Xavier Dolan | J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) / 2009

a whiny winding road

by Douglas Messerli

 

Xavier Dolan (screenwriter and director) J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) / 2009

 

Xavier Dolan’s semi-autobiographical film, I Killed My Mother—written by him at the age of 16, and which he directed and self-produced at 19 or 20 (the reports vary) with himself starring in the central role of Hubert Minnel—is a film you desperately want to like.

    Since the film won awards at the Cannes Film Festival, the best Canadian film of the Vancouver Film Critics Circle, and numerous other awards, including one for his script, apparently a great many audiences and critics have done just that, not only “liked” the film, but loved it, the audience at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight awards giving it a standing ovation of 8 minutes. As Film Comment critic Genevieve Yue wrote: the film “demonstrates the kind of phenomenal precociousness that publicists adore.”

     Moreover, there is much to commend about the cinematography, accomplished by Stéphanie Weber Biron and Nicolas Canniccioni, but carefully overseen and, at moments, edited by Dolan—particularly the scene wherein he and his gay lover, Antonin Rimbaud (François Arnaud) drip-paint Antonin’s mother’s office with the two, at the end, falling into a sexual release after their highly physical Jackson Pollack-like artistic expressions. If the messy result of their arty attempts doesn’t live-up to their apparent mentor, the painting process clearly has represented a great deal of loving fun.

     The New York Times critic Rachel Saltz writes of Dolan’s visual tactics:

      

 “As a director, Mr. Dolan has a freewheeling style, and he’s self-dramatizing enough to want to call attention to it without being too much of a visual show-off. He likes extreme compositions—pushing characters to the side of the frame, or to the bottom—and he makes use of slow motion (and fast motion) and those black-and-white sequences of Hubert confiding to a video camera as if it were a diary (a diary whose moody visuals might seem a bit Gap ad-ish in another context). His second movie, the swoony charmer Heartbeats, takes its style even more seriously, both in its allusive execution—he draws giddily from things like the Nouvelle Vague and Wong Kar-wai—and its subject: self-fashioning and teasing, unfulfilled desire.”

 

     Finally, as the churlish young hero of his tale, Dolan is a cute curly mop haired young man in the manner of Timothée Chalamet (but with hair trimmed a bit shorter) who is so attractive that it’s hard to wish anything he might turn his hand to—and, in particular, something so closely linked to her own persona—might in any way be disliked.

     Nonetheless, for me the charm quickly wore away when I began thinking of the film I had just seen. The film is centered, first of all, on the hero’s relationship with his mother, an inexplicably hostile one that, after a while, simply doesn’t make sense. Obviously, as most young people in their last years of high school feel, parents are hopeless in their restrictive viewpoints and, often, just in the way their kids perceive almost all adults as being culturally out of touch. Those tensions were most definitely played out in my own high school parental relationships.

      Hubert, however, absurdly exaggerates those feelings regarding his mother, Chantale Lemming—presumably, Lemming being her maiden name to which she has returned after her husband, Hubert’s father and she divorced. Chantale (a wonderful Anne Dorval, who reminds me a great deal of the young Shirley MacLaine) is obviously bourgeois, their home (apparently filmed in Dolan’s real familial domicile) filled with bric-a-brac, while her life, when she isn’t busy working to support herself and Hubert, is consumed by trips with her friend on shopping excursions (during which she purchases clothing that is in outrageously bad taste) and to a local beauty shop to get “a complete redo”—in the latter of which she runs into Antonin’s far more hip mother (Patricia Tulasne) who accidentally reveals to Chantale that her son and Hubert have for some time been involved in a gay relationship.

      Chantale seemingly has little difficulty in dealing with her son’s sexuality, but is deeply hurt that he has not dared to tell her. But, in fact, that is Hubert’s problem throughout this work, outwardly dismissing his mother for nearly everything, from her daily eating habits to the way she applies makeup in the car while driving him to school each morning. And after a while, the constant disapproval of her son turns into one long whine that dominates what are the more serious issues which the work later attempts to explore: his sexual awkwardness and his frustration for not being able to recover the joyfully beautiful mother he recalls from his childhood.

