Jacob Tierney | Heated Rivalry (Season 1, Episode 3: Hunter) / 2025 [TV series]

let’s make love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacob Tierney (screenwriter and director, based on the novel Game Changers by Rachel Reid) Heated Rivalry / 2025 [TV series]

Season 1, Episode 3 “Hunter”

In this third episode of the already quite acclaimed TV series Heated Rivalry, the focus utterly changes. And, in some sense, the fairly radical cinematographical perspectives of the work become more apparent. Not only do we get repeated incidents set in a new location, as if the story has itself forgotten where he had previously been (a tactic occasionally used in Fassbinder’s works), but time becomes disjunctive, at moments images jumping ahead while simultaneously playing out a former scene.

    The break away from the story of Shane and Ilya is itself a rather radical device. The new characters featured in this episode did not even truly exist in the previous two episodes, but receive a love story every far steamier that the central figures. Once they hit the sack, these boys immediately know what it is they want—and get it. Here there are now longer any long impatient flutterings of the heart. It is as if the motor of the movie has gone into a kind of stutter before cranking up into an entirely new gear.

   A scene from “The Olympians” is almost repeated with the same figures, Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) and Carter Vaughn (Kolton Stewart), but this time instead of being at a café in Sochi, Japan during the Olympics, where the focus was entirely on Shane, it occurs in a small smoothie bar in New York, where once again, they encounter Shane, and somewhat casually comment on the bravery of the Russian gay figure skaters, but this time with the camera focusing on Hunter, making it quite clear that the observation has specific meaning for him that the others cannot imagine.

     And Hunter, the captain of the New York Admirals, who has not been having a very fulfilling season with absolutely no goals, soon after enters a local health bar where he meets up with the shop employee named Christopher “Kip” Grady (Robbie G.K.), a beautiful hunk of a man, to whom Hunter, rather amazingly given the fact that we have had no clues of his possibly being gay, appears to be attracted. Reading his badge, he calls him “Kip” twice, while the barista suggests the Blue Moon special (which obviously calls up a major lyricist celebrated in a move of the same year, the gay Lorenz Hart) to which Kip suggests he add a banana—the perfect sexual picker-upper that becomes necessary, we soon discover, for Hunter to regain his mojo and start winning again. As the synopsis blandly declares: “That night, Scott finally breaks a scoring slump.”  

   But any gay perceiver of this film, and all the woman who have embraced this narrative sense almost immediately, as well, I should add as Kip’s loyal (best girlfriend) Straw+Berry co-worker Maria Villanueva (Bianca Nugara) perceives, there’s something going on between the two rather emphatic acknowledgements of the barista's name and the return of Hunter to the smoothie shop for another order of the Blue Moon before the next game, even if Kip knows absolutely nothing about hockey and hasn’t a clue who Scott Hunter is.

    You can describe it simply as superstition, but the flirtation that Kip senses and Maria openly recognizes is quite apparent unless you are a dumb straight man sitting in the corner. If this had been Heartstopper little electric and heart shaped emojis would have danced across the screen.

Thank heaven Heated Rivalry has the wonderful jibes of Kip’s coworker and the members of his local gay pub to make obvious what even the barista can’t admit until he’s actually invited by Hunter to a hockey game and catches the man’s obvious nod and wink.

     And even his challenging hockey members notice that something is in the air, particularly after Hunter, losing games against the Raiders and the Metros, brawls on court, after the game, when Hunter cannot help but poke Shane’s so very secretive romance by comparing him to Ilya, the two breaking into a brawl.

     The tempest is about to explode even the politest of New England teapots when Hunter encounters Kip at another venue where the overworked barista is attempting to makes some extra money, only to discover his newfound heart throb is in attendance. They go home together, have glorious sex, and, as the saying goes, never look back as the recognize there is not going to be any turning back, that they are already wed as a couple.

    Yes, such events to happen. My companion Howard and I met, moved in together by the end of the week, and are still living together 56 years later!

