Vicente del Río Laya and Hans von Marées Pedede | Antes de que te vayas (Before You Go) / 2022

nostalgia for a love that never occurred

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vicente del Río Laya and Hans von Marées Pedede (screenwriters and directors) Antes de que te vayas (Before You Go) / 2022 [14 minutes]

 

Friends Franco (Joaquín Batarce) and Daniel (Nícola Vilander) are camping in Patagonia when from a cliff, Daniel accidentally drops their backpack that contains their tent. Rain and winds force them to break into a nearby cabin.

     There they drink, celebrating their last few days before Franco leaves for college in the city, Daniel wishing that he wouldn’t leave and fearing for the problems he hears about in urban Chile.

It’s also clear that Daniel has special feelings for Franco, the latter of whom may also be gay since they speak of homophobia in the city and Daniel suggests that one of their friends is Franco’s boyfriend.

    They spend the night together, but when Daniel awakens in the morning, he finds Franco gone. Searching for him, he discovers that Franco has retrieved the backpack, but has received a sprained ankle in the process. Together the boys find their way to a nearby lake, where Daniel applies mud to Franco’s ankle, and Franco falls comfortably asleep with head resting in Daniel’s lap, a sort of paradisiacal work the two inhabit temporarily.

      Back at the cabin, they decide to slit each other’s eyebrows as a memory of their last days together. Daniel succeeds in gently slitting Franco’s eyebrow, but before Franco can do the same to Daniel, they hear the cabin owners arriving, and they are forced to grab their gear and escape.

     At a safe distance they peer back at the cabin, and before they can even explain their actions, they find themselves in a deep kiss. Yet the fact that it is all momentary given Franco’s imminent departure, Daniel finally pulls away.

     In the last scene of the film, we see them being picked up as hitchhikers, both ensconced in the back of a pick-up truck, their gazes turned away from one another. But finally, a slight smile appears on Daniel’s lips as he recalls what recently happened between them as he turns to see Franco facing off in another direction.

     Daniel returns to gazing off, as a vaguely similar smile finds its way to Franco’s face, he too turning his gaze slightly toward Daniel, boy boys realizing that despite their expression of love, it is now too late. Their love for one another has no space and time in which to develop into anything other than a nostalgia for what might have been.

     It is clear, in this understated story of friendship, love, and farewell, however, that both boys have something to remember each other by for the rest of their lives.

     The Chilean writing and directing team, Vicente del Río Laya and Hans von Marées Pedede’s work is not profound, but in its quiet narrative and its excellent cinematography by Natalia Mejías, this short film remains memorable in a period when far more histrionic queer works slip the mind after viewing.

 

Los Angeles, July 22, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Arvind Caulagi | Taps / 2023

an uncertain future

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arvind Caulagi (screenwriter and director) Taps / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

There’s not much to Indian director Arvind Caulagi’s short film Taps. Rohan (Ullas Samrat), a medical doctor, is off for a year’s residency in Baltimore in the US, and his lover Akshay (Rohit Mehra) has been working hard to pack his bags and wrap gifts for the people who have helped him attain the position and others. But he has forgotten one important thing, the “five taps for Rohan.”

    We don’t quite know what the “taps” are or mean, except that they clearly remain an in-joke for the couple, presumably something sexual, but also necessary for Rohan’s safe journey and their continued love while he is away.

     But Akshay, clearly troubled by an entire year alone and the fact that Rohan has put all the preparations for that journey in his hands, is clearly upset, not as we might say, “in the mood for love,” despite the fact that it is his and Rohan’s last night together until Rohan’s eventual return.

     We get the sense that even the talk about the fact that Rohan has given Akshay the okay to see others during his absence has upset him. The very fact that he has “permission” suggests a difference that he cannot quite accept in their deep relationship.

     Returning home from work, accordingly, Rohan does not find his usual playful and loving Akshay, but a man that doesn’t what to be hugged and snuggled. He becomes particularly upset when Rohan wants to pack up a bag of pickles Rohan bought especially for Akshay in order to bring it to “Dan,” the person most responsible for help Rohan get his temporary residency, presumably in the famed Johns Hopkins Hospital. In a phone argument with Rohan earlier, he has also accidentally broken the gift Rohan was planning to bring Dan.

