Anthony Schatteman | Dag vreemde man (Hello, Stranger) / 2016

the stranger on the couch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Schatteman (screenwriter and director) Dag vreemde man (Hello, Stranger) / 2016

[19 minutes]

 

With the long shadows of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) and Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) flickering over it, Flemish director Anthony Schatteman’s Hello, Stranger is a very moving film about a man, Arthur (Arend Pinoy), who performs each evening as a drag queen in a Ghent gay bar. He’s a popular performer and has a deep friend in another elderly drag queen who performs with a full beard, Michel (Wim Opbrouck).

      Everything might seem quite ordinary for a gay film if it were not for the fact that Arthur also is raising a young boy, Max, who he has brought up alone since he wife Daisy (Delfine Bafort) left them when the child was still an infant. Keeping the boy close to him in his dressing room as he goes on stage, Arthur performs with his heart in his throat in worry for his son as Michel often looks after the boy.

    One night, however, the boy awakens to wander off into the busy dance floor where Arthur has been ordered to appear, and for a few moments he madly searches in terror through the dancing drunk and drugged out customers to scoop up Max from the bowels of the crowd. Even Max’s schoolteacher chastises Arthur for still wearing nail polish as he delivers him up to school in the morning.

      Arthur cannot even help encouraging Max, for time to time, to play drag queen with him at home, where the numerous gaudy, sequined dresses and wigs are on open display. He is he doing right by his son?

      To make things even more complex, Daisy has suddenly returned after all these years, begging to see the son who might not even recognize her. Finally, Arthur relents and, retrieving Max from Michel’s care, hurries home with the boy to lay him beside his mother on the couch.

       So the film ends, without any answers about whether that bond will bring her to demand to keep Max or even bring her back together with the man who, as she puts it, she just “couldn’t” any longer live with.

       Played with enormous restraint, despite the exaggerated world in which Arthur and Max live, Schatteman’s tender short film presents all the problems of trying to protect and love someone from aspects of one’s own life which to the outside world may seem perverse and deleterious to the child. Arthur is a man torn between his love of his son and his own identity. Need he, we ultimately have to ask, abandon who he is in order to protect the child he loves? Will the boy grow up to find his father, as his mother apparently did, to be too strange to live with? Or will Max come to recognize that the real stranger in his life is the woman with whom he has laid down to sleep, his own mother?

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Tanuj Bhrama | Dear Dad / 2016

when home is not where the heart is

Tanuj Bhrama (screenwriter and director) Dear Dad / 2016

 

As the reviewer Subhash K. Jha begins his piece in the Hindustan Times about the 2016 film, Dear Dad:

 

“It takes a whole lot of guts to make a film on alternate sexuality in India, especially when you are a first-time director. Tanuj Bhrama has pushed the envelope out of the closet as far as possible. And then some.”

 

      We learn almost from the very beginning of this film that the central character, Nitin Swaminathan (Arvin Swamy), married with a son and daughter, has recently come out to his wife as a gay man and that she is seeking a divorce. She quite rightfully insists that Nitin also explain the situation to her son, Shivum (Himanshu Sharma). So begins a road-trip drama to Mussourie and other Indian nature spots that is not so very dissimilar from the journey the gay figure of Evening Shadows takes with his mother. And, like that film, the central purpose of the trip is to reveal and explain his homosexuality, which in both cases ends at first in confusion and anger before final assimilation.

     Yet, unlike Rangayan’s lean telling, wherein he reveals the love the hero and his friend feel for one another, Bhrama’s Dear Dad has little to do with sex—Nitin is single and apparently has no lover, nor do we get a glimpse at his sexual preferences, although he does mention that he is not attracted to “all men.”—so that the film becomes a statement of the father and son relationship more that it is a gay film.

      If the movie represents, at first, Shivum as a fairly typical self-obsessed kid, far more interested in his cellphone and a “celebrity” (Aman Uppal) whom he spots at a local restaurant (requesting a signature), it suddenly shifts when the two stop by Nitin’s parents. There his overly-loving mother greets Nitin and Shivum with joy; but it is the sad empty relationship between Nitin and his dementia-inflicted father that provides deeper psychological perceptions.

