Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Satansbraten (Satan’s Brew) / 1976, USA 1977

fassbinder’s absurdist comedy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Satansbraten (Satan’s Brew) / 1976, USA 1977

 

Satan’s Brew is now the 27th film of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s I have reviewed, and, in one way or another, I have loved every one of these movies. Even my beloved Hitchcock has not fared so well: I do not like several of his apprentice films, and the films from The Birds forward are disappointments that cannot compare with his greatest work of the 1940 through 1960’s Psycho—although I do know that there are plenty of critics who might disagree. But Fassbinder, far more difficult to love than Hitchcock, has not ever completely disappointed me.

      How in a brief period of 13 years Fassbinder created so many amazing pieces of cinema is nearly impossible to comprehend: generous support by the German cultural community, governmental and private, a repertory-like group of actors with whom he worked, and lots and lots of drugs and sex probably helped. But it still doesn’t explain the genius of this director.

      For years now I had been waiting for Netflix to add the 1976 film Satansbraten to their list; but when it never came about, I finally found it on the new Criterion streaming service and quickly determined to watch it. Now I think it’s one of my very favorites, since it involves absurdist drama traditions, from Artaud and Ionesco to more contemporaneous theatrical artists such as Harold Pinter and Edward Albee with whom I feel a deep commitment.

      It is a heady mix of theater of cruelty, farce, and social critique that seems so different from Fassbinder’s other films that some critics, as quoted in Andrew Grossman’s excellent essay on the film, argued for its total exceptionalness in Fassbinder’s short career. As Grossman quotes film historian Thomas Elsaeeer, for example, the movie is “a rare attempt at comedy from a filmmaker who, as commentators have noted, is entirely devoid of humor.”

      Christion Thomsen, a critic devoted to Fassbinder’s films, described it as “ultimately nihilistic,” summarizing that “the film is light years away from the time when Fassbinder tried to be positive and constructive and present alternatives to the reigning misery.”

      I can’t explain how these important critical figures have seen a Fassbinder who I have never experienced. But, for me, the great director’s films have almost always been filled with humor and a great deal of campy satire. I might almost suggest that Fassbinder’s ability to turn his miserable characters’ lives into humor is one of his signature qualities. How else to explain the crazy Bonnie and Clyde-like robberies of Love Is Colder than Death, the fetishized murder of the hero of The American Soldier, the absolutely crazed societal replay of popular American films in In a Year of 13 Moons, the melodramatic breakdown of Petra Kant (right out of Djuna Barnes), the crazy adventurers of Rio das Mortes, the absurd gathering of his regulars in Behold the Holy Whore—and the list goes on? If you haven’t a good sense of humor, then you might never comprehend Fassbinder’s darkest films.

     I might even argue that humor is always what saves Fassbinder’s melodramatic depictions of his needy and downtrodden circus of post-World War II Germans. This director, as in his own depiction of the naïve gay dreamer of Fox and His Friends, is a clown experiencing very serious results for his absurd perceptions. Surely that is how you would have described the sad-sack fool, Franz Biberkopf, in the director’s monumental television series Berlin Alexanderplatz. If Fassbinder always has close ties to his fellow German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, he also comes out of the tradition of Georg Büchner, whose Wozzeck was as foolish as he was tragic.

      It’s simply that in Satan’s Brew Fassbinder opens up all the spigots, turning up the gas, so to speak, on his completely ridiculous figure, Kranz (a marvelous Kurt Raab), a writer, evidently of some note, who has been unable to write anything for years and is now totally broke and unable to even obtain another advance from his publishers.

     Kranz obviously stands for the temporary or perhaps permanent writer’s block that perhaps every writer in the world must face and one time or another (except perhaps for Fassbinder and, alas, me). If he is logorrheic, he is also logophobic, unable in the world he now inhabits with his several domineering prostitutes to communicate—except through his terribly bitter fights with his long-suffering and insufferable wife Luise (the indomitable Helen Vita), who not only allows him to have numerous affairs with his prostitute-lovers but continues to argue for her own rights for sex as his married partner. Their conversations, at times, appear to be lifted out of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which in 1976 Fassbinder would have been well aware.