    It all ends in words that both men regret, with Akshay telling him to leave already, and Rohan angrily storming off. Eventually, after failed phone calls, they hook up again and wait for the Uber cab to arrive. Clearly this was not the way that either of them imagined they would spend their last night together for an entire year.

    Yet they kiss and make-up—much to the disdain and shock of the Uber driver—Akshay finally revealing something about the “five taps,” as he quickly looks around to see if anyone might be watching, and hits his cock with his hands at least four times before complaining that “it hurts,” sending Rohan off with a remembrance of his source of sexual satisfaction.

     But, in fact, such a long distance from one another will hurt, and can cause damage to a permanent relationship.

     The critic for Gaysi, jhanvi believes, contrarily:

 

“As most short films are, they either show us the journey that characters go through right before something is about to end or begin—but what sets TAPS apart is it’s set right in the middle of Rohan and Akshay’s relationship. It’s already established, and it’s more at a turning point for them. It’s not an ending nor a beginning, just a couple venturing into a different mode of their relationship.”

 

     I can tell you, however, that such a different shift in a relationship can change everything and put to an end to what already seems established. What if the lonely Akshay actually does visit a gay bar and meets someone less demanding that Rohan, or Rohan, in visiting a new world, discovers a more open society that can help him more fully express love? These clearly are the fears of the far more organized and troubled Akshay, while Rohan appears to be self-assured, relying on others like Akshay to make his travels go smoothly. “Out there,” where he is suddenly headed, he may seek out someone to make his life as easy, seek out someone like Dan, which is perhaps why Akshay is not so ready to give up his pickles.

 

Los Angeles, July 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Radley Metzger | Score / 1974

elivra & betsy & jack & eddie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Douglas (screenplay), Radley Metzger (director) Score / 1974

 

Having become recognized as one of the best of US erotic filmmakers of the day, Radley Metzger, had already successfully tackled soft heterosexual porn in his Camile 2000 (1969) and The Lickerish Quartet (1970), as well as having distributed several European films that showed causal nudity that deemed them unworthy of being released in the good ole USA, when he decided to dabble with bisexuality, one of the earliest to do so, in Score of 1974, one of the first such US pictures to feature frontal nudity and dramatically present both lesbian and male gay sex. The film received such glowing reviews one might think that Metzger was a kind of cinematic genius.

     Watching this in 2021, however, the fact that it was passed off as a “first”—particularly given the fact that in the very same year Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. presented a far more intelligent and sexually explicit vision of gay sex in Passing Strangers of the same year, and that only a year later Sidney Lumet would tackle a far more complex issue of a transgender, potentially transsexual relationship that leads to a major bank robbery and hostage situation in Dog Day Afternoon, without even mentioning the fact that in Europe and Asia filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti, Lino Brocka, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Chantal Ackerman, and others were delivering up far more professional and daring LGBTQ movies—Score doesn’t particularly impress me given its  laughably bad script, acting, and cinematic tricks, as well as its garish sets and silly presentation of its admittedly “naughty” intentions. In hindsight Score looks like an amateurish production of someone determined to wake up suburban married couples who just loved Paul Muzursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and are ready to move up to something slightly kinkier.

    Let me be clear, Metzger’s film has very little do with being gay or lesbian, nor does it have anything at all to do with love. Both Elvira (Clarie Wilbur) and Jack (Gerald Grant), the seducing couple of Metzger’s film, admit that they’d have sex with a porcupine if they found the species attractive.

     That is not to say that if you perceive it as a comedy of seduction in the same way that you can read Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1967) as a comedy of aging actresses and their drugs that Metzger’s film doesn’t provide a great deal of campy fun. The “true” seductress of the couple, Elvira has been busy grooming the young married convent-trained Betsy (Lynn Lowry) for a lesbian encounter, while her husband Eddie (Calvin Culver) seems, unknown to either of them, ripe and ready to try out a fling in bed with another man. He’s even brought home from a convention, along with his several porno mags of females one magazine of male nudes, so we later discover from the devout Catholic Betsy’s bedtime confessions. Why she’s even discovered him masturbating in the bathroom when he should be focused on his morning shave!