      While Shivum seems mostly bored in the company of his father, Nitin quickly leaves the arms of his loving mother to attend to the old man, who has been left in the yard with shaving lotion pasted across his face, apparently awaiting his daily shave from his wife. It is an almost a surreal scene, as Nitin takes up the razor—hinting at both true love and perhaps a little hate—to accomplish the task of shaving his father. During the gentle scrapes of the razor he explains, knowing the father will comprehend very little of what he is saying, that he is a gay man. The camera focusing on the older father and son, however, gradually pans away, revealing that Shivum has overheard the conversation.

      Through this device, quite early in the work, Bhrama sucks almost all the expected drama out of his cinema, while for the rest of the film the focus shifts to the hurt and angered son who must suddenly come to terms with a father who he has never truly known.

      The only bit of drama, other than the son’s growing angst, is provided by the fact that the duo again encounters the “celebrity” (we’re never truly told why he is famous) along the road, hitchhiking, Shivum insisting that they give him a lift, if no other reason than to put another being between the intensity of his father and him.

       The two, father and “celebrity” even share a bedroom—hinting that the easy-going and quite accepting “guest,” could have shared Nitin’s bed. Yet Bhrama does not suggest any sexual actions, and the “celebrity” expresses a kind of standard “heterosexual trope”: “But you’re married, with kids!”  So too was the hero’s uncle in Evening Shadows.

       However, it is the “celebrity” who, after Shivum has fed his father something to make him very ill, who nurtures Nitin to health again and who advises the boy that he must accept his father for who he is, admitting that he too left his father out of hatred, and hasn’t been home in 15 years. By film’s end, we recognize that his journey has been one to see his family again.

       Shivum moves on to his boarding school, still harboring anger that “things can no longer be the way they were.” He, so a pop song proclaims must still grow up and “learn to fly.” Which he eventually does, winning top honors in mathematics in his school.

       For the honors celebration, his mother, with her new lover (“Isn’t he a bit old?” asks Nitin; “Well at least he’s straight,” she quips. “Ouch,” is his response); but the loving Nitin, after a long emotional scrapbook of images from Shivum’s and his close relationship years earlier, does unexpectedly show up to congratulate his son, who finally is able give him the inevitable hugging forgiveness.

     If this is not a great queer film, it is an important one simply because within a very homophobic culture it takes a different trajectory, exploring a married adult coming out—with all the numerous issues that decision represents—as opposed to the more common young man coming out to his parents or to himself. Yet there seems to be something missing here, particularly when Shivum asks his father, near the end of the movie, “are you going home?”

      The film might truly have explored this question further. For a man who has had to abandon everyone and everything in order to no longer live a “false life,” where is home? Clearly for such an individual, “home is not where the heart is,” but in a larger world of possibility and desire. It is quite clear that for Nitin his love lies with his son and younger daughter. But his access to them will now be limited, and his ability to show that love or any love will lead to constant searching.

      Yes, this is a brave film, a work that truly explores what is next in mid-life after you made a major decision to change your lies into truth. Where do you go from there, and how to obtain whatever dreams or even illusions are left?

    And for those left behind, well patriarchal relationships, as this film makes clear, are always so far more difficult that matriarchal ones. Just ask Freud.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

Noan Ribeiro | Dudes / 2016

junk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Noan Ribeiro (screenwriter and director) Dudes / 2016 [15 minutes]

 

Like the feature film of the same year Andrew Nackman’s Fourth Man Out, Noan Ribeiro’s short film Dudes (2016) is a satire of four straight “dudes,” one of whom suddenly decides to come out as gay to his bros.

