Julián Hernández | Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo (Raging Sun, Raging Sky) / 2009

a desert of the heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julián Hernández (screenwriter and director) Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo (Raging Sun, Raging Sky) / 2009

 

Julián Hernández’s 2009 gay masterwork, strangely enough, begins with an encounter between the film’s beautiful young hero, Ryo (Guillermo Villegas) who meets up in a sudden downpour with a woman, Tatei (Giovanna Zacarias), obviously seeking a hook-up, who immediately recognizes in the young man a desire equal to her own.

     But suddenly we see differences between them as the storm begins and she retreats to a covered doorway, while Ryo—in a somewhat gay-like rendition of Gene Kelly’s “Singing in the Rain”—accepts the full force of the raindrops while inviting her to join him. No umbrella in this movie, and no regrets for the sexual desires that Ryo has for all the human individuals. If he comes off, by film’s end, as not really bisexual, he is certainly open to the fullness of human sexuality.

      When they finally copulate, Tatei both laughs and cries out in delight and relief. Sex is everything in Hernández’s films, and there is no embarrassment for the sexual act, but simply joy or disappointment.

      As some critics have observed, by beginning his gay story of desire with a heterosexual encounter, Hernández normalizes the rest of the movie which some viewers might otherwise find shocking.

      For the young Ryo is basically gay, which the Aztec-like prophet Tatei seems to recognize her statements after the sexual encounter.

 

                       O, beautiful Ryo, the vigorous. A mighty companion will

                       come to you. And his vigor will be like a piece of sky.

                       That is, perfect, superb. Impetuous stream go find him.

                       Responsibility is in your hands. Be your eyes attentive. Be

                       careful. Don’t be afraid. Go and liberate the world of this

                       misfortune. Love will be your guide.

      Yet yearning itself seems to be the central subject of this film as the director turns almost all his public spaces, through his camera, into tactile realities. Hernández does not simply show desire between human bodies but between his primarily male figures and the entire space around them. Place itself becomes an important aspect of what these gay figures are seeking, and the languid movement of their actions against the rich velvety feel of his black-and-white images is as important to them as the sexual release they seek. In a sense, sex is not just the release of semen into other men (and women), but is an endless sensual encounter with the world itself.

      Ryo, armed with a cub-scout-like backpack (not unlike the young boy in search of his youthful belovéd in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom), seeks out love in the Mexican city in which he lives.

      He first encounters the dark-featured and slightly sinister-appearing Tari (Javier Olivan) on the street with its noirish-like neon lights, and they spend a quite delirious evening with one another.

      My poet-friend Paul Vangelisti told me that one time in Rome as a young journalist he attempted to arrange an interview with fellow poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini agreed to the interview, but strangely, asked Paul to meet up with him at the Coliseum at midnight.

      Paul arrived by taxi, standing outside the historical monument to death, hearing inside the moans, groans, and sexual rubbings of lust. Pasolini never showed up, but Paul believed he had been shown a kind of lesson, one which Hernández seems to have quite assimilated: life is all about eros, and eros occurs in the most unlikely of places.

      So too does Ryo enter a kind of coliseum in the large local porn house, the paint on its walls peeling, and the central film theater, showing openly gay sexual films, becoming a kind of pit of lust. But as in the real Coliseum, there are other levels to this palace of love, an older decrepit theater seemingly in the basement of the first, where serious seekers of intense gay sex descend, in an almost Dantean way, to find their pleasures.

      Tari, quickly spotting the young would-be camper Ryo, follows him, even stalks him in an attempt to reconnect.

       Below, the space is even more derelict than the one above, and we can hear and often see the gay sybarites, just as Paul heard from gay and heterosexual lovers outside the Coliseum, lustily involved in lovemaking.

       There is a moment when Ryo finally spots his former partner, and might even return to him, but suddenly a younger, far-more handsome boy, Kieri (Jorge Becerra) appears, and Ryo turns instead to him.

       If there was ever a cinematic representation of the power of the gay male gaze, Hernández captures it, as suddenly, freed from Ryo’s attention, Tari is almost literally devoured by the others who suddenly come out of the shadows to embrace him and perform fellatio. How could this not help but remind me of the 1995 ballet, Swan Lake, by Matthew Bourne that I saw the other evening, wherein, when the head swan attempts to reclaim the young Prince, the other swans turn on him and nearly devour the lovely young man whom they have all also been long desiring?

