Todd Stephens | Gypsy 83 / 2001

going their own way

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Stephens (screenplay, based on a story by Stephens and Tim Kaltenecker, and director) Gypsy 83 / 2001

 

Todd Stephens’ Gypsy 83 takes us into the teen goth subculture of the late 1990s and early years of our current century—at least as Stephens tells it; and I have a strong feeling that his vision of the Goth subculture is a bit limited, particularly since the hero of these young high school Goths is Stevie Nicks, hardly a performer I associate with the post-punk Gothic rock groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and Joy Division or even the later the Birthday Party, Southern Death Cult, Specimen, UK Decay, Virgin Prunes, and the Damned among others.

     It doesn’t matter since, as these young kids, Gypsy Vale (Sara Rue) and Clive Webb (Kett Turton), later reveal, they’re not fully up-to-date in their Sandusky, Ohio high school regarding either Goth music or Stevie Nicks for that matter.

      What this film did make clear for me was just how logical it was for certain teenage girls and boys, who might feel some sexual differences from their peers to align themselves instead with an outre music fetish. With Clive’s long jet black hair and Gypsy’s blond frizzy curls, along with their Goth jewelry and clothing, they are able sublimate their feelings of alienation in a manner that, if it made them no less of outsiders among their classmates than if Clive had hidden his gay sexuality and Gypsy had attempted to cover up her physical sexual maturity, it at least saved them from sexual bullying. If they are mocked for their attire and alien interests they can nevertheless deflect their sexual longings, even sometimes from themselves as Clive does—imagining at moments that although admitting he is gay he declares that is not “really into messy sex”—without setting off the hormonal and homophobic rage of so many of his peers.

     Despite their costumes and their musical preferences, their denigration of the world around them, and their fascination with death, Gypsy and Clive differ little from the standard gay boy and bestie female friend that kept a far straighter Steven Carter in Simon Shore’s Get Real and Eric in David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen on edge, both movies from only 4 years earlier.

    Although, given Gypsy and Clive’s self-awareness and their quite purposeful statements of alienation, we don’t quite have the same dynamics in the film as the other two about “coming out” (of which I’ve long argued Get Real and Edge of Seventeen and a couple of slightly earlier films stood as the models of the B version of that genre) we nonetheless do find ourselves in a similar situation in which the central characters both need to come to full terms with their sexuality, just as the two central figures of Shore’s 1998 work did. Instead of staying home and trying to come to terms with their parents, these two—discovering that there is a Stevie Nicks concert featuring a Night of a Thousand Stevies, encouraging would-be singers such as Gypsy to audition before a New York audience—take to the road.

      Clive’s family, who we never meet, seem to be a liberal somewhat well-to-do couple, while Gypsy lives alone with her father, who once performed in a band with his wife who has since disappeared or perhaps is dead, her father remaining vague about her long absence. Actually, we discover along with Gypsy as she and Clive finally dare to try out a new life, that her mother left her daughter and husband to pursue her own dream of becoming a singer, leaving her family cruelly behind.

      With her own car (she works in a drive-up photo shop in the days when films were still developed from negatives) and with Clive’s encouragement Gypsy and the young 17-year-old are soon on the road to self-discovery.

     Their first encounter, a washed-up popular singer named Bambi LeBleau (Karen Black) seems basically disconnected with the story and their own lives, being only tangentially related. Stopping by an Ohio roadside eatery made up of redneck hicks that almost make Lawrence Welk seem sheik, they find Bambi singing in the motel lounge. Gypsy, in particular, is amazed by the woman’s voice, despite her conservative repertoire, and both she and Clive wonder why she hasn’t had a career. Bambi assures them that almost made it big in New York, recording one record album, which she plays for them.

       True innocents, they attempt to convince her to join them on their voyage in order to resuscitate her own career. But in the bedroom of the house to which she’s invited them to stay the night, Gypsy discovers a full hideaway closet of the albums which have been paid for by Bambi herself. She has had no career in New York, but is, as they also quickly perceive, a middle-aged alcoholic who has used the two in an attempt to escape her life of performing in just such venues in which they discovered her. They drive off without her as soon as the sun  rises.

       Although they’ve justifiably left their scarecrow behind, a little further along their yellow brick road they encounter an even stranger figures, an Ohio Amish boy, Zechariah, hitchhiking in an attempted escape from his Amish life. Both Clive and Gypsy are attracted to the cute hunk, stopping along the way at a graveyard to have a picnic.

