Lucas Camargo de Barros | Ouça o Ciclone (Hear the Cyclone) / 2013

lonesome town

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Camargo de Barros (screenwriter and director) Ouça o Ciclone (Hear the Cyclone) / 2013 [18 minutes]

 

Brazilian director Carmargo de Barros’ film based on images rather than coherent narrative is filled with interruptions to the normal patterns of life, a car navigation system telling its driver where to go, an interrupted call from the driver’s mother, a possible geomagnetic storm in São Paulo, and

one of the character’s personal struggles with grand mal seizures.

     These intrusions all stand in the way of the search for love, found only momentarily in the songs and arms of a transgender woman and a desperate attempt to reach the interrupted mother, who may in fact be one and the same.

     What we do know is simply that the central figure(s) remain(s) in the “Lonesome Town” of the old Ricky Nelson standard, unable to find the way back to love.

      The cyclone of the title refers not only to natural storms, but the storms inside the searcher’s own head, symbolic perhaps of his inability to resolve the two central forces of love. Is true love the mother the voice on the phone worried about his health, a voice that cannot be reached, or the siren song of the transgender performer who so captivates him? Both are terrified of being torn apart by the cyclone of death.

     And where does that leave this or these suffering being(s) whose only few minutes are represented in in this film in the sensation of a slow shower.

     There are no answers in the film to any questions which might arise from what its images and events reveal, but we can certainly sense the near-impossibility of the protagonist(s) to reach out for love through the static of his/their life/lives.

      Actors include André Stern, Sandra Camargo de Barros, Amanda Sparks, and José Henrique.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

Garth Maxwell | When Love Comes / 1998

youthful and mid-life angst

by Douglas Messerli

 

Garth Maxwell, Rex Pilgrim, and Peter Wells (screenplay), Garth Maxwell (director) When Love Comes / 1998

 

New Zealand director Garth Maxwell, working with the noted Kiwi director Stewart Main as his assistant, creates in When Loves Comes (1998) a film about three pairs of lost lovers, younger and older, gay, lesbian, and heterosexual who all seem displaced in their lives and, particularly for the figures of a slightly older generation, in danger of losing the somewhat enchanted lives they had thought they had created for themselves.

      That is particularly true for the most sane and symbolic magnet, Stephen (Simon Prast) of these somewhat lost souls—it is in his apartment and later seaside home that they all gather to regain their sanity after facing the chaos of the mostly music-and-bar scenes in which they daily participate—a man who, despite his own aging and increasing despair for losing what he has thought to be a rather magical life, now sardonically and sometimes rather campily copes with a  failing relationship with a young hunky, curly blond-haired lover, Mark (Dean O'Gorman) who evidently began as Stephen’s paid prostitute, now plagued with heaving drinking, doping, lack of purpose, and a violent streak due to self-hate.

     Stephen might almost be seen as coping rather well despite all those problems were it not that his very best friend and a might-have-been-lover—if “only he hadn’t been gay and she of the wrong gender”— Katie Keen (Rena Owen), who facing the dead-end of her singing career and the failure of her own relationship with her US manager Eddie (Simon Westaway) has decided to leave California to return home to Auckland. If Stephen has seemingly lived a gifted life, Katie, as he attempts to explain to his generational illiterate friend Mark, reached the heights as a noted, top-of-the-chart pop singer both in New Zealand and temporarily in the US, but is now playing the

kind of longue bars where, as she puts it, she performs as a figure who has lost her voice to a body that makes her appear to be a kind of drag queen. She’s not only sad and disappointed with life, but, as she tells us in a late-film dramatic monologue, has lost the love of the man she has come to depend upon as well as losing the baby he has unknowingly provided her as a last hope that she might open herself up to a splendid later chapter in life.

         If she, like Stephen, is nonetheless fairly good at sardonicism as a tool of survival, she is also truly at the edge and in need of one of those long, deep looks into the mirror of the future if she intends to survive her forties. Stephen, despite his own problems, is pretty good at bucking her up, but a bit like Mark, she too is now floating through her days, herself pulling away from those her care most about her to instead let herself be pulled into the utter chaos of the song lyricist Mark and his lesbian friends, Fig (Nancy Brunning) and Sally (Sophia Hawthorne), who Time Out describes as “riot grrrl bandmates...tousle-haired muppets, full of carefree insouciance,” and of whom Stephen Holden of The New York Times adds are “wildly in love with each other,” serving “as the movie’s cheeky Greek chorus, introducing the story and commenting on the action.” The trouble is that even they don’t quite know how to explain what they are encountering in her and Stephen, taking her on at moment as a backup singer and the next as a would-be manager without hardly being able to explain the events going on about them. As Sally proclaims after hearing Katie’s late-film revelation, “I’m too young for all of this.”

