Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh | Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) / 2024, 2025 general release

the killing kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh (screenwriters and directors) Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) / 2024, 2025 general release [36 minutes]

 

The Theater of the Absurd is still very much alive and well in the dystopian drama, Two People Exchanging Saliva of 2024.

    Set in the grand deluxe upscale clothing shops of Paris’ Galeries Lafayette, it takes us a while to recognize just how disturbed the world we have entered really is. Although we might have guessed that even the world we might already know is obsessed with very strange behavior given the fact that as customers enter the stairs to the shops they are offered, at almost any time of day, glasses of wine or champagne as they hurry off to shop.

     The young girl holding the platter of glasses, Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), is immediately spotted by the head saleswoman Pétulante (Aurélie Boquien) who quickly puts her to work lifting numerous shoe boxes in that department, which she proceeds to drop almost at the feet of one of Pétulante’s best customers Angine.

     Almost immediately the young 24 year-old establishes an almost imaginary relationship with the older woman by speaking to her in the informal “tu” and suggesting they play a game of having long been friends. When it comes time for Angine to try on dresses, Pétulante is busy helping another customer so that Malaise is forced to help her, eating into Pétulante’s notable sales records.

     Soon after we discover one of the strange laws of this somewhat recognizable world. Upon completion of the sales, Malaise takes out a sequined white glove and receives payment for Angine’s numerous purchases by slaps to her already somewhat bruised face, counting down in this case from something like 32. However, Malaise also uses the occasion to almost flirt with her customer, the slaps being not coldly doled out as a kind of punishment as they might surely have been if Pétulante were to receive the payment, but almost as playful, even joyous moments of flesh (even if covered by a glove) upon flesh.

     The bruised cheeks are, in fact, a kind of sign of being chic or least of having wealth. As the shopworkers change from their black and gray outfits to return home, we see them applying makeup that looks somewhat like bruises, obviously a sign of their own well-being outside of the workspace.

     As the shopworkers arrive and leave from work, we also witness another seeming absurdity of this society: they exit and enter through what might be described as human breath analyzers, smelling their breath to make certain they smell badly enough from the garlic that they eat during their lunch breaks and from their lack of dental hygiene. In this strange world, kissing is not permitted and, as we soon discover, is punished by death. Since we associate the kiss with love, passion, and pleasure, we should imagine that along with kissing, any kind of physical affection is also outlawed, although the film doesn’t enter that territory and doesn’t even attempt to explain how this society reproduces. Besides, the film features to children, the youngest woman being Malaise who behaves, in her game-playing rather dangerously like a delinquent.

      Yet that is her very charm, the thing that attracts Angine to her, as Malaise now regularly becomes her preferred salesclerk, much to anger of the top manager Pétulante.

       Over the course of the nine days narrated in this story by the film’s narrator (Vicky Krieps), the two women grow increasingly closer, Malaise even going to far as to purchase a toothbrush and toothpaste from the black market, even there receiving her require slaps, as she moves further to seduce Angine.

       In the bathroom Pétulante overhears Malaise brushing her teeth, a truly taboo act.

     Certainly, Angine knows of the dangers facing her as the two women grow closer. A woman, arrested in the Galeries for attempting to kiss her husband, is grabbed by guards, her head covered in a sack and her legs and hands tied and she is slipped in a cardboard box (designed, we soon discover, by Angine’s husband), sealed up and sped off the ravine into which her body is dropped, left to die if she should happen to have survived the fall.

     Angine, coming across the very space in which the “crime” according, gathers up the contents spilled from the woman’s purse, noticing several “illegal” postcards of famous artists who have sculpted and painted lovers in the midst of a kiss. Angine, keeps the purse and its contents for herself.

     That evening, at dinner, her husband and two of their friends, comment on difficult it must have been for Angine to even encounter such an event, an act which they cannot even imagine naming, Angine finally describing it as a “kiss,” the others appearing shocked as if she has just spoken a profane word.

