Stefen Henszelman | Venner for altid (Friends Forever) / 1987

a straight kristian pilgrim’s gay progress

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stefan Henszelman and Alexander Kørschen (screenwriters), Stefen Henszelman (director) Venner for altid (Friends Forever) / 1987

 

Danish director Stefan Henszelman’s 1987* film Venner for altid (Friends Forever) is an odd LGBTQ film, if you can even describe it as such.

     The central figure of the work, Kristian (Claus Bender Mortensen) is a shy, new boy at a rough-and-tumble city school seeking out friends who might allow him to discover himself. In fact, you might describe Kristian as a rather passive, open template of a human being just waiting for someone to help to shape and define him. Kristian is certainly an utter innocent for whom we might take pity except, as the work’s epigraph “Innocence is no excuse,” warns us, it is difficult to forgive the central character, who hides behind his youthful innocence as an excuse for his rather selfish behavior as he betrays first, the friendship proffered by Henrik (Thoms Elholm), and later, turns against his other new friend Patrick (Thomas Sigsgaard).

      Early on in the film, I quickly grew to dislike Kristian and the movie in general because of his diffident attitude toward those around him, until I finally began to see Kristian as precisely what his name suggests, the Christian of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress who, having left the City of Destruction (his past and lost world we learn nothing about) goes bumbling about seeking to find meaning in his life, finally being guided by Obstinate and Pliable, the former who quickly leaves him and the latter who uses Bunyan’s pilgrim’s moral flexibility for his own advantage until they arrive at the Slough of Despond.

     In this instance, however, I might describe the Bunyan-like hero Kristian as representing normality, an inexperienced, unknowing, and a totally uneducated being who simply wants to find the easiest way to get through his new encounters and the rest of his life.

     And since, as normality, he so firmly represents the Everyman, almost anyone with true emotions, values, and some learning stands out and apart. In this case, we might describe both figures to whom he is attracted as being “queer” simply because Kristian is so unformed and undefined as a human being.

     Henrik, who first attempts to become Kristian’s friend, is obviously someone with an intellectual bent, fascinated by astronomy but equally knowledgeable—when Kristian mentions “astrology,” confusing it with the study of bodies in outer space—in aspects of the tarot, science fiction, and other esoteric information. Henrik is also a practitioner of Tai chi, using it both for its meditative and martial arts benefits. By daily meditating he finds a way to tune out the daily banal lunacy of his fellow students, and by using it as a form of martial arts he is able to protect himself from the bullying of Patrick and his thuggish chums. Henrik also seems interested in a kind of “New Wave” music and regularly attends the concerts of one of its composers. Finally, he wears a pony-tale and stands apart from all the others during school recesses performing the meditative positions of Tai chi—all signifying, one might argue, his obstinacy against the way the world around him defines the “other.”

       Sexually, Henrik stands as a kind of cypher, immediately catching the good-looking Kristian’s eye, and quickly inviting him into this room to describe his interests, providing him with tapes of his favorite composer and even loaning him his walk-man so that he might listen to them. He  immediately offers to show Kristian the basic Tai chi movements and makes an appointment to begin the instruction. One of his first questions is whether or not Kristian has a girlfriend, a sure bead dropped by gay boys in order to determine to even proceed any further. Kristian, at that moment, replies that he does not.

     Moreover, in his enthusiasm, Henrik is constantly leaning forward and moving into Kristian’s private space, at times almost impulsively touching him as he attempts to help the new boy find the proper art gestures and posture for the martial arts positions. In his always eager approaches to Kristian we cannot but help suspect that he might also be attracted to Kristian’s body as well as the state of his mind. And any gay individual naturally almost wishes for the two handsome boys to develop a deeper rapport.

    On the first day after meeting Henrik, Kristian seems almost overwhelmed by Henrik’s brief discussions with him, parroting back the new information he’s already gleaned from his conversation with Henrik to other students who might listen, while being mocked, in turn, by Patrick and his gang. Already by the end of the day, however, Kristian has cooled to the idea of being best friends with Henrik as—galvanized by the equally frenetic actions of the good-looking blond Patrick—he watch him, almost painfully, absenting himself from his appointment with Henrik.

     His attraction to Patrick’s behavior, however, is disturbing, particularly since it includes the quite brutal attack on a girl in their classroom involving what one might almost describe as a rape in which Patrick and his friends attempt to pull off her sweater; Kristian blindly enters into the fray succeeding in stripping off the sweater and handing it over to Patrick, who tosses it out the window, forcing the now half-nude girl to escape the room to retrieve it as the school authorities suddenly arrive to bring order. Patrick and Kristian escape together into the school bathroom, while the principal rounds up the other boys. In a bathroom stall a couple of boys are enjoying a marijuana joint, which they quickly hand over to Patrick who shares it with Kristian, bonding the two naughty boys and bringing the newcomer into his sway.

