Àlex Aguado | Barcelona des de dalt (Barcelona from Above) / 2017

actor and director

by Douglas Messerli

 

Àlex Aguado (director) Barcelona des de dalt (Barcelona from Above) / 2017 [9 minutes]

 

David (Àlex Bonavia) is planning to shoot a short film and his friend, an actor, Marti (Pau Matheu) joins him. He has chosen a spot among the old bunkers of Barcelona, but before he can even begin to snap pictures of the location, Marti has grabbed the camera away from him and demands to know the plot of the short film.

     David, who clearly hasn’t thought his story over that carefully, is a bit embarrassed, particularly since it’s about a guy who turns invisible. Regaining the camera, David takes his friend to a high point overlooking the city, suggesting that this is where he wants one of the shots.

     Finally, David takes out the script and hands it to Marti, and together they do a short scene about a scientist and a magic potion. Finishing the scene, Marti suddenly moves toward David and kisses him on the lips. David pulls back violently, Marti arguing that it was in the script. Still David takes umbrage for the act.

      David asks why Marti has insisted in joining him in the first place, but Marti refuses to respond, instead leafing briefly through the script, surprised and even angered that Frank, the invisible man, turns out to be the bad guy, when everyone knows it has to be the scientist.

      Even more angered, David pushes the script out of Marti’s hand as the papers go flying, Marti admitting that he isn’t quite sure why he has joined David.

      David eventually walks up to the old bunkers, which Marti keeps describing as an anti-aircraft site. Marti, having gathered up the pages, follows.

      The two boys sit side by side. David admits that he wanted another ending, Marti describing it as “a bit cheesy, badly written.” David says that directing is his thing.

      Marti announces that he won’t let David do the film because the bunkers are anti-aircraft positions, not bunkers, while David argues they’re bunkers to him. Call them what you like, Marti argues, but they still are what they are, just like Frank, even if invisible, still exists. “He’ll be as tall, skinny, as much of an asshole as he is, and even being invisible won’t change him.”

      David turns away. But it is Marti who apologizes for having become so invisible. David takes away the script and tears it up. He puts his hand on Marti’s shoulder as the credits rise.

      Clearly these two boys have been in a relationship that has broken up, the film a kind a possible metaphor for what has taken place. But now that they’re back together again, apparently there is no need for art, as they see the situation anew from “above Barcelona.”

      Inevitably, Spanish director Àlex Aguado’s short film has, with its evocative ending, lost all purpose as well.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2013).

Chad Hylton | Love You Thank You / 2017

face in the pillow

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chad Hylton (screenwriter and director) Love You Thank You / 2017 [27 minutes]

 

In this short comedy-drama gay boy Lance (Tim Torre) spends most of the time arguing with his inner self (body double Michael Nicolo) about his previous relationship with Adam (Donovan Mendelovitz) who, long after their breakup, has asked Lance to attend his first major art opening.

      Lance is about to obsequiously return the man he once loved, while his inner self attempts to force him to remember all the unpleasant occurrences which resulted in their breakup. In fact, despite the rather bitchy and often outright nasty Lance 2, what we witness in the film’s ongoing series of flashbacks of Lance’s and Adam’s relationship, the couple’s first encounter at a coffee shop, is rather charming, as the frustrated would-be actor Lance first introduces himself to Adam, who has secretly been drawing picture of him from afar. Their affair seems almost destined as, having swallowed some peanuts to which he quickly discovers Lance is allergic, Adam tosses them out stating that he regrets having eaten them. Lance responds, “You really want to kiss me.” “I do,” continues Adam, Lance countering it would literally kill him. “I’m that good,” jokes Adam.

     Back to Lance’s learnèd conscience: “He was molasses smooth and sugary sweet like a snicker-fuckin’ doddle and you chowed down on that shit like a thirsty little bitch, but you know what, too much sugar and you know what you’ve got, a rotten tooth….” So much for love at first sight.

     When we witness more flashbacks, Lance’s and Adam’s early sexual encounters also suggest some problems. Adam apparently sees himself as the top, but has difficulties in finishing the job, whereas Lance would actually enjoy that position. They have been evidently talking about the shift, with Adam resisting. Does he somehow see the position as something essential to his control, a macho role? The film doesn’t precisely suggest that, but we discern something is a bit amiss. He claims he’s simply stressed out about the how his art show is going, but his comments, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” suggest a far bigger issue that lies underneath his doubts.