      Even if we chalk up Hubert’s constant discomfort with his mother as part of what the character’s authorial voice is also mocking, it’s somewhat difficult to separate the two. And particularly, when most of the glimpses we have of Hubert is lying in bed with his lover while they smoke joints, we can only wonder at the sense of superiority this endless complainer seems to hint at. No, he does not go so far as to actually “kill” his mother, but spiritually he does, taping self-interviews as if being drilled by an unseen psychologist in which he memorializes his feelings: “Deep down I love her, but it’s not the love of a son.” Indeed, when assigned by a teacher to write about his parents, Hubert takes her aside to reveal that since he was a child he has seen his father only at holidays and that his mother has died, virtually assigning her to a coffin.

      Naturally outranged when Chantale discovers from her son’s teacher what he has done, the battle between the two switches from his simple whining to an outright war. He determines to get an apartment of his own, to which she at first agrees but almost immediately after refuses to permit, insisting that he is simply too young. For a couple of days, pretending to be staying with his friend Antonin, he sleeps on his teacher’s couch.

    An invitation by Hubert’s father for dinner further confuses the boy until both his parents, after conferring with each other, report they now intend to send him to a Catholic boarding school in another town, perhaps the only apparent example of bad parenting we have seen in this film to date.

      Now torn from his lover as well as from the routine of his previous school, Hubert discovers that even this stricter school, as Antonin has predicted, has plenty of gay and lesbian students, and temporarily he has a fling with a classmate named Éric (Niels Schneider), who invites him to join him at a night spot with other students where they openly kiss and take Speed.

       In his heighted focus of perception, Hubert suddenly regrets having betrayed Antonin and escapes his new school via the Metro to return home, talking endlessly—which is what one does on Speed—while poignantly admitting to his mother “I love you. I’m telling you so you won’t forget.” We know it will be a short-lived sensation.

      The next morning she drives him to Antonin’s home and they spend the morning painting the office, as described above, ending up in sex—the first time this movie has actually portrayed the boys’ love-making, a nice relief from the melodrama of the rest of the film.

      Back in his boarding school Hubert is attacked that evening by two of the school bullies. Confused, and feeling he has now completely lost touch with his past, Hubert disappears.

     Chantelle—receiving a telephone call at her office from the school principal about Hubert’s escape—quickly discerning that the administration is more worried about the irregularity of her son’s behavior than actually worrying about his well-being—suddenly spews out a torrent of anger which we recognize she has long been holding within, particularly after the administrator suggests that, as a single parent, she may be unfit.

   Her rage boils over as she catalogues the thousands of sacrifices she has made for the sake of her son, the hours she’s worked, the abuse she’s accepted in silence, and most importantly, the pride and admiration she still feels for her child, cutting off any further possible connections with a world she realizes will only attempt to replicate the sense of male privilege and exceptionalism the principal himself exudes. It is as if she has only now come to realize that the most remarkable thing is that she and her son have together come to be so extraordinary in their odd (we might say queer) differences.

 

     Leaving her a clue to his whereabouts—Hubert has left a note stating that he can be found “In his kingdom”—she rushes to her former husband’s country cabin, the location of both her and Hubert’s joy during his childhood.

      There, for the first time, she meets the legendary Antonin, acknowledging his love for her son, before the film, in a kind of breakdown into sentimental nostalgia infused with a yellow-colored lens, attempts to recover for the viewer her and Hubert’s loving past, the picture closing with a movie clip of Hubert the child playing by beach with his doting mother.

      I can forgive Dolan’s Hallmark Card tribute to the much maligned and symbolically buried mother, but am a bit impatient by the whiny winding road it took to get there. Even Antonin describes the man he loves as being more than a little selfish. Does it really take an old-fashioned homophobic bashing to knock some sense into this boy genius’ head?

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).