     Patrick is now in control of Pliable Kristian’s destiny, and the boy indeed acts somewhat like a piece of putty in Patrick’s hands. On their first night out, Patrick engages the acts of hooliganism, such as pulling up a street sign, breaking out store windows, and minor acts of theft before one of the group, Anders (Lars Kylmann Jacobsen) takes it too far, pulling up the parking sign and crashing it into the windows of a nearby shop, setting off the police warning signal. Soon after, Patrick confides that Anders has twice before been arrested, once for car theft.

     If you were a parent—and notably there are no parents portrayed in this film—you might certainly be worried about who Kristian has chosen to be his best friend. And soon after, Obstinacy represented by Henrik tells Kristian that he is moving away with his family to Lisbon, leaving our confused hero completely under Patrick’s sway.

     Patrick loses no time, inviting his new friend to visit the disco in which he works and insisting that Kristian also get a job at the local video store so that we too might have the money to manipulate the world around him. Despite his seemingly chaotic nature, Patrick actually as two jobs, besides working as a dishwasher and set-up boy at the disco, by morning he delivers papers all so that he might make enough money to get his own apartment, freeing him from the control of his parents.

     Soon after, Patrick moves into his new flat, shared with several others, inviting Kristian to hang out there, and after a drunken night at the disco with his friend, permitting him to sleep over in his new place.

     By this time, it is quite clear that Patrick is not only “queer” in his bullying schoolboy behavior but is also actively gay, and Patrick’s sleep-over certainly hints that the innocent may soon be forced to come into at least some sort of recognition of the world around him and of his own sexuality. Yet nothing happens, making it clear that even Patrick perceives that Kristian is a lost cause, a best friend with no real comprehension of who or what others are.

     Having met an older female singer at the disco—a hangout also for the gay scene—Kristian meets up later with the woman who entices the shy beauty into bed. Kristian is so delighted with the sexual event that he immediately falls head over heels for the older woman, telling her “jeg elsker dig” (“I love you”) in a puppy-dog-like manner that reminds us once again just how unworldly this young man is.

      When he observes Patrick being kissed by an older soccer player, Mads (Morten Stig Christensen), on the field, Kristian is unsurprisingly shocked and immediately pulls away from his “best friend,” an entirely predictable series of events given that Kristian is clearly a product of what anyone might define as normal and has given absolutely no thought to possible alternatives to his simplistic thinking.

      You might say, without taking the Bunyan metaphor too far, that Kristian has now fallen into the Slough of Despond, overwhelmed by fears of his own doubts, temptations, lusts, shames, guilts, and sins—although one might easily argue that our Kristian is too shallow of a thinker to fully be knowledgeable of any of these abstract concepts. He is simply depressed, and unable to accept the abnormality of his friend’s life despite an open conversation with his new love interest, Berit (Trine Torp Hansen), about homosexuality.

      In a school extra-curricular event, supported by the Danish government, wherein a man has been asked to speak to the student body about possibilities of employment, Patrick rather cheekily asks whether his being gay might not be a qualification of getting a job, actually rather a savvy question given the growing Danish awareness—long before other countries—of the need for diversification in their working force. Moreover, his being gay was perhaps the very reason he was hired by The Disco in which he works. The speaker, however, simply hems and haws, unable to really speak to the question as Patrick’s fellow students howl in laugher, seeing the unanswerable question only as another of his numerous pranks. The angered Kristian, however, interrupts, asking why they are laughing since Patrick is really gay. That statement not only leads to a stunning quietude among the students, but opens up the room to a possibly profound discussion of sexuality and its effects on everyday life which, however, is immediately squelched by the rektor, Kallenbach (Rita Angela). It is as if Kristian’s “Help” of the Bunyan parable were pushed away at the very moment when Kristian most needed him.

     Suddenly, in his outburst Kristian is aware that he has not only revealed his close-mindedness, but will now be recognized by his fellow students as either someone who has betrayed his best friend or as a person who himself, since he has been so close to Patrick, may be gay.

     It appears suddenly that help may have come to save the day. Having worked with Berit as a coordinator for the very student even that has now been closed down, Kristian sneaks back into the school to print out an illegal flier declaring “Hands off, Kallenbach,” during which as the small printer accomplishes the job, director Henszelman presents us with a montage of scenes portraying the good times shared by Kristian and Patrick previously in the flick. Obviously taking political action also has begun to awaken Kristian’s consciousness as well.

      Rushing over the Patrick’s apartment to present him with his accomplishments, however, he bursts into his former friends room only to find him being fucked by Mads. The very reality of the situation causes a kind of breakdown of Kristian’s formerly exterior of silence, as he breaks down into a confession of his having been a coward while simultaneously being unable to work out the fact of Patrick and Mad’s sexual acts. Holding the boy around the shoulder to comfort him, Mads attempts to calm down Kristian, explaining that in fact they are not ones like them, as Kristian incoherently insists, and that the “strangeness” he feels about the whole thing doesn’t truly effect his own relationships with girls, to which Kristian cannot resist reporting that he has had a day of sex with the older singer, Ayoe. Patrick’s sudden injection of “Wow, that must have been quite an experience,” calms Kristian down, as they pack up the bags of fliers ready for their protest against the autocrats.