     That is not to say there aren’t incredible problems. Neither Howard nor I, at least, were not famous athletes for whom, like Hollywood stars, such a relationship might mean the complete relinquishment of the lives they worked so hard to create. One could never imagine or more accommodating and comprehending companion than Kip, but, as his dear friend Maria whispers

into Hunter’s ear in a dance at another celebratory occasion, he is desperately suffering. How to remain silent about what one is driven to desperately shout about with joy, having found someone with whom you are finally desperate in love? How to pretend a perfect romance? Everything that gay couple does reveals their exceptionalness, we are special because there are still so few of us, and when we fall in love believing in the impossibility that we have been taught our very existence denies, how can we remain quiet?

    In a brilliant cinema moment, director Jacob Tireney, portrays Hunter delivering a truly inspiring speech about how, after his parents were killed in a car accident, the very organization that he is celebrating and seeking for further support helped to make him realize that he had another family in the world sports—with lover Kip and his best female friend Maria in attendance—at the same moment interweaving scenes of his Hunter and Kip’s return home and the latter’s first recognition that he must, at least temporarily, get away at least to revisit his beloved father. It is a bit like witnessing a train wreck while watching a film in which the speaker is praising the wonders and pleasures of train travel. Both are realities that cannot be denied, but how can one ever reintegrate the realities faced.

    Kip celebrates his birthday with his own friends at the gay bar, away from the person he so desperately wishes were there to celebrate their new life together. He falls into tears in his father’s arms without the truly caring father knowing how to even explain the phenomenon. Kip is happier than he has ever been in his life. Kip is more miserable that he has ever been in his life. That is, obviously, the central torture of deep love. It is no longer an issue of choice; you can only celebrate the pain.

     That a popular series would choose this message for its very third episode, interrupting its major love story with another suddenly intruding love story—perhaps even dominating the sensual first episodes—makes it clear this is not a truly normative soap opera. For one of the first times in gay cinema, the power of sexual allure, the draw of individuals to one another based primarily on bodily desire is placed openly in front of the viewers. These people don’t have complex intellectual interchanges; they are like most of us, animals when it comes to discovering who they love, drawn by forces beyond their control.

     If sex has always been at the sublimated heart of all Hollywood portrayed romances, it has generally been toned down, hushed up, kept steeping in the background, while the narrative attempt to explain what might actually be behind desire, confused moral compasses, childhood and adult abuses, and misinterpreted visions of what society has to offer become the dominant themes. Certainly not at the same sophisticated level, but with the same dynamic force, this work returns to what Tennessee Williams long ago made apparent: desire is something that truly can’t be contained and unless it is openly admitted and expressed, will destroy the individual and all his or her possibilities of love. You can’t hide love is the lesson that these (a)moral tales tell us, no matter how “perverse” the society might interpret that love to be.

    It’s truly interesting that women are behind the re-engenderment of raw sex to the world of gay love, after now so many years of pale male films celebrating our new ability to marry. Now perhaps we can get back to the lust in our souls and stop assimilating what the straight patriarchal world has determined is the right course on which we should proceed.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

 

Letia Solomon | The Cypher / 2020

standing up for who he is

by Douglas Messerli

 

West Akwuobi (screenplay), Letia Solomon (director) The Cypher / 2020 [15 minutes]

 

This is a difficult work with which to sympathize if you’re not part of the freestyle rapper world of Philadelphia. Name calling, racial self-abuse, violence, and finally homophobic attacks combine in this backroom competition that is simply hard to endure.

     Khalil (Nigel Cox) in the first part of this film wins out over his first competitor, making him the next man to compete against reigning champion K.O. (Michael Devon). Having won, Khalil seeks out his gay lover Marc (Juan Gil) to spend a night in his bed before the next day’s competition.

     But his sister Kiki (Kerrice Brooks), also a would-be rapper, is hot on his trail, discovering quite by accident that her brother is queer, snapping a picture to prove it to herself.

 

    That photo gets stolen by others not long before the competition, which begins with a put down of Khalil’s racial identity, social position, and even his mother, all in the name of verbal power, answered by Khalil with equal force, who even argues he will “fuck” his opponent’s father. But what follows Khalil did not expect, as K.O. reveals his competitor’s homosexuality, shocking the entire crowd.

     After some long pauses, a bit of a stumble, and some deep thinking, Khalil comes back by claiming that he already is a king with a crown (represented on the necklace that his lover Marc has placed around his neck beforehand). Suddenly acknowledging his sexuality, Khalil claims that he at least doesn’t have to spout homophobic nonsense, that he knows who he is and is proud.

