Wiktor Grodecki | Tělo bez duše (Body without Soul) / 1996

the lost boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wiktor Grodecki (screenwriter and director) Tělo bez duše (Body without Soul) / 1996

 

Grodecki’s second film in his trilogy (Not Angels but Angels, 1994; Body without Soul, 1996; and Mandragora, 1997) of young gay Czech prostitutes—or hustlers as many of them prefer to define themselves as heterosexual—begins simply with the boys, aged 14-17, simply introducing themselves and admitting to their “professions.” Slowly the interviewer gets them to begin  describing how they got involved with being a prostitute, and most of them seem ready to describe their situation, often involving running away from home, being kicked out of their houses for being gay or criminal activities, or losing their parents to death and winding up, for these and other reasons in the Prague railroad station sex shop, nearby video arcades, the Podolí swimming pools, or nightclubs like the Riviera where they are met by homosexual tourists who lure them into their beds. Later they meet up with other boys who tell them how to pick up strangers or are scouted by pimps who offer them what they are all seeking and very much in need of, money.

    They seldom get paid what they are told they might, although some of the scores of mostly German, Swiss, Austrian, and Dutch gay tourists do pay them fairly, mostly for a quick blow job; but others demanding and even forcing, if the boy insists he is straight as most of them do, anal sex. Almost all of them seem in Grodecki’s earliest interviews to be now well accustomed and even somewhat “adjusted” to their roles as quick sex pickups for male tourists. Prague is one vast brothel, as one of the boys says late in the film, and they are there, under the terms of the capitalist system, to give pleasure to those of the tourists searching for young boys. Several of them even knowingly bemoan the fact that since the younger, sometimes pre-puberty street boys are willing to do anything for less, that they have had to bring down their own prices.

      Some writers have described the boys as appearing glum, dour, or doomed, but in these earlier sequences I would simply say they are aware of the lives—depending upon the charity of your viewpoint—they chose or was forced upon them. Some of them are clearly more alert and less seeming drugged-out than others, and some of the boys are particularly intelligent in their comments, one of them asserting that even if they mostly claim to be heterosexuals, they are clearly, given the vast number of men they weekly service, either bisexual or gay. One hold-out, who declares he is not only heterosexual but hates homosexuals (“I don’t like the fact that homosexuals exist. The Bible tells us that Adam and Eva had children. If they were homosexuals they couldn’t have any children.”) admits to having had sex with 200 men, and when asked how many girls, answers: “Four.”

     One might instead of describing them as doomed—which of course they most certainly are given the fact that in a couple of years or so these boys will no longer be of interest for the tourists with money. I would describe almost all of them as deluded. Although some of them do use condoms with their customers, others argue that there the Czech Republic doesn’t have much AIDS, or that they don’t fear death, or that AIDS is simply a myth, or somehow since they don’t allow themselves to be fucked, but only swallow, they’ll be safe. While at the same time Grodecki speaks to one of their friends who has tested positive for AIDS, facing his death now for a year as he speaks from a prone position in bed, unable to explain how he got the disease, suggesting it was perhaps from the movies.

  

    Indeed, it is only when these boys begin to open up about their meager earnings from appearing in movies by the well know Czech director Roman Hysek—who appears to be in jail during the filming of the movie for soliciting underage boys for his films—and Pavel Rousek, who goes under the name of Hans Miller in the German world where his reedited and rescripted movies are finally released. Most  of the boys interviewed have also worked for these directors, particularly Rousek who grinds out several each month paying the boys paltry wages, no condom protection (demanded by his German audience), lots of bullying behavior and even punches and slugs in turn for their on-screen nakedness, kissing, sucking, fucking, and for the lead the bottom position of being fucked.

       If at first we might simply see this porn-maker as part of the horrific money-making machine is never fully paid the usual 6000 DM promised, and has out of that money to pay for film, the boys, their food, drugs, and other costs—at least as Rusek tells it. He is near poverty he insists, sending away his wife and daughter to the several days that he spends with the boys filming them in the family bed. Some of the boys, those he defines as criminals as opposed to the more pliable exhibitionists, rob him while on the job of lightbulbs and other camera devices useless to them.