       The rest of the movie, however, seems as quickly patched together as that last scene has been. How has suddenly Kristian been so quickly swayed away from his homophobia? And how does tossing out piles of fliers proclaiming their rights to hold such extracurricular meetings featuring the phrase “Hands off, Kallenbach” win over the recalcitrant authorities to their cause.

      And what does a Bombay-like musical production number of the major figures dressed up in Renaissance-like costumes have to do with anything? I suppose the director simply felt that such a grand Danish hootenanny might convince his youthful viewers that everything has turned out for the best in the end, and that his characters’ former differences and wounds have now been healed.

      But I’m not convinced since it appears that once again normality has won the day, even it permitting a little gay sex, once in a while, on the side. I’m still obstinately more interested in what became of Hendrik, and would like to fly off to Lisbon to find out.

      Finally, what does this film’s title actually mean? Do Patrick and Kristian drive off into the sunset to live out their lives together as a gay couple? I doubt it. And besides, Mads is far more attractive, at least from my point of view.

 

*This film was released and copyrighted in 1987, although there is evidence that it was filmed at least two or three years earlier.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

Eric de Kuyper | Pink Ulysses / 1990

where the boys are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric de Kuyper (screenplay and director) Pink Ulysses / 1990

 

Having now watched three films, Casta diva (1982), A Very Strange Love Affair (1985), and Pink Ulysses (1990)—I have yet to find a copy to view his 1983 musical Naughty Boys—I can say with some confidence by the Belgium Flemish film director Eric de Kuyper, is one of the true greats of LGBTQ+ cinema. Filled with homoerotic images of beautiful boys, de Kuyper’s works show in varying forms, from a series of operatic tableaux vivants portraying pretty and handsome men in various relationships, to a fairly realistic romance of a boy who falls in love with his professor, to an utterly artificed series of staged tableaux and images stolen from movies, opera, and ballet that impressionistically recreate Ulysses leaving Ithaca, journeying to Troy, and in a slow 20-year cycle returning home to destroy the hundreds of Penelope his wife’s suitors.

   Lest you imagine that this is a rather boring series of on-the-road scenes representing Ulysses’ endless voyages, think again. Letterboxd commentator Nikola Gocic summarizes it quite perfectly:

“Taking cues from [Bob] Mizer’s beefcake photos, and offerings by the likes of [Pier Paulo] Pasolini, [Werner] Schroeter, [James] Bidgood and [Derek] Jarman, Flemish-Belgian and Dutch writer, semiologist, art critic and film director Eric de Kuyper loosely adapts the Odysseus myth into a formally daring, deliberately artificial experimental feature centered around the theme of homoeroticism. As Penelope waits for her beloved’s return to Ithaca, her home draped in many warmly hued layers of fabric, the hero’s adventure is broken into a series of sthenolagnia-inspired vignettes some of which presumably represent his visions. Glued with the cleverly inserted found footage – including, inter alia, the hammock sequence from Battleship Potemkin – these often anachronistic ‘sketches’ betray the author’s keen eye for striking visual composition, as well as his penchant for amped-up melodramatics reflected in his obsession with classical music and vintage ballads. De Kuyper’s intention is, apparently, not to retell the legend, but rather to explore the cinema’s painterly potentials, unapologetically objectifying the male body.”

One doesn’t need a plot to see the basic elements of Ulysses in his voyages to Troy, the island of the lotus eaters—hinted at through even the youthful Ulysses and later the elder version munching on the petals of roses which call up immediately associations with Schroeter’s masterwork The Rose King—his encounters with Calypso pretending to be Penelope, his survival on the beach of the friendly Phaecians, his journey, bound to the stern of the ship, through the straights of the Sirens, and his eventual return home where he poses as a beggar, testing both Penelope’s and his servant’s faithfulness previous to revealing himself to her and to his son Telemachus, who together roll in ecstatic homosexual joy in their reunion, before they join forces to kill all of Penelope’s suitors and their supporters.

    Yet, as de Kuyper makes clear, his is also a new telling, and in this version, the young beautiful Ulysses, tired with his feminized role of ironing his own clothes, and being refrained from his mad, almost demotic male dances, escapes his marriage to undergo his long voyage. Even if during those long years, his wife has successfully fought off her suitors, surely she suspected the attraction of the male body to her husband, as one scene clearly depicts. Having finally returned home to kill off all the other available males, Penelope, fed up with her husband’s homosexual adventures, literally stabs a “quill” into the back, rewriting this history, ending in a vast staged modernist reenactment of the pietà—the image that appeared in nearly all the early (version A) gay “coming out” films of figures such as Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, and so many others.

