Maren Ade | Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (The Forest for the Trees) / 2003

in search of a friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maren Ade (screenwriter and director) Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (The Forest for the Trees) / 2003

 

The Forest for the Trees, German director Maren Ade’s directorial debut, is a tale about of provincial school teacher, Melanie Pröschle (Eva Löbau) who has moved to Karlsruhe to work in their prestigious Bose school. It is her first teaching position, which begins, inexplicably, in the middle of the school term. And, equally inexplicable, she is asked to teach math to both third-graders and ninth-graders. She is full of apparently new concepts of teaching, but in this far more conservative institution, she is thwarted not only by her fellow teachers, who apparently give far higher grades to their students but severely control classroom behaviors, but particularly by the unruly older students themselves, who protest almost any new project she suggests, including a field-trip outing, for which they argue instead for a trip to a local amusement park. At one point a particularly unruly student throws a chocolate milk carton at her; and when she calls in his mother to speak of the incident, the woman sides with her son.

     In short, the positive-thinking Melanie is thwarted in almost all her optimistic ideals. One teacher daily displays lovely plants her students have awarded her, but, as Melanie’s only seeming ally Thorsten (Jan Neumann) suggests, she purchases the “presents” for herself.

     While Thorsten attempts to help and perhaps woo her, Melanie, who apparently has experienced a breakup of her own previous sexual romance, pushes him and his advice aside, attempting to soldier on without the help of others, particularly when she overhears other teachers gossiping about her inabilities to control her classrooms.

     Moreover, she has been unable to find new friends in the city, although she even awards some of her fellow apartment-dwellers with house-warming gifts that they might have been more logically gifting her. The work she spends on planning for new teaching projects mostly turns her under-decorated apartment into a mess. And as she grows in the depression of what she projected as a new life, her calls home to her mother end in near-disaster as her mother attempts to probe the cause of these calls.

     In short, Melanie is left entirely alone in a new world, vulnerable to depression at work and at home. If there ever was a film to demonstrate the difficulties teachers daily face—and there have been numerous others (think of Up the Down Staircase or the earlier Blackboard Jungle)—this somewhat quieter version of the dilemmas of attempting to help a younger generation learn is a model. I left the university, with basically good experiences nearly four decades ago, but I have heard from peers about just how difficult it now is to try to help young closed and seemingly privileged minds to question their values, a necessary event if we want to truly educate our children.* 

     Shopping for a new outfit that might slightly intimidate her misbehaved students, Melanie meets a shopkeeper Tina (Daniela Holtz), whom she soon after discovers lives in the apartment across from hers—almost completely visible from Melanie’s vantage point.

    The two, at first, strike up a kind of friendship, Tina inviting her neighbor into her far nicer apartment, and even befriending her, at one point even hiding out in Melanie’s apartment, as the two slug down glasses of homemade schnapps as Tina watches her angry boyfriend return to her space. The event seems to create a bond between the two that only Melanie truly recognizes.

    Let me clarify: this is not a lesbian movie; there is no sexual interrelationship between these two women. But it might as well be, as Melanie becomes more and more attached to her new “friend,” spying on her, often through binoculars (which have been donated for her classes’ failed field trip) and, ultimately, even slightly stalking her new-found friend, showing up at a rather elegant celebration in her haute clothing shop in a frowsy coat to talk to Tina’s clients about the difficulty of teaching.

      In other words, this might as well be a lesbian film, since Melanie is now almost infatuated with Tina to the degree that when her friend finally attempts to include her in her birthday party, the schoolteacher suggests to Tina’s arriving ex-boyfriend, Tobias, that he leave, while she delivers the roses he had brought to her to the new friend.

      The politics of this “friendship” are now quite clear; Melanie is attempting to replace Tobias in Tina’s life. If this relationship is outwardly simply a close connection between suffering women, it has now unfurled into something else, and Tina’s response of now isolating herself from the voyeur of her life is totally comprehensible, while it is also quite devastating.

       Melanie, always the outsider in the new world into which she bravely has entered, later observes the couple mocking her, as she looks down from her apartment upon them.

       With the school vacation over, Melanie takes her own day off, driving her car down a freeway on cruise control, and suddenly, releasing her hands from the wheel, jumping over into the back seat to calmly observe the results, an imitation, if you will, of Thelma and Louise in the 1991 film bearing their names.

     2003, the date of the film, was long before cars might possibly be driven electronically by themselves. We know what the result will be. Melanie may be outwardly mourned, but she will never have discovered much love in her life. She has been a clumsy and desperate would-be lover for her students and both her heterosexual and woman friends.