Don DiCillo | Box of Moonlight / 1996

finding his very own pan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don DiCillo (screenwriter and director) Box of Moonlight / 1996

 

In the midst of the glorious rolling wildlands, with seemingly pristine forests, lakes, and rivers, is a small Tennessee town with the usual small town look-alike chain-owned dining spots, a sprawling strip club, and new a factory going up on the edge of town, to be powered by a Zeus dynamo electric generator to mass produce window-shield wipers. In the town live also the usual hillbilly mechanics, mean-spirited elderly men and women, and masses of citizens who come running the minute one of their brethren spots a figure in a billboard that looks like Jesus Christ.

    Staying in the nearby Quality Inn motel are the workers building the new factory on the edge of town including their Chicago-based boss, the finicky and basically unfriendly company robot Al Fountain (John Turturro), feared and mocked by his employees, a fact he knows but discovers more fully while standing outside a room one night where his workers are playing poker as they express their feelings that, having just been invited by their foreman, he will not show up. Al would suck up all the joy even out of family July 4th celebration, which in a few days is about to occur, he reminding his young boy with each telephone call that fireworks are illegal, while he demands instead that the kid learn his multiplication tables.

       Even his wife, describes Al as a piece of “clockwork,” a human under the thrall of time; and throughout the film Turturro’s character not only telephones home to his wife Deb (Annie Corley) and his son Bob (Alexander Goodwin) at precisely the same time each evening, but clocks his comments to himself, which have become increasingly more common. Moreover, he has begun to have impossible visions, a strand of gray hair that he has plucked from his dark black mane falls to the floor as if in slow motion. When waitresses pour water or coffee, the liquid flows backwards, out of the cup and back into their pots. A young boy bicycles backwards past the bus the workers take each day to their work site. 

      In another words, Tom DiCillo’s 1996 film Box of Moonlight is, on one level, a fairly conventional story about a man undergoing a mid-life crisis. If at first, Al hasn’t a clue as to what is happening to him, when an executive helicopter flies in to announce that work on the new plant is to immediately cease, he does not, as do the others, gladly take his bonus and hurry off home. Lying to his wife, Al determines to stay on the few days more at the closed-job job than it was to have taken and travels to a lake where he remembers in which that as a child he had a wonderful time swimming out to a large slide in the middle of the water, which sent him flying off its lip like a bird in flight.

      No one remembers the place he calls Splashy Lake, but after a long drive the following day, he does eventually find Splatcee Lake with its old slide crumbling into pieces, the water filled with formaldehyde leaked from a nearby factory. There he encounters a seemingly friendly couple who briefly share in his nostalgia about the days of the original park before attempting to convert him to their born-again religion, Al hurrying off in disgust, even his lame attempt to discover some of the missing joy in his life having also ended in failure. On the news, we later see the same man after he has axed to death of his “followers.”

    But around the very next bend of the road he spins out in terror in his attempt to miss hitting a stalled car owned by an eccentrically dressed young man (Sam Rockwell) who calls himself “the Kid,” costumed as Davy Crockett, trappings he has stolen from a movie set because after trying it on; “it just fit perfect,” as if made for him.

      The Kid, utterly stymied by the car’s breakdown, asks if the electrical engineer might know anything about car engines, and before Al can answer with a weak, “probably,” he finds himself in the driver’s seat of the boy’s broken down Cadillac with the Kid in the front seat of his rental car, the two chained together as they tow the broken-down auto to the young’s man “house.”

      His home, it turns out, is the outer shell of a deteriorating trailer, at the back of which, in the midst of a forest grove, sits a bed defining a kind of bedroom, a couch standing in for a living room, and benches pretending to be dinner tables all lit up with strings of festive lights that  celebrate, as the Kid describes it, “going off the grid.”

    Told that there are no hotels for miles and given the late hour of their final arrival, Al has no choice but to fall into the open-air bed, while the Kid snuggles up exhaustedly in his couch. Like clockwork, Al wakes up to join the Kid in a breakfast of mashed-up Oreo cookies and milk, ready to drive back to his motel and probably back into his routine life—but not before the Kid shanghaies him for a quick trip to the local garage for his car’s new distributor, and, through a series of tricks and deceit, which includes the inexplicable loss of rental car’s keys, holds Al a virtual prisoner for a few days in what Al soon discovers is paradise.

