Stéphane Marti | Le Veau D'or / 2002

the devil's bargain 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Marti (director) Le Veau D'or / 2002 [15 minutes]

  

Generally, when viewing a film by Stéphane Marti it is not something that you can talk about as much as you simply experience. You recognize at the same moment, however, that it is not merely your perception of the work that is central to his art but the experiences / images of camera, the photographer, and the models / actors who themselves appear not quite to know what secrets they are revealing in their fetish-like actions. They are both enactors of the ritual gestures of the film and subjects of it who finally in their interchange in a work such as Le Veau D'or reject the photographer while still embracing the film camera. It short, it is a complex interchange involved with all, a past evidenced by the carefully curated objects revealed throughout the short film, a present that is completely indeterminate, and a future of what you finally of make the images you witness and what you might carry of them through your own life.

     As Michel Amarger has written: 

 

“Marti plays with the proximity of his subjects to one another, composing plastic variations in choreography. The tradition of his predecessors is incessantly evoked; first and foremost, that of Michel Journiac, who frequently works with the changing identities of his subjects, from object to actor. Like Journiac, Stéphane Marti celebrates rituals surrounding desire and death. Eros and Thanatos suffuse a mythology interwoven with themes of antiquity, unbridled sexuality, and traditions of cinema.”

 

    Just as the white model (Losio) paints the black man’s finger’s red, so does the black model paint black and red rectangles on the feet and hands of the white boy, and two luxuriate in a kind of exotic world filled with votive-like object such as sacred skulls, crucifixes, dried flowers, Monique Delvincourt fragmented mirrors, and Louboutin high heels, black and red also.

      Their encounters with each other are both sexless and highly homoerotic as they dress up, paint one another, and basically play at being various other selves which seem finally too personal for the presence of the Marcel Mazé’s constantly clicking camera. It is as if the mysterious performances that they have invoked gradually become sexual and private, of which the film’s viewer can only glimpse through the interstices of the continually shifting frames of the video, film, and photographic images of objects, bodies, and music which sensuously come to a sort of orgasm as the two paint one another with white, red, and black bars almost as if skin color and blood equally have rubbed off upon the other in their unseen sexual encounter.

     Desire here is intertwined with interactions of race, gender, and cultural experience that ultimately cannot fully be comprehended but merely observed.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Amy Gebhardt | Look Sharp / 2006

evidence of what doesn’t exist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amy Gebhardt (screenwriter and director) Look Sharp / 2006 [9 minutes]

 

Australian director Amy Gebhardt creates a tough series of sequences as photographer Jo (Rhondda Findleton) spends the night in bed with her subjects in the Melbourne of the 1970s, drinking a great deal and fucking as a three-some mostly just to keep them close and to put the boys as ease for the actual photos she wants.

     Like all such manipulative but also brave and challenging female photographers such as Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, and Carol Jerrems, Jo has gotten two grungy but good looking Sharpie gang members into her bed, hoping to push their somewhat bisexual sharing of heterosexual sex just a little further, to challenge their macho defenses just enough so that she might capture the two men in a tender moment together which might hint at their homosexual “allowances,” if not tendencies beneath their layers of self-protection.

     It is a dangerous task. At any moment the men, Jason and Darren (Charlie Garber and David Lyons) are ready to explode with the recognition of what she is asking them to perform and the fact that she is manipulating them into the situation with which they feel intrigued but obviously also uncomfortable. Violence is most certainly a possibility, as it is always with on the edges of society concerning sex.

      As the Gay Celluloid reviewer nicely summarized this work:

 

“Filmed over two days in an urban squalor set reminiscent of Derek Jarman's The Last of England, here writer and director Amy Gebhardt has added many a neat touch, with the bedsit now akin to a boxing ring, one that finds David Lyons as Darren / Des hitting out when forced into a corner. In short and behind all of the 4-Xs of the piece, lies the issue of repressed feelings, with Jo…. determined to edge ever closer to the truth beneath the macho exterior of hard-as-nails gang member Des and here cue Lyons in an emotionally to the core performance.”

