Barry Jenkins | Moonlight / 2016

learning how to float

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barry Jenkins (screenplay, based on a play and story by Tarell Alvin McCraney, and director) Moonlight / 2016

 

Barry Jenkins’ well written and excellently directed film, based on a play and film script by Tarell Alvin McCraney, takes us to places where few black films have previously gone. In its tripartite structure, Jenkins’ work explores the issues of growing up in poor projects (this in Liberty City, Miami) from childhood to being an adult and the toll it takes on people’s lives.

       Beginning with a skinny, almost malnourished young boy, Chiron (Alex Hibbert), whose nickname in his early days is “Little” because of both his size and manner, is plagued by a mother who is quickly developing a drug habit.

       The film begins (shot in Fuji film) with the young schoolboy being chased by his larger peers into a vacant motel, where he hides out to protect himself. A local drug dealer, Juan (Mahershala Ali) finds him there and, recognizing his terror, takes him home to his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe) where, together, the two feed the boy and finally get him to talk. Returned to his mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), “Little” is berated and punished for having not come home.

       Over the next few days, things get even worse as she becomes more and more involved in drugs, and finally attacks him (which the film brilliantly expresses in silence) as a “faggot,” a word the young boy does even understand. He returns to Juan and Teresa, who, once again, invite him in, as he asks questions about sexuality and other fears, which they, kindly, attempt to explain to him, reassuring him that if he does later find himself to be gay, he must choose his own identity.

       Juan is the first of many stereotypes in this film who is revealed to be a different individual as he lives day by day; despite Chiron’s painful connection that this is one of the men who sells his mother drugs, he might have made a wonderful father for the boy, behavior we particularly perceive when he takes “Little” to the ocean and gently teaches him to swim. And even when Juan drops out of the film (we hear later that he has apparently died), Chiron continues to return to Theresa to escape the mother he has now grown to hate, she, in turn, slipping extra money into his pockets.

       The second section of Moonlight is shot in modified Kodak, signaled by a blue image in the quick interlude. As the teen Chiron (André Holland), has grown in a gangly kid, who still seems lost in pain and fear. Now those who taunted him as a child are even more aggressive in their raging hormonal changes, not only threatening him, but mocking his tight jeans as opposed to their baggy streetwear. Chiron is also further abused by his increasingly drugged-out mother.

       One fellow student, in particular, Terrel (Patrick Decile), is determined to punish the still-shy boy, who now, with his only friend Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), realizes his gay sexuality one late night on the beach. Yet Kevin is also a former tough guy, accepted by his classmates, including Terrel, who forces him to engage in a hazing tradition of beating a chosen classmate until he refuses to get up.

       Having now fallen in love with Kevin, Chiron, when struck by his friend, stands again and again to accept his face blows, finally leading to a schoolyard brawl, saved only by the intervention of school faculty. Chiron retaliates the very next day by angrily slamming a chair over Terrel’s head, and, when finally quelled, is hurried off to jail by police.

       The third section, shot in Agfra film stock (adding cyan to its images, a complimentary to red, signified by a red spot in the brief interlude), features Trevante Rhodes as a march darker, hulkier, and menacing adult Chiron, who, working in Atlanta—where his aging mother now lives and works in a rehabilitation center—as a drug dealer, like his father-figure Juan. If we do not like the gold-tapped toothed “Black,” his new nickname, as much as we did his previous incarnations, it is because he has now retreated so far into himself that he no longer knows who he was or might have been.

      Yet in his nightly wet sweats, he realizes that he realizes that as a street thug he is having many of the same problems of his youth. His mother calls to beg him to visit her, as he equally attempts to ignore her pleas. When the phone rings again he attempts to reassure her that he will visit, before finally realizing that this call is from his old friend-enemy, Kevin, who now works as a cook in Miami, after having himself served time in jail. Kevin has heard a song on his restaurant’s jukebox that suddenly reminded him of their long-ago friendship and has somehow found Chiron’s telephone number.

       For “Black” the call brings up everything he hates about himself and the love he once (and evidently only once) so enjoyed. Without even thinking carefully, “Black” visits his mother—which, in one of the most touching scenes of the film, results in a kind of painful resolution to their lifelong separations—and takes to the road, arriving at the small café where Kevin works as chef and server both. After recognizing his long missing classmate, Kevin whips up a special Cuban dish and serves it to his friend, insisting that, even though Chiron does not drink, that he share a couple bottles of wine.