       Nearby they encounter yet another group of hidebound traditionalists, a bus of frat boys forcing their pledges to go through ridiculous maneuvers.

     Clive believes the young man might be attracted to him, but soon discovers, much to his disappointment, that Zechariah is not only straight but is very attracted to the zaftig bosom of Gypsy. Embarrassed for his presumption, Clive runs off as Gypsy and Zechariah try out the women’s room of a highway gas station plaza for a thoroughly lusty round of sex that might remind some older viewers of Tom Jones’ sexual encounter with Molly Seagrim in the Tony Richardson film of 1963.

        Clive doesn’t go unrewarded as one of the upperclassman frats sneaks away from the torture bus and catches Clive’s eye. These two try out a toilet stall of the men’s room with equally successful results, Clive suddenly discovering how wonderful sex is for the very first time as Stephens’ peeping tom camera now shifts from the floor of the ladies’ room to a stall in the men’s toilet to let us watch Clive’s deflowering.

       Although both sexual encounters are fulfilling, they also both end badly. Zechariah tells Gypsy that, although he loves her, he’s decided to return home to his pregnant wife. Like all the other men she’s met up with, it’s another case of “love ‘em and  leave ‘em.”

        Clive, hardly sensitive to her terrible disappointment, selfishly recounts his sexual pleasures. But soon after, meeting up again with the frat bus, they discover that the frat boys have written “queer” and “freaks” across both sides of their car and when Clive attempts to stand up against their stupid bigotry, he is beaten while his friend from the night before looks on through the bus window without a word.

        The Tin Man stuck in a life frozen in time and the Lion who is too meek to speak up are clearly not making the trip with them. The duo prefer to chance it alone. And before long the New York skyline looms up as it has for so many thousands of hopeful young men and women as a beacon that calls out for all who witness its Emerald City-like towers to enter and become everything they ever wanted to be.

        Further difficulties, however, face them. They’ve arrived too late for Gypsy to audition and win a place on the program. When she finally discovers someone who knew her mother, she discovers that her mother is dead, having committed suicide four years earlier. She also uncovers the fact that her mother has been sending her letters regularly, emphasizing her love of her daughter, but that her father has kept them from her.

         Meeting up with a couple of cute fellow Goth boys, Clive makes an unforgiveable faux pas of confusing a literary work with a new record, and is mocked for being a poseur—an outsider even in this world—whose relationship to them is mere pretense.

        The friend of Gypsy’s mother, however, goes to bat for the girl and gets her on the list. With Clive photographing the performance, Gypsy finally gives it her all, the audience in thrall of her performance.

       By film’s end, Gypsy has decided to stay on and, like her mother, to give a career a try; while Clive, who hasn’t stopped thinking about tomorrow, realizes he has to return home via Gypsy’s car, graduate, and move on to college—now with the realization, however, that he is gay and quite enjoys it.

     Gypsy visits her mother’s grave which appears to be in Queens, given the distant Manhattan skyline.       

        If Stephens’ fanciful tale of coming of age seems a bit too familiar and coy, it is nonetheless near perfect for the youthful audience for which it was spun. And it’s nice, for a change, to have the youthful figures face their own dilemmas without all the turmoil of adult parental shock, turmoil, and eventual acceptance. These figures make it down the road quite well, despite some bumpy moments, all by themselves.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).   

       

Alfonso Cuarón | Y Tu Mamá También / 2001

heaven’s mouth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carlos Cuarón and Alfonso Cuarón (screenplay), Alfonso Cuarón (director) Y Tu Mamá También / 2001

 

On the surface of its narrative, Alfonso Cuarón’s film Y Tu Mamá También is a teenage road movie in which two young Mexican boys travel with an older married woman across the Mexican landscape on their way to an imaginary seaside beach—which, amazingly, they actually do stumble upon. The tale of Tenoch (Diego Luna), from a wealthy family, and Julio (Gael García Bernal), from a middle class leftist family, is also a coming of age movie, as the two teenagers falsely brag about their sexual conquests, have sex with the beautiful woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), and ultimately discover themselves in each other’s arms in bed.

      But these genres are overlaid by much more fascinating issues when Cuarón and his writer brother also reveal the cultural differences of rural and privileged city life in Mexico, as we serve as witness to events along their route; and, similarly, they transform their work into a kind of “sentimental education,” as, along the road, Luisa subtly teaches these horny young boys how to actually behave with and even come to love women, which, apparently, her own husband—who has just told her that he has been having an affair with another woman—has never learned.