     If Look Sharp does not reach the artistic merit of its mentors, it certainly pushes the limits of the normally nicely contained short LGBTQ cinema works, introducing a far grittier energy into short gay cinema, even while Gebhardt’s characters are not necessarily gay and are most certainly permanently closeted to admitting and expressing it. Yet here is the evidence to which Jason and Darren will most certainly never admit.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2023 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Micah Stuart | For Years to Come / 2023

untold stories

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Patrick Nelson (screenplay), Micah Stuart (director) For Years to Come / 2023 [27 minutes]

 

Johnny (James Patrick Nelson) is sitting on the front porch of his home, exhausted from the crying “actresses,” (his mother had evidently been an actress) fawning relatives, and others who have attended his mother’s funeral memorial in his father’s home. Having given up his sublet in Brooklyn in order to return home for his mother’s last days as she lay dying of cancer, he now can’t wait until everyone leaves. Nor, for that matter, can his father (played by Veteran TV actor Richard Riehle).

     Two of his own friends bring him a plate of tatters and matzah, evidently the male being someone with whom Johnny once had a gay relationship, but who now seems to be with a female who plans to “peg” (meaning to fuck her companion with a strapped-on dildo) Johnny’s male friend, perhaps that very afternoon. Here was a couple I wanted to get to know more about. You are these friends? Were they originally a gay and lesbian duo who fell in love?

     When he finally returns to the house to find his father puttering around, he also encounters one straggler, his mother’s hospice nurse, Edward (Jason Wayne Wong). Edward soon leaves, but not before handing Johnny his card in case he or his father need any further information or help, both Johnny and his father characterizing him as attractive, the son describing him as “kind of hot.”

      Johnny and his father, it is clear, have never been close, although inexplicably he has told his father that he is gay, but kept the fact from his mother, and he wishes he had shared the information with her, asking his dad if she knew. The question remains unanswered.

      Moreover, when he told his father, the elder’s only response seems to have been that he should be “Will instead of Jack,” referencing the TV series Will & Grace where Jack “was the really queeny effeminate one,” while Will “was the more straight acting one.” Obviously, this is a family who watches a lot movies and television.

      But when Johnny attempts to get to know his father better, wondering what he did each day when Johnny’s mother went off the work, his dad provides only a vague answer. All we know is that he seems to be some sort of writer.

       When the conversation turns to his mother’s final condition, however, and Johnny attempts to know why she didn’t see a doctor earlier, the father describes the fact that she didn’t want to see a doctor and besides they cost a lot of money, which the family didn’t evidently have since they paid Johnny’s own hospital bill (earlier he describes himself as nearly dying, but now is find if he injects himself with a shot every so often, he’s fine; presumably that suggest diabetes).

        Hurt by what he feels is an accusation that he was, in part, responsible for his mother’s death, Jack leaves the house for a short walk and a lot of thinking. What will his father do now, he surely wonders, and how will he return to his own life?

        The next day he does follow through with a call to the hospice nurse, the two getting on very nicely, as the nurse admits that Johnny’s mother actually wanted them to get together (he signifies a sexual relationship by linking his fingers), and indeed that begins to happen that very later evening, as they kiss, both admitting to having enjoyed one another’s company.

        Returning home, Johnny discovers his father still up with his laptop in front of him, and when Johnny leaves the room, the elder opens it up again. What we quickly discern is that Johnny’s father is a porn writer, at work on a porn story or script.

        The short work of 27 minutes is filled with what one might describe as the beginning of a story or stories that we might like to hear, and we have no choice but to imagine various further intrigues between Johnny and Edward, and both men and his secretive father, discovering perhaps that they all have severely misjudged one another.

       It helps to know that Nelson wrote this “film” as a TV pilot, hoping it might get picked up as a series. The work, in fact, has that feeling about it, with all sorts of tendrils and roots already sprouting from a seedling that hasn’t fully developed into a full plant. Certainly, given the excellent acting of the pilot, and the titillating possibilities of blending porn and a traditional love story, this might have made for an excellent series. All we have, alas, is the outline for imagined continuations.

      Rob Watson in the Los Angeles Blade, nonetheless, liked the first episode enough to write:

 

“If you’ve ever laughed through your tears—or cried during a kiss—For Years to Come is the kind of film that knows exactly how you feel.