      Ade’s first film was a kind of tragedy about idealism meeting up with truly cynical aspects of real life. Her later figures become kinds of clowns who persevere in worlds of near-disaster, living and surviving despite themselves.

 

*There were only two instances of student rebellion in my many years of teaching experiences: the first was when a freshman class in literature were appalled when I taught Jonathan Swift; having lost the concept of irony, they hated the writer for suggesting that the English might boil and eat the Irish children. But the worst was with a bitter group of graduate students to whom I attempted to teach Williams and Pound. They hated Williams because of his dismissal of the academic and hated me because, even though I had them purchase the Index to Pound’s references in the Cantos, I suggested that the author often explained those references later in the text, and that the index was not truly necessary. However, the wonderful Tenney Nathanson came out of that angry class as a friend and made a significant career for himself.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2019 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia | Pristine Books / 2003

love with an older man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Felix Stacia (screenplay), Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia (directors) Pristine Books / 2003 [7 minutes]

 

The good university student Travis (Samuel Evans) rooms with his friend / lover Luke (David G. Vigo) who evidently falls in a drunken stupor most afternoons. Travis has evidently been chatting on line for some time now with an older man from Sydney, Mark, who happens to be visiting the city where Travis and Luke are attending school.

      Travis meets up with Mark and they go for dinner, returning to Mark’s hotel room where the handsome visitor fucks the boy, as Travis expresses it, “like no one ever before.”

      In the very next scene of Australian filmmakers Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia’s film, the roommates are deep into a fight, Travis accusing Luke of doing nothing but drinking, smoking, and sleeping through his university days. Mark, he argues, cares for him and has ambitions. Taking up a knife, Luke threatens to hurt Mark or to tell Travis’ father about the situation. Or perhaps worse, destroy his “precious books,” presumably meaning the thing that most differentiates these two boys, the one actually reading and studying, the other simply partying away his hours.

      In his next meeting with Mark, the visitor argues that he needs to get away from Luke before he actually does hurt him. The businessman suggests he move into his apartment in Sydney, and as for his education, he might do that in the city as well, he’d even help to arrange it.

      But Travis questions his motives, and furthermore is simply not certain that it’s what he really wants. When Mark gets angry, Travis walks, meeting up with his roommate in the elevator, obviously having decided to return to the friend with serious problems, but at least of his own age. Together clearly they will have to work out a future between them.

      This short work has quite dreadful sound and the actors reveal their amateur status. But the worst problem is the simplistic narrative that simply doesn’t explain or even probe Travis’ feelings or his viewpoints. Why not join the far more handsome man in Sydney? Age seems to be a barrier here, but to me there doesn’t seem to be that many years at issue.

      Perhaps he loves Luke for reasons we’ve not discovered, but it the responsibility of the film to establish those reasons so that we can make sense of the decision which is at the crux of this short drama. As it is, nothing truly seems to matter. Travis, the good student with the “pristine” books will certainly graduate, while his friend will likely drop out. What interest is this to us? What does it all signify? Unfortunately, the writer and directors do not bother to explain.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Gary Halvorson and Richard Eyre | Werther / 2014 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

between duty and the devil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Massenet (music), Edouard Blau, Paul Millet, and Georges Hartmann (libretto, based on Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), Richard Eyre (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director)  Werther / 2014 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Werther makes it clearer than ever that Werther (the remarkable Jonas Kaufman) and his beloved Charlotte (Sophie Koch) belong together, while standing apart from the others of the work. As my spouse Howard commented, both are costumed in clothes—mostly gray with a white bodice in Werther’s case, and pearl-white or white with a dark overcoat in Charlotte’s—that stand in opposition to the others of the work. Although the melancholic Werther is willing to risk everything for love, he is, nonetheless, like her, a man who adores children and believes in duty. Indeed, his absolute love for Charlotte is based on her conventional values, her determination to care for her brothers and sisters after their mother’s death and to remain true to her promise to her mother that she will marry Albert, a kindly militarist, who by opera’s end all but accuses his wife of unfaithfulness, forcing her to herself send the pistols for which Werther has asked in order to kill himself since Charlotte has refused to give into his sexual assaults.

