Paul Morrissey | Forty Deuce / 1982

the boy in the bed

by Douglas Messerli

Alan Bowne (screenplay, based on his stage play), Paul Morrissey (director) Forty Deuce / 1982

 

Forty Deuce is the Paul Morrissey film that every talks about but very few have ever seen. The film was never released as a DVD, and hardly had a movie theater release in the United States, although it was screened at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard. Certainly Americans gave it little regard, with their intense distaste and disapproval whether or not they’d actually seen it. The only version I could find was probably a DVD retape a French VHS tape with subtitles in that language. The only other DVD representation of it that I know about is a short series of snippets from it featured in a series of trailers described as “Weird Movies.”

       Add to these facts that it stars, among others, Kevin Bacon, playing the role of the drugged-out gay street punk Ricky at the age of 24, in only his second film role (for which he had won an Obie in the stage version in same year); the reputable Orson Bean, playing an older closeted gay business man, Mr. Roper, who’s into sadistically torturing young boys; a 12-year old lying on the bed, brought there by Blow (Mark Keyloun); and Augie (Harris Laskawy), Ricky’s older brother who is the head of a small gay prostitute ring that also includes Crank (Tommy Ciera) and Mitchell (Esai Morales)—all of whom discover early in the movie that their new child recruit has died, probably of the drugs supplied the previous night by Blow which also made Ricky and the others sick.

     Shocked by their discovery, Ricky and Blow convince Augie, who’s mistakenly left the room in their hands for the night, that they go ahead with the meeting with Roper, get him high on “dust (PCP),” and then blame him for the kid’s death, forcing him to hand over cash from a local ATM. They also have an appointment with a volatile black couple from Harlem for a purchase of heavy drugs and who knows what else, which is why they need Roper’s money.

   Blow, moreover, who used to work for Augie has tried to go solo, but in “borrowing” the old room, has certainly brought down Augie’s wrath. And all of them are even more nervous about what the real boss, Mike will do if he finds out about all their bad deeds, and who seems to know everything. Mike may be Augie’s imaginary name for any being in control of things or actually his “protection,” but we never find out.

      Accordingly throughout the entire film, a dead boy, who has just arrived in New York excited, Blow claims, to become a male prostitute and enjoy queer sex, lies dead in a bed while around him these players let loose a volley of machine-gun-fast obscene, racist language that even David Mamet couldn’t have dreamed of and would make an ex-navy trucker blush. Based on the play by Alan Bowne, this is a piece whose language for many if not most Americans is quite incomprehensible.

      A couple of short passages will have to represent the entire hour and a half of Morrisey’s movie. The first is when Augie first discovers the 12-year-old boy in the bed, still alive, representing the first lines of the film:

 

(Unlocking the door, he enters the room, sees the boy in the bed, picks up the blanket and drops it).....

Shit. Fuckin’ shit! Fuckin’ bozzo, fuckin’ bozzo queen. (He storms out of the room.) (Pausing to look back in) Fuckin’ shit! .....(continues to swear as he returns to the street. To Crank, one of his boys) Dumb shit, who’s that fuckin’ twerp up the fuckin’ stairs?

     Blow bring him in and Micky let him stay, I dunno.

     I take off one fuckin’ night and Ricky and Blow married again? Fuckin’ Jesus.

     He looked kind of sick today, Augie. That was some bad dope that Blow bring us.

     That fuckin’ Blow. He drops a 12-year-old up my room. He deals shit out of my room. He’s running my fuckin’ operation right? And you and Ricky say, yeah, go ahead, sure, go ahead Blow. Piss all over Augie’s room where is that big shit?

     Over at his business. I dunno.   

     Business. Whatever his fuckin’ business is I don’t fuckin’ like it. Where’s the fuckin’ greaseball?

     Ricky’s Port Authority.

     Port fuckin’ Authority. You go up (pointing back to the stairs) to that fuckin’ room and stay with that fuckin’ twerp. I don’t trust twerp alone in my facilities. (slapping the boy’s face) You understand?

     I understand (goes off. Runs up a couple steps, turns around and exits back into the street.)

     (Augie heads off toward the Port Authority. To himself as he walks) Fuck. Shit. Guinea bastard. I swear....Guy will never know if he had any balls I’ll squeeze them off like a fuckin’ grapefruit....