     This 27-minute gem isn’t just another coming-out tale or quirky indie. Instead, it’s a heartfelt, sharply written slice of queer cinema that blends grief, humor, and romance without ever feeling forced.”

 

      To me, it sounded a little too much like a TV series, while I might have enjoyed a “quirky indie.”

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

 

José Antonio Valera | Límites (Limits) / 2020

sex games

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Antonio Valera (screenwriter and director) Límites (Limits) / 2020 [10 minutes]

 

Andri (Jaime Macanás) and Jon (Victor Montesinos) have sex out-of-doors. Obviously, it’s their first and perhaps only time together; both have bicycled to the isolated spot, so either or both of them may have other relationships.

     Jon queries Andri about his fantasies of other sexual encounters, a “golden shower” for example. But Andri seems to never have truly thought about such things. But if Jon wants to play a game, he suggests, how about they meet up 10 times, alternating on the location and situation. The first to fail show up and refuse the sex act the other demands loses; what the loser must give up or the winner is awarded, we are not told.

     At the first meeting, Jon shows up in leather, bringing a pair of open-rear pants for Andri to wear. At the second meeting Andri, who happens to be a photographer, films their entire sexual act. For the third meeting, Jon has chosen a drive-in movie where they will have sex among numerous others in the car. Andri readily crawls atop Jon.

     For the fourth meeting, Adri brings along Victor, who, we observe, is busy putting on a lubed-up rubber glove, obviously readying for a fist fuck. Jon awards Andri his piss on their next meeting.

     For their sixth get-together, Jon demands Andri suck his toes, and when Andri seems rather inept at it, shows Andri just how pleasurable it can be. In another meeting, Andri is forced to play a dog on a leash to Jon, again in the wilds. Andri wears a huge teddy-bear head in their next get-together, insisting Jon call him Florentino Mandarino.

     Jon demands that Andri wear a locked leather mouth gag in his final request. Andri has passed his most difficult challenge, he proclaims, and while freeing Andri from the gag, he bends to kiss him.

     But Andri has one final challenge, binding his friend tightly up with ropes. This time, however, we sense a kind of shift, particularly when Andri declares that he’s tried to Jon running away from him each time they meet. For him the sex has been truly personal, and the game was, in fact, a way for Andri to continue to be with Jon. His last request is that Jon become his boyfriend, and if he leaves, he loses.  

     You know I’m cooperative, Jon answers.

     To what, queries Andri.

     Jon insists that Andri untie him.

     But Andri refuses, fearful that Jon will simply run away, while Jon explains that he just wants to hug Andri.

     Andri leans forward and kisses the man who can only be described now as a victim, for the film ends without Andri making any attempt to loose the ropes around his lover.

     One might describe Spanish director Valera’s short film as a descent into kinky desires—desires centered mainly around power and control—which can end only in one or the other becoming the captive. Yet a man bound in rope, as we know, is difficult to make love to, while he has an even more difficult time expressing his love to the other. As Proust has shown us, the captive and the captor can never be truly happy with one another. They are doomed to an imagination of what might happen if they escaped or changed roles.

     There are limits to everything, most particularly regarding sex. And we now come to realize that the loser of the sex games has had to give up his freedom to fully express love.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Andrew Y. S. Cheng | 我們害怕 (Shanghai Panic) / 2001

exploring life and death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Y.S. Cheng and Mian Mian (screenplay, based on the fiction We Are Panic by Mian Mian), Andrew Y. S. Cheng (director) 我們害怕 (Shanghai Panic) / 2001

 

Bei (Zhinan Li), Kika (Mian Mian), Fifi (Yuting Yang), along with Caspar (He Wei Yan) are a loosely structured “family” of three women and a young man all of the so-called jeunesse dorée, (the pampered young “little emperors”—as critic Neil Young describes) them—products of the for communist government’s one-child policy. These Shanghai babies do not simply undergo a mad panic in this film, but have already experienced a life—as they move from one club to another, from ephedrine and ketamine to other combinations of drugs, and from one sex partner to the next—of continued disenchantment, frustration, and failed suicide attempts.