       But gradually, as the boy hustlers begin to describe what a standard “shoot” is like and we hear Rousek tell of his own activities we begin to see him for the monster he truly is. Rousek evidently not only has the boys first suck him off, offering them alcohol, drugs, and constant abuse in order to keep them horny and able to function on demand, but we lose all sympathy as we recognize the master manipulator from the moment he meets the boys, takes them for several days on a drunken spree to loosen them up, forces them to sign agreements with clauses claiming that if they force a reshoot (i.e. unable to perform or look up at the camera they will have to pay for the entire film), demands they provide evidence, even if sometimes obviously fraudulent that they are of the age consent (in the Czech Republic it is 15), and bullies them into his inane plots revolving around lost street boys, sex in chicken coops, a  young robber sexually attacked by his would-be victims, etc. 

      Slowly he admits not only to his love of control, seeing his “actors”—as even some known beloved Hollywood directors have described them as being like cattle or bodies to move around and manipulate. Working with teenagers, he suggests, you have to psychologically control them demonstrating time and again the possible punishments if they complain or behave otherwise than commanded.

    In their first denuding and group showering, the boys themselves seem to check over one another’s bodies for any sign of a red or dark mark on their otherwise nearly flawless skin, determining amongst their peers which one might be willing to be a “bottom” and therefore the lead of the film.

       When Rusek reveals to the camera that his primary job is that of an autopsy worker at the morgue who is only to ready to invite the director’s camera to follow him into his workspace as he almost gleefully takes up a knife and cuts upon an entire cadaver, himself admitting that he is not wearing garments required for full protection.

       I resented, at first, Grodecki’s intercuts of Rusek’s almost reckless cutting apart of human body parts and his direction behind the camera of one of his porno scenes, where the fictional “robber” lies on a couch naked, pretending sleep while his intended “victims” sneak up to fondle him, suck him off, and otherwise use him as a piece of sexual meat. But Rusek himself seems to reiterate the analogies in his own commentary, and later when Grodecki returns to interviewing the boys one-on-one, they describe themselves as bodies for sale, given up for temporary use by others, so much empty meat sold to the tourists. One young man argues that when he sells his body it’s the entire body, if someone likes my legs I won’t cut those off for him.

   For Rusek, so he claims, there is no soul. But for almost all these previously almost illiterate hustlers, there is indeed something they call a soul which they keep apart from their bodies, that provides them with hope that they are more than simply toys for their johns. Some are proud to be unable to fall in love with any of their customers. Others insist that they save their love only for friends, on in one case for a wife with whom he lives with his male lover, insisting that he is justified in occasionally lying to his wife while claiming he is ever honest to his boyfriend, suggesting even to himself that perhaps he loves him more than her. Others are amazed to hear some prostitutes claim that after a few days of paid accompaniment they might even fall in love with their customers, knowing that it’s truly only money that they seek when it comes to the men who take their bodies temporarily away from them. A couple of the more sophisticated boys recognize that life is only a theater in which they are acting; but one shy boy can only wonder that he has not yet discovered his role in the play.

       One boy admits he has continued to love only one man he has encountered, although the individual may not know it since he has treated him badly. That person he quietly confesses, after a few minutes, is his father.

       Sadly, they need monsters like Rusek as surely as he needs them since in the society in which they live there is apparently to one to whom they can turn for help out of the financial quagmire into which the system has thrown them. One can only imagine that, metaphorically speaking, their bodies will also soon be sacrificed along with what is left of their souls to the street-bin equivalent of the large plastic trash container where Rusek throws, after quick inspection, his cut-up body parts.