     What became more apparent than ever in this production is that, as opposed to the conventionality of both Werther and Charlotte, most of the rest of the opera’s figures—despite their outward celebration of the local parson and clichés of cultural obedience—are far more willing to bend to the joy of daily pleasures. Several times in Werther, characters sing out in praise of Bacchus, particularly early in the opera when we first meet The Bailiff’s (Jonathan Sommers) friends, Johannn (Philip Cokorinnos) and Schmidt (Tony Stevenson), who while mocking Werther’s seriousness, themselves sing of the wine and crayfish they are looking forward to at the local pub. Despite the Bailiff’s more serious demeanor and his insistent demand that his children perform adequately a Christmas carol he currently teaching them, he too speaks of Bacchus and, through his daughter’s Sophie’s encouragement, is easily convinced to join his friends at the pub.

     Although both Werther and Charlotte may see the children as “angels,” the children themselves act up and mock several of their superiors behind their backs. Only in Charlotte’s gentle care to they truly act angelically.

     Although Charlotte’s 15-year-old sister, Sophie, is a pleasant and gentle girl who, when Charlotte is away at the ball, lovingly cares for her siblings, she has her own way of not taking things seriously, at the pastor’s wedding anniversary party singing of the joyfulness of the day and weather, while flirtatiously inviting Werther to dance with her at the celebration. In Act III she, similarly, attempts to cheer up her distraught older sister, who has now realized through Werther’s anguished epistles how much she is in love with him rather than with her often fatuous and inattentive husband, Albert (David Bižić).

      In such a bacchanalian world of wine, women, dance and, in Sophie’s case, just the joy of living, the two heroes of the piece become tragic representatives of conventional faith and duty, a fact that, by opera’s end Charlotte has come to realize—that she was forged her with chains to Werther from the first time she set eyes upon him. Two of Werther’s most touching songs—his Act II disquisition on God’s response if he were to commit suicide (Werther’s version of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be,” “Lorsque l’enfant revient d’un voyage”) and his stunningly sad recitation of one of his translations of Ossian—center on death, as does Charlotte’s Act II aria (“Va, laisse couler mes larmes”), a prayer for moral fortitude. While the others dance around them with the zest of living beings, these two suffer, mostly in silence—except to the opera’s audience—unable to survive in the devil’s bacchanal of daily life. Although seen as everyone else as models of moral certitude, they are, in the real world in which they are forced to live, the most tenuous of beings. Is it any wonder, then, that they end their lives in a passionate embrace and kiss that resembles the high Romantic sacrificial pattern of “love, death, and transfiguration.” Although Massenet’s work is far more intimate and modest that Wagner’s great Tristan and Isolde, it is, at its heart, a similar tale, a tale of two lovers doomed by social and cultural conventions they feel are beyond their control, while the others, those on the side of the devil—according to Werther and Charlotte’s way of seeing things—are free to enjoy their lives and survive.

      As Jonas Kaufman suggested during an intermission discussion of this HD presentation of the Met production, in this pre-Freudian drama, there is no way that Werther or Charlotte might see the error of their ways, to psychologically comprehend their entrapment in the dichotomy of “Totem and Taboo.” The problem for modern audiences, accordingly is to try to maintain Werther (and also Charlotte) as credible figures, despite their manias, with whom we can identify. Both Kaufman (in one of the best operatic performances of the year) and Koch accomplished that!

      Unfortunately, in the last moments of Werther’s death, when the two sing of their passion and Werther is transfigured by the sound of the children singing, once again, “Noel Noel Noel,” the sound of the broadcast disappeared. Several members of the contemporary audience with whom we shared the theater suddenly became like children, shouting out for others to sing, or—in the most disgusting of experiences—two elderly women stupidly commenting in loud voices on the slow death of Werther: “Is she dead too? Oh, he’s still living! She’s covered with blood. Oh he’s still singing. Is she going to shoot herself?” etc. etc. Most of the audience members tried simply to imagine the emotional impact by following the subtitles, but for these adult-children the grand opera had simply fallen apart, the credibility that Kaufman had so brilliantly worked towards completely disappearing from the art. At times like these, one can only wonder why some people had been attracted to such a memorable opera broadcast in the first place, leaving the theater as they cried out, “I want my money back!”

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (March 2014).

Benjamin Thomas | Sortir avec moi (Go Out with Me) / 2023

take me out to the beach dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Thomas, Marie Albert, Julie Chaye, Anaïs Boucher, Véra Jantzem, Luna Delorge, and Julie Barbe (screenplay), Benjamin Thomas (director) Sortir avec moi (Go Out with Me) / 2023 [24 minutes]

 

When it takes 7 individuals to write the scenario of what basically is a standard romantic comedy, you realize almost immediately that a work of only 24 minutes is going to have problems. The two major male leads of this cast, Liam (Baptiste Baudais) and Théo (Armand Le Roux) are two lovely looking boys and seem to be charming—although it is difficult at moments to know whether Baudais’ pouting woodenness is a problem of his acting skills or the script. Besides, everything else works against this movie.

