Julien Duvivier | Au Royaume des cieux (The Kingdom of Heaven, aka The Sinners) / 1949

itching to sin

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julien Duvivier and Henri Jeanson (screenplay), Julien Duvivier (director) Au Royaume des cieux (The Kingdom of Heaven, aka The Sinners) / 1949

 

The 1949 French film Au royaume des cieux, known in some markets as The Sinners, has all the ingredients of later lurid lesbian reformatory and prison films made mostly for heterosexual male audiences. Director Julien Duvivier’s film is set in a reformatory where fifty post-pubescent girls are housed for crimes ranging from revolutionary anarchistic activities, immoral behavior, and robbery, to prostitution and even murder. The girls, some of whom demonstrate lesbian desires, are often seen dressed in their underwear and generally grouped closely together in busy, crowded frames, bantering, verbally fighting, and, at one point, engaging in an out-of-control cat fight in their vast group bedroom.  

    The director of this institution, clearly a frustrated man-hating lesbian, sadistically punishes and tortures her charges, at one moment participating in an incident that today might be described as rape.

     Although all of these things do occur in variations throughout The Kingdom of Heaven—the English title (closer to the original French) which I prefer—is a far more interesting and complex work than it first may seem, and has little in common with the Grade B movie genre I described above. While there is no question that this film belongs to the girl’s boarding school (Mädchen in Uniform and Olivia) / women’s prison dramas (Caged) genre, the film far transcends it as it centers upon the lives of some of the local townspeople and, most importantly, a true-love heterosexual story between the newest inmate, Maria Lambert (Suzanne Cloutier) and her lover on the outside who comes to her rescue, Pierre Massot (Serge Reggiani).

     Just as intense as the pent-up human lusts and hate boiling in the inside of this institution, outside the rivers and streams roil up with the annual rains in this land of water and mud, threatening to drown the townspeople just as the emotional pressures rise within the old fortress transformed into a what has become a young womens’ prison. It is no accident that when the dam walls break, so too do the women inside rise up and rebel against their sadistic director, bringing together the redeeming heterosexual love story and the internal “queer” emotions that have been kept under lock and key within the institution, creating a perfect symbiosis between the normative and queer forces at play in this work.

     Duvivier, moreover, is a classy, “A” list director, and with his cinematographer Victor Armenise is perfectly able to alternate his inside/outside maneuvers in a manner that reveals that the two are innately related. The most notable of these scenes is when the inmate Maria describes what “rain”  means to her as she recounts a sports event she attended with her lover Pierre in Paris which a downpour halted, while the two lovers, escaped to a shelter under a porch. There, a man nearby turns on his car radio playing a song to serenade their hidden love-making. Duvivier’s camera swings back and forth in the telling of this event from Maria, laying on her bed in the reformatory telling the tale to her fellow prisoners, to Pierre, relating the same story at the table of the Barattiers where he is boarding, each time between swings pausing at an image of a window with rain pelting upon it.

     It is that same rain that ultimately endangers everyone’s life but also permits the escape of Maria and Pierre, and helps, with the sacrifice of her life of the anarchist inmate, to foment the inside revolution that results a permanent change with the establishment of a new, kinder director, Miss Guérande (Monique Mélinand).

     The interconnecting between what happens in the larger world and within the prison walls is also played out in the character of Margot (Liliane Maigné), who in her regular escapes and returns from and to the institution plays the role of the Greek Hermes or the Roman Mercury, who links the inside and outside, those of high position and those of low. It is she who delivers Pierre’s letter to Maria, describing his plans to help her escape and relaying his expressions of his love for her.*

     As the girls indirectly introduce themselves to the “newbie” Maria, they also reveal their own  crimes and sexual preferences, some clearly heterosexual, others obviously lesbian, as when one girl, advertising her natural breasts asks Maria to touch them in order to prove that everything within her bra is real, while another greedily attempts to grab a feel for herself.