       As one anonymous commentator (using only the handle Berry) wrote about this film:

 

“When Paris is Burning [Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary] concludes, one can simply find the whereabouts of the people featured with a quick Google search. The results aren't always perfect, but you have some closure as to how close they came to their dreams and aspirations before it came to an abrupt conclusion. Streetwise [Martin Bell’s 1994 documentary] is lesser known, but there's an entire section on its Wikipedia article and Facebook group dedicated to answering what happened to the runaways and delinquents. How this relates to Body Without Soul is that it's the most elusive level of obscurity. Therefore, hearing these stories, watching these events, and digesting them long after the film ended becomes more soul-crushing in the realization that there's no information on the subjects. No trace exists to the point that you'd think they never existed, and worst of all, consequences for the monster who feeds off of the youth presented are ambiguous. That's where it becomes startling cinema.”

 

Los Angeles, November 3, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).

 

 

Anne Fontaine | Tapin du soir (Night Hustler) / 1996

complications

by Douglas Messerli

 

Olivier Rouvièr and Anne Fontaine (scenario and screenplay), Anne Fontaine (director) Tapin du soir (Night Hustler) / 1996

 

As I’ve mentioned several times, in 1996 French Television showed a series of ten LGBTQ films, each presented on a different evening, by a wide range of international directors titled L’Amour est à réinventer. The 7th episode of the series, Tapin du soir (Night Hustler), a 5-minute short directed by Anne Fontaine, was aired on November 8, 1996.

     This is an extremely simple but lovely and rather disconcerting short film that charms one more in afterthought than upon first viewing.

      Voices begin to be heard even before we see the first image of a rather attractive young man (Franck Demules) walking the night streets of a city. We hear one voice offering a blow job for $40, so we presume immediately that we must be near a popular urban pick-up spot for gay prostitutes. And, accordingly, it is likely that the young man we follow is a hustler as well. When he passes a young black man who asks for a cigarette we discover, however, from questions that the black hustler asks—“You new here?” and “Are you working”—that our assumptions may be wrong. The young “hero” denies he is “working.”

     We see a car pull up and another young boy walk up to its window, presumably to discover the driver’s needs, as our young figure hunkers down on a nearby bench, taking out a cigarette.  Another car pulls up and the young man goes over to the window, the driver calling out “How much for a blow-job?” The young man replies, giving apparently the going rate, “$40.” And he soon joins the driver in the car as they drive off to a quieter location where the older but still handsome man (François Chatriot) hands him the money, the boy, putting a prophylactic on the driver’s cock, sucking him off.

        So it appears the boy is a hustler after all, and he is working the street that night, even if he’s new to it. But something happens once again that alters the way we perceive what we have just witnessed. The boy starts up a conversation, “It’s cold tonight...don’t you think?” 

        The man gruffly agrees and announces he’ll take the boy back to where he picked him up. But the boy asks the unthinkable: “You want to suck me off too?”

        “No, that’s enough,” replies his apparently satisfied customer.

       “I can be gentle, you know,” the boy adds, twisting the conversation into another dimension. Presumably, a true hustler wouldn’t want to cum simply because someone else might hire him later for the same pleasure. Another $40 or even more be made that evening. And “gentleness?” Perhaps for some customers but not for others. It is certainly not a general qualification. Some like it rough.

         His gentleman friend pretends to turn the tables, so to speak. “Really. You’d pay for it?”

         “Yes,” he immediately responds. “That would be funny.” But despite the man’s dismissal (“You’re wasting your time”), he’s serious: “I’ll give your forty dollars back.”

     “I’m not interested. I’ve got to get home.”

     A young boy is determined if nothing else. “I want you to suck me off.  I need it.”

     The gentleman finally realizes that something is strange here. “You’re a funny sort of hustler. Nothing better to do?”

   “I’m not a hustler. I’m lonely.”

   The customer starts up the car and begins to drive off. “Let’s go have a drink.”

  There is something so simply touching and honest about Fontaine’s film. Our young man clearly recognizes that in a transactional world the only way to find love or possible friendship is to pay or have someone else pay for it. And, strangely, his somewhat perverted logic appears to work. But in having a drink with the man, might he not also be perceived as a paid companion? Is any genuine relationship possible in a world in which everything is bought and sold, to be enjoyed for a limited time without any further complications? Our young man, if nothing else, has complicated things, has forced the consumer to pause in his busy schedule to possibly discover a new aspect in his sexually meaningless life. It’s important to note that even as he ejaculates there is little but a mild sense of release expressed upon his otherwise blank face. In expressing his loneliness, the boy has at least reached out to touch something deep in nearly every one of us. Perhaps before the night is out, the man might even manage a smile.

