Benoît Jacquot | L'École de la chair (The School of Flesh) / 1998

temporary abnormalities

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Fieschi (screenplay, based on a fiction by Yukio Mishima), Benoît Jacquot (director) L'École de la chair (The School of Flesh) / 1998

 

Although French filmmaker Benoît Jacquot is well known for his several films centered upon the feminine personality within the context of the LGBTQ community, his 1998 work, L'École de la chair (The School of Flesh) might easily be overlooked as a gay film, despite the fact that one of the two central figures, Quentin (Vincent Martinez) is described as being bisexual, and he is surrounded by several gay figures, in particular Chris (Vincent Lindon), the manager of the bar in which Quentin works, and the several gay men—whom we never meet—who inhabit that bar.

      Like many young male hustlers, Quentin perceives himself, it appears, as mostly heterosexual, engaging in sex with males such as the elderly Soukaz (François Berléand) only to make good money. Besides for a young half-Berber man, despite his beauty, in 1990s Paris jobs are not easy to come by.

      The film, moreover, focuses almost entirely upon a heterosexual woman, Dominique (the always fascinating Isabelle Huppert), who one might almost describe as an unintentional, unthinking homophobe. She resists even entering the “gay” bar which her nameless female friend (Danièle Dubroux) one night encourages that they check out. And later, when she returns to the same bar on a quieter evening, she describes the atmosphere to the bartender as almost “normal.”

Later, after she comes to know Chris better, she asks him outright, “When did you become one of the girls”—a rather odd question, although Chris later describes himself as being a “girl,” put to a man who is simply effeminate, not a drag queen nor an individual transitioning. For Chris the term is simply a statement of his effeminate manners, but we sense for Dominique it is a sort of judgment.

       Indeed, Dominique is full of judgments, which are, in part, the crux of this film. Once she enters the “strange” world in which, perhaps for one of the first times in her life, she is somewhat out of her league as she is swept away, quite literally, by that handsome bartender Quentin, the two of them exchanging languorous glances the first time they encounter each other which quickly progresses to a relationship that almost resembles that of a wealthy female and her gigolo. Indeed, the Italians—Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini—might each have had much more fun with this tale. And Panamanian-born director José Quintero, a gay man, did seemingly enjoy himself with a campy version of this film’s themes in Tennessee Williams’ The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961).

       For Jacquot, however, everything is far more ponderous, for even entering upon such a relationship, Dominique barges in—forceful, intelligent, and quite successful businesswoman that she is—without quite knowing her role. Chris, also clearly in love with Quentin, attempts to fill her in with some of the attractive and more seedy details of the boy’s life, both encouraging her to take him under her wing and honestly warning her about the dangers of attempting to do so. But at the same time, one might almost describe Chris as a pimp in this relationship, especially since he latter approaches Dominique for money to pay off Quentin's "debts."

      For Dominique, however, who is quickly obsessed by the boy, there is no “correct” way to function. Sporting closely cropped hair and often wearing stylish male-like attire, she takes her seduction of him almost as a kind of “business-like” challenge, the way in fact that many a woman who discovers a man is gay—or in this case, “also gay”—believes that he only needs the proper heterosexual passion to correct his ways.

      Dominique is too smart to truly believe that she might “convert” Quentin, and it is also doubtful that she seriously wants to do so, since what she clearly finds so intriguing about him—and somewhat like Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) in Luis Buñuel’ Belle de Jour (1967)—so excitingly dangerous are the differences between them: his social “inferiority,” Quentin’s “perverted sexuality,” and finally, and most especially, his secretiveness about his entire life. Each of these “qualities” becomes something she sets out to both discover and correct, just as she might woe a recalcitrant customer for the high-end gowns and suits her company designs.

     She stalks him without pause, meeting up with his former male lover, Soukaz to discover as much as she can about their relationship, befriending the smitten but also bitter Chris, and after she goes through her new lover’s wallet and address book, tracking down his mother who works in a cafeteria, just to check her out.

     They are both such attractive people, Dominique and Quentin, that we have to believe that their sexual acts are more than fulfilling, as they both claim they are to one another. Yet Jacquot, despite his picture-perfect actors, goes out of his way to portray their sexual encounters quite discretely. Sex, it is quite clear, is not at the heart of their relationship.