       Their elliptical conversation seems to take them nowhere, as Kevin admits that he married, had a baby, and is now separated but friendly with his former wife; and Chiron, as unable to express himself as always, dares not to hint at why he has made the trip. Neither knows how to clearly brooch the subject of their own failures, loneliness, and total isolation.

      Having nowhere to stay the night, Chiron takes up Kevin’s offer to visit his small apartment, where finally Kevin himself admits that he had failed in almost everything he attempted until now, working as he does for nearly nothing. Chiron, meanwhile, admits that he has never been with another man since Kevin on the beach, perhaps one the saddest admissions about love ever expressed in film. Whether these two men have sex that night or not is beside the point: each has come home to help the other to find expressions of love that they have never before been able to admit, and the final scene simply portrays the somewhat menacing Chiron with his head upon Kevin’s shoulder.

       While this film, in part, is a kind of black gay story, it is, more importantly, about abused children who have never had the opportunity to express the love which might have nurtured them into adulthood. These now hardened males must find their own way back into tenderness and feeling, a difficult journey for anyone.

      Jenkins, his cinematographer James Laxton, and his editors Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon take what is basically a naturalistic tale and break it down into stunningly-timed images that reveal more than any one character can express.

       Although all of the actors are quite wonderful in their gentle and almost mute performances (Naomie Harris and the child actor, Alex Hibbert, are particularly memorable), it is their actions that matter most: tears at the most unexpected moment, a quiet and hard-won bubble bath, the gesture of helping one learn to float, an unexpected kiss, a loving sprinkle of parsley upon a special dish. To say this small film is elegant in those images is an understatement. Jenkins turns the everyday, the painful, and the ugly into visions of a restoral of life.

        As awful as Chiron’s surroundings have been, it is a world, when looked into more carefully, as this film does, we recognize as filled with would-be loving figures—if only given half a chance.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).

Akosua Adoma Owusu | Reluctantly Queer / 2016

letter home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kwame Edwin Otu (story and narration), Akosua Adoma Owusu (director) Reluctantly Queer / 2016 [8 minutes]

 

Akosua Adoma Owusu’s film of young Ghanaian refugee Kwame Edwin Otu’s letter to his mother might have better be titled, Reluctantly American, as Letterboxd commentator Michael Sicinski observes, since “we get no sense that he is "reluctantly" queer” [but] “he does express serious regret that his identity positions him in a no-man's-land between two inhospitable cultures, neither of which he can make into his true home.”

      Written in a far more florid and literate English than younger US viewers are used to, Otu’s beautiful letter home to his mother describes the pushes and pulls of his life, facing in the country to which his parents have helped him to emigrate, an unsettling hostility. As he describes the situation in the US of 2016: “The life of a black man is uneasy, messy. It is riveting, inuring physic carnage. Indescribable.”

       Nonetheless, he quickly shifts to his real subject, carefully coding his language so that he can express the problems he is facing without actually having to explain that it primarily concerns his sexuality. It begins with a simple statement of self: “Of the things I have told you there is but one self left out. It is that self which renders my life a puzzle.”

       He continues with a brief explanation of what that puzzle consists of, and how determines the difficulties in his life: This self is at once daunting and haunting. Drifting further and further away from the love you nourished me with. That indefinable love. … This self is troubled by the double jeopardy of wander and wonder. This self wanders around seeking to speak out, yet at the same time being careful and fearful with what to say and what not to say.”

      As he speaks these words, director Owusu shows him in bed naked and with another man, making it clear to the viewer that his vague expressions of “wander and wonder” have to with the search for male love and the wonder of finding it, even if temporary. And at the same time it presents a body behind his puzzlement of self, a beautiful man that he soon relates would be suppressed in his homeland, perhaps even rejected by his beloved mother.

      “Would you embrace this self if it finally speaks?” Certainly, his homeland would not. He notes that while he sang in primary school that Ghana remains “My Happy Home,” it continues “to remain my unhappy home.” And he links that with his puzzling self: “I come up against the jeopardy of being this self, this self I cannot bring home.”