       Malaise has told Angine that it is to be her 25th birthday and that she shall be serving a cake, almost an invitation for her new “friend” to visit her. And that evening as Malaise bites into the cupcake, there is a knock at the door. Malaise quickly reviews herself in the mirror, straightens her hair and opens up the door to find no one there. At the very end of this film, we see the scene played out from another viewpoint, as we witness Angine, having lost courage, cowering on the steps above.

    For Malaise, however, her enchanted few days are almost over, as the now jealous and bitter Pétulante plans her downfall by approaching her and putting her mouth over the girl, declaring that, in fact, the girl attacked her. Guards arrive quickly, box up Malaise and send her into the ravine.

     When Angine discovers what has happened, she hurries off to the ravine, rushing into the endless pile of box of dead bodies, pulling them open until she finally discovers Malaise, now dead, Bobak Lotfipour’s marvelous musical score swirling us up into the emotional horror of event.

    This terrifying vision of our own possible future as we as a culture turn against empathy and disdain various forms of love, won the 2026 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

Knial Saunders | Solitude / 2023

pagan christianity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Knial Saunders (screenwriter and director) Solitude / 2023 [16.29 minutes]

 

Solitude retells a story that has been expressed hundreds of time before, but seems still necessary in the third decade of the 21st century, supposedly a time when in the US, at least, gay sexuality has come to be generally accepted. But we know the truth to be something different.

    Even today, thousands of US parents believe in a pagan religion, not even close to what they describe as true Christianity, that would prefer obscure and misunderstood laws of an ancient civilization to the well-being of their own sons and daughters. Christ reified love has his primary doctrine, yet parents like Augustine (Marlo Stroud) pretends to love by declaring the very nature of her son Zeph (Jael Saran) to be a sin.

    Zeph, like so many young gay people, is not even sure he is homosexual, but he definitely admires and enjoys being around the artist Sol (Da’Von J. Solomon) who is painting a portrait of the young man with whom he is now clearly in love and who, in turn, is unknowingly in love with him. What does someone in Sol’s situation do when a young man he perceives is gay is secretly developing a crush on you? You can send him away, suggesting he work it out by himself, or help guide him to his own feelings without attempting to sway him into the gay sexuality you are certain he is seeking. Empathetic gay men know just how difficult it is to “come out,” or even to fully express emotions that are so openly being expressed in various ways that are yet invisible to the individual who can hardly contain himself. The idolized being is in the strange position of protecting while gradually revealing what the other feels is still a hidden secret. To reject him would be to destroy his burgeoning love; to fully embrace and encourage it is unthinkable to a caring and loving being admired, whose open encouragement would be a betrayal of one of the very reasons for the other’s love.

     It’s a difficult position to be in, and is not always rewarding, particularly if the family is working, as in Zeph’s case, to undermine the natural process of the individual’s discovery of himself. The decisions that are needed to be made must come from within the innocent through a great deal of pain and solitude, and many young men and women can’t literally “come through” that process of admitting their sexuality against the wall of denial that still today the society attempts to build around individual choice. Many go scurrying of, quickly marrying in a heterosexual ceremony to which they many never be able to maintain or fully commit to. The other, the loved one, is always the deceiver, the dangerous tempter or temptress, the hated other out to get hold of or convert the young innocent. Yet the innocent often cannot come to his own realization of self without the other’s love and support.

     At one point in this tale, Sol crosses the boundary before Zeph is quite ready, attempting to kiss the innocent so desiring his kisses before he is quite ready to accept it as a defining designation. A kiss inexplicably defines, in our society, sexuality. To kiss is to love and identify oneself through the implant of the lips upon another being; yet once a relationship is truly established, heterosexual or homosexual, friendly or familial, we just as quickly come to realize that kisses can be merely gestures, a false expression of love. The mother’s kisses in this film pretend to, as she puts it, love the sinner without being able to accept the sin. But since one’s sexual identity is part and parcel of the bodily sinner, such a concept is an implausible expression of love. The hug and kiss means nothing if it cannot be attached to the body on which the kiss is pasted.