     Another resident, nicknamed Gaby “Invoice” apparently for her use of her body for monetary purposes, appears to be bisexual, raising her skirt to show her thighs: “The left thigh is for men.  The right one for lonely ladies.”

     These variations of sexuality are presented as the director as normal, even if for his audiences they may have appeared to represent the rough lives these young girls have had to endure in order to survive their broken home lives and the criminal actions of their own parents. Yet the girls wear their differences like badges of honor, even allowing one girl to cry in response to almost everything since it clearly makes her feel better. And there are few hard feelings about their personal desires or past actions.

    The major issues of conflict that arise between these young women relate to their present survival and future acts. They all dislike the anarchist among them who appears to constantly seek out dissension in order to foment revolution, which as I suggest she eventually accomplishes. Their fights with one another, however, are mostly about how to proceed, not about their core values or the acts that brought them all together. And their major topic of discussion is how to survive until they are released, particularly given the most recent developments regarding the directorship and regulations of Maison Haute Mère.

      It is perhaps not so strange that it is the arrival of the innocent Maria—her major crime being to attempt to escape from her assigned employment with a family whose father and son both attempt to force her into sexual relationships—that sets off the series of events that completely alters the order of these girls’ lives as well as those who themselves seek to be free of such malevolent control.

      Things begin rather benignly, as the current director of Maison Haute Mère, Madame Bardin (Paule Andral), meets the young woman just brought to her. Although she greets the new girl with a rather menacingly interrogation of her past record, she soon after assures her that she recognizes these as minor infractions and attempts to explain that she is not being locked away in a prison—the doors and gates remain open, although there are punishments for those, like Margot, who abuse their regulations—but rather will hopefully be given the skills to work upon release in professions that do not entail the kind of indentured situations in which Maria has been placed. Complaining of the cold and damp of the former fortress which serves as the girl’s home, she suddenly receives a call from authorities saying they’ve have finally found new quarters for the institution. But hardly has Madame Bardin had a moment to share the good news, before she falls to the floor, dead apparently of a heart attack.

      Given the speed with which she takes up the telephone conversation and her seeming disinterest in what has just happened to Bardin, Miss Chamblas (Suzy Prim), we cannot help but suspect, that she may have involved in her predecessor’s death. Suddenly having been given command of the reformatory, she orders the open doors immediately bolted, the girls’ playtime be taken away until she discovers who has broken a drinking glass, that the nearly rabid dog Goliath be untethered, and, after abruptly re-interrogating Maria, that she be locked away in basement cells that have never been previously used.

     Somewhat like the wicked stepmother in Snow White, Chamblas immediately recognizes that Maria, in her beauty and innocence, represents everything she is not. And whereas, she can quite easily intimidate and dominate the other girls, even possibly sexually satisfying her desires with some of them, Maria, in her moon-struck innocence is incorruptible.

      Even the tough girls into whose quarters Miss Guérande, in rebellion against her superior, releases Maria, know that the new beauty is living in a reality unavailable to them which they jocularly refer to as “living in a movie in which locomotives fly the skies.” Yet it is her specialness, the fact that, despite the hard times she too has suffered, that she has remained untouched by them that attracts these women to her. When they finally are convinced through her and Pierre’s relationship that love does “still exist,” the only way they can imagine helping her—at least a first—is to turn to the spiritual world in which none of them any longer believe. Having even forgotten how to pray, they make up their own prayers to a God in which they don’t believe, chanting the word “Amen” each time their designated priestess says the world “thumb.” It is such a lovely scene that one tends to forgive Duvivier for so sentimentally connecting it up with Christmas, a day in which miracles always happen in motion pictures.

      But first Maria must endure the torture and temptations that the newborn Christ won’t have to face for 33 more years. Having heard from a prison snitch that a man is headed to the prison to release his lover, Chamblas personally challenges the young girl in a scene so salacious that it almost wipes away any taste of Christmas cookies still lingering on your tongue.