     The two go swimming naked (the Kid at least) at a local water hole, steal tomatoes and eat  them fresh from the vine, play vineyard games that result in the police showing up to arrest what they think are delinquent kids, and after evading the cops, they share a short trip through the nearby forest at the edge of which sits new factory being built which the Kid is certain is government installation to create nerve gas. It happens to be the very windshield wiper factory that Al and his men were building, all this time, he now realizes, having been only a few steps away from the wonderous new world that the boy has shown him. His stay ends with an Independence Day celebration that includes hamburgers, hotdogs, corn-on the cob, a wild display of illegal fireworks, two girls (Catherine Keener and Lisa Blount) the boys have met at the local swimming hole, and before the night is over, they share the absolute pleasure of sex.

     Al discovers in the Kid a gullible boy who loves professional wrestling—which he watches on his found TV screen powered by electricity stolen from a nearby powerline—refusing to believe the truth when Al tells him that it’s just a stage performance in the way that some Southern folk still today refuse to believe the truth about presidents and elections.

        Upon being beaten up by the two local goon mechanics, the Kid breaks down in tears when Al attempts to hold him back from seeking revenge, the boy hugging Al desperately in his momentary defeat like a father he probably has never had.

        And despite all of the Kid’s thievery—which extends to wooden statues of deer and gnomes that people put out on their lawns as objects of beauty which he resells to local buyers to pay for the little food he consumes (Al has purchased all the 4th of July eats and liquor)—the boy has a private moral code that would shame any priest or elected official.

        All of which leads Al to his own deceptive tricks, postponing the delivery of his car keys in order to stay on just a little bit longer before returning to the routine that is at the center of his growing angst.

        As I mention elsewhere in these pages, a straight friend of mine once said with regard to the film On Golden Pond, “All you need to make an older man happy is to put him on a boat with a beautiful boy fresh with the wonder of the world.” If Al and the Kid don’t bother to board a boat, together they have a near-ecstatic adventure sailing through the few days they spend with one another, engaging in a deep kind of hetero love that is close to that shared by Enrico Salvatore "Ratso" Rizzo and another grown up kid in a queer costume, Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. 

        These are heterosexual men behaving somewhat like kids in their exploration of each other’s minds and bodies, for of course the only real solution to a midlife crisis is to meet up somehow with Peter Pan, the lost boy who, having never grown up, who can take you to Never-Never Land, a queer world that opens up all your closeted desires. And who doesn’t love Pan?

        Only in this case, alas, Al has been his own Captain Hook followed about by his crocodile clock. But by joining forces with the enemy, Al comes through, realizing that all his visions of time going backwards where in his head, available any time he wanted them, as nearby to life as his factory was to this back-hills paradise. Being spot on the grid and off is only a matter of traveling through a few synapses of the brain.

        When he finally does drive off into the sunset, pausing ruefully to wave goodbye to his Peter Pan, Al returns home with gifts, a little pack of the least dangerous of fireworks for his Bobby, and a box that the Kid has given him upon his leaving, which so the boy insisted captures the moonlight that falls so visibly upon his open-air house. Al suggests Deb might want to use it as a jewelry box.

      When she opens it, of course, the moonlight escapes without her seeing it. But under its purple lining she discovers something very strange, a pair of rental car keys. I wonder who these belonged to, she muses?

     Evidence, once more, that the heterosexual world needs queer reality to learn how to survive, DeCillo's lovely film demonstrates, without threatening sexual identity, how "the other" is necessary to help the majority to enhance and redeem their lives.

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

 

Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (as Larry and Andy Wachowski) | Bound / 1996

 plumbing the depths of lesbian desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (as Larry and Andy Wachowski) (screenwriters and directors) Bound / 1996

 

The 1996 movie Bound begins with a scene we’ve all encountered a thousand times before in cinema, a woman enters an elevator with a man, her eyes glancing over at the other passenger, taking the person in with a knowing and lusty glance, which is returned, eyes meeting, bodies surveyed, a get-together assured, particularly when they both get off on the same floor, the stranger headed to the room next door to the apartment the man and woman enter. The fact that we soon discover that the woman’s boyfriend is mafia, is even familiar. As in so many movies of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, this promises to be to be a long, slow-paced film wherein obviously the lone passenger is going to be in for some difficult times until he gets the girl away from the danger which he has just assessed.