    Both of these boys, freshmen in college, seem to have daddy problems, having come out to their parents and been readily accepted by their mothers, while having to recognize that their previously loving relationships with their fathers will never be restored because of their being gay.

     All right, it hurts. My own father, who I dearly loved, and with whom I never again could restore a relationship after I came out, still long after his death, occasionally hits me with a pang of sorrow. But surely that didn’t stop me at age 18 to seek out gay love and friendship with others; if anything, it lured me on to seek the love I was now missing at home.

      Even if these characters, moreover, can be simply described as not quite being able to get over that major disappointment in life (Liam’s father even shared a loving friendship with him as a cook hovering over their home stove, something almost inconceivable in US kitchens), how could French director Benjamin Thomas and his cadre of female writers imagine that such an issue might be of interest to any gay male who had seen more than 10 short gay films?

   Of course, we root for the boys to find love and get together, but after a while their pouts and placement of their lips on the wrong gender—in the big scene of this little film, Liam discovers Théo in an upstairs bedroom smooching one of their mutual girlfriends—begins to distract a sophisticated viewing audience. From what backwater French province did these clueless kids come? Even Théo, at one point when Liam asks him he he’d like to “go out with him,” suggests that usually a relationship begins with kisses instead of a formal invitation.

     Really, both the boys and girls of this small college should get out a little more. They all seem so perfectly sweet and guileless that it’s difficult to imagine that they’ve even checked out the full resources of their own computers.

   At one point it appears that Théo does not even know how to properly address a research question; and he, in turn, cannot believe that Liam has never seen a Woody Allen movie, a director he appears to absolutely love—despite I should imagine Allen being someone most aware kids these days utterly reject, if not for his now tiresome humor and old-school Jewish plaints, then certainly for his apparent child abuse. Even though these boys together watch the 2017 gay love film, Call Me By Your Name, it appears that the sexy scenes between the actors in that movie which premiered six years earlier and which they never have still not seen, have utterly no effect on their penises or libidos. Both simply long for a father as understanding as Mr. Perlman, who in that film practically dangles his cute young 17-year-old son Elio before the eyes of 24-year-old graduate assistant. These two boys seem to have not even masturbated, let alone touched a peer’s cock. The movie seems to have almost put them to sleep instead of possibly presenting a heart-pang thrill.

     And when Théo finally gets up the nerve to put away his Pierrot mask (yes, this film actually speeds back in time to the days of Les Enfants du Paradis of 1945) and ask Liam if he’ll go out with him, they don’t seek out some private spot to kiss and touch, but join in a beach group dance with the war-paint of the LGBTQ+ community on their cheeks. Even an old-fashioned Sunday School Iowa hayride, in retrospect, seems more fun.

Los Angeles, February 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

Pierre Scot | Mindfuck / 2017

not real

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pierre Scot (screenwriter and director) Mindfuck / 2017 [6 minutes]

 

In this little terror tale by French director Pierre Scot, the director performs as a journalist who, apparently on a film set, is told to drop his pants before he is tied up, handcuffed, and blindfolded by a dominant leather man (Sebastian Freeman).

    The dominant fetishist also, just before blindfolding our subject, seemingly has opened up a strange container in which there appears to be flour and something possibly atop it.

     The leather man exits the room, slamming the door behind him as the journalist is left to imagine what might be happening.

      We observe a giant tarantula crawl out of the canister, jump down from the ledge, and make its way across out journalist’s hair before moving down his face. By this time, of course, the journalist is so horrified that he is almost begun to scream out for help, the leather boy returning to tell him “It’s all in your head,” as he unmasks and unties him.

     But, of course, we didn’t imagine it even if our journalist did; we saw in upon the screen with our own eyes. Is it also in our imaginations? Obviously not. So what is the point of this little exercise? Is it a warning to stay away from such dangerous male sexual encounters? Is it actually attempting to question that what we truly believe we see in that play of flickering lights is not really a thing of reality?

     Perhaps it’s simply trying to remind us never to watch this little film ever again, or if one was actually titillated by it (I was not) to watch it over and over just for fun.