 

     On his way to the Port Authority, he runs into another his boys, Mitchell, talking to an older man in the street near the Biltmore Theatre.

      You see Ricky, bozzo fuck, bozzo queen?

      Augie, please I’m doing business.

      Last night I leave Ricky in charge. Today I got a 12-year-old twerp up my room, Blow dealing shit of my room. Where’s my commission?’

      Look, forget about Blow’s dope. Last Night we party off of Blow’s dope.

      You shoot it, you shoot my commission?

      She wasn’t no dope, she was Draino. We all get sick. Especially that little number from Blow.

      He wants my commission. He’s a three-year-old up in my fuckin’ facilities.

      Augie, don’t worry. Money. He’s got money.

      Those new ones he fuckin’ up there?

      Those Rabbis, oh Jesus. Plus I telephone him from the Haymarket, but that’s mime.

      You use my room?

      Sure I use your room. I give Ricky a cut to use your room.

      When you’re dealing with tricks you deal with me.

      And where was you?  

      None of your asshole. You don’t deal with me you go fuck off. You wanna use the facilities you don’t deal with nobody but me. I’ll freak your fuckin’ arm (grabs him) if you don’t come up with Ricky. Crank says he’s over at the fuckin’ Port Authority?

      That’s where I left him. Asleep in the bathroom.

      Asleep in the bathroom?

      Right when he’s doing this trick, he falls out on the toilet.

      Asleep on the toilet?

      What fuckin’ toilet?

      In the little one. For the Jersey commuters. He likes that one. That’s his headquarters.

 

      So in the first 8 minutes (which I’ve tried to record to the best of my listening abilities, with surely lines and words misheard and missed) the film has established the major figures, except for Blow and Ricky, both of whom we soon after meet, discovering them to be sort of mirror images of one another, Blow being perhaps a younger version of the now washed-up and drugged-out Ricky, who’s now so strung out and lost that it’s hard for him to have any true feelings. Blow is trying to make it on his own, which clearly Ricky has tried and failed many times to do. Ricky has become bitter, taking his anger out on anything and anyone, as his long diatribe, early in the film, against the Greeks who are taking over all the bodegas reveals.

      But all eventually are forced to return to the lowest rung, Augie, who keeps them busy with $20 tricks, $15, two for $30 when it comes to the orthodox Jews he sends them. These are young men so devoid of imagination that the best idea they can come up is the find a richer customer or score a better drug deal. As Blow says, “I sell dick, I sell dope.”

       So too do the boys of 42nd calling out moment to moment to anyone who passes: “Speed, crack, cock.”

       But Blow is determined to find something, anything better, and it’s clear the boy was part of that plan, and perhaps he also somehow fell for him. They seem to him as something special, even Ricky who instead of taking advantage of the kid, saves him for Roper.

      Blow, however, is the only one who appears to still care for the 12-year-old, who he discovers upon the group’s meeting up in “the room” that he is now dead. And he continues to care for him, demanding even after they’ve hooked up Roper with the corpse, to not hurt him, knowing from his own experiences how Roper likes to hurt the boys before making love to them.

   But as expected everything goes wrong. Roper gets so high that he cannot even properly communicate, let alone crawl into bed with the kid. For this last scene Morrissey has created an oddly split screen, clearly demonstrating the two losers, Ricky and Blow’s inability to create a full view of the world in which they live. Each try to trick and tempt Roper into bed with the dead boy, and when he finally does slip into bed beside the boy he immediately falls to sleep.

     Discovering that he doesn’t even have much money his wallet, they threaten him so they might carry him off to an ATM to collect the money, as he crawls under the bed as in a farce, refusing to even come out.

      Meanwhile, they are expecting the Harlem couple who if they don’t get their money will surely, as they promised, cut both their throats. Even Crank and Mitchell enter the scene trying to figure out what’s happening.

      Only when Augie shows up is the situation resolved. Mike, he tells them, has arranged for the police to make a crack-down on the place soon after the drug dealers show up, arresting them not only for the drugs for the death of the kid. Augie coaches the terrified Roper out from under the bed and sends him on the way. The other boys are temporarily forced to return to the streets, to get lost, better back in Haymarket, presumably the name for the Village territory where there is little interest for male prostitutes, that section of town being already filled with gays and lesbians. It’s the tourists and up-towners who haunt Times Square, the ones who can’t get boys find boys in any other manner.