     Everything that matters here, accordingly, is how to go about the seduction. Since Jack has a successful career as a porno and fashion photographer and the couple can afford a nice moderne home in a lovely seaside Croatian village where Metzger filmed the movie, they spend much of their time playing the game of who can succeed at seducing heterosexuals for same-gender sex. Ads for tourist couples in the local paper everyday haven’t panned out, the previous evening having produced a lot of empty wine glasses, a pot of roaches, and tossed off undergarments without, evidently, a “score.” And the clock is running down on their bet. Elvira only has 24 more hours to get Betsy into her bed and to put her tongue into Elvira’s “pussy.” As part of their bet, she’ll pick up Eddie on his way out....that is if Jack doesn’t jack him off first.    

     Meanwhile, there’s the telephone repairman (Carl Parker) to contend with, while Betsy has unexpectedly arrived earlier in the morning on the same evening Elvira and Jack have invited the couple over for the “last supper.” Elvira gets the idea that she might get Betsy in the mood by allowing her to watch while the repairman services her personal line. Betsy’s intrigued but runs home out of modesty and almost refuses to come to dinner.

      The fact that Eddie arrives early as well and is already making fast friends with Jack quickly cures Betsy’s headache as the poor girl comes running, willing to play her role for the rest of the evening as a mix of the ditzy blondes who Goldie Hawn’s been forced to play for most of career and the woman “on the verge of a bathroom upchuck” who Sandy Dennis was asked to perform in the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, even worse, to play “Chopsticks.”   

     A little bit of wine and a lot of grass, however, is the perfect cure, and before Elvira and Jack can even begin to play “Getting the Guests,” Betsy has stripped and put on a negligee that purposely reveals what most such articles of clothing pretend to hide, while Eddie has eagerly pulled the cowboy regalia out of their host’s deeply stocked costume trunk suddenly convinced that he is Billy the Kid.

       Eddie is almost ready to be seduced, but Metzger refuses to hurry the plot, and nearly bores us to death with the stumbling straight couples’ purposeful misreading of event, and with the terrace conversations of the frustrated seducers. And when, finally, things begin to unravel, Metzger’s camera goes all out of focus as it attempts to show us a truly artsy series of doubled images to signify lesbian sex while becoming suddenly terribly shy about showing the two males going after anything but a few French kisses. The seducers of this film evidently believe amyl nitrate to be an aphrodisiac, and spend more time sniffing than smooching, screw-ing, and scrogging. Yet, obviously, both Jack and Elvira eventually score.       

     The next day Eddie has the “morning after druthers,” while the convent girl has evidently been completely converted to the devil’s ways. Indeed Eddie and Betsy are nearly set to go their own ways, as Betsy jumps into bed with both Elvira and Jack ready for a second act, while Eddie is about to wander home to ponder his new homoself.

      Fortunately, the telephone repairman always rings twice, returning just in time to take along Eddie and Betsy on another call, forcing the slightly disappointed Jack and Elvira to look elsewhere, finding a new object of possible interest in a male waiter they’d never before spotted at a local café. 

 

Los Angeles, December 31, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).

John Waters | Female Trouble / 1974

where these people come from?

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Waters (screenwriter and director) Female Trouble / 1974

 

Dawn Davenport (Divine), furious for not receiving her desired “Cha-cha heels for Christmas,” pulls the tree down upon her mother and punches out her father before “leaaavin’” home forever.   

       In her escape she catches a ride with low-life garage mechanic Earl Peterson (also Divine), is raped—mostly with great pleasure—and left pregnant, bearing the baby by herself, forced even to cut the umbilical cord with her own teeth. Without payment from Peterson or any other source of money, Dawn joins her friends Concetta (Cookie Mueller) and Chiclette (Susan Walsh) as a robber and sometime prostitute, raising her “retarded” daughter Taffy (Hilary Taylor and Mink Stole) with hate and punishment before falling in love and marrying her hairdresser-neighbor Gater Nelson (Michael Potter).

     When she and Gater are about to split, she falls into the clutches of the Lipstick Beauty Salon owners, Donald and Donna Dasher (David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce), who voyeuristically photograph her with the intention of proving that beauty is commensurate with criminal behavior.     