      Soon after, Tari is raped in a nearby park, and, at least metaphorically, loses his life, dragging his body through a swamp into which he is eventually buried. It is a desert of the heart of nothing else.

      While Ryo lies comfortably in bed with his new “knight,” Hernández explores far deeper issues of desire and love, by digging into Aztec myths, in which the buried Tari rises out of the cracked earth in an attempt to try to redeem his earlier lover, who seems also now to be nakedly tied down in his own demands of lust.

      It appears that both Tari and Kieri fight over the attempt to redeem the young adventurer. Whether or not they succeed or who wins over the other is not of importance, clearly, to the director. The only thing that truly matters is they both do care and try to hold onto his existence, even though we realize that Tari is not the right person for Ryo.

     Yearning has gradually turned into nurturing, to a matter of the boy’s survival, his right to survive in a world that tempts him with all the possibilities of eros and the suffering from that desire, a bit like the tortures suffered by Saint Sebastian in Derek Jaman’s work. The arrows of love do also kill, and in suggesting this, the director subtly calls up all the issues of AIDS. In the end Kieri offers his own life to save Ryo.

     Each segment of Hernández’s trilogy—A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2004), Broken Sky (2006), and Raging Sun, Raging Sky—won a Teddy Award (the premier gay-film recognitions) at its respective Berlinale premieres. Finally, today he has now been perceived by the more traditional film world as the significant filmmaker he truly is.

     His long list of mentors, Cocteau, Fassbinder, Tsai Ming-Liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and to a certain extent Visconti and André Téchiné have all received their due. Let us hope Hernández soon garners the full attention his films demand.

 

Los Angeles, December 12, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

Mark Levine | Follower / 2009

two bodies prepared to make love: a film about nothing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Levine (screenwriter and director) Follower / 2009 [15 minutes]

 

In Follower, writer/director Mark Levine has no story to tell. Indeed, nothing quite happens to the two lost high school boys, one of them, Eric (Artie Ahr), the leader if he can be described in that manner, still skate-boarding like he were a 10-year-old kid; the other boy, Matt (Patrick Stafford) basically just hanging out with his friend and passively following his suggestions.

      It begins with Matt walking out of his well-do-do home and wandering down a sidewalk to an underpath where he meets up with Eric, the two sitting down on the concrete, their backs against the wall as he pulls out a small bong, handing it over to Eric who lights up, inhales, and hands it back. The two enjoy a few inhalations and move on to a friend’s house, Dana (Laurel Vail), whose mother suggests their unannounced visit is impolite, but still invites them in. They join Dana in her room, each inhaling a few more rounds of marijuana while discussing issues about friends that are indecipherable to an outsider. Evidently Matt’s brother has stopped dealing drugs because of his girlfriend and, we gather, that they purchased their newest batch of pot from someone’s mother.

     At one point Eric signals Matt to ask a question of Dana, is it true she has some acid? She does, and they’re off, putting the tablets into their mouths as they walk towards Matt’s house.

     There Eric almost passes out on Matt’s bed, while Matt sits on the floor. That is until Eric, fed up with the music, shuffles through Matt’s collection of tapes, choosing one, putting it on and joining Matt on the floor, where he sprawls out next to him. Matt, with nowhere to put his feet, finally drapes them over his friend’s legs, but the carefulness with which he does this suggests that he is highly sensitive to the issue of touching his friend, not usually a sign of heterosexual disinterest, but of some sexual feelings which he doesn’t wish to admit to either his friend or himself.

      A short while later Matt is alone in his room. We hear a voice calling out to him: “Matt,” three times. The boy follows the sound to the bathroom where it is clear Eric is showering. He enters, wondering if something is wrong with his friend. But when he enters we see Eric standing naked with the shower door open. Although we cannot ourselves observe it, apparently Eric has an erection, for soon after Matt quickly strips down and joins him in the shower.

     The two beautiful boys stand closely facing one another before they kiss, and Eric goes down on Matt.

      In a version of gay male coitus interruptus we hear Matt’s mother’s voice, apparently having just returned home and curious about her son’s whereabouts. After a couple of queries, he responds that he’s in the bathroom. Eric stands and turns off the shower. Leaving the tub, he begins to dress.