       All of this is even more exaggerated by the household existence of Kranz’s brother, Ernst (Volker Spengler), a man much like the mad Reinfeld, Count Dracula’s assistant, with flies, attempting not only to collect them but, after naming each of them, and through masturbation to mate with them. At one hilarious moment Kranz admits to his brother’s obsession, suggesting that he hasn’t succeeded, to his knowledge—“at least yet.” When the unpaid furniture dealers come to collect the chifforobe, they almost take the shy brother, hidden away in its confines, with them.

       In fact, Kranz is a kind of Dracula, using the women from whom he begs for sex also as sources of possible income—a reversal of the usual “john,” using even a prostitute, sold to others by her husband, as a likely financial attribute. Another prostitute, into heavy bondage, writes checks out to Kranz as he threatens (and possibly does) shoot her to death with her own gun.

       Yet, when the detective, investigating the incident, shares a foot tub with Kranz and joins his and his wife for lunch, we can’t even be sure that her death wasn’t also just a sexual fantasy.

        As Grossman perceptively writes:

 

“What becomes normative in Satan’s Brew is not a state of bourgeois passivity, but a panicked desperation that, taken to its ‘extreme,’ unbridles characters’ ids and returns them to states of irrational infantilism. If the sociopolitical revolutions (of the 1960s, we assume) in which Kranz once believed have died away, he can now do little but succumb to a rising capitalism that bloats appetites but never sates them. Thus afflicted, Kranz is part-beast, part-child, his attempts at dignity dissipating as the film goes on. He is a pressure-cooker of frustrated desires, and sexually hopeless. We laugh when the degraded yet ‘normal’ Kranz, spying through a keyhole on a female friend as she scratches her buttocks, exclaims, ‘I want to screw you like a stoat!’ He then complains incredulously to her husband, ‘Your wife doesn’t want to sleep with me!’ Perhaps we initially mistake Kranz’s joyful desecration of monogamy for a poet’s iconoclasm. But Kranz is also a beggar, and when he asks his married friends for a loan, his unaffected artist’s ways become indistinguishable from a vagabond’s destitution; it is only when he repays his debts to the couple that the husband is happy to whore his wife. Yet Fassbinder’s humor is impersonal, political — when we laugh at Kranz, we really laugh past him, and at the meretricious culture that has made human appetites an allegory for degeneracy.”

     What’s even worse is that Kranz, ultimately, does begin to write. But this time, perhaps without his even knowing it, in the romantic voice of the beloved German poet Stephen George, whose Nordic images of the German race later became popular with the German National Socialists. When Kranz discovers that the “new” poem he has created is from the pen of George, he imagines that he himself an incarnation of the poet, attempting to look like the poet and even taking on a group of young gay acolytes with whom he now embraces homosexuality.  

      Louise, meanwhile, becomes desperately ill with cancer—well-earned in her world of absolute servitude—who is taken away to the hospital, with even the retarded Ernst realizing the desperateness of the situation.

      Finally, Kranz himself, in his total downward spiral, realizes he has lost the only person who truly might care for him in the real world in which he lives. And he admits for the first time in the film what she has attempted to proclaim throughout: “You’re my wife before God and man!” But in so doing, of course, he admits that his entire life has been a fraud, that he, his poetry, and his identification with George is an absurdity no longer able of being supported. Her death is his death. The comedy is over.

 

Los Angeles, May 12, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2019).

Bryan Sudfield | Out With A Bang / 2018

false alarm

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert O’Connor (screenplay), Bryan Sudfield (director) Out With A Bang / 2018 [8.24 minutes]

 

The supposedly happy couple Dwayne and Carter (Aaron Badilla and Jesse Singleton) are lounging in bed when suddenly both get a notice on their phones that an atomic missile is on its way, the end of their world about to occur in an hour and a half.

     Dwayne is suddenly up and desperate to leave, while Carter would rather the two spend their last time together making love. Carter attempts to restrain Dwayne from his desperate attempt to leave until the former is forced to explain that he is love with someone else, a new person he’s been seeing for a couple of months. After finding his keys, he darts out the door in the short time left before the end of their world, perhaps the end of the world as we know it.