     Adam soon admits to a very dark high school experience, “lots and lots of black Crayolas, boys and boys of black Crayola.” He had no one to even invite to the Prom. In the midst of Adam’s conversation, Lance admits that he loves him, which stops everything for a few moments as if a time warp had swallowed them both. He apologizes, suggesting that his love was not something which he even had permission to mention. “I know we haven’t been dating that long and I know it’s kind of crazy, but I had to say it.”

     Adam’s response, gives meaning to the film’s title, “Thank you, really.”

     Even the densest of audience members must surely realize there are some serious problems ahead.

     Lance is forced immediately to back off, describing his feelings as not suggesting that he is “in love with Adam,” but simply that he loves spending time with him. It is apparent, however, that he’s now saying something he doesn’t really mean: covering up the lie that he truly loves someone by pretending he does not. Dangerous territory lies indeed.

     The two make passionate love, but all Adam has to offer is “Hey, I appreciate you too.”

     Even Lance’s conscience has to admit that he didn’t actually run away like a sociopath. Perhaps he should go see him at the opening, explaining his decision to agree with his softer self as has having to do with his back molar tooth pain—caused probably by the oversweet lies Adam has fed him.

     Back into history, we discover that their relationship is truly disintegrating. Their game of “Perfectly perfect” has seemingly been forgotten by Adam, who also refuses to let Lance see the drawings he’s doing of him. Alcohol is more prevalent. Adam seems to suddenly wonder about his lover’s capability of even getting home safely, and refuses to accompany him upstairs into the room where presumably they might have sex. When a lover suggests, “You know yourself better than I do,” it’s clear the personal involvement between the two men in a deep relationship has evaporated. He no longer even pretends or apparently even wants to know the “other,” as writers such as Eudora Welty have long made clear is the mania of early romances, involving the absurd attempt to even become the other.

     Lance nonetheless lures him upstairs and the two engage in great sex. But when your lover suggests that he’s not ready—pausing seemingly forever—for a show, anyone with even a bit of common sense knows it’s not just his art show about which he’s speaking, particularly since, as we suspect, his art is focused on his lover.

     When Lance suggests that he believes his boyfriend is certainly ready for the show, Adam counters with a legitimate question, “How would you know me better than I do.” Lance has taken the leap that Adam has not dared to, attempting to insert himself into his lover’s life. And when they fight soon after, Adam screaming out “I never know with you,” Lance rightfully responds, “Know what?” We realize that what he doesn’t know has to do with Adam’s own inability to fully come to terms with himself emotionally and sexually. As Lance perceives, what he really doesn’t know is whether or not he truly loves Lance.

      The metaphor, strangely, becomes the “cum on his chest,” still dripping from their sex, a moment when Adam has been forced to actually realize that his semen involves another human being, instead of a body turned away from him facing into the pillow. The fact that Lance has demanded the act as a face-to-face encounter seems to have changed everything.

       Lance, pairing up with his double yet again, determines it’s time to take a walk.

       He recalls another meeting with Adam, perhaps their final one, in which Adam describes, again in metaphoric language, the dilemma he faces.

 

 “I feel like someone has built a replica of my house across the street from my actual house, the one I grew up in. An exact replica with all picture frames and bookshelves and furniture and my grandmother’s urn, and just moved it across the street. And in this new house there’s a comfort, a familiarity, but still everything’s different. You know?”

      Lance perceives the issue: “Yes, because you’re across the street and the mailbox is on the wrong side.

      But Adam puts it somewhat differently, “I’m not in the house I’ve always lived in, but I’m home. I’m home.” The second emphatic insistence that he has returned to the world Dorothy believes she has in Kansas, makes it clear he’s still mentally in Oz.

      The recognition that he might be able to live a life outside of his internalized sense of self seems to promise everything, and the two kiss. But it also suggests a sense of possessiveness, as if the other in that house did not have his own world, his own furniture, his own vision of home.

      Lance attends Adam’s opening. There he is greeted joyfully by Adam, whom he hugs. But he is also greeted with a wall of pictures of himself, from that first day of their meeting to their first dance and their intimate moments in bed, including his face in the pillow. The smile on his observing face gradually turns to a scowl, as he realizes that if the artist feels that Lance has created a world just like his own in his house, that Adam has actually stolen his image and the intimacy of their own love, putting it on public view, an act which many visual and other artists reveal their lack of true respect for their private lives.