    Finally, having properly brought his body into the Christian myth, de Kuyper’s pagans gather round the corpse and celebrate in a Classical version of an Irish wake, with bread, fruit, and numerous bottles of wine.

    If James Bidgood’s remarkable Pink Narcissus celebrated the artist’s individual fantasies, this filmmaker has captured an epic vision of the conflicted male drive, men moving away from their women to explore the suffering and pain of the male world of war in a search for tough love, the stereotypical struggle of male into manhood that is not always what it pretends to be. All that bouncing around on each other’s bodies, just perhaps, so de Kuyper’s work hints, represents a far more meaningful battle than the conquering of the female uterus. Women suffer from within, while men must push out to explore their own brutal bodies.

     If this myth is truly misogynistic, de Kuyper does not apologize anymore than he did in A Very Strange Love Affair for a young boy stalking his professor. This artist sees the sexual world very much from a viewpoint in which men struggle to control the direction of their lives—he even poses himself as the director in the final scene—but is actually a space in which females ultimately determine history. If the patriarchal story is all about Ulysses and his mostly male encounters, it is finally Calypso, Circe, Penelope, and Athena who control his fate.

    De Kuyper takes on major issues of sex and gender that few others of his generation ever attempted.

    Pink Ulysses signaled an entirely new generation of filmmakers of the likes of André Téchiné,

Isaac Julien, Constantine Giannaris, Michael Brynntrup, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, Roberto Fiesco, Bruce LaBruce, Cheryl Dunye, Tom Kalin, Sally Potter, Ming-liang Tsai, Gregg Araki, Amos Guttman, and so very many others.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).

Madeleine Gottlieb | Bound / 2023 [TV episode, Erotic Stories, Episode 3]

removing the braces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alistair Baldwin (screenwriter), Madeleine Gottlieb (director) Bound / 2023 [27 minutes] [TV episode, Erotic Stories, Episode 3]

 

Episode 3, one of three LGBTQ works in the series of eight “erotic stories” presented on Australian (SBS) TV, concerns a handsome young man, CJ (Joel Lago), suffering the results of childhood cerebral palsy. CJ is a sexually active gay man who is active on Grindr, although often doing himself harm in some of his sexual activities. Even his doctor advises him that “Someone else’s pleasure isn’t worth your pain.”

    Yet CJ has a kind of comic, but bitter response to his own disabilities, in part oversensitive to the selfishness of abled others, such as the perfectly healthy businessman who is impatient that he give up his disabled seat of the subway, while at the same time refusing to be perceived as somehow disabled and, in particular, of being regarded as worthy of being treated as someone different and special for his disability. To resolve the stand-off with the businessman, he gives up his seat, while allowing the attentions of another able being who sits in the same section, Jet (Tim Draxl), a slightly older but still trim and good-looking man, who invites him to an evening party at new gay sex bar, providing him not only a “special entrance” but a key that gives him an unexplained special entrance.

     CJ is not at all sure that he wants to attend the “special opening” of the club, but is fascinated by what he later describes as a “hot” man who has approached him in the subway, who also noticed that CJ wears leg braces, not necessarily a good sign since some, seeing them some immediately respond with pity, while others with have a kinkier attraction that involves pain and domination.

     Not only is CJ whisked through the long waiting line, but is shown his way upstairs where Jet in a S&M room decked out with a metal bed, bejeweled with handcuffs, leg locks, and other devices to give further pain to Jet’s visitors, and longer sexual pleasure to himself. As Jet attempts to woo him into the bed, he explains that his S&M attractions began with handcuffs, moved on to ropes, and from there to various other devices, ending in his obsession with the handicapped, all with the express purpose of confusing the pain and pleasure that he has come to associate with his own gay sexuality. CJ is tempted to play along, realizing at last why his leg braces has attracted Jet, but is hardly able to keep a straight face as the man reveals his pleasure in suffering—particularly since he has spent his life suffering without much pleasure involved. Why, he demands to know does Jet bring disable people into his “freak fetish stuff.”

     Finally, he quickly demands release and leaves the premises only to meet up with a disabled woman who he has previously encountered at the doctor’s office, Blue (Crystal Nguyen) who is wheelchair bound.

     She has come her precisely looking for action from those who perceive her as a “freak,” which CJ argues Jet was trying to make him. She has long ago accepted the term, although she is surprised when the word comes out of her fellow disabled friend’s own mouth.

     Recognizing that he has for most of his life fighting against the just such a designation, he returns to the bar, finding Jet in a far humbler state of mind. Jet admits that he has always perceived himself, just for being gay, one of the freaks of life or what some of as have reclaimed as our birthright, among the people who are born “queer.” Yet most of his gay friends have gone on to claim their “normalcy,” to marry, have children, live basically heterosexual lives. For Jet, he is still a “freak,” a queer who identifies with the old vision of the separatist homosexual experience.