     Whether he wins or not doesn’t really matter anymore. He’s become a true man, admitting who he loves and what he stands for.

      Nonetheless, this is not a piece that can expect much general popularity. It’s a peek into a rough and tumble world where foul-mouthing one another wins temporary popularity and little else. Yet, it perhaps represents the only power remaining to these poor young men.

 

Los Angeles, January 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Anne-Claire Poirier | Salut Victor (Bye Bye Victor) / 1989

heart attract

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anne-Claire Poirier (screenwriter, based on Edward O. Phillips's short story "Matthew and Chauncy," and director) Salut Victor (Bye Bye Victor) / 1989

 

French-Canadian director Anne-Claire Poirier’s highly moving depiction of two elderly gay men who come together in an assisted living home in one of the earliest in a long tradition of late-in-life gay love portrayed in the movies. Among the many films made after this work in the first two decades of the new millennium in which either one or both central characters must be described as an elder are represented by both short and feature works such Sexy Grandpa (2001), Ageless (2013), Never or Now (2013), Love Is Strange (2014), Wayne (2015), The Carer (2016), Two Words (2018), Our Way Back (2018), Stepdaddy (2019), Hank (2019), Strangers (2019), Rialto (2019), Twilight’s Kiss (2019), Sublet (2020), Where’s Steve?, and Supernova (2020). Even singer Doug Locke’s music video #ThisCouldBeUs (2014) conjures up a younger couple’s possible experiences together in old age.

     Poirier’s work paved the way by following the arrival of a rather wealthy old-timer, Philippe Lanctot (Jean-Louis Roux) who has basically decided to abandon his mansion with servants after his younger sister’s death. A life-long bachelor—a self-closeted homosexual—has determined, given the fact that he has fallen and spent almost a day on the floor alone, that it is time to enter a home, despite the fact that, as we keenly recognize on his first day, he is clearly uncomfortable with the watchful attention of female nurses and the limitations immediately placed upon him.

    Although the room itself is elegantly understated, it is most definitely, as we soon discover, not a room with a view.

    One of his other immediate discoveries is that there is no assured privacy in this care home; the door remains unlocked and within just a few moments after his arrival an eccentric resident, Victor Laprade (Jacques Godin) barges in on his wheelchair to check out his new neighbor, although he admits he lives in another wing of the building.

     Victor, in many respects, is almost the opposite of Philippe. While the latter is reserved, rather quiet, and quite refined, Victor is gregarious, slightly loud, and a former construction worker by trade. While Philippe is respectful, Victor is irreverent, challenging other residents to wheelchair races in the hall, keeping a small stock of illegal cognac hidden in his drawer, and generally causes havoc wherever he goes; yet knowing of his tendencies, he remains apologetic and is willing to establish and obey boundaries if necessary.

     If Philippe might at first be taken aback by Victor—he quickly asks him to leave so that he might rest—he soon comes to perceive, just we do, his joie de vivre and enjoys the energy he radiates despite the fact that he as recently suffered a major heart attack.

    Before Philippe can even imagine complaining, moreover, Victor has invited him to his room where he shares a real “view” of the freeway filled with noisy passenger cars traveling in all directions, a drama played out through his windows every night. The two of them watch life passing before them with pleasure, sipping on Victor’s cognac.

     In a short period of time, in fact, despite their differences the two men become fast friends, Philippe sharing with Victor his child-like collection of clay tiles of various shapes with which they build castles, Victor, however, spilling them to the floor when he attempts to attach flags to their playful constructions.

    In return Philippe arranges for an elegant dinner with his friend at his club, Victor ordering up, for the first time in his life, squab, while Phillipe dines on veal, both sipping martinis before their wine.

    And when Victor receives a painful letter from his children, announcing that they feel they can no longer afford to pay for his room in the expensive institution, a potential expulsion from what has now become a substitute for paradise, Philippe secretly arranges for the continued payment, sending what may be a forged letter from his children saying that they have changed minds, delighting Victor with both his change of fortune and the behavior of his estranged children.

     Eventually, Victor makes it clear that he is openly homosexual when he is chastised for having attempted to feel up the balls of a window washer. He explains to Philippe that he left his wife and family when he fell in love with a pilot with whom he lived for three years before he was killed by crashing into a mountain.