      In the next scene the boys are in a car with Matt at the wheel, waiting at a red light in complete silence except for a song on the radio. Eric leans over and turns the radio to a rather louder song, but Matthew turns in back to the quieter one. Has the dynamics changed between them?

      The light eventually turns green and they drive off. Evidently reaching their destination, presumably Eric’s home, the two sit quietly in the car saying nothing as they stare mostly forward with a quick glance of Matt to Eric before turning back to look ahead. Eric takes out a cigarette, takes a couple tokes, and turns to leave, speaking the film’s final words, “See ya.”

      As I said, nothing truly happens in this film, or maybe everything does. Have they discovered something about each other and themselves? Will they carry through with their encounter or reject it as nothing meaningful, a result merely of the acid or marijuana they previously smoked. Have they possibly gone through these actions previously or is this the very first time?

      We have no answers, not even a hint since neither of these figures is developed as a true character. They serve simply as two beautiful bodies ready to join one another in a pleasurable act. We must imagine the next step. Or wipe away what we witnessed as unintentional voyeurs.

     It is as if the director were merely taunting us, giving us a temporary high the way the drugs function for these two young men. But after, alas, there is nothing. If Matt and Eric are merely followers of their momentary whims and one another, we desire to know what might happen next, while realizing it can only be the emptiness of the black screen upon which their director scrolls his credits.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 3, 2022).

Kenny Ortega | This Is It / 2009

all by myself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kenny Ortega (director, with performer Michael Jackson) This Is It / 2009

 

Despite the obvious outcries by viewers and critics that This Is It does not portray a performance —indeed there is no audience other than the stage workers, waiting dancers, and others involved in the show—and that it is not even a film—having been intended as a personal documentation of the rehearsals—I found the work to be extremely watchable, if only because its focus, Michael Jackson is, metaphorically speaking, so "blurred out" that he creates an even greater mystery about him than the cause of his recent death.

     A boy (even at the age 50), yes, a sensational dancer (indeed, but not necessarily here: although many of his moves are quick and lithe, the overall choreography, particularly in the robot army number, is based more on fascistic-like marches rather than the smooth glide across space we usually associate with Jackson), a singer (true, but although we get various passages from his catalogue of "greats," for the most part the performer is not singing to his full capacity in an attempt to "save his voice"; at one point when he does begun to belt out a song, he interrupts, "Don't make me sing full out.")

     When he does speak, it is, for the most part, psychobabble about his caring for the earth—the worst number in the film is the unbearable "Earth Song"—a hand-joining pep talk with his talented dancers, musicians, and staff, and quiet mumblings when something goes amiss.

     The most insightful moments are when Jackson speaks of his art, of the necessity of waiting between beats, stepping at the right moment into the spotlight, pausing in a musical phrase, getting the precise beat of a song. If nothing else, it is clear that Jackson is a consummate showman.

     Yet we get little insight into the man, and only glimpses of what the final performance might have looked like. Certainly, it would have been spectacular, but clearly, also, it might have revealed that the aging Michael was no longer at his top, and the directions in which his art was apparently taking him were distances from the Astaire-like perfections of "Thriller" or his famed "moon walk."

     I know I will be heckled, perhaps even hated by all those who love the "King of Pop," but I feel that Jackson's music was never his great contribution. Most of his best-known songs are repetitive ditties gaffed up by inward gulps of breath and sigh. He was a great dancer, a performer who knew up until the last day of his life how to move his lean body to convey a deeply asexual sexuality that made him into “something” for everybody to love. But This Is It, I am afraid, is not what it/he is or was.

    Who and what precisely Jackson was is, and probably always will be, open to question. Let’s face it, he was probably a gay man who never could have permitted himself to perceive his ego as old enough to “come out.” He remained an imaginary Peter Pan, delusionally perceiving himself that he was as young as the boys he molested as a pedophile. According, it is likely that he never thought as their sleep-overs with their masturbatory interludes as pedophilic behavior, since he was still convinced that he was just a boy, doing what boys normally do, bonding and in the process discovering themselves. Never allowed to be a “normal” boy, he mentally determined to become one for his entire life.

    If anything, the documentary further mystifies us in our search to find out who this "man in the mirror" was. Here he remains only a shadow of a shadow, and one wonders "Does he have any reality away from his audience?" One comes to see him, ultimately, as one of the loneliest beings in the universe, like a frightened child, demanding doctors be there every night to put him to sleep. Was he afraid of death or afraid of life?

