expectations
by Douglas
Messerli
Eric De Kuyper
(screenwriter and director) Casta diva / 1982, released 1983
The figures of
filmmaker Eric De Kuyper, in this experimental film from 1982, almost all
represent variations of Narcissus, looking into space, into the images of other
bodies, and mirrors in search, so it appears, of love without being able to
achieve it. The act of looking and posing, a sophisticated kind of cruising,
makes their actions almost comic as they endlessly preen and beg for attention,
but seem to pull away or move off the moment it comes near. In almost every
sequence of this quite static film—reminding one of the endless long shots of
Hungarian director Bella Tarr—figures of great beauty and allure (performed by
friends, models, and actors Paul Ruven, Ben Kettenis, Jan Simons, Paul
Verstraten, Walter Nuyens, Jacques Castelot, Marina Berti, Gérard Lemaître,
Hugo Hilgers, Rik Roesems) seem ridiculously unable to achieve their desires or
even their simplest of acts. They are pure and chaste gods, not of their own
choice necessarily, but because they are all unable to meet up to the
expectations that they and others put upon them. In De Kuyper’s beautiful black-and-white
“scenarios” or in some cases tableaux-vivants, they fail because of they
are untouchable, gods who cannot come down to earth in order to participate in
the real world.
Similarly,
the director himself continually delivers the unexpected, contrarily presenting
us with the opposite of what we had imagined. In the very first scenario, a
young man returns time and again from inside his apartment to his large terrace-like
balcony as if he were waiting for somebody, and is attempting to look for his
arrival. Actually, we eventually discover, that he is not only looking for someone
but allowing others to see him, at one point removing his shirt before
reentering his apartment, and returning wearing a vest, he looks off in all
directions without apparently finding anyone he seems to be seeking or without
observing someone who might see him. This beauty is absolutely frustrated by
his chasteness, desperate for an encounter. As if he were in a film—which, of
course, he is engaged in—he poses, smokes, and stares into empty space as if he
might engage someone other than the viewers of the film, who are real in his “fictional”
world.
Just when he and we have given up on that
possibility, however, the director presents us, apparently directly across the
way, with a man who appears to be staring back at the model seeking his voyeur.
But strangely, the original
seems not to be
aware of the other’s existence and stares of in another direction, missing out,
so it appears, on precisely what he has been seeking.
In the second scenario, another good-looking,
presumably gay man seems to be readying himself for a night on the town. He
begins by cleaning up the bathroom tub, an act, one imagines, in preparation
for a shower. But instead, he turns to the small sink over which hangs a
mirror. Our young man strips and washes his body slowly and thoroughly, even
giving himself a sort of douche. He then, just as completely, dries off his
body.
Just when we
imagine he has finally finished, however, he takes up a bottle of lotion or oil
and carefully applies the lotion to his body from top to bottom, almost seeming
to undo the acts of cleaning himself he has previously accomplished. Just the
length of his sink-bound shower seems to suggest he prefers the act of cleaning
himself over any effects in my have in terms of others to whom he might later
present such a lean and fresh figure.
If we have no idea whether this young god is
chaste, we certainly do know by the time the sequence is finished that he is squeaky
clean and scented.
The
third of our male “models” is first seen in the kitchen preparing a meal in a
pot, perhaps a kind of stew. On a small table in the foreground are table settings
and napkins for two and a vase of flowers in the center. He soon opens a bottle
of wine, moving the flowers to side ledge, and putting out the wine.
Yet no one shows
up, and he soon brings out what appears to be salad, finally seating himself on
the empty place between the settings, and eating the salad leaves by hand, one
by one.
He brings a newspaper to the table and soon
after, a newspaper. A book engages him soon after, and finally he leaves to
bring in a typewriter.
The pot of stew,
looking more like a soup is finally also brought to the table, some of which,
along with the wine he pours into a cup and a bowl. Ultimately he also brings
to the small table a TV set. It is as if the lovely table setting is an image of
something which has no reality in his real world, a shared dining space that
never is realized. It reminds be a little of a scene in Billy Wilder’s The
Apartment (1960), where “Buddy Boy” Baxter, despite his best intentions, is
left yet another night alone without any one to share his meal. Or perhaps yet
another movie, Hitchcock’s Rear Window where the central figure played
by James Stewart watches a lonely female neighbor pretend to serve up a meal
for another who isn’t there.
We don’t know who or what this man was
expecting for his dinner. Was he stood up? Yet, here it is made even more sad
and absurd by the final preponderance of objects on the table, the fact that
this cook eats his soup or stew directly from the pot, fishes his pickles with
a fork out of the bottle, and has little time to ponder the taste of anything
he has so carefully prepared.
