Louis Malle | Lacombe, Lucien / 1974

the wrong side of history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Malle and Patrick Modiano (screenplay), Louis Malle (director) Lacombe, Lucien / 1974

 

Lacombe, Lucien only proves my contentions that there is something of a disconnect between French director Louis Malle’s characters and the way he portrays them. There is a kind of cold, almost documentary quality to his work that, despite the rich texture of colors and mastery of cinematography, which makes us unsympathetic to his figures. As Pauline Kael expressed this, in far more positive terms:

“We look at Blaise’s [the untrained actor who plays Lucien Lacombe] face in a different way from the way we watch a trained actor. We look into it rather than react to an actor’s performance. The enigma of a Lucien, whether he is a bullyboy of the right or the left, is the enigma of an open face and a dark, closed mind. Professional actors have the wrong kind of face for this sort of unborn consciousness, and they tend to project thoughts and feelings from the blank area. Blaise doesn’t, and we trust our readings of his silent face almost as if we were watching a documentary. We examine it in that way, and we’re more engaged than at most fictional films. There’s nothing about Lucien that one can take for granted. Even those close to him don’t feel close; his own mother (Gilberte Rivet, in a fine performance) isn’t sure how to talk to him. His incomprehensibility is a mystery we’re caught in, and Malle astutely surrounds Lucien and the girl with unfamiliar faces (actors from the theater, with little exposure in films), so that we won’t have past associations to distract us. By the end, the case of Lacombe, Lucien has been presented to us. We know the evidence on which he will be judged a traitor, and we’ve also seen how remote that term is from anything he’s ever thought about.”

    
     As Kael makes clear, this country bumpkin—who falls in love with the daughter of a Jewish tailor, Albert Horn, who is attempting to keep out of Gestapo sights, but nonetheless is forced to dress some of its men and women—doesn’t really intend to become a brutal traitor, responsible for many deaths; like so many Europeans, he simply complied to Nazi demands the same way he had been taught to comply with school teachers and the local bourgeoise. When he introduces himself to France Horn, he replies as he has been taught to, expressing his name with the conformance of a schoolboy: Lacombe, Lucien. Like so very many peasant bullies, he sees nothing wrong with taking out his slingshot and killing a beautiful bird singing out its heart in a tree next to the hospital where he scrubs floors. Chickens are kept to have their necks wrung; rabbits exist to be shot. As a farm boy, he sees no brutality in their killing. So how might he possibly be expected to comprehend the politics swirling around him?

      If the head of the local Resistance Movement, a former school teacher who finds Lucien to young (and perhaps too stupid) to join, you turn to the Gestapo. Besides, their headquarters at the Carlingue are far swankier, and the perks, open liquor, well-coifed women, and a new suit crafted by Horn (Holger Löwenadler), along with what seems like a new friendship with the man willing to use Lucien’s knowledge of locals to his advantage, beginning with the arrest of the school teacher who turned Lucien down.

      I would not describe Lucien, as does Kael, as another representation of the banality of evil—evil is never totally banal given its horrific results—but rather evidence of stupidity and rigidity of class distinctions which so often lay under those who embrace and accept that evil, much like those who strongly voted for Trump. Those folks are anything but banal; they specifically embraced the president’s politics of hatred because they, too, had been rejected and felt left out of the American Dream.

     What you do have credit Malle for, if nothing else, is showing us a figure in France, during the German occupation who was a true collaborationist, and not secretly a member of underground which, after War II, nearly everyone claimed to have been. It nothing else, Malle is far more truthful than many another director. Yet, in presenting us with yet another kind of monster, he has once more alienated us from his central figures, risking us to care for his films. One might almost describe Malle, in some stranger manner, as the Bertolt Brecht of cinema. His figures seem to be heartless and unsympathetic rather than, as directors such as Renoir, Bresson, Resnais, and so many other French filmmakers, helping us to take them to heart, even if they are outsiders or criminals.