       They’re also both simply too very happy for the soap-opera-like muddle the movie keeps trying to involve them and us in. In fact, the real problem is perhaps that none of the characters is as bad off as they imagine themselves to be, each of them having despite the mess they’ve made of their lives, a fairly good hold of who they are and who they might like to be, as well as, most importantly, having someone to love them if they’d simply open their eyes, and like the two girls, jump into bed with one another.

      Indeed, if the movie had provided what Katie and Stephen were seeking, a good quiet weekend at the beach, they might have brought things a bit more quickly under control; but then Maxwell’s whole point is that the only way to really solve your problem is get everyone, young and old, together for a kind of old fashioned beach bonfire around which everyone, including Katie’s ex-lover Eddie who flies in from California to tell Katie how much he loves her, gets a chance to play out their own melodramatic fears before taking a chance on love.

       For a while, it seems that the most caring, least self-pitying of the group, Stephen, will ironically be the only one left empty-handed, but even his lost boy, after having hitch-hiked half-way back to Auckland, returns for a much-needed late night kiss. And everything turns out to be just swell!

      If we feel somewhat cheated by all the tears and fireworks we had to suffer through for what was apparently only a little of youthful and mid-life angst, we forgive the film’s creators simply because of the beautiful views of the New Zealand seashore and sunset and the actors’ fairly good performances. But we still wish, given so much potentiality, that the film had provided us the more of what it seemingly argued for: a truly adult film, with both younger and older viewpoints, which might have awarded us with deeper insights and far less simplistic solutions if it had only gone with its instincts of taking the wrong direction more often, bringing us into the finer mess it promised.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

 

Jonathan Wald | Just Out of Reach / 1998

leave taking

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonathan Wald (screenwriter and director) Just Out of Reach / 1998

 

     In the 4-minute short film by Jonathan Wald, Just Out of Reach, a younger boy (Steve Connell) wakes up in the bed with an older man (Tom Fitzpatrick). It’s morning, clearly after a night of sex. The boy gently touches the man’s face and hair, rises, and quickly puts on his pants and shoes, sneaking away. Suddenly what sounds more like a car alarm than house detection goes off, the man awaking and joking, “Gottcha!”

  

      The boy says his only line: “I didn’t wanna wake you.”

    The man smiles with the recognition that the boy is off, perhaps never to return—certainly not interested in further conversation. “Say hello to your dad,” he remarks.

     The boy leaves and the man gathers and pulls up his purple coverlet, holding it a bit into the shape of another being, recognizing this may be the last time.

    With the economy of an abstract artist, US director Jonathan Wald has expressed the sadness of a moment of pleasure recognized as now forever lost. It’s also beautifully composed and crisply filmed, something you don’t often see in such a freshman short. Wald later filmed one of favorites in Australia, What Grown-Ups Know (2004).

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Jeff Dupre | Out of the Past / 1998

angelic troublemakers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelle Ferrari (screenplay), Jeff Dupre (director) Out of the Past / 1998

 

Like many young people of high school age, particularly growing up in politically, religious, and sexually conservative environments, Kelli Peterson grew up knowing early on that she was a lesbian, yet felt she was a freak a nature without knowing any like her. For years she lived a tortuously closeted life, afraid to reveal her sexuality to her parents, her peers, and her community.

     In 1995, however, after finally being able to come out, she began what called the Gay-Straight Alliance which she believed could be an important organization for those like her and others living with gay friends, brothers, and sisters at her Salt Lake City high school.

     Although the organization, after some delay, was approved, the teacher-advisor for her group hinted that there may be difficult days ahead. Kelli and those with whom she met were finding the healing process of simply sharing their experiences with others as an important way to help those who suffering as she had, and helped some from feeling suicidal thoughts. But their’s was a small high school organization; they hardly could imagine what lay ahead.

      Before long the school board was meeting secretly—and illegally—with the state legislature, members of which were calling for a complete ban on the gay organizations—also illegal. In order to get around the fact that they couldn’t specifically discriminate against, they eventually voted to ban all student organizations, while the legislature went further in disallowing any discussion of homosexuality on school grounds. Major student protests arose throughout Salt Lake City, and a general walk-out of students flummoxed authorities. Peterson’s life was even threatened. And suddenly she discovered herself, as a young teenager, on the cover of newspapers across the nation discussing, often quite ineptly, her sexuality and her desires for an open discussion.

