Gerardo Vera | Segunda piel (Second Skin) / 1999

the end of the sea

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ángeles González Sinde and Gerardo Vera (screenplay), Gerardo Vera (director) Segunda piel (Second Skin) / 1999

 

The critics, in general, did not like Spanish director Gerardo Vera’s film Second Skin, and I don’t blame them. This 1999 work, I should warn sophisticated fiction readers, has nothing at all to do with the US writer John Hawkes’ 1964 fiction Second Skin; pity.

     Some commentators, such as David Ehrenstein, writing in the Dallas Observer, compares this movie, in passing, to Arthur Hiller’s 1982 film Making Love, but to do so, I suggest, brings up the serious problems with Vera’s work and sidesteps what I think is a far more compelling issue about bisexuality that the film attempts, somewhat unsuccessfully, to explore.

      Indeed, on the surface, the successful aeronautical engineer Alberto García (Jordi Mollà)—blessed with a loving wife who works as a graphic print artist Elena (Ariadna Gil) and an almost too-perfect to be believed son—seems to be hiding a heterosexual affair. At least, that is what Elena first believes when she discovers a receipt from a hotel and sundry other pieces of paper her husband has left in his suit coat just returned from the cleaners. 

   Their relationship has apparently seemed so perfect that she is even hesitant to bring up her discovery, but when he also begins to go missing for hours from his job and she cannot reach him for long periods on her cell phone, Elena, like Hiller’s character Claire Elliot, perceives that Alberto has been lying to her. But when she attempts to have a discussion about it, even suggesting that she herself might seek out the help of a psychiatrist, he refuses to even begin a conversation let alone join her to talking to a “shrink.”

      So intractable is Alberto that she finally calls the hotel and confirms that her husband has indeed been a guest there a few weeks earlier. When she angrily reveals what she has discovered, he admits to having an affair with a woman he had met years earlier, but assures Elena that it was for one night only and reiterates his love for his wife alone.

     An even longer spell of inexplicable absences, including at one point, his own son’s birthday party, along with the repeated voice of a male caller on his cell phone, reveals to her that the one-night stand with a woman he has confessed was actually a much more recurrent relationship with a man. Accordingly, we have it appears entered into the territory that Making Love so precociously explored decades earlier.

      Yet by this time the viewer already knows that Alberto is lying, not only to his wife but to his male lover, the beautiful and sensitive orthopedic surgeon Diego (Javier Bardem)—observing them as well in a hot gay sexual scene outside the covers—to whom he has failed to inform that he is married with a child.

    Accordingly, if Elena isn’t yet fed up with Alberto’s lies, the film’s audience certainly is, and the sexual focal point of this work, Alberto, who apparently with great difficulty and pain pivots between the two, is either having an inordinately difficult time in coming out as a gay man or is a hidebound bisexual unable to give up his lovers of either sex. It also thrusts Vera’s film into the realm of soap opera, as the viewer increasingly begins to think of the lying coward as a villain as opposed to a more passive hero (Diego is presented as what in what old-fashioned gay jargon as describes it,  a “bottom”) and the wife, both attempting in their near adoration of Alberto to allay any dramatic confrontations and forgive him for his unpredictable fits of abusive absence and silence. 

      Both Elena’s sagacious mother, María Elena (Mercedes Sampietro) and Diego’s co-worker Eva (Cecilia Roth) despise Alberto and advise their daughter and colleague to end their relationships. Apparently both the otherwise smart and loveable Elena (who has a brief fling with her handsome co-worker Rafa in revenge) and Diego (who is having difficulty concentrating on his patients and surgical operations) seem able to “dump the creep,” the words I am sure had I seen this film in the theater the audience might by this time be chanting. After a night or two in the sack where Alberto performs, after his previous performance with Diego, rather tepid sex, Elena is about to give the guy another try; but when at a celebratory dinner, she asks him a simple but crucial question—“How long have you been sleeping with men?”—he storms out of the restaurant (without even paying the bill), tears welling up his eyes as he bleats out a cry to Elena, “Help me!” she finally recognizing that if for her son’s sake if not for her own sanity, she has to obtain a divorce.

