Mehmet Binay and Canner Alper | Zenne Dancer / 2012

honesty kills

by Douglas Messerli

 

Caner Alper (screenplay), Mehmet Binay and Canner Alper (directors) Zenne Dancer / 2012

I wish I could report that the film I am about to write about, Zenne Dancer, by the Turkish film-makers Mehmet Binay and Caner Alper, was a total fiction; alas, it is based on a true incident that occurred to an acquittance of the directors.

      The movie recounts the inter-relationships between three figures, a beautiful male-in-drag belly dancer, Can (Kerem Can), his former gay lover, the university student Ahmet Yildiz (Erkan Avci), and a gay German photographer, Daniel (Giovanni Arvaneh) who, while in Istanbul, shifts from his war-time reporting to the delights of the city, including snapping pictures of Can, whose patronage helps him to survive in a strange world where, in an attempt to escape the military draft, Can goes out only at nights to dance without pay at a gay club.

      In case it might strike you that Can is involved in a strange activity in belly-dancing with lavish costumes but often with a bare chest that reveals his beautifully chiseled torso, I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs from an article by Tara Isabella Burton in Smithsonian Magazine about the zenne dancers who participate in a popular entertainment in Turkey:

 

“Male belly dancing is hardly a new phenomenon in Turkey. Most zenne dancers date the practice back to the Sultan’s court in the final centuries of the Ottoman Empire, when women were largely prohibited from performing onstage. Much as how boys would play women’s parts in Elizabethan Shakespeare, young men – generally ethnic Greeks, Armenians, or Romani, drawn, often unwillingly, from the Empire’s non-Muslim population – would be trained as dancers, adopt androgynous or feminine attire and makeup, and – in many cases – moonlight as paid courtesans to noblemen.

     In traditional Ottoman practice, the terminology of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ was largely absent from discourse, as explained by scholar Serkan Görkemli. Sexuality was more customarily defined as a matter of status/rank and sexual role. A higher-ranking nobleman would as a matter of course define himself as an active or penetrative sexual partner, one who would under other circumstances sleep with women; a zenne dancer would be expected to take on a more so-called ‘feminine’ sexual and social role. Regardless of whether or not sexual relations between dancers and their spectators took place, however, zenne dancing (and the watching thereof) was considered part of ‘mainstream’ masculine culture.

      Even though with Turkish modernization, the zenne tradition fell out of favor, it remains a

staple of entertainment in many parts of Turkey.”

     

     As a university student, Ahmet is still also very fearful of being stopped by the Turkish military police and being conscripted. In the very first scene of the film, in fact, he seeks to be hidden in Can’s dressing room, fearing that even being seen out at night, and, in particular, in a zenne bar, might draw attention, and he is particularly fearful in this case because of his traditional Muslim parents, particularly his harridan of a mother, who is perhaps the real villain of the work

     Through Can’s agreement to be photographed by Daniel, the hirsute Akmet meets up with the equally hirsute photographer and, gradually over a period of days the two become lovers, while still both remaining friends with the more fragile and needy Can. If both Can and Akmet live basically shadow-lives out of fear for the societal forces, Daniel has the ghost of his past in his sex-wife, who is now his agent and is highly critical of his new photographic interests, wishing he might return to filming on-site battles and the children scarred by war instead of his new fondness for the picturesque oddities of the great Turkish city.

      While Akmet’s parents are holy horrors, his sister, with whom he lives, is totally modern and seemingly accepting of his nightly wanderings—except when the gorgon of a mother comes to visit. Can’s aunt, with who he lives, is a loving and caring woman in complete acceptance of his lifestyle, even while her husband highly disapproves; and Can’s mother, living in the country, loves her son so dearly that it truly borders on incest. On a visit to her, later in the film, he can hardly pry her hands from a deep embrace to escape back to the city. The outsider Daniel, given his completely Western upbringing cannot even quite comprehend their predicaments.  

