Josh Safdie | Marty Supreme / 2025

paddling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie (screenplay), Josh Safdie (director) Marty Supreme / 2025

 

Both the character Marty Mauser (loosely based on the table tennis player Marty Reisman and his 1974 memoir The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler) and the movie Marty Supreme might easily be described as intensely frenetic, irritating, violent, and utterly charming all at the same moment. This is most definitely not a film for those who like quiet, gentle narratives that push them into confident and pre-determined boundaries. Or, perhaps, this film is not even for those who like tense action movies with, nonetheless, predictable endings wherein the hero, having proved his worth, lives on.

     Marty, a figure who actor Timothée Chalamet embraces so fully that you might describe him as possessed, also survives at film’s end. But, you have to ask, at what cost to himself and to everyone around him?

      A lot of things happen in Safdie’s busy film, but I am not going to describe every twist and turn of events. And I’m not sure anyone who hasn’t seen the film would be able to understand such a description were I determined to recount it.

    What is important to note is that Marty, an American second-generation Jewish man, is almost doomed by birth. Coming of age in the 1950s, his constantly “suffering” mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher) is the major reason why his uncle, Marray Norkin (Larry “Ratso” Sloman), who owns a shoe shop, is determined that Marty will become manager of the place; besides Marty is good with the customers.

    Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), with whom Marty has occasional sex, is a childhood friend of Marty’s, now married to a mean slob Ira (Emory Cohen), also determined to use Marty to find a way out of her relationship, at one point pretending Ira has severely beaten her after having discovered their affair.

    Dion Galanis (Luke Manley), one of Marty’s friends, a man who still lives with his parents, also would like to stop his friend from trying to involve him and his father in obtaining financial support, and argues for him just to settle down, presumably like the dumb obedient, fruitcake of a son he has become.

    The entire world which Marty inhabits, in fact, including those whom he tries to hustle for money and those he accidentally encounters in his money-raising adventures, want the man to cease and desist, in short, to become one of the normalized “dead.”

    But Marty, a truly excellent table tennis player (better known in those days as ping-pong) has a dream, first to defeat the current table tennis champion, Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig, playing a role loosely based on real-life player Alojzy Ehrlich), and later to defeat the new table tennis winner, Japanese champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, inspired by Hiroji Satoh).

     But first Marty has to get to London in order to compete in the British Open, and that’s the rub. To keep him home and safe, Murray denies him his wages for the summer, forcing Marty to have to rob his uncle’s money vault by threatening a co-worker, Lloyd, with a gun, an act that begins a series of catastrophes that, combined with Marty’s own egotistical behavior and his generally conniving ways, swirls him into a world that eventually will so challenge and demean him that he has no choice but to surrender.

     Yet what an epic adventure he dares to undertake, first winning most of his table tennis matches in London—all except, of course, to Koto Endo, a loss which forces him to find a way after to attend the next World match in Japan—before seducing a famous a former noted actress and socialite, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), and entering into what he hopes will be a successful business deal with Kay’s wealthy husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) who is determined to sell his expensive pens to the Japanese market.

     If through all the events up to this point, we perceive Marty as an opportunist, hustler, and womanizer, he is also simply a man who, above all, is trying to live out his version of the American Dream, the problem being that the closed-minded USA doesn’t yet see the game of Ping-Pong as even being a legitimate sport. And in that fact and the decade’s abandonment to the status quo, Marty’s dream—as so very many other American dreams of the day—does not correlate with US values. Marty might as well be trying to become the world’s greatest dancer, actor, poet, someone trying to create a computer, or even an openly gay man. Sound familiar? There is no ready place for him in this society. This straight dreamer is doomed by the world in which he lives.

      And even more important, he is destined to become a loser because he is determined, despite his worst tendencies, to play it straight, to stand for the very ideals that most US citizens believe are behind their actions.

     Charges for his illegally changing to a clean and silent hotel room (along with several unnecessary splurges on the side to impress Kay) get him into trouble with the International Table Tennis Association (represented by Ram Sethi, performed by Pico Iyer), and he is fined $1,500.