     We may be fascinated by Malle’s criminals, wild innocents, burghers, and bourgeoise, but we seldom grow to completely like them. Lucien, we know from the start, simply chose the wrong cause, and as the director coolly announces in his end credits, he was executed as a traitor.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2018

Reprinted from World Literature Review (March 2018). 

Miguel Starcevich | Dry / 2014

boys in the sand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miguel Starcevich (director / photographer) Dry / 2014 [3 minutes]

 

Whoever wrote the pretentious blurb for this piece of “cinema” was obviously reaching for audience that it will never find: “In a barren desert, two men given themselves over the emptiness and to each other, creating a bast, experimental portrait of connection and surrender.”

     Nonsense, this is not a film but is a promo shoot for the kind of arty photography book which uses the male nude to excuse it’s exotic locales, in this case the seemingly Saharan desert. There is little interchange between the two naked figures of this work, just the usual handsome profiles, shadows and interactions with the natural ripples of sand, sky, and body.

     I cannot find a list price of the actual German-produced book, but you can begin bidding for it on E-Bay for $149.00. Don’t bother with the 3-minute movie. Strange to see this on Gay Films Matter, since this is not a film, providing hardly any gay matter.

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

 

Katie Parker and Benjamin Stubbs | A Table for Two / 2025

code red/code green

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katie Parker and Benjamin Stubbs (directors) A Table for Two / 2025 [11:30 minutes]

 

About five years ago Harry opened a small café called A Table for Two, which he declares the best decision he ever made since he gets a front-row seat in “watching love unfold, be it husband and wife, father and son, and long-lost friends.” And he likes to think that he plays a part in their love lives.

    At this point in his story, a beautiful young woman, Sophie (Becky Clifford-Ball) enters ordering up a special coffee, who seems momentarily to excite our barista, Harry (Timmie Lee Murphy). But he continues on, nonetheless, making it clear that his central tale is about Jasper (Rich Dee), who enters the café almost everyday at “rush hour” and orders a “flat light to go.”

     But soon Jasper begins coming into the café during his lunch break and telling the barista about his favorite films and new art exhibitions at the busiest time of the day.  

     But now he won’t leave. Jasper, he tells us, is a hopeless romantic. But, turns out, he’s also romantically hopeless. Harry now proceeds to recount the various men Harry meets at the café who turn out to be terribly inappropriate for a possible date. One by one, we encounter, first an absolutely boring man (Benjamin Stubbs), who discusses his monthly business figures and the intricate details in different kinds of wood. The second gentleman (Matt O’Connell) seems to be discussing the small size of his penis, although assuring him it still works.

     A man (Ian Wilkinson) looking many years older than his Facebook picture, a man with a frozen creepy smile (Damian Burdin), and a man (David Davenport) who for a few seconds seems to be a rather normal bloke but quickly makes it apparent that he is a Dungeon Master.

     For each of these disasters, Jasper has worked out a plan in which he walks up to Harry whispering the words “Code Red,” at which point Harry proceed to deliver up a black coffee which he accidentally spills upon the failed lover, apologizing and promising to pay the bill and he ushers him out of the establishment. Presumably Jasper recompenses him well for his troubles.

     But given the dreadful dates he’s found on Facebook and other apps, even our romantic hero is now more than a little despondent about his hopes to find true love.

     And meanwhile Harry breaks up with is own girlfriend.

     Asked about how his dating his going, poor Jasper reports the latest red flag: “He didn’t like coffee.”

     “So what about the other guy,” queries Harry, “the builder?”

     “I think he’s married.”

     “What makes you say that?”

     Harry shows him a cellphone picture of the groom, bride, and wedding cake. “Cause he’s married.”

     Jasper is desperate, arguing that it’s time for him to forget and just get a cat.

     But the barista insists, to use an appropriate metaphor, that Harry “wake up and smell the coffee. He’s a perfect catch. He’s funny, he’s intelligent, and he shows the best cat videos even if the timing is completely appropriate, reminding him of his noon-time revelations.

     But poor Jasper is now just bored, lonely, and horny.

