until it no longer is possible to even crack a smile. A German real estate agent Christian (Oliver Scherz), on the prowl for new land and properties is visiting a backroad farmland with field after field gone empty of crops and a large, sprawling farm compound that is so derelict that to sell it the buildings might have to be torn down. He drives in his expensive borrowed car down the dirt roads and up into the property itself without encountering a soul. Exiting the car, he gently wipes away the dust. The quietude of the place itself is somewhat unsettling, and there are a few unpleasant visions for a city man, a rabbit caught within the claws of a large metal trap, bits of old farm machinery rusting in the overgrown grass. Christian takes photos of the outbuildings and major farmhouse as any realtor might, walking down another lane where suddenly he hears the sound of hammering.

     Glimmering in sunlight suddenly stands a huge early 20th-century combine atop of which works a shirtless young man, probably in his late teens, whose pants are nearly falling from his thin frame. Blond haired he shimmers in the sun like a god, the camera, even if we can’t be sure of the eyes of our bespectacled intruder, focusing in on the beauty.

     The seemingly taciturn boy, which the film somewhat inexplicably has named “Cowboy” (Pit Bukowski) responds very slowly to his questions about who owns the property and whether or not they might be interested in selling the land and buildings; but it’s apparent that, as the young man assures him, they’re all away and they probably wouldn’t be interested in any event.

     When Christian finally gets him to come a bit closer he gets little more information, accept the permission to explore the place. He wanders a bit inside a darkened room before almost reflexively aiming his camera out a window to take a picture of the young Adonis, who noticing the glint of the camera in the sun poses for the shot.

     The boy soon calls him out to help him lift down and move a large machine part, which, after removing his suit coat, Christian accomplishes but not without a bit of heavy breathing. The young mechanic replaces it with a harrower, starts the engine up and moves the mammoth machine slowly forward while Christian sits in his car, the door open, smoking a cigarette while watching with pleasure the success of the boy’s work.

    Eventually, Cowboy joins him, asking if he has a have a cig and then, as he leans his sweaty torso toward him, if he might have a light. Without warning, the boy asks if Christian has a girl, a question that the realtor openly rebuffs, to which the boy affably admits that he fucked every girl in town. Christian opens his billfold and hands him a photograph from within of his own girlfriend, to which the boy nods in proper deference. So presumably these men have both now established their heterosexuality.

      But a moment later, Cowboy signals his desire to join him in the car to listen to the radio, the realtor realizing just how isolated and out of touch this kid is. Where, we pause to imagine, is the “nearest town?”

      As Christian steps out of the car for a moment, the boy suddenly slides into the driver’s seat and speeds off with the car, the businessman cursing his stupidity, now forced to sit it out in the middle of nowhere to see if the car might ever be returned to him.

      Eventually Cowboy drives back into the pullup, congratulating Christian on the machine; but almost as quickly the realtor pulls the boy out of the front seat jumps in and drives off. A bit later on the road he telephones his girlfriend explaining that he has been delayed but will probably be back soon. His girlfriend (performed by the voice of Isabelle Höpfner) senses something is amiss and asks him about it. But Christian cannot quite explain, expressing that he has never experienced anything quite like this, and we perceive that he is a bit terrified of its consequences.

    We don’t hear the end of his muddled conversation, but we see that in the dark he has returned to the lonely farm, and is soon knocking at the door, Cowboy arriving to let him in as he demands the picture of his girlfriend back. It is quite clearly a rouse, and Cowboy recognizes it as being just that, suggesting he can’t remember where he put it while, at almost the very same moment, pulling it out of a drawer and playing a game of cat and mouse with it as Christian chases  him around the room, up and down chairs and tables—that is until Christian suddenly grabs the boy pulls him toward him and kisses him, Cowboy soon following, while both strip off their clothing, the boy laying down upon a bed on his back and lifting his legs and positioning his ass into position as Christian seriously fucks him. Unlike so very many 21st century LGBTQ sex scenes, this one if absolutely honest and sexy, without even an erect penis in sight.

     It is as if these two have been waiting all their lives to violently crash into each other’s bodies, gay men without ever having imagined such desire. Rain pours from the skies, on cue, outside the rude room in which now Cowboy brings Christian a plate of plain home cooked meat and potatoes, probably rabbit—“women cook for me, I be the father of their children,” Cowboy mutters—while Christian unknowingly blathers on about how lucky the boy is to be where he is. When the two return to more tender touches, he notices a black ring around the boy’s ankle, Cowboy pulling back when he attempts to touch it.