       Crank and Mitchell sadly go off to where they began. And even Blow is ready to admit what he sees as a temporary setback. But when he checks on Ricky, who has retreated to the bathroom after it has become apparent their plan is doomed, he reports that there’s no longer any need to worry about him.

     Presumably Ricky has now overdosed on the “Draino,” and is dead. They leave the 12-year-old and Ricky together for the police to deal with. Human beings in this dark world—darker that even than Wiktor Grodecki’s trilogy of films on boy prostitution in the Czech Republic in the late 1990s—are dispensable, all for the sake of twenty-dollar tricks. You make enough you can get cottage on Long Island.

      Despite this film’s lurid subject and a language that would probably require subtitles for contemporary viewers, I believe this to be Morrisey’s very best work, and the promise of a much more substantive career than the one that actually followed.

 

Los Angeles, March 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

Anthony Schatteman | Volg mij (Follow Me) / 2015

teacher and student

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Dhondt and Anthony Schatteman (screenplay), Anthony Schatteman (director) Volg mij (Follow Me) / 2015 [16 minutes]

 

This happens probably more often than we like to admit. A young male student falls in love with his male teacher or someone a few years older who is not ready to fully commit to gay life. In this case, in Belgian-Dutch director Anthony Shatteman’s small soap opera, it is 20-year-old Jasper (Ezra Fieremans), who evidently works as the barkeep in a gay sauna, who has begun an affair with Gerard (Maaten Ketels), an individual who suddenly is no longer available to receive his phone calls.

    The two clearly have had a series of quite passionate sexual encounters, but suddenly that seems to have ended, as Gerard appears to have begun an affair with a woman, Vero (Lien Maes), and we have entered the territory of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name of two years later.

    Still obsessed with his teacher, young Jasper follows Gerard and his new girlfriend around the museum and overhears them in bathroom sex. When he finally confronts his former lover, he is told to not only stop following him, but basically to get lost.

      But we know, at least from the final scenes which may or may not be in the past, that the obsession between the two will not end that simply. If the last scenes are only those of Jasper’s memory, it is obvious that boy will to scarred for the rest of his life. But if they are a repeat of their relationship, it is even more terrifying for what Gerard and his new girlfriend will have to face in their future lives.

      So many gay men still appear to sublimate their queer passions by attempting to put them out of their memory in the arms of a heterosexual marriage. It almost always ends in disaster, and the results in a still unforgiving society are revealed in the kind of desperate pain we see in films such as Making Love (1982), The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), and so very man other films, long and short, which I have discussed in these volumes.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

Nagisa Ōshima | 御法度 (Gohatto) (Taboo) / 1999

attempting to possess beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nagisa Ōshima (screenplay, based on Shinsengumi Keppūroku by Ryōtarō Shiba), Nagisa Ōshima (director) 御法度 (Gohatto) (Taboo) / 1999

 

The great Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima’s last film, Gohatto is a complex and ambiguous movie that might, upon first viewing, be difficult for Hollywood-bred audiences. I suggest for US audiences originally coming to this film that they see the work’s beautiful hero, Kanō Sōzaburō (Ryuhei Matsuda) to be a bit like Herman Melville’s character Billy Budd—without all the Christian trappings.

     Clearly, Sōzaburō (I use Kanō’s first name throughout to give him equal weight to the HMS Bellipotent crew’s beloved Billy) is no stand-in for Christ. He has willingly joined the Japanese Shinsengumi, the elite samurai order of the mid-nineteenth century, specifically, as he puts it, “to have the right to kill.” Unlike Billy, this stunningly beautiful young man has not been stolen, against his will from another merchant ship, but has willingly joined up for the promised sword-play. And kill he does, perhaps as many as three times in a film wherein the other warriors see no violence whatsoever.   

     Finally, if Sōzaburō is tied to any ineffable beings, it is to the world of the ugetsu, the world of the rain and the moon or, more explicitly, to the world of ghosts, not to the human incarnation of the son of God.

     Yet, much like Billy this 18-year-old Japanese samurai, once permitted “on board” at the samurai academy, certainly sets the male hearts aflutter. Chuck Stephens, writing in Film Comment described the new recruit as “some sort of teenage daydream: a pale and lethal alien from the glitter side of the moon.” And much like Melville’s young hero, we know almost from the beginning that all will not end well.