       What Dominique—with her offers of money, new employment opportunities, and even her sheik apartment which she encourages the young man to use as his own—has not quite prepared for is the young man’s pride and refusal to totally engage in the role of an older woman’s young lover. Not only is he understandably bored by the social world she inhabits, he is purposely gauche and intentionally uncomfortable in playing the role she has planned for him. Indeed, what at first intrigues both of them, but soon becomes a struggle for power between the two, is his continual testing her limits—at first with little things like picking up a whole fish to eat it in a restaurant (Dominique demands he put it back on the plate and it eat it properly, not because of dining ethics but because she is with him). At another point, he refuses to leave the video game when she demands they move on during a date. And gradually, he stays out nights, returning to her only on certain days when they once more engage in their “fantastic” sex.

     Quentin—who bears the same name as William Faulkner’s suicidal “lover” of his older sister Caddie in The Sound and the Fury—appears to be like so many of the young Czech boy hustlers in the works of Wiktor Grodecki, someone who sells his body only to intensely guard the secrets of his soul. And it is that secretiveness that infuriates the normative thinker Dominique. Despite her seeming appetite for adventure, she remains, after all, a rather heteronormative figure, at heart  a cold being, as she describes her father. When she cries, as critic Stephen Holden wrote about the actress in another role, her tears seem "to emanate from a realm somewhere beyond feeling.” To me, they do not seem to come from within, but suddenly appear, dripping from her eyes as if they crept down from her forehead to find a suitable outlet.

      So too is our young beauty, despite his seemingly “perverted” lifestyle, a seeker of the normal. Both of these figures, indeed, beneath their bluff of naughty and dangerous sexuality, are seeking normalcy much like the central figure of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and they use that cold comfort of everyday reality to torture one another.

      Hooked up with a man closer to her age by her friend, Dominque takes him back to her apartment, presumably to irritate Quentin. But when she discovers her lover is still absent, she engages in a quite standard sexual encounter with her date.

      For his part, Quentin falls in love with the daughter of one of Dominique’s wealthy clients, Marine Thorpe (Roxane Mesquida), a spoiled teenager with nothing special to offer, but who permits Quentin the macho necessity, despite her wealthy parents, of seeking to support her. Indeed, both of the empty-headed socialites find Quentin the “perfect” potential son in-law, and plot with him so that a trip he makes to Morocco with Dominque will also serve as a kind of accidental meet-up with their daughter.

     In one of the most torture-ridden moments of the film, Dominique insists upon a Japanese dinner shared by the two “new” couples, she and her new friend and Quentin and Marine. When it turns out that even her friend knows Marine’s parents, it becomes a sort of battle of the generations, the two elderly figures judging the youthful pair, while they, in turn, dismiss their elders as unable to comprehend the own feelings and emotional needs.

      Some of the nights Quentin spends apart from Dominque, she discovers, he is hustling male clients to obtain more money than even she can pay, he insists, so that he might support his new girlfriend.

     It is Dominque who now plots revenge. But unfortunately, by this time we no longer care, having recognized that they were never a good match and that her inexplicable obsession has, just as she constantly expresses her fears about nearly everything in her life, including her former husband, become “boring.”

      Chris, who out of revenge for Quentin’s betrayal of his own love, has arranged with a friend to take pictures of Quentin having sex with men, offers her the perfect tool for blackmail. We never see the pictures, but apparently the quite graphic photos show him even serving as a bottom, and certainly are revealing enough that even Marine’s spineless parents would have to cut off their daughter’s relationship with him.

       Dominque shows him the photographs, just as he appears to be ready to return to the uneasy relationship with Dominque. But recognizing that it is now all too late, she burns them, freeing him to go; but he now refuses to do so, knowing that, in truth, he has nowhere to go. What he describes as the morgue-like atmosphere of the Thorpe home, is clearly not any more “normal” than his and Dominique’s bizarre relationship. But she is now utterly disinterested in her former prey, and summons her friend to insist that Quentin leave her apartment.