     Rockwell is willing to support him, but only if he first plays a series of pre-professional matches with Koto Endo in Japan in which, wherein, to please the Japanese audiences to whom Rockwell hopes to sell his pens, Marty must lose and show up the Americans as being coarse pigs by, obviously, wrestling a pig.

     Marty refuses, but severely pays the price when even the money he has successfully raised for the trip is reclaimed by his uncle who will otherwise have him arrested for robbery. Rachel shows up pregnant, claiming the child is his. And quite by accident, Marty becomes involved with a mobster Ezra Mishkin (played by film director Abel Ferrara) who, while recuperating after a truly incredible bathroom accident, entrusts his dog Moses, to Marty's keeping, promising to pay him for the dog’s care. 

    With Rachel’s and his taxi-driving friend Wally’s (Tayler Okonma) interventions even worse things begin to happen, including the loss the dog, with events spiraling out of control until finally, after again encountering the actress Kay Stone, now performing in a Broadway comeback, he has no choice but to beg the pen magnate Rockwell to let him play and lose the Japanese demonstration match.

     The cost this time is not only a loss of all principles but a total abasement, both sexually and societally, as Rockwell demands that Marty, in front of his wealthy male friends, pull down his pants so that he might ruthlessly paddle him with the very tool of Marty’s trade. The red butt the camera watches in this voyeuristic affair, so Chalamet assures us, is that of the actor himself, who was also one of the producers of this film.

     At least Marty is now in Japan! But even then Marty reaches an impasse when the Table Tennis Association head, Ram Sethi, who advises him that he is not even registered to play in the contest, and no exceptions will be made.

     Despondent, but not yet ready to give up, Marty is suddenly is intent on revealing the lie of the demonstration match, demanding that Koto Endo play a real match with him as opposed to the intended sham game. Advised of the change of plans, Rockwell tells Marty that he will find no chance of happiness in his life ahead, revealing, perhaps metaphorically, but what we fear what may be actually the truth, that he is a vampire.

     Even he has to give some credit to and register a bit of admiration for the little loser, despite all blocks put in his way, who finally wins the unofficial match. Marty actually wishes Endo well, hoping that he will win the international tournament so that we can at least know within that perhaps he really is the best table tennis player in the world!

     With the help of US servicemen who have watched the match, Marty returns to the US just in time for the birth of Rachel’s baby, a child who he now recognizes as his own and like all model fathers watches with love and even tears through the protection of the glass panel behind which newborns are kept, the nurse holding up perhaps a child who may in the future be able to break the boundaries with which society will attempt to contain his or her life.

     When I originally announced to my queer blog audiences that I had seen this film, I reminded them that I do still watch and review straight movies from time to time, and that this film most definitely had no gay content.

     But I think I was probably wrong. Safdie is known as a director open evidently to improvisation. In an interview with director Sean Baker on an A24 podcast, O’Leary revealed that the suggestion that his character was a vampire was an ad-lib, which was so supported by the director and his co-writer, that they planned for a new ending in which an older Marty would take his granddaughter to a 1980s concert, only to again meet up with Rockwell who, being an actual vampire, would bite Marty in the neck.

    Clearly, Rockwell’s interest in paddling young men’s butts extended to an interest into a vampirish bite of love to keep the winning boy near him throughout eternity. The studio heads, however, obviously having never imagined the success of a movie like the same year’s Sinners (which shifts genre from a black blues musical to a vampire blood bath), nixed the changes. Besides, Rockwell is not the only loving villain of the piece; the entire society has also taken its bite.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).   

    

Todrick Hall and John Asher | Rainin' Fellas / 2021 [music video]

heavenly bodies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todrick Hall and John Asher (directors) Rainin' Fellas / 2021 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

Often it is the simply audacity of singer/dancer Todrick Hall’s music videos that makes them so watchable. But in the case of his 2021 video Rainin’ Fellas (influenced obviously by the Weather Girl’s 1983 hit “It’s Raining Men”) it is not only the audacity of the metaphor—a sky pouring down beefy gay men for all below to grab up and enjoy—along with the outlandish costumes that so many Hall’s videos feature, but the absurd narrative itself. Here, finally, we leave behind the heartache ballads of singers pining and praying for love to enter their lives, opening us to a world where the gods have seen kindly to let everyone find the male beautiful body they have long been seeking. Women and men both joyfully dance to the delight of open sexuality—cis straight men need not apply.