 

Los Angeles, April 4, 2021

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

 

 

Merzak Allouache | Dans la décapotable (Burn Rubber) / 1996

youth in a hurry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier-Daniel Deloeuil (scenario), Merzak Allouache (director) Dans la décapotable (Burn Rubber) / 1996

 

When I was a Freshman in high school I played a small role, probably one of the dead souls in the Grover’s Corners cemetery, in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. I remember the play well, but I recall only small bits and pieces of our rehearsals and our final production. What I do remember is the adolescent tittering of most of the cast members when Mrs. Webb, observing that her son was about to leave the house, was asked by the script to shout out: “George, don’t forget your rubbers!”

      I should imagine I remember their silly giggling because I didn’t quite comprehend why they were laughing. A mother had simply reminded her son that since it might rain that he should wear his galoshes. I never had never owned a pair of galoshes, and I had no idea that a rubber was how most people described a prophylactic, but then I didn’t know either what a prophylactic was and why you should wear one. I was so innocent for so long after that I can now finally admit that even today I never have once actually used a rubber, even during the years before my relationship with my now husband Howard—this despite the fact that for two or three years in the late 1960s I had regular sex with different partners almost every night, and that even after I met Howard I had sex outside our relationship for several years. Like so many young people of the time I lived out my youth in a hurry, unable to conceive that I might need more carefully to protect it. Miraculously, I somehow survived without contacting AIDS.

      I repeat this almost forgotten incident because the other night, after watching Dans la décapotable (Burn Rubber), a short film directed by Merzak Allouache as part of the French TV series from 1996, I realized that Mrs. Webb’s long-ago admonishment to her son to not leave to house without rubbers, applies directly to the central character’s situation. The front downstairs buzzer is ringing as a handsome young man, Axel (Julien Lambroschini) is packing up for a trip. It rings again and again as he hurries to pack up his toiletries and the rest of his clothing. Finally frustrated by the endless ringing, he zips up his bag and rushes downstairs to meet his friend Marc (Guillaume Depardieu). Axel suddenly reports that he’s forgotten something, determining to go back, but Marc refuses since, he argues, they have to beat the rush hour traffic.

    Axel is pissed but also irritated as the two begin to drive through Paris, Marc, obviously his boyfriend, attending particularly to every young beautiful woman they encounter along the way. It appears that he is either very flighty in his attentions or is simply attempting to get a rise from Axel, who increasingly grows irritable and disgusted by Marc’s immature actions.

      It quickly becomes apparent that the two are on their way to a weekend or perhaps weeklong retreat, mostly to enjoy one another’s company, and that what Marc has forgotten is his condoms.

      In a series of works mostly dedicated to love in the time of AIDS, hence the title Love Reinvented, Allouache’s work, the last of the 10 films to be aired, picks up the major theme of the sixth episode, Pierre Salvadori’s Un moment.... In this case, however, Axel is far more serious about his responsibility to maintain safe sex than the character in Salvadori’s movie, particularly as it becomes increasingly clear as they make their way across the city that Marc is carefree and rather irresponsible.

     At one point for example, he asks Axel to retrieve a cassette in the glove compartment. When Axel does so, he discovers a number of rubbers stuffed into the plastic case, and for a second seems relieved, but the very next moment Marc, taking the cassette in hand, declares, “oh I must have left these there when I bought the car three years ago,” and tosses the plastic case out the window.

      Axel is furious, demanding his friend stop the car, even though they are now on the freeway, determined to get out to recover the discarded item. But Marc insists it’s impossible and dangerous to stop of the freeway. “What do you think I’m crazy?” he asks, pulling down the visor to display a large set of condoms attached.