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2009).

Erik Gernand | Non-Love-Song / 2009

the last day

by Douglas Messerli

 

Erik Gernand (screenwriter and director) Non-Love-Song / 2009 [8 minutes]

 

Two very unlikely friends, Josh (Joe Sinopoli) and Alex (Lawrence Kern), who have obviously grown up together, are facing their last day together as Josh is going away the next morning for college.

    The two, hanging out at Rogers Beach on the north side of downtown Chicago, are vastly different, and on this day those differences become evident and a source of worry, particularly for Alex. Josh, obviously straight, keeps describing the choices Alex makes—such as taking pictures with an old-fashioned Polaroid camera so that he’ll recall this special day and making a tape of “Josh’s” favorite song to remember him by—as gay or “faggety.” And because of Josh’s reaction Alex refuses to share the tape he is made as a reminder of their friendship.

    Moreover today, when Alex seriously shares his fear that when they meet up again they will each have quite radically changed, and finally succeeds in communicating just how much Josh’s constant description of his choices as queer, a true rebuke in which he explains just how much it hurts him, and in doing so tacitly admits to the truth that he is gay. For one of the first times in their life, he seems to actually make a true connection with Josh, the latter admitting that that he does comprehend, confirming his knowledge of their sexual difference.

     A couple of girls pass by, one of whom Josh knows. Alex encourages him to go after them, and Josh brings one of the girls back so that his friend might take a picture of them together, just to remember. Alex does so, slipping it into his own bag as a memory of the Josh he has known and, at the same moment, putting the tape he has made into Josh’s bag.

     It’s clear that when they meet up again, perhaps for the school’s homecoming celebration (although Josh thinks its ridiculous for him to return for such an affair), they will be different; by that time Alex may have come out, and Josh, having met up with a serious girlfriend may no longer want anything to do with him.

    The song Alex has recorded is simply one that he identifies with is friend; but in time it may certainly come to be “their” song, like an old couple who recognize a past that has not survived their own futures.

    I had such a friend, from the Northwestern Polish part of Chicago, who when he married felt even afraid, years later, that his wife would be upset for us having met up for lunch. When I look back I perceive that one day, years earlier, when we traveled together to downtown Chicago he had wanted me to seduce him, to introduce him to gay sex. But he seemed off limits as a straight boy, even if it was obvious that he was seeking for a way to explore his sexuality; and I did nothing. Now he was trapped in a relationship which he might soon have if not already regretted. Things had changed between us, and there was no way of bringing that special day back, not even with photographs.

    So it is with Alex and Josh. And in that sense, this is a most special day, the last of their innocent lifelong friendship.

    But this short film is also about something perhaps even more profound, outside of its plot. It is about the way film and photography differ in their relationship to memory and reality. Alex wants the immediacy and color of the photography so that he might remember the moment as it was. We never see the photographs he takes. The film itself is in a beautifully toned black-and-white work similar to that we see in films from the 1930s and 1940s and certain art films of the 1960s. They show us a world locked away in time, frozen as it were, in their non-reality of a time without color, without flesh. While the boys hope to capture the moment, the film which tells their story is already a dead and frozen one, projected to us from a world that no longer exists.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Eric De Kuyper and Paul Verstraten | A Strange Love Affair / 1985

a melodrama transformed into a fairytale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric De Kuyper (screenplay), Eric De Kuyper and Paul Verstraten (directors) A Strange Love Affair / 1985

 

This rather unknown film from 1985, directed by Eric De Kuyper and Paul Verstraten, has quickly become one of my favorites. Here, as a kind of homage to US directors Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk, and with perhaps a backhanded love pat to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the Flemish-Belgian director employs and explores the structure of melodrama. Using black-and-white photography by the cinematographer also of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), Henri Alekan, De Kuyper tells the story of a film teacher and semiologist, Michael (Howard Hensel), discoursing primarily about what he perceives to be the Western notion of love as expressed in film, with Ray’s 1954 movie Johnny Guitar as his prime example.

     For Michael asynchrony is the key, love occurring at different times for individuals that creates tragic or, at least, unhappy situations for the lovers, who, in their displacement of feelings, circle around one another, desperately seeking a way to continue or even begin what both have desired at different moments, yet equally have abandoned, or attempted to block out of their memories.