    It begins with a somewhat conservatively besuited Lance Bass hailing a downtown taxi in the rain; only his high heels and pedal-pusher pants might provide us with a clue to his gay sexuality, the costume itself almost satirizing the mixed signals that Bass himself has created over the years as a gay boy who sees himself as “straight acting” (i.e. not effeminate).

     But the joke is short-lived as suddenly, you might say, the heavens open, delivering up a nude man on the roof of the taxi. From here on out, the joy is simply in finding the right man to grab hold of and fuck.

Feel the thunder crashing like we crash the party

And the lightning flashing like the paparazzi

And the weatherman says we probably should take cover

But we're running outside to try to find a lover

You better find an ATM

Baby, fast fast

Tip some cash cash

It's raining dicks and ass ass

It's a fire (work) and it ain't even July

Muscles falling from the sky

If you wanna find a guy

 

Get your umbrellas

Get your umbrellas

It's raining fellas

It's raining fellas

Get your umbrellas

Get your umbrellas

It's raining fellas

It's raining fellas

     From here on out the splendiferous delights come simply from the costumes and the dance routines—and of course the bevy of beautiful boys.

 

  In one moment Todd, completely covered with glitter, is singing in the rain, the next prancing around in a kind of laminated bed robe under a plastic umbrella. At the next moment he’s part of a chorus of men in colorful latex outfits. Finally, he appears in a costume with a showgirl bodice featuring panels of cellophane cubes that serve as true pantaloons.

     A plastic ruby red gown is followed by a yellow latex suit that gives way to an entire Busby Berkeley-inspired chorus of naked men who hide their private parts with the long black gloves they wear as their only article of clothing. O joy, o rapture!

    But the highlight or the piece is when Hall appears atop a mountainous ochre-colored gown within which men are entrapped as the performers begins naming names:

 

It's raining Billys, Bobs, Blakes and Brandons

It's raining Willys, Robs, Jakes and Landons

It's raining Garrys, Jerrys, Larrys

Raining twigs and berries

Toms, Dicks and Harrys

Bears, jocks and fairies

It's raining thighs, tries, briefs and boxers

It's raining fly, guys, flight attendants and doctors

It's raining feminine, gentlemen, dripping down like a faucet

Yeah, these boys are coming out

Like the sky was a closet

   Frankly how could any gay person not enjoy this music video, even the music itself is nothing you might want to listen to without the visual stimulus attached? This is a gay statement of true liberation.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

Manuel Kinzer and Jorge A. Trujillo Gill | Darío / 2018

darío the dancer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manuel Kinzer and Jorge A. Trujillo Gill (screenwriters and directors) Darío / 2018 [15 minutes]

 

Darío, by Columbian directors Manuel Kinzer and Jorge A. Trujillo Gill really isn’t much of a movie when comes to plot. The 17-year-old boy, Darío (Javier Alberto Bula García) from Barranquilla (a seaport city flanked by the Magdalena River, known for its carnival festivities) simply loves to dance and is delighted to be an important part of the upcoming carnival activities.

    Yet his hard-working mother (Norelis Nieves Cardona) demands that, like his elder brother and she, he help support the family, insisting that each day he work at his uncle’s small food shop.

     Given the demands on the young boy of school, work, and dance, he arrives late to both work and his dance routines, and doesn’t return home until late, his mother furious that he has missed the evening meal. Even more important she is afraid of what his dancing might mean.

   While the others boys play soccer Darío practices his elaborate maneuvers with the other dancers, mostly female, watched carefully by another cute young boy (Jean Carlos Calderón), and to whom it is quite apparent that Darío is attracted.

    In short, her son is already what she is determined to he will not become, banning him from any further dance rehearsals.

    It is inevitable that Darío finally realizes that he needs to resist her demands; and when he doesn’t even show up to his uncle’s shop the mother grows furious. While attempting to reach him by cellphone, his brother notices that the carnival parade has begun and that Darío, dressed in an orange costume topped by a glorious orange headdress, she rushes from the store to the street where the parade is gathering, attempting to find and prevent her son from participating.