      So this one-liner film ends, Marc not having forgotten his rubbers. The two kiss as the car speeds up, the lovers headed to a wonderful weekend of sexual bliss.

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2021

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

Pierre Salvadori | Un moment... (A Moment) / 1996

what isn’t said, what isn’t done

by Douglas Messerli

 

Didier Seynave (scenario), Pierre Salvadori (adaptation and director) Un moment... (A Moment) / 1996

A man (Stéphane Höhn) again runs into a young lovely looking boy on his staircase, and this time he cannot resist the boy’s evident flirtation as he moves up to where Ludovic is now standing on the landing—“He’s gorgeous. I kept running into him. It was high time we spoke”—as he embraces him, the two engaging in deep kisses. The boy unlocks the door to his apartment, inviting in the man who we never see throughout this 7-minute film, into the room. The kid enters his bedroom, strips off his shirt and invites the man in to join him on his bed

     In the meantime, the man has searched his carrying bag, unable to find any rubbers, realizing in a voiceover of his thoughts that he cannot have sex. The boy, he observes from running shorts and other articles tossed to the floor, is obviously “into sports.”

     When the boy appears, half naked in the doorway, he perceives that the Ludovic (Adrien de Van Adrien) “is too young to have it.” At the same moment we realize that this entire film is about what isn’t said and what doesn’t happen, not what is inevitable, as the man, completely caught up in the lust of the moment, deludes himself by repeating almost as a mantra “I’ve gotta to stop. I better stop!” before he continues with a meaningless postponement—just a bit more, a bit more and then we’ll go to sleep.

     It is in those few “more moments” that the two grasp each other to intensely kiss, continuing, when the boy rolls over, with the man fucking him. There are a few silent seconds after the intense huffing and panting of the act, as we see the beautiful Ludovic laying on his side to face his momentary lover.

     It is clear that he sees something in the eyes of the observer: “Why are you staring at me? What is it?”

     “You fuck often without a rubber?”

     “Sometimes yeah...it depends. ...How about you?”

     “Not very often.”

     “But this time, right?”

     “Sure.”

     “All right. But...what?”

     There is no answer, and the boy turns away from the man who may be the cause of his death.

     Of the ten short films centering around issues of AIDS commissioned by French television, this film by Pierre Salvadori, aired as episode number 8 on December 9, 1996, perhaps best captures the angst of the continued AIDS crisis, which still exists today even if we pretend it no longer matters since we have a series of potent drugs to extend the life of those infected. Approximately 690,000 people died throughout the world of HIV-related infections in 2019.

 

Los Angeles, April 11, 2021

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

 

Françoise Decaux-Thomelet | Enceinte ou lesbienne? (Pregnant or Lesbian) / 1996

guess

by Douglas Messerli

 

Françoise Decaux-Thomelet (screenwriter, based on a scenario by Pierre Guiho) Françoise Decaux-Thomelet (director) Enceinte ou lesbienne? (Pregnant or Lesbian) / 1996

 

Françoise Decaux-Thomelet’s five-minute film, Pregnant or Lesbian, shown as part of the 10 short film series Love Reinvented on French television in 1996, is a theatrical comic vision of a lesbian’s coming out to her parents.

     There have been a substantial number of such films, most recently the 2020 Hulu Christmas special broadcast The Happiest Season, directed by Clea DuVall, in which such an announcement results in a series of complications. But the Girl (Bérénice Bejoas) in this film appears to have few qualms about announcing the news to her folks, perhaps because she puts it in the form of a question, almost challenging them to express which is truly preferable.

      As the curtain opens, the suburban couple in Decaux-Thomelet’s little opéra-bouffe is apparently still very much in love as the Father (Gérard Touratieras) and Mother (Marina Toméas) are found joyfully singing to one another as she prepares fried eggs, he rubbing her ass before she turns, her husband kissing her above the breast. Their lovely teenage daughter, entering, wonders whether or not they might “do without the cracklings at breakfast?” Somewhat disappointed, they stop their stove-side love-making, each demanding a kiss from their daughter, as her mother whispers in her ear, “Antoine called.” “Sophie, too,” adds the father.