    Carter is left behind with no one to help him face his own death.

    For an inexplicable reason, he too rushes out, perhaps in chasse of Dwayne, but finds the car already missing, with their neighbor Donnie (Kofi Donald Gwira), who they have previously described as “their street’s resident bachelor,” sitting in his front lawn, face buried in his hands. He explains his sorrow being is that he has spent his entire time upon his career instead seeking out someone to love.

    Carter invites the hunk to his house suggesting they both can at least face the end together, and Donnie agrees, soon after also taking up Carter’s offer to share his bed.

     We see the two after sex, the ballistic missile about to hit. But suddenly their phones announce it’s all been a false alarm, and Donnie suddenly rises, dresses and wishes Carter well, explaining that he has a proposal to write.

      So once again Carter sits in his home alone; that is until Dwayne reappears. He’s been rejected by his new boyfriend, and they’ve broken up. He begs Carter to just pretend that the last hour or so never happened, to which Carter agrees. However, he can’t resist speaking the truth, that he’s just fucked their handsome neighbor.

     I suppose screenwriter Robert O’Connor and director Bryan Sudfield saw the end of the world as a kind of perfect metaphor for the personal end of one’s love affair, but the comparison is so lame and inappropriate that, frankly, we don’t really care. It’s difficult, in fact, to arose any feelings for Dwayne and Donnie; and although Carter certainly has the best idea of how to spend one’s final moments in life, it’s even impossible to sympathize with someone so nonchalant. At least this trio didn’t rush into the streets and go mad as most such end-of-the-world scenarios portray the final moments of life on earth.

     But this short film is so very absurd, that frankly, even though Carter gets his truly just reward, I didn’t give a damn.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Noah Himmelstein | ShirtTugger / 2025

 oreo cookies, red licorice and corn chips

Noah Zachary (screenplay), Noah Himmelstein (director) ShirtTugger / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

This short film directed by Noah Himmelstein is about a serious issue, “Binge Eating Disorder.” Yet for all the seriousness of the issue, it’s hard to feel engaged with Max (the film’s writer Noah Zachary) who leaves his hunky lover Bill (Matt Gibson) to trot off to bed many a night while he secretly sits up and swallows down every piece of junk food he can get his hands on—or even worse, food that he keeps in plastic bags in a hidden-away drawer.

     The next morning, he dutifully serves up pancakes and eggs to Bill after his companion’s strenuous workout, while he goes hungry. Is Max pretending to be on a diet? Why doesn’t Bill ask why his lover isn’t eating?

     Throughout the day, Max virtually starves himself despite the people he encounters, all stuffing their mouths with iced café latte, ice cream cones, and other fast-food items, as well the vast variety of fast-food restaurants that he walks past on his way to work.

     Despite his self-conscious pulling away whenever Bill goes to hug him, Max must perceive that his companion loves him despite his bulging belly. So why does he once again binge into the night?

     In short, we see his actions, but are provided so little knowledge about either Max or Bill that we can’t imagine the source of his endless hunger or even how the two men possibly got together and what they have found in common. All we know is that there is a problem, and frankly it’s an issue that isn’t that easy to watch as it’s played out. A plump man chomping on chips, licking the frosting off Oreo cookies, and downing red licorice does not a fascinating movie make.

     While we may believe be convinced of the seriousness of the disorder, we are given little reason to care for a solution or to even root for the central figure’s ability to mend his ways. Frankly, I’ll join the kind and thoughtful sleepy-head Bill in bed any day before I’ll sit through another night of watching Max gorge himself to death on calories and bicarbonate of soda to settle his inevitable stomach ache.

     And while we’re at it, we have wonder what does any of this have to do with being gay?