        The two finally meet up quite by accident a few years later with Dominque, now with longer hair and waiting a man closer to age to pick up tickets to an evening at the theater or opera, spotting Quentin with his young daughter, a child he has had with another girl closer to his age whose parents have given him a job in the hotel they run. Both have seemingly found the normalcy they have been seeking, although even now he suggests that if his own current relationship should end, he’ll take his daughter and run. Perhaps that is, after all, contemporary normalcy. If so, I’d prefer remain in the dark shadows of Chris’ gay bar. Fortunately, something that seems beyond the realization of Jacquot’s normalized figures, there are so many hundreds of other choices.

       In the end, unfortunately, The School of Flesh educates its students in a manner that gives the LGBTQ community a bad name.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and The Queer Blog: All Things LGBTQ+ (November 2021).

Christopher Ludgate | The Love Permit / 2010

before the revolution

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Ludgate (screenwriter and director) The Love Permit / 2010 [13 minutes]

 

In the most dystopian tale of the works discussed to date, Christopher Ludgate’s The Love Permit, the eager of complete naïve Mr. Young (Scott Key), shows up the vast hall in which exists a single window, open only from 8:15-8:30 on Mondays only in which the State dispenses love permits, the permission to love and have sex. Mr. Young even shows up a bit early so eager is he to be able to engage in lovemaking with what we perceive is his boyfriend.

     Strangely there are no others waiting in line. And when the window is finally opened, the Administrator (Russell Saylor) immediately asks for his credentials, our young hero not all comprehending even what he might mean by that request. He is simply there because he has found someone to who he wants to make love, which means, so declares the administrator that he has already committed a crime, since the state has yet given him the permission to do so.

     But he has told no one, insists our hero. Oh, but “you have told me,” scolds the Administrator, something we cannot ignore, he argues, since it is already on camera.

     He has the form, his DNA sample, his fingerprints, and civilian ID number after having visited this same window last week; yet, so the Administrator explains, he still has not provided him with the surveillance records that can prove that he has a history that he complies with the standards of trust.

     Mr. Young responds that he was not told of these requirements, but still the Administrator stands firm. Mr. Young finally declares he is not leaving without the permit.

     The administrator does allow to place his thumb in the reader so that he can verify he is who he claims to be. He grants that Mr. Young is, in fact, allowed to have such a permit. “Thank God,” Young interjects, the Administrator reminding him that God has nothing at all to do with it. The State alone allows and grants such permissions. You should thank your government.

      “Thank you government,” Mr. Young momentarily enthuses.

      But now the Administrator has to go to accounting to have a permit ID number issued to him.

     The Administrator returns to report that “I’m afraid that the capacity of issuance of ‘Love and Sex Permits’ is at its limits, Mr. Young. We cannot grant you a permit at this time.”

       When Young even attempts to comment that he had just said…immediately the Administrator suggests he not argue about the matter. “Case is closed. Please, come back soon.”

      “That’s not fair at all,” persists the young man.

      “We’re not about fair here, Mr. Young, we’re about law and protocol. We’re about what’ for the State, which can’t afford passionate romantics like you. …Next!”

      “But there’s nobody else here. Look, I came to get a permit and I’m not leaving here without one!”

      The Administrator answers as all such government employees in such positions have over the centuries: “I don’t make the rules here. It’s my job. I have no control.”

      Now, for the first time, Mr. Young, wonders why both the last time he visited the window and this time no one else was there seeking out a permit.

      The Administrator finally puts him straight. “Don’t be naïve, Mr. Young. Don’t ask questions. It is what it is.”

      So what is our young romantic supposed to do? He is told that we can try again, if he wants.

      But he also warns him to be careful if he is lucky enough to get a permit. Violation of its conditions may result in a removal of his transmitters (the cameras over the doors of each and every citizen). And if that happens he will no longer have any chance of experiencing love.

      That last sentence alone suggests that this society has lost love forever. There already is no longer any possibility that love can exist, at least openly, and even secrecy can lead to punishment if the transmitters represent any unauthorized visits. We can only presume that almost place lovers might imagine to gather, cameras have been placed—much as they have already been today—almost everywhere except perhaps for the dark paths of parks and forests. But even the entry to those are surely clocked.