     Diego goes so far as to visit Alberto at his airport hanger-contained spiffy offices, where he mostly gets the cold shoulder before his lover promises to meet him at the astoundingly specific day and time: Wednesday at 4:00, as if it were an execution instead of a date for making love or even talking about returning to his bed.

     When Alberto is too busy to show up even for that specifically parceled-out moment in time, Diego turns up again in Alberto’s office, this time bearing a gift of a book just to show there is still no hard feelings. One begins to feel that Diego is far too dense of mind to be a skillful surgeon; but when Alberto refuses to even unwrap his present, he too knows it is time to wave a final farewell.

      Now that he is freed of his heterosexual responsibilities, however, Alberto again shows up at Diego’s door, and the two continue their affair, this time mostly in Alberto’s new apartment. There are still things, however, that Diego needs to talk about: for example, why did a boy repeatedly answer Alberto’s cellphone, and why wouldn’t Alberto return those numerous calls? Finally—far too late in the plot to be slightly believable—the inveterate liar admits he is married with kid. In fact, he is ready for another, and finally we hope, a truly cathartic breakdown. He admits to having lied throughout his life so often that it seemed like the truth. As he finally admits, he hates his work, hates his life. His life has been lived entirely to please his father and grandfather. “I’ve spent my entire life passing everyone’s tests.”

     If one might think that this is the moment our unpleasant hero is finally ready to admit that he is gay and, as Diego proposes, to live out his life on his own terms, you picked the wrong worm. When Diego argues for their love, Alberto cryptically responds “Neither of us feel right.”

    At least, Alberto seems to be admitting to his total schizophrenia. It is not that he prefers one life, whether forced upon him or not, better than the other. He remains a truly split personality, a true bisexual unable to come to terms of accepting the full consequences of either of his identities.

    Even Diego now knows it is time for his exit, but Alberto cannot even accept that fact, insisting instead that he will leave—his own apartment!

    What he truly means, we suspect, is he will leave life itself behind. He quickly mounts his motorcycle, spinning out of sight around the corner and into a coming rush of traffic, dying soon after from injuries in the crash.

      Vega’s film had it’s chance to truly explore Alberto’s bi-polar bisexualism, but seemingly abandoned it at the last moment, a bit like its central character has throughout.

      A tacked on epilogue where the two ex-lovers meet up to share their inexorable grief in having loved this despicable man makes both of these fine actors seem like foolish dolts. No wonder Bardem, about to brilliant perform as Gay writer Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls—for which is was nominated for an Oscar—fought against the release of Second Skin!

     Yet this film did haunt me, making be ponder a bit more than usual what bisexuality might really represent. When I was young—I suspect to help allay my own outsider feelings for having identified as homosexual—I argued that all men and women were born equally open to all possibilities for sexual satisfaction, but that societal pressures and personal relationships ultimately narrowed those choices not always expected ways. Well, I was young and believed in pansexualism even if it turned out a few years later that, despite heavy heterosexual dating, I entered a basically monogamous gay relationship that has lasted 51 years—without my ever having had sex with a woman. I certainly enjoyed the company of women but simply, I now realize, was just never sexual aroused by the female gender. I was born a homosexual.

     In retrospect, it seems to be that identifying oneself bisexual is a youth-oriented act. A recent Gallup poll almost suggested that an increased 15.9% of Generation Z individuals (those born between 1997 and 2002) identified as LGBT as opposed to 78.9% describing themselves as straight, and 5.2% having no opinion (perhaps the Q factor of the LGBTQ gathering). Of that almost 16% of the population, however, a staggering 72% of the LGBT-identifying individuals describe themselves as bisexual, with means at 11.5% of the US adult population claim to be bisexual at an early age, while only 2% identify as being gay, lesbian, or transgender.