      Later, the boy admits that once he attempted to leave the farm to explore other towns nearby, towns that didn’t much interest him. “I think they feared that I might never come back. They punished me so that I would never dare to leave again.” Obviously, they have been holding him on a chain since that occasion in his early youth. In gentler ministrations nothing much else is spoken except for Cowboy to mention, almost as in passing, “I don’t think my people will be happy if you’re here tomorrow.”

      That may be the understatement of all cinema dialogue. When Christian readies to leave the next morning, he spots Cowboy standing upon the tall weeds in the near distance. He moves towards him, presumably to say goodbye, but suddenly Cowboy has apparently lowered himself to the ground as Christian moves forward his foot suddenly stung by the sharp metal jaw of a rabbit trap, as he too falls to the ground seeing the boy a foot in front of him.

      Turning back to a sound in the distance, he witnesses the combine, its interlocking metal teeth perfectly functioning as it moves toward him at the very moment that he observes face and face also peering at him through the weeds, the group standing in the large circle in interlocked arms to prevent him from escaping as the combine moves inevitably forward.

     Somehow Christian frees his foot from the trap but, in deep pain, can only drag himself, sometimes in a prone position, forward a few feet at a time. The realtor tries to run, but is held back by pain and the deflating circle of the mad-faced community to which Cowboy is a slave.

       Eventually, the boy throws a stone at the combine driver, knocking him out as the combine veers suddenly toward the community members, blood squirting through the air where apparently it has hit upon the flesh of one or two of them.

       Distracted, they run from the machine, as Cowboy breaks loose from his own chain and leaps upon it to drive it after them, Christian making a break to his car which looks, to all appearance, as if it has been partially stripped, tires laying nearby. But apparently it still functions, and he speeds off down the road finally discovering Cowboy waiting beside it, his entire body streaked with blood.

       Christian pauses, clearly suggesting that he cannot dare to let a citizen of this mad community back into his life, but, after hesitating, he unlocks the door, as Cowboy joins him in the next seat, the two driving off we pray to the safety of urban life.

       We can only wonder, however, how Cowboy might adapt to his new environment, and Christian to his old world from which he has apparently completely now severed himself. Perhaps the two will survive only as a pair.

       Cowboy won the esteemed Iris Prize for an LGBTQ movie in 2008.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

 

Mark V. Reyes | Last Full Show / 2005

the moviegoer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark V. Reyes (screenwriter and director) Last Full Show / 2005 [19 minutes]

 

Philippines director Mark V. Reyes’ debut film was Last Full Show (2005) in which a wealthy young high school student, Crispin (Francis Villanueva) asks his driver, Bert (Nanding Josef), to stop one evening on his way home and wait while he takes in a movie at a local theater.

      This theater, however, does not simply show movies but caters to gay clients, younger and older who join up in sex in the auditorium proper and in the bathrooms—a sort of grander version of the several gay porno movies that used to exist on New York’s West Side near 42nd street, mostly now all closed for decades due to AIDS.

     This particular movie house, in some senses, is more like a gay bar than a porn theater, showing regular films, mostly in English to a crowd most of whom know one another and are regulars, couples often pairing off into regular duos, probably for most of them the only place where they can go to have gay sex outside of a cheap motel. And here are also the old-timers like Gardo (Sugus Legaspi), a man in his mid-to-late 30s and his friend, the younger Jess (Jeremy Aguado) who introduced him years previous to the niceties of movie palace sex. These days the friends stand mostly behind the seats commenting on the goings-on before them almost like guides to the world with its own rituals and codes of behavior.

    Despite the “No minors” restriction, our young hero seems to have no difficulty with the ticket seller (Mae Paner) in getting in, and the commenting duo note the arrival of the young “twink” who almost the moment he sits in the center of the theater is joined by an older man, his shirt already lifted as if ready for immediate sexual activity. Crispin quickly moves a few seats off, and Jess suggests that perhaps Gardo should try “a dance” just to see if he is what the boy is looking for.

      Gardo takes him up on the dare, and in a few moments the two are kissing, Jess the next day joking with his friend about what a dirty old man he is attempts for find out how big or small the boy’s dick was.

     But there is something different already between Gardo and the boy, and when they accidentally meet up before the movie in the bathroom the next evening, they again join in sex contact, following it night after night. His friend is soon warning him to remember that such relationships are a felony. But Gardo’s relationship with the kid has become a kind of compulsion, and he is not about to stop meeting up every night with the boy whose name to this point is never mentioned.

     Soon after, when the movie breaks down, Gardo suggests the boy join him at his favorite soup house, where they dine on the restaurant’s specials, he asking about the boy’s schoolwork, advising him to study hard, while the younger asks Gardo about work.