     Kelli Petterson’s brave actions are in themselves worthy of a documentary, but as Bob Graham, writing in the SFGATE noted, the film documenting Petterson’s actions “would be of only passing interest, like a reasonably good report on "Dateline NBC," if it dealt solely with the 1996 events in Utah. What makes it worth seeing as a documentary is the cumulative effect of the five historical sequences” director Jeffrey Dupre added to expand the missing historical dimension that Peterson had felt even as she was growing up gay.

      Instead of pulling out the usual well-known names of gay figures, in his film Out of the Past, Dupre chooses to help fill in the missing pages of gay history by focusing on basically unknown gay heroes of the past, some of whom were unable to achieve their goals and one of whom, the 17th-century Puritan cleric Michael Wigglesworth, could only express it in his private, coded diaries, while at the same time warning of the “Day of Doom” for his fellow believers when God’s reckoning would occur, revealing every one of each man’s sins, even those hidden. Strangely, it might almost be a relief to the deeply closeted religious thinker who suffered for his attractions to males for much of his life. Actor Stephen Spinella voices Wigglesworth’s tortured voice.

      Better known is the lesbian relationship between writer Sarah Orne Jewett (provided the voice of Gwyneth Paltrow) and her female lover Annie Adams Fields (Cherry Jones). Although Jewett was married and her Boston home become the center for cultural events, she left for a long voyage of the continent with Fields and upon their return, continued to write intimate letters to her, Fields regularly responding. The two women finally divided their time between Maine and Boston, sharing each other’s lives in what, at the time, was described as a “Boston Marriage,” an allowable relationship between two women which, since men could not quite imagine a sexual component, was perceived as a close feminine relationship that actually protected their wives from the attention of other males. As the film makes clear, however, with the rise of Freud and psychiatric communities such relationships were no longer seen as innocent, homosexuality being defined as an illness, and such “marriages” were now looked upon with great suspicion. After Jewett died, Fields attempted to publish their correspondence but it was suppressed by their publisher.

      Far lesser known is Henry Gerber (with the voice Edward Norton), a World War I soldier, who returning to the US attempted to form the first gay-rights organization, The Society for Human Rights, the first openly gay organization in the US. Working for the postal office, Gerber attempted to find a few men to join him, but fears of public revelation, job loss, and even imprisonment made it almost impossible, although he did finally find a few men to sign on, creating a newspaper.

      Soon after, however, as The New York Times critic Stephen Holden summarizes: “One night the police raided Gerber's home, confiscated his typewriter and other materials, and jailed him for several days without formally charging him with a crime. Upon his release, he was dismissed from his job for “conduct unbecoming'’ a postal worker.” Finally, Gerber perceived that that there was a huge wall between gay men and women and rest of US culture, and he had been defeated by that wall.

      Even sadder is the story of Bayard Rustin, an early associate of Martin Luther King and the other black leaders attempting to create an activist black community of the South. Rustin, a tireless organizer, helped relay the lessons of civil disobedience to King and his associates, and helped form the groundwork of the black southern leadership. There was every reason to believe that he and King would be perceived as equal cohorts in the foundation of the movement. But when competitive elements demanded that King disassociate himself from Rustin because he was gay, King, fearing repercussions, accepted Rustin’s resignation and locked him out his life for several years, bringing many to describe Rustin as “the lost prophet” of the Civil Rights Movement.

       It was only when the movement needed someone to oversee the vast march in Washington, D. C. on August 28, 1963 that Rustin was asked to return. With A. Philip Randolph, Rustin organized, with the help of civil rights, labor, and religious institutions, for buses to take the poor to Washington, arranged for overnight housing for the thousands who poured into the city, and even involved churches and other organizations in creating box lunches for those who had not brought their own food. Working with the police and hundreds of others, it was he who made sure that the day went relatively smoothly so that King could speak his memorable words: “I have a dream.” But even here, leaders in Washington and elsewhere, revealing Rustin’s sexuality, attempted to cut him off from the event which would not have occurred without him.

     Rustin also spoke brilliantly that day, but his words are now forgotten, and he came to realize, as the film reiterates, that gays suffer through their own invisibility, silence, and a lack of history that defines their roles in society. This movie reiterates what so many post-Stonewall documentaries have—and to which the very book you are reading is a testimony—the need “To create a place for ourselves, we have to find ourselves in the past.” In the end, Rustin realized that in devoting all his energies to the issue of race he had also lost part of himself, concluding ”We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.”