     “Well look, chin up. I’m sure the right guy is just around the corner.”

     Later that day, Jasper rushes in having found the perfect guy on the internet: he’s 6’ 2”, runs an art gallery, and his favorite film’s The Crab, which just happens to be Jasper’s favorite.”  

     Moreover, this new perfect man, Kyle, is meeting Jasper at the coffee house tomorrow.

     Jasper shows up in a nice dress shirt for the date. Sitting alone, he impatiently waits as Harry pours out two “flat lights and places a rose between them.” In the very next moment we see his hand switching the café opens sign to “Come Again. We Are Closed.”

     Jasper truly appreciates the thoughtful gesture, but is terribly puzzled when Harry sits down across from him, saying “It’s Jasper, right? Nice to meet you.”

     “What are you doing? Kyle’s going to be here at any moment,” Jasper responds.

     But we know what’s coming. Harry reveals that he’s Kyle, admitting that he hasn’t seen The Crab, but if it means that much to him, he’ll watch it.

     “Oh, I get it, so this is an intervention.”

     “It’s a date, you mellon.”

     There is a long pause. “I thought you were straight.”

      “So did I. But then I woke up and smelled the coffee.”

     Need we say more. In the film, Harry goes on to explain how he gradually fell in love with Jasper, realizing what he himself needed in a mate; for a moment it seems as if, possibly, Jasper is ready to blame him for catfishing him.

     “Code Red?” asks Harry.

     “No, not this time.”

     “So we’re doing this thing then,” as the two toast coffee cups.

     This lovely British movie doesn’t list a writer, but I guess he might assume that these quite skilled directors served in the role as well.

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

Kyle Reaume | Ecstasy / 2016

emblem of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kyle Reaume (screenwriter and director) Ecstasy / 2016 [5 minutes]

 

In this wordless drama by Kyle Reaume, a handsome young man (Justin Miller) sits at a bar alone drinking. For a long while, given the short five-minute length of this emblematic representation of ecstasy, the camera simply focuses face-on with the ruminating man.

    In the corner we see another two men, obviously a couple, the one standing (Harrison Reynolds), whispering over the shoulder of the other (Kyle Reaume).

     The film interjects a similar scene of the standing figure and the lone man in a similar position which we immediately perceive to be from some time earlier. Again the camera returns to the lonely drinker, who finally stands, moves over to the couple, pushes the lover out of the way and knocks the man standing to the floor, the film once again returning us to a moment between the two of them as they fall together to a bed, suddenly in a similar position where the one in the passive position moves into dominance, likely in the earlier manifestation, for a deep kiss.

 

     But this time, on the bar floor, he has raised a fist into the air where he hovers for a few seconds before coming down crashing into the face of his former lover, blood issuing from the ex-lover’s nose and mouth. Yet a smile remains on his face, even as the fist goes crashing into him once again. He is apparently in ecstasy over the possibility of once more coming into bodily contact with the man he loved.

     Love, unfortunately, is often like that, particularly if after the lovers break from one another, one cannot completely abandon the transformative feelings of affection; the pain is all that is left to remind him of the joy he once felt, and he keeps the pain close to him for that for reason. Violence becomes the only possible way to express what once was the ecstasy of love.

    I should add that without the incessantly repetitive and driven musical score by Emily Klassen this short work would not have nearly the same effect.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

 

 

Nick Oceano | El primo (The Cousin) / 2008

the long night of public lies and personal truths

 

Nick Oceano (screenwriter and director) El primo (The Cousin) / 2008 [15 minutes]

 

Mark (Daniel Marin), a rather sheltered teenager and his mother visit his cousin Luis (Many Montana) and mother in Laredo, Texas, the elder immediately whisking his younger cousin away into his male lair which contains his former DJ equipment and boxes of records which immediately interest his younger cousin.

    His cousin has heard Mark is a bookworm—word has obviously gotten out that he’s a good student—but the boy insists that he parties all the time. When the two women drive off together, Luis takes out some heavy dope and encourages his innocent cousin to join him.