     Melville, writing for a late 19th century American audience could not openly express whether Billy actually gave into his various sailor-mates’ desires and lusts, but for the all-male samurai homosexuality was the highest level of love, and Ōshima leaves no question about the prurient interests of Sōzaburō’s barrack mates and his superiors. From the very first moment that he watches the beautiful boy in a mock fight against Captain Okita Sōji (Shinji Takeda),Vice-Commander Hijikata Toshizō (renowned actor Takeshi Kitano), the Captain Vere of this story, suddenly opens up his usually inexpressive face to a slight grin as he begins to talk of those who are “inclined,” evidently including himself; and even if he does not actively seek out sex with the bishonen (the “beautiful boy”), he watches over him as carefully as a mother hen would care for her new-born chick, assigning him as his own aide, while placing another promising recruit, Hyōzō Tashiro (Tadanobu Asano) to Okita’s First Unit.

     Even he, however, recognizes the dangers of allowing such a figure into a deep pool of unfulfilled, testosterone-fueled desire—and later, the Commander (Yoichi Sai), having heard that the beautiful new recruit has taken on a lover, reminds his second-in-charge, "This has happened before. Passion influences the heart and this in turn means trouble. It must not happen again.—yet Hijikata’s grin says everything. He is delighted for what today we might describe as the “eye-candy” standing before him despite his tentative fears of what might happen to his men—and, of course, to the boy.

    Stephens quotes writer Ian Buruma, referring, in turn, to yet another commentator Nosaka Akiyuki: “a true bishonen has to have something sinister about him. The vision of pure youth, because of its fragility perhaps, reminds one of impermanence, thus of death. In fact, youth is beautiful precisely because it is so short-lived. The cult of cherry blossoms, which only last about a week in Japan, is the same as the worship of the bishonen, and the two are often compared. Taken one small step further [the cult of the bishonen] is the cult of death.”

     And Stephens himself, in his terribly insightful if inconclusive essay, notes the trajectory of this film: “Delicious in design, delirious with detail, Gohatto was photographed in and around ancient temples in Kyoto. Its mysterious appeal is poly-demographic: anime admirers, romance aficionados, fans of Mishima and Hana-bi, young lovers on a date—this is the Ōshima film for you.”

     We get a scene out of Mishima almost immediately in this work. In part to test him his willingness to accept death, Hijikata immediately assigns him the beheading of a fellow samurai who has been caught borrowing money. If the samurai are permissive regarding male on male sexual activity, their codes are highly strict regarding everything else, and anyone who is caught violating the code must disembowel himself. The beheading evidently reveals that the swordsman is only “suspected” of having violated that code.

     Just as Sōzaburō has shown his skill as a swordsman a day earlier, he severs the head with simple aplomb after uttering the traditional phrase before the kill, “Forgive me.”

     Already Tashiro has attempted to claim Sōzaburō as his lover, while the beauty has pretended to sleep; and soon after he visits the bishonen’s sleeping mat yet again, prepared to spend the night. Yet as he turns the boy over for a kiss, Sōzaburō puts a small knife to Tashiro’s neck (later, we discover the knife has been stolen from the would-be assailant himself), making it clear that he desires no lovemaking with the lusting swordsman.

      Soon after, however, when Hijikata pairs up the two for a fight, the perceived better swordsman

Sōzaburō succumbs to Tashiro, which seemingly proves to the Vice-Commander that the two have now sexually entwined, the rumor of which quickly spreads around the barracks. The narrator, who intrudes from time to time throughout the film, makes a point that much in this all-male world is based on just such rumors.

      It is not that Sōzaburō is disinclined for male sex. When Commander Kondö is called to Hiroshima, Hijikata is put in charge of the official residence, and moves his best men, including Sōzaburō, to the Commander’s far more ornate palace. Nearby, wined and dined by an older samurai, Tojiro Yuzawa (Tomorowo Taguchi), Sōzaburō seemingly sexually succumbs to the man’s passion twice, begging him only not to tell Tashiro about the events.

      When, soon after, Yuzawa is found dead, the officers and those in the barracks all suspect Tashiro; later when asked by a sergeant whether Yuzawa attempted to have sex with him, Sōzaburō replies truthfully, but lies when he reports that he resisted.

