Ben Ogunbiyi | A Walk / 2022

 work first

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacob Meadows (screenplay), Ben Ogunbiyi (director) A Walk / 2022 [4.15 minutes]

 

British director Ben Ogunbiyi along with screenwriter Jacob Meadows created this short encounter between two gay lovers, Thom (Meadows) and Seb (Vincent Rosec) apparently in a weekend.

      There is very little “story” here, but the major “event” of the film is devastating to one of the gay lovers and will probably end the relationship. Nothing is resolved and no explanations are given. We simply see the two men, Thom and Seb, beginning to enjoy their day together. Thom has evidently just bought a couple Heinekens as they take a walk. But something, Thom feels, is being held back, Seb being slow to even crack open his beer, as well as being quieter than usual. Thom stops in their tracks and holds on to tell Seb that he loves him.

      When Seb replies that there people around, Thom pulls back, realizing something is up, asking once more, “What’s going on?”

       Seb finally tells him that the promotion he has been waiting for has been offered to him.

       Thom is delighted, excited with the fact, but there are suddenly qualifications. Seb has been asked to move to Paris. Temporarily taken aback, Thom is still delighted with the news and suggests that they go out for dinner talk about it, weighing the pros and cons.

        But Seb reports that he has, in fact, already accepted the job, encouraging Thom to join him. Thom replies that his entire life is “here,” presumably London. And when he asks about the transfer date, Thom reports that it’s the very next week. Finally, as he assimilates the news, he asks Seb when he found out, Thom reporting a week ago.

         Suddenly everything strikes him, not only has his lover kept the information from him, but has planned the move without even consulting him. His suggestion that Thom join him, repeated, is simply a hollow one since everything has been decided without him being involved in any manner.

         Thom insists that he needs some space, and when Seb hovers near somewhat apologetically, he commands he leave him, that the other get away, move off.

          As I mentioned, there is no resolve. We do not see Thom thinking over the events further. Actually, what has happened has been made quite clear. And the film ends before we can observe the pain Thom surely suffers over simply being abandoned by the man he thought he loved. Seb’s immediate response of “Work first,” says it all, we perceiving just how selfish he is, forcing us to sympathize with Meadows’ character.

          Even if Thom were to suddenly find it possible to leave his work and life behind in Britain and move to France on a few days’ notice, we realize that the love between them is now over.

          That Ogunbiyi, with Meadows’ brilliant writing and acting, have conveyed all of this in something close to 4 minutes is truly amazing, and suggests the talent that might go in to making a longer short or even feature film.

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).

Dan Fry | My Son’s Best Mate / 2022

the coward

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Fry (screenwriter and director) My Son’s Best Mate / 2022 [10.20 minutes]

 

In another of the movies Australian filmmaker Dan Fry describes as his homemade films—most of these not even listed on IMDb—Fry plays an errant father who has been having sex with his university son’s best friend, Carlos (whose face we never see).

     It isn’t that he hasn’t been in a moral crisis of sorts which he has even shared with his lover, but the younger boy doesn’t see anything wrong with it and—well what older man can resist younger, muscular flesh so freely offered up to him.

      To ease his sense of guilt, the father spends most of his time in this film recording a computer video message to his son Michael in an attempt to explain his and Carlos’ relationship. The first thing he has to make clear, obviously, is why he and Michael’s mother were divorced. Although it has been hard for their son, neither parent ever provided a reason, evidently to comprehend their break up. He now admits to having lived a lie most of his life.

      Another scene between the man and his lover intrudes upon the videotaping as Carlos seems hardly able to keep his hands off the older man, who keeps attempting to tell him that he’s got some work to do.

      Continuing with the video, the father finally announces to his son that he’s gay, and that’s why he had leave Michael’s mother. And, he adds, he also has a thing for younger boys in their 20s. He doesn’t feel necessary guilty for that however, explaining that there are so many heterosexual politicians who have young girls on their arms all the time. “I just need to tell you because I don’t know how you’d feel about that, and uhhhh….”