     One has immediately to ask, just how far is this from the reality of today’s world, particularly for young gay men and women, who live with their parents or other family members? Or even for those with intrusive neighbors and landlords. As the truly innocent Oliver Twist begs to know in the musical written by the gay composer Lionel Bart, “Where or where is love?”

     Our now despondent hero queries the Administrator about coming back, but is told that starting next week the place will be closed for renovations, “improvements.”

     Young cynically comments that it is not clear just how much the administration truly wants to accommodate the public.

     Desperately, he attempts a bribe, declaring he doesn’t have much money but perhaps he can make it worthwhile to hurry along the process.

     “You are persistent, aren’t you? It must be someone very special to you to persist, offering a bribe from the official of the State.”

  The naïve young man proclaims he is not at liberty is saying anything about the other, the Administrator warning him to be very careful with his words.

     The young man insists on seeing a supervisor, but is told he is busy and that perhaps he can schedule an appointment—after the renovations.

     There appears to be no way out. Love has truly come to an end in this cinematic tale.

     Finally, even the dreamer perceives the reality: “I’m not getting the permit today, am I?’
    But finally, a bit of humanity creeps into the Administrator’s voice: “I wish I could.” As Mr. Young continues in his complaints the Administrator writes a message on a piece of paper and hands it to him: “I hope to see you soon, Mr. Young.”

     And so it appears the romantic fellow has met his end.

    But, after looking at the slip of paper, Mr. Young, in his next question, suggests a complete sift of possibilities. “Where’s the bathroom?”

     The exuberant would-be lover visits the bathroom, the shrine to so very many gay meetings, where our Administrator soon joins him to explain what is truly happening. This is not a gay encounter but something closer to a revolutionary meeting: first the monitors record everything; more importantly, “The State doesn’t want any permits issues to anyone anymore.” He hands him a document, demanding that he put it in his jacket. “It’s a permit.”

     When our innocent begins to thank him, he insists that it’s the best he can do.

     But why doesn’t the State want to issue permits anymore?

    “Don’t you see, the new order wants to enforce dispassion. Their goal is to condition and repress the nature of humanity. Love ignites passion and freedom and confidence threatening their power. If they limit the ability to love, they will have control over the people.”

     Mr. Young responds quite logically, “But if they don’t issue permits anymore, people will rebel. They’ll be taken in to have their love removed.”

    “Exactly.”

    When asked why he keeps this job, the Administrator, a gay man in the manner of Francis Pangborn, no longer has any patience with our hero’s naïvite. If he were to be replaced, what’s to say that anyone might be even granted a “false permit?” “We can’t let them win.”

    Still, our dense lover complains about the hard time the Administrator gave him.

    And the Administrator, in turn, reminds him of the monitors. “I needed to make sure you weren’t working with them.”

    Our hero repeats the obvious: “But you could get caught.”

    “Doubtful. There’s no proof.” Besides, as he has hinted, he will soon be out of a job. He has simply recognized another gay man who might provide just a little revolutionary fervor or simply make love with the permission of the State.

    When our hero wishes he might give him something in return, our revolutionary Administrator leans in to beg him to fight against the system.

     Along with the last film in this gathering, Two People Exchanging Saliva, where I talk about a world in which even a kiss is banned, this film, despite it’s encouraging ending, is perhaps the bleakest of all these films in which love in certain ways have been curtailed and deleted from the societies in which the lovers exist. Why, one can only wonder, is something so very important to the human species even endangered? If one could answer that question, we would be able to answer the torture of human beings for loving throughout history.

     Almost as interesting is why should we presume this film as being about an illicit gay romance since the potential partner is never shown to us? Yet this film not only appears on “Gay Films Matter,” but is listed only in gay film lists, not even sexually neuter listings which abound on Letterboxd. Perhaps because no other straight men or women appear in that fruitless waiting line, and because of the utter eagerness of the applicant, of his insistence to enjoy in the rights of sexual pleasures, which are something gays, so long punished for their sexual desires, constantly demand and have won through long, long years of insistence and patience. Primarily, because our snippy and prissy governmental employee himself seems to be gay and recognizes another of his kind in Mr. Young. And then there is just something that is inexplicable: we gays tend recognize one another not through any private nods or secret signs, but just in the look, the spirit, the frustration of desires. Heterosexuals need not be so frustrated, even if many of them are, since they have the open sesame of the society, presuming that eventually someone will naturally appear on the horizon.