      Providing Dawn with drugs, money, and even more radically ugly clothes and hairdos, they make her so famous that she loses all sense of reality and sanity, refusing to even feed Taffy, let alone care for her, and warring with her neighbor, Gator’s aunt Ida, who blames Dawn for her beloved Gator’s escape to Detroit to work in the auto industry, and in revenge tosses a bottle of acid into Dawn’s lovely face.

      Now even more hideous looking to the average eye, Dawn is convinced by the Dashers that she is more beautiful than ever and prepares for a nightclub act while the Dashers put Ida into a birdcage encouraging Dawn to chop of her hand with an axe in punishment.

      Dawn, finally ready for her act, kills Taffy in the green room for having joined the Hare Krishna movement before stumbling on stage where she models, sings a song, and does somersaults on a trampoline before taking out a gun and killing several of the audience members.

       Is it any wonder that even though her lawyer argues for insanity, Dawn is found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair, where she fries with the satisfaction of having been able to give one last grand performance before her fellow inmates and audience, her imagined public who take such great pleasure in watching her one last performance?

      I’m glad I got all that off my mind. Now perhaps we can really talk about Waters’ hallucinatory side-show of a movie, made obviously only for those who truly enjoy the circus freak show or get their jollies from anything truly perverse. As gay critic Rex Reed not so very innocently asked: “Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn't there a law or something?”

      The question, however, might be recontextualized by asking who he means by “all these people.” Is he talking about the film’s several trios such as the classroom dropouts Dawn, Concetta, and Chiclette; the three queer hairdressers of the Lipstick Beauty Salon Wink (Ed Peranio), Dribbles (George Figgs), and Butterfly (Paul Swift); the social representatives such as incompetent school teacher (George Hulse), the cop who shoots more members of the audience in order to control their terror than does Dawn, or the sleazy courtroom prosecutor (Channing Wilroy)? Or is Reed talking about the movie’s desperate duos: the sicko/psycho Dashers; Gator and his Auntie Ida who is so very disappointed that her son has not become gay and settled down with nice male beautician; Dawn’s absolutely clueless parents (Betty Woods and Roland Hertz); the two disapproving bailiffs attending to Dawn at the film’s end; or Dawn and her monstrous “Bad Seed” child Tammy? No one gets off free in Waters’ 1974 vision of the American nightmare.

      His world, in fact, is simply that of the cinema world of the 1950s and early 60s just a little more exaggerated than it truly was, as if like Divine herself, the movies, their themes, and their actors were simply enlarged, given steroids, and colored with deeper hues of the technicolor lens.

      In the witchcraft transformations of Water’s cinema laboratories, he tosses a smidgen of Blackboard Jungle (1955), with just a drop of East of Eden (1955), teen angst, bad girl and boy classroom behavior, along with a prostitute mother denied by the would-be preacher dad, along with a good stir of Rebel without a Cause (1955) just for a little more angst, sexual confusion, and unlikely allies on the run along with a heavy dose of the aforementioned Wild Seed (1956) just for Tammy’s sake! And while Waters was at it he obviously threw in Godzilla (1956), Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), all stirred up with an entire stick of The House of Wax (1953) and a handful of Caged (1950) for the cheesy horror of everything we witness upon his screen. As for the cinematographer, surely Waters must have hired Diane Arbus, from whom he admits he stole the idea for some of Divine’s hairdos.

      The important thing is to get a drag queen like Divine to play your central character and a whole host of nonconforming, larger than life figures that define the Dreamlander performers of his many films such as Edith Massey, Cookie Mueller, Mink Stole, George Figgs, Ed Peranio, and David Lochary, who are trans, gay, lesbian, and just confused but, nonetheless, agree with the director that up is down, in is out, and normal very strange. Waters’ world is inverted from one you read about in textbooks.        

     They come from the streets of Baltimore and every American town, large and small, where people are made to feel uncomfortable for being who they are. So there are a very great many of these unreasonable freaks, Rex, walking the US streets just looking to get into trouble—not only female trouble, as Cookie Mueller described her pelvic inflammation which named this movie, but the kind of trouble involved with sex, drugs, and art all mixed up. They’re very silly and, if you put away any sense of reality that may have accidentally brought with you to the movie house, they are a great deal fun in their larger-than-life presentations of the American experience. Like Albee’s George and Martha, Ginsberg’s “best minds” “destroyed by madness, running hysterical naked,” or Williams’ “pure products of America” who go crazy, and those who performed in Ronald Tavel’s and Charles Ludlam’s “Theater of the Ridiculous.” Waters’ characters go racing through the streets in twos and threes just waiting to greet you. So, Rex, as Ed Woods advised, “Be afraid, very afraid.”