      Determined to discover what the wisp of a female being possesses in order to bring a man to their doors, as well as attempting to witness her beauty for her own delectation, the furious matron strips off the girl’s blouse as her fingers appear to itch in midair to get her hands on “the skin” which makes a man follow her “like a dog.” In an utterly over-the-top performance Prim strokes that skin in self-gratification thrusting her face so close to the girl’s that their lips almost touch all the while knowing that if they actually had the whole scene might have been cut. Certainly, I can’t imagine that these frames would have made it through the US or British censor of the day.

      Maria’s outrage and declarations of hatred are so deserved that even Chamblas is speechless, as she sentences the girl to return to the dungeon, as if we needed further proof that in the perverted version of love represented by Chamblas, desire can only be expressed through power and pain; this character obviously has long been a student of de Sade.

     Using the excuse of the annual girls’ Christmas choral presentation at the local church, Guérande once more intercedes, freeing Maria so that she might meet up with Pierre at the Christmas mass.

      Oddly, God himself is presented in this film as an even more malevolent force than Chamblas—if you believe that nature is an expression of God’s will. The damn breaks and the flood waters come crashing into the church, rendering any actions of the priest almost meaningless as he calls for the roughly hewn rowing boats to be brought into to the sacred stone structure to save his parishioner’s lives.

      After hiding out in the church steeple Pierre and Marie finally escape, but only after a chillingly dangerous run through the local fog and bogs in a police chase that almost takes away the frail child’s life. We can only hope that this time the police, wherever the two end up, will not yet again intervene in their relationship.

      Meanwhile, the girls, finally realizing there are fifty of them compared with four elderly administrators, take over the reformatory, as Chamblas and her only true supporter lock themselves inside their office. The half-starved girls vandalize the institution’s kitchen, most of them getting drunk on the wines stocked for the pleasure of the staff. Once more her associate intervenes, allowing Chamblas safe passage out of the building where she is severely bitten by the brutal dog she has previously unleashed. Guérande is ordered to take over as director and the girls’ lives return to semi-order—although given that these young women have now come to realize their power, it seems doubtful that they will ever be fully ruled again.

     It appears that “the kingdom of heaven” that this film proposes is attained only through challenge and disobedience, laying as it does outside of any self-described normative attempt to define, control, or delimit behavior, including sex and love. This sounds suspiciously close to Milton’s description of the great angel Lucifer to me. Maybe The Sinners is not such a bad title after all.

 

*It is difficult to believe that Stephen Sondheim had not seen this film prior to writing the lyrics of his song “Maria” in West Side Story given that his message to Maria ends with the repetition of her name—“Maria, Maria, Maria”—with a final emphatic “Maria” at the end.

 

Los Angeles, May 10, 2021

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

 

 

Valentin Vaala | Ihmiset suviyössä (People of the Summer Night) / 1948

god’s child

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lea Joutseno, Usko Kemppi, Valentin Vaala (screenplay, based on the novel by Frans Eemil Sillanpää), Valentin Vaala (director) Ihmiset suviyössä (People of the Summer Night) / 1948

 

Finnish filmmaker Valentin Vaala’s classic film Ihmiset suviyössä (People of the Summer Night), based on Nobel Prize winning author Frans Eemil Sillanpää's 1934 novel, is one of the many “back to the soil” fictions of Scandinavian literature and filmmaking. Like Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil, Tarjei Vesaas’ The Great Cycle, and Halldór Laxness’ Independent People, among others, these fictions represented the difficulties of rural living, while celebrating the stubbornness and independence of the central figures whom it suggested lived fuller lives than their fellow city dwellers; and, in general, these works argued that the natural, “real” world was preferable to the modern urban one.

     Indeed, that is one of the central themes in this film, as it begins with an unusual sight in this rural paradise, a car speeding along the dusty road on its way to the Teliranta estate, a farm that has been in the Teliranta family for 300 years, remaining one of the wealthiest farm estates in the region.