     Whereas, at least in Nackman’s work we saw the soft side of the gay boy’s straight idiot friends in their attempts to hook him up with the right guy, this 15 minute session with adult college boys who still behave like they were 15 or 16—heavily drinking, playing computer games, and bragging about their female conquests—are below par college chums, Matt (Jakeem Hawkins), Jay (Anthon Meyer) and Bobby (Alexander Quitman Volpi), who can’t assimilate their friend Denny’s (Michael Gmur) sudden admission of being gay.

a moment earlier, two of them suddenly grab their shirts or sweaters to cover their scrawny torsos, put down their beers, drop their mouths, and try to imagine all the times when their friend might have been looking at their “junk” in the showers, or about the time when they went camping and he might have “come on” to one of their cousins, or their having missed the fact that he had taken an art class. Surely this explains why, although he is friends with some of the “hottest” chicks in the school, he has never bragged about his conquests.

      Bobby’s question about whether he’s actually had sex yet—with a man, almost makes the other two wretch. But at least he’s trying to explore the new territory. Jay asks if he dates transsexuals. And Matt thinks of all the evil things that he might have done in the past without them even knowing. It short, these ignorant, homophobic slobs turn on their friend as he stands in a position of inquisition with a sign, a rec-room decoration, behind him that reads: “Road Closed.”

      It’s not that Denny makes it easier, clearly having not purposely decided to tell them that very day. He speaks haltingly, seemingly unsure if he’s even really had a sexual experience with another man, never attempting to truly explain or answer their absurd musings—although he certainly does deny having ever tried to seduce one of their cousins, and explains that taking an art class has nothing to be with being gay, and assures them that he has never “looked at their junk.” But Denny is about as literate about the gay experience as they are totally ignorant of it.

     Clearly, he dresses better and seems far more intelligent however, and he cannot help but wonder why he would remain friends with his old bros after having long ago, evidently, come out—although he has still not told anyone else including his parents.

     Like Nackman’s film, the satire of straight dudes really doesn’t resonate. Are they all so very dumb, relentlessly sheltered from the world around them? Here one wonders if they’ve ever even stepped out of their game room whose walls are covered with model planes and the shelves stuffed with toy soldiers as if they are eternally arrested teenagers. Although that’s a useful trope to describe the 20- and 30-year-old jocks who stand around bars and talk about their favorite sports and female tricks, it all quickly wears thin when played out in real time and space.

     And if such behavior might actually be an exaggerated representation of how such boy-men really behave, why would director Noan Ribeiro imagine that I and other gay men might want to sit down even for 15 minutes and giggle over their antics.

      In the end, these guys finally find a use for their friend, who as a gay man able to befriend women who they can’t get close to; might he put in a good word for them? And Denny, evidently not a lot smarter these straight comic cutouts, seems pleased with his new assignment. Apparently, he is probably is into their “junk.”

 

Los Angeles, August 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

          

Reid Waterer | Bed Buddies / 2016

friends and lovers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reid Waterer (screenwriter and director) Bed Buddies / 2016 [15 minutes]

 

This is the 6th film I’ve see of filmmaker Reid Waterer, most of them on quite different subjects and, I must admit, of varying quality, while they are all fairly well made and approach fascinating subjects.

     Bed Buddies, from 2016, like the 2012 film Performance Anxiety, is basically a work in the dialogue tradition, despite the fact that it begins in bed, when the central figures of the film wake up the next morning after what they gradually recall was a night a wonderful sex.

     But it is the very fact that they are in bed together that startles first Jared (Dylan Wayne Lawrence) and Brent (Daniel Lipshutz), who are each surprised after drunken pleasure to find he shared it with by a close friend Danny (Enzo Nova).

      For them this immediately creates a problem. They all rely deeply upon each other for comradery and advice and have apparently thought about one another sexually. But now…they realize that they’re not only attracted to one another, but have found the night one the most pleasurable sexual experiences of their lives.

      Moving from the box spring to the debating platform the three of them discuss their next options: to forget the great sex they just enjoyed and return to friendship—as they all realize, a very difficult thing to do—or they abandon their friendship and take on one another as lovers. But that too is problematic since there are three of them. Has a threesome ever dated, romanced each other as a trio, showed up as a truple to social events?