      Indeed, we suddenly recognize this 8-minute film as a very different to sort of coming out movie, a work in which the young man “comes out” to his mother without having the possibility to truly express in full what he means, that at the very moment he “speaks out,” he must necessarily also be “careful and fearful” about “what to say and what not to say.”

      He wonders if he truly spoke out “will you ever let me in to the lighted caverns of your heart?” And with that question unanswered can he ever dare to speak the truth?

      Both the cultural and legal viewpoints of his country do not permit his to return, so he forced to remain a different kind of outcast in a country in which he can at least express his sexuality. Sickinski nicely summarizes these irreparable tensions in his comments about this work:

 

“As a gay man, he is not welcome back in Ghana, where homosexuality is considered not only immoral but illegal. But he also recognizes that in Ghana, his Black body is the norm and not a spectacle. In the U.S., on the other hand, he feels the eyes of racism upon him every day. (Although he does not mention Frantz Fanon, the young man's account of daily experience in America calls to mind the writer's description of being Black in a white world: ‘Look, a Negro!’)”

 

     So painful is this epistolary picture that we wonder if he dare send the letter to his mother, or if he does so might not his language trouble her more than if he simply announced that the issue was about sexuality. We see him writing the letter, but we never see him seal it up to post. Perhaps the film containing what he has written provides a fuller picture of his dilemma.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Muiris Crowley | Change in the Weather / 2015

the film that resists telling its tale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Muiris Crowley (screenwriter and director) Change in the Weather / 2015 [16 minutes]

 

Irish writer/director Muiris Crowley’s short film Change in the Weather almost resists telling its story. But who can blame Crowley for keeping it almost a secret for such a long time, focusing  instead upon what seems like normal actions, even when we know that something else is going on.

   The film begins with the teacher Michael (Crowley) putting up the student’s desk and erasing the teaching board at the end of a day. He drives to what appears to be a practice session for young soccer students, he doing exercises on the sideline before driving off into the night.

     In the very next frame, he is eating dinner with his parents, whom this late 20-year-old or man in his early 30s man obviously still lives.

     The next scene seems equally banal, as he rises in the morning, shaves, showers, and dresses before returning to the school, where we discover that he’s evidently tutoring only one slow learner (Brian O’Donoghue), whose father (Joe Mullins) picks him up after class and asks about his progress. Michael assures him that he’s “coming along.”

      We see Michael again later in the day at a local pub, and once more, presumably after, driving along in dark roads. But this time we get a far more revelatory scene as we see him stop at an isolated country spot where another car is also parked. And soon after in the back seat of the vehicle he is fucking another male.

       So we can presume that Michael is a gay man, living what the IMDb “handle” describes as a “furtive lifestyle.” He washes his shoes of the mud clearly accumulated from the country spot.

       The next day he attends a soccer game with his Da, anxious to check his cellphone. And again that night, he drives to the isolated place for sex.

       It is the next morning, probably a weekend, when he shops at a nearby convenience store. But here things begin to make terrible sense, as he encounters his student’s father once again, who this time approaches him menacingly, telling him to “To keep the fuck away from my son.” And what we suddenly realize, scrolling back through our bank of visual memories, is that in those trips to the country make-out spot, that the person he met up with was the boy he is tutoring.

     The rest of the film consists of Michael beginning to perceive the consequences of his acts: a drive to the ocean with his father where he enters the cold waters, quiet moments of pondering in the family kitchen, sighs, and the discovery that someone has written the word “queer” on the window of his car.

        He takes another trip to the ocean, floating on the surface of the water like a dead man. And after, a telephone call that expresses his sentiment that he “can’t do this anymore.”

        Michael makes yet one more trip to the country meet-up spot, but turns around without participating in sex. He returns home, sits up is bed mulling over everything that has happened,

stands up and goes to his parent’s bedroom to confess, as he breaks down in tears.

