Abel Gance | La Roue (The Wheel) / 1923

as the wheel turns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abel Gance (screenwriter and director) La Roue (The Wheel) / 1923

 

Director Abel Gance’s original La Roue was 32 reels in length, shown over a period of three days, running for a total of 7 ½ hours (some claim it is closer to 9 hours long). For the British showing, it was collapsed by the director himself into 2 hours, obviously focusing on it sentimental story, and for years this is the version most critics saw, the original having long been lost. The most recent recreation of the film by Eric Lange and David Shepard (released in DVD by Flicker Alley) runs about 4 ½ hours, and varies highly in quality. But at least we could now see Gance’s great experimental work in a way that is closer to the way in which it was intended to be seen.

     The seven hour original has been restored by Janus films and is now in the Criterion Collection.

    The story, if melodramatic, is hardly important. The great train engineer, Sisif (Severine-Mars, who died before the film was released) returns to work at the very moment a train crashes into another. Thinking quickly, he closes down the other lines only to find that one line is still open with a third train soon barreling into the station. Singlehandedly, he lifts an axel allowing the line to be close and saving the day.

    He also discovers a small child among the ruble, whose mother apparently died in the accident.

    Taking up the girl, which he names Norma (Ivy Close) home, he places her in bed beside his son, Elie (Gabriel de Gravone), whose mother died birthing him. Years later, the children, living in a small stone house in the middle of the Nice tracks, have grown up, both feeling deep love for one another, without knowing that they are not related.

    Elie, trying to ignore his incestuous feelings, puts most of his energy into violin making, while also attempting to find a varnish close to the one created by the great Cremona violin makers. Norma busies herself with house cleaning and caring for her pet goat.

     Sisif also has developed unnatural feelings for his young charge, and finds it difficult to contain himself, insisting that she stop wearing short dresses and silk stockings, and demanding that the brother and sister no longer spend time together.

     The first engineer has also taken to heavy drinking in order to wash away his perverse thoughts; he wears a mask of coal dust each evening so that she might not read his real feelings upon his face.

     In the hothouse of repressed desires, the beautiful Ivy, confused by the changes in nearly everyone’s behavior, determines finally to accept the proposal of a wealthy railway man, Hersan (Pierre Magnier) for whom Sisif has been creating railway innovations, which Hersan pretends are his own handiwork. At first Sisif refuses, but, having told Hersan of his feelings for his daughter, he’s blackmailed into allowing the marriage. He even agrees to take her, via train, to the marriage, but in his drunkenness and self-pit almost crashes the train, until his stoker—himself a heavy drinker—slows the train and brings it to a successful destination.

   This, leading to Sisif’s second reprimand, removes him from duty, as he is sent to run the funicular at Mont Blanc. There, he meets up again with his daughter on a visit from what she conveys is an unhappy relationship with Hersan, who in the meantime has discovered her own feelings for Elie (involving a letter she discovers in the interior of one of his violins, when Herson attempts to destroy it). Meeting up with them together, Herson attempts to kill Elie. The young violin maker succeeds in fatally wounding his assailant, but nonetheless spends several frames hanging from a cliff until he falls to his death within a glacier.

     Sisif, blaming Norma for her intrusion into their lives, once again sends her packing, although she quietly returns, which Sisif, now suffering from blindness, does not even notice until in a moment of rapprochement, he discovers her presence, accepting her aid and love. By film’s end, he sends her off to dance in a group “ring dance,” while closing his eyes in acceptance of his death.

     Pure melodrama, even given its archetypal motifs. As the acting, yes, Norma Desmond, these figures all have great faces, but their overly emotive gestures cannot be explained away as anything but bad acting.

     What is great about La Roue is Gance’s absolute joy in trying out every cinematic trick he might have imagined—most of which today have become standard procedures of filmmaking and editing, but which, in 1923 had never or seldom been seen on screen.

     Given the title, The Wheel, meaning both the wheels of the locomotives and the ancient torture device, symbolizing the changes of fate, Gance explores every possible image of roundness, from his endless cinematic iris closing in transitions, his insistent close-ups of the moving energy of locomotive wheels, and the final ring dance. Time and again, images are enclosed in circular friezes, like cut-outs from some ancient scrap-book.

