bringing home someone to love
by
Douglas Messerli
Viktor
Shklovsky and Abram Room (screenplay), Abram Room (director) Третья Мещанская
(Tretya Meshchanskaya) (Bed and Sofa) / 1927
Russian
director (Lithuanian born) Abram Room’s 1927 feature comedy 3rd
Meshchanskaya Street better known in Europe and the US as Bed and Sofa
is most definitely of interest to LGBTQ audiences, but not generally for the
reasons for which some commentators and critics have claimed it to be. The
early kiss between its two male leads Nikolai (nicknamed Kolya) (Nikolai
Batalov) and Vladimir (nicknamed Volodya) (Vladimir Fogel) is not the first
homosexual kiss on screen, and, in fact, is not even necessarily a homosexual
kiss.
As I have shown throughout my volumes of Queer
Cinema there were many other gay kisses before it, including several
instances of males bussing men in drag (Gilbert Saroni, in transvestite drag
kisses a French count on the lips in in Sigmund Lubin’s Meet Me at the
Fountain in 1904; the two male suitors of Charles Chaplin in drag kiss each
other on the lips, accidently, in Chaplin’s A Woman of 1915; and numerous
such films are filled with homosexual jest). Charles IX of France in D. W.
Griffith’s Intolerance from 1916 kisses nearly all the handsome men in
his court on the lips, announcing his homosexuality in the act. And, of course,
the famous truly gay drama of 1919 Different from the Others represents
gay males kissing. There are other examples, including several early porn films
of the 1920s, in particular Le Ménage modern du Madame Butterfly, which
screened not only kissing but male on male fellatio and masturbation with cum
flying in all
directions.
But, in fact, the kiss that Kolya plants on
the lips of his old military buddy Volodya when he takes him home in Bed and
Sofa, offering him up a place to sleep on his and his wife Liuda’s
(Lyudmila Semyonova) couch, is not at all what some contemporary commentators
make it out to be. In Russian culture and in many others throughout the world,
a greeting between close friends is often expressed with lip kissing, just as
the French kiss both cheeks.
Truth be told, the first truly passionate
homosexual kiss was shown on screen in the very same year in the US director William
A. Wellman’s Wings, a scene that is often simply dismissed, quite
mistakenly I insist, as an expression of deep bonding between two military
buddies. They may never have had sex, but that kiss is one of true and deep
love which they surely, had the other lived, would have expressed in bodily
lovemaking—if, as the directly hints, they haven’t already.
In fact, Kolya and Volodya may have had sex
previously since they describe having spent much of the war under the same greatcoat,
much in the way that the two cowboys joined one another in the same tent in Brokeback
Mountain (2005).
Moreover, they not only do they kiss one
another in that early scene in the movie, but kiss again later, when Kolya
returns home after a business trip, holding hands over his friend’s eyes as a
surprise, Volodya mistaking him for Liuda by planting another big kiss on his
lips that this time, although a mistake, does not at all represent a simply
friendly greeting but real love. By repeating the act, the writer and director
now truly draw our attention to it as very being very different from Kolya’s
kisses with his wife and even later Volodya’s smooches with Liuda. If nothing
else, it suggests that something other than mere friendship has transpired
between the two.
What most viewer’s simply miss is that this
film actually begins with Kolya, a construction foreman working on the
construction of the Bolshoi Theatre, takes his breaks directly under a large
male penis of a bronze nude of a male, thus establishing the fact that he literally
lives under the rule of smoking every day under the aegis of a male penis.
That very afternoon he skips a Communist
committee meeting to return home early to his wife, before actually running
into his old army buddy Volodya on the streets. As in so very many Rainer
Werner Fassbinder films beginning with his 1969 movie Love Is Colder Than Death
the central figure with a female partner takes his male friend home and, in
a sense, offers him up the equal companionship of his wife or female partner as
if it were a gift to be shared.
Granted,
Kolya is more macho than Fassbinder’s males, and far more possessive. Yet his
behavior is very similar, hinting that he attaches more to his male friendship
than to his heterosexual marriage. For soon after he introduces Volodya to his
couch, cat, and wife Liuda—almost in that haphazard order—he is sent off on a
business trip with the intention of leaving his friend and wife alone. Even Volodya
argues he should leave the couch for other sleep quarters, that it certainly
wouldn’t look right to neighbors for him to remain in the one-room apartment
with Kolya’s wife. But the married man, given his braggadocio behavior, is
blind to any possible problem: he’s strong and she’s loyal; what could the
problem be?
The problem, of course, is that he has
treated Liuda as a servant, ordering her to scrub the floors and fix his meals—and
one point not even able by himself to rid a glass of hot milk its top curdles,
forcing her to run for a plate to put them on—without even considering her boredom
and general dissatisfaction with their relationship.