     Early in the film, Michael falls in love with one of his own students, Chris (Sep van Kampen), who himself has a crush on the teacher whose course he has not yet decided he will take. Their relationship is established almost immediately, first on a school stairway where the very sight of the boy causes the professor to drop all the pages of the manuscript he is carrying, helped to gather them again by the boy who has returned from a higher level on the stairway to join the slightly discombobulated teacher in gathering the papers.  

     Chris soon attends one of his lectures and after stops by Michael’s office to deliver up a paper on the central love scene of Johnny Guitar. Despite the fact the boy has a kind of girlfriend, Linda (Lieke Leo) (“Is Linda your girlfriend?” asks Michael; Chris answers, “No. Yes. In a way.), the boy soon visits his professor at home, lolling on his couch while the professor types away at his newest book on love, and eventually shares a meal with him “out of tins.” Here their future relationship is fully established, Michael declaring as he opens a bottle of wine: “Don’t expect me to try to seduce you. I never seduce young boys like you.” Yet a moment later, Michael turns and kisses Chris on the lips.

      So, it appears, that the film will undertake its subject of the love’s asynchrony in respect to the vast age difference between the quietly gay 40-year-old professor and his sexually gay curious student, in some ways perhaps almost paralleling one of the earliest of gay love films, Different from the Others directed by Richard Oswald in 1919. In fact, moments before Michael and Chris’ sudden kiss, De Kuyper and Verstraten verbally chime with that early German film when Michael asks why Chris wants to take his course anyway; his answer, “I don’t know, because it’s different. Because so different from the other teachers.” And the next moment he is asking the older man if he has always lived like “this, alone.”

     Yet Chris Dÿstra is no Kurt Sivers (the young boy in Oswald’s film); and Chris is clearly beyond the age of consent in Belgium (which in the year this film was made was determined to be 16). Michael faces no threats from either other faculty members or strangers. And it’s quite clear that Chris would prefer to be in Michael’s arms than in Linda’s.

      When he returns after dinner to Linda, we see him bicycling her home, she leaving the door open, while he leaves the bicycle and walks away, she returning to the doorway to wonder about his absence.

      Although Michael does not apparently let in the now dancing boy, we see him sitting quietly upstairs fetishizing Chris’ scarf which the boy has left behind.

      In the very next scene, we see Chris gifting that same scarf, now around Michael’s neck, to Linda, she emblematically, in return, offering her former boyfriend up to the professor as the two males travel off together, leaving her behind in the fog and smoke of the departing train, a film trope turned on its head.

      They follow this with a visit to an old family friend of Michael’s, Maria, who clearly approves of the relationship between the 40-year-old teacher and the young Chris, in a manner that can only remind one of the grandmother of Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant) in An Affair to Remember who thoroughly approves of the woman, Terry McCay (Deborah Kerr), he has brought with him on his visit. Once more, it might appear that the woman is traveling off by train, but it is the two males who enter the cars as she, left behind, rushes to the departing train with one suitcase they seem to have forgotten, making it quite apparent that in this odd melodrama it is the males leaving the females forever behind.

      After traveling by train to the city where Chris’ parents are living, they attend the opera Eugen Onegin (which once more supports Michael’s theory of love), when we discover that Michael used to be an opera critic. That they sit in his very favorite balcony seats foreshadows his return to a past which he also reiterates is a pattern in the Western love story.

      Later that evening we discover that they plan to meet up with Chris’ father who will take them to the boy’s parental home, another strange twist in this work which suggests they are seeking the formal approval of their relationship from Chris’ father and mother.

       It is in the very next scene, however, where the directors completely throw us off track, as they ditch the younger/older love affair theme for something much darker and closer to Michael’s concepts about love.

      As Michael and Chris wait in a bar for the father’s arrival we see another foreshadowing occur, this also about reversals of expectation. As a rose seller sings the Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” Michael comments to Chris, “If you were a woman I would buy you a rose.” When she finishes her son the flower girl moves over to the table, pulls back Chris’ head and gives him a deep kiss. Chris soon after rises, and moves off screen momentarily, bringing back a rose for Michael, commenting, with great irony, “Now you can give me one.” Clearly he is not interested in the traditional role-playing that Michael maintains.

      He then proceeds to describe the place where they sit drinking as his father’s favorite café, a place where, after football matches, his father and his friends would regularly gather, sometimes even including Chris, then a young boy. And Michael responds that he also knows the place well, regularly writing his reviews there and occasionally meeting up with a friend for a drink.