     Zeph’s uncle, come to help and support the mother in altering the boy’s behavior can only express what he calls love with a brutal slug across the face. As Sol later puts it, they have already made apparent that their love and it is not something which a sentient being can accept if he values himself.

   Like so many others before him, Zeph is given no choice but to abandon his home and embrace the man he admires, in this case we are led to believe, a truly worthy choice; but in so many other cases, the first love may actually be a manipulator, a liar, someone incompatible with what the young innocent needs in order to further develop.

    Pagan believers push such sons and daughters out the door, revealing only their own failure to embrace what any true faith must accept, the sexual nature and being of the other. Sexual difference is just what it suggests, difference; it is not a sin, a crime, or an offense. Yet so many men and women describing themselves as religious beings never come to comprehend that fact, proving at heart they do not even comprehend what true belief represents.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

Peter Bogdanovich | Saint Jack / 1979

a moral man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard Sackler, Paul Theroux, and Peter Bogdanovich (screenplay, based on the book by Paul Theroux), Peter Bogdanovich (director) Saint Jack / 1979

 

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1979 film Saint Jack was filmed on location in Singapore in May and June of 1978, featuring many of the city’s landmarks, including the now lost Empress Place hawker center, Bugis Street, the former Singapore International Airport, transformed in 1981 to a military airbase, Raffles Hotel, and other major spaces. Due to the conservative government and political climate of Singapore, a city the attempting to eradicate the history of any sexual and particularly homosexual past, Bogdanovich and his crew submitted a fictitious synopsis of a film that the director himself described as “a cross between Love Is a Man Splendored Thing and Pal Joey. Even the Singaporeans involved in the production were most convinced by the fabricated narrative, not even quite perceiving what was actually happening in the shooting.

     How startled they were to later discover that the central figure of this film, Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara), a Buffalo, New York native portrays a genteel and friendly pimp, working ostensibly for a local Chinese importer but actually spending most of his time gathering up British, Americans, and European visitors and offering them nightly companionship working primarily out of a house which serves almost as his own private bordello.

     Yet we quickly perceive that if Jack is a pimp, he is unlike almost any such figure we have previously met in the movies or literature. This man is a kind of “saint,” beloved my most of the natives on the street and those working in the neighborhood, in bars, kitchens, and small shops, a man who knows everyone on sight and calls out their names with friendly aplomb. They in turn offer him and his friends liquor, cigars, and other special privileges in part because he provides so many of them and their friends jobs that certainly treat his mix of female prostitutes, transsexual women, and occasionally even a gay boy with a respect and dignity that clearly isn’t rewarded to them by the competing syndicate—determined to end Jack’s maverick operations—or for that matter by the British ex-pats, Frogget (James Villiers), Yardley (Joss Ackland), and Smale (Rodney Bewes) who drunkenly muddle through each afternoon and evening singing English melodies as if the colonials were still in control. They are tolerated only for their money and for their utter harmlessness as ghosts of something long passed.

     If Jack is also a kind of imperialist, he practices it with an almost always joyful banter and commitment to the local community that binds the locals to him and helps create a kind of shield of individuals surrounding him, some of whom do not mind playing sexual games and subservient roles for the tourists, particularly since the pay is good.

     But Jack doesn’t spend his entire time, either, as a ponce. His first action in the movie is to meet a British account at the airport and scurry him back to his inscrutable and obviously corrupt businessman employer. But once he meets the basically good if somewhat befuddled accountant, William Leigh (Denholm Elliott) who is more interested in playing a game of squash than meeting up with a whore, Jack keeps him with him the entire evening as if he were a kind of lucky token, taking him for a drink in the British expat bar, keeping him close as he hooks up a sweaty-faced Australian customer with a transsexual couple (Bridgit and Lily Ang) who play out a sex routine for the paying voyeur, and eventually even involving Leigh in a run for his life when faced with the always-following triad of syndicate enforcers (Peter Pang, Ronald Ng, and Teow Keng Seow).

