Benjamin Morgan | Meet Joe Gay / 2000

the gay romantic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Morgan (screenwriter and director) Meet Joe Gay / 2000 [25 minutes]

 

Director Benjamin Morgan would like to make a gay romantic fairy tale, but, at 27 the longest relationship he’s ever had lasted only 3 months. So why hasn’t he found his Prince? Why has he failed on gay relationships? And why this interest in gay fairy tales?

      Toggling back and forth with the fairy tale he’s attempting to film and the questions he asks of himself along the way, Morgan tries to get to the heart of his romantic failures.

      In search of answers Morgan revisits his past boyfriend, Kevin, who he strangely asks to talk about their relationship when that was what he most complained about Morgan in the first place. “Everything was a big talk. Can we talk? There was this constant need for reassurance.” On his part Morgan remembers that Kevin wouldn’t describe them as “dating”; they were simply “spending time together.” He couldn’t even call him his boyfriend.

      They’ve now become good friends, but Kevin is also brutally honest, remembering their sex as being only “okay,” not great, but just “okay.” The honesty and opening-up eventually hurts Morgan’s still fragile ego.

      So Morgan goes to his wise friend Richard to see if he might help with some of his problems. Richard thinks one of the problems is perhaps that Morgan uses a lot of “products,” meaning make-up and facial creams (not “tools” or “toys”). We have already noticed that the director had applied a dark tanning color on the lower part of the face while seeming to forgot the top. In any event, Richard feels that perhaps that gets in the way, that Morgan is sort of looking at himself over his shoulder, so to speak, trying to be someone he physically is not.

     Morgan, accordingly, shows his make-up artist and audience his “routine.” As someone who washes his face and combs his hair at most, it does appear to me to be quite ludicrous, Morgan himself suggesting he recognizes of the absurdity of it all. “But I do it anyway,” he adds as if that explains his obsession to use makeup in the manner of that I always thought absurd—even of women, but particularly with regard to men.

      He goes home to see his parents because they have what he believes is fairy tale romance, every day each of them trying to make the other happy. In fact, they appear to be a truly loving couple. His mother suggests his expectations are far too high and, although her son believes himself to be receptive, he truly isn’t. And both parents seem to suggest that there are parts of him that simply haven’t matured yet.

      Even Morgan agrees that he may be trapped in adolescence, reiterating why most of his audience quickly discerned, that anyone at 27 who still believes in fairy tales has some growing up to do.

      In order to see if he can get some of his “adolescent funkiness” out of himself, he decides to throw a gay slumber party, which seems to be the most adolescent of all his interests in the film up to that point.

       Together they discuss gay behavior, commenting on how many gay men in their late 30s are still going out every night and doing drugs as if they were in their 20s, with a friend commenting that today’s gay boys openly break out of adolescence in their late 30s when they began to think about relationships.

       In the streets of West Hollywood, he gets reconfirmation of these views. Many of the young men came out relatively late, one at age 24, another 30-some-year-old admits he didn’t come out until two years ago, while a 40-some-year-old laughs, suggesting he never came out of “it,” that he’s the biggest kid he knows. Obviously, the very problem of coming to terms with one’s own sexuality late, delayed by the cultural and social pressures to remain heterosexual, themselves impose delayed adolescent problems. There’s so much catching up to do, as one young man complains.

       Suddenly I recalled my own youth, remembering that many of peers married right after school and others even during their last year having impregnated their girlfriends. By the time that I came out at age 20 they already had four-year-old children, while I still needed a least three more years of wildly enjoying my sexuality that I had just finally uncovered, and probably would have remained in the exploratory mode much longer hadn’t someone like Howard, my 53-year-long husband, who I knew so closely shared my intellectual, moral, and cultural values that I couldn’t dare to let him out of my life. I did find the right person, if not a “romantic prince.”

      Almost all the young men he interviewed felt they were still “catching up” on those lost years of not being able to except the sexual desires one felt.