     Except—this seemingly familiar scenario has, in fact, seldom been played out before, because that passenger is not another male looking upon the foreign territory he would like to conquer, but another woman, a tough lesbian broad, who’s just been released from prison for robbery, now hired to completely redo the plumbing, walls, and floors of the condo next door. The seemingly ditzy mafia gal, Violet (Jennifer Tilly) is, in fact, only playing that part to keep her job as a long-time partner with benefits until a better opportunity and a tastier sexual tidbit comes along. And with Corky (Gina Gershon), opportunity and sexual allure have suddenly arrived in the very same instant.

     Violet loses no time, trotting over next door to see if Corky might help her get back her earring she has “accidentally” dropped down the drain. This plumber not only retrieves the earring, but like all plumbers shows her crack, the two getting it on so suddenly that there’s no turning back.

      If Corky, equally attracted, is a bit cautious at first, before you can even spell the name of the famous head of the Chicago crime syndicate for whom Caesar works, Gino Marzzone, Violet has not only bedded Corky but managed to hint at a way out of her 5-year relationship with her gangland money-laundering boyfriend, Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), a relationship she convinces Corky she has performed simply as if it were a job.

      Just to make sure you know what they’re up against, the directors, referred to in 1996 as the Wachowski brothers, arrange the torture of a gangland executive, Shelly (Barry Kivel) who’s managed to lay away 2 million dollars of syndicate funds. In brutal 1990s cinema style, the monstrously perverted son of Gino, Johnnie manages to torture the in-house thief by punching and beating him, jamming his head down the toilet several times, cutting off his fingers one by one with a garden shears, before, off screen, shooting him in the head at the very moment he reveals the hiding place of the cash. In short, this is what these men do for a living—when they’re not beating up their girlfriends or their wives. Any sympathy we might have for them later, has already been erased.

       Caesar has been assigned this time to quite literally launder the now bloody money, the man staying up late to wash and press every single $1000 dollar bill and hang them throughout the apartment to dry before Gino arrives the next afternoon to collect the restored loot.

     Gino, it so happens, drinks only Glenlivet scotch. So, according to Corky, it’s easy. Violet, in preparing a cleanup for their august guest will accidentally drop the bottle, forcing her to run out to get some more. And while she’s out, Corky will sneak in while Caesar is showering and getting gussied up, and steal the loot which Caesar has by this time counted, stacked, and packed away in a locked briefcase. It’s a cinch. Corky steals the money, fills the briefcase with heavyweight cardboard, and places the stash in a plastic bag buried deep within a paint container next door.

       As arranged, Violet returns with the scotch, tells Caesar she’s just seen Johnnie leaving, and waits for her suspicious boyfriend to wonder just enough to check on the cash. He does, and just as planned, suspects Johnnie of having entered and stolen it.

       The next step, so Violet and Corky presumed, would be for Caesar to flee, knowing that Gino would assume that Caesar, not his beloved Johnnie had robbed him. But Caesar, behaving somewhat irrationally, as women in such situations are often portrayed, knows that if he runs, he as much as admits he has stolen the loot. He decides to confront Johnnie in front of Gino. Realizing that suddenly everything has begun to unweave. Violet panics and threatens to leave. But Gino, now claiming he needs her more than ever, beats her and forces her to stay on for the arrival of Gino, Johnnie and the bodyguard, Roy.

        Caesar and Johnnie have long gotten on each other’s nerves, Caesar, in particular, detesting his hot headedness and his constant flirtations with Violet. When Johnnie, after arriving immediately begins to hit on Violet, Johnnie taunts him, finally pulling out a gun and announcing that Johnnie has stolen the cash. When Gino realizes that the money is gone and Johnnie appears trapped in Caesar’s accusations, both get ready to turn on Caesar, he having no choice but to kill them and the bodyguard. The gunshots, obviously, frighten the neighbors, as well as their special next-door neighbor listening in to their every move. The police arrive and before they can reach the apartment from their front door buzz-in, with Violet stalling them, the already exhausted Caesar drags the bodies into various other rooms, attempts to clean up and cover up the blood pooling on the living room floor, and together with Violet calmly meets up with the police explaining that he’s been listening to TV rather loudly since he's going deaf. Somehow, even with blood seeping through their shoes, one of the cops sharing the toilet without even noticing the body in the bathtub, Caesar convinces them that nothing suspicious has been going on.