    As Ron Yap argues, in what is surely one of the most intelligent and inclusive of essays on this film, “The Counter-Imperialist: Reflections on Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack (1979) by a Singaporean,” Leigh becomes symbolically Jack’s “ally,” the way in some respects, the pianist Sam served Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca.

    Leigh also serves as a representative of time in the film, his annual visits announcing the passing of years in what is otherwise almost awash of routine in Jack’s life as he maneuvers his prostitutes in and out of the arms of the passing Singapore visitors and, despite his surface expression of eternal positivity, attempts to keep the devil from catching him, like his friend Leigh also imagining a time when he will be able to afford the freedom to return to a life he has long abandoned. Leigh, with a serious heart condition, that finally ends in his death in Jack’s hands as he desperately attempts to revive him with artificial respiration, as a signal that his own time in his attempt to fulfill human desires is coming to an end.

     On the first night he meets Leigh, Jack also first encounters a beautiful Sri Lanka model Monika (Monika Subramaniam) who wears a long blue sari which she gradually unravels to almost bare her body a bit in the manner Salome. If Jack is not a particular expressive fellow when it comes to the beauty of woman, it is clear that she pleases him, and the two remain bedmates for the rest of the film until it becomes clear that Jack is contemplating an end to his Singapore activities.

     His life may have gone of for years in the dark city of pretense if it weren’t for the evil forces of the gang, who abduct him, tattooing his arms in demeaning Chinese profanities such as “Red Butt Face,” “Son of Prostitute,” and “Curse of Dog Shit,” a kind of name-calling for life. Meanwhile, the trio and the other syndicate goods ransack and wreck the brothel, the girls escaping for their lives. If he is devastated by his losses, Jack can’t allow himself to fully express it, as he immediately visits a tattoo parlor to re-tattoo both arms with various images of flowers, covering up the slurs.

     An even more pernicious force appears in the character of Eddie Schuman (Peter Bogdanovich), a CIA operative who convinces Jack to become the ponce for an army station set up only to bus the soldiers serving in Viet Nam and elsewhere in the East Asia into it for a relaxing weekend or more of sexual pleasures. Eddie reclaims the Civil War legend that the word “hooker” came about from the illicit gatherings of men serving under General Joseph Hooker followed by a contingent of prostituted nicknamed “Hooker’s Brigade.” The word “hooker used to mean prostitute, however, appears to have been in use at least as early as 1845, long before Hooker came to prominence.

     It doesn’t matter, however, since Eddie is simply convinced that it is good for morale, and as far as Jack goes, it is simply another way to put his knowledge and connections to good use. At one point, with the promised visit of a US commander, Jack is asked to scrounge up a boy, this particular commander’s preference. No problem, Jack suggests. But it is a problem, a true moral dilemma, when soon after he is asked to follow a visiting senator who evidently is speaking out too strongly against the US activities in Asia. Jack is asked to film him in a compromising situation.

As we have seen, Jack does have moral principles, even if he does not recognize sexual fulfillment as being involved. Yet the payment of $25,000 or more is tempting, particularly since it might offer him a way out of his nefarious activities and a return to some sense of “normalcy.”

     The senator, played in a quite ironic bit of casting by one-time James Bond performer (George Lazenby, himself a kind of conjure artist, worming his way into the role without any acting experience simply by showing up for the audition in a tuxedo).

     It almost seems as if Jack is ready to turn in his halo as he follows the senator out of the Shangri-La Hotel, picking up a young Asian boy along the way before checking into the Hilton and returning to the street to provide him with his room number.

    Jack follows up, paying the kid for the room number, and begging him to keep the door unlocked. When the boy finally does visit the senator in his room, Jack sneaks a peek through the door, snapping a picture of the boy in the nude being hugged by the senator.

     By the next morning, it appears that he actually is planning to return to the US, with, as I suggest above, Monika determining it’s also time for her to return home. But when he exist his room to see Eddie sitting across the street on a park bench, he simply cannot give up his saintly bonhomie and refuses to hand over any evidence, soon after tossing the camera he’s placed in a small package into the ocean.