      And there are other problems. Most young gay men don’t date in high school, or at least seriously date. Accordingly, the appropriate behavior of meeting and getting to know another person has never been learned. Indeed, I think if one might carefully explore the subject, we would discover that gay men don’t at all behave with each other on their first meetings the way heterosexual couples do. There is far more honesty perhaps, but also a deeper sense of insecurity since the rules of gender dominance and behavior has little sway in gay world, except at its extremes.

      What Morgan also notices (the year being 2000 when this film was made) is that younger boys of 17 and 18 were forming easy gay relationships that didn’t seem possible to his own generation. He interviews a couple of boys he taught in his summer film program who began just as “best friends” and quickly fell into a natural, loving relationship that was not readily possible for those who would not come to terms with their sexuality for several years in the future. When asked where they see themselves in 10 or 20 years, these young teenagers describe themselves still being together, almost unthinkable for those entered the scene 5 or 10 years beyond their current ages.

     Back at the slumber party Morgan and his friends also discuss the fact that as gay men they have no parameters, no definitions that help define or demand rules and structures to their relationships. Gay men generally do not begin a relationship by looking to raise children together, or even imagining a family. Moreover, almost all of them do not know other gay men in their later 30s and they almost all agree that know no older person in a relationship. They have no one to speak to who might advise them or stand as models to a permanent relationship.

      What doesn’t get discussed, moreover, is that these men have a much smaller pool in which to seek out others than do heterosexuals. The number of gay urban individuals is tiny compared with the heterosexual world, even in cities as large as Los Angeles. And one quickly gets to know most of the bar-going individuals available of one’s own age group.

      Joe Gay (Nicholas Downs), the Cinderella-like figure who begin Morgan’s fantasy romance, has a hard time in even climbing onto the Prince Charming’s (Joe Domenico) horse.

      Morgan finally visits an older gay couple who have been together for 41 years. They explain how they met, a kind of fairy tale story of its own. And for Morgan, the couple are living his fairy tale.

      His “wise” friend Richard suggests that gay men have to get used to the possibility that they may never meet anyone who wants a permanent relationship with them. And there is a way to accept that by realizing that living alone also has its advantages. It’s certainly better than cursing one’s life because it didn’t turn out as you expected.

      The older gay couple admit to the world I know so well: they fight endlessly, describing themselves as “The Bickersons”—which clearly dates them, given that “The Bickersons” was a popular radio show beginning on NBC in 1946, and continuing of CBS until 1951, starring Don Ameche and Frances Langford, who argued throughout each show. Even though the elderly gay couple claim they still kiss good night before going to bed and kiss each other each morning, there are still sometimes, suggests one of them, that you want to take a frying pan and knock the other over the head.

       Morgan admits that he has never bothered to imagine what happens after his Prince Charming and Joe Gay get home and settle down for the night. He admits that he had cast his friend Kevin as Prince Charming, but the role Kevin wanted to play was just “Kevin.” Morgan had tried to make him a “boyfriend” more than attempting to get to know him as a friend.

      Perhaps, Morgan ponders, he’s simply not cut out for a relationship. To be 27 years old and never yet been in love, particularly when he considers himself such a “romantic” says something about him. The myth, perhaps, has become more important than the reality, the idea taking prominence over the experience.

      The thing that almost all of Morgan’s slumber party friends most fear is to be old and alone. But what they aren’t taking into account is that even if they met Prince Charming and lives a long full life of happiness, the same ending is a likely possibility.

      All of those of older age or in relationships in this film, suggest Morgan stop trying to find someone with whom to have a relationship, to relax, open himself up to pleasure, enjoy another person, have sex, hang out, and let happen what will happen.

      But even after all of that, the director of this work cannot let go of his concept of Prince Charming. Although he hoped that the film might provide an epiphany, it didn’t anymore than his daily scanning of his world reveals the perfect person. He cannot that quickly give up his adolescent myth, which like his daily make-up routine, he knows is absurd but cannot cease.