     The next impossible step is for him and Violet to visit Johnnie’s apartment to find the missing money. Just as in so many previous gangster movies, he trashes the place in search of the loot, of course without finding anything. In order to waylay Gino’s other mob palls, he telephones Mickey, Gino’s best friend from Johnnie’s landline, faking Johnnie’s voice, that his father never arrived at the airport.

      By this time, however, Caesar has begun to suspect other possibilities, and when he catches Violet attempting to make an illicit call, hearing the phone ring through the wall, he figures out that, in fact, the robbery has been another “in-house: job. Threatening Violet with the same garden shears as Johnnie has used on Shelly’s fingers, her scream brings Corky running to their door. After a good fight, Caesar slugs them both out, ties up Corky and drags her into the closet—signifying the terrible life she has long ago thought she escaped. To gain more time he forces Violet to call Mickey and explain that Gino and Johnnie are in the hospital after a car accident.

      Having found out that the money is next door, he drags Corky to that apartment to find the money. Violet meanwhile escapes, calls Mickey to tell him Caesar took the money, and returns, gun in hand, to save Corky from the consequences.

      So far, however, although the women have certainly made it clear that they are extremely clever and have almost outfoxed their male counterparts, the story seems to be going in the direction of so many other films about gay figures throughout cinema history, those movies so brilliantly documented by Vito Russo that end with the LGBTQ figure dead.

       If nothing else, it surely appears it will fit the pattern of what B. Ruby Rich has described in her essay, “Lethal Lesbians: The Cinematic Inscription of Murderous Desire,” of the other “lesbian chic” murder movies and real-life situations such as the serial murderer Aileen Wuornos (arrested in 1991), Thelma and Louise (1991), Catherine in Basic Instinct (1992), the teenage girls Hillary and Bonnie in Fun (1994), the similarly young girls of Heavenly Creatures (1994), and the Papin sisters of Sister, My Sister (1994)—all in either lesbian or close sisterhood relationships—who were forced to suffer the penalties of taking on the male prerogative of violence through death or imprisonment.

      Even as Violet holds a gun to his head, Caesar is convinced that she really loves him enough to be unable to pull the trigger, that the female weakness for romance will always save the far more hard-headed and brutal male of the not-so-human species. She proves him wrong in an instant, blowing his head off and escaping almost as a mob hero with the money, Caesar suspected as having hidden or destroyed it. She and Corky head off into the sunset in a newly purchased truck to live a life of sexual fulfillment without an iota, evidently, of guilt for the men from which they have ridden themselves.

      As Rich summarizes the situation: “…They get to drive off into the sunset, not just the Grand Canyon, after committing the perfect crime: they get away with murder, and money, a gun, and most of all, each other. It took five years to get there, a half decade of eroticized vengeance.”

     Rich also observes that the truck they speed off in is blood red, a haunting reminder of the significance of the lesbian menstrual blood that permeated the earlier lesbian murder flicks as well as the numerous lesbian vampire films, Jean Rollins' 1979 Fascination serving as an early emblem, before AIDS made it necessary to remove that association.

      Almost as interesting is the fact that the two brothers’ directorial premier met with negative reaction by executives at some studios who insisted that they could do the film only if the character of Corky where to become a man. The siblings refused the suggestion, arguing “that movie’s been made a million times, so we’re not really interested…”

      Larry Wachowski began transitioning to a woman in the early 2000s, and formally announced that she was now a woman, Lana Wachowski in 2008, appearing as a fully transitioned female in 2012. Her former brother Andy came out as a transitioned woman, Lilly in 2016. Obviously, the Wachowski’s even back in 1996 had sympathized with the female point of view enough that they knew where they wanted to take their powerfully liberating movie.