     While the total number of youths identifying as LGBT may be on the rise, accordingly, the gay, lesbian, and transgender portion of that population is still an astounding minority of young US men and women.

      Youth, as we have long known, is a time of discovery and exploration, and being bisexual represents some of that in terms of sex. And that’s absolutely fine when one is seeking only sex without the commitments of a longer-term relationship.

       But what happens to bisexuals, I need to ask, as they grow older. If they wish to continue without making long term relationships, they perhaps will do so, simultaneously, or alternately seeking out same-sex and opposite-gemder experiences. But as relationships begin to develop, as they often do, or, to put it in somewhat archaic terms—but which remains at the heart of the vast majority of gay, lesbian, and transgender cinematic narratives—when one falls “in love,” choices are necessarily made unless one can find partners of either sex who are nonplussed by an open relationship with partners of varying genders. It would be fascinating if in another few years from now we discover that people in relationships show no jealousy or concern about open relationships involving others with different sexual identifications.

       Any traditional notion of marriage, however, represents some rather severe shifts in identification. If a male determines to maintain a permanent or long-term relationship with another he might now he begin to define himself as gay, or in the case of a woman seeking a long-term relationship with another woman define herself as a lesbian. Choosing someone of another gender suggests that no matter whether you’re male or female, you’ve “gone straight.”

       An attempt to live simultaneously in relationships with both, as this movie suggests, demands total honesty and acceptance on the part of all parties. And I should think it would represent a fairly difficult and demanding lifestyle as well. To live both in a closeted manner, in the way Alberto did in Vera’s film, would end up surely hurting nearly everyone involved.

       That may explain why in the next youngest group of polled individuals, the Millennials (1981-1996) only 2.0% identify themselves as bisexual, 0.8% percent as gay, 1.2% as lesbian, and 0.4% as transgender (the same amount as in Generation X). By the time you get to my generation, the Baby Boomers (1946-1964), only 0.3% claim to be bisexual, 1.2% as gay, and 0.4% lesbian, with the same 0.2% identifying as transsexual.

      Somewhere along the line, a lot of LGBT individuals dropped out and entered the straight world, or perhaps, never fully explored the other possibilities as they might today.

       Early in Vera’s film, Antonio describes himself as a child who, when he reached a beach, would immediately rush forward into the sea, much to the consternation of his parents, to face the rush of rolling waves and turbulence. Diego asks him why, since apparently he was unable to swim. “I was trying to get to the other side,” he explains, “to the end of the sea.” But there is no end to the sea, Diego reminds him.

      That is Antonio’s problem in a nutshell. He has attempted all of his life to escape the dangerous tide and turmoil of human relationships by speeding toward them, hoping to find peace and acceptance within a force that always remains in violent flux. Encountering other human beings is the very definition of danger and possible drowning; the only way to escape is to live, metaphorically speaking, alone in some isolated inland village or to seek out death. Or, perhaps, learn to swim with the tide or to keep someone at your side to save you.

 

Los Angeles, March 4, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

   

 

 

   

 

 

Samara Halperin | Tumbleweed Town / 1999

toyland boyland

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brook Lane, Ivan Blackshear, Matt Mayfield, Dia Felix, Gabe Winter, Leigh McFadden, and Dulce Ziegler (animators), Samara Halperin (director) Tumbleweed Town / 1999

 

In this charming gay cowboy saga, US direct Samara Halperin and her animators take toy plastic cowboys, a dog, and several miniature cars and trucks across a desert covered with patches of sand and animal pellets, animated with small passing tumbleweeds against a miniature cactus garden into territory where even the most precocious budding gay adolescent never before imagined.

     Arriving in the middle of the desert, god knows how, our cowboy hero tries to flag down many a car and truck for a hitchhike before he finally lucks out with a similarly attired cowboy friend who takes him hurling through the desert night to the Bronco Bar where we watch one hirsute cowboy getting a blowjob and others wandering off into the night to enjoy the cool pleasures of the desert.