      It’s strange, as one critic pointed out, just how much things change in a few years. In 2016 there was not a great deal of talk about polyamorous relationships. Although sexual threesomes where often talked about in LGBTQ movies, and even occasionally portrayed, they were, as this trio suggests, one-night stands, not something that had grown out of years of friendship.

     As the director himself suggests, the problem isn’t generally one that appears in the heterosexual world. Heterosexual men and woman have same-sex friends without ever even imagining that they might find each other sexually attractive—although, obviously, such things have been known to happen. The wonderful fiction writer Harry Mathews devoted an entire work, The Journalist, to just such incident wherein two straight male friends suddenly found themselves head-over-heels in love, unable to stop kissing. But that is an exception to the rule.

      These men are terrified that if they are so literally “embrace” each other as lovers in bed, they will lose the easing-going confidentiality of the beer pub. Good advice will turn into to jealous strategies of how to keep the other close. Their personal comments about others will be interrupted as dangerous “outside interests” that might deter the relationship.

      Obviously there is a great deal of logic in this, although as a youth I certainly had good friends with whom I also regularly had sex, neither of us having any intentions of entering into a romantic relationship. But then that was the sexually open 1960s when you probably could have had sex with your brother and his wife without raising eyebrows in some quarters.

      Certainly, these men are worried that their sudden interest in each other’s bodies will mean giving up their easy-going rapport. And the three of them together further casts shadows upon their futures. As one of them suggests, it’s bad enough to have to deal with the suspicions of jealousies of one partner, but two is nearly unimaginable.

      They finally agree, that despite their attraction to each other, they’ll remain just good friends. That is until their eyes catch a glimpse of each other once again, which starts up the pattern of kisses, a leap back into bed, and—as Waterer turns his black-and-white figures into color—another round of pleasurable three-man sex.

     Perhaps this is the first recorded polyamorous gay relationship in LGBTQ cinema,* followed by Matthew Puccini’s Lavender in 2019, wherein we observe a polyamorous affair between two married men and a younger boy come to an end.

      The film is billed as a comedy, which it is given its conclusion; but the heart of this work is a dialogue of serious intent, which although not of great significance, certainly detracts from the “light entertainment” value of Waterer’s movie. Although I must admit, just looking at the three hunks together gave me a great deal of joy, and seeing them lined up in a row in bed certainly brought me to giggles. Debate all they want, now that they’ve seen each other naked there is no turning back. And as Jared mentions, Brent is surprising well-hung, which might not be so obvious if he hadn’t spent the 15-minutes of this film in his undershorts.

 

*The first film LGBTQ film that I know of to actually talk about polyamorous relationships was in Jon Fitgerald’s Apart from Hugh (1994) in which a female guest to the party hosted by two gay men talks about her happy relationship with a husband and wife. Before, obviously, there were many polyamorous relationships on film, described generally as a ménage à trois. Of the obviously male gay, two males and one female examples, you might begin with Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933). Other early two-male and one-female examples are François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Love Circle (1969), Harold Prince’s Something for Everyone (1970), and Carlos Hugo Christensen’s The Intruder (1979), the last of which concerns two brothers and a wife. None of these, however, contain what the boys of Bed Buddies are proposing.

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

Andrew Nackman | Fourth Man Out / 2016

mr. wrong

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aaron Danick (screenplay), Andrew Nackman (director) Fourth Man Out / 2016

 

In his film Fourth Man Out director Andrew Nackman clearly couldn’t determine what kind of movie he was attempting to make. Was it to be a wacky “bro” movie, where four blue-collar friends get together on weekends for ballgames, beer, boobs, and fag jokes? Or was he attempting to show the difficulties of an individual in such a culture in expressing his own sexual difference? Perhaps he was simply satirizing small town America. Of course, a brilliant director might have possibly accomplished all of these genres in one fell swoop, but Nackman, alas, is not a brilliant director.