     What we see is what often happens in such May-September pairings, or used to occur even in the old days when gay bars did not strictly restrict underage men. The boy, who’s apparently businessman father obviously does not spend much time with his son since there appears to be no restrictions put upon Crispin’s coming and goings. And Gardo offers him not only a seeming introduction into gay sexuality, but serves as a kind of surrogate elder. The boy clearly enjoys their night out finding the food a little “odd” but comments on the surroundings—a place where they are not embarrassed about being seen together—as something truly enjoyable. The boy is spotted in the restaurant, however, by his other caretaker, the driver, who clearly knows what is going on and does not approve. The two ride on a small street gurney to the place where Bert waits in the car introducing Crispin to his new adventures.

       The next time we see the two together it is simply for a date, with no movie involved, when the boy presents Gardo with a present, evidently an “antique” necklace, a gift which we recognize by the way he wears and holds it over the next several frames, that has truly touched the older man.

       But as he cherishes the necklace, so we observe Crispin in his room pinning up yet another movie ticket to his wall filled with hundreds of them in all colors—far more than he might gathered over the nights of movie-going with Gardo. To emphasize this, the camera begins with a “close up” of the tickets, quickly pulling back to reveal an even larger space than we might have first imagined.

     The next evening, Gardo is a bit late for the movie, as Crispin sits within waiting, looking at his watch in consternation. In line, Gardo discovers a man behind him, Bert the driver, who begins to talk suggesting that the “antique” which he proudly displays on his chest, might not be the “real thing” these days. By the time they reach the window, Bert demands a ticket for two, taking Gardo aside to suggest that if he dares the other to go in. “You see, it’s time to finish the dance. Let’s see who will get hurt the most.”   

       Perhaps we have been so fearful of how Gardo might be treating the boy that we have missed the fact that the boy has turned his habit into an addiction, with Bert having each time when the boy finally determines to break off the “romance.”

       This is the last full movie, at least for a while, for the teenager, who returns to the car looking sad and disappointed, maybe even a bit tearful as he tells Bert, “I just want to go home please.”

        Bert answers with his usually perfunctory “Yes sir,” but for the first time in the film addresses him by his name, “Crispin.”

       The reality hits us, probably mostly movie goers closer in age to Gardo, with a slight punch. It is the elder who is most deeply hurt, for he knows that it is likely that another such boy might never again enter his life. Next time, as he joked to Jess in the very first scene, he will simply be watching the movie.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

 

Antonio Hens | En malas compañías (Doors Cut Down) / 2000

toilet conquests

by Douglas Messerli

 

Antonio Hens (screenwriter and director) En malas compañías (Doors Cut Down) / 2000 [18 minutes]

 

The first film that I discuss in the context of what I have described as “Plastic Paradises” is Spanish director Antonio Hens’ Doors Cut Down, the only truly comic work discussed in this context, although it takes us on a series of journey’s that are equally as compulsive, hallucinatory, and absurd as the others I discuss, representing a ridiculous paradise with little difference from the other six more serious-minded works.

     The young Spanish high school student Guillermo (Israel Rodriguez) is certainly a different species of a teen fag from almost anyone born before 1970, the kind of gay kid we all wish we might have been, gleefully picking up all the boys without suffering any sense of the queerness or oddity of it.

      Guillermo trades his everyday looks for his thin frame, his charming smile, and a savvy sense of knowing how to capture the attention of any traditional male macho beauty of any high school football team (in this case we’re speaking soccer).

      This kid has also traded in his English language lessons for a degree in shopping for mall bathroom sex, picking up men young and old as he pleases while helping to realize that all they have to do is shut up, pull down their pants’ and let him perform fellatio or, once he gets the kick of it, turn him around and fuck his ass. He has all the cockiness certainly that it took me decades to discover with regard to how use the john for a more complex kind of relief. There, if you’re good at it, you can really let go as this boy reminds us.

    We observe him in only a couple of his toilet stall conquests. As even the adolescent wonders, “I don’t know why men pick me up. It might be the way I look back when they look at me.” Our young Romeo doesn’t just sweep his eyes down in a bashful tease, but stares back directly into the lust-ridden eyes of the elder.

       Ernesto (Antonio Álamo) is a young 20-something who, as Guillermo describes, is a real asshole in attempting to find someone with whom to fall in love in a men’s room. The boy clues him in, reminding him with regard to the police and security guards he so fears, that their role is merely observational.