      The eggs are served up, as the girl plops a pill into her water glass and drinks it, a tennis match evidently being broadcast in the background. As a cuckoo-clock door opens, revealing a white plastic bird with green wings, the daughter turns to the two suddenly appearing to be several month’s pregnant. The parents stare at her in startlement, as she asks: “Pregnant or lesbian?” (“Enceinte ou lesbienne?”). The mother quickly stands, moves over to her child, and slaps her. The father switches off the TV set.

  

     The mother, sitting down again, turns to her husband flashing a brief smile before asking her daughter is she truly pregnant? “No. Lesbian.” the girl emphatically answers. She pulls out the pillow and tosses it to them.

       The father stares into his wife’s face intensely whispering: “It’s your fault. You never put your foot down. See where it leads?”

        The mother hisses back: “You always wanted a boy. You set a bad example! She’s afraid of men.”

      Both have been tightly holding on to the pillow from opposite ends, which the mother in anger finally pulls from his grasp. He suddenly smiles, as the two quickly make up by bringing their ringed hands together in sympathy, apparently, for the situation. They smile at one another, before the mother turns to the observing daughter reporting, “Honey, you’re a love child.” Clearly, she’s admitting that at her daughter’s age she chose the “pregnant” option, or perhaps, it made the decision for her.

      The girl smiles and sits down with them, her mother leaning over to say, “We’ll find a solution.” “But I’m not sick,” her daughter reacts.

       “Is it recent?” the mother asks.

       “Always,”

       “Is it Sophie?” Her daughter smiles in delight of the thought.

       “I was looking forward to grandchildren.”

       “But you may still have them. I’m a lesbian,” the girl answers as if clarify that one’s sexual identity and baby-making are not the same thing and do not necessarily contradict one another.

       “And that’s it,” the teen concludes with a giggle, the little red curtain closing again.

        This is a true bon-bon of a work, sweet but not terribly profound. And what it has to do with AIDS, which was evidently the overall theme of these commissioned films, is lost on me. Perhaps since she is a lesbian she has less chance of acquiring the disease than a heterosexual.

         We get another perspective of this issue, however, in François Dupeyron’s Et Alors? (So What?) in the same collation of films.

 

Los Angeles, April 9, 2021

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

Xavier Dolan | Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) / 2013

i’m so tired of america

by Douglas Messerli

 

Xavier Dolan and Michel Marc Bouchard (screenplay, based on the play by Bouchard), Xavier Dolan (director) Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) / 2013

This truly wonderful film is nearly impossible to watch if you are gay and have any empathy for others. I suffered through the film with tears.

      Tom Podowski (powerfully performed by director Dolan himself), a Canadian, has lost his lover Guillaume, and returns back to the farm where his body has been taken. This is somewhat reminiscent of A Single Man, where the former gay lover is not invited or wanted at the funeral of the man he has loved and lived with for years; except in this case the dead boy’s mother Agathe Longchamp (Lise Roy) has had no idea that her son was gay. Tom’s sudden appearance, however, immediately arouses the homophobic hate of the dead boy’s brother Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who quickly recognizes that this is his dead brother’s lover who intends to deliver a eulogy which might reveal his own love and bereavement for his former lover.

     Francis violently threatens Tom against delivering any expression of love so that he might protect his mother, who quite blindly believes her dead son was in love with a woman, who she is surprised she has not attended the funeral. And Tom gives in, refusing to deliver the eulogy with a lame excuse that he was dissatisfied with the quality of his writing. He is ready to leave, but is again forced by Francis to stay on the farm for a few days just to satisfy his mother Agathe, who he also admits is becoming somewhat dotty and will, as soon as he can, send off to a nursing home.

      What follows is a true psychological horror film, wherein Tom is suddenly confined to the farm, while also recognizing that the handsome farmer Francis, despite his homophobia, is attracted to him.