 

Los Angeles, June 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

(W.I.Z.) Andrew John Whiston | Baby / 2000

teenage angst

by Douglas Messerli

 

(W.I.Z.) Andrew John Whiston (screenwriter and director) Baby / 2000 [12 minutes]

 

A young man (Ben Whishaw, in only his third film but only four years away from his major stage role as Hamlet), is purposely overwhelmed by female and homoerotic images. By day he visits the local public pool, mostly to serve as a voyeur as he checks out the male divers and swimmers—some of whom greet his glances with delight—finally joining them in the steam room before daring to share quick glimpses of their bodies in the shower.

 

     The skater boy also appears to be heavily into drugs, at one point sitting on his skating board shaking in a manner that looks something like a slight withdrawal.

      By night the clicks of his eyes serves him as a memory screen of images to which he masturbates, and through which British director Andrew John Whiston’s film draws its audience in as shared voyeurs, reexperiencing the narrative they have already witnessed as the almost never-ending blinks of bodily imagery we all daily encounter.

      The boy, however, is still a kind of innocent, somewhat like a child embarrassed for his own body and equally afraid to share in the world of sexualized images that he witnesses even at his local grocer, with its magazine racks of women’s glamour magazines and adult porno mags equally and openly displayed.

       When our nervous young bi-sexual finally decides to leap into the pond, so to speak, he can hardly bring himself to maneuver around the dozens of bodies, large and small which fill up the space around him. Ready to leave due to self-confidence, the sudden appearance of a female beauty in a mauve one-piece bathing suit opens his eyes to the true seduction of the flesh.

       This short film ends, however, in the men’s shower, where he has now joined all the other male swimmers who’ve been forced out of the pool due to the restricted pool hours for women only.

       Into this mass of male muscle and cock, the boy plunges almost terrorized for showing an erection. But suddenly, in comic counterpart, a naked female child appears in the doorway, moving forward without pause through the mass of male flesh in search apparently of a father or uncle. The baby is the complete opposite of the young teenage “baby,” totally unaware of any of the sexual implications of nudity or gender, demonstrating perhaps what happens to us all as we gradually become sexualized through societal pressures. Our baby boy teen hopefully might take lessons from the real baby in his midst, joyful in her body, innocent, and mindless to the meaning of sexual difference.

 

      Since this movie was filmed in 2000, both British and US culture has grown even much more nervous and self-conscious about nudity and sexual difference, perceiving nearly all nudity as a potentially dangerous manipulation of others, so that such an innocent scene would surely never have been permitted, with thousands defining it as “child porno”—which perhaps reveals just how much we are now all trapped in a teenage-like angst.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Alain Guiraudie | Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream that Moves) / 2001

finding the possible in the impossible

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alain Guiraudie (screenwriter and director) Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream that Moves) / 2001 [51 minutes]

 

In French director Alain Guiraudie’s 2001 brilliant film That Old Dream that Moves, we begin by watching a handsome young man pacing back and forth and leaning outside against the wall of the Lumière Factory. Dressed in yellow and orange, he’s a lean beauty, particularly when compared with the older and mostly portly factory workers who begin to arrive to work, some of them greeting him while others clearly questioning why the stranger is standing there.

     As the manager Donand (Jean-Marie Combelles) arrives, a bit after his fellow workers, we discover the young man’s name is Jacques (Pierre Louis-Calixte) who has been hired to disassemble and pack up an old film cutting and binding machine. And soon after, we discover, that the entire gigantic factory is closing down, the few remaining workers left being paid off as they will lose their jobs at the end of the next week.

      The workers are understandably angry and distressed with the situation, and some are suspicious of the beautiful newcomer. One by one, however, they come to the far-off shed where he is constantly in motion. Most of them no longer seem to have much work to do, and are not at all interested in helping him gradually pull away some of the heavy apparatus of the complex machine. Besides, Jacques, clearly a professional at this job, insists he prefers to work alone.