      The momentary “panic” they first undergo in Andrew Cheng’s version of Mian Mian’s banned fiction, is former ballet dancer Bei’s sudden fear that he is HIV-positive. He has fevers that don’t go away, a semen-like liquid in his urine, and a general feeling of dread—all having descended upon him without any evidence that he has had any gay sex, or even heterosexual intercourse for that matter.

     Despite the worry of, in particular, the group’s leader Kika, he refuses to go for a check-up, having heard the rumor (highly possible given China’s draconian control over its citizens) that the government ships off its HIV-positive citizens to an offshore prison island. The only answer is women friends offer up is more clubbing and more drugs, all to no avail.

     When Kika finally drags him off to a doctor who promises them that no such actions will occur, Bei is tested only to discover that he is negative.

    As one critic suggested, his AIDS scare may have had to do with the fact that he has been long considering that it’s time to explore homosexuality, and with the help of Kika, who seems to have property both in Shanghai and at the beach, shacks up with the very best friend, fellow dancer Jie (Zhou Zi Jie) to see if he might seduce him into having sex.

      The two loll about, do some kissing, and a great deal of talking before Jie finally refuses him, in part for fear that after having sex he’ll lose his friend forever, but also because, as it appears, both of them are really straight.

      The closest we get to sex is Jie dancing to some studio music in a manner that all recognize as truly sexy and original. Indeed, one might describe Cheng’s film as a fake lure for gay desire. All you need to do is focus the camera for a while on a couple of cute boys taking about having sex, and the entire LGBTQ community will welcome your film into our hearts!

      In reality, as it becomes apparent, Bei seems now more interested in the pedophile images he’s discovered on a “Lolita” site, without even knowing what the name Lolita refers to or what a pedophile might be. Like his other sexual identities, it may, hopefully, be only one which he is momentarily exploring.

      We know that their various anxieties are serious business, however, because director Cheng films this fictional work as if it were a documentary, asking his actors to mostly improvise as they go along, resulting in long passages of talk upon a couch or quick suggestive asides in the midst of illegal shopping sprees (Fifi, for example arousing the interest of a policeman, allows him to buy her a new wardrobe before she runs off from a local Starbucks with her “presents” in hand). Cheng’s club-movie imitations, his hand-held camera fluttering around rooms—as Young puts it, “he can’t seem to get enough of the blurry, jerky slow-motion facility on his video-camera”—now seem as stylized as Michelangelo Antonioni’s characters wandering across islands, deserts, and city streets or Federico Fellini’s circus-like creatures parading down the strand.

      Yet, we do encounter in Cheng’s version of the wild Shanghai kids, a city which at the time was seen to be far more interesting to the young than Hong Kong, a vision of youth that we might never before have imagined. The reviewer from Time Out postulated that it might “Very possibly [be] the start of a new chapter in Chinese cinema.”

      But, alas, we know where that ended with rise of Xi Jinping to the role of general secretary in 2012 and to President in 2013. Whenever Cheng’s film might have taken Chinese cinema, he and others quickly met up with a brick wall. Cheng made only one further feature film, the futurist 目的地，上海 (Welcome to Destination Shanghai, 2003) with the city now crumbling and filled with poverty and social decay, featuring “male prostitutes, aging hookers, and other sex-trade workers.”

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

Glenn Gaylord | Boychick / 2001

master debater

by Douglas Messerli

 

Glenn Gaylord (screenwriter and director) Boychick / 2001 [12 minutes]

 

The Yiddish expression of affection for a young boy, boytshik, anglicized as boychick is something parents or grandparents used to call their sons and grandsons. But in this basically TV-like sketch a contemporary mother (Andrea La Bella) can’t stop using the term in calling into her son’s room where, when she doesn’t hear a sound, she imagines her son is “pulling his pud.” Not that she has any problem with that. Being a “hip” mother, she shouts after him, as he leaves the house for school, “It’s okay to masturbate in your room.” The neighbors aren’t amused. 