     Inside our cowboy duo, on a floor of popcorn spin in a breathless dance of blurry pleasure, other similarly besuited cowboys in blue shirts and brown chaps whirling about in a dizzy swirl. The whorl of it all beneath a glass disco ball makes for desert magic in a manner no youth could ever have imagined. Or perhaps they might have imagined it but would never have been allowed to create such a miniature paradise under their parents’ watchful eyes. Certainly I, despite the fact that such an age I’d long again retreated into a world my brain had conjured up from Hollywood images, could never have imagined what a legion of cowboy men, a Christmas tree ornament, and a record turntable might have been able to conjure up.

 

    Hold your horses, it gets even better as the two cowboys retreat to a desert campfire with the driver’s dog, a bottle of Maxwell House coffee, a bag of sugar, a warming-up pan, a banjo, and, most importantly, a can of Crisco. Who could ask for anything more?

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

 

Bradley Rust Gray | Hitch / 1999

in the murk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bradley Rust Gray (screenwriter and director) Hitch / 1999

 

Bradley Rust Gray’s 1999 short film (18 ½ minutes) is purposefully “murky” on all levels. Two friends, pretending to be cowboys, are on their way across country from nowhere to somewhere—we’re never told where they’re headed—in a kind of languid hurry, at least if we are to believe the early morning wake-ups by Porp (Jason Herman). Evidently the other, far more handsome friend, Jason (Drew Wood) has a girlfriend waiting.

     Presumably, Porp, with green fingernail polish, is gay, while Jason is straight; at least that’s what we can surmise by Jason’s accusation of Porp having fucked a guy they previously picked up, citing as evidence a condom he found in the back of the car. Porp, on the other hand, asks Jason if he fucked a woman, evidently at a truck stop, “in the ass,” claiming that he fucked a girl named Jackie anally, while denying having sex with their hitchhiker. In another words, even if he’s gay, Porp is evidently not comfortable talking about it. He even buys a copy of Playboy for his friend so that he won’t have to think so much when jacking off.

      There are two nighttime scenes at the center of this film in which we can barely see given the purposely poor lighting of the flick. But presumably in the first Porp is jacking off alone, rather enjoying it, while the second time around, Porp’s green painted fingernails seem to have found their way into Jason’s pants giving him a great deal of nighttime pleasure.

      The next morning, while Porp smokes a cigarette a short ways from where they have parked their SUV, Jason walks in a rather wavering and hesitating path over to his friend, asking for a cigarette which, when offered, he slowly extracts from the box, catching a light off Porp’s cig. Porp moves back toward the car, signaling it’s time to again get moving.

       Presumably, we are to comprehend that Jason enjoyed his masturbatory sexual act with Porp, and has somehow now formed an attachment with the other. Do we care? Does it even matter? This film so tiptoes around any issue of sexual or interpersonal communication between these two that it might as well have featured two teenage boys jacking off on a couch to a heterosexual porn tape; in fact that might have been of greater interest, particularly if they discovered they liked doing it with one another.

       The presumption is that we might be interested in this encounter simply because it is unlikely, although, as I wrote long ago in my review of Brokeback Mountain we know that lonely men, no matter what their sexual inclinations generally enjoy the company of whoever they’re with if there is none else around with whom to do it. In that movie at least we knew for certain that Enis Del Mar and Jack Twist definitely “liked it.” In Hitch we can’t even be sure of that! If Jason did in fact enjoy the fit of Porp’s hand around his cock, can we be sure that it was satisfying in any way to Porp? Not knowing anything about anyone in this film seems to be its object.

       I suppose one might say that this is what being incurably Q is all about. But even those who are intent upon constantly questioning sexual boundaries do it with more energy and determination, I hope, that these two drifters.

 

Los Angeles, January 6, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).