    How can Mark refuse his far more experienced and knowledgeable cousin whom he clearly admires and for whom we already suspect he might have a sort of teenage crush.

    When was the last time you got laid, asks the cousin, shaking his fist back and forth, to indicate that masturbation doesn’t count. “Oh, I don’t know, last month” brags the kid.

    Luis can’t believe it’s been that long. Who was she, he asks?

    Mark quickly comes up with a name, Margaret.

    Is she a librarian?

    No, my lab partner. 

    And the conversation quickly escalates into a discussion of white girls versus Mexican women.

    In the middle of the conversation, Luis looks meaningfully at the boy, strips of his shirt—as the boy’s eyes grow wider—and puts on a dress shirt, handing another one to Mark. Mark wonders if they are going someplace, which indeed they are!

    When asked where they’re going, Mark replies that it’s a surprise.

   Before he even knows it, the primo is sitting in what looks to be a bar with female strippers and prostitutes, drinking down shots with his braggadocious cousin.

    For a moment they have a serious conversation, Mark asking if Luis has graduating from school which Luis declares he will be soon, planning simply to “get the fuck out of here,” obviously unhappy with his Laredo, Texas existence.

    What about San Antonio, Mark innocently asks.

    “For what, so that I can come and visit you, baby?” And Luis’ next question is a painful one for the boy, “Seriously, why are you such a square. It’s not like you’re this fucking dork or you’re ugly or something, you know?”

    There’s little Mark can answer, wanly turning his cousin’s comments in a kind of joke: “You think I’m not ugly?”

    “I mean, maybe if you cleaned yourself up and stopped hanging out with your fucking lab partner, you wouldn’t be such a mamma’s boy, you know?”

    How can anyone, especially a sensitive, probably gay boy, answer that question. And it is the heart of this movie, a moment when Mark must finally begin to face up to who he really is.

    At that very moment, in sidles the favorite bar prostitute, sexually flirting with a few boys as she makes her way over to Luis, stands him up and unbuttons his shirt and pulls it off, leaving the buff Luis facing her off. He pulls of her blouse, and in the next minute we see Mark sitting on a staircase outside a room wherein, quite obviously, his cousin and the woman are having a quickie.

     Luis soon comes out, zipping up his pants and turning the whore over to his cousin.

     The next scene will remind anyone acquainted with gay film of the numerous short films where young gay boys are forced to face off with prostitutes, much to their dismay (works such as Gregory Cooke’s $30 of 1999, Cameron Thrower’s Pretty Boy of 2015, and Taisia Deevva’s The Cure and Denis Laikhov’s The White Crows, both of 2023).

   But in each of those works, the boy explained the situation or the women caught on rather quickly. Elena (Carla Tassara) is far less insightful, imagining simply that it’s the boy’s first time with a woman. She isn’t mistaken, but she can’t at all comprehend why he can’t get an immediate erection, presuming that he’s just nervous.

    As she sits on him, trying to arouse him and involve him sexually, you can see the increasing look of terror and frustration registered upon his face. He finally sits up, bent over in tears.

    She still doesn’t get it, as she attempts to hand him back his money, which he demands she keep.

    She can only draw his face down to her shoulder for a hug, which he finally rejects, quickly standing and dressing.

    It has clearly been an earth-shattering night what with his cousin’s pointed questions and now his own full awareness of his disinterest in the opposite sex.

    Luis is waiting outside, congratulating his cousin for the joy of the experience.

   As Mark drives Luis home, all he can do is peer over at his sleeping cousin, finally as they arrive and park, carefully, skittishly placing his hand over his primo’s hand, his admission to himself, if no one else, of his real love.