        We don’t know precisely what he tells them, but it is surely in preparation for a possible public outing and revelation of his behavior. We don’t know the boy’s age. Since he is studying in the summer, he may be attempting to graduate after his peers have, which may make him of legal age, which in Ireland, is 18 to engage in sex with anyone in a position of authority. But he doesn’t look to be 18, and he may still be of the legal age of consent at 17, but in which case Michael is still culpable. It doesn’t matter. Michael’s obvious guilt and the student’s father’s threats make it clear that the teacher has been in the wrong.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Jerell Rosales | Please Hold / 2016

hang up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerell Rosales (screenwriter and director) Please Hold / 2016 [15 minutes]

 

A young Asian-American man, Danny (Mike Ball), not terribly handsome and perhaps just a little overweight, hasn’t a very good image of himself and has sex primarily with older adults who meet him at out-of-the-way parking lots to fuck him in the back of his car. In the sexual meeting we observe, the stranger gets up immediately after he comes and will not even give his name. Needless to say, Danny’s sexual life is not very fulfilling.

     He discovers that the condom the man has used has broken in him. And, after not feeling well for a couple of days, he’s fearful that he might have contracted AIDS and visits a doctor for a test. All of this is all too believable and sad, the plight of so many men of all ages who for one reason or another don’t dare visit bars or hang-out at sites such as Grindr or other photo-based services, who instead make dates for quickies through other services on the internet and in gay newsletters.

     This time for Danny it feels different, as if he really has contracted AIDS, and he is angry at the world and mostly at himself for the way things are in his lonely life. What isn’t quite believable follows, and makes for good drama, perhaps, simply because it allows the character to speak at far more length that in most short films. Yet, in that process it allows the film to become a not terribly scintillating monologue that leaves realism behind without managing to become a fascinating fantasy.

     In Jerell Rosales’ work Danny calls up a condom manufacturer, spending hours attempting to speak to a real human being, and winds up talking, so it seems, mostly to himself while he waits to be connected with a man who can better handle his problems than the original spokesman, Logan (Ben Warner, whom we never see), who tells him the obvious: “We clearly state that our condoms don’t prevent sexually transmitted diseases or….” Danny interrupts him to say that he feels, in waiting for the test results, that he is observing his life roll out before just as we are told that happens just before a car crash.

    Accordingly, we are forced to listen to Danny’s confession, becoming his witness, which puts us in the position, unknowingly, of the company clerk who without Danny realizing it also listens in to his personal history. In short, we are asked by the director to serve as a surrogate company spokesman without even the ability to truly communicate to the fictional customer. The service we provide depends solely on how each of us feels about the script and empathizes with the lost gay boy who tells us his life-story—certainly a chancy manipulation of his audience particularly since what Rosales’ script provides is far from original.

     Like so many young boys in his situation, Danny rather idealizes his mother, who was a nurse and might have even suspected him of being gay. Her motto, which she repeated day after day was, “You need to live a clean and healthy life style,” certainly not evidently an effective lesson given the life her son eventually falls into, at highest possible risk of sexually transmitted diseases by men he doesn’t even know and who may also be heterosexual and on drugs. But he now recognizes that despite all her prayers and warnings if she might simply have openly embraced who he was he might indeed have been able to live the life she wanted him to or, at least, help to protect him.

     When he discovers that Logan has in fact heard all he’s said, he’s startled, as Logan quickly responds that his shift is about to end and thanks him for calling Trojex before hanging up.

     Our fictional Danny has found a kind of imaginary listener just as the director has forced us to become, presuming that since Danny obviously has far more to tell that we will want to hear it as well. And the very day we observe Danny desperately trying to get through to Logan again without success and with a great deal of frustration. But finally, Logan does return, suggesting that there are other representatives that may be able to better help him. Even Danny knows he can’t put his new-found friend in the position of listening to him again and asks for someone higher up, as Logan checks to see to whom he might connect him.

      In the interim, of course, Danny will surely tell more of his story, a lead-in to our subservient sympathies. This time we discover that the young man has never been told by someone that they love him. He has, as he puts it, been “fought, smashed, plowed, and hammered,” but he’s never been made love to. And he’s scared, he admits, that if he gets sick that he’ll never be loved. “Or worse, that the right guy will come along, and he won’t love him anymore.” (Rosales camera briefly entertains us with a beautiful naked man, Jonathan Chironna, clearly Danny’s dream figure, whom magically does appear to top him and provide him with a fully-clothed kiss.)