     The driver of that car Arvid (Matti Oravisto) who has come, unannounced, to see one of the family’s daughters, Helka (Eila Pehkonen) whom he had evidently dated back in the city and who spoke often of the wonders of her home, including its noted sauna. The family, father, mother, grandmother and Helka’s sister all greet the newcomer with pleasure, seeing him as a likely partner for their beloved family member.

    Nearby live Hilja (Emma Väänänen) and her husband Jalmari. She appears to be more worried about her sickly cow than the fact that she is pregnant and near to labor. When she finally does go into labor she sends out Jalmari to get the midwife, who happens to be on another case which forces him to seek out the doctor, also missing, meaning that by the time he returns the baby has already been born, Martta, the mistress of Teliranta have helped Hilja bear her child.

     An even poorer woman, Santa (Kaisu Leppänen), whose husband, a lumberman, is missing, but with her several children survives by brewing mead and, to help pay down her debts, allows one of the brutes to engage in sex when he’s not too drunk to perform. As she tells her children as they about to visit a nearby farm, “You must never tell the neighbors what’s happening at home.”

      Over the period of one long midsummer night, when the sun refuses to disappear and the characters are kept mostly awake, little and larger things happen to these people and others in the countryside that are aligned almost perfectly in the rhythm of the natural world about them. Just as their crops, flowers, trees, animals, and other natural phenomenon stand in glorious testimony to birth, love, decay, and death, so too do the lives of these people. Indeed, the reason this work is so beautiful to watch is the way in which Vaala and his cinematographer Eino Heino capture the natural world in black-and-white. As the novelist had reminded Vaala as he was making the movie, there should be only one main character, and that is the summer night.

   

     By comparison the humans in this story seem almost undeveloped, hazy, and slightly out of focus. We observe them drinking, eating, staring out windows at the landscape, kissing, traveling, and dancing; but nothing except the death of a drunken lumberman and the birth of Hilja’s baby seems to be of great significance. In fact the regional doctor arrives too late for both events. 

     Although taken by the beauty and charm of the countryside, at the end of this extremely long day and night, Arvid returns to the city perhaps to be joined by his girlfriend Helka or maybe he will return after he settles up his affairs. The film does not definitively answer any questions that arise concerning the fate of these figures. And besides, given the patterns of the natural world around them, we know their fates, no matter the seemingly all-important incidentals.

      That is, in fact, what I perceive as the weakness of this film which never truly invites us into the lives of its characters enough to allow us to really know and care deeply about them. On the one day we witness them amidst their everyday lives, they basically seem lost in a kind of frozen stasis that we also recognize does contain outsiders. We are strangers who have no real place in this apparent paradise, despite the sorrows some of its citizens, particularly Santa, must bear. Yet even she seems to be not only a strong survivor but someone who, by saving aside the money she receives and by rewarding the sexual favors which lowers her debt, is someone who surely will still prevail.

      However, one figure stands apart from all of these, an outsider much like us, a young romantic boy from the region who has escaped farm life to join the lumberjacks; yet even then remains apart from his lumberjacks as one who reads and who has evidently traveled, describing early on in the film how he has seen a Chinese carney performer throw knives at a woman who apparently was his lover. This young boy, the beautiful doe-eyed Nokia (Martti Katajisto) also throws a knife at the wood planking of the boat on which he and other men live, the mean men leaving their world dedicated to the floating logs only long enough to get drunk for a night before moving on.

            Even though for most of the film we know little about Nokia as well, we sense something in him that is special, simply in the fact that his beauty stands out against the brutal ugliness of his co-workers and even among most of the people who farm the land. Perhaps Nokia can be matched only by the handsome Arvid, both outsiders of sorts, even if Arvid appears to desire to become one of the farmsteaders and the surrounding peasants. If nothing else, we recognize in Nokia’s literary interests, in his politeness to those he meets, and in his animated story-telling that he is somehow exceptional.