     What her son (Ben Lang) is really doing in his room, however, is far more pernicious. His favorite singer and dancer, Ashley Hart (Linsey Girardot, a kind of cartoon version of the living cartoon Britney Spears) has come down from her wall poster and is attempting to teach him to get into the rhythm of things so that he might impress the boy of his dreams, captain of the Debate Club (Greg Siff).

      In class, Boychick does everything he can to find a reason to bend down just to get a better view of Debate Boy’s butt. Not that his gay teacher (Nic Arnzen), discussing gay Hollywood stars and their “beards,” minds in the least. But Debate Boy himself is completely oblivious.

      In the hall, Boychick imagines an encounter with Debate Boy in which finally gets up his nerve to put what Ashley Hart has taught him to a test, and yes, Debate Boy strips off his shirt and joins him in a raucous recreation of something that might possibly be found in movies such as the movie Staying Alive (1983), but stays in his head only as he discovers, waking from his trance, that Debate is still chatting with two chicks by his locker.

 

      Boychick tries to put all his fears behind him, walking in back of the Debate Boy, casually running his hands across his ass; but the busy straight guy is oblivious. Poor Boychick returns home, occasionally taking a sniff of his hand, but once more all alone with only Ashley Hart for a friend.

      At the end, this silly little sketch tells us what we might have expected:

 

      “Debate Boy married his high school sweetheart and runs a successful motivational speaker seminar. He has been known to experiment with homosexuality…which he adamantly denies.”

       “Boychick went to college, but comes home to visit his mother quite often. He is currently living with his life partner and is a big faigelah.”

 

 Faigelah is the Yiddish word for a gay person, although it’s far closer in meaning to the word “fag.”

     The corny title I selected for this short essay characterizes the substance of this film.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Lawrence Ferber | Cruise Control / 2001

turn off

by Douglas Meserli

 

Lawrence Ferber (screenwriter and director) Cruise Control / 2001 [6 minutes]

 

In 2000 Lawrence Ferber wrote and directed a rather charming film, Birthday Time, about a young gay boy who simply couldn’t wait any longer for his birthday so that he might have legal sex with other gay men. And by the end of that decade he had written a script for another fairly popular feature gay film, Bear City, directed by Douglas Langway.

     But the film in between them, Cruise Control (2001), I have to report, is hardly worth discussing; one might describe it as a rather embarrassing one-liner.

     Gary and Mark (David Drake and Kelvin Walker), neither of them great-lookers, are out at their local bar, Flapjax, both of them in “cruising mode,” one on the hefty side ready to go home with nearly anyone who’s willing while his scrawny and nerdy looking friend intends to be somewhat more selective.

      Both spot a new man with a nearly perfect body, his workout breasts clearly defined by his tight T-shirt, a good-sized box, and a nice, friendly, if a bit ordinary face. He catches their eyes, and they go for him.

      Unfortunately, this would-be prize, Josh (Scott Wooledge), has a strange habit. As he grows sexually interested in others his mouth suddenly shifts into contorted positions turning him into a figure straight out of the distorted mirror images of an amusement park. They are startled and stunned by the sudden transformation and immediately turn away with disgust.

      Soon after, another boy (Jay Corcoran) spots Josh at the urinal in the bathroom, checking him out. He too is attracted but when he looks up to see Josh’s response he’s terrified as well by the man’s contortions.

      Josh simply cannot figure out what’s happening, why people seem at first attracted and them pull away at the last moment. He looks long and hard at himself in the mirror and can’t spot the obvious flaw since he apparently is not “turned on” by his own image.

      After a rather meaningless encounter with two drag queens who have gossiping in a nearby stall, equally horrified by his sudden distortions—are we supposed to believe he’s trying to come on to these two as well?—flutter off in horror.

      Back at the bar, Josh, by this time quite dejected, encounters yet another cruiser (Linas G. Vytuvis) who looks over Josh’s body, noting the well-developed pectorals and the outline of his cock and balls, looks up at the now distorted face, and then scans once more the man’s well-developed breasts and penis. He pulls Josh toward him, puts a bag over his head, and leads him off, actualizing the cliché about men endowed with gifts other than their facial beauty.

      If you’re up for an extended one-liner that isn’t truly funny in the first place, this is your movie; otherwise, I’d put the screensaver to use before viewing.

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).