    She doesn’t find him in time, and when he finally goes strutting with his other dance members down the street, a wide smile of delight on his face, and glimmer of pride and love focused on the young boy who is watching and applauding his performance, all is too late. He has taken on his role, at least for the moment, of his young life, refusing to be shuffled off into the corner of poverty’s neglected children. For a moment, at least, he is a member of one of the ancient indigenous tribes (Muisca, Quimbaya, and Tairona) celebrating his existence.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Ward Kamel | If I Die in America / 2024

the body thieves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ward Kamel (screenwriter and director) If I Die in America / 2024 [15 minutes]

 

Syrian-born Ward Kamel’s 2024 short film If I Die in America once again recounts something that happens far too often in gay life.

    Both Manny (Gil Perez-Abraham) and his husband Sameer (George Shakkour) have evidently been in an automobile accident that has injured Manny and killed Sameer.

     Hardly as Manny recovered and attempted to visit the funeral home where is husband’s dead body lies that he is presented with papers by a cousin serving a lawyer for the family asking him to sign permission for them to ship the body back to Kuwait for a proper and immediately Muslim burial.

    Outraged that Sameer’s mother has not even bothered to talk to him about their request and for the fact that they do not even want to allow him time to assimilate the family request, he refuses.

     A short while later Dalal (Han Chamoun) tries again, this time visiting Manny at his home where a birthday cake for Sameer still sits on the table. Dalal is accompanied by another relative Khalil (Moud Sabra).

     Dalal apologizes, having presumed that the mother had spoken to him and for her having confronted Manny without warning. But she still reminds him that it is the Muslim custom to immediately bury the dead, and begs him to consent for the body to be returned to the family. She also argues that his flight will also be paid so that he might attend the ceremony.

     But again, Manny is not at all ready to make such a sudden decision, having not even had the time to assimilate his lover’s death. Khalil enters into the negotiations by claiming that Manny has no real say in the matter since he was not really married, their marriage having been only a green-card arrangement: “Are you a woman? Did you have a wedding? A real wedding, not just one with your friends. You didn’t because this was not a marriage. This was an arrangement. That’s all this was.”

   Manny lunges at him and tells them to get out. The homophobic statement, denying even the love they shared outrages Manny and he throws both of them out of the house, hurrying back by chauffeured car to the funeral home.

     Throughout he has attempted to call Sameer’s mother, but he receives only a recording; and he is told by Dalal that it is problematic to the mother to even have to acknowledge his existence. Furious by her refusal to answer his phone call, he throws his cellphone out the window. But soon after, he demands the driver stop and he attempts to find the phone in the field, finally speaking to the mother who attempts to explain that he is being selfish, that Sameer also had deep commitments with the family.

       In the last few moments of the film, it is clear that Manny has come to terms with the issue as we see him packing, dressed in black, obviously prepared for the voyage to Kuwait. He has come to realize that the burial will not alter the fact of their real love and time together.

      So often throughout gay history, lovers have been denied the right to even mourn their companions or, as the film A Single Man (2009) reminds us, robs the lover the possibility to even attend to funeral ceremony. In many cases before gay marriage was allowed, the houses of gay men, their possessions, and any remaining traces of their relationship were claimed by the families, particularly if their dead partners had made no will or other legal documents.

     Despite the truly homophobic situation, Manny finally comes to terms with the family claims because he is at least invited to the ceremony and he has the documents to prove his marriage and the significance of their lives together. More importantly, he has the memory of their love, as stronger force than any anger the family has had for their son’s sexuality.