 

Los Angeles, May 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Chris Greenwell | Rainbow / 2018

the courage to stand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Greenwell (director) Rainbow / 2018 [music video]

 

All right, they’re a cute boy band made up of Jay, Mike, Randy, David and Gama called ECHO V, first names only. They’re cute and their songs and rhythms are a nice blending of such boy band’s pleasing harmonies.

    But this boy band is slightly different given the fact that all are openly gay and out. No hiding it in their first release, “I am a Rainbow,” featuring visually a Gay Pride parade. The song with lyrics by Mike March and Jay Maq, music by Zak Lloyd may be nothing special, but it is a musical celebration of being gay, which speaks loudly to the LGBTQ community and puts this pleasing group of young men on the map.

 

Walking down this path of gold

trying to find my way real life got

to fit a mold want to fly like blue birds do

but my dreams I'll see them come true

and one day I will have a story

for you I won't be afraid to say I know

I have the courage to stand

I know the rhythm of my heart will be

I know I am the rable I am

the rainbow I am a rainbow

 

      It’s truly important that such young groups are now being featured, and I enjoyed their energetic performances.  

 

Los Angeles, April 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2025). 

Tabitha Russell | Undone / 2018

a polemic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joshua Walker (screenplay), Tabitha Russell (director) Undone / 2018 [13 minutes]

 

Jarod (Joshua Walker) and Chris (Dwain Duran) meet at a party, but don’t really communicate. Jarod’s female friend hints that he’s enlisting in the Marines and he’s apparently not gay.

     However, a few days later Jarod runs into Chris on his daily jog, Chris asking if he’d like to go for a drink. We see the two, Chris walking a somewhat drunk Jarod home after their bar visit. At the door, Jarod turns, asking, “So, was this a date?” immediately regretting his statement and blaming it on his drunkenness. But Chris quickly moves forward with a kiss, responding “Yes, it was a date.”

     In between, are brief clips of the current event that is at the very center of this 2018 film by Tabitha Russell “The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” regulation regarding homosexuality in the military implemented in 1994 as a compromise measure during the Bill Clinton administration as opposed to a complete ban on homosexuals in the armed services. The rule was finally repealed in 2011. During the years of existence, 13,650 (other sources suggest as many as 17,000) military men and women were discharged, 889 of them Marines, the branch in which Chris enlisted.       

     In a somewhat larger perspective, we get a quick history of Jarod and Chris’ relationship as Chris becomes a Marine, falls in love with Jarod and finally wants to marry him. Jarod is still warry, given the fact that Chris has still not spoken about his sexuality with his parents, something he argues vociferously that he is not ready to do.

     In the very next frame he is sitting with his lover explaining that he’s gay, a fact that his parents readily embrace.

     However, it has just been announced that the policy has been reinstated, and Chris has been called in to his commander’s office to be told that he is a good soldier, but it would be better if he simply ended his open and widely shared relationship with Jarod. Chris declares that he will never again deny it, and leaves the office, beginning and ending the film in the shower, breaking down into tears for having been forced to make the decision between the man he loves and his career.

     The right to marry through the Supreme Court decision was in 2015, so presumably what we are seeing is an imaginary event motivated by Donald Trump’s decision to ban transgender individuals from the military in 2017, with fears that he might reinstate the general “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. And in that respect, this film is a call to arms over something that, fortunately, never occurred—although it certainly may have for transgendered couples.

     On the one hand, its sentiments of any such governmental policy against LGBTQ individuals and their current rights is still very much an issue, and the emotions that this short work bring up are still worthy of reexploring. The trouble is that we don’t really get to know these figures very well. Why did Chris join the military? Why did he choose it as a career? What do these two very different men see in one another? What is the basis of their love? And what is Jarod’s career? If such a thing were to happen, might he be able to support them in their relationship? In such a polemic, these are crucial questions. If we are to be emotionally moved by the possible consequences, we need to know more about what these two have invested of themselves in their choices.

     Unfortunately, a film about an event that never happened featuring characters that we know little about doesn’t, in the end, really amount to much.

     But then, we later came into the second Trump days when these matters truly mean something.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).