    This is a gritty coming out tale in which, as in the deep history of gay experience, there seems to be no one to come out to except to oneself.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

Toshio Matsumoto | Bara no sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses) / 1969, USA 1970

parade of the blind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Toshio Matsumoto (screenwriter and director) Bara no sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses) / 1969, USA 1970

 

I had heard of Japanese director Toshio Matsumoto’s outrageous melodrama of 1969 earlier, but had almost forgotten about it until my Facebook friend Joe Amato reported, coincidentally on my birthday, that he had just seen Funeral Parade of Roses, and asked several others as well had we ever seen it? I had not, but fortunately another friend, Aldon Nielsen soon after posted a link where we might watch it for free, which led me to seek it out as an odd birthday activity.

      Funeral Parade of Roses is surely the kind of film many might wish to avoid, let alone view it on a special holiday. With influences from Godard, Resnais, Jonas Mekas, and Jack Smith—and influence upon, so critics argue, Stanley Kubrick—Matsumoto’s film is not so much a “narrative” as it is a sort of slow-motioned testimony to Japanese outsiderness.

     Eddie (Pîtâ) a transsexual “gay” (today seeming contradictory terms, which are nonetheless appropriate to the time in which movie was made when those who engaged in homosexual behavior of any kind were described as “roses” in Japanese culture) is in bed with Jimi (Yoshiji Jo). The two, a bit as in Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour and Smith’s Flaming Creatures, are engaged in deep, lustful sex, their bodies becoming almost inseparable. If Eddie later seems a bit unsure of her/his sexuality, it is clear she loves Jimi, and is willing to do almost anything to keep him near.

       In fact, they spend much of the rest of the movie driving around while trying to avoid the inevitable encounter with Jimi’s other lover, Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), a mean-spirited owner of the local bar and an intensely jealous transsexual.

      The voyage of these two, Eddie and Jimi—accompanied by various pop songs, contemporary and classical—take us through Tokyo’s underground world, filled with other transsexuals and “roses”—as I’ve hinted, the sexual lines fortunately are not clearly drawn—as they talk about their sexuality without being able successfully to explain it even to themselves. And accordingly, we might describe these travels as a kind of “parade,” each of them desiring to be seen while also hiding within their own sexual confusions and, given the level of Japanese fascination with the homophobia of the day, necessarily somewhat secretive.

     At the same time, we are also privy to momentary flashbacks to Eddie’s childhood, which seems to suggest that he was not only molested but perhaps witness to a murder, which calls up another brilliantly outré Japanese film, Susumu Hani’s Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen (Nanami: The Inferno of First Love), a film which combines a first heterosexual love with child abuse and pedophilia.

      Yet Matsumoto’s film attempts to accomplish, despite its rather forbidden characters, a movie that is also about filmmaking. If this work’s various characters are all about identity (or lack of identity), so too are they attempting to discover (or rediscover themselves) through the outsized figures they are portraying on screen.

     One might easily argue that Matsumoto’s “roses” stand in for the strongly heterosexual figures of Godard’s Contempt and Pierrot le Fou, as the director here keeps calling “cut,” which forces us to see this parade of identities as an truly artificial thing such as the film shoots of Contempt—in fact, that first scene is, in some senses a reenactment of the first scene of Godard’s film—while at the same time presenting us a wide-range of cinematic genres as in Pierrot le Fou with its actors constantly looking in the rearview mirror or turning to the backseat as if to seek our approval.

      From a love story, Matsumoto’s work drifts into a road film, a documentary, a satire of self-satisfied artists and other filmmakers—as critic Simon Abrams notes, “Some of them, like pontificating stoner beardo Guevara (Toyosaburo Uchiyama), solemnly quote their favorite artists.”—and a kind of existential drama of selfhood that cannot quite be properly linguistically expressed, a horror film of childhood memories, a kind of “rose bowl” parade, which finally transforms into a revenge tragedy that ends in a violent Oedipus Rex-like blinding. Far more ambitious than any Hollywood film, Matsumoto’s “funeral parade” may not be as gloriously slick as many a great movie, but its mind and heart is so deeply involved that, finally, this becomes a film we simply cannot ignore. We have to watch these “drag-queens,” transsexuals, “roses,” whatever you want to call them, play out their imagined lives and destinies. And to any open-minded individual they utterly enchant and amaze us along the way.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2018).