      The other workers, accordingly, mostly spend their day drinking and enjoying lunches under a series of small umbrellas set up in the grass surrounding the factory sheds, where we hear them talk about their appending joblessness and what they plan to do with the buyout money, realizing they will also soon be on welfare, with no other jobs available for them. A slightly younger man, José (Jean-Claude Montheil) is set on buying a new Porsche with his 150,000 francs, a decision that his co-workers mock. Most of these married men are either resigned to an empty future or, particularly the younger ones, bitter at being laid off.    

     In comparison to their almost purposeful idleness, Jacques is endlessly at work, having been told he must finish the disassembling and packing within a week. And these now passive workers are now curious about his obvious enthusiasm for his job. After all he has no commitment to the factory where they have worked for most of their lives. He is being paid only for his weekly job, and evidently travels about the country either disassembling or reassembling just such complex machinery.

    Nonetheless, they grow interested in the newcomer, particularly the older bearded Louis (Jean Ségani) and Donand, both of who return again and again to watch the worker, amazed at his expertise but even more importantly, drawn to him for his beauty, particularly after they get a glimpse of his naked body in the factory shower.

      Although this film is only about 50 minutes in length, it reads as a feature film given all we learn about these workers and the rural French employment situation, and particularly because of the growing intensity of the erotic world which Jacques suddenly offers them, after finding out that not only is he unmarried but is homosexual.

      Despite the obvious heterosexuality of the workers, some like Louis and Donand are attracted the young man as they see in him their own past sexual lives; and Jacques, in turn, is not at all disinterested in their attentions, evidently preferring older men.

      Jacques, in fact, seems most attracted to Donand who at one point, moving closer to his new worker in older to help him lift away a large tube, encounters the young’s man’s hand frotting his cock. As Jacques finally reaches out to fully touch it, however, he quickly backs off.

       It becomes clear that Jacques would love to have sex with Donand, and Donand is terribly tempted, but is far too traditional to actually move into Guiraudie’s sexually fluid world. Louis is not, and attempts to warn Jacques that in his interest in Donand he will only become frustrated. But as it is with so many of this director’s figures, Jacques argues you cannot explain with whom you fall in love.

      As the week comes to a close, and Jacques will be leaving, Louis invites him home to dinner, explaining, after Donand finally explains that he simply cannot share in any sexual experience, Louis admits that he has gone around for a week with a hard-on; why can’t Jacques have sex with him? Is it my weight, my age, my looks, he asks Jacques. The young man replies that it is none of these, that you simply cannot explain the vagaries of the heart. Yet, in the last scene, he does go home with the elderly Louis for dinner.

     Somehow my account above, however, does not fully capture the wonderment of Guiraudie’s small masterpiece. Lawrence Garcia, writing on Letterboxd, better captures the sense of marvel with which this film entices:

 

“Repeated locations, anchored by a mysterious machine, mark the week-long immersion: a locker room, with its brusque nudity and casual homoerotic charge; an overgrown patch of land with a motley arrangement of umbrellas; a perpetually orange-tinted corridor which the avuncular boss speeds across throughout the film. Guiraudie somehow manages to fuse a gorgeous study of light and space (esp. DP Emmanuel Soyer's luminous gradations of red) with a casually political portrait of a dying community, while still remaining attentive to both physical comedy and the subterranean emotional currents running throughout. A sense of prematurely thwarted desire permeates the air—the culmination being an offer of assistance with a pipe ("Will it take long?") and an abrupt, anxious rebuff. A reverse-shot of a locker room, previously seen in just one repeated composition, observes the aftermath: an intense, climactic rush of emotion—all the more moving for how matter-of-fact sexuality and desire is in Guiraudie's worlds; for how closed-off the lead is (‘I'm used to taking care of myself’), though he refuses to accept the border between the "possible and impossible"; and for how precisely the film sculpts around its plangency. The kind of film that pulls you in and envelops you with its warmth, then lets its immense melancholy seep into your bones, marrow-deep. ‘It's so nice to believe,’ says Jacques, even when faced with the portent of failure. And as the penultimate exchange and radiant final shot suggest: Perpetual disappointment may be the default, but it isn't everything. ‘You still coming for dinner?’ ‘Of course I'm coming.’”