     But even more innovative is how he uses the vast screen, allowing full images for his narrative that appear far more epic than the domestic drama that he is telling. Fully conceived comic sketches suddenly turn into brooding symbolic framings, where even the characters comment on the iconic looks of their fellow beings.

     The original train wreck is far better than Cecil B. DeMille’s of The Greatest Show on Earth. Time and again, Gance’s film images are pared down to be transformed from narrative significance to symbolic abstraction. Despite its melodramatic contrivances, the film is a feast for the eyes. At moments, as numerous critics have noted, it appears the Gance simply cannot and will not control himself as he juices up scenes with bright red, blues, and greens, overlays of images, imbibing on distortions and blurs as he trots his figures out of camera range.

    Of course, not all of these highly experimental cinematic devices work: and, as critic Dave Kehr argues, they are perhaps not even appropriate to a single film. But the very energy they and its creator (along with his brilliant poetic assistant Blaise Cendrars) exude cannot be dismissed. Even the intertitles, quoting major poets and writers such as Baudelaire, Hugo, and Cendrars, cant’s seem to contain themselves. The wheel turns and turns with utter abandonment, throwing out everything before it and after. As Jean Cocteau remarked: “There is cinema before and after La Roue, as there is painting before and after Picasso.

     Perhaps the best way to think of Gance’s La Roue is not to experience it as a coherent movie, but as a series of cinematic pyro-technics. Gance clearly took a simple story and explored it with whatever arsenal he had in his head. If today it seems sometimes banal and outdated it is only because every filmmaker after him stole those ideas and embellished them so thoroughly that they became standard methods of filmmaking.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).

    

Jack Shea | "Once a Friend" from the series The Jeffersons / 1977 [TV episode]

man on the run

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael S. Baser and Kim Weiskopf (writers), Jack Shea (director) Once a Friend from the series The Jeffersons / 1977 [TV episode]

 

Just as the Norman Lear series All in the Family, his series The Jeffersons, featuring Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley—who used to be the neighbors of Archie Bunker, but who moved “on up,” while he remained stationary—covered a great many controversial topics new to the US popular TV medium.

    One of the most interestingly controversial subjects of the series appeared on the October 1, 1977 episode (Season 4, Episode3), in which George Jefferson gets a note through the family maid Florence Johnston (Marla Gibbs) that Edie Stokes is in town and wants to meet George at a local hotel.

   Louise, George’s wife is naturally suspicious; might her husband be having an affair? George certainly doesn’t know any Edie Stokes until he realizes that it might be his old-time Navy friend Eddie Stokes who is playing another “gottcha” joke on him, which the two of them engaged throughout their Navy years, consisting of practical jokes as simple as buckets of water being poured over the heads of people entering the camp doorways, to George’s revenge of getting Eddie a tattoo of the camp commander’s wife.

    Eddie and he did everything together. “Shoot, he slept on top of me for two years!” Louise’s response: “That must have been uncomfortable.” Of course, he is talking about bunk beds in the Navy, where Eddie was his closest and dearest friend.

    And he runs off immediately to visit Eddie in the Marquee Hotel, with Louise worried about what is going on.

    Eddie (Veronica Redd) appears at the door as a lovely female, while George challenges the real Eddie to come out of the closet, which, obviously, brings about Edie’s riposte that he is most definitely out of the closet.

   George still can’t comprehend. Is he gay?

   No, Edie, explains calmly, she is not gay. Good, because George couldn’t deal with that, as he one by one peels the onion of his true homophobic bigotry.

   Soon after comes the next layer of the prejudice, surely, George’s friend is not one of those men who love dressing up as a woman. “Travestites?” responds Edie.

    Edie assures him that she is not at all transsexual, and again, just for a moment George is relieved, surely not being able to tolerate such “weirdo” behavior from even an old friend.

    Still convinced it is a “gottcha” joke, George tries to make his way into the closet to hand his old friend Eddie a pair of pants only to discover an entire closet of dresses.

    Finally, in a sincere and intelligent discussion of gender dysphoria, explaining that she has always felt uncomfortable about pretending to be a man, yes, even in the Navy. George’s cheap comeback is that he wished he had told him given that he had daily undressed in front of him. It is finally, not a very funny joke, nor is the canned laughter that keeps fueling George’s inane comebacks to the truly serious conversation that is the heart of this moment on TV.