     Finally, the film is an elegy to Luisa, who at the end of the voyage is described by the boys, who have gone their separate ways but who accidently run into each other again, as having died of cancer.

     Although Cuarón uses a narrator to fill in narrative gaps and past facts, the film does not judge its characters or the political situations it reveals, but simply and openly displays images to the viewer, allowing the audience to make their own inner perceptions. His method is particularly useful when it comes to the subject of sex, which, as critic Roger Ebert, adamantly observed, is presented so very differently in this work than in most US movies.

     One can imagine an US version of this film in which the camera leers over the naked bodies of first Tenoch and Luisa, and then, to bring the boys to equal status, Julio and Luisa. Most certainly Luisa would have been judged as a loose woman if not an outright slut. But in the Mexican version she is more of an older tutor, a beautiful teacher demonstrating to them the art of lovemaking, teasing them for their sexual taunts, and yet fully enjoying the sexual act. She is, after all, a jilted woman who is near death, and she almost wisely has agreed to the trip to help relieve some of her inner feelings of emptiness.

     Even when the boys find themselves in a homosexual moment, we recognize that the passions moving through their young bodies was simply momentarily out of control; we have no evidence that they are possibly closeted gays. Sex, in this film is simply a pleasurable experience with no sense of negative consequence or guilt. And the experiences of this summer clearly change both Tenoch’s and Julio’s life in positive ways.

      Similarly, the sometimes odd or perhaps even threatening behavior of some of the rural natives is met rather good-naturedly, particularly with Luisa explaining things from the back seat. When they pass police checkpoints, ride by traffic accidents, and, at one point, are blocked by a flower-covered checkpoint by celebrants of a girl dressed in white, a stand-in for the Virgin, Luisa calms their fears. “You have a beautiful bride,” she quietly says, as they pay a small donation so that they may pass.

     Despite this film’s objectivity and serenity, however, we recognize that, psychologically, all three characters are experiencing something like an earthquake, a momentous moment in their lives that will make the boys into different people than they might have been before their voyage; and which, hopefully, provided Luisa some final peace of mind. After all, they found Heaven’s Mouth, the name of the famed beach, without really knowing where it was.

      

Los Angeles, August 17, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2016).

Arnau Vilaró | Entreacte (Intermission) / 2024

somewhere between nostalgia and melancholy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnau Vilaró (screenwriter and director) Entreacte (Intermission) / 2024 [25 minutes]

 

Catalan Spanish director Arnau Vilaró’s Entreacte is about time, and either the nostalgia or the melancholy that passing time creates. In the very first scene, where David (David Selvas) is acting in a series of Strindberg fragments, the director asks him about the piano piece which someone in the character’s apartment building once seemed to play for him every night. David suggests that it is the pain that the piece embodies, changing the word pain to nostalgia. But the theater director (Xavier Albertí) challenges him if it might not be melancholy. “Nostalgia is specific. Melancholy is profound and persists.” We suspect that if David thought he might return to that apartment building that so energized him, he might be willing to describe the sensation he now feels as nostalgia; but if he has lost the place forever and there is no returning, it may be closer to melancholy.

     The director asks if David thinks he will ever hear this piano piece again.

    Immediately after, the director evidently as called for his own “intermission,” as the actors debate where to go for lunch, David suggesting a new Argentine restaurant. But at that moment he receives a telephone call, taking us on a voyage which makes it appear that the luncheon “entreacte” has taken place over days or even weeks.

     The phone call, of which we hear only David’s responses, is elliptical and vague. David’s response is “Yes, yes, perfectly,” and a few seconds later the question “And do we both have to go?” Then he adds, “Sure, sure. No, everything’s the same. Yes. Alright. Thank you.”

   The first sentence is seemingly unimportant, perhaps simply a response to whether the phone connection is clear or whether he recognizes who is calling. But the second is an important clue, since it involves attending something and going with someone; involving an “other.” And it is that clue that takes us on the long intermission that David seems, immediately after, to embark upon.

    David’s first stop is a gay bar for a drink, totally empty except for the sensuous, dancing bartender. He returns to what is obviously his apartment building, checking his mail, and beginning up the staircase to his own apartment. But midway he stops and turns—taking yet another intermission—traveling by tram to visit an urban animal sanctuary or zoo. He visits the section devoted to birds where he finds a single caretaker (Arnau Comas) feeding two wild avians. David asks the worker if he knows Gerard, Gerard Poblet, who works with the birds.