     Most important, once our young hero is told that the State no longer is giving out such permits, his response is about possible rebellion. But the first question any heterosexual would certainly have asked is “Doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the human species?” Our character, in his hurry to hug his lover to his bosom, doesn’t at all appear bothered by that important fact. Perhaps enough straight people have already been awarded their permits to keep the nation going, but what about the next generation, or the one after that? Will there be enough new workers to keep such a State functioning?

     That fact alone makes it quite clear that our lovely figure isn’t thinking properly about the state of the nation, but simply the situation of his own bed. Maybe he will wake up some morning and realize that there are fewer people on the streets, and perhaps actually begin to fight the State. But his mind hasn’t quite assimilated the larger issues.

    At least this explanation saves me from simply having to say that Mr. Young looks gay—a statement we all know is absolutely ridiculous and speaks more of the person who expressed it than the reality of the world. There is no gay “look.” To me, however, he looks gay. Which means I suppose that I simply find him attractive, somebody who, were I not an old man having lived out a relationship with another man for 60 some years, as someone I’d gladly invite into my bed.

    Good luck, Mr. Young. It would be interesting to see what you do with your illegal permit.

 

Los Angeles, May 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

 

 

Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel | The Most Dangerous Game / 1932

one passion builds upon another

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Ashmore Creelman (screenplay, based on the story by Richard Connell), Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel (directors) The Most Dangerous Game / 1932

 

Produced by Merian C. Cooper of King Kong fame, and staring Fay Ray of the same movie, the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game, because of RKO budget cuts was filmed on the same set as King Kong for at least part of the movie; but contrary to some claims, this film was not shot at the same time as the classic film that was released the following year, 1933.

    And if Wray can be said to be the star, along with the grand ape, in the 1933 movie, her existence in this film is basically peripheral. In fact, there is no female love interest in the original story; no females at all. Even in the pre-Joseph Breen production code period of filmmaking, producers and directors were still made to feel that there needed to be a heterosexual story at the center of their movies, a so-called “love interest,” here perversely described as the sexual “reward” for the hunter having succeed in stalking down his prey, who then feels privileged to rape any available woman.

     But, in actuality, the villain of this piece, the wealthy expatriate Russian Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) is hardly interested in women. A bit like the central figure of the Moreau’s island horror tales, the Count has found a way to lure men to his spot by rearranging the channel lights and sending the ships off-course in hidden reefs which sink their vessels, only the strongest and luckiest of survivors finding their way to his fortress on the jungle island. The ones who survive, mostly male, become the objects of his sadistic compulsions to lure them into his trophy room, lock them up, torture them, and set them free in an attempt to escape his determination to hunt them down and kill them, perceiving them as far more clever prey than mere lions, elephants, or jaguars with his heavy-bow and arrows, his guns, and his hounds.  

     By accident, the survivors of another shipwreck already ensconced in his castle are a brother and sister who are quite meaningless to him, Eve Trowbridge (Wray) and her obnoxiously drunk of a brother, Martin (Robert Armstrong), who he grandly entertains after having already lured in and killed the two sailors who have accompanied them.

     Any viewer of this 1934 film would have immediately recognized Count Zaroff, despite his prowess as a hunter, as an elite and slightly effeminate human being simply because of his affectations, his grand dress, his taste of great wines and liqueurs, his love of classical music and his abilities to play the piano, as well the way he controls the thugs around him, Ivan and Tartar, as simple brutes whom he manipulates, in the manner of all authoritarian villains, as if they were mere robots meant to service him. Finally, the way he stares of his guest’s brawny chest makes it clear where his attention is focused. Despite his theory that the female is a reward for his hunting the prey, it is clear our attractive Russian madman is a homosexual with hardly any interest in actually having intercourse with the woman hostage after. Rape, one must remember, generally does not emanate from sexual desire but from hate.