     The final figure that Out of the Past features, with an overall narrative voice provided by Linda Hunt, is Barbara Gittings, for years the president of the early lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, who fought with a few others for years manning picket lines to bring attention to their cause. Even after the advances finally brought about after the Stonewall riots, Gittings continued the battle, attacking in particular the American Psychiatric Association for its refusal to remove homosexuality from being described as a psychological disorder. When she finally won the battle, the Association simply admitted that they had been wrong, and we were all suddenly “normalized,” but few of us turned to bow down to Gittings for her years of lonely and brave battles.

       One of the most touching moments in this work is near the end where Gittings and her companion ride in an open car in a Gay Pride parade to meet up with Kelli Peterson and her lesbian lover who follow behind them for the rest of the parade.

       If this is not a truly great work of cinema documentation, it is an important one among many others in helping to fill in the historical gaps which encourage not only LGBTQ individuals but the general public remain aware of the tireless energy of others who came before them to defeat the centuries of bigotry against sexualities that do not dominate the societies of the world. Even a passing mention of Henry James along with a statement that “it is much easier to think of Henry James as asexual than that he was enamored of men,” is a mind-opening reminder of just how many major world figures have had their lives washed over by the history texts to hide the truths about their sexual lives.

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Marcel Gisler | F. es un salud (Fögi Is a Bastard) / 1998

the death of mick jagger

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcel Gisler, and Rudolf Nadler (based on the book by Martin Frank Ter Fögi ische Souhung, screenplay), Marcel Gisler (director) F. es un salud (Fögi Is a Bastard) / 1998

 

Before you can even wonder about the authorial viewpoint that the writers and director take toward the central pedophilic character, Swiss rock musician Fögi (Frédéric Andrau) in their 1998 film, they announce it in the title. They might have described him even as a monster, but things are far more complex than that in this actually quite intense, frightening, but also somewhat loving portrait of a perverse love affair that can’t quite be described in normative terms. Given the central figure’s behavior, if in fact Fögi can be perceived as the primary figure, anything but our hate may seem inappropriate, but then this probing work is about impossibilities, contradictions—and above all, resilience.

   I also realize it is nearly impossible to describe the plot of a movie about abuse, particularly when it’s an abuse sought out by the very one who himself suffers it. We don’t like to imagine or even believe that young boys actually sometimes seek out the figures who will serve as their abusers. In fact, it occurs quite often, particularly with young boys without any stable parental figure who desperately seek out love. In this case Beni Müller (Vincent Branchet), a young 15-year old impatient to leave the confines of his unloving home and also totally enchanted with the lead singer of a struggling rock band titled “The Minks.” Beni, like most young men, is a highly knowledgeable innocent, who realizes that the lead singer is rumored to be gay, but even writes him a letter to the effect that he would love to join up with the band even if he means becoming involved in gay sex.

    Whether Beni even perceives himself as being gay, doesn’t matter; he is willing to sell himself outright to the devil, given the glamour he perceives in what is actually an already washed up musician who sings the songs of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground; Beni is delighted when to be taken on as the band’s “roadie” and gradually groomed and transformed into Fögi’s sexual toy.

     For Beni is a ready initiate, so in love with the whole idea of the rock world and everything that Fögi stands for that given his undeveloped, underaged sense of being, he is ready to be molded into whatever they desire. Accepting everything that comes his way, including sex, is cool, part of the mystic the band stands for in his total adoration of the outsiderness he felt in his mother’s empty house. No one previously has bothered to even suggest who he might be, let love him for what he is.

    No one can possibility describe what such narratives gradually reveal moment by moment, just how deep embraces, kisses, fucks, and vague whisperings of love break down any logical defenses, few as they are, of a young inexperienced child. No written narrative can convey even what an hour and a half visual presentation of events summarizes. In reality, it takes hundreds of caresses, lies, promises, and eventually masses of drugs, added one by one, to break down the boy into a virtual whining dog ready to please his master until the lease becomes too tight.

     In essayistic terms, it remains inexplicable. This is a story without a plot. What happens is all in the moment to moment transformations Beni endures.

     At first, of course, it is simply a matter of feeling loved and special, even if two of the band members are straight, while the third figure Töbe (Urs Peter Halter) having perhaps once Fögi’s lover and remains still in love with him.

     The two, Beni and Töbe bond, but. of course, this is still a competition, wherein the older Töbe cannot possibly win out over a young thin frail boy doll which Beni represents to Fögi. For the first time in his life, Beni senses power, a wondrous feeling for a boy without any previous experience with love or even any significance among others in the world in which he has existed.

     I know that feeling. I wasn’t as young as 15, but I was still designated as underage in the US state where I first willingly offered up my body to older men—and I am still unrepentant! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Suddenly the sex I had been denying myself was both a source of power and immense pleasure, the feelings it produced as good as any drug might have been.