      When Lance encounters the final piece revealing their breakup, he rushes out of the gallery. Back at home he confronts his “toxic” self who has made him question everything, telling him “I hate you.” But his other, rational being powerfully reacts, “Wow, maybe that’s your problem.” Lance puts on Greg Atkinsons’ song “Only Me” and gently dances with his own other.

       I have to admit, when I first saw this short film, I simply perceived it as yet another example of the numerous works of the “failed gay relationship” genre. But after watching it yet again, I was struck by director Chad Hylton’s quite sophisticated dialogue, and realized that, not only was it highly original but it fit very nicely in a kind of subset of that genre, the narcissistic relationships between visual artists and their lovers, films which include Armen Kazazian’s Gold (2005), Tami Ravid’s Boy (2012), James Fanizza’s Sebastien I discussed above, and Stillman’s Portrait directed by Joshua Davy just a year before this film, in 2016.

 

Los Angeles, November 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Ana Galizia | Inconfissõ (Unconfessions) / 2017

my uncle, the ghost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ana Galizia (director) Inconfissõ (Unconfessions) / 2017 [21 minutes]

 

In Unconfessions, Brazilian documentary director Ana Galizia, given by her aunt boxes of photographs and letters that remained from her mysterious and quite colorful uncle, Luis Roberto, attempts to bring some aspects of the man to life.

     Although it is often a touching glimpse of the man who was involved in the Berkeley, California theater scene of the 1970s and 1980s, it ultimately does little more than to create a kind of scrapbook-like portrait of him, particularly such she has added no commentary or even explanation of what she is showing other than reading out a few letters of admiring male lovers and friends, and mentioning near the end how this archive came into being.

      That’s not to say that this work isn’t of interest, particularly to the gay community of that period, so many of who died of AIDS, as did Luis Roberto at a time when the disease was not yet well-known in Brazil. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recent film directed by Rodrigo de Oliveria, Os Primeiros Soldados (The First Fallen) which explores some of the earliest Brazilian victims of the epidemic living in small Vitória, Brazil during the early 1980s, about the same time that Luis Roberto died, 1986, in São Paulo.

      Here, however, we have only remnants—the numerous snapshots and super 8 films which feature Galizia himself and the many beautiful men who passed through his life, as well as a brief series of photographs of theater performances similar to that of the Bread and Puppet Theater of the 1960s and 70s. And nothing at all is mentioned of Galizia’s career in theater and film including Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Maldita Coincidência (1979), and O Olho Mágico do Amor (1982). In the most famous of these, however, Spider Woman, he only played a nurse.

     Some of these “remnants,” however are certainly fascinating. Early in the film, in fact, a narrator reads from Luis’ psychological evaluation as a young boy 16-year-old:

 

“His personality: Presents accented traces of inferiority and insecurity, mainly affective. Has an enormous need for validation and projection, adopting a behavior that he himself disapproves of, feelings of guilt, and of not being liked by the group. Attempts to self-affirm through reverie. Sexual and family issues, intensely seeking affection and communication with parents. As a consequence, he is overwhelmed with marked anxious-depressive features. Conclusion: Group psychotherapy is recommended.”

    I don’t know if Luis’ parents encouraged him to enter into group therapy, but I had to laugh since everything the psychiatrist observed is what almost any young gay man of his age feels, or at least did in those days when we were daily taught and shown just how inferior and guilty we should feel for having the sexual desires he had. Obviously, most of us sought out some signs of approval from our parents and other family members, far too often never shown since we could not fully share our full feelings.

     Yet the later photos and letters reveal a beloved and seemingly healthy outgoing individual, relating fully to the like-minded social groups with whom he later allied himself. He appears to have been a beautiful, mercurial clown, who delighted most of his friends, even as he grew more and more ill.

     If only his niece had provided us with some sort of narrative trajectory, a chronological identification of images, a hint about the year he first traveled across the vast spaces of US to New York City and what he did there when he arrived. Did he attempt to perform in off-Broadway or Broadway theater? Where those Bread and Puppet Theater-like images actually of that company? Who did he meet on his travels? Who are these beautiful faces that keep appearing and disappearing? When did Galizia return to Brazil and why? With whom did he study at Berkeley? What roles, if any, did he perform? These and dozens of other questions frustrate the viewer at the very moment when we want most to get to know who the mysterious uncle really was. Alas, his niece offers us only images of a long-ago ghost.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Gustavo Nieto Roa | Mariposas Verdes (Green Butterflies) / 2017

leap of faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katalina Boham, Gustavo Nieto Roa, Mauricio Pichardo, and Idania Velesquez Luna (screenplay), Gustavo Nieto Roa (director) Mariposas Verdes (Green Butterflies) / 2017

 

I must admit, I’m a sucker for political movies, particularly ones in which the underdog is righteously battling the authorities. It must certainly stem from my own strong anti-authoritarian personality, a knee-jerk reaction to all those years of being a such a well-behaved child who grew up to discover all the joys he had been missing, reiterated in the fact that, except for a few years of teaching in a university which I left for those very reasons, I remained self-employed for the rest of my life.