    On a special visit to a botanical garden, Phillippe, with Victor’s somewhat indiscreet prodding, finally admits that he is homosexual, although in his world no such term even existed, and he was so closeted that still he cannot talk about it. However, he does admit to a brief love affair with a male Mexican houseworker, a heartthrob that lasted three months until immigration turned up, declaring his lover to be illegal and taking him away—an incident that is almost prescient given the current situation in 2026 in the USA where the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) attack on major cities, wherein numerous individuals, children and adults straight and gay have lost their loved ones.

     As a special gift, Phillippe plans to take his new found friend up in a hot-air balloon so that he might see the world from the air as his beloved pilot once did. But a couple of nights before the event, Victor suffers another heart attack and is taken away, never to return.

     Unexplained and perhaps a bit preposterous, Phillippe somehow inherits Victor’s ashes, arranging with a hot-air balloonist that he will take them up and scatter them over the countryside, freeing Victor’s joyful soul to the skies.

     Once you accept the terms of the movie, that such a wealthy individual would be willing to enter a public institution in old age, almost everything seems believable in Poirier’s creation, immersing you in the two gay men’s lives in a manner that allows equal amounts of laughter and tears. This is a movie with heart, quietly and smartly directed in an almost documentary manner that helps to keep it from becoming sentimental.

 

Los Angeles, January 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

    

Ethan Gough | Do People Think We’re Gay? / 2025

do you think?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ethan Gough (screenwriter and director) Do People Think We’re Gay? / 2025 [6 minutes]

 

This rather silly short film dares to ask the question of two presumably straight guys (Reece Vanderveen and Aiden Bond), or I should say dares for the two straight guys to ask the question about their friendship, which includes the necessity of holding hands in public (one feels uncomfortable in crossing open streets), living together, sleeping in the same bed, and spooning (i.e. curling up close with the other in bed), if they might suggest to others that they are gay. As one of them explains, it’s simply a matter that “I get lonely at night, and I need someone to cuddle.”

    Obviously, these two men are into deep, deep denial, since they maintain that despite their later open kisses—perhaps just the imagination of the one who has maintained an erection throughout the night—and simply their lovely rapport together has anything to do with homosexuality.

    Perhaps Michigan boys are simply not into such big words, but you’d think that they might at least offer up the possibility that they might be queer, even it they use the word in the old-fashioned manner.

    This film is obviously just a little tease. These guys are truly into one another in terms of male-on-male sexuality, selecting their records as a pair, shopping together for each other’s sweaters, even grabbing an imaginary cop of a naked man on a poster.

     Actually, I’ve met such true innocents, back in my university days, college roommates who loved to wrestle, hugged, shared their lives together without even stopping to consider whether their intimacy meant anything other than being a great ‘bro to another brother. I think they’re now both married to deeply possessive women.

     But really haven’t we gay men now have more to talk about than boys playing house without realizing it? Just as the barista reportedly says early in the film: “They’re so cute together.” But does any of this matter?

     Cute is a midwestern term for something that provides nothing but a surface pleasure. But these boys, curling up together in the middle of the night, are just dumb to the deeper joys they might have enjoyed. And frankly, I don’t give a damn anymore. Let them spoon in bed. This is 2025; even as an old man who no longer can get a hardon, I just want to fuck.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).  

 

 

Isabelle Solas | Nos corps sont vos champs de bataille (Our Bodies Are Your Battlefields) / 2021 [documentary]

making and recording transgender history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isabelle Solas (writer and director) Nos corps sont vos champs de bataille (Our Bodies Are Your Battlefields) / 2021 [documentary]

 

If you are among those many sis heterosexuals who believe that transsexuals (women born into male bodies in which they felt trapped) spend their time once freed into the appropriate gender by dressing up in gowns, putting on makeup, and coloring their nails, you need to see Argentine documentarian Isabelle Solas’ film Our Bodies Are Your Battlefield where we follow the political struggles of several Argentine and one Peruvian transgender activists who fight long and hard for their rights and basic civil protections. Focusing on two women, Claudia and Violeta, Solas presents their long journeys through the years, the friends who’ve they established in the process, as well as the lonely exhaustion they must endure for their cause.