     Finally, recognizing a shared perspective without the victimization that Jet tried to impose, the two do begin to make real love without all the apparatus.

     On his way home on the subway, a stranger asks about why he is wearing “that,” and instead of immediately reacting with a quip or bracing for an outpour of meaningless sympathy, he simply explains that he has had cerebral palsy. But the stranger is not all talking about his leg braces but CJ’s hole-punched leather halter. CJ finally smiles: “To get attention,” he admits.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).

      

Davide Ferrario | Figli di Annibale (Children of Hannibal) / 1998

permanent outsiders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Davide Ferrario and Diego Abatantuono (screenplay, based on a story Ferrario, Abatantuono, and Sergijo Rubini), Davide Ferrario (director) Figli di Annibale (Children of Hannibal) / 1998

 

Davide Ferrario’s comedy Children of Hannibal begins with a group of mostly unemployed workers sitting around a table outdoors near a workers’ food stop. They are discussing their options for employment and wonder what their friend Domenico (Silvio Orlando) might have planned, particularly since he has suggested that he intends to buy a motorbike. The long stringy-haired, slovenly ex-paint factory worker (we never learn whether he mixed paints, applied them, and simply sold paint) grunts instead of answering at the very moment a waiter brings him a paper back, inside of which is a gun. In the distance he spots a cat and rushes over to him, grabbing him up by the ruff, and in the very next scene, on a train heading North, has put the cat into a small cage.

     A moment later, Domenico stands in a city square facing four large Italian banks. Putting the gun under the cloth at the bottom of the cage, he enters the least officious of these, lifting up his cat in the cage as an excuse for not having put all metal objects into a container before being buzzed into the building. He immediately goes to a teller who reports that he closing the line for a banker’s meeting, something one might almost expect of a bank robber in a Woody Allen film; but our bungling hero pulls out the gun and insists that the teller nonetheless fill a bag with money.

     At the very same moment, a female bank guard draws a gun aimed at the would-be robber. With money bag in hand Domenico choses a stranger just entering the lobby from within the bank and puts the gun to his head, forcing the guard to toss down her gun.

     With his hostage Tommaso (Diego Abatantuono), Domenico exits the bank only to ask him if he has a car, Tommaso amazed that his stupid kidnapper has not even planned his get-away. He hurries him to his car as they speed off, on Domenico’s command, to Switzerland.

     Having driven only a few miles, the hostage tries to convince his kidnapper that going South would be the better route, but Domenico, who doesn’t like hot weather because has asthma, we latter learn, and wants to leave the country via Switzerland, without realizing that even his millions of stolen lire will not go nearly far in that country as it might in the South of Italy or, as we soon perceive to be the hostage’s desired destination, Africa—more specifically Egypt. Commanded to make the turn-off toward Switzerland, Tommaso takes off into another direction, South.

     Demanding he stop the car, Domenico forces his hostage out, but the stubborn Tommaso, frustrated with his kidnapper’s incompetence, easily pulls away the gun (which isn’t even loaded) and demands Domenico return to the car to travel with him to the South.

       On the way, he stops by an old night club/hotel/entertainment center, now in terrible decay. As a fairly successful businessman, he has just purchased it and hopes to return it to its former glory. Indeed, his visit to the bank was to get a loan; but they have turned him down, and he is now close to default. He attempts to share his dreams with Domenico of the glorious vision he has for restoring the place as if the bank robber were simply an investor, with the money Domenico has in his bag aching for just the right project.    

     In any event, he convinces his temporary captor that the police would have been waiting for him at the Swiss border, but wouldn’t at suspect that he’d turn around and go South—the route of Hannibal, the Italian conqueror whose darker blood, so the anti-racist Italians claim, is in most of the Italian race.

     So this wondrous on the road farce begins, as Tommaso first stops by his own house where, as he puts it, the bitch is fortunately still out. He manages to get the door open, but his wife keeps changing the burglar alarm code, remembering that she has changed it to their dog’s birthdate just in time before it goes off. At the house, he picks out a good-looking sports coat for Domenico to wear so that he won’t draw attention for the T-shirt he is wearing. He packs his suitcase. But at the next moment his teenage daughter Rita (Valentina Cervi) returns home and he is forced to explain that he is going away for a while, but will eventually help her to also “escape.” He insists that she tell her mother that she’s seen him. And they’re off.

    Along the way, in this infectious farce Tommaso forces Domenico to get a haircut, considerably improving his appearance. Eventually, as they reach the southern provinces, he stops for a police car, Domenico becoming terrified. But Tommaso only pulls out their bags, opens the police car’s trunk and puts them inside, explaining that the policeman, Orfeo (Flavio Insinna) is a friend.