Liu Bingjian | 男男女女 (Nánnán nǚnǚ) (Men and Women) / 1999

comings and goings

by Douglas Messerli

 

Liu Bingjian and Cui Zi’en (screenplay) Liu Bingjian (director) 男男女女 (Nánnán nǚnǚ) (Men and Women) / 1999

 

With the earlier Chinese film Zhang Yuan’s East Palace, West Palace (1996), Liu Bingjian’s 1999 film Men and Women stands as one of the first major Chinese movies to explicitly depict homosexual activity. But unlike Zhang’s work, basically an underground tale, Liu’s film represents the working-class’ quotidian experiences. Indeed, the film’s central actions consist of the most banal of everyday activities, the camera focusing for long periods of time on the film’s central characters going about daily chores: Qing Jie’s (Yang Qing) attempts to convince a couple of her customers to purchase a sweater; the young boy she hires as her assistant Xiao Bo and her unpacking and displaying new garments they have just received; Qing chopping up vegetables for their dinner; Xiao and his friends Chong Chong and Gui Gui stuffing fliers promoting Chong and Gui’s new magazine on toilet literature; Qing’s husband Kang simply reading the newspaper; and frame after frame of cars, trucks and pedestrians swarming the Beijing streets.

      Since the film was shot in a few days with little budget, these scenes are often ill-lit, noisy, and quite frankly boring to sit through, but in the end they establish the very banality and normalcy of the lives of these figures who only in a few sudden bursts of communication and action reveal the other realities brewing within.

     The plot is equally banal. One morning Xiao Bo, a shy boy originally from the country, shows up at Qing Jie’s small clothing shop having been given the name of a man who might be willing to employ him. The shopkeeper quickly assures him that there is no one there by that name, but Xiao persists, standing patiently in the shop while customers bicker over the prices of coats and blouses.

      When the haggling customers finally leave, Qing again assures the boy that his has the wrong address, but eventually ends up hiring him herself. She is obviously so taken with the young man that she even offers him a bed in her small apartment, over her husband Kang’s mild objections. Clearly she is also taken with his good looks, a possible romantic partner if not for herself perhaps for her friend A Meng. Perhaps she sees him as a surrogate son, as she fixes up his room while he showers, and prepares a full meal during which she continually attends to his preferences and encourages him to fully eat. 

     When later we see her and Kang in bed that evening, she refuses her husband sex, so that we are led to presume that their long silences cover up the years of contentions between them.

      Xiao Bo proves to be an apt assistant with a real flair for the displays and a patience dealing with the contentious customers that she innately lacks. She spends more and more time with her friend A Meng, introducing her to Xiao Bo. Even Kang seems to finally approve of the boy, taking him along on a visit to one of his wife’s clients who refuses to pay, brutally beating the man until he gives up the money; at another time he spends one long evening before dinner playing pool with the shop boy, Xiao easily winning all of their games.

     But Xiao’s “date” with A Meng does not go well, and she later tells Qing that she thinks Xiao does like women, something the viewer might now suspect given the fact that he tells A Meng that he has no interest in any of the contemporary female movie stars, and refuses even to take her to the movies. Obviously he is no cinema connoisseur. 

     At first, Qing refuses to believe that it’s possible, a nice-looking boy like Xiao not being interested in girls, but watching him more closely, particularly as he blithely works on clothing a naked manikin, she realizes the possible truth of her friend’s observation. As she discusses the situation with A Meng, she does not show any moral outrage or social disapproval, but merely worries that it will be very difficult for him in their society. There is no talk of his liking boys or men instead of women, and no concept, it appears, of homosexuality. She is simply worried about his well-being.

     In the subplot, meanwhile, we encounter a handsome young man, Chong Chong, who regularly visits the Beijing public toilets, gathering the words and graffiti symbols plastered on their walls for material in his new magazine devoted to “toilet literature and behavior,” a subject that has perhaps grown out of his friend’s internet broadcasts. Since the Beijing toilets are the major meeting place for Chinese gay men, there is no need for the film to establish his probable homosexuality, particularly when we soon discover that he and his co-partner in this strange publication—perhaps stranger for the Westerner than for the Chinese, who would possibly recognize the magazine as a cover for a gayzine—Gui Gui, a rather effeminate boy who we have spotted earlier in a brief and meaningless street encounter with Xiao Bo, when even after Xiao has passed him, he continues to make obvious his appreciation of the boy’s appearance through his several looks back and hand gestures. The hero of director Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum klo (1980) would certainly approve of their enterprise.