     He recognizes that he seeks out older men because perhaps he has “Daddy issues,” but jokes that since he never had a dad, how might he be described as having “issues?” He tells us what so many like him must hear, those of his own age “pointing out his flaws,” while older men tell him he’s beautiful and sexy—men who having lost their own beauty cannot hope to get others of his age to join them in sex. “So I let them in. I let them use me and do what they want to me.” And for a brief moment in time, he can lie to himself, imagining that he is truly “being loved.”

     Of course, Logan is listening in again; of course, the director presumes his audience is still watching his film and hearing Danny’s confession. The boy’s tears are inevitably moving, Logan dutifully reporting “Unfortunately our supervising reparations manager is unavailable today.” He thanks his customer once again for his call and hangs up. For Danny there is now no possible consolation.

     At the doctor’s office he waits to be called, humming a song. But now we hear what quite miraculously and totally unbelievably happened yet again before his scene, another call to Logan who insists there are so many other people who can help him. “All my life, I have struggled with this question,” Danny proceeds as if Logan’s statement was an invitation. “Why would God make me the way that I am?” He feels he’s being punished for being gay, that he doesn’t deserve love. He calls Logan only because he would like someone, somewhere to give him some answers.

    Logan’s response is not what I might have suggested: “I want you to look at your toes and slowly bring your eyes up your body. All of that is worthy of love, especially the parts that you can’t see.” No matter what happens with the test results, he tells Danny, he wants him to remember that he is worthy of love.

     It sounds a far too much like a self-help program to me, a series of cliches, even if what he says might be helpful and true of any individual who dreams and aspires for love and purpose in his or her life.

     One would have to be without any emotional sympathy to not feel that Rosales’ character, as he describes him in a later interview, is someone who in his loneliness, his fear of death, and feelings of being unloved is a lot like all of us. It would be hard not to be somewhat moved with empathy. But I guess I resent this film’s sentimental hijacking of my emotions to fill out a story the author/director himself didn’t feel he had the time to truly explore. My own self-doubts are not very entertaining, and are certainly not worth creating a film around them. And given my age, Danny is certainly more attractive than me, I probably being closer to the older men who would lie to him about his youthful beauty while quickly stealing a moment of pleasure from his body.

     Alas, we don’t even discover if this young man ultimately is AIDS free or not. But then given the generalities the writer has thrown upon him I guess it doesn’t truly matter. Now if he I had actually had the opportunity to get to know this character other than through a few vague confessions, I might really care. But just as Danny says, even his creator doesn’t seem to care enough to give him the full reality of his love. The character himself deplores precisely what the director has done: “I let them use me and do what they want to me.” If I were Danny, I’d demand a new script with if nothing else another ending that tells me where I might be headed and lets the audience in on the facts.

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Robert W. Gray | Aidos / 2016

the shame of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert W. Gray (screenwriter and director) Aidos / 2016 [5 minutes]

 

The narrator of Canadian director Robert Gray’s Aidos begins the short film with declaring that “by the time Ben died 21 people had declared their romantic love for him.” I would suggest, given the film’s title, that the word “romantic” here is out of place, since, as the narrator continues to explain, “some [of the expressions of love] came too early and some too late,” the words turning out in the end to be somewhat of a hieroglyph.

    Indeed, by showing 21 faces of mostly males but also females we must question which of these expressions of the simple phrase “I love you” represent the many different associations gathered around the word “Aidos,” the Greek Goddess of shame, modest, respect, humility, and numerous other inter-related concepts, including honor, sobriety, moderation, scandal, and disgrace.

    Given the context we must suppose that Ben died young, of AIDS—a dirge accompanies the images and we get one glimpse of what appears to be a sick man sitting up a bed—and that the faces were are observing are those of lovers, family members, well-wishers, bedside visitors, old friends, perhaps even nurses and doctors, etc. And it is only by attempting the carefully read their faces that we can determine what their true feelings, despite their outward expressions of love, might mean.

    Some apparently love with erotic desire without the modesty or shame, others almost hypocritically say those words with a sense of pity for the sense of shame that his illness represents. Still others contextualize their love as family members expressing a sense of respect and honor; while a few seem to say the words almost with a sense of scandal in their very love of the young man.

    Gray provides us with no guidelines, and as I watched his very short, 5-minute, film over and over I keep alternating my interpretations of the faces’ expressions, subtly reinterpreting the words that we cannot hear spoken.