   When that name seems to be unknown to the avian zookeeper, he asks after Sonia, “a tall girl, brunette…with big eyes.”

    The birdkeeper answers: “The Foundation fired many people, it could be that.” But, he adds, that was about a year ago. He, the stranger responds, is now the only one who works with birds. “Because they left me alone with everything.”

     In the very next frame David has moved on from the enclosed spaces that attempt to recreate the birds’ original habitats to the open wet-lands somewhere in the country, where the same birds actually live. This, we soon perceive, is a wild wetland where there are also keepers or, at least, bird and other animal specialists who keep watch over the natural world.

     David finds the small building where obviously the workers sleep, but no one is there. He waits

out the day in his car, observing the return in darkness of two workers by motorcycle, who enter the building on whose door he had previously knocked. Strangely, he does attempt to meet up with them, one of whom we presume is the man he is seeking, Gerard.

    The film, now almost 14 ½ minutes in, announces its title, or perhaps its very next action: “Entreacte.”

      When the narrative returns, David is now standing on his apartment balcony, the noise of the city heard loudly from where he stands. When he reenters his apartment, he dictates a voice mail to the missing Gerard, which explains to us his actions of the first Act of this drama.

      We immediately discover that David is now living in his grandmother’s old place, and that he and Gerard have not spoken to one another for about a year after 10 years of a relationship, the very length of both perhaps explaining his reticence to suddenly show up in Gerard’s life, particularly when he is with another man.

     David explains that he is now seeing a somewhat younger man, but taking things slowly and that his still acting with his theater company, preparing a new play based in Strindberg’s pieces. He recalls that they had seen Miss Julie together, but this Strindberg will be a long piece with an intermission. “You always said you liked plays with an intermission because then you had time to remember and imagine what would happen in the second part.” He explains that he no longer plays the roles of young lovers. Now he is playing a paranoid writer who spends his time concentrating on the past.

      He pauses for a cigarette break, another short intermission, before pacing out what else he has to day. Actually, he begins all over again, greeting Gerard and commenting that it may be a strange to receive such a voice mail. He explains that he received a call from the adoption center, and there is now a child for them. “And they want both of us to go, of course.” Obviously, he observes, the situation is not the same as when they first did the paperwork. The process starts again. “You might find it crazy, but it’s been for me to imagine what would have happened if this child had come a year ago. What would have happened between us, of course. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so foolish to break up all of a sudden. Could have imagined if it had arrived 7 years ago when we started the paperwork? Most couples do that. Decide to have a child, have sex, and that’s it.”

     He reminds Gerard that he was finishing his Ph.D, and that he was looking for employment as an actor, and working extra hours at a bar. He talks about not having any money, of needing to give up luxuries if they had had a child. He also recalls his father, who had Alzheimer’s, regretting that he never told him that Gerard was his partner, not just a friend.

     He explains that after the call, he went to the museum (what I described as the zoo), and he explains that when he was told that Gerard no longer worked there he went to the Delta, to where Gerard had always wanted to return but didn’t because of David.

     David explains that he visited the Delta and waited to see him, but when he saw him on his motorcycle: “I can’t tell you what I felt. I can’t explain it to you. But I understood how much you loved me. Until I allowed it.”

     He explains that he went to Delta because he felt that it was something he could get back, much like the song the figure in his Strindberg play hopes to find again in the song a resident played every night just for him. But he realizes also that it had been something he had lost a very long time ago. “But maybe…neither.”

     The film ends there. And we left with the question of “Neither” what? Maybe neither of these ex-lovers can get back what they lost? That’s a strong likelihood. Throughout we see the urban world around David constantly changing, rebuilding itself. But the new will not include what the old did. Certainly, t will not include the world David knew.

     But Perhaps he means that it is neither nostalgia or melancholy, but a desperate and meaningless longing and desire to return to what cannot be returned to, akin to nostalgia perhaps, but not the same precisely because one knows he will never experience it again; and yet not precisely melancholy since he has already moved on, has already found a new friend as Gerard may also have. It is like the strange pause of an intermission, part of the past that yet permits one to imagine a future of the second act, or the next part of one’s life.