      The film cuts again, leaving out, of course, the real reason why this man might feel some fear of a break in his relationship with his son if not with his own moral scruples. Indeed, in the very next scene we see the older man and Carlos in his bedroom having sex while in the next room, apparently, the narrator’s son is sleeping. He begs the boy to be quiet, obviously hoping to keep the relationship a secret.

      Indeed, this time Fry as director offers up an entire collage of sex scenes between the two of them using various cinematic experimental devices, including a spectral rainbow overlay outlining their hand-holding and various shots in slow-motion shot through different screens to indicate their sexual ecstasy.

      Finally, back at the video, he admits that he’s been sleeping with Carlos. And although Carlos has thought it best to keep the relationship a secret, the father feels he must be honest, at last, with his son. “I don’t think it’s right to keep it a secret from you.”

      As the father finally admits that throughout his life he’s been a coward and that he no longer wants to be one, Fry splits the screen into three, one showing the father posing at an attempt to look more fit and younger that he is, described as “The Fantasy”; the second with an image of the always faceless Carlos described as “The Reality”; and third with him, bare-chested and almost in tears described as “The Truth.” No one has ever accused Fry as being a subtle director.

      He plans to talk it over and if his son cannot accept it, he insists, he’ll stop the relationship, wanting nothing to come between dad and son.

      But just a few problems still remain: for one the relationship with the son’s best friend has already occurred and is still ongoing; even if the father were to stop seeing Carlos, it is still a difficult reality for a young college boy to digest about his father along with the fact that he’s just discovering that his father is gay. Secondly, he has chosen to first send a disembodied voice to reveal the truth, refusing to face up to his son in person. Whether or not they really meet up face to face to “discuss” the matter, the subject has been rolled out before the boy without any being behind it to further explain or react to his son’s emotional response.

     If the father has chosen not to be a coward any longer, he has certainly gone about by proving just how cowardly he still is.

     It’s hard to tell how writer/director Fry perceives his own character: does he truly see him as a man attempting to finally speak the truth or is he aware that the man is still hiding behind a screen instead of in a closet? If I were this man’s son, I’d find it more than a little difficult to forgive a father who had dished me out lies all my life and hadn’t the gumption to drive himself over to “uni” to speak to me as a real person. I also might wonder, is Carlos a kind of “replacement” for the older man’s sexual desires for me as his son. And then there’s the little matter of my best friend’s betrayal. The film seems to be heading into far more dangerous territory without really knowing it.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2023

 

Tómas Arnar Þorláksson | Niðrí Bæ (Downtown) / 2022

spurned love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tómas Arnar Þorláksson (screenwriter and director) Niðrí Bæ (Downtown) / 2022 [35 minutes]

 

Icelandic director Tómas Arnar Þorláksson’s film Dowtown is one of the best short films I’ve seen in 2022. Although the plot is quite simple and somewhat predictable, the film’s beauty, pacing, and acting is excellent.

    The story involves three friends, Sigga (Natalía Gunnlaugsdóttir), Viktor (Baldur Einarsson), and Friðrik (Mikael Kaaber) who plan a wild night on the town, beginning with drinking even as they are being driven to the club where they plan to party. Viktor, an experienced drinker who has just returned to Reykjavík is already sick and vomiting, while Friðrik seems deep in thought. Meanwhile Sigga simply chatters keeping up a party like atmosphere and attempting to keep her two young male companions, evidently longtime friends, in two.

     Both seem to be heterosexual, Friðrik unable to stop talking about a girl he’s met during the summer while Viktor was away. Since the relationship ended badly, Sigga is sick and tired of Friðrik talking about it. Viktor snaps good-looking women along the way, as they get out and walk so that Viktor can also freely vomit along route.

    By the time they get into the club, Viktor is drunk that he hugs Friðrik, telling him that he loves him, and explaining that he will have to look after him feeling the way he does. Sigga, who appears to be experimenting with lesbianism jokes that it looks like her two hetero friends are going to make out in the club even before she can find a female friend.