     Unfortunately—in this static world in which even the celebrating dancers seem to move in slow-motion, floating in patterns around the small dance stand instead of actually engaging in intense bodily movement—Nokia is nearly all action, his eyes themselves dancing in the light of others whom he meets and his body reacting to the threats he encounters, particularly when challenged yet again by his totally drunken cohort. Egged on by another logger, Nokia finally takes the bully, Jukka, in hand, rushing at him with his knife, the man falling dead so quickly that we can only wonder, since he has passed out previously several times in this film, if he suffers a drunken seizure or a heart attack. It doesn’t seem to matter, for the moment the man falls, all the others, farmers, and loggers both gather to call Nokia a murderer, quickly assuring his being manacled, arrested, and jailed. It is he who insists immediately upon sending for a doctor who, as I mention above, arrives too late to do anything but to repeat the obvious: the man is dead. There is no attempt to truly discover how he has died.   

     But it is when he is locked away, and let out briefly by the only other comely man in this picture, Iivari (the brother of the jail keeper) that we discover just how different Nokia is from all the others in this film.

    Nokia, we slowly come to perceive through his own telling of his life, is a gay man (the first gay character in Finnish film) who has joined up with the lumberjacks imagining he might find beautifully fit men who in their loneliness might seek him out for a sexual adventure: “It was an impulse. I wanted to try it out. They tell such beautiful stories about it.” But, as he tells Iivari, “everyone is so ugly. Haven’t seen a fair man since I left home.”

     What about the girls, asks Iivari?

     “Ha! Those cows are not for me.”

     It is only when he begins singing a popular Finnish folk-song:

 

           "The boy was naive and beautiful,

           he was naive and beautiful"

 

with Iivari correcting him: “Don’t you mean the girl?” that his questioner begins to comprehend. When Nokia repeats another chorus with “the boy,” the truth suddenly dawns upon the jailor's brother.

      Calling him “God’s child,” Iivari hands him the liquor bottle, while Nokia falls crying into a kind of mad fit trying to explain what he means for someone like him to be manacled. In the end he cries out what might almost be a restatement of Wilde’s famous quote:

 

          "The young soul has longing that he cannot even name."

 

      We hardly care if Arvid returns or not or whether Helka joins him in Helsinki. But we feel cheated for not knowing at film’s end what happens to Nokia, a soul seeking out an impossible love in the world in which he lives. Like so very many of the “return to the soil” works, we discover the land of farmers, peasants, and itinerant workers sharing a pastoral paradise ultimately to be empty; it was after all just such a world to which the Nazis aspired, why Hamsun so admired Hitler, and the Germans chose his The Growth of the Soil as their favorite novel.

      Thankfully Sillanpää's work makes no argument for returning to nature but simply presents that world in an objective manner that shows its beauties and limitations simultaneously. I grew up in such territory, and frankly I have no desire to return even for a long midsummer night. And I can only dream that Nokia may be let free to escape its lures.

 

Los Angeles, July 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review July 2021).

 

John Greyson and Jack Lewis | Proteus / 2003

claiming gay identity

 

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Greyson and Jack Lewis (screenplay, based on a story by Jack Lewis, and directors) Proteus / 2003

 

Canadian director John Greyson is among the notables of queer cinema, and anything he directs is worthy of our attention. His 2003 film with South African gay activist Jack Lewis, however, received highly mixed reviews, perhaps because so many of his other transgressive and postmodern gay political statements before this 2003 film were so beautifully clothed, as Variety review Dennis Harvey put it, in “lush aesthetics and impassioned complexity,” while the brown-toned Proteus, in the critic's estimation, failed.

     Partially due to the filming limitations of an 18-day shoot on the South African prison camp of Robben Island, to where Nelson Mandela was also sentenced for 18 years of his 27-year imprisonment, and because of the historical limitations of the central story, based on an actual criminal case of 1735, Greyson and his South African compatriot were not given as open of a postmodern perspective in this case. There is no dancing, no singing mix of gay representatives of different periods, no hot-house perspectives of gay sex in this truly profound film. Moreover, how Greyson and Lewis even interpreted events was open to question.