     And therein lies the rub, so to speak. As Daniel and Akmet grow closer, so too does the German, who is determined to take Akmet back to Germany with him, encourages him to speak out about to sexuality to his parents, as does the obviously utterly outed Can. Daniel is simply naïve, while Can’s motives seem somewhat sinister, since he should perhaps perceive the difficulties of declaring homosexuality in a modernized but still mostly Muslim country—despite the fact that his family has clearly adored for being “special.” Strangely, when both men are forced into interviews prior to induction, Akmet gets off for being gay (the Turkish military like to see pictures of sexual penetration to prove those who claim homosexuality, and to this day may have one of the biggest collections of gay pornography in the world), while the zenne dancer Can is accepted: we can always use a belly-dancer in our ranks cracks one military officer. But both men are destroyed by their “honesty,” although perhaps Can survived military duty to return to his love of dancing.

    When Akmet finally does confess his sexuality to his parents, the mean-spirited mother forces her husband to take up a gun and to kill his son in a kind of reverse “honor killing,” usually reserved for women who have supposedly been immoral in sexual activity or for divorcing their husbands. In Turkey, evidently, Akmet’s father is still in hiding.

      Despite the fact that this is quite amazing and that such a movie was even permitted to be filmed in Turkey, the production values of the work are excellent, the directors working within a fairly large financial investment for such an independently produced work. My only quibbles with the film are its sometimes quite excessive production numbers representing Can’s imaginary choreography of his dances; as one critic observed, at moments the film seems undetermined whether it wants to be a serious expose about the terrible events it documents, or a comic drag film in the manner of Priscilla: Queen of the Dessert.

      In the end the film succeeds simply because of its honesty about its trio of gay heroes. And quite surprisingly, when shown in gay film festivals in Turkey, became a great hit, as it was in the gay film circuit in the US—although until its release in Netflix it has not had general US distribution. Even I, who often seek out the unusual, almost passed on this one. Belly-dancing in Turkey, I smirked. But on further exploration, I became more interested, and am happy I was. This is a tragic statement not so much about being gay, but about being different in a culture that is based on broad ethnic and cultural differences, but with individuals often trapped within the confines of those very walls of identity.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2018).

 

 

Marco van Bergen | Vattnet (Water) / 2012

the lost moment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marco van Bergen (screenwriter and director) Vattnet (Water) / 2012 [15 minutes]

 

Dutch director Marco van Bergen’s short 2012 film seems to rely as much on its press kit as on the images of the film itself, the general description of the film reading that the central character, James “leads a lonely life in a luxurious castle” (IMDb), and in other descriptions that the “castle,” is an expensive hotel which, evidently, his mother and father operate.

     Simply watching it, I might have presumed it to be a kind of prep school or some similar institution, in which what are described as Swedish soccer players might have been seen as students or visitors, with which the head master’s son James (Tobias Kersloot) is discouraged from meeting.

     It doesn’t change the story as much as it alters the tone of the piece. In the “authorized” interpretation James is even more magically separated from the world around him, looking down upon it with sincere fears, strong attractions, and confused feelings. Certainly, had I been more attentive the first time watching this film, I’d have noted the sign stating that this was a Bilderberg Hotel, a chain of exclusive hotels throughout the Netherlands and Germany from where the mysterious Bilderberg Group, an exclusive club involved with world finance, politics, and fine dining (depending upon which source you consult) took its name.

      If nothing else, James’ busy mother (Barbara Labrie) certainly is determined that he brings no friends into his room, particularly young women, that he join his parents for their private meals, and that he focus on his homework for his obviously private school education. And in her constant attentions to him, she is a bit like a mean queen who’s locked away her son in the castle tower.

     The imprisoned prince, however, has no appetite for spaghetti, which his mother tells him his father has just made for dinner, but does hunger for the Swedish soccer players stopping over at his hotel. He follows their group peregrinations both from his indoor staircase balcony, as they traipse through the hotel lobby, and from an outside balcony where he looks down upon them, marking sure to duck out of sight if they should ever chance to look up.

      And from his distant viewpoint there are a great many mysteries concerning the world he is observing, as there are also for us. Why does one of the boys suddenly fall over in his chair in the garden, why does our young prince wander down to the swimming pool to check out all the dressing cabins? And why is one of the Swedish soccer players found in a cabin with his nose-bloodied. The few reviews which I’ve read about this movie simply suggest he had an “accident,” but that makes no sense. How did he fall near the pool, bloody his nose, and crawl into a cabin? 