     We can imagine that there will be no child entering into the life of these two lovers, likely no reunion between them; but we can also dream of those very possibilities. That is what art allows, the mind to imagine something impossible, a halt to the mistakes of the past, a new creation built upon its foundations, while also knowing that such a thing is rare and nearly impossible.

     Fortunately, Vilaró’s profound work stops mid-sentence, allowing its viewers to create their own second act. Surely, many will see only a repeat of what old age brings, David, like his father, falling into Alzheimer’s without perceiving the truth, his acting career having come to an end; while others, admittedly like me, might imagine a longer play wherein Gerard feels similarly, that the child has permitted them a new possibility to rekindle the love they once had. There is no answer what happens but the decisions the characters—that we ourselves make.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Matthew Puccini | The Mess He Made / 2017

reckoning

by Douglas Messerli 

 

Matthew Puccini (screenwriter and director) The Mess He Made / 2017 [11 minutes]

 

It’s strange how today almost all gay men and obviously many other viewers immediately recognize the very first image of Matthew Puccini’s short 2017 film for being an AIDS test. One can have a blood test of thousands of reasons, but standing as it does at very first instance of this gay film, we know the central character, Jude (Max Jenkins) is having a Rapid HIV Test, particularly when he’s told, moments later, that he’ll need wait only 15 minutes, sometimes less.

      In this fifteen minutes, which Puccini actually collapses into only ten, we encounter a man whose life has just gone into a spin, hence the film’s title The Mess He Made.

      Although he obviously hasn’t smoked in a while—he has no cigarettes nor a lighter—the crisis suddenly leads him to try to bum a cigarette off of another waiting patient. And when he reports he doesn’t smoke, Jude is led on a journey through a rural or suburban strip mall in search of cigarettes and, soon after, groceries, as well as a birthday card. Like everywhere in the US, this tiny neon-lit world seems to have nearly all you need to help correct and further corrupt a life you feel you have totally fucked up.

      We don’t know what led Jude to have his test, but a telephone call from his male lover who begs him “Can we please just talk,” in response to which Jude immediately hangs up, clearly hints at the reason. Did his lover just reveal to him that he was HIV-positive? Has he discovered that his lover has been having unprotected sex with others? It seems to be precisely a time in which he should sit down and rationally talk.

      But we readily perceive that Jude is not now rational, feeling all the guilt and sorrow that having gay sex in the US for centuries, despite the remarkable strides the LGBTQ+ community has made in general acceptance, is not easily dismissed, particularly when one feels he himself might have become another statistic in the long decades since 1981 when AIDS began to be described as the gay disease.

      The questions we have about his life with the mysterious voice, moreover, are just the beginning of a series of endless speculations that arise in our attempt to comprehend Jude’s dilemma, to empathize or even possibly judge the behavior of a man who believes he has made a mess of his life.

     His next stop in his endless 15-minute wait is a supermarket where he seeks out an appropriate birthday card for someone (Puccini not even permitting us a clue by blurring out the notation of the category from which he grabs his card). Ice cream is next on his list, but a telephone call from “home,” with a young girl’s voice, April (Maya Piel), interrupts even that activity. He reports he’ll be home soon, that he’s just picking some things up and he’s almost finished.

      April obviously is someone close to him, who speaks of another person asking when he’ll be coming home. She might, in fact, be his sister. But Jude appears to be a bit too old to still be living at home, with the other person possibly being his father.

      And particularly when he asks April is she’s done all her homework, it appears that she may, in fact be his daughter. And the way he asks her about her day at school—what was fun about it, etc.—is not the way a brother usually talks to a younger sister, whether or not he helping to raise her. When she asks if she can watch TV, he asks if she has asked “Dan”— of course wondering if we have misheard it; is it really “Dad.” But when she reports that the other man has told her she should ask Jude, it doesn’t sound like an older father deferring to his son. And that comment further blurs the issue of April being Jude’s sister.* She might, in fact, be describing her other father as “Dad.”

      When Jude tells April that “a little bird told me that it’s someone’s birthday tomorrow,” and that he’s thinking about getting off work early and picking her up at school, we further become convinced that he is talking to his daughter, one that he shares with “Dan” or whoever the other caretaker of April is. She asks if someone else can also come, to which Jude answers, “Sure, if he wants to.” April immediately proceeds to ask him, with an answer that makes it rather clear that there is some resentment between the two, “He wants to but is not sure that he can come.”