      Two other incidents in the central story, one minor and the other momentous, help to build up the tension in Lui’s otherwise rather placid presentment of his tale. After Xiao and Kang’s pool game Kang briefly stops by a public restroom to urinate, Xiao quickly joining him, the two momentarily standing side by side at the urinal as they talk about the high and low methodologies of playing pool. The fact that cinematographer Liu Jiang immediately cuts to a scene of a larger public bathroom into which Chong Chong enters and exits establishes an unspoken link between the two locations and those who frequent them. 

       A short while later, Kang is home in his apartment as Xiao showers, a scene reminiscent of the early instance in which Qing showed her new house guest the shower, the camera voyeuristically enjoying his handsome physique for several long moments. Kang plays the role of the camera in this case. And when Xiao finishes showering and begins a series of 50 some push-ups, Kang stands close by calling out the numbers. Suddenly Qing’s husband, having been denied sex by his wife for some time, grabs the boy and attempts to rape him. When the boy pulls free and begins packing his clothes with the intention of leaving, he further verbally abuses him, mocking his manhood.

       As he storms through the streets, Xiao is rightfully furious with the situation, stopping by the store simply to tell Qing that he made the decision to quit. She, evidently believing that he intends to take a train home, trying to hand him extra money and make sure that he buys his tickets at the official ticket stand and not from peddlers.

        But Xiao has no such intentions, soon after calling up an old friend with whom he has obviously stayed during a previous crisis, Chong Chong. The two threads of the story have now become interwoven, and the sexual subtext slowly begins to show its weave, particularly since Gui Gui is now living in the same small apartment where Chong Chong has readily agreed to house Xaio on a cot. It quickly becomes apparent to the rather slow-thinking boy that his friend Cong and Gai are sharing a bed.

       Soon, Xaio is working for the couple, attempting to sell subscriptions to trendy shop owners who might also place them in their establishments. And it is here where we watch the three putting

all their energy into stuffing fliers and attempt to get their controversial magazine some attention.

       We now observe Qing in the shower, moisturizing her face as she yells out to Kang that she has something to tell him.

        In the night, Chong arises from the bed he shares with Gui, appearing at the side of Xaio’s cot seeming just to tuck him in, but almost spontaneously bending low to give him a gentle kiss on the cheek. The boy awakens without at all appearing to be troubled by the event.

        Another day the trio, Chong, Gui, and Xaio observe three other young men their age playing basketball and offer themselves up as an opposing team. They lose quickly without scoring.

       Qing finally washes away her moisturizer and enters the kitchen where she tells Kang that is leaving him, the apartment is all his. When he asks if she wants a divorce, she suggests it’s up to him. She admits to having an affair, but will not tell him who it is with; but when he finally insists that he will not let her leave without her telling, she admits that it is her friend A Meng, whom she immediately calls to say she is ready. A Meng with a small cab soon arrives, and two get to make their escape. But this, after all, is a comedy, and the car engine now won’t turn over. The two must get out a push it until it once again starts, and they return to drive off into their future.       

     Late at night, Chong again arises, attempting not to awaken Gui. He returns, this time completely naked, to the side of Xaio’s cot, in this instance pulling up blanket and joining him. Clearly Xaio is now ready for the encounter since the two explore one another’s bodies with evident pleasure under the covers.

      The next morning, we see Gui, also packed up and ready to go. A telephone message serves as his final “tragic,” he melodramatically proclaims, broadcast of his “toilet literature” series, which includes a latrine story and a pun-laden anal riddle. Xaio and Chong sit on the cot to listen and when it’s over crawl back under their covers.

       Even “coming out” in this sweet tale of everyday life, becomes just another aspect of the ordinary.