       If at home, he lives with a typical homophobic father, the boy knows the man is too horrified of his son’s exaggerated behavior to actually share the facts with his mother, let alone others. When the couple hire him an English tutor to help him pass his abandoned school studies, Guillermo tries to break the ice by removing his shirt and asking the handsome young bookworm to tell him how to say all the dirty words in English; and when even that doesn’t do the trick, he gets quite specific, demanding to know how to say “Fuck me up the ass.”

     When the tutor proceeds to do so, he opens the boy up for all such future activities. The only problem is that, having forgotten his keys, Guillermo’s father reenters their apartment to hear the creak of the bedsprings and his son’s painful groans, opening up the bedroom door to witness “the horror, the horror” of his son joyfully taking it up the ass. Silence pervades their home for a long while after. “Nonetheless,” he reports, “I passed my English test.”

        Meanwhile, one day in his mall sprees the boy encounters the handsome 21-year-old mechanic Asier (Pablo Puyol) who used to attend his school, who impresses all the girls by taking apart and reassembling motorcycles, a contemporary equivalent of what where I grew up we used to call “greasers” because of the vast amounts of Vaseline they applied to their hair and for their mechanical abilities, but which Howard growing up in Baltimore knew as “drapes,” a word I didn’t believe until John Waters brought it back into the language in his 1990 film Cry-Baby, defining it as a “rebel, the opposite of a square.” Whether called greasers or drapes their wore a uniform, in our days, of a white crew-neck T-shirts and denims, and long carefully combed black hair, all of them looking to my eager eyes like Marlon Brando and James Dean, guys who terrified me and with whom I knew I can never have anything to do.

       Our young hero, who has a theory that if you stare at the back of a guy’s head long enough they have to turn around and see you, does his magic, Asier turning to find the cute kid licking a banana ice cream cone; and within minutes they’re visiting the mall bathroom truly enjoying a taste test. Unfortunately, the mall security guards must have gotten bored or been told by someone to keep the young chickens away from the hawks, and go pounding on the stall doors, arresting both the mechanic and the well-oiled machine he was enjoying straddling. Once out of the bathroom, Asier goes on the run, while Guillermo is brought down to police central where his parents are called and told not only what he was doing but that it wasn’t his first time.

       When the worried parents trot him off to a psychotherapist of the year 2000 he praises the boy for “accepting himself and meeting other gay men,” and scolds Guillermo’s parents for being the ones the ones who need therapy. “My father went berserk,” Guillermo calmly reports in the narrative voice over. “It was the first time I felt proud of myself.”

       That’s a simple line that might be missed in all the other action of the film, yet it is of vast importance. I might never have heard such words in the entire history of LGBTQ cinema before the year of the new millennium.

        Guillermo forgives Asier for bolting, and two become a couple, kissing in front of the school before setting off on the mechanic’s bike like any love-possessed straight couple in the dozens of high-school based films of the 1950s and 1960s. 

     Occasionally, they still haunt the mall, teasing the guards by openly kissing in front of them, the boy evidently having come of legal age. But the kid’s curious if the bathrooms are still filled with the same queer boys, and they take a look only to discover that all the stall doors have been cut down on top and cut up at bottom. In those stalls with which I was familiar, the authorities simply tore off the doors of every other stall, presuming no one would want to do anything sexual being so exposed; but a lot of guys found it preferable, using the glory hole while being able to observe the others greedily eye them as they passed. No one went to have sex in a public bathroom who was afraid of public sex.

       Asier and Guillermo leave the men’s room with a bit of nostalgia for the old days, but happy in their relationship—until the boy catching a cute guy walking in the direction of the men’s room asks Asier to wait for him for a moment as he goes on the chase.

       Hens’ comedy is no less driven by uncontrollable urges which force the individual into uncharted territory than the others I describe. Perhaps it is simply that the adolescent of Doors Cut Down more fully enjoys his manias—something that in the past queers were simply not permitted.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).   

Till Kleinert | Boys Village / 2011

kissed by a ghost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Till Kleinert (screenwriter and director) Boys Village / 2011 [22 minutes]

 

Till Kleinert is one of the most provocative the 21st Century filmmakers who embrace gay themes. His works, such as the brilliant Cowboy (2008), often involve horror and adventure genres, but they are much more poetic and suggestive than the standard works in these forms.

    Boys Village was a village-style holiday camp in West Aberthaw, in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. Opening in 1925, it catered to sons of coalminer’s families of South Wales, offering them a place to play and freedom from difficult homelives and pollution.

     Founded by David Davies, the philanthropist president of the Ocean Coal Company and his Welfare Officer Captain J. Glynn Jones, the village consisted of a dining hall, dormitories, a gym, swimming pool, workshops, and a church.