    Edie, begging George to address her by her new name, explains that she has had to give up most of her “old” friends and has found new ones, and developed a new life with which she has found great happiness. But she hopes, she explains, that one of her oldest and deepest friends might remain so.

    Defeated, George hints that it might be possible, but the moment she moves forward to show her appreciation and to encourage him to join her in the promised drink, he quite literally curls up in disgust, quickly trying to find his exit.

    He hurries out of the room demanding ghostly individuals to hold the elevator, as the beautiful transgender woman sadly stares out in the horror of his vacuum: “Yeh, George. You take care of yourself.”

    If she has found herself and come to enjoy her new identity, George, much like Archie Bunker, is most unhappy in the world of such flux and change.

    Yes, Archie once met a serious transgender figure in his taxi. But this is a far more serious presentation of the issue, and beyond that this presented US audiences with a black transgender woman, who was so beautiful that we can’t even imagine her as a sailor boy.

   But confusion persists, as Louise (“Weezie” as he calls her) calls the hotel to find out if there is actually an Eddie Stokes registered there. She discovers, obviously that the guest’s name is Edith (Edie) Stokes, which clearly means to her that George has been lying to her.

     Since Louise now threatens to kick him out of the apartment for the night, George desperately attempts to find a solution, calling to enlist his cleaning establishment employee Leroy to pose in drag as Edie.

     But Louise, always far cleverer than George, immediately perceives the hoax, and gets even more insulted until Edie actually visits, upon the desperate insistence of George, their apartment.

     Louise is still far from convince until Edie, talking about their Navy days together mentions the nickname “Weezie,” as George called her in his letters, and mentions Louise’s own terms of endearment: “fuzzy wuzzy, teddy bear.”

     As punishment for George’s inability to face the truth, the former practical joker lures George into the bathroom proclaiming her fear of a rat, dumping a bucket of water on him. We might hope that George, now wet and enraged will come to his senses, but at the very least we perceive he now sees that the old Eddie is in Edie’s inner being, and despite his fears, can still remain a friend.

     If this still remains a slightly crude representation of the transgender experience, despite the truly enlightened description that Edie describes about her own experience as a male in a society in which she painfully not in sync, one has only to realize that Rainer Werner Fassbiner’s great exploration of the transgender experience, In einen Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year with 13 Moons), did not appear until a year later. Norman Lear, a purveyor of popular US entertainment, was ahead of even the avant-garde European filmmakers.

 

Los Angeles, May 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

 

Gus Reed | Free Bench Must Pick Up Today / 2023

a haunted bench

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gus Reed (screenwriter and director) Free Bench Must Pick Up Today / 2023 [6 minutes]

 

I guess this must be a “gay” film because the two boys who pick up the free bench advertised for free, actually a lovely small church-like bench, live together. There’s nothing more to the part of the story.

    Nor, actually to the so-called “horror” film that is very short work promises itself to be. One of the boys, Simon (Davi Santos) begins to see a man on the bench. He knows know one is there, but he sees the figure nonetheless, and his friend, George (Hunter Doohan) begins to worry about the fact that he keeps seeing this presumably ghost sitting on their bench beside their front door, where they’ve placed it. Eventually, in the middle of the night, George also visits the bench to discover the same ghost hovering about him.

      If you’ve seen even a half-dozen horror films, there is absolutely nothing so terrifying going on here. Frankly I see a ghost roaming our house every day. I don’t mean this literally, but after Howard goes to bed and I work late, I feel as if there is still someone in the room, who comes and goes. Obviously, it is just my imagination. Do I need to make a film about the tricky feeling of those who have left you behind, and there are now hundreds, creeping back into your imagination each night? Absolutely not. And there is, alas, no real reason for this short movie.

    Let’s just say, I would have kept the bench and been happy for the extra company.

   These young boys do the logical thing. Post an ad, just as the one which piqued their interest: “Free Bench Must Pick Up Today.”

    Nothing at all happens in this film even a little out of the ordinary, and absolutely nothing about this film is gay, except these cute actors. So please, don’t waste your time.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

Alfred Hitchcock | Spellbound / 1945

playing doctor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Angus MacPhail and Ben Hecht (based on a novel by Francis Beeding), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Spellbound / 1945

 

Over the years I have watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound numerous times, and yet—although I have written essays on most of the director’s films—I had not even attempted any comment on this.