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

João Pedro Rodrigues | Fogo-Fátuo (Will-o'-the-Wisp) / 2022

the politics of art and love

by Douglas Messerli

João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata and Paulo Lopes Graça (screenplay), João Pedro Rodrigues Fogo-Fátuo (Will-o'-the-Wisp) / 2022

 

Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues’ 2022 feature Will-o'-the-Wisp might be said to fit into his oeuvre much like I’m So Excited (2013) does in the cinematic works of Pedro Almodóvar, a highly sexually comic work that, although containing a great deal of social satire, more clearly has allowed a later career director pull down the curtain—or in Rodrigues’ case to open up the palace doors—concerning the director’s gay sexual focus. And although the Portuguese director has long been open about LGBT sexuality, this work is in some respects his most risky work to date.

    Certainly, the risks are not about locating the film’s center in the Portuguese royalty. In fact, Portugal did away with their royals in 1910. But in the fiction of the film the royal line behind the conquering of the Congo and Brazil is still in place in 2069. Crown Prince Alfredo (Joel Branco playing is elder self) is dying beneath his favorite painting, the 18th century work by José Conrado Roza, originally titled “The Marriage of Negro Rosa,” now retitled as his mother advises him, despite her complete disinterest in real social issues, “The Wedding Masquerade,” now hanging at the Museumdu Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, France. The blacks in this painting are depicted as what once were called “midgets,” now described as “little people.”

     But for Alfredo it is not likely a case of bigotry that draws him to the painting, as much as his youthful gay lover, as we shall soon discover, was a black firefighter. And cultural correctness, particularly as applied to the royal family in this film, stands as another layer of its satire.

     For none of the royals, except for Alfredo appear to care for anything but the images they represent. The film quickly takes us back to 2011 with the endlessly cigar-smoking king (Miguel Loureiro) compares the royal forests (the Leiria Pine Forest) with the uprightness of the royal family and almost burning down the forest as he tosses away a still-lit cigar butt (his son carefully puts it out with his foot).

     In 2017 the actual Leiria Pine Forest was subject to a major forest fire. And by the next scene representing a royal family dinner when, as The New York Times critic Amy Nicholson suggests,  “smoke wafts through the palace while the conservative queen (Margarida Vila-Nova) putters around anxiously snuffing candles.” In fact, the smoke in the palace is not from the forest, but emanating from the king’s cigar.

     And already Alfredo (now played by Mauro Costa) is beginning to feel frustrated with his family, and at one point, fed up with his mother’s meaningless piety, stands and delivers, as Carlos Aguilar of the Los Angeles Times puts it:

 

“Greta Thunberg’s now emblematic U.N. address before announcing to his conservative royal parents his desire to become a firefighter. Under the watch of an imposingly large painting depicting a group of Africans dressed in opulent attire, an inescapable nod to Portugal’s colonial past, this statement of youthful rebellion takes place in a static and ornate dinner shot.”

 

     The queen laughs at the utter absurdity of his desire, while the king sees it as an opportunity to put the royal name on yet another worthy organization by recognizing his son as a fire chief. But the pale and spindly boy insists he wants to work his way up from the bottom.

     In fact, those words will be taken quite literally by the director once the boy enters the world of the firehouse, where the female fire chief laughs at what she perceives is a whim, but also recognizes an opportunity perhaps for funding, putting him into the capable hands of a young fireman to training, Alfonso (André Cabral).

      Suddenly having come face to face with a nearly all-male world of the fireman’s locker room, Alfredo discovers the sexually randy firemen, dressed only in jockstraps or standing completely naked, test the art history student on his knowledge of art by enacting scenes from famous real and imaginary works of art by Caravaggio (“Fireman’s Head”), Francis Bacon (“Mr. Fireman, Bring Me a Dream”), Ruebens (“The Rape of Ganymede”) and others, creating sexually suggestive all-male tableaus by notably homosexual artists.

     Lessons in the positioning of the fire victims' bodies and artificial respiration bring Alfonso and Alfredo even closer, and before you know they are both gleefully sliding down the fire pole with surely their own poles just as erect as they engage in an erotic dance joined by the fire brigade, the zaftig fire chief and a clearly lesbian firewoman.