      Now if a poisonous snake had slithered across that room, I certainly would simply have clicked the film off. But we all know that although they are venomous, these hairy insects are generally

not dangerous to humans. And Sean Connery was never truly in jeopardy in Dr. No (1962), although he was terrified by spiders and a couple of nurses were waiting nearby just in case.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

Daniela Ambrosoli | Papa & Dada / 2021 [documentary]

gay pops

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniela Ambrosoli (director) Papa & Dada / 2021 [documentary]

 

Swiss documentary director Daniela Ambrosoli followed the lives of four-same sex couples over several years, intimately questions her subjects on the experiences of raising children. Christian and Mimmo Iannuzzi, Tim Kelleher and Josh Reed, John Lam and John Ruggieri, and Brian and Ferd all shared their lives and stories, revealing that although their experiences with adoption and using surrogate mothers were very different, that in raising their children these parents were very similar to the more traditional male and female gendered families.

    As the official film website summarizes it: “At the end of the day, exactly the same as that of the conventional family unit with father, mother, and child, they eat together, go on family outings, and the fathers help their children brush their teeth and tell them bedtime stories.

     Homosexual men, however, are basically two methods of getting children. As in Mimmo and Christian’s case, they can use surrogate mothers, with the couple did, the surrogate mother Kelly Klassen sending them regular ultrasound pictures or audio messages of the heartbeat of the unborn child. These two fathers paced the floor during the actual birth that is similar to most heterosexual expectant fathers.

     Tim and Josh, however, decided to adopt, suddenly coming home with a new baby which they wondered aloud about their sudden “acquisition”: “It was strange to suddenly have a baby without having witnessed the pregnancy. We asked ourselves, are we allowed to have a child?”

     Brian and Ferd sought out internet tips and advice, but unlike the experience of heterosexual couples, they found so little information that they created their own platform in 2014 to provide gay men information, now one of the major places for gay, bisexual, and transgender fathers to seek out necessary information.

   The noted ballet dancer, John Lam, whom Ambrosoli also shows in short dance scenes and his companion John Ruggieri discuss the tough challenges and joys in becoming fathers. They were also a bit taken aback by the wide range of characteristics you are allowed to choose from: “You can choose the level of IQ, for example—but all we wanted was a happy, healthy child,” comments Ruggieri.

     The director also interviewed Argentinean choreographer Demis Volpi, who at the time was working on a ballet piece based the children’s book, King & King, in which two princes fall in love. He argues, however, that it’s not about homosexuality as much as it is about universal love, a view that is echoed in Christian and Mimmo’s comment: “Being a parent simply means giving love. Period.”

      Director of the noted 2014 Swiss film The Circle—about the lives of the early rights couple Ernst Ostertag and Röbi Rapp—Stefan Haupt observes, "The traditional family image, consisting of man, woman, and child, is still very much with us – but it is undergoing profound change."

     My only criticism of this fine documentary is that the chosen fathers, in this case, were mostly well-to-do and able to afford the often very high costs of surrogacy and even sometimes adoption. It might have been useful if we could visit the same questions about men desiring children who lived more middle-class and even working-class lives.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

Dave Wilson | Dad, I'm Straight / 1982 [TV (SNL) episode]

i am a….heterosexual!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael O'Donoghue and Bob Tischler (head writers), Dave Wilson (director) Dad, I’m Straight / 1982 [TV (SNL) episode]

 

Like so many short gay films before it, the September 23, 1982 episode of Saturday Night Live, reversed the standard coming out trope, as the Dad (Howard Hesseman), clearly a gay man who has divorced his previous wife, greets home his college-age student son (Gary Kroeger). To help his son come out to the reality of his life, Dad has even made a date with for his son with a handsome young medical student, Mike.

    The only problem, as it soon becomes apparent, is that his son has returned home with serious news, a problem which he is sure will be difficult for his father to accept: he’s straight.

     The standard outing tropes are used to seemingly new effect here, “Where have I gone wrong,” I should have played with you more when you were younger.” “I never should have left your mother bathe you.”

     It’s all a very smug heterosexual gimmick inverted to suggest perhaps that the standard reactions to a gay son reporting his homosexuality to a bigoted heterosexual father might not be so very different these days from a homosexual father dealing with his son’s heterosexuality.

     The only problem is that we know that the society in which this young boy has grown up would still completely embrace his heterosexuality, and any problems the gay daddy back at home might hint at are merely in jest. The society at large will have already laid its large open hand upon the boy’s back with utter acceptance. This is a total farce.

     Moreover, there’s something disturbingly sleazy about this sketch when Mike calls, the father explaining that the date has fallen through but that he might still come over to watch TV with him.

     This SNL piece simply doesn’t work for anyone truly involved in the LGBTQ community, and its forced laughter of inversion seems more than canned and actually quite offensive. And Hesseman’s prissy straightening up of the couch pillows at the end take us right back to the early days of homosexual stereotyping.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2025).