     And as with Beni and Fögi, at first there was a sense of love and the rapturous enjoyment of sex. No one ever talks about that feeling that many young abused boys feel even while they are being lured into a world they might have not truly have wished to enter had they have been of saner mind and not have been so controlled by the youthful testosterone rushing through their bodies.

     Beni is thrilled by the joy of being loved and making love simultaneously, even though the first might have been merely an illusion, and the second a chimerical experience that eventually leads one shivering back into the cold world of daily life.

     As Fögi falls more and more into the vortex of drugs, losing even the aura of celebrity he brought to his performances and any creativity he might have once possessed, Beni is increasingly forced to prostitute his life, with his former lover now serving as his pimp, simply to support Fögi’s and sometimes his own drug and drinking habits.

     Having already played the literal dog to Fögi’s S&M disintegration, it is almost pleasant to meet up with often somewhat sophisticated and well-behaved older men. But after Töbe’s tragic suicide and Beni’s increasing disdain for “old geezer men” with whom he is forced to have sex, he turns to modeling, which moves into stills that might be described as pure porn. Drugs, food, clothing and all else once provided by Fögi now are paid for by Beni, as their roles in life reverse, Fögi playing the dependent, rather mindless, and now subservient prisoner of Beni’s.

   Fögi himself seems to be slipping into a suicidal fog, at one point, totally drugged out, sinking to the bathtub waters as if he might drown. But then Fögi has always insisted, like so many performers of his generation who believed in burning themselves out in their overheated lives, that he will die before turning old. Yet even then, something pushes him back into life.

     But for Beni it is now over. He has met up with an old classmate, been given a wonderful blowjob by the man who hires him for modeling, and now proclaims “Mick Jagger is dead,” a lie that reveals that all the dreams he might have had for Fögi becoming a rock sensation are over. There are no more illusions to be had. It is the true end of innocence for Beni, the moment when youthful idealism is so totally crushed that one is doomed to cynicism for rest of one’s life, one of the many results of childhood abuse of any kind.

     Beni finally challenges Fögi by expressing the disgust he now feels for him, the fact that he has in fact not lived up to any of the magical views with which the Beni once endowed him. The rock star needs believers like Beni to make him what he is, and when the biggest and final fan tells him that he no longer matters, there is nowhere else to turn but into the grave.

      Fögi can scream, kick tables over, destroy the bits and pieces of civilization that are still left, but even he must realize it is all over. He cannot even any longer find his album of the Rolling Stone’s The Beggar’s Banquet to play in honor of what he now imagines is their death. His plea for Beni to help him find it is so painful to watch that, for at least a second, all his horrible crimes are washed away in pity for him.

     Yet despite all these horrors, between them real love still exists. This is far beyond the wallowing hate/love relationship of Albee’s characters in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This is a love of true drugged-out dementia, but love nonetheless, the need of two human beings who have helped to destroy each other’s lives. “I can understand why you don’t love me anymore,” gasps Fögi, “but I still love you.” And even the abused boy can only quietly gush out remnants of love: “All I want is to be with you. To hell with everything else.”

     They leave Zürich for a seaside vacation, with Beni knowing it means that there is no return to Switzerland, no return to Fögi’s previous world.

     Fögi now watches his young boy interreacting with others people nearer his own age, as if the pedophile Humbert Humbert had had an opportunity to see Lolita suddenly engage in conversation with the young men and women he realizes he has stolen her from. Beni talks of a possible meteorite striking the world in 2004, a truly fascinating date since in that very year, just six years later, Greg Araki released his masterpiece, Mysterious Skin which dealt with the effects of child abuse and unrequited love in a similar way with even younger boys. “A scientist made research on that. And we shall all perish,” declares Beni without any seeming qualm or fear.

    Fögi, it is clear has now determined it is time to bow out of live even earlier, and Beni, despite his renewed spirit, is willing to join him in death.

     Fögi is more than a bastard, he even is willing to take his precious gift with him to the grave. Or is he? Beni survives, convinced that Fögi gave him a lesser dosage of the drug meant to kill them both. Perhaps the monster, in the end, has become a kind a savior. We have to believe so in order to retain any love we too, by now, may feel for this fragile but highly destructive being.

     Yes Fögi is a bastard; he is a monster. But he is also a man once desperately alive and selfishly in love. If Beni can forgive him, and even still love him, deluded as he might be, how can we not?

     And finally, is it any wonder that although this film has achieved a kind of underground cult following, it has received hardly any coherent analysis?

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (February 2026).