      During the war it used for military use, but returned to civilian use in 1946, and in 1962 was somewhat refurbished to include a youth hostel and facilities to teaching work-related skills. With the increasingly ability for coalminers for inexpensive trips abroad and the general decline in Welsh valley coalmining in general, it was finally closed in 1990 by the Boys’ Clubs of Wales which was responsible for running the camp.

      For a while after its closure it was used for a short while as a residential place for Bible studies, and then in 2000 it was sold to a new order who rented it out to a family who lived in the caretaker’s cottage, using the yards for farm storage.

      When they moved out, airsoft enthusiasts, people who use replica firearms that shoot non-metallic pellets to simulate military combats. But without any security, the site, as we witness in this film, became a place for metal theft, gang vandalism, and arson. In 2008, due to extensive fire damage the dormitories were demolished, and after, when the swimming pool roof collapsed, it too was removed.

     In June of 2011, the date of this film’s release, the area was cut off with gates and fences, along with boulders and rubble to deter vehicles from entering. According to a “Derelictmisc. Organization” report of 2012, rumors and myths still remain the nearby area about the village being haunted or plagued by a troubled past, which may, in fact, have been stimulated by Kleinert’s own film, shown on BBC in 2011.

     In short, it’s the perfect place for Kleinert to have filmed is semi-ghost story where a young boy of another decade, Kevin (Benjamin Thorne) seemingly has been left behind in the Village, if not quite literally, certainly spiritually and because a possible relationship with another childhood boy. What happened to the original Kevin we can’t know. He seems to still be waiting for his parents to return, all these years or even decades later, perhaps even from the 1930s, but possibly as late as the 1950s.

      Wandering the now derelict Village day after day, he rights the chairs and tables, prays at the old Church alter, and puts flowers in the doorstep of one of the burnt-out dormitories, recreating his childhood straw-and-fabric doll “friends,” endlessly waiting. Did this 12-year-old child’s mother and father never return for him? Did he die in the Village? Was he punished for young-boy love? Or was what he describes himself to be, “a beautiful boy,” an encouragement to be abused there by a teacher or priest? Did he perhaps lose his mental wellbeing rather than his physical life in the experience of living in the Boys Village?

      Kleinert is a far too clever director to definitively answer those questions. But perhaps is equally far too clever in imagining an encounter between the 12-year-old ghost and one of the teens who each day come to the place to spray-paint and further wreck havoc upon whatever is left, including the lost boy’s dolls, rock chimes, and tiny rock-memorials he daily creates. One of the teenagers, Alex (Andrew McQueen), vaguely notices the existence of the young boy, especially when the young ghost throws a few tiny rocks at him to simply get his attention. For Alex, unlike this thug-like beer drinking friends, is into drugs and has a beauty unlike any of his peers.

     When one night Alex sneaks back to the Village with his would-be girlfriend, Brenda (Hannah-Rose Jones), he hands her Kevin’s dolls claiming he has created them for her. She is not impressed, and certainly not at all interested in a date who dismisses her own fears and apparently is not ready to properly snuggle up to her with love and kisses.

     She leaves in a huff, and it appears that Alex has his own ghosts. Perhaps he also attended the Boys Village as a child. If nothing else he is probably a gay boy attempting to lay to rest his who fears. The ghost, necessarily, is attracted to him, particularly when, now alone, he attempts to masturbate.  

    The interruption leads him on a wild chase to find the “young perv” who he perceives has been watching him. And in a wonderful scene of magical drama, helped along by the film’s eerie score by Conrad Oleak, Alex goes on the chase.

      But we soon discover that he can’t truly even see the ghost by the light of his cell-phone, and only vaguely hears the murmurs of his voice. He too seems to be trying to trace remnants of a fraught gay childhood. And when Kevin finally bends over to kiss him on cheek, his world collapses as a brick wall knocks him to the floor, soon after killing him.

      His death perhaps releases the other boy’s own childhood memories, since his parents now come to pick him and take back into their own darker realities.

       But even here, Kleinert won’t entirely permit us to see his work simply as metaphor. The tractors to tear down the camp’s remnants appear, one of the workers discovering, in the realistic setting, the body of the beautiful high school vandal. Being gay seems always, in one way or another, to demand society’s vengeance. In fact, perhaps the newer generation offers even less permission and acceptance for queer transgression than those of the earlier decades. The brutally macho world in which Alex lives evidently offers even less protection than the heterosexually-dominated romantic one in which Kevin existed.

     

Los Angeles, October 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).