       To help mitigate further advances, Hijikata insists that his trusted Inspector, Sergeant Yamazaki (Masa Tomiizu) take the beautiful boy to a geisha house, since Sōzaburō is still a virgin when it comes to women. Yamazaki carefully arranges everything, including choosing the establishment’s youngest and most beautiful woman. Three times after the sergeant asks the boy to accompany him to the inn, the bishonen refuses, finally, on the fourth try, accepts. The sergeant, in another effort to enforce normalcy suggests that the boy is now old enough to cut his chonmage, the long ponytail that accentuates his youth. But  Sōzaburō refuses, declaring that he has made a “vow.” To whom and why we cannot imagine. Surely not to the sexually rejected Tashiro; or has he been rejected, we must ask.

       Along the way, Sōzaburō breaks the strap of his shoe and embraces Yamazaki’s hand intensely as the sergeant attempts to help. Finally, he ensconces the boy in the proper room, and returns home. When he returns the next day to check on the encounter, the geishas report that it was a disaster, that Sōzaburō refused to lay with the girl. One proffers her belief that the boy only wanted to go to bed with Yamazaki himself, and had been waiting for him.

       Later Yamazaki is himself attacked back in quarters, but is able to scare the would-be killer away. The knife he finds nearby seemingly belongs to Tashiro.

       To solve the lustmord that is quickly escalating the Commander orders the beautiful boy to kill his presumed lover, Tashiro. He also orders Hijikata and Okita, to whose divisions Sōzaburō and Tashiro had been assigned, to hide a short distance from the encounter to observe the execution without intruding. We are, in fact, not sure that it is it an “execution” and simply not another attempt for their superiors to prove which of the two was truly the superior swordsman.

      In the moonlit quite ethereal landscape—created by an artificial backdrop—all has become ambiguous, and Okita’s questions further confuse us as he challenges Hijikata himself about his relationship with the bishonen. Yamazaki is offended. But Okita continues, describing a long ugetsu tale he has read about a soldier taking an enemy soldier he has maimed in combat into his home in order to nurse him to health. Gradually, the two become friends and find themselves growing even closer before one of them is forced to kill himself for having fallen in love.

      Troubled by all this discussion of male love, Hijikata temporarily turns the table, so to speak, wondering why Okita has been so observant of his and others’ reactions to the boy and querying his interest in such ugetsu stories.

      Okita declares not only is he “not inclined” but, in a kind of early homophobia we now might equate to being closeted, tells Hijikata that he hates both of the young recruits. He reads the ghost stories only for their beauty of their structures, not for their content.

      Sōzaburō and Tashiro approach one another, the younger boy claiming that Tashiro has killed two men over his love for him. Tashiro quickly rejects the charge, claiming that he knows that   Sōzaburō has long ago stolen his knife. As the two swordsmen begin to fight, it becomes apparent that indeed Tashiro is the superior of the two, at one point towering over his would-be lover who cries out “Forgive me.”

       That, we recall, is the cry of the executioner about to behead a prisoner. But Tashiro has arrived too late for that early execution (which it was illegal for him to attend) to recall it, or more likely, he hears it as an impassioned cry of the man he still loves. In any event, he lets up just enough for Sōzaburō to regain his position and thrust his sword in the other’s body.

       Both observers lament Tashiro’s death, recognizing that Sōzaburō has been forced to kill the other simply based on the words and views of those around him. In the brief flashes of light on the dark landscape, however, we can only note that Okita too wears his hair in a mage. Was Sōzaburō’s vow made directly or silently to him?

       If nothing else we now do suddenly recognize our John Claggart, the not unattractive man who as Melville writes, seemed “defective or abnormal in the constitution,” possessing a “natural depravity.” As the story asserts, Claggart more than anything was controlled by “envy” for Billy’s “significant personal beauty,” along with his innocence and general popularity.

       As Sōzaburō, a winner who has lost the man who most loved him, moves off down a road, Okita tells Hihikata that he has something he has forgotten to do, and moves in the direction of that the killer has taken. Alone, Hijikata suddenly comes to the perception, shouting in the direction in which Okita has now moved: “Destroy him. If you did not love Sōzaburō, Sōzaburō loved you.”

       In the far distance we hear a scream as Okita kills the boy.