      Obviously, the boys have gotten a bit drunk, and something this particular boy, Tobias (Serge Mensink) said, something long-simmering in the group dynamic, or more likely, Tobias’ attempt to show his love to one of them—the name he calls out upon James’ discovery of him, “Peter”— called for him to be beaten up.

      But why James has gone in search of him or why the Dutch boy who can’t even speak Swedish has a Swedish flag on his bedroom wall is one of the film’s gentle reminders that we can never truly know another person or fully interpret what is happening.

       What we do suspect is that James has just begun to discover that he is attracted to boys, and has been following the soccer players, similar in age to himself, for that reason. Finding the hurt boy and bringing him back to his room to wipe away the blood and allow him the use of his shower is similar to a dream scenario, in which James has been able to kidnap someone to play out his sexual fantasies. The very fact that they must speak English, since neither of them speak each other’s language, places them into a coded world in which they must speak a special outsider language they “alone” share.

       His plans are almost destroyed by his intuitive mother, who suspects his lie about making sandwiches for his own dinner and now perceives that someone might be in his room. But fortunately, business calls distract her from further investigation.

       While Tobias continues to shower, James takes up his jersey and hides it under his pillow, picking out another, far more expensive one, to replace it. When the boy finishes, towels off with a freshly provided linen, and puts on the new jersey without question, he turns to James to provide him with a gift for his friendliness, a kiss on the mouth. This may have been precisely what James has dreamt of happening, but the suddenness and unexpectedness of the event forces him to turn momentarily away. He immediately returns to consciousness and leans toward Tobias to provide a kiss, but by this time the Swedish flirt has himself turned away, irritated by the rejection of what he certainly recognizes the hotel prince has so desperately wanted: his first (male) kiss.

      Recognizing just how meaningful and uncommon this event is in his life, James rushes after the boy into the hall, daring to continue what he had hoped might happen in his room in public. He almost insists upon the lost kiss, but the other now can only put his hand on his cheek, look in tenderly in the eyes, and thank him for helping. It is nearly as good as kiss. But it cannot ever answer the loneliness and longing of the young locked-away hotel prince.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Evan Roberts | Yeah, Kowalski! / 2012

childish pleasures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Britta Lundin and Evan Roberts (screenplay), Evan Roberts (director) Yeah, Kowalski! / 2012 [10 minutes]

 

US screenwriter and director Evan Roberts’ 2011 film, 33 Teeth, about a young boy having a crush on his older high school neighbor was an absolutely charming short. The comparison of signs of maturity in that work were of little significance since the subject was penis size, which given the difference of ages, was less of a significant source of envy than it was a simple expression of desire.

     In his short work of a year later, Yeah, Kowalski!, the late blooming 13-year-old Gabe Kowalski (Cameron Wofford) is very much ashamed of his bodily differences, particularly since he has a crush on a boy of same age, Shane (Conor Donnelly) who has already developed underarm fuzz, while Gabe remains hairless. Desperate to impress his fellow classmate, or just to get his attention, Gabe pastes some of the hair his father has just trimmed from Gabe’s head, into his armpits, and now struts off to a local birthday party showing of his suddenly visible sign of male masculinity.

     The trouble is that having a crush on an older boy next door and being fascinated by the size of his cock is someone poignant, while trying to show-off your underarms to your male and female peers isn’t at all appealing or even very comedic, particularly when you get pushed into the pool…well the hair goes everywhere.

      It doesn’t matter anyway, since Shane bicycles by soon after and invites himself over for a visit to Gabe’s house. Gabe is thrilled, without seeming to recognize that his post-pubescent rosy red cheeks and smooth, hairless complexion makes him far cuter than the early adolescent slightly pimpled complexion of his friend’s face. But then young boys always want, so it seems, what they can’t yet get. But at least now Gabe has Shane’s attention, something unthinkable and maybe even undesirable in my ancient days. Besides, in washing off the paste left under his arms, he discovers he’s suddenly spouted a tiny black hair.