Others with high expectations, but low
results follow, including a truly beautifully coiffed young gay man who decides
to give himself, again in the mirror, a little trim. But a snip with the
scissors at one point, leads to yet another, and another, and on until we’re
not sure at the end of haircut he looks better or worse than when he began.
In yet another sequence a young man living
in a near-barren room with his entire wardrobe apparently slung over and upon
two chairs, tries on a pair of pants before looking into the mirror, and
quickly decides to change into another pair, and then into yet another. He does
the same maneuvers with shirts, equally unhappy with the results. Finally, he
puts on a pair and shorts and a T-shirt with which he ultimately seems pleased.
But instead of going anywhere—sits down on another chair and drinks from a
bottle of milk and eats on of three apples laying in the foreground.
All of his efforts
at dressing up appear to be for naught.
And
in the very next sequence we observe basically the opposite of the previous
scenario, as a man, staring into the mirror attempts to button the three-way
gathering of the collars and final button of a tuxedo before attempting to
formally tie a bowtie.
At a
swimming pool a swim-suited boy anxious, it seems, to make a hookup, bruises a
bearded man across the way, who for interminable moments sits on his haunches
while looking in the opposite direction of the parading male across from him.
Finally, a pool boy enters the scene, closing the curtains of the various shower stalls
before also attempting to engage the crouching lion of a man. Although the
latter does talk to the bearded man, he seems to get no further in encouraging
him to exist his hunkering pose. You might almost cite this “expectation” as
the kind of cruising event we saw in the first sequence, except here all
players are far more obvious in their intentions, the two cute boys trying to
seduce the sad man in thought. Although the stand-off seems to last for hours,
no one budges, and once more there is little interaction between the seemingly
desirous participants. Each of these individuals seem to caught up their voyeuristic
poses to actually engage with others.
In two of the sequences, handsome gay men
meet up with machines, in the first case a man simply trying to install a light
over his bathroom sink find that despite his careful measurements and box of tools
that the bolts he attempts to affix into wall either will not fully enter or
can not easily be pulled out. The holes he has made grow larger and larger
until one wonders whether he can ever get the fixture to align. But with dogged
determination, he finally achieves his goal, lighting up his narcissistic
mirror image.
One of the most visually fascinating of the
sequences is in a vast field, at the far end of which is a typical Belgian road
lined with trees.
In the
center of this field is a car with both its engine hood and back truck opened
wide. Nearby sits a man (perhaps the same model as in the swimming sequence
above) lying on the grass, as if frustrated by trying to repair his automobile
has taken a rest or even a picnic.
Eventually, however, he determines to continue in restoring the engine,
pulling our wrench after wrench from his tool box and from within the car
itself to find just the right tool for the nuts and bolts which keep his engine
and the other parts in place. In utter frustration he returns to the driver’s
seat and pulls out a beer, but even that does not relieve whatever bothers him
as he puts his head down pulling his arms over it as if in deep grief. But he
too seems aware of a possible audience, eyes each passerby who happens down the
road in the far distance, as if someone might cross the field to help or at
least commiserate?
In the next sequence we watch a handyman
wash and dry a gigantic mirrored wall of a major ballet company, an act that he
achieves through a careful pattern of the application of water, the spreading
of it, and the wiping away of the liquid.
In this section’s last few moments, customed
dancers enter of go through their steps in front of the now glistening clean
mirror.
One
of the most fascinating of the sequences is held in a large room wherein the
camera basically scans its long walls, reviewing versions of nearly all the
characters we have seen until this moment—each of them poised in a position of exhibitionist
stature, without any of them playing the voyeur, each looking off into space as
if they were the object of the film goers viewpoint. Once more there is no
interchange here, as the camera takes yet another voyage around the room to
reassure us that not one of these figures seems to be allured by the others.
One might argue that this represents the very essence of the misconceptions of
these men, caught up in themselves so intensely that they have lost touch with
the very sexuality which they intend to incarnate.
It is as if all those gestures, the cleaning
of their bodies, the clothes they put of their bodies and remove, the mechanical
gestures they employ to amplify and engage the other has been for naught. This
is a vast space of empty stares, of sexualized bodies that have lost their
purpose. Even the art of seeming disengaged with which we have observed the
director teaching them in the previous sequence has lost its meaning; and we
are left with a vacuum that no longer enchants.
Even the glorious music by Bellini (whose
song “Casta diva” from Norma is sung by the chaste Druid princess to the
moon), Puccini, Dalida, and Offenbach can no longer awaken these frozen
mannikins. Their beauty and sexuality has been robbed from them in the
artificiality of their gestures, in their frozen stare into nowhere.
Los Angeles, July
22, 2025 | Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).
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