 

Los Angeles, March 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 4, 2022).

 

Guillem Morales | Back Room / 1999

a drug without a name

by Douglas Messerli

 

Guillem Morales (screenwriter and director) Back Room / 1999

 

The short 14-minute premiere film, Back Room. is an odd one for Spanish director Guillem Morales, who went on to direct mostly heterosexually-based psychological, mystery, and horror-related tales such as Upside Down (2002), The Uninvited Guest (2004), and Julia’s Eyes (2010).

    Back Room takes us into a world that few other than gay men might have even imagined existed, the back room (actually upstairs in this instance) of a gay club in Barcelona where men seek out public sex with one another.

     LGBTQ films, obviously, have many times visualized the gay bar experience where men attempt to get chosen or to choose someone with whom to go home or elsewhere to have sex. One of the most memorable views of that world was revealed in Ron Peck’s Nighthawks of 1978, while bathroom sex was briefly depicted as early as 1971 in James Bidgood’s romanticized portrait of it in Pink Narcissus and, more extensively and brutally, in Frank Ripploh’s Taxi to the Toilets (1981). But few films have actually taken their audiences into the maze of, in this case raw concrete walls, against which seemingly disinterested yet desperately desiring boys and men lean in anticipation of the right sex partner.

     What isn’t openly expressed is that the process is so exceedingly difficult simply because of the wide range of desires each of these males have: while some want sexy younger boys; others look for brutal-looking older or middle-aged men. Some desire leather, others seek the school-boy or collegiate types. If some wait to be sucked off, others seek out the opportunity to perform fellatio. Some want to be fucked, others want to do the fucking. Some are turned off by any kind of small talk, others seek verbal communication. Some, as this film suggests, live under the illusion of finding anybody in this hellish environment who might join them outside for a longer relationship; others imagine killing of their temporary lover and leaving the body behind. No one wants an old queen unless he happens to participate in a secondary manner while they are having sex with someone else. A bit like an American supermarket, the choices are so diverse they appear to be limitless. The list of desires goes on so indefinitely that it is almost a miracle when two men actually meet up to perform the sexual act.

      The two major figures of this scene are a young boy, perhaps a neophyte to the place, Iván (Juan Jaimez), and a nerdy, not particularly good-looking but friendly older boy, Álex (Oriol Serra). Through a voice-over of their inner thoughts, we know that both young men are leery of even being where they are, and are constantly considering their exit, uneasy with their surroundings and uncertain about protocol. Both attempt to imagine opening phrases, the standard for even heterosexuals, “You gotta light?” and “It’s hot isn’t it?” Apparently these introduction courtesies aren’t well received by the locals. Showing too much passion, as we observe, is a turn-off to many, particularly when Álex attempts to kiss and lick the earlobes of a slightly older leather-like figure, who appears to be more attracted to the new kid, Iván.

      At one point, when he is about to leave but is drawn back into the maze of halls by his hopes of finding some sexual satisfaction, Iván meets up with a handsome black man with peroxided-spiked hair, who literally accosts him, shoving his hand into the good-looking boy’s pants while kissing him. A moment later he has pulled down Iván’s pants while an older unattractive queen, whom others have previously rejected, begins to rub across the boy’s backside. It continues for a few moments until the leather number, who Iván believes looks like his acquaintance Hector, passes by, breaking up the group, the newcomer somewhat happily escaping their clutches.

      Again Iván contemplates leaving, given a little sense of competence by his short encounter, yet fearing what else might lie ahead. Álex, similarly checking out the halls one more time, determines to depart. But this time, when he encounters the school-boy, his ploy of asking for a light works, as Iván takes out a book of matches and strikes one to light Álex’s cigarette.

      The two briefly begin to fondle one another before Iván makes clear that he would enjoy being fucked. Putting on a condom, Álex turns the boy around and proceeds, with others watching. If there is something slightly titillating about this, it quickly loses most of its sexual allure in the almost programmatic way the act occurs, as if, instead being an intimate encounter between two men, it were a kind of performance. The narrow, darkened stage of the “back room,” we realize, wipes away any visual sexual excitement for the would-be voyeur, permitting pleasure only for those actually engaged in the act.