     This brilliant film was banned in Singapore until 2006, while most of the rest of the world got to enjoy Gazzara’s brilliant performance and a film the critic Liam Sherwin-Murray nicely summarized in The Paris Review:    

     

“A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event. Saint Jack is laid-back, even chill. Applied to heavy material, this attitude usually produces a comedy, but Saint Jack, while full of funny moments, achieves something serious: the sublime.”

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

Peter Jackson | Heavenly Creatures / 1994

enemy of the people

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson (screenplay), Peter Jackson (director) Heavenly Creatures / 1994

 

Based on the real-life murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1954, in which two girls, aged 16 and 15, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme killed Pauline’s mother by bludgeoning her over the head. The murder was trumpeted in all the papers as the girls were described as ruthless child-villains.

     The truth, which Peter Jackson attempts to portray in his 1994 film, was far more interesting and complex and involves the girl’s relationship beginning in 1952, when the beautiful Juliet transfers from the Bahamas and elsewhere to the Christchurch school where the working class Pauline is enrolled.

     The younger of the girls, Juliet (brilliantly played in this film in her first major movie role by Kate Winslet) just 13 years of age is well-traveled, sophisticated, and knowledgeable, taking out time in her very first class to correct her French teacher’s grammar, immediately catapulting her, as she probably has been throughout her young years, into the domain of the outsider where Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) sits brooding.

     The girls immediately discover that both have had sickly childhoods, Juliet suffering from different lung difficulties and Pauline needing serious operations to her legs, the scars of which impress her new friend. As they sit out gym class, both find they also share an obsession with the then popular movie tenor, Mario Lanza, hot from The Toast of New Orleans (1950), The Great Caruso (1951), Because You’re Mine (1952), and The Student Prince (1954).

      Both girls are highly intelligent and display a dark sense of wit, but Juliet, in particular, pulls  Pauline into her far more well-off world, with educated, open-minded parents—her father Henry (Clive Merrison) is a professor and her mother Hilda (Diana Kent) is a psychiatrist—and into her highly imaginative romantic world in which she argues for “the Fourth World,” a heaven without Christians that celebrates music and art.

      As the girls paint, together write a long romantic novel whose characters they play out in their own lives, and create plasticine figurines of the characters of their imaginary kingdom Borovnia, both girls imagine that they actually are, at moments, in that fourth dimension, a world of such beauty and splendor that it is indescribable to all others.

     At about this same time, Pauline receives a diary book for Christmas from her poor parents and begins to write a series of diaries that expresses their private world and were later used to convict her and Juliet of the murder. All of the spoken narrative and many actual lines in the film were taken from Pauline’s diaries.

      Jackson, as his later Lord of the Rings trilogy makes clear, was the perfect director to create the fantastical worlds of these young “heavenly creatures.” Indeed, their world, as they run endlessly through space both indoors and out, does seem almost heavenly. The talents of both girls are suddenly drawn out by the other as they together fall romantically in love, the beautiful Juliet playing the Princess and Pauline playing her Prince consort.

      At one point, Juliet even gives birth, played out quite convincingly with a pillow, in which she produces a royal son who unfortunately proves his mettle by killing off many in the court in an unpredictable attempt to protect both his mother and father.

       As a year passes, the girls in puberty begin to realize their actions of love in a manner than more closely parallels lesbian love, which disturbs Juliet’s father enough that he pays a visit to Pauline’s mother Honora (Sarah Peirse), who terrified by the news sends her daughter to a physician recommended by Dr. Hulme, who typical of the profession of the day, immediately describes her daughter’s obsessions as an unnormal one (whispering the word homosexual), that perhaps she will grow out of or, if not, must be corrected by other methods.

     The ignorant working woman is worried enough by day to day living to know how to help her daughter escape the strange “affliction.”