    Ultimately, we must recognize that it is a fruitless game that even appears to trivialize the word love, which most certainly wipes away any romantic connotations. Love here is anything but romantic; it is embarrassed, polite, conforming, accepting, even erotic perhaps, but seldom if ever “romantic” in this context. And, in that sense, the film is quite unrelated to the issue of his queerness, but is grounded simply in Ben being a diseased man, shamed perhaps only for having contracting a disease he could not escape.

 

Los Angeles, May 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Mariana Thome | Straight A / 2016

the new pressures of coming out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Lien (screenplay), Mariana Thome (director) Straight A / 2016 [9 minutes]

 

Straight A, like so many films featuring an Asian-American gay individual, concerns all the pressures society and family put upon a young man, in this case Alex Chen (played by screenwriter Todd Lien), who in order to get into a top college is participating in school politics and other organizations as well as managing to keep a straight-A grade level.

      Yet even these achievements are not enough for his demanding father (Nathan Chen) who now wants him to focus more on his college requirements and tests, and to focus less on his senior activities and, in particular, spend far few moments best friend, Kyle Miller (Zach Cramblit).

      The two begin the movie in bed together, a gay couple who have been going together now for 4 years, an occasion which Kyle celebrates with a gift of a ring. But how can Alex accept it, and more particularly, wear it when he has been challenged all his life to carry on the family name with a wife and child as well as finish a challenging education in medicine?

      Understandably, Kyle is angered that Alex has still not brought up the matter with his father and that they can only pretend to be friends when both feel a strong love between them. And after having to jump out of bed and play-act as good friends in the midst of studying when Alex’s father returns home, Kyle walks out, demanding some serious changes in their relationship.

      The Asian pressure on young gay men is well known and has been the subject of many of the films (short and feature) on which I have previously written. But what this film also made somehow clearer to me is just how so many young boys now feel pressured, having sexual affairs beginning in high school, to settle down with their high school lovers without even bothering to consider the issues of college and exploring other possible companions for life.

      It seems more than ironic that after fighting and winning marriage equality, gays, particularly young boys of 16-18 are now being asked to settle down into a monogamous relationship the way young heterosexual boys and girls were being pressured to do in the 1950s-1960s. Feminism liberated a lot of females from having to make such life-time decisions at such an early age. But gay rights now seemingly demand that young boys come out to their families, introduce them to their lovers, and settle down into a life-time relationship some time before the end of the senior high school year.

      Is it any wonder that Alex keeps describing all the pressures on his life, resenting, in particular the demands his father continues to make when he already the near-perfect son, or at least has aspired to be. But Alex’s father, in this case, is no monster.

      By the time Alex has dinner with his father and returns to his room, he notices the ring in its box is missing. He quickly rings up Kyle to see if he has taken it back, but there is no answer. And when he returns to the living room he observes his father speaking to his dead mother at their small home shrine to her, praising him to her, and praying to guidance to help him tell his son that he knows about the relationship. He has taken the ring to show it to the dead mother as evidence one presumes, and now hands it back to his son demonstrating his love and acceptance.

     Finally, the two, father and son, can openly communicate and reiterate their love for one another. But first Alex feels it necessary to clear up his boyfriend situation and runs off to Kyle’s house, openly kissing him in the doorway, proving that he’s finally come out.

       It’s fine as a story; the two boys can now openly share their love. Isn’t that what we elderly gay men wanted? Yet something in the pit of my stomach is churning, and I suggest poor Alex has yet further pressures facing him at age 17 that he shouldn’t have to deal with. Will these boys be going to the same university? Will they be able to sustain their relationship with all the various pressures and distractions of college life?  Mightn’t there be other young men who might have made for better mates or, might Alex or Kyle even end up preferring a single life?

      The happiness I am supposed to feel at the end of this, and so many other short films like it, is increasingly turning into a kind of generational angst. Why this hurry to rush into a relationship that demands a ring and life-time commitment? What happened to “playing the field,” to the process of learning above love, to all the fun that is often involved with open sexuality in youth. Coming out shouldn’t have to mean introducing your family to your future husband.

      I’m afraid the “coming out” film is now beginning to devolve into a wedding shower.

 

Los Angeles, August 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).