     Too bad Roberts’ film is about as pointless as his character’s childish pleasures.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Jacob Kernis | Who You Wanted All the Time / 2024

an unlikeable trio

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kyla Kralapp (screenplay), Jacob Kernis (director) Who You Wanted All the Time / 2024 [13 minutes]

 

It’s hard to know with whom to even sympathize in Jacob Kernis, Who You Wanted All the Time. Beck (Caleb White), a pre-law student, is an insecure man who is now suddenly faced with a hearing product. Although Beck is clearly the one with whom we are meant to feel empathy, he basically dismisses his previous roommate and friend, Jasper (Diego Andres Rodriquez), with whom he obviously desires a relationship. Besides, he, like Jasper, has spotted a handsome new boy Georgie (Jamie Martin Mann).

   If Beck is uncertain in how to approach Georgie, the latter is not at all afraid to play tricks in order to get to meet Beck, pretending in the library that he can’t find a certain book—he’s completely looking in the wrong section of the library—and begging for the pre-law student’s help. Beck quickly takes him to the book, and to Jasper, who serves as check-out librarian.

    Before they know it, both have been invited to a private party at Georgie’s, who, with a wink, suggests they can “play games.”

    Which indeed they do, as he takes out masks, forcing them to put them on, and, as a kind of ritualistic indication of friendship, demands that they each sacrifice something of great importance.

    Jasper flirtatiously sacrifices his fear to tell Georgie the truth; he wonders can he sacrifice that? Only if he promises to never lie, argues Georgie.

    Beck, momentarily suffering a serious problem with his ears and his thought processes, has a sort of emotional breakdown, finally after a long silence with inner turmoil, sacrificing Jasper himself, willingly giving him up to Georgie. Is Jasper the mysterious you of the title?

     A short time later we see that Georgie and Jasper have, in fact, developed a relationship which clearly now excludes Beck.

     The viewer, however, has difficulty in knowing how to react to this. We have only the slightest evidence that Jasper and Beck actually saw themselves as a couple, or that Beck wished they might truly get together. Mostly he spouts a principle about law concerning the famed ternary of the judicial system: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

     But what this means precisely in terms of his desires and what he has truly sacrificed is never made clear. How can you truly sacrifice another person without owning or controlling them? What writer Kyla Kralapp and Kernis are suggesting is simply that Beck has given up his desires for a relationship with Jasper that seemed to have never truly prospered enough—given his lack of confidence—to mean anything in the first place. Are we, accordingly, meant to feel deep empathy for him now to be locked out of the new relationship with Jasper and Georgie?

     And then what kind of a friend might Jasper be, to so totally exclude Beck not only from his own company but from Georgie’s, knowing as he does that Beck has been attracted to him.

    And what kind of person is the intruder Georgie who forces his future companion to don a mask and sacrifice something special in order to find love? I might suggest he is an untrustworthy manipulator. And does he, himself, have no preference of the two “candidates” for his sexual desires? What does it say about a relationship that’s based on what the other might do for you?

    Finally, what does Beck’s possible sudden hearing loss have to do with all this? Is it a metaphor for his inability to hear what has actually been going on between his two acquaintances? If he is losing his hearing, moreover, are the film’s creators simply using his disability to make us pity and side with him?

    In the end, there is just too much confusion about this story to render it meaningful. We realize that we don’t actually know any of these characters, and what little we’ve been shown in the 13 minutes we encounter them, makes us want to turn away and find another trio upon whom we might better focus.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Gary Halvorson and William Kentridge | Nos (The Nose) / 2013 [Metropolitan Opera-HD live production]

shrill charm

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dmitri Shostakovich, Yevgeni Zamyatin, Georgy Ionin and Alexander Preis (libretto, based on a story by Gogol),  (music), William Kentridge (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Nos (The Nose) / 2013 [Metropolitan Opera-HD live production]

 

Yesterday Howard and I saw, for the first time, the rather raucous, even, at times, rackety opera by Dmitri Shostakovich composed in the last wave of Soviet Futurist experimentalism in 1927-28 and premiering in Leningrad a year later.

     I cannot imagine a more innovative and stunningly visual version of this short opera than William Kentridge and Luc De Wit’s dynamic production which combines small, beautifully lit (by Urs Schönebaum) “realist” sets upon and behind which is projected a stunning collage-film of Russian visuals and English-language and Russian-language words that creates the entire world of Leningrad whirling out of control around the fairly simple story of a lower bureaucrat, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov (wonderfully performed by Paulo Szot), who one morning wakes up without his nose.