     Yet this short film only reiterates just how tentative all gay relationships remain in a world of homophobic hatred.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

 

 

 

Sek Kei (Wong Chi-Keung) | 死結 (Dead Knot) / 1969

new growth

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Woo and Sek Kei (screenplay), Sek Kei (Wong Chi-Keung) (director) 死結 (Dead Knot) / 1969

 

In 1969, Hong Kong student John Woo and Wong Chi-keung, Wong being one of Hong Kong’s most well known and experienced film critics writing under the pseudonym of Sek Kei, wrote the screenplay to and directed an experimental film, Dead Knot. Although Woo came to be known for his generally all male martial arts and “bullet ballet” action films, in this early work we see him questioning and exploring sexual and gender differences in a manner that is clearly related to the US and other western European versions of the first coming out films (which I describe as version A) as represented by the early works of Kenneth Anger, Cutis Harrington, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Jacques Demy, and A. J. Rose, Jr., the latter of whose Penis (1965), almost a summary of the early “coming out” film tropes, is chronologically closest to Woo’s and Sek Kei’s film.*

    The 18-minute film, divided into eight short chapters—“the beginning,” “the place,” “the forbidden fruit,” “run away,” “the living,” “rainy season,” “lost,” and “dead knot”—recounts the experience of a young boy (John Woo) who is at first in thrall of a gay S&M lover (Chan Kai-Yat) before he escapes and attempts to enter in what he believes is a “normal” relationship with a woman (Cho Chung-Lang). That relationship, however, soon disintegrates into a daily fragmentation of their lives—expressed quite brilliant in their repetitive daily acts and the insistent cinematic break-up of the images with white fragments and cuts in continuity in “the living”— before things truly break down in “rainy season,” where the male actively attempts to escape the relationship, before their final breakdown in “lost,” symbolized by their placement of blindfolds over their eyes as they desperately attempt to find a way in darkness back to one another.

     In despair, the boy returns to the forbidden allure of his former male lover who now puts him into a “dead knot,” as he types out what is apparently the history of the story we are encountering—or, perhaps, another possibility for their future, since the “dead knot” can mean either the new growth from a tree that is only loosely connected to the original branch or a tied at the end of a rope to prevent it from passing through a hole or another knot used most commonly to join ropes in climbing. The dead knot, is short does not represent death or strangulation but ideas centered around climbing new roots.

     This short film, obviously influenced by the western filmmakers I mention above, begins with a male-on-male relationship, representing the suffering and torturing the confused gay-leaning individual must undergo through the S&M torture. Although there is clearly a long tradition of S&M behavior in Asian literature and filmmaking, it here my be simply symbolic as the narrow bed on which the individuals must suffer through their nights of doubt in the US versions of the coming out films.

    Later incidents in Dead Knot clearly parallel the US films about the same subject, including the demands of the woman as she is either carried up or runs up a long set of steps which the male attempts with an almost Herculean effort to follow her, a scene in this film that seems right out of Harrington’s short work Picnic. And other moments, such as the male’s awe of and attempt to comprehend the female body through a sculptural work, reminds one immediately of the male admiration the sculpted male body of Adam in Rose’s Penis.

    In short, this 1969 work almost seems to be the last example, as well as a nice summary of the gay coming out movies before young people discovered that you could actually come out to more than simply oneself and a delimited cinematic audience—but to family, friends, and society in general.

    As critic Tony Rayns described this short work in Time Out:

 

“Rescued by the Hong Kong Film Archive, this is the earliest surviving trace of John Woo's beginnings as an indie film-maker. A psycho-drama in the vein of Anger's Fireworks, it's divided into eight short chapters. A young man (Woo) tries to escape from a gay sado-masochist relationship into a 'normal' relationship - with a girl! - but ends up back where he started, unable to buck his deepest desires. Whatever light this may shed on Woo's later work, it's fascinating for teasing out the subtext from the perverse swordplay bloodbaths which Chang Cheh was making at the time (Golden Swallow, etc).”

 

    For a more detailed description of the music and sound production of this film, interested readers should read Li Cheuk-to’s essay “The Past and Present of Dead Knot, published in 2025 and available online on the internet.

      

*Although Woo heterosexually married in 1969 and has three children, it is nonetheless interesting that his major cinematic influences are films that are concerned with male bonding and homosocial if not always homosexual works. His favorite films, so he has reported, are David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï—films with implicit homosexual and strong male bonding, along with other named favorites such as Michael Cocoyannis’ Zorba the Greek and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Most of these works are discussed in the pages of My Queer Cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).