     Columbian director Gustavo Nieto Roa’s 2017 film Mariposas Verdes reads a bit like a high school-level version of a good Eloy de la Iglesia film of the 1960s, this time involving the entire LGBTQ contingent and a few abused others fighting not only the neglect and bigotry of the own parents and their abusive school mates but, in this case, the entire school administration typified by the school principal, Bárbara (Cecilia Suárez) who embodies the conservative attitudes as well of the Columbian church and government.

      Indeed, the adversaries of the outsider world that this film argues for, led by a beautiful gay couple, Mateo (Deivi Duarte) and Daniel (Kevin Bury), are so powerful and the attacks come so fast and furious that the film has some of the suspense of political thrillers such as Costa-Gavras’s 1969 movie Z, Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 All the President’s Men and, yes, de la Inglesia’s 1978 homosexual-driven fight against the oppressive government in The Deputy.

      Yet the very age of these battlers leaves them far more vulnerable, even after they have seemingly suffered so much. Both Mateo and Daniel have grown up in unstable and abusive households. Daniel’s father is a violent patriarch who regularly beats his wife and fights with her every night, holding entirely machismo values. Mateo, the best student in the school, is the son of a money-driven mother who has kicked out his father for not being able to provide sufficiently for the family although he offers the love for the boy of which she is incapable. In short, these children, along with their peers, generally cannot look to their families for support.

     The so-called LGBTQ contingent, consisting of Ángela (Victoria Ortiz), bullied simply for being overweight); Lorena (Juliana Rendon), Mateo’s female confidante; Gabriel (Edward  González), who is moving towards being a transsexual; Daniel, who early on admits his love to Mateo and is Mateo’s strongest protector; and Mateo, who throughout the film is the major spokesman for this group and moves to bring in the radical politics he is learning from the world outside of the closed community, must almost daily do battle with Lucas (Andres Cardona), the principal’s nephew, and his gang of friends. They do battle with Mateo at every moment possible, ending almost always with Mateo and Daniel being punished instead of the bullies themselves. One of their worst activities consists of first brutalizing Ángela and later actually raping her simply as punishment for her not acknowledging Lucas’ mockery of her.

      Gabriel is such an outsider that basically Lucas can do him no harm, but the school makes up for it in finding ways to punish every small infraction, including his wearing earrings. That act of public embarrassment for a boy who regularly puts himself on public display is so tortuous that he whimpers in pain as he is stood up and condemned before the entire school and is suspended for a week. And we realize that the bullying of Lucas is condoned simply because Bárbara’s administrative policies are very similar.

      And far worse than the bullying of their classmates is the support for the bullies themselves by the school director along with her personal vendetta against anything non-normative, which Mateo represents on several levels, including his very intelligence.

      When finally, Mateo and Daniel are caught kissing in the men’s room on camera, Bárbara turns it into horrifying situation in which she uses Daniel’s intolerant and brutal father as a tool to oust Mateo from school during the last days of his senior year, and to break all relations between the two boys, suggesting the father file a lawsuit against Mateo for having corrupted his son.

      Mateo’s sense of injustice by this time is beyond the breaking point, and he can perceive no other way to set the situation straight than himself becoming a performer of a political act that, having now had one suicide and a rape on the school’s record, will surely close down Bárbara’s evil reign, while possibly changing the entire way the authorities think about the intrusion of school leaders upon their student’s personal lives.

   That act, foreshadowed in the very first scenes of the film, consist of the most horrible and unforgiving action possible: Mateo leaps from the top level of the building to his death face-first.

      It is such a gut-wrenching event—one that is played out in smaller, less significant ways by so many and transgender students each year—that it seems almost impossible to forgive the excellent writers and directors of this film for not having presented a more positive solution. Yet we know in our hearts that given the hundreds of ways that the voices of youths still underage go unheard, we comprehend that any major protest or action on their parts would have simply resulted in the same reactions, silence and their suspension and the end of their future educational goals. When the system is out to end the education of their best student, one realizes that there is no justice available because there is no logic involved and few would believe it even possible. And in this sense, we also realize that nearly everyone in this film has been in some way responsible for Mateo’s death, both for acting and refusing to act or even speak out.