     Local mechanic Adam (Evan Todd) has, somewhat inexplicably, finally determined, after ten years, to come out to his three macho friends; but given their own homophobic and misogynistic behavior, he simply cannot get up the nerve. Only as they lay half asleep, sprawled out on couches and chairs does he manage to whisper the news to the best of his friends, Chris (Parker Young). And when his other friends, Nick (Chord Overstreet) and the overweight Ortu (Jon Gabrus) get wind of his admission, their fear and trembling is apparent. The equally unattractive and self-doting Nick is even convinced, soon after, that Adam is seeking a sexual relationship with him!

      Chris eventually calms them down, and with the help of Chris’ date, Tracy (Jennifer Damiano), comes to realize just how difficult it has been for Adam to tell them the truth. Soon they are all going on-line to gay dating sites such as Grindr and reading gay sex manuals in order to help their friend to find Mr. Right. In the end, they seem to know more about gay life than Adam himself.

      Adam even finds the courage to tell his parents, and before long the whole town knows of his sexuality, including his fanatically religious Catholic neighbor Martha (Brooke Dillman) who for years has been offering him up baked goods along with her niece.

      Given these developments, this film might have been comedically charming—and at moments it is—if it weren’t for Nackman’s own seeming bigotry about gay “types.” In just a few moments, as Adam tries dating several men at the local Irish pub, the film offers us up a sleazy married man—with the on-like moniker of Bradstar—who has turned his basement into a dungeon for his gay dates, a nelly queen, a nervous not quite out of the closet boy, a tough jocko loudmouth obsessed with Scarface, and a effeminate black gay who’s offended by Adam’s flatulents (who might not be?)—a gag-result of a meal of nachos. Even if one might imagine that all these young gay stereotypes might exist in this small town, the caricatures drain any credibility from Nackman’s film, and merely reiterate the silliest and most obnoxious visions of gay life. Surely, Nackman seems to argue, these are the not the right partners for the straight-looking working-class Adam. A later date with an outlandish queer artist truly crosses the line—even for Chris, who suddenly claims to be Adam’s lover to get rid of the snobbish prick.

     When Adam “services” the car of a very handsome man of his age who drives around town with two kayaks attached to the roof, he feels he’s finally found the right man, especially when they share a moment of intense eye contact. But at the very moment when the attractive car owner is set to pick up his car, mechanic Adam is sent away on an errand, and misses what may seem to be his last opportunity.

     Of course, that gives Adam’s friends time to take him out, for what is apparently for the first time—again an inexplicable narrative twist—to the small city’s gay bar, where not only do they all have a good time, but where Chris is able, once more, to connect up with Tracy, who’s there, apparently, with her gay brother.

      Meanwhile, Chris is having trouble with his current lover, Jessica (Jordan Lane Price); he apparently can no longer get an erection, and soon after, encountering the kayak-topped car in a parking lot, he determines to bash it in with a hockey stick. We can no longer quite guess his intent. But having recently attempted to kiss Adam, he, we suspect, may be coming to terms with something he has never before admitted to himself, that he actually is in love with Adam.

      This might have resulted in a very fascinating conundrum, which could have completely redeemed the emptiness of the rest of Nackman’s work if he had explored its consequences, but clearly the director was not willing to go where the script might naturally have led him. Adam adamantly rejects Chris’ advances, and the film ends with the easy resolution of Adam reintroducing him, yet again, to “Tracy,” whose real name, it turns out, is something else.

      Of course, Mr. Right, having again to repair his car, returns to the garage where, this time around, Adam has the chance to truly introduce himself. Presumably they will soon be driving off into the sunset to kayak together down some lonely stream. But I have to tell you, Parker Young is far cuter, and if I were Adam, I surely would have returned his kiss.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).