 

      As Robert Koehler, writing in Variety, summarized: “The rare film whose every moment is subtly and brilliantly conceived, Alain Guiraudie‘s That Old Dream that Moves manages to avoid all cliches in its distinctive handling of a story about the closing of a rusty industrial factory and the allure of a young worker to a group of soon-to-be-unemployed men.”

 

      This is the kind of film that once you watch it, you can’t get it out of your mind. It’s as if you have gone down some kind of rabbit-hole of homoeroticism that you never before knew existed, the images returning to you again and again even in your sleep. Along with his other short feature of the same year, Sunshine for the Scoundrels, which I discuss in my next essay offering, it has made me a fan of Guiraudie that his later masterwork Stranger by the Lake (2013) didn’t quite accomplish.

    That Old Dream that Moves won the award for the best short film at the Cannes Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

 

Daniel Guarda | Naquele Dia Escur (That Dark Day) / 2022

caring in society that won’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Guarda (screenwriter and director) Naquele Dia Escuro (That Dark Day) / 2022 [29 minutes]

 

At the beginning of Brazilian director’s Daniel Guarda highly moving short drama, That Dark Day presents a day on which it seems the world might end. Jair Bolsonaro is in power in Brazil and Trump in the White House when on that day in 2019 when a city councilor Victor is taken away by car in São Paulo and presumably shot, at 3:00 the sky dark because of a meteorological phenomenon and smoke from forest fires along the Amazon highway.

      The movie then shifts to the aftermath focusing on a young trans man, Fabio (Miguel Filpi) who works as a caregiver, now focusing on an elderly woman near death, Louise (Isabelle Lenoble). Gently he daily cares for her as he silently grieves the end of his own relationship with who we later discover was the gay man Victor e Felipe (Athos Souza), the same one who has been taken away to be shot by Brazilian rightist vigilantes.

      Little by little as he shares an exercise regimen and small meals with her, she opens up about her own upbringing, and particularly her loneliness from the fact that her three well-off children all live in her native France and seldom come to visit her in Brazil. Her own relationship with her husband has been unhappy. But now with Fabio, she begins to open up sharing both her sorrows and joys of her quickly disappearing life.

   Fabio, in turn, begins to tell her of his own life, how we was adopted by a loving couple but who left him alone much of the time, while he, himself, feeling that he was a boy trapped in a young girl’s body with no one to talk to about it, and those days, no computer to rush to in order see if others felt as you did.

     A gay parade finally awoke him to his identity, as he suddenly determined to go through the process of transforming himself and his body into the handsome young hirsute man he is today.

     In the background of their gentle and loving conversations is a society that is increasingly hostile to sexual, political, and cultural differences (much like in the US), where transgender children like him must now for years before getting medical help because of governmental cuts to such programs. Victor had clearly been working for further LGBTQ+ representation in a society made of cis gender heterosexuals who have no patience for their voices in society, ideas parroted by a taxi driver in a car in which Fabio is riding to work.

     The picture ends, inevitably, with a call from Louise’s daughter Claire to tell him that her mother has died, and in the last scene we see that Fabio has now inherited Louise’s dog.

      That Dark Day is not only a lovely movie about two desperately lonely souls coming together to heal and comfort one another, but as the director himself describes it, “talks about social control and repression, gender censorship, and sexual orientation reinforced by power structures (and their consequences)….The short also reinforces discussions on discrimination, moral judgment, and psychological violence caused by heteronormativity which, in turn, suggests and elaborates behavioral patterns within social structures. That Dark Day entertains while speaking about cultural habits, deconstructs taboos and prejudice, and connects the viewer to different realities in divergent fields.”