     For a minute the two, Tommaso and Orfeo walk away a moment, as Domenico—now totally frustrated with how things have turned out—makes a call to a friend, attempting to explain what’s happened, telling him, “it’s complicated.” As he turns to look in the direction of the couple, he now notices them in a deep embrace, kissing. He turns back to his phone conversation, adding that it’s even more complicated than he can explain. So we discover that Tommaso and Orfeo are gay lovers which, when one recalls his financial situation, makes Tommaso a man who has been waiting for just such an opportunity that the confused worker has given him.

      Domenico, now a pawn, is taken to Orfeo’s aunt’s home, where Domenico and Tommaso must hold up, sharing a bedroom for a few days or perhaps weeks. The half-deaf aunt hasn’t a clue who her two guests are, having no radio or TV filled with reports about the robbery or a telephone—much to Domenico’s consternation, since Tommaso has tossed his cellphone away. As Tommaso heads to the beach, Domenico sneaks off to find a phone, speaking to his lawyer about what kind of sentence he might get and whether or not Italy has extradition rights in Egypt, in the process providing the police obviously with their whereabouts.

      Within days, Domenico has made friends with the aunt, with whom he gambles, using his stolen bank money as he loses time and again. Meanwhile, Tommaso arranges for a boat to take them to Egypt. To complicate matters further, however, Orfeo shows up with Tommaso’s daughter Rita, having found her in the train station. She has determined to join them, freeing herself from her mother’s (and father’s) bourgeois control of her life.

       Attempting to explain who Orfeo is, Tommaso indicates that Orfeo and Domenico are a “couple,” forcing the two to play the roles that Domenico has observed from his cohort. Domenico, now beyond any ability to be startled by new events, plays along nicely, but Orfeo is so angered by Tommaso’s denial of his existence and perhaps the closeted life they both have had to play for so very long that he threatens to break up with his real lover.

      Rita becomes interested in the relationship and begins to query Domenico on all sorts of personal aspects of his life: when did he first realize he was gay? how did he meet Orfeo and know it was love? etc, questions to which Domenico, good sport by now, attempts to answer.

       Finally obtaining, through Domenico’s phone-calling buddy, a three wheeled wagon, the trio moves on to the southern port where they are to meet a boat, but not before a final stop-off to see Domenico’s blind sister Carmela who is staying in an institution nearby. Wary of visiting her himself, Domenico sends Tommaso to check out her condition. Given the fact that the overweight and very angry Carmela greets him with a knife, Domenico has been correct in his fears. She is furious with her treatment at the institution and for his having helped to keep her there.

      The trip resumes, but they are soon stopped by police who this time are not friendly acquaintances, but demand their car registration and their identification—upon which Tommaso discovers Carmela has stolen his wallet—and believe that the hidden Domenico in the back to be an Albanian they are sneaking into the country. Fortunately, Orfeo again comes to their rescue, taking them in his car to the small port village where they put up for a couple of days in a hotel.

     It is there that Rita, sneaking into Domenico’s bedroom realizes that it is Orfeo and her father who are the “couple,” as she joins Domenico in bed.

     Tommaso and Orfeo make up, but he still cannot convince him to join them in their flight. When he returns to his own room to discover his daughter and Domenico in bed together, he becomes infuriated, ready to kill his former kidnapper, business-partner, "gay" buddy, and friend! Both Domenico and Rita attempt to explain that they sleeping in each other’s arms was other utterly innocent, and Rita turns the tables, so to speak, when she demands to know why her father hadn’t been honest about his relationship with Orfeo. She doesn’t at all mind that he has found his true love in the form of another man, but that he hasn’t shared it with her angers her, just as it has hurt Orfeo.

     But they hardly have the opportunity to assimilate their new set of relationships before Domenico’s sister Carmela also shows up, having escaped from her institutional “prison,” ready to join the gang.

     When they finally arrive at the pick-up spot, there is no boat there, and they wait with a storm rising on the horizon with nowhere further South to go. They have come to the end of the voyage.

     The boat (the “Federico Fellini”) does finally show up, helmed by a basically drunken sailor Ermes (Ugo Conti) who takes them most of the way before passing out.

     Seemingly stranded they are greeted by a much smaller vessel of immigrants from Africa to Italy heading in the other direction—the real “Hannibal’s children,” whereas these confused emigrants remain unsure of their destination. The Africans, given the increasingly nationalist positions rising at the time in Italy, may be refused jobs, passports, or even entry into some provinces, but surely will find their way to some spot in the European union, whereas we are not sure what might happen to the Italians seeking the leave their homeland.

      The film, in fact, does not show their eventual Egyptian arrival. We simply hear from them in letters and postcards as they quickly begin to run out of money (both having snuck 20 million each into Orfeo’s bag as they left him). They write of surviving on camel meat. And, at one point, one of asks Orfeo, that if he hasn’t yet spent the money, might he send some back to them. They await his arrival, although such a reunion has never been suggested in the plot. But in their disembodied voices we do hear the fact that, whether or not they like it, Tommaso and Domenico have become lifelong partners, who even consider the possibility of hitting up another bank.