    One commentor on Letterboxd, with the handle of Lesego, complained that he was disappointed with the portrayal of the Khoi people, represented in this film by Claas Blank (Rouxnet Brown), as “harboring homophobic attitudes when historical evidence shows us they were positive.”

     Since the court records of this particular case, however, wherein Blank, a man accused and exonerated for stealing back cattle whites had already stolen from his tribe, but was still imprisoned for 10 years’ hard labor to the penal colony off of Cape Town, facts are sketchy. The crime which killed him was sodomy, which in this case he practiced with a white South African Rijkhaart Jacobz (Neil Sandilands), who had already been labeled a “faggot,” and was shunned accordingly by the rest of the prison community.

 

     It is the native black man, Blank, who in the strange nightmare community, is the “object of desire,” a man in this highly racist world of torture and violent punishment who offers something special to the man officially assigned to the prison world by the Dutch officials as an English botanist in order to develop exportable flower strains. The irony is already apparent, and one that seems almost inevitable for Greyson’s aesthetics.     

      What Blank represents to the conventionally married British botanist Virgil Niven (Shaun Smyth), since he was previously employed as a servant, is his ability to speak English, Dutch, and his tribal language with its inherent knowledge of the local flora and fauna. In Niven's categorization of all plant life and people, and for whom even Blank might be described as an inferior “Hottentot,” the prisoner Claas Blank, nonetheless, is the perfect conduit between his imperceptible and unacceptable desires: to create a  taxonomical listing of Robben Bay—which later the noted Swedish Carl Linnaeus claimed as being his own work—and fulfill Niven's closeted gay desires.

      Given his societal position and conventional role in this prison world, Niven is allowed to fulfill his voyeuristic needs—becoming far more sexually active when his returns to Amsterdam—while also being forgiven for carrying in his entourage a highly effeminate “poof” as his close assistant. Niven, accordingly, is quite willing to allow the highly attractive black man to become his guide into the native knowledge of floral category of Protea Cynarides, named after the shapeshifting figure of Greek mythology, while observing for something like 10 to 17 years (the official records being somewhat ambiguous) both Blank and Rijkharrt, as they travel back and forth to the water tank in order to maintain his flower garden and escape into anal sexual paradise.

 

     I think it is only logical that Blank, given his culture’s total indifference to all categorizations, sexual definitions, and hierarchies, at first resists the “faggot’s” embrace. But love is love, and the two soon after can no longer contain their sexual desires for one another, as the immoral voyeur Niven gradually threads his life to them in order to gratify his unfulfilled private desires.

    Only his presence, however, protects them, and his return to Amsterdam for a brief period of two years to publish his book, allows the vicious local authorities and fellow prisoners to finally reveal the couple’s “criminal” behavior, both as sexual outcasts and racial misfits.

  Critic Michael D. Klemm, writing in CinemaQueer quite nicely summarizes the gay couple’s situation:

 

“Unlike the European invaders who sought control and dominance by the assigning of new names, our befuddled heroes don't have, and refuse to accept, a name for what they are. This is hardly a case of love at first sight or meeting cute. Games of alpha dog dominance transform slowly into genuine affection over the course of a decade. At first there is only antagonism. It culminates in Claas taking Jacobz from behind and it's a scene straight out of Genet. Is this rape or is this something more? Claas vainly clings to a more traditional gender role and asserts his masculinity by speaking of a woman "with big titties" waiting for him back at the village. Jacobz, bearded and butch, has embraced his queer self and often gazes with longing at his sometimes indifferent friend.”