     These women look very much like the feminist advocates they are, although often unrecognized as such. In fact, they are at war with so many forces larger than theirs one wonders, at moments, how they even endure their chosen avocations; but perhaps it is because they are so denigrated by the dominate and basically conservative culture in which they live and are equally ignored and even hated by their sister feminists, that they are forced to make themselves heard simply to prevent the kind of incidents which this film chronicles, beginning with a trial from 2018 of man convicted of stabling to death a major transgender activist, Diana Sacayán in 2015.

      In her review of this film in the Washington City Paper, Ella Feldman nicely describes the first scenes of Solas’ film:

 

“It opens in an Argentine courtroom, where a judge delivers a sentence for Gabriel David Marino, who brutally killed Diana Sacayán, a transgender woman who dedicated her life to advocating for her community. The judge describes the harrowing details of her murder plainly, while Marino sits, unflinching. Outside the courthouse, trans women hold signs condemning “transvesticido,” or transvesticide. (In Argentina, the term transvestite is embraced by the trans community.)”

 

     The murderer’s conviction, one of the first in Argentine under laws against gender-motivated hate crimes which Sacayán and the central figures in this film fought for, was a truly historic event.

      From the general past, Solas moves quickly to the specific, introducing us to Claudia Vásquez Haro, a transgender scholar and activist, in a moment of private joy as she runs across the sand with five dogs only to join, a moment later, her mother and sister, laid out on a blanket. Claudia will soon be one of the level-headed voices central to this story.

     She is a Peruvian immigrant who has long lived in La Plata, making history as the first Argentine trans woman to receive a doctorate degree. Cath Clarke of The Guardian describes her as “a funny, witty force of nature who is doing her damnedest to lobby feminist groups for more trans inclusion.” “Spirited and bold,” observes Feldman, “Vasquez Haro comes alive when she speaks to crowds at marches and political gatherings. Rights, in her eyes, need to be demanded, and bodies need to be put on the line.”

     She and numerous of her activist friends have come together for the annual women’s conference, while at the same time the film follows the latest presidential election which ends, fortunately, with the liberal with liberal Alberto Fernández ousting right-wing businessman Mauricio Macri.

      

     If you might think these transgender women have every reason and right to join the feminists on the stand to speak with the vast community of women still fighting for legal rights, you haven’t encountered the “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs) who, even along with many centrists, resent and fight the inclusion of transgender individuals in the conference.

     Claudia, as we quickly learn, is close to her mother and family who have supported her at all times; but many of the women for who she battles were kicked out of their homes at early age for admitting to their parents their gender dysphoria, and were forced to survive as transgender prostitutes on the street. They too have fought the patriarchal system that not only denigrates women but vilifies and attempts to destroy men who identify as women. Most feminists today can enjoy the relative safety of their heterosexual unions, while transgender women—whether lesbian, straights, and those who find love only with other transgender individuals—have few safety nets or legal protections. Gay men and lesbians have far more rights than transgender individuals.

     Claudia and her friends, however, must fight their way even into the conference grounds, and when it comes time for the public speeches, Claudia brings in a gay man dressed in drag to help, with her friends, to literally lift up her body against the pushes and shoves of the TERFs and others, so that she too might speak to the issues for which the conference in general argue. *

      The second major focus of Solas’ film, Violeta Alegre works as an anthropologist, and we follow her not through the political melee in which Claudia is involved, but as a visitor to a group of trans women whom she intends to interview about their romantic and sexual relationships. Her methods of resistance include the quieter activities of walking the night streets of Buenos Aires to paste up posters over political advertisements, and quietly question the women she meets, discovering a wide divergence among them, which Solas is eager to identify: as Feldman summarizes, “Some are immigrants, others are native-born. Some are light-skinned, others are women of color. Some are lesbians, some are straight. Some are sex workers, others believe sex work should be abolished.”

      At one point in the film Violeta celebrates her 30th birthday, which brings up the issue of an observation earlier in the film that life expectancy for transgender women is 32 in Argentina. At the party we see lovers and friends come together for a joyful gathering of drink and dance, Violeta herself joining the dance floor and pulling in one of the dancers for gentle, long kiss.