     The place might also very well remind us of the small train eatery in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), another film wherein true love is found and lost as the central figure returns to her faithful but boring husband.

     The arrival into this café, where the Cafébezitster (Ann Petersen) grows increasing impatient to close up, of Chris’ father is one of the most understatedly shocking events of film history. Jim (Karl Scheydt) enters late, arriving from far back in the screen, moving quickly and noisily from our left to right. Dressed in a leather jacket (his son and tutor, you recall, are dressed in tuxedos) he suddenly stops and turns to the bar midway without so much as greeting his own child. He looks down, then over momentarily to the two where we see Michael himself now sitting erect with anticipation.

     Finally, Jim picks up their suitcases and moves toward their table, pausing one more time to glance at Michael. Chris stands, introducing his film teacher “friend” of whom he has told him. Michael also slowly, almost regretfully stands, Jim speaking, acknowledging him as his son’s teacher and repeating that he is the father, Michael responding: “I know, I didn’t know, but now I know.”

     Jim suggests a drink. There is a sad and sour look on his face as he pulls up a chair to join them.

    No conversation follows in the film, but what soon is revealed is that Jim is Michael’s former lover of 15-years earlier. And we have suddenly been thrust into a past of which Chris has utterly no comprehension or is given any explanation.

     The constant return of the failed lovers, what Michael has described as their need to meet over and over again, has been realized, throwing Chris and his mother overboard in the process, as the two men begin to try to work out their former relationship in the present, just as do Johnny “Guitar” Logan and Vienna.

     The rest of this film consists of tantalizing bits of information about the past, where we discover that Jim’s wife Ann (Pascale Petit) and Michael were also sexually involved, and that she apparently knew about the two men’s relationship or even participated, at moments, in what may have been a love triangle, Ann even intimating that Chris may, in fact, be Michael’s son.

     Jim has broken with Michael, apparently choosing Ann over Michael, but he is clearly still in love with the former opera critic, now professor; and without much ado, they take up their old relationship once again, displacing the others in their life in the process.

     When Michael determines to travel on to England, he encourages Jim to join him. But it appears from the message that Chris bears to him that Jim has determined to remain behind with Ann and attempt to restore his parental relationship with Chris.

      The message that Michael holds in his hands is the standard tale of two lovers meeting up, coming back together, and pulling away yet again, proving once more that time most often does not correspond in Western portrayals of lovers in film and opera, that there is no beginning or ending.

    Yet, this time, as Michael acknowledges to Chris, he was wrong. There is, in fact, an ending expressed in the letter’s text.

      At the last moment, miraculously, Jim comes running. The “destined” love prevails.

     Yet, we also know it will be a love embedded in pain as well, a little like the kind of love portrayed on that on that important night long ago when Chris first dined with Michael in the film the critic shared by playing a recording of scenes from Now, Voyager, which concerns the love of Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) and the married Jerry Duvaux Dorrance. Jerry becomes the architect of a new wing of a psychiatric clinic where Charlotte, thanks to the doctor who has also helped cure her, she will be able to care for Jerry’s psychologically impaired daughter Tina—as long as her relationship with the father remains platonic. Both are delighted for the little bit of territory they have scratched out for themselves, as Charlotte invites him to regularly visit her and his daughter, ending the film with the lines, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.” In a very strange sense, I was reminded in her famed line of the US military’s former requirement for gays, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

      So must the lovers of Eric De Kuyper and Paul Verstaten’s remarkable queer melodrama forever face the fact that they are now denied the arms of Chris and Ann. However, for one moment in cinema history, queers win out over everything against them, including the Western patterns and myths of love.

      At one point in Michael and Chris’ travels, the boy asks about what might happen if the two lovers actually did get back together again. Michael suggests that should that happen it would be like a fairytale where the couple lives happily forever and ever. The melodramas of Michael’s preference would be subverted. In the end of this film his theory of love is proven untrue. Fairytales do occur in semi-realist dramas, at least in gay versions.

      As commentator Chris Cassingham rightfully bemoans, however, very few people in the US have been able to see or have been unwilling to watch this major motion picture. On the Letterboxd site, he notes, “fewer than 50 people…have seen this. That’s homophobia in action.”

 

Los Angeles, August 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).