 

     Today’s commentators, for the most part don’t like sexual ambiguity, even if it has existed throughout history. Yet Greyson and Lewis reveal their character’s true relationship when, after both are threatened with drowning, Rijkharrt—the seemingly “out” faggot, admits to his guilt, while Blank refuses to give himself over to the would-be sexual definers. Once his friend is sentenced, however, Blank is the one who finally speaks out, talking in two languages, as the director/writer Greyson reiterates:

 

“This is what drove us — in the court record, the [sodomy] crimes were mutually perpetrated. The only way he [Blank] could claim his dignity was in confessing. He says it in two languages and the translators [performed in an anachronistic matter by bee-hived haired 1950s typists] translated it in three. This is how we wanted our narrative to resolve the moment of claiming identity for the first time it condemns him to death.”

     Niven, involved in his own gay criminal activities back in Amsterdam, when it was historically recorded that 70 Dutch men were arrested and punished for their gay sexual activities—evidently Niven’s assistant among them—can only again play the role of voyeur as he watches his two lovelies drowned.

     This film, what the prolific Greyson imagines as being his last full feature film, is a tragedy of the highest proportions. Although he once again stuffs it with anachronisms in order to pull it into our own times, it is ultimately a crime of major historical dimension which we have to comprehend as part of the endless terror of our gay history rather than a mere reiteration of our own cultures continued hate of gay beings. This is an event of our horrible LBGTQ+ history, not just a contemporary injustice.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (February 2025).

 

Marie Losier | Bird, Bath and Beyond / 2003

sharks, shopping malls, and the kissing parakeet

 

Marie Losier (director) Bird, Bath and Beyond / 2003 [13 minutes]

 

The star and subject of Marie Losier’s 2003 short is the low budget, gay camp filmmaker Mike Kuchar, who made films with his also gay twin brother George, who died in 2011, and by himself. Together and separately, Mike made over 200 films involving lurid, mostly homosexual sex, Hollywood glamor, superheroes, monsters, and soap-opera situations. As Kelly Vance describes the brothers in the East Bay Express, “They were shoestring Cecil B. DeMilles, the Mozarts of 8mm cinema” (a sobriquet hung on them by screenwriter Buck Henry), charting epic concepts on cardboard and papier-maché sets.”

     In Bird, Bath and Beyond Losier lets Mike, dressed up in ridiculous costumes probably of his own making, talk. He says absolutely nothing about filmmaking, except for his beginning sentence:

 

"I used to have dreams where I would go shopping in a department store. But when looking down I would realize I forgot to put on my clothes. I was afraid that maybe I exposed and revealed myself too much through my films or drawings. I don't put myself into my movies because that would be too much - my pictures reflect my own feelings. So hopefully it's entertaining. Otherwise I can't bear looking at them, ha ha!"

 

     From there on, he opines on sharks, outer space, and his and George’s pet parakeet Lulu.

   Traveling horizontally in Losier’s frames, Mike bemoans the reputation of sharks. It’s the human being who is the predator he insists, having himself supped on shark-fin soup several times. All they do is take a bite out of you, he argues. It’s simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, although it’s the right time for the shark.

    He loves to think about outer space, the constellations. Surely as our sun dies off, we will have to extend human life by living on other planets, where we’ll have to build domed shopping centers like malls. “I like malls, shopping malls, they’re kind of space-agey,” he admits.

     The longest and most fascinating moment of Kuchar’s rambling conversation is about his pet bird Lulu, who every morning pecked him and his brother on the lips. He would take the parakeet out of its cage and put it upon his record turntable, putting it on the lowest speed where Lulu would move quickly to retain her position, like she were exercising on a treadmill. He’d then turn it up just a bit more and the bird would start into a kind of run, and when he finally put it on full-speed within 3 seconds, Lulu would fly off. One day she flew out the window, and they never saw her again.

     As in most of the Kuchar films, there is certainly nothing profound here, and unfortunately his wry short monologue is not really even that humorous. And it eschews any discussion of significant LGBTQ interest. But Kuchar is always fun to be with nonetheless, behaving like an uncle who, having grown up, still behaves as a naughty schoolboy of the kind in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933).

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review.