      We get the feeling that Violeta’s life is a kind of never-ending round of travels where she lectures on the numerous aspects of transgender life that she has uncovered, it being a sexuality that perhaps was first identified in scientific papers as late as the late 19th century and had little serious research before Magnus Hirschfeld’s studies in Weimar Germany, documents utterly destroyed by the Nazis. What she has learned, accordingly, is essential to be shared with trans communities wherever they exist.

      Near the end of the film, Violeta is feted in a provincial city showing photographs of black and white images of trans women from other eras, dressed-up formally for secret balls and celebrations. For the attendees she is nearly like a goddess bringing them knowledge of who they are and what they have been.

      But it is not an easy life for either the fiery advocate or the traveling anthropologist/historian who looks tired and fairly lonely, both of whom have quite literally lived lives, like so very many transgender women, whose bodies have become the battlefields of others.

     

*Watching this film for the first time was somewhat confusing since, as Feldman notes: “The details of this landscape are largely left for the viewer to infer on their own, a choice that succeeds in upholding the film’s verité tone, but may be challenging for viewers unfamiliar with Argentine politics.”

 

Los Angeles, June 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Érica Sarmet | Uma Paciência Selvagem Me Trouxe Até Aqui (A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here) / 2021

letting it all out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Érica Sarmet (screenwriter and director) Uma Paciência Selvagem Me Trouxe Até Aqui (A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here) / 2021 [26 minutes] 

 

Interestingly, of the seven short lesbian-oriented films I saw at the NewFest 2022, six of them were notably different in tone and approach than any of the gay male films I saw in the same festival. While the gay films moved directly to the heart of their subjects, dealing head-on with the issues at stake—desire, coming out, the search for changing self-identity, anger, and acceptance—the films about lesbian relationships approached their subjects, for the most part, obliquely, spoke of love in almost whispered terms, shyly pointed to oppositions rather than announcing them, and hinted at coming out rather than representing any such actual confrontation. Although this is, of course, a ridiculously small sampling of such films to make any generalizations, it reminded me that, for example, the “coming out” film was rare in the lesbian vault of LGBTQ movies. Although there are numerous films demanding attention for the lesbian cause, there are far many more movies that prefer to discuss those very issues through what I might describe as a “slanted” approach often surrounded by a veneer of domesticity.

     Actually, I admired these subtler approaches, having long ago tired of the endless visual rhetoric of thousands of outpourings of hurt, anger, and frustration in gay male films.   

     The exception to this observed phenomenon, Brazilian filmmaker Érica Sarmet’s 2021 movie, even carries within its Adrienne Rich-inspired title the “wild patience” is has taken the lead figure of this work, now an older lesbian who had almost given up an active life in her community, to come to the open declarations and revealing sexual representations that her film proclaims.

      Vange (Zélia Duncan) seems to be sitting on the outside of her own world as enjoying a drink at street café she observes the youth around her playing and teasing openly about their costumes, appearance, and sex itself. Vange evidently determines to return to lesbian bar from where she has long been absent and there meets a curious young woman, Rô (Bruna Linzmeyer) who’s intrigued and fascinated by the older lesbian woman, as well as being admittedly attracted to her.

      When Vange leaves for the evening, explaining that she has a long way to travel on her motorbike, Rô outrightly asks if she can join her. Vange accepts and the two go racing off to the elder’s home, looks of joy as they sit close to one another with the wind on their faces.

      After an apparently sexually satisfying night, Vange returns Rô back to the city, where the younger girl immediately introduces her to what appears to be a commune of lesbian activists with whom she lives and spends most of her days.

     Almost immediately, the story shifts from being a personal re-outing of Vange to a love-letter to lesbianism addressed to the world, as the younger women, embraces the older with great interest for the depth of history she provides.

     The film then metamorphizes almost into an intemperate and most certainly impatient advertisement of the joys of lesbianism as the women engage in a group orgy, demonstrating the numerous positions of possible lesbian sexual pleasures, presented almost as an answer to those millenniums of male taunts that question how lesbians might sexually satisfy themselves.

     After, the women march to a local public beach where, with two boys playing with a ball in the background, they set up camp.

       The film ends with a complete abandonment of patience proclaiming the lesbian cause in logos, flags, and shouts. Obviously the long patience of woman like Vange has worn itself out, and the wildness overtaken their hearts. 

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).