      That answer, played out with a hand to chin gesture by Jude seems to reveal one of the reasons why he feels he’s messed up everything. He has perhaps been having sex outside of his marriage with another man, the result of which finds him where he is at this very moment in space and in his life.

      But the director does not confirm this, and with all the other possibilities available, I too might be creating a fiction.

      The fact that when he returns to the car to put groceries in, a meter maid is writing up a ticket for his parking illegally in a handicapped space causes almost a complete breakdown of this troubled man. “I’ve had a really hard day,” he pauses, and in near tears, continues, “and I wasn’t thinking.” When the meter maid (Zenzi Williams) asks “Are you handicapped, sir?” we want to respond, yes, at this moment our character truly is. Everything seems to be going against him, and he isn’t thinking rationally. 

     When he finally returns to the clinic and is called for the results, Puccini continues to keep his central character’s life private. We might suspect the news is not good, since the consulting nurse seems to spend too much time explaining things. And the camera catches a remarkable range of expressions that keep altering Jude’s face. First his slightly open mouth closes as if excepting what has been stated. Then they open again with a look of fear and doubt, his eyes seeming to focus on some distant point that he knew he might one day be facing. A slight smile forms, but it might be the kind of smile that comes over one when coming to terms when what one expected, just before tears well up in the face. But then, the mouth closes, eyes slightly looking skyward with a sense of hopefulness. 

    In this case, the excellent acting of Max Jenkins keeps us from knowing the whole truth. Yet even in the act of attempting to decipher the reality surrounding this unfortunate man, we have been forced to imagine the life of another, the possible realities for ourselves.

      Even if he is free from being HIV-positive, Jude realizes that he still must face the “others” in his life, whoever they be: a wronged lover, a husband whom he has betrayed and may never be fully able to forgive him, a daughter or a sister with whom he might have lost or still may lose contact forever.

      In the old days, police swooped down on bathrooms and movie houses, rousting out single and married men for indecent behavior, ruining their closeted lives. Today, the truth often comes raining down in the form of the medical profession, bringing with it all the sense of shame, fear, and possible death that those gay men of another age also had to face. Some things change for the better; but AIDS changed the sexual landscape for the worst seemingly forever.

 

*In attempt to confirm the name, I moved from a Vimeo video with no captions available to a YouTube version; but it too provided no subtitles which might resolve the puzzle.

 

Los Angeles, October 10,2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2023).

 

 

 

Omid Iranikhah | People (Who Need People) / 2024

the split

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Grant (screenplay), Omid Iranikhah (director) People (Who Need People) / 2024 / [8 minutes]

 

Alex (Patrick Sprague), recently separated from his husband Raj (Adron Duell), breaks into his former house with its front-door lock now changed to steal back the Barbra Streisand album he has signed and given to his ex-lover as an anniversary gift.

     Raj grabs back the album and threatens it as hostage if Alex will not sign and countersign the waiting divorce papers. Evidently, at least as Raj puts it, Alex has not listened to him in years and has cheated on him several times, the former evidenced by the fact that he has never known that one of the Christmas balls Alex holds up as ransom has held the ashes of Raj’s great-aunt.

     Yet, Alex wants the album, he argues, because it reminds him of Raj and their better days.

     Clearly, both of these men who find it nearly impossible to live with one another, are still very much in love, or at least have a nostalgia for when they were very much in love.

     Writer Eric Grant keeps the reasons for their break-up vague, which shifts most of their highly dramatic and slightly campy actions into a kind of fast-flowing surrealist sketch. This work might be described as a comic riff on relationships. Even the set, filled with boxes, including a cardboard-covered couch, seems like something out of a Eugène Ionesco short play. Their world as been empty, a makeshift reality that never allowed either of them to become totally adults.

     Yet we feel there is something more serious going on here, and are almost disappointed when Alex finally accepts the facts, slicing the album in two and signing at least the first and most crucial page of their divorce papers.

     We long to know more, however, given both their crazy likeability about what really happened between the two of them; and it is apparent that director Omid Iranikhah and Grant might have made a very different film if they had relented and given in our desires. Probably it would have tipped the short cinema into a sort of painful realist apologia of which we have all seen far too many. As it stands, the work is a kind of absurdist emblem of all the relationships that, in hindsight, end for reasons that even the parties no longer remember unless they are the kind that hold a grudge and define their ex-companions as evil.

    In the glimpse of what once was, we see two men near insanity which is probably what drew them to one another in the first place. It is unfortunate that now they see that aspect of themselves only in the other.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).