     The movie, accordingly is a painful one, with some simplistic presentations, admittedly, of perhaps far too obvious villains; yet we all know that the bullies who daily wear down the energies of gay, lesbian, and transgender children continue to exist in the form of both their peers and often the systems of administration themselves through faculty, school leaders, government, and others in control. This film simply admits a reality that we don’t truly want to face; that the very institutions that we rely upon to educate and protect our children sometimes work toward goals that are at odds with that role.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Sylvain Coisne | Dylan Dylan / 2017

irrational responses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sylvain Coisne (screenwriter and director) Dylan Dylan / 2017 [17 minutes]

 

French director Sylvain Coisne’s film about the loss two gay men suffer for their adopted son, Dylan, has an amazing potential to be true tearjerker, and the scenes around the breakdown of their marriage are quite touching and convincing. Yanis and Hugo (Matthieu Dahan and Vincent Marie) are suffering all the difficulties of parents who lose their child, including simple things such as boxing up the boy’s stuffed bear and toys.

     Early on, Yanis is furious with Hugo for attempting to peel away the stars they have posted for their son on the sliding door of the balcony. Their varied feelings of bereavement, moreover, put each other on edge. Had the film expanded and continued to explore this territory, it might have been a somewhat profound short that explored new territory.

     But Coisne immediately thickens the plot with homophobic hate. The two discover their car has been covered over with the word “Mort,” threatening their deaths. Two newspaper reporters, both female (Julia Lacoste and Eglantine Pauget) appear to be stalking them to get an interview. When Hugo puts their son’s teddy bear in the building dumpster, Yanis retrieves it, arguing that if he were to have left it there it would be all over the evening news.

     Much of the plot consists of a trip to a distant motel to which the couple take their boxes of their son’s possessions to toss into a local dumpster, there momentarily rediscovering their love in sex. But even in their isolated spot someone has found them out, their car again covered over with a homophobic slur, the reporters having followed them as well.

     Hugo, moreover, keeps having visions of a lightning storm in which an airplane is hit by a lightning bolt. At another point he sees an image of a plane in the bathwater, which convinces us that perhaps the child died some freak air accident.

     After their sexual reconciliation, Hugo begins to leave as Yanis remains, telling him to pretend that he may never return home.

      I can well imagine is some communities that the death of an adopted child by two gay men might bring about the hostility of the right-wing neighbors. I can comprehend the fact that even the news may be interested in the situation, although any respectable media source would have not seen this incident worthy of coverage. I cannot quite imagine, however, even in the worst corners of the bigoted USA that the two would be threatened with death because of their own child’s death unless there really was an incident of neglect or abuse involved.

      But when Yanis finally speaks to the media team, he mentions that the boy was indeed intrigued by lightning and rain, and ran out every time there was a major storm, much to their chagrin. But the evening of his death, worried that he might attempt to do something similar, they ran into his room to find him already dead of an aneurism.

 

“That night it was thundering. Hugo could not sleep. So he went to see him in his bedroom. Dylan was asleep, facing the wall. But his eyes were open. Ruptured aneurism, they said. Simple. He would have died, even in the bathtub, even in the car, or with another family. It was bound to end up this way.”

      So why haven’t Hugo and Yanis told their “simple” story, if the press was that interested, in the beginning? Why have we, as well, been misled with images of lightning and aircraft? Why didn’t they immediately wash away the words of hate on their car, even if somehow they felt some sense of guilt? Surely in their seemingly upscale community, there must have been other gay or lesbian families whose children died or became ill in the past? And if there were no others, certainly some heterosexual family might have spoken out with sympathy is this particular French community, even if it is some backwater rightest French village akin to an Alabama rural community? And where, at the end of the work, has Hugo gone? Has he left Yanis? The film ultimately brings up more questions than their simple story answers.

     We feel we were purposely made to feel confused by the author, given the real story is the couple’s sadness and perhaps sense of guilt. Coisne has created a mystery where there was none to be found, embedded his work with a sense of hysteria that is hardly believable, and then resolved it without truly exploring the emotions that remain with the troubled gay couple. Perhaps he is attempting to demonstrate the irrational behavior of those who hate. But even the repetition of the child’s name hints that the director might want to have started all over again without the theatrics, telling the story of the couple who loved this boy who just happened to have been homosexuals.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).