     The nose has been found in a piece of bread baked by the wife of the local barber, who the day before has attempted, unsuccessfully, to shave Kovalyov. The barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, immediately attempts to get rid of the discovered nose, but has a great deal of difficulty as he is met throughout the streets by friends and enemies alike, establishing the almost always mix of wildly exuberant and severely controlled world of Gogol’s story. Finally, attempting to throw the nose into the Neva river, Ivan is spotted by a police officer who immediately arrests him.

      As Kovalyov wakes up to bemoan the missing appendage, the utterly absurd story begins its dramatic arch as the nose, suddenly now as large as a person (played in this production by Alexander Lewis), is seen running through the streets, and soon after is encountered by Kovalyov in the Cathedral—now dressed in the uniform of a State Councilor, who, compared with the Collegiate Assessor, is of so high a rank that Kovalyov dare not even address him. When he does demand that the nose come back to him, the appendage declares to have nothing to do with him and, in the crowded service, again escapes.

      Outraged, Kovalyov visits the chief of police, only to be told, as in so many tales of the slipperiness of those in power, that the chief has just left his office. A too-long encounter with journalists at the local newspaper follows, wherein they refuse to post Kovalyov’s notice of his lost nose for fear of discrediting the newspaper; who would believe in the loss of a nose: When Kovalyov finally reveals his face, however, they are convinced, but still refuse to post the advertisement, ironically offering him some snuff in recompense. In anger and self-pity the bureaucrat leaves them to return to his room in despair.

      The real pleasure of Kentridge’s sets reveal the nose in various “adventures,” linking itself, at one moment, to an equestrian statue, at another dancing upon head of Anna Pavlova. Mostly, the poor nose roams the city, attempting, like the murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, simply to not be noticed and trapped. As the artist-director described his interpretation of Gogol’s story in an engaging conversation with Met manager Peter Gelb before the opera, he sees the nose as something like a writer reading his failed words in despair, the words unable to match what in his head. The nose, a bit like one’s words, simply desires a life of its own, a life apart from its humdrum pimpled existence upon the face of the failed human being, we gradually discover, who Kovalyov is. Adding another layer of irony to the story, Kentridge modeled the opera’s nose upon his own quite sizable proboscis.

      Throughout the opera, indeed, much is ironic, and everything is almost always satiric, without being truly funny (despite the constant chortles that issued from the elderly woman sitting next to me who obviously confused attention to the opera with the need to issue vocal clues to her appreciation). Indeed, Shostakovich’s piece, one might argue, presents itself as a kind of one-liner. Without character development in the narrative, and basically shrill in its scherzo ostinato and high tenor and baritone squeaks, the work, despite its often exciting score, generally overwhelms its subject matter, particularly in the crowd scenes, where both in the train station and on the streets the large wonderfully-costumed cast run about in chase of the nose and scream out their fears for the dangers the escaped nose represents. At times, one sought just a few moments of tonal relief, but when those moments arrived, as in the comic balalaika song sung by Kovalyov’s servant or the somewhat quieter moment when, after everyone has rushed to a park to see the nose, one viewer summarizes the “nothing” he has seen; the momentarily quietude was quickly swept away again in the frantic action and sounds of Shostakovich’s busy city life.

      There is ultimately a kind of sadness to this satiric work, as when, even when Kovalyov’s nose is returned, it still is determined not stay upon his face as the Collegiate Assessor briefly fantasizes during an evil spell cast upon him by Madame Podtochina whose daughter he has refused to marry, and who he continues refuse even after the fracas has died down.

     In the end it appears that the nose has just been worn by all the hubbub of the citizenry and police stalking the Nevsky Prospekt and other parts of the Russian city. It is only then, when Kovalyov discovers upon awakening the next day, when his nose has returned of its own will, that Shostakovitch’s opera quiets down into a fetching polka, as the gossipy city-dwellers—similar to the officials proclaiming the Stalinist-imposed restrictions—chastise the writer for even thinking of such a silly and unbelievable story—although admitting, in true Eastern European manner, that, of course, such things can happen. That even the unbelievable can sometimes occur.

     If Shostakovich’s first foray into theater and opera is not a great work, it is, nonetheless, a kind of hidden treasure, despite its often-strident narrative and sounds. And William Kentridge has transformed this work into a true visual pleasure which I will not soon forget.   

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2013).