Volodya, a blond beauty cleans up after
himself, serves her tea, brings her home a radio and the party newspaper for
which he is responsible for one of the presses, and on “Aviator’s Appreciation Day”
he takes her out, on one of her very few escapes from he basement one-apartment,
for her first plane ride. Her reaction of absolutely giddy and girlish delight
expresses it all. A trip to a movie after settles it. He has won her heart and convinces
her provincial mind afterwards by telling her fortune where it makes it clear
that the jack should top the queen.
By the time Kolya returns, with Volodya
planting that second kiss on his lips, he has already been sequestered to the
couch. If for one night he tries to remain at his office, but the next day he
is ready to swallow his pride and curl up on the couch. At least at nights he
now has the company of his dear male friend as they play endlessly at checkers,
symbolizing the homosocial relationship they have developed that utterly removes
the woman from their lives.
Even
if some commentators have argued this isn’t precisely a ménage à trois since
the men are still uninvolved sexually with one another and are rivalrous about
the body remaining in the bed, we can’t help but recognize what is happening.
The two men enjoy each other’s company while using the female as a tool of
sexual gratification. And if we cannot apply that term to this film then neither
can we embrace it regarding Jules and Jim (1962), which is written in
that very genre. Except for some early mutual gymnastics there is no obvious portrayal
in Truffaut’s film of the two males’ obvious sexual attraction either. Even in
the pre-code era, like the later generations after into the late 1970s period
directors did not dare be so literal as to openly show the male engaged in
homosexual behavior—unless it was an underground porn work such as Le Ménage
modern du Madame Butterfly or the 1929 pseudonymously directed The
Surprise of the Knight. Literal minds need not apply for deep discussions
of films of LGBTQ interest.
It turns out that, at heart, Volodya is no
more attentive to his Liuda (both men describe themselves as her husband) that
was Kolya. And bored and feeling even more trapped that before, Liuda begins to
alternate, the men shifting night by night between their nights in bed and on
the sofa.
Inevitably Liuda becomes pregnant with neither
of these scoundrels (a term later that they apply to themselves) willing to
take on the responsibility of possible raising the other’s child. Together they
demand that she get an abortion. While waiting to be called, the uncomfortable
Liuda looks outside the window spotting a young boy playing with a doll and
another child being cared for by his mother. Finally recognizing what she will
face if she stays with her husbands, she escapes, quickly returning home to
pack and remove all semblances of her image, so that there is no longer
even
evidence left her being. Like Nora of A Doll’s House, she will find her
own way in the new Russian society, where women are encouraged to work
(although in reality could not readily find jobs). Whether Liuda can, in fact,
survive in what she hopes will be a less paternalistic society, is open to
question. But the important thing is that she will longer allow herself to be
defined by the males in her life.
Left
alone, the two men, although admitting as I suggested to their abysmal behavior
to her, seem immediately to adapt to the new reality of their now quite clearly
homosexual coupling, the one asking for tea, the other responding, “do we have
anymore jam?” These works might have been out of a play by Harold Pinter.
Critic David Robinson summarizes this brief
period in which Bed and Sofa was made in terms of what was soon to come
in Russian society (although I must say I am highly offended by his choice of
adding the qualifier “perhaps” with regard to Gorky’s statement against
homosexuals):
“Sex
and marriage were a challenging and constant subject of debate for the new
Russian Bolsheviks. While many party-line-toers reckoned that revolutionary
energies should not be diverted into such private trivia, the brilliant and
sophisticated pioneer revolutionary and feminist Alexandra Kollontai recognised
that “sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst.” The
bourgeois and religious traditions of marriage and family were obviously
rejected, in favour of civil marriages, and as late as 1925 there was a
(failed) attempt to introduce a bill altogether eliminating distinctions
between registered and unregistered marriages. Divorce was an effortless
formality. The concept of illegitimacy was eliminated. One consequence was a
vast rise in the numbers of abandoned and homeless children, already
unmanageable after the Revolution and Civil War; and as one measure to contain
it, in 1920 abortion was legalised for the first time in any European country.
With the Stalinist thirties and a fall in
the birth rate, the state took a tighter hold over marriage and sex. In 1934
homosexuality, decriminalised in 1922, again became an offence, with the
approval of Maxim Gorki, who declared, short-sightedly perhaps: “Destroy the
homosexuals: fascism will disappear.” Abortion was again prohibited, or at
least made extremely difficult. Russian moral codes were firmly and durably
redefined.”
Russian society in the 1920s was radically
changing when came to sex. But fascists, as always, made sure that such open
notions of how one perceives the control of one’s own body were abolished. The
fact that human body became another way the state could control their citizens
lives seems all too familiar in hindsight.
Los
Angeles, January 18, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2016).