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

 

Ulrike Ottinger | Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoön & Sons) / 1971-72, premiered 1975

the widow, the ice skater, and the gigolo

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ulrike Ottinger (screenwriter, based on a text by Chiquita Brook [Xavier Arrovuelo] and Ottinger, and director) Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoön & Sons) / 1971-72, premiered 1975

 

Subtitled “The Story of the Transformation of Esmeralda del Rio,” Ulrike Ottinger’s Laocoön & Sons like her later Freak Orlando is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s fictional “biography” based on the imagined life of her lover, Vita Sackville-West. The focus of Ottinger’s first cinematic work is her own lover, Tabea Blumenschein. In this instance, Ottinger foregoes the historical contexts, locating her work more in the world of the fairy tale, a territory wherein female figures often dominated. But already realizing her personal vision, the director does not place her narrative into a rational or even temporal imaginary world, but allows for the various assemblages of what Patricia White has described as the “referential tableaux, rituals, and performances shot on location in places layered with disjunctive cultural histories” that so dominate most of her early work. Moreover, Ottinger sets down her heroine, Esmeraldo del Rio (not at all so very different from Bette Midler’s later comic mermaid persona Dolores del Rio) into the mythical all female land Laura Molloy, which has its own myths, rituals, and customs:

“Once upon a time there was a country known by the name of Laura Molloy.

Laura Molloy was the name of this country. Only women lived in Laura Molloy. Esmeralda del Rio was a woman. One day Esmeralda del Rio had the idea to undergo a series of transformations, which were to take her very far.

So far did she go that she had no way of knowing how far she had gone.

Two things were certain: Esmeralda del Rio was blond and in her own way she practiced a kind of magic which I would like to call 'blond magic'.”

 

      What we also immediately recognize in this early work is that Ottinger will focus not only on outlandish customs, costumes and behavior but reclaims the world of magic and witchcraft which as many feminists are argued over the years has traditionally been associated with the female outsider and, in particular, with lesbian behavior. Throughout this film, women will be observed not over boiling pots brewing up strange mixtures but also looking through the glass orbs of fortune tellers.

      And finally, beyond all of these layers, is simply a great deal of comic, almost adolescent goofiness that, at moments, turns into pure narrative genius. Indeed, as the narration adds, “Is not Laura Molly a country of small absurdities?”

      To begin with Esmeralda decides one day to transform herself into a widow, Olimpia Vincitor.

Unfortunately, her lover had died without Olimpia remembering who she was, why, and when. Accordingly, this new Ovid-like figure must go on a search of the past. Desperately seeking out her much-missed lover, Olimpia finally is forced to commit necrophilia: “Even gravestones have their charm. They let themselves be caressed.”

      Finally, tired and worn out of seeking a past that she cannot find, Emeralda determines to make another significant transformation, well-chosen particularly given the cold, arctic conditions, so we are told, of the country of Laura Molly. She now becomes the ice skater in the manner of Sonja Henie, named Linda MacNamara. Throughout, Linda stands upon the ice-cold beach in the positions of ice-skating champions, although we never see her from the waist down.

      A circus comes to town, which involves nearly all Laura Molloy’s citizens involving being embraced by a large python, a paper snake that several of the carney people hold as they run around the others, embracing them and capturing them within their prop. “And now they are snaking -it’s unbearable, it’s unbelievable!”

     At other points the narrator describes a Duchess and a Countess: “While the Duchess and Countess discussed their silly ideas in all detail, their daughter, lover of gestures that were unjustifiable from a strict theatrical perspective, stepped onto the balcony to let herself be booed by the peasant women who found her to be frankly decadent.”

     And finally, tired of skating, Esmeralda del Rio puts away her skates, becoming Jimmy the gigolo who courts one of the older members of the Laura Molly community who in order to maintain their roles in society inexplicably become pederasts, the figure here played by an effeminate gay man speaking in a high female-like voice. Eventually, even Jimmy, interested only in the older pederast’s money, has to go on the run.