      One might describe Tom as rather naïve, and he engages in a frightful game of attempting to become part of the Longchamp family, Agathe so happy he has decided to stay on, and joyful in his presence. Tom, in fact, is trapped into remaining, helping in the birth of a new calve, milking and mucking up the place, and in the process actually discovering it a kind of source to become closer to his former lover.

      He eventually reads his eulogy to Agathe, pretending it is from the female lover of Guillaume, Sarah (Evelyne Brochu), although it is his love poem to her son. But the mother is delighted that at least the missing girlfriend has written.

    And there is a moment when Francis actually dances a tango with Tom when you think he might admit that he truly desires his brother’s lover. And we come to realize that, in fact, Francis was in love with his younger brother. Even Agathe comments that seeing the two men in the bedroom together she has reimagined the days of her son’s sharing a room, a joy to her, perhaps a terror of memories for the now homophobic Francis.

      But gradually, particularly when Tom invites a friend to impersonate Sarah, and arrives to explain why she wasn’t at the funeral, the real horror story begins to unweave. The friend actually confesses to him that she too has had sex with his former lover Guillaume, as had many others. And she is only too ready to make have sex with Francis, the couple ordering Tom out of the car.

      In a local bar into which he retreats, he asks the barman (Manuel Tadros) why Francis is not allowed into the bar and is told the horrible story from years before when a young man had told Francis that his brother was queer. Apparently he tore is mouth apart, the man surviving after surgery now working in a nearby city.

       After having now completely destroyed Tom’s car by removing its wheels and hoisting it up into a farm garage, Tom finally determines to escape, rushing as before he did through the sharp cornfields, this time into a woods, chased down by Francis, determined to destroy him for his attempt to express the truth of his life. But Tom runs back to the road, steals Francis’ car and drives off. As he stops by a gas station he spots a young man scarred on both sides of his mouth just as the barman described the brutal Francis’ actions.

      The final song, as Tom returns to Montreal, reveals another terribly brutal truth, particularly in these Trump days, that, in fact, the farm Tom has visited is in the USA, as we see Francis dressed in a USA coat, with the movie ends with Rufus Wainwright’s plaintive lyrics, “Going to a Town”:

 

I'm going to a town that has already been burnt down

I'm going to a place that has already been disgraced

I'm gonna see some folks who have already been let down

I'm so tired of America

 

I'm gonna make it up for all of The Sunday Times

I'm gonna make it up for all of the nursery rhymes

They never really seem to want to tell the truth

I'm so tired of you, America

 

Making my own way home

Ain't gonna be alone

I've got a life to lead, America

I've got a life to lead.

 

Tell me, do you really think you go to hell for having loved

Tell me, enough of thinking everything that you've done is good

I really need to know, after soaking the body of Jesus Christ in blood

I'm so tired of America.

    Today, many of us feel like Tom, ready to escape the dark lies of US living impossible to assimilate.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2025).

David Peter Bonetti and Eilidh Gow | Stum (Tongue-Tied) / 2018

the short goodbye

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Peter Bonetti and Eilidh Gow (screenwriters and directors) Stum (Tongue-Tied) / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

In this Norwegian film, the students are attending an international school in Stavanger, a small city in the southwest of Norway where I have actually been. It’s a simple, and often told tale that is nonetheless quite powerful in this obviously student film.

     Sondre (Tom Dart), an English boy, and Elias (Lars Kristian Gellein) are school-boy lovers, although Sondre is not yet fully able to assimilate himself as being a young gay man. Elias is more than sympathetic and attempts to comfort him, but also has some bad news. He’s been awarded an internship in London, and announces to Sondre that he will soon be leaving.

      Despite his not yet fully “out’ situation, Sondre is devastated. Yet Elias messages him that they should meet on the beach before he leaves, and Sondre—despite awakening far too late in the morning—rushes off the meet up with his would-be lover. The two spend a few moments of joy on the beach, and clearly Sondre begins to come to terms with his sexual identity.

       Perhaps the relationship won’t completely end. We at least are provided a hope that there is a future possibility in this quick short.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2025).