     A bit like Lear, Hijikata suddenly screams out in a rage: "Sozaburo was too beautiful. Men took advantage of him. He was possessed by evil." And with that, the Vice-Commander takes up his own sword, cutting down several branches of the nearby cherry tree, ending the tragedy into which we have just awakened.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020). 

François Ozon | Une rose entre nous (A Rose Between Us) / 1994

prick of the thorn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nicolas Mercier and François Ozon (screenplay), François Ozon (director) Une rose entre nous (A Rose Between Us) / 1994 [27 minutes]

 

In Ozon’s early study of sexual experimentation and confusion, a young British woman, Rose (Sasha Hails) enters a hair salon to have her hair colored from its raven tones to ginger or “squirrel-red,” which the young apprentice stylist Paul (Rodolphe Lesage) readily accomplishes. But the moment he’s “finished, she, now speaking only in English, pretends outrage for what he’s done to her, and rushes from the shop in anger without paying, Paul fast on her heels in order to be properly recompensed for his efforts.

     After a street incident, witnessed by his fellow hairdresser Rémy (Christophe Hémon), wherein she finally offers to pay after describing him basically as a fag to his boss, he rejects her money and, winning back her power over him, she invites him to a late night club, The Palace.

     So begins what is basically an evening and morning of sexual-shifting and role-playing, as Rose gradually lures the young Paul into an agreement to prostitute themselves to two older men, she to Robert (Jacques Disse), evidently one of her regulars, while the cute hairdresser will have sex with Yves (Francis Arnaud), promising that they will earn a great deal of money, over a thousand francs for a not so difficult evening.

    

     At the same time, it’s apparent that Paul is attracted to his hairdresser friend Rémy, who also shows up at the club, eyeing Paul as someone to whom he is deeply attracted but also with a sense of judging his peer’s ridiculous infatuation with Rose.

      Rémy, who evidently sells drugs at the club, faces off with her alone, describing her as a little “con-girl,” while still attempting to sell her drugs which she promises to purchase the next evening when she will have enough money (although we have already seen her be paid for arranging to Paul to have sex with Yves).

     But for these young kids, it doesn’t seem to matter much. The men finally take both Rose and Paul to an apartment, where Rose sings a cabaret-like song as together they all dance, putting Paul in the center of a ring they form before he finally passes out from dizziness from the champagne he’s been drinking.

     Rejuvenating the boy, Rose finally convinces him to go with Yves. We watch Yves go down on Paul, while in the next room, the far more seasoned Rose refuses to have sex with Robert.

     As we see Yves toss a filled condom to the floor, it’s clear that he has fucked Paul, despite the boy’s earlier insistence that he didn’t want to be sodomized. What Paul also discovers is that Yves has paid 3,000 francs for him, while Rose has given Paul only a single note. Furious with her, he tosses even that amount back at her before attempting to rape her. But when Robert intervenes by appearing at the doorway, Paul runs off, Rose following after, apologizing for the lie and convincing him to come back home with her, where the two do indeed have sex—but a tender sex of the kind of which Rose is clearly not used to. We might even suspect that Rose is Paul’s first woman.

    Finally, he suggests that he is going out for some croissants and will be back soon, she offering him all the money which is still in her purse. He quietly rejects her offer, saying he has enough, as she watches him through window, stroking her cat, realizing that he won’t be coming back.

    The camera shows him having returned to the hairdressers, working now more comfortably with  Rémy, offering him one of the croissants he has purchased, as the two laugh together now in friendship.

     What we realize in Ozon’s work which some may read as representing child abuse, is truly a comedy, in that these three, Paul, Rémy, and Rose have used the adults, at different times, to explore their own sexual desires and orientations.

     The young unconfident 18-year-old Paul of the day before has returned to Rémy with a far deeper knowledge of himself. Like the Balthus poster that Rose has on the wall, these “children” have allowed themselves to be sexually objectified each for their own purposes of discovering how to negotiate the adult world and what sex is all about. Despite prostitution, robbery, drugs, intended rape, and sexual longing none of these youths has been truly traumatized, but are joyful in the discovery of their own desires and its expression through their bodies.

      In the 1990s French director Ozon was one of the few brave enough to explore this territory, as had filmmakers as diverse as Louis Malle, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Delannoy, Mauro Bolognini, Carlos Hugo Christensen, Lasse Nielsen, and a few others had in the more open-minded 1960s and 70s.

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).