Matthew Diamond and Penny Woolcock | Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) / 2016 [HD Opera]

love vs. faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugène Cormon and Michael Carré (libretto), Georges Bizet (composer), Penny Woolcock (stage director), Matthew Diamond (director) Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) / 2016 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

Changing the location from the more specific island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon), the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Georges Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers)—the first time on their stage for over 100 years—is set in a vague “Far East,” its ramshackle sea-side village filled with figures dressed in a wide-range of outfits that cover everything from the mid-19th century to the contemporary, and who inhabit rooms fit out with run-down refrigerators and television sets. These brawny pearl fishers reach for out a “brewski” while still worshipping the ancient brahma, and still glorifying their religion with the nightly songs of a vestal virgin, Leïla (Diana Damrau) who might have been at home in ancient times. By permitting these obvious anachronisms, director Penny Woolcock allows for the exoticism of Bizet’s world while bringing that fairytale landscape into the real world.

    That tactic pays off by transferring our attention from the obvious flaws of Eugène Cormon’s and Michael Carré’s original libretto and later disastrous musical revisions by the opera’s publisher Choudens, back to Bizet’s sparklingly limpid score. Under the careful and yet exploratory hand of conductor Gianandrea Noseda, we can now again hear the constant references to the surrounding ocean (made even more theatrically central by beginning the opera with plunge of two pearl fishers into the deep sea—using skilled company dancers with newfound aerial skills to pretend the undulations of swimming) and discover that there are more than two great arias to this almost forgotten opera.

     Yes, the well-known tenor-baritone duet, “Amitié sainte,” a swearing of the two male lead’s eternal friendship that reads to anyone with an ounce of imagination as a male-male matrimony, is the most unforgettable aria of this opera and many another; but almost as memorable is Nadir’s (Matthew Polenzani) solo recounting of the beauty of Leïla, “Je crois entendre encore.” And the choral pieces of both acts I and II beautifully bind the personal emotions of the village leader Zurga (Mariusz Kwiecien), Nadir and Leïla, with the fears, strengths, and desires of the community as a whole.

       In part, this tale, like so many operas, represents a struggle to express the self within the confines of communal rules and decorum. Nadir’s and Leïla’s love not only betrays the love of Nadir and Zurga, but the pledge Leïla has made to the community and their god. 

       The fact that both men are also in love with this woman merely complicates the various positions, public and private, which have been imposed upon them in this slightly desperate world, threatened by the possibility of daily death by drowning, being crushed by the waters’ tsunamis, and, at opera’s end, being destroyed by fire. In short, the central question of the opera becomes how can these individuals sublimate their private passions to their public declarations and their faith?

     The character of Zurga, in particular, is torn between these issues. It is he, despite the outcry of the community, who must decide whether the discovered sinners must live or die, and he openly wavers again and again, twice by the end of Act I. 

        Even after he has sentenced them to death, Act II finds him suffering for his decision; and, upon meeting with Leïla, who argues for him to spare Nadir, even if he kills her, he once again temporarily rescinds his decision, desperately wanting to believe that the whole affair was a thing of accident instead of a preconceived betrayal of Nadir’s and his love.

        But as Leïla goes on to restate their love, Zurga’s feelings of reconciliation quickly turn to jealousy and vengeance again in the magnificently tumultuous ending of “Je frémis, je chancelle, de son âme cruelle,” in response to which the previously submissive Leïla curses Zurga and proudly embraces her death beside her lover

        Once again, it appears, community values will outweigh personal passions; but having now realized that he has, symbolically speaking, had his own night with Leïla when, as a child, she offered him haven in her family home, Zurga shifts position one more time, in this case ardently turning against his community and religion by setting the fragile wooden homes afire, and sending the city’s inhabitants back to their burning homes in order to save their endangered children. While the lovers escape, his fate seems sealed, as he, himself, in this production, appears to be surrounded by flames. And no matter what outcome we might imagine for events, his passion for both Nadir and Leïla has set his own life afire at the expense of communal obligations and faith.

        So excellent is this new production of the early Bizet opera, we can be assured that at least for several years, The Pearl Fishers will again be available, at least in New York.

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2016).