     In fact, when he is finally lucky enough to snag, through yet another shipwreck, the noted big game hunter, Robert Rainsford (the hunky beauty Joel McCrea), he recognizes him immediately and, at first, is not at all interested in employing him as prey, but imagines he might be the perfect partner in his horrific hunting of human prey. Without fully expressing his intentions, he certainly does intimate that he would like Bob to join him in the pleasures of his life, including, perhaps, the wine, musical entertainments, and lovemaking of his bed. Even we can see him slightly drooling as he describes his philosophy to Rainsford: "One passion builds upon another. Kill, then love! When you have known that, you have known ecstasy!"

     He quickly puts “Bob” in some of his own hunter’s pants, and obviously dresses the half-naked survivor in his own pajamas and dressing robe. Eve wears a single dress throughout, and where she has gotten that is inexplicable. Perhaps she survived intact or it is a remnant of another female survivor of the past.

    Basing his ideas on the concepts of sexual normality threated by a monster as described in the writings of Robin Wood, critic Shane Brown observes that in the 1930s films, the starting point of many of the later horror films, consist primarily of two types of queer monsters in classical Hollywood films: “The first of these attempts to disrupt a heterosexual coupling in order to allow a union for the monster with the male in most cases…. This type of queer monster seems to be found more commonly in horror movies that are not wholly supernatural affairs, such as White Zombie (dir. Victor Halperin, 1932) and The Most Dangerous Game (dir. Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932). The second type of queer monster is that which appears to be attempting to spread homosexuality among the masses as some sort of contagion—although…this is suggested implicitly rather that explicitly within the texts. Here, we are entering a world of werewolves and vampires as found in films such as Nosferatu (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1922), and Dracula (Dir. Tod Browing, 1931).”

    Both of the latter are described earlier in this and other volumes, but here it is the first kind of queer monster that we are facing. If in the early hours of the evening, Rainsford appears to actually enjoy the company of the Count, particularly after having just survived the shipwreck and asked by Zaroff to pretend happiness for the sake of his other two survivors, he is quickly cued into the oddities of the Count’s behavior by Eve, and perhaps is even a little disturbed by the interruptive rudeness of Martin’s drunken comments which also mention the missing seamen.  

     By the time Eve comes to him in the middle of the night, quite worried about her brother not yet having returned from his visit to the trophy room, our hero has begun to become aware that the prey Zaroff is after is other human beings, not wild animals. And by the time he actually visits the trophy room with Eve in search of Martin, he too is horrified by what he observes: a shrunken human head and floating head in glass. Evidently, in the original version there were far many other horrors shared with the viewer, but the test audiences were so disturbed by the images, that Schoedsack, the primary director, cut the movie from its original longer showing time to the brief 62-some minute work it is today, both he and producer Cooper determined to produce a tightly-time film that provided the ultimate in horrors.

     By the time Zaroff encounters them in his official shrine, he is forced to tell Rainsford his hopes for their relationship and admit to the true prey of his hunts, admitting that Eve’s brother has been yet another victim, which makes his obsession seem even more perverse since Martin could certainly not have run for more that a few feet and probably could not have survived more than a few minutes at most.

     Hearing Zaroff’s pleas for him to join him, in a kind of mad wedlock of a hunting obsession, Rainsford, an obvious cinematic heterosexual hero, has no choice but to refuse Zaroff’s offer to join his horrific cult. And the moment that he makes his disgust apparent, the Count has no choice but to turn him into another beast of prey, offering him a hunting knife, a few provisions, and permission to roam the island until midnight, when the Count will begin the hunt. If Rainsford survives until 4 a.m., he wins the battle and Zaroff promises him the keys to the boathouse so that he can leave the island. But then Zaroff has never lost in his game of “outdoor chess.”

     At the last moment, Eve decides to join the stranger rather than remain as a different kind of prey in the Count’s mansion.

   The rest of the film, accordingly, is involved in the chase through the King Kong jungle, which must have provided Wray with some sense of déjà vu.

      Once the two have realized the small chances of their escape, Rainsford begins to create a number of hidden traps, which were all based on real traps, so we learn in the Wikipedia entry, that Schoedsack learned to use in Thailand.