     In short, even the fairytale runs dry and the hurries to its end. Some of the figures such as the carnival folk reappear in Ottinger’s far more complex 1981 Freak Orlando. But throughout one can perceive this as an early dry run for the later exploration of being forced to live in a world of constant metamorphosing in attempts to fit in the various evils of society at large.

 

Los Angeles, November 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022). 

Fernando Arrabal | L'arbre de Guernica (The Guernica Tree) / 1975, USA 1976

images of terror

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fernando Arrabal and Francesco Cinieri (screenplay), Fernando Arrabal (director) L'arbre de Guernica (The Guernica Tree) / 1975, USA 1976

 

As Roger Ebert pointed out in his 1976 review, Fernando Arrabal’s 1975 movie L’arbre de Guernica was the first film about the Franco era actually made in Spain. And even then, this powerful study about the early days of the Spanish Civil War is presented more as a De Sadeian fantasia than a realist picture of the terrible takeover of Spain which brought that country into horrific decades of fascist rule—far longer than its neighbors Italy and Germany.

     In Arrabal’s version, we see the terrible events of Franco’s takeover from various viewpoints: including that of the wealthy Count Cerralbo (Bento Urago), whose family for generations has demeaned, starved, and punished the poor citizens of the small village of Villa Ramiro and whose thuggish three nephews continue the abuse; his only son, Goya (Ron Faber) whose major actions have been artistic interventions before he joins the underground; the radical woman leader Vandale (Mariangela Melato) based on the real-life Civil War hero La Pasionaria; the pacifist local school teacher, who passionately believes in freedom, but is hesitant about the local’s abilities to control their violence; and the wild and raucous peasants who dance out their long frustrations and anger in various de Sade-like maneuvers.

      Hardly any of these figures is free of blame, although it is clear that Vandale and Goya, who finally meet up in Guernica, under the Guernica Tree, a symbol of the area’s commitment to independence and freedom, are the film’s heroes. That is, of course, the very moment when Franco’s forces chose to bomb and kill the attendees, and as with Pablo Picasso’s famed painting, Arrabal’s cinematic presentation reveals all the horror of those events.

      Much of this director’s presentation of “reality” however, is revealed in a manner that one might describe as a kind of terrifying mix of Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini (particularly Pasolini’s Saló). The Count’s nephews attempt to rape Vandale as she rides into the village on a donkey; she escapes by throwing a handful of vipers at them.

    Small boys dance naked, girls wave flags and sing on their way to mass. A dwarf has sex with a beautiful woman, while around him others of his kind voyeuristically look on.

     The villagers’ celebration of Guernica day is more like a mad Mardi Gras than a recognition of what Guernica and its tree truly represents. The elderly local woman see Vandale as a witch. The peasants’ passion for freedom results in the invasion of the Count’s estate, his wife and servants led off to death. The Count escapes only through the good graces of the school-teacher who hides him simply because “it is the right thing to do,” refusing to take the money and jewels the Count offers him.

      The villagers overtake the church, desecrating most of its holy symbols, including the cross with Jesus upon it, as they shoot it apart with guns, pissing on other holy symbols.

     But even more horrifying are the images of their deaths after the Falange, aided by Hitler and Mussolini, take over the small village which Arrabal has created to represent all Spanish villages.

       After a blessing by church leaders, which includes a full outright tongue-kissing episode between the presiding priest and his male assistant, the rebels are painfully punished with the dismembering of their testicles, numerous absurdist shootings, and, eventually, the dwarfs being tied to small vehicles who, one by one, a well-dressed matador impales while an aristocratic audience looks on with applause.

       Let us just say that, as beautiful at times his images are, Arrabal’s film is not an easy one to witness. But then neither was the Spanish Civil War!

       Beneath the lovely color images, the director is comprehensibly angry, and as in Pasolini’s Saló, the degree of the torture of human beings is commensurate to the passing of time.

       No solution in this film seems totally possible. The aristocracy and church members terrorize the villagers, the villagers are stupidly brutal, the fascists are murderers. Even the pacifist teacher is trapped into non-action.

       Arrabal’s own father was imprisoned during the Second Spanish War, attempted suicide, and escaped from a hospital in his pajamas, never to be seen again. If that doesn’t make one a Surrealist, then you’re simply unable to comprehend life.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2020).