      This truly melancholy and lovely movie won the “Silver Rabbit” award as the Audience’s Choice for the Best Brazilian Short Film Festival of Diversity Culture in 2022.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Mark Pluck | Hornbeam / 2022

strangers in love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Lane (screenplay), Mark Pluck (director) Hornbeam / 2022 [16 minutes]

 

Two middle-aged men (Daniel Lane and Christopher Sherwood) meet up in a rural English parking lot, driving a short ways to have gay sex. The latter discerns immediately that the first is a gardener and presumes that he’s snuck away his wife and kids. He admits that he is living with his parents.

     But he is also a difficult lover, immediately commenting on the other’s bad breath. And soon after the driver of the red van takes the rider (Sherwood) back to the lot, he apologizing for “wasting” the other’s time.

      Hereafter, since the characters are not given names, I’ll refer to the first man as the driver, the more difficult other as the rider.

     The two meet up again, despite the failure of previous night, the next evening, the driver suggesting that the other simply seemed like a nice guy. They talk a little, the fussier rider making it clear that he’s closeted, still presuming that his friend is married. Just as they begin kissing a car drives up behind them, flashing its lights, the rider presuming the driver has brought him to an “dogging” area, a public place where others can watch sex or participate with a third party.

     The rider, terrified of the situation, demands they leave immediately, the driver suggesting that they tease the doggers a bit, flash their own lights back. Indeed, their car won’t start right off, which further frightens our rider, but eventually they move away.

      At least, they have something now to share, to laugh about. And they determine to meet up again the next night, our rider insisting however the driver not take him again to the alley where they encountered the “doggers.”

      On the next occasion our rider finally asks the driver about his gardening talents. He explains that his grandfather was a gardener who worked for a large estate and taught him as a child all the Latin names of the plants. When the rider points to trees nearby, the gardener immediately describes them as pinus spetalis or hornbeams, a European species of the North American beech tree. The driver even sings a song about his “Johnny” who he doesn’t want to forget him very soon.

      It now appears that their meetings are becoming quite regular, and they are discovering new things about one another. The rider can’t believe that his friend has chosen to listen to classical music, something only old people or his schoolboy friends do. Suddenly he becomes convinced that his friend must be a Tory. “I can’t believe I’ve been kissing a Tory boy!”

      The so-called “Tory boy” retorts back that he hadn’t known that he’s been kissing a “champagne socialist.”

      Later, after apparently having made love, the two are sitting together, the driver asking if the rider would dare to hold his hand in public. To his surprise, the hesitant rider says he could, that he might have a drink or two first, but he might. It is the most gentle and loving moment of this short film, the only time when the two have not been on the move, so to speak, getting to know each other almost the way a rider in a taxi or rented car might get to know the life of his driver over a long voyage.

      Driving either later that night or on another meet-up, the gardener explains he seems to have obtained his first garden designing job. And he suggests that they get something it eat.

      Back at the parking lot, the rider suddenly admits he really likes the other, but realizes, he argues, that it’s all a bit ridiculous, that this is as far as their relationship can go since the other is married.

     There is a pause as the driver slowly reveals that he is not married. “You assumed I was, and, I don’t know, I just didn’t say anything.” He further admits he’s in a relationship with another guy.

      The rider leaves the car and walks over to ocean near where they’ve stopped. Eventually the driver joins him, now admitting that he’s been in the relationship for 12 years or so, but hints it just isn’t meaningful anymore. He can’t just leave his friend, he explains, because “I guess I don’t want to break his heart.”

       The illicit lovers hug one another good-bye. And the next night the driver waits once more with his van. His friend understandably does not show up and when he calls up his rider, the phone in now hooked to a machine that reports he is no longer available.

        The presumptions that both of these men have made about one another were mistaken and destroyed any love that might have helped them to turn their meetings into a true relationship. It is as if they truly had been speaking different languages, living in different worlds, separated by conflicting cultures.

        Mark Pluck’s quiet and subtle film was nominated for an Iris Award.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).