      Yet Zaroff eludes all of these, and they help him to locate the couple hiding nearby. They jump chasms, cut down vines and trees, and hide is a cave, but ultimately are forced to enter the alligator ridden swamp where, along with the shark-infested waters near the island, they are probably safer than in the jungle.

      Finally, loosing the hounds, Zaroff tracks them down, after he loses one of his servants as the prey breaks his neck, shooting Rainsford when a dog attacks him, spinning both into a long voyage into the sea waters below a cliff. Zaroff pulls the girl back into his mansion for the promised later orgasm of pleasure, even if we doubt his sexual abilities with the female kind.

      But, we discover, the shot has killed the dog, not Rainsford, who sneaks back into the castle, and in all fairness is given the boathouse key for having survived. Yet Rainsford goes further, grabbing up Eve and stabbing Zoraff with one of his own arrows.

      Zoraff survives just long enough as he lays out beside a window, rifle in hand, to observe Eve and Bob speeding away before he falls from the window into the sea below, presumably dead.

      Commentators claim this film, titled The Hounds of Zaroff in England and was later reissued as Skull Island in 1938, probably influenced a slew of later movies in which human beings became prey, including Zodiac Killer, Apocalyto, Bloodlust!, The Hunt, The Pest, Predator, Surviving the Game, Hard Target, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Hunger Games.

 

Los Angeles, May 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

Zachary Ayotte | Ce qu'on ne raconte pas (What We Don't Tell) / 2020

the man who got everything he wanted

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zachary Ayotte (screenwriter and director) Ce qu'on ne raconte pas (What We Don't Tell) / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

Already in 2018, the then Canadian film student Zachary Ayotte wrote and directed a truly intriguing short film, My Dad Works the Night Shift wherein a young gay boy attracted to a slightly older boy provokes a relationship with him, mostly to challenge his conservative alcoholic father by finding the two boys in bed upon his return from a night of work.

    Two years later finds him writing and directing a work far more than merely provocative, wherein a underage handsome gay boy Jeremy (Félix Paquette, played in the younger version of himself by Philippe Scrive) is basically abused by a young man, or even if not precisely abused, certainly involved in a relationship that ends in great pain to the younger, particularly when the older Max (Jean-Sébastien Courchesne) has abandoned him to become a corporate businessman now living with a woman, Catherine (Aude Mathieu), who is pregnant.

    Jeremy, now a 22-year-old drifter, pays a visit to Max in his high-rise office, demanding a check, which Max may have or may not have been regularly paying him just to keep him quiet about his past. In any event, this time Jeremy leaves without the check, which Max, confused, tears up.

     That act alone is threatening, and somewhat frightening even though we know Max to have been the offender. But when Jeremy visits their apartment, rifling through their yet unpacked bags where is discovers a special shirt once given by Max to Jeremy to wear only during their sex episodes, we realize that Max is still memorializing their former relationship.

      When Catherine returns home, Jeremy cockily greets her, puts his hand to the womb of her baby, and moves into a position of what might be construed as a kiss, instead whispering in her ear: “Watch out for him.” This is interrupted by a scene from years before between the two males, boy and young man decades before in which they seemingly prepare to have sex.

       We are uncertain whether the revenge has just been the fact the Jeremy has put created a deep level of doubt in both of him, it has gone further.

      All we know is that, later that night, we see Max still in the office, not having not yet returned home. When he attempts to call his girlfriend, he gets only her answering machine.

    Jeremy again visits the office, this time Max attempting to engage him yet again in sex, clearly revealing that the straight relationship with which he is involved is just pretense, something that comes with the territory of his job.

     As Max attempts to again make love to the now older boy, Jeremy repeats the phrase Max as told him when he awarded him the shirt, “It’s all right if you like it,” as he simply declares that that was not the purpose of his visit and turns and walks off, providing his former abuser with a kind of vengeance that will surely utterly change his life.

       All is so subtly, quite beautifully, and smartly handled, that I, as one of his commentors wrote, can’t wait to see what Ayotte does in a feature film.

 

Los Angeles, May 19, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).