    The haunting music for much of this film is provided by the Neapolitan hip-hop group Almamegeretta inviting Southern Italians to consider their ties to the Maghreb. But no serious implications occur in the film itself, as it is clear that neither Tommaso and Domenico feel at home in their newly adopted world, probably feeling as out of place as the immigrants we’ve seen on their way to Italy feel in the new country in which they’ve made their home. If both Italian characters begin the film as being portrayed as outsiders in their own country, they have now become permanent outsiders.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

 

Douglas Messerli | The End of Love [essay]

the end of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Since time immemorial religion, the state, and personal beliefs have worked singularly and often hand-in-hand to find ways to restrict, redefine, limit, and even ban various forms of love heterosexual, homosexual, and any other expression available to human beings. For some absurd reason, one of the most joyful, healing, and regenerative of all human expressions and emotions has constantly been the source of fear, terror, and even hatred for some parts of the population, as if sharing pleasure were the most dangerous of possibilities. And well it may be. As the gatekeeper to the State-run “Permission to Love” certificates whispers to one of his disappointed applicants: Don’t you see? Love creates passion, the freedom and confidence to threaten their [the State’s] power.”

    Religion cast most of sexual activities as a sin except in the modest expression that went toward producing new bodies for the church. And individuals from the beginning of time were jealous and frustrated that others were more attractive, sexually gifted, and just personally appealing as sexual partners than themselves, leading them to strongly support State and Church restrictions.

    Understandably, dozens of major films have dealt with these subjects from the very earliest of gay films, Different from the Others, which the central character is being blackmailed for his love of a younger man to the hundreds of the later 20th and early 2lst films that showed how religious culture infected families who stood against their old children for various loves not readily permitted by their beliefs. Even the education institutions, supposedly bastions of open-mindedness, worked with the State and religious organizations in helping to delimit what can be expressed of love—at the very time when human beings are hormonally most intrigued to explore their passions.

    Christ, who espoused love as being the most important of human behaviors was killed for that very reason. And isn’t Romeo and Juliet, after all, simply another attempt to control and delimit the expression of youthful love. Even normative heterosexual love was perverted by envy and just plain evil forces in Othello. The Romantics spent long hours in confusing their intense feelings of love with death. Love, so the ending of King Kong insists, even killed the powerful beast.

 

     Only in the late 1960s and 1970s did it seem possible for a few decades that love, in all his forms and expressions, might prevail. Hair (1979) was not just an expression of the body growth atop one’s head, under one’s arms, and around and beneath the chin, but about the rapture of the body itself.

     And then AIDS and a return to the conservative times in the US of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes destroyed that momentary revolution.

     Although he LGBTQ community had most certainly made incredible strides in convincing the world that differing sexualities were not a threat to heterosexual love; in fact, their very existence did continue to threaten the patriarchal versions of straight love, and we always knew the Church and State might rise up again at any moment to threaten any concepts of open love.

     Even before the first election of Donald Trump, a man who has attempted to cover up his own pedophilia through the embracement of the religious and social prejudices against sexual difference, gay filmmakers, in particular, begin to perceive a new breed of men and women, who oppose any but the most selfish forms of love, mocking empathy, fellow feeling, or any other form of sexual expression except patriarchal heterosexuality, feared that we might be approaching a new dystopia, not only a political theocracy or brutal dictatorship, but one that called adamantly for the “end of love” as we know it. Perhaps these was always an ongoing undercurrent of these kind of predictive works, particularly the numerous films which actually dealt head-on with the growing hate that gay men suffered in the earliest years of AIDS. But their focus, understandably, was on the disease and the lack of human response to it, not to the larger forces demanding the end of all non-progenitive sex.

      Already in 1997, the always prophetic French director François Ozon in See the Sea featured an unstated battle between a sensualist woman and a new breed of female dominated by her hate of sex and act of copulation who acts out only her personal obsessions through other means which includes destroying those who exhibit caring, love, and sensitivity.

     The very next year, the wonderful director of short gay puzzlements, Canadian filmmaker Wrik Mead, questions whether love might have ended forever in a gay bar in which the drunken Cupid himself accidently was struck down with one of his own arrows.

      In 2010 alone, two more such works appeared, the first, Dennis Hensley’s The Rubdown, joked about a rather minor restriction of a massage chain demanding the covering at all times during the massage of the male and female nipples and what lay beneath; featuring a gay undercover agent who is sent out to check to make sure the masseur is following the new strictures, hoping we will obey them while wishing simultaneously that he might break the rules just this once.  

     In the second film of that year, Christopher Ludgate’s The Love Permit dives more directly in a dystopian nightmare wherein the State need approve any attempt a making love through its requirement of permits which it not so secretly is no longer granting.