     In an interview with Jordan Cronk in Film Comment Rodrigues comments in his dance numbers he cinematically “looked to Vincente Minnelli and Jacques Demy, as well as Ginger Rogers–Fred Astaire and Stanley Donen–Gene Kelly musicals.”

 

    “ My choreographer, Madalena Xavier, and I watched a lot of musicals—and by that I mean classical musicals as well as music videos. ….Madelena is a dance teacher in Lisbon. Some of the firefighters were and are her students, including André Cabral, who plays Alfonso. Our main idea for the choreography was to establish a rhythm early on, in the sequence where the firefighters are going through their safety training—especially the First Aid Recovery Position routine. Those gestures were the starting point.”

     Yet Rodrigues’ sense of camp doesn’t stop there and he soon moves to a sex scene between Alfonso and Alfredo in the middle of a burned-out forest, strangely a place where there is nowhere to hide as the two engage in what’s described as the 69 position, both sucking one another’s cocks while they shout out racial slurs applicable to whites and blacks. (In case you might be shocked with the sight of actual on-screen fellatio, I can relieve your fears by telling you the penises are clearly dildos, a sight gag that perhaps makes the scene even more suggestive.)

    Later, Alfonso tests Alfredo’s knowledge of the various Portuguese stands of trees and forests by projecting a series of photographic slides of naked men’s penises.

    There is, in fact, almost a sense of the sacred in the firemen’s domain, as their sturdy, lithe bodies easily give way to one another in the only acts that the director seems to keep at a safe comic distance from his sardonic humor regarding the society, its perpetuation of racial abuse, and the general climatic degeneration of the planet.

     But all good things must end, so goes the cliché in a world filled with them, and with the king’s (and most of Alfredo’s family members’) death by Covid, he is forced to transform back from an individual into an imagined standard of heteronormativity and conformity. Alfred’s ties with the firemen and, in particular, his lover Alfonso need be cut off as Alfredo loses his identity to the people who, as he puts, “are always watching me.”

     As some critics such as Ryan Swen have noted, however, the true saving grace of this far-too-short romp of a film is its ambiguous shifting of time. At the Alfredo’s funeral in a small chapel, the major part of the attendees are the 2069 fire brigade and two gossipy older women, as well as the famous fado singer, Paulo Bragança,* telling the story of how during the performances of the song a masked man would appear, who turned out to be the king of Portugal. At about the same moment a man dressed in a hooded cloak enters and sits.

     The gossips shift over to be near to the intruder, suggesting that because he is in a chapel it is not proper to wear a head-covering. Standing, the stranger drops the hood to reveal an older Alfonso, who is immediately recognized by all as now the President of Portugal. Karma has won the day. The pale-white king has been replaced by his black former lover.

      There is little one can do with such an irreverent and wild discombobulated tale, but enjoy it.

 

*In his Film Comment interview, Rodrigues speaks of the fado singers used throughout the film: Amália Rodrigues. She’s our biggest fado singer ever—she’s like the Edith Piaf of Portugal. That’s her song playing in the scene where the main characters are having sex in the forest.

     It’s an amazing song but a hidden one, because it’s really racist. People pretend that she didn’t sing it. She was a very progressive person herself, but she sang fado, which is connected to a more conservative tradition. Even the song that’s performed in the film, “Fado do Embuçado” (“The Cloaked Man Fado”), by João Ferreira Rosa, is a very royalist song—it denotes nostalgia for the aristocracy and pre-Republican times. It tells the story of a man who always came to listen to fado wearing a cloak, and when he uncloaks himself he’s the king of Portugal—which is what the last scene of the film is referencing when the character uncloaks. In that scene I have the ’90s fado singer Paulo Bragança perform the song. I had used one of Bragança’s songs in To Die Like a Man, and I always wanted to work with him. He is a visionary and irreverent fado singer, who used to sing barefoot, wearing skirts or futuristic clothes, and somehow he revolutionized fado singing. He rearranged some very traditional fado songs for the film—he even changed the lyrics in one song so we could play on the similarities of the words fado and falo, which in Portuguese means phallus.

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Eric De Kuyper | Casta diva / 1982, released 1983

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).