      When Juliet is diagnosed with an infection of pneumonia in one lung, both their parents seem to feel that they prayers have been answered as the girls are necessarily separated. But the situation merely intensifies the girls’ love for each other, as they write each other daily in both their own voices and those of their fictional characters. Juliet, moreover, locked away in a clinic with other sick individuals, with her parents choosing this moment to take an extended vacation together, is so totally isolated that her entire attention is now focused on “Paul” and she has long before renamed Pauline.

      During this same period, a male boarder at the Parker home, John (Jed Brophy) is attracted to the chubby teenage girl who made her own bedroom in a family outhouse, and one night sneaks out to snuggle up in her bed, Pauline being so amazed that a boy might be attracted to her that she accepts and even encourages his rape.

     Now Honora and her husband are faced with even further terrors and their newly enforced restrictions only further turn Pauline against them, particularly her mother whom, in comparing her coarse manners with those of Juliet’s mother, she grows to hate.

      When Pauline even describes the boy’s attraction to her, Juliet grows so jealous that she gives up all heterosexual intentions and grows into an even deeper lesbian-like love with Juliet. Whether or not their shared bathing situations, bedtime snuggling, kissing, and perhaps further sexual explorations can truly be described as lesbian is open to question, since both girls also still fantasize about males making love to them, Lanza of course, but even the hideous Orson Welles whose horrific behavior in The Third Man (1949) haunts but also excites their sexual imaginations.

      There is no doubt, like many young girls of their age, they lived a full sexual life, but frankly playing out their Borovnian fantasies with out-sized plasticine figures, as Jackson and his special effects co-workers Richard Taylor and George Port do may result in visual wonderment for some, but for me seemed just to be silly. There is no reason to suspect that the girls imaginatively kept their court in the form of their plastic figurines. Surely they transformed them, through their imaginations into handsome, colorful living figures.

      But if the girls might have remained somewhat innocent about real sexual events, the world around them did not spare them. Even as Juliet’s parents return and any normality, such as it might be, is restored, without them even knowing it the girls’ beloved father and for Pauline fatherly model is fired from his professorship and given until the end of the year to find a new position. Alas, the reasons for this action remain vague, something which I wish the film at looked at more carefully.

     The film does, however, look quite specifically at the behavior of Juliet’s beloved mother, for Pauline the representative of all her own mother can never be, has been leading some of her male psychiatric patients to her own bed, ultimately even suggesting one of them, Bill Perry (Peter Elliott) move into their house for recuperation. When Juliet discovers the two, Bill and her saintly mother, in bed together she threatens to tell her father, only to be told that her father already knows and the two are planning eventually to divorce.

      As if that were not enough, the Hulmes soon reveal to their daughter and her friend that her father is returning to England and the daughter is being sent off to South Africa to lives with a relative.

      In short, both girls’ life and love is simultaneously shattered in numerous ways. And even their plots to escape together before the dreaded day fail when Pauline discovers she cannot obtain a passport so that she might escape with Juliet to Hollywood without her mother’s signature.

    For Pauline in particular, but since the girls now almost share minds, for Juliet as well, Honora becomes the symbol of almost everything that stands in their way. The result is not so much planned but almost inevitable, the reality played out in shocking detail—the first instance in which the camera has taken us out of their perspective—as they hit the mother over the head with a brick enveloped in a woman’s stocking again and again.

      With the proof of Pauline’s diaries, the girls were both tried for murder, but their convictions as minors lasted only 5 years each, released on the condition that they would never see one another again.

      Pauline disappeared from sight and has not been heard from since. Juliet moved to Scotland where she became a murder mystery writer under the pseudonym of Anne Parey. Jackson and Walsh did not attempt to contact Parey nor track down Pauline, choosing to allow them their peace, however they have come to it.

       Heavenly Creatures may not, ultimately, be a tale that reveals much about the so-called lesbian relationship of these two individuals, but it certainly deals with their queerness, representing them as the ultimate outsiders, urban “goths” long before they came into existence.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).