     When they are finished, both contemplate the possibility of continuing their encounter outside of this lurid place with the potential of a possible friendship. But for slightly different reasons and simply because of their awkwardness, both, Álex in particular, pass up the opportunity. We suddenly comprehend that this is not the way to meet a lover, not the way even to meet a friend. Anyone met in the “back room” is simply another vessel of sexual release, a thing not a human being to take home to wake up to in broad daylight.

      And yet, for all of the raw sensationalism of the place, a kind of innocence exists in the heart of nearly all who enter: a hope of finding not just someone for release, but someone who might offer the ineffable “other” whom each of them seeks. And it is also, in some cases, a strange kind of school for learning. As Iván turns to leave we hear his inner relief that the sexual act in which he just participated didn’t hurt as much as he expected, confirming what he first suspected. This is his very first time of engaging in anal intercourse.

      Finally, anyone who has entered similar winding, twisting rough-hewn halls senses the smell not only of sweat and semen but an odd perfume of a drug without a name that will draw the Álexes, Iváns, Victors, Miguels, Julios, and Isaacs back night after night to get their fix.

      This is not a film for everyone, particularly the meek or sanctimonious, for this is the territory Jean Genet, not that sweet, happy gay and lesbian couple residing down the street.

 

Los Angeles, Christmas Day, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

Elena C. Lario | Nigel the Plonker / 1999

fool for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elena C. Lario (screenwriter and director) Nigel the Plonker / 1999

 

Featuring Paul Coldrick, Karl Ryan, and Sara Jane Feldman, British director Elena C. Laio creates in Nigel the Plonker a work that might have existed in 1920 without our remembering it.

     A gentleman, Arthur (Ryan), is out for a Sunday stroll in the park with his girlfriend, Charlotte (Feldman) when a man, Nigel (Coldrick), rushes up to them, handing Arthur a bouquet of flowers and grabbing the hands of the lady, while pleading in this silent film via subtitles, “Please, please, I want my love back.” Arthur hands the bouquet to Charlotte who hands it back to Nigel, as the heterosexual pair, heads in the air, march off, clearly offended.

     But in the very next glen there again is Nigel, arms open, calling out “Sweetie!” Charlotte grabs Arthur’s hand and pulls him in the other direction. As they walk along, they comment on his “revolting trousers.” They sit down on a bench to continue their conversation, but almost immediately Nigel creeps up behind them, staring in joy at his “lover,” Arthur’s face. The couple hurry off.

     As the couple play peek-a-book around a tree and Arthur cuts a heart upon its bark, they look up to see Nigel nicely embraced by its upper branches. This time Charlotte does not even wait for Arthur to run off, disgusted with the constant interruptions in their innocent love-making. Nigel falls rather clumsily to the ground, but even then, finding a posy in the grass, calls out “Oh, mon amour!” 

      Arthur goes after Charlotte and faces her for a final showdown, immediately going off to the side to drag Nigel out of the bushes, now ready to beat him up.   

     Charlotte, however, intrudes, standing between them to prevent a fight. She grabs one of the hands of each and, smiling with all the sarcasm she can manage, places their hands together in a holding position. Gradually, they wind them round one another, come together with an expression of “ah joy, what rapture!,” while swinging their hands together while walking off. Charlotte shrugs her shoulders and walks away. Having them permission for the love they clearly prefer, she must now go in search a man more appropriate for her.

      This is a lovely little tribute to what almost happens in early films when the other is in drag, and might have happened in some of the films if only the directors had been given a little push.

     In Cockney, a plonker is an idiot; but in this case Nigel seems to be a wise fool, calculating just how much it will take to make Charlotte give him back his man, although he may still be a fool for wanting him back.

 

Los Angeles, August 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).