    In 2021 Brazilian filmmaker Madiano Marcheti’s Madalena presented a world in which anyone whose sexual differences became too noticeable suddenly disappeared in the vast agricultural fields around which clumped the thousands of small matching field worker’s homes who helped Brazil to feed it masses while turning its own people into ghosts, permitting their young hardly any expression of sexual joy, and allowing very limited sexual difference.

    That same year saw a series of short dystopian films. In Harry Weston Two Birds in a Cage a small Australian suburb cannot even permit the sympathetic hugging of a straight man and his gay friend, the straight boy later being punished by a beating and perhaps death.

    In a complete reversal of the usual pattern, a gay boy, afraid of losing the love of a new boy in town, invites the boy over to his homes and locks him away in a basement dungeon so that they will be “together forever,” the name Kass McLaws’ film of that name. Here torture and punish are doled out in the name of love and a fear of losing it that is every bit as strong as the fear of demented heterosexuals afraid of difference kids of expressions of love.

    Also in 2021, the short film a Bloom, South African filmmaker Anthony Rangel Coll reminds us of the terrifying dystopian world in parents often place their children in submitting to the care of conversion therapists, reminding us of Kerstin Karlhuber’s Fair Haven (2017), Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased of 2020 documentary Cured, ending as in the latter two earlier films in the suicide of a central character.

    Taking us back to dictatorial government’s like the Soviet Union which attempted to outlaw homosexual behavior Peter Rebane takes us back to a military base in the Soviet occupied Estonia to reveal to Soviet governmental and social repression which continues today in Russia in his gay soap opera Firebird (2021), while Máté Konkol’s Budapest, Closed City (2021) shows us the results of current Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán’s racist and homophobic policies. Both of these works, in turn can only remind us of earlier cinematic representations about the Nazi attempts at LGBT eradication in films such as Bent (1977), Pink Triangles (1982), Paragraph 175 (1999), and Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom (2021), the latter film of which I also include in these pages.

    Even when it is not nationally decreed, the social order can create a world in which young gay lovers are not permitted to survive, as in Guiseppe Fiorello’s beautifully moving Scillian dystopia, Fireworks which resonates—perhaps unknowingly—with Kenneth Anger’s 1947 masterwork by the same name.

    By 2024 French directors Nathalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh had already perceived and assimilated just what the kind of world Trump imagined might truly look like in the truly dystopian tragedy, Two People Exchanging Saliva. In this film not only had love been erased but even it’s emblem, first evidence, and entry, the kiss itself. To those who even might wish to explore it, foretold in Ludgate’s earlier work, Eros had at last had become redefined as Thanatos.

    Love of all kinds has been threatened throughout history, but for LGBTQ figures it almost goes with the territory. As Vito Russo made clear in The Celluloid Closet death is how most gay men and women end of any film which bothered even to represent them.

    Yet the works I include here were all made after Stonewall, the symbol of the supposed end of gay prejudice in the USA. Yet we all know it is only an emblem, that reality continues to be a world in which gay men and women still find themselves often marked by local community haters, and is subject to major social of government shifts in sentiment. Today transgender individuals are under even greater torture and punishment than many gay men and lesbians were in the previous century. In many states they no longer have any legal rights to be who they are—a deeply existential statement—but must return to their birth names and the reality that surrounded their youthful non-existence; they are refused licenses, the permission to vote, and even the simple access to appropriate bathrooms, denied even the permission to dress as the gender by which they define themselves. Transsexual individuals have also been denied their flexible shifts in identity, drag queens, long individuals who were most able to move between the heterosexual and homosexual worlds in their satire of and disregard of gender definition, are denied in some states their performances or even socially conscious activities such as reading to children in libraries. And we all know that the rightest groups in many countries are working hard to take back the rights gays, lesbians, and bisexuals have demanded and won over the years, banning books and educational services so that younger people cannot even find a way out of their confusion of sexual identity.

     For queers, the end of love has always been just around the corner, lurking to deny their own passions, pleasures, identities, and deep love. We have been forced into an almost paranoid view of our positions in society, believing at times that perhaps a veneer of heterosexual-like marriage and family life might wipe away all prejudice, but being, nonetheless, to be always wary perceiving that the façade might just as quickly turn on us or actually corrupt our true identities and widely and sometimes wildly loving beings. Perhaps, Wrik Mead was right; we are all cupids infected by our own commitment to love.

     The works I have chosen in this small collection are just a sampling of the many such feature and shorter dystopian cinematic representations of our societies since the so-called liberations of the late 1970s and early 1980s, freedoms quickly squelched in the terrible AIDS epidemic of the 1980s-the early years of the new century, and which continue to be denied today. Yes, since 2015 we can even marry, but don’t imagine for a moment that individuals, governmental officials, and judges of the courts aren’t waiting in glee for the opportunity to again deny those rights. There are still laws on the books banning same-sex marriage in 26 states. All the Supreme Court has to do is to return the law to State regulation and many thousands of US citizens would be banned from the right to love those with whom they live.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).