     But Viktor soon has to the bathroom, while Friðrik goes to the bar to get Sigga and himself of couple of tequila shots. By the time he gets back to the table, however, everything has changed. We’ve watched Viktor come back downstairs, go outside and accidently discharge vomit over the club’s front window, the bouncer disallowing his return. And Sigga seems already to have met up with a female friend.

 

    Friðrik consumes the two tequila’s himself before going on search for his friend Viktor. But as he passes through the dance floor he runs into a girl who has been an old friend Stella (Sigurbjörg Nanna Karlsdóttir), who insists he dance. Since, through a door he spots the woman with whom he had had the summer affair, Bella (Kolbrún María Másdóttir), with another man he decides to dance with the other female acquittance in order to make her jealous.

     Stella is definitely a sex fiend, insisting that they go into the alley where she kisses him and wants to give him cocaine and a blow-job, all of which Friðrik resists, but she is near relentless.

      Even worse, she’s spotted by her current boyfriend, a ruffian, Tommi, who believes that Friðrik and his girlfriend are engaging in sex, and with his two buddies beats up the resistant boy, leaving him for dead.

     Sigga finally discovers him, brings him back to life and insists she’ll call her brother to drive him home. But, of course, Friðrik has still not discovered where Viktor has disappeared to and insists on going in further search. Sigga believes he’s gone off with the football friends to another party, and they head off in the direction where the party’s being held.

      On route, however, in a scene that does challenge our ability to believe in this plot, Friðrik is almost in hit by a car in which riding his summer girlfriend and her boyfriend. The couple stop and get out to see if he is all right, and Friðrik in total anger tells her off, explaining that he cannot get her out of his mind and wishes he could hate her for what he did to him, but continues to be unable to forget their affair. When Bella tells him that since their break up, she hasn’t thought about Friðrik at all, Sigga comes forward slugs the ex-girlfriend in the face, before running off, with Friðrik following soon after.

      If the film might seem by this time to have lost all credulity, it attempts to explain the odd behavior of everyone by mentioning that there is a full moon shining down on them. And as the movie hints, Reykjavík, despite its clubs and large music scene, is still a small city where nearly everyone knows one another.

      The couple on the run finally reach the other party, and Friðrik insists to Sigga that this time when he finds Viktor, he will finally speak with him, Sigga waiting outside seemingly knowing what information he wants to share with his best friend.

       One surely might have guessed by this time, that the girl friends, the drinking, and other drugs have all be a ruse on Friðrik’s part. When he finds Viktor, they meet up in the bathroom where he finally explains that while Viktor was away he had actually made the realization that he loves him, not just as a best friend, but as a gay man. Viktor retorts that he too loves Friðrik, but can’t return the kind of love his friend is seeking. It’s too bad because we would have made a good couple, he argues, but I just don’t have those kinds of feelings. 

      So Friðrik’s love is spurned once more, a beautifully sad song by composer (Kristján Sturla Bjarnason) playing as Sigga drives him back home, the camera focusing on actor Kaaber’s lovely face.

     

Los Angeles, March 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

Karl Lakolak | Un Chien dans le puits (A Dog in a Well) / 2005

 

discovering the other

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karl Lakolak (director) Un Chien dans le puits (A Dog in a Well) / 2005 [13 minutes]

 

Quite by accident on a Russian site I tuned into the 2005 film of the theatrical production of Karl Lakolak’s work, Un Chien dans le puits in which the artist and director has painted his two male nude figures with bright neon colors, which when light is turned upon them shifts into various colors.

      The narrative dance, is one can describe it as such, is a mix of the Ballet Russes’ Nijinsky ballet of Debussy’s The Afternoon of a Faun and a sort of fable of Adam and Eve, in this case two males, credited simply as Tom and David, awakening to discover one another’s bodies.

      If this performance is not narratively profound it is terrible erotic and, more importantly, fascinating in its artistic brilliance as the two men not only discover themselves but glow with emotional layers of shifting colors of paint. There is no simple way describe this film without simply watching it. I’ve posted below a series of some shots from the film to give you an indication of its power and beauty.

 

     This is a film you have see in its full wonder of the transformation of colors and sexuality, a performance about the male painted body and balletic art.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

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).