      Although I have often enjoyed watching Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck romantically entwined in what becomes a kind of psychological-detective tale, I also have long felt it is one of Hitchcock’s silliest works. Spouting populist notions of Freudian Theory, Spellbound puts Bergman (as Constance Petersen) in the uncomfortable position of diagnosing her lover’s every move. Not only is the poor man apparently suffering from amnesia, he has a guilt complex for accidently killing his brother as a child and, having witnessed the murder of Dr. Edwardes on a skiing trip, attempts to impersonate him, presumably again out of guilt, by show up as the new head of the psychiatric clinic where Constance works. Even to describe this pot gives one the giggles. Poor Berman has to pretend to believe it all between swoons and smooches.

     Oh, and I forgot to mention the even less credible ending. It seems the “real” murder was Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), the for head of the clinic Dr. Edwardes was about to replace!

     True, Hitchcock’s plots (think of Vertigo and North by Northwest) can often be quite complex and even illogical, but mightn’t he and writers Angus MacPahil and Ben Hecht have assigned their poor hero just something a little bit less off the charts. And did Hitchcock truly have to use kitschy Salvador Dali sets as an aide to interpret John Ballantyne’s (the name of Peck’s character) dream?

Did he really have to introduce yet another figure, Constance’s know-it-all, elderly mentor, Dr. Brulov, to help Constance diagnose her lover-patient?

    Hitchcock was obviously greatly interested in psychological motives, which are at the heart of almost all of his films. And accordingly, in his movies he often brought in psychiatry to explain character motivations. In one of his earliest works, The Lodger, the director toys with the seeming madness of his hero, and in several later works, including Rope, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, Psycho, and most notably, Marnie—again, I am convinced, a failed film—explores psychological analysis nearly to the extent of Spellbound.

     Watching this film again the other morning, I wondered why I had even bothered to see this movie more than once. And yet, despite its labyrinthine plot and hooky imagines of opening doors, along with the sled tracks in the snow which show up on clothing, bedspreads, and even a piece of linen on which Constance traces the shape of a proposed swimming pool with the tines of a for (events which send Peck into an immediate trance and, inexplicably, abusive outbursts), Spellbound remains somewhat spellbinding, full of intense moments and lust romantic intervals—evidence, perhaps, of Bergman’s and Peck’s real off-screen relationship during the shooting.

     This time around, moreover, I finally realized that, although Hitchcock is somewhat serious in all of this psychobabble, he is also quite clearly mocking it—perhaps in reaction to producer David Selznick’s own exultation of his personal experiences with psychoanalysis conducted by Dr. May Romm, who is credited an advisor to the film. Somewhat like another 1940s work, Marianne Hauser’s fiction Dark Dominion (1947), the director of Spellbound and his figures on one level are utterly serious about their schoolteacher-like dream analyses and layered dream analyses and observations of behavior, white also testing and teasing us about our personal expectations and evaluations of the new “scientific” field.

    Early in the movie, the lecherous fellow psychiatrist, Doctor Fleurot (John Emery) makes fun of Constance and his own profession, suggesting that his beautiful colleague is using her career as a shield behind which to hide from any emotional involvement. Even the clinic’s head, Murchison, realizes that his young employee needs more time, metaphorically speaking, “in the field.” And once Constance meets the fraudulent Dr. Edwardes, we see her desperately trying to fend off her sudden infatuation with the newcomer with medical doublespeak.

    He, it turns out, is also a doctor—but of another kind, a medical doctor, who, despite his mental illness, can equally analyze the body and its maladies. And only he, given half a chance, can open Constance up to human contact. But, obviously, she must first nurse him to mental healthy before he can cure her “school-marm” tendencies. Even after she has fallen in love and in a mad rush away from her own profession, has chased John to New York, the hotel dick still mistakes her for a schoolteacher. And Ballantyne/Edwardes calls her that again when she immediately begins to badger him to recall his past.

     If psychiatry, as she and others keep insisting, can heal the patient, it can just as easily lead to further misreadings of human behavior and put the victim into further harm. A patient in the clinic attempts to kill himself. And the more Constance and her elderly professor (Michael Chekov) badger John with their probing questions, the sicker he seems to become, sleepwalking with a razor in his hand, and falling again and again into faints (in accompaniment with Miklós Rózsa’s theremin-inspired score) in which he behaves more like a drugged-out zombie than the healthy newlywed he and Constance are pretending to be.

    His revelation of his dream is so ridiculously prolix (with card games hinting at the New York dining club, 21, and a hovering bird-like figure pointing to the ski lodge’s location in Gabriel Valley) that Dali’s corny curtains of eyes, severed by over-sized scissors, along with the sculptures of melted clocks and wheels seem right at home in the over-the-top presentation of what a madman’s dream might look like. The actual scene was reportedly 20 minutes long, of which we see only about two minutes. It would be fascinating, maybe even frightening, to see the original shoot. As it is, the short scene, nonetheless, is one of the campiest moments in all of the great master’s films.

      Even when John is finally cured, his layered secrets all spilled, psychiatry cannot, so Hitchcock posits, save him, as he is arrested and tried for murder. But even then the analysis doesn’t end.

     Constance must still save her man and does so more as a detective than a psychiatrist—running with an accidentally dropped remark by Murchison that he had slightly known Edwardes—as she, confronting the reinstate clinic leader, determines that he was the man who shot the “real” Edwardes. After all, had he truly met his “replacement,” why would he pretend not to recognize Edwardes’ imposter when he joined the clinic staff? In short, we realize, as he puts a bullet through his head, the chief psychiatrist cannot even cure himself. So much for the wonders of Freudian thinking!

     The movie ends with the couple’s actual marriage, putting them in a position, finally, where Ballantyne can cure Constance by allowing her to be the beautiful and sensual woman she was hiding from herself. No further analysis necessary, even if it might appear to be a more than little sexist conclusion.

 

Los Angeles, December 18, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015).

Rhys Marc Jones | Boundaries / 2018

cornered into self-destruction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rhys Marc Jones (screenwriter and director) Boundaries / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

In this short film, Welsh-Irish director Rhys Marc Jones focuses on a young black man, Jared (Jared Free) has evidently been dumped by his former boyfriend, primarily for his desperate need to be loved. Even if one loved Jared, apparently, he is so desperately seeking attention at times that he violates, again and again, his own body.

     As we first encounter him we see him with razor blade in hand, and notice the long scars of cuts of his legs where, apparently, he has cut himself several times. This morning he simply bashes his head into the wall of the shower, causing a deep wound.

     Visiting his former boyfriend Paix (Paix Robinson), he is granted entry only so that Paix might tend to the head wound, which Jared claims was the result of intruders who seemed to want to do him harm, but were only after his phone.

    Paix reluctantly mends the wound and shares some drugs with him, in the process being swept up again, just for a moment, with love for this obviously dependent young man. But as he begins to undress him, he finds the phone still in his pants pocket, and again reminded of the several leg cuts, puts back on his clothes and simply demands Jared leave.

     Clearly he has had to much of this young man’s drama, his desperate need for constant attention and caring.

     In the next few scenes with see Jared on the subway, spotting a good-looking girl. He quickly pulls off the bandage over his head-would and moves into the next car where she sits, sitting beside her as she offers him up a tissue for the blood of the wound. She looks at him sympathetically as he obviously tells her yet another story of how he came to be attacked, calling upon himself, at least, a temporary kind of attention and sympathy, perhaps even what he can imagine is love.

     This is a terrible wounded human being, but not from the outside, from the attacks of others, but from within, by his deep, deep insecurities which are the very thing which finally make people pull away from him, leaving him always standing alone in the corner self-destruction.

     Whenever he might become strong enough to pay attention to the concerns of others, instead of himself, he may truly find love; until then he is frozen out of the very thing his fragile ego most demands.

     It is not that this figure has gone beyond the “boundaries” of love as much as that he has never entered into a true relationship, focused as he is, always, on his own constant sense of need.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

Craig Johnson | Alex Strangelove / 2018

a different kind of bond

by Douglas Messerli

 

Craig Johnson (screenwriter and director) Alex Strangelove / 2018

 

Having truly enjoyed Craig Johnson’s second feature film, The Skeleton Twins, of 2014, I determined yesterday to watch his most recent work, Alex Strangelove, released by Netflix this year.

    His earlier film had been a clever family drama, starring Bill Hader and Kristen Wigg, which featured a rather unhappy housewife and her gay brother who both attempted to nurse one another, often rather clumsily, back to health, after attempting suicide, the ending of this black comedy being rather uncertain.

     Accordingly, I wasn’t quite prepared for the rom-com sitcom-like Alex Strangelove, although the title might have easily tipped me off, since the character’s real name is Alex Truelove. In a sense, it’s just a sex and drug-infused movie that, like another recent film, Love Simon, tells the tale of a handsome and quite popular young high school student who is in the process of “coming out.”

     Like that film, the central character doesn’t yet quite perceive that he’s gay. But things are so far different from the days I attended high school, that the entire decision of whether to be heterosexual, gay, pansexual, whatever, seems simply to be a matter of choice, like picking items from a Chinese menu. As the comic straight-guy in this film, Dell (Daniel Zolghadri), argues you just need to choose. Their school even seems to have an active LGBTQ community, the drama kids, who hold their own parties to which select heterosexuals are also invited.

    But Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny), now the popular class president and a dogged cultural conservative—he’s carefully laid out all his plans for his life, determining upon studying marine animal biology at Columbia University, getting married, and having children—and he’s already found the girl of his dreams, his long-time friend, Claire (Madeline Weinstein).

      Although Alex is clever, witty, and even enterprising—he and Claire perform together in a popular on-line school web series, featuring the sexual habits of and other eccentricities of the school’s students—there’s still something slightly nerdy about him (at least in his own mind), and like most of these teenage comedy-dramas, he hangs out with a group of rather dorky friends who spend far too many of their hours describing their heterosexual conquests. Something doesn’t seem right. Why is this bright kid not moving on? And, most importantly—at least in terms of teenage hormones—why us he still a self-admitted virgin, particularly given the fact that Claire herself insists she has been desperately trying to “de-virginfy” him. He keeps putting off the event.

     Finally, embarrassed in front of his bragging buddies, he determines to do something about it, setting up a hotel room so that he and she might finally have sex.

      The plot needs time to hatch it’s secret, of course, so the sexual encounter is put off for a few weeks, while the meandering story takes him to one of the “drama kid” parties (consisting of numerous ridiculous stereotypes, including one male who obviously believes he is the permanent host of Cabaret and a hallucinogenic turtle which Dell immediately picks up and licks sending him into comic hallucinations that might have served nicely for a backstory to Todd Phillips’ The Hangover. Oddly there seems to be a lot a role playing and very little sex. Maybe that is what Johnson meant by “Strangelove.”

     Anyone with a sense of film history knows that gay director Johnson means that other “strange love,” even if there seems nothing at all strange in being gay in this progressive high school community.

     By accident, Alex stumbles into the more normative “pot” room, where a handsome young man, Elliott (Antonio Marziale) and what we used to call a “fag-hag” (a heavyset young girl who is best friend to a gay boy) are about to light up. Clearly not inexperienced with pot and quite obviously intrigued by this open gay guy, Alex joins them ending up head-to-head in bed with Elliott; and a day or so later, meeting up with him for a concert and slow walk, so to speak, around the park.

     Claire clearly begins to suspect something’s up, but Alex (I must admit, a bit like me at his age) is slow to wake up to the reality of his feelings. He still takes his girlfriend to the hotel, but in the midst of clumsy sex tells her there’s someone else.

      It takes a final deep dive into a suburban pool to make him come to his senses, finally admitting to himself that he is gay. (As I’ve written in My Year 2005, it took me a bad showing in an ROTC test and a few circles around my bedroom to come to that same realization).

      What’s a guy to do? After admitting to Claire that his “Truelove” has reverted to a “Strangelove—a moniker, as a gay man, I rather resent—they still agree to go with one another to the prom party. Claire, perhaps the wisest figure in this film of dumb-headed adolescents (she has also the wisest of mothers) arranges for Elliott—how she knows the address of a boy who has graduated from another school the year before is never quite explained—to also attend. 

     Suddenly faced with the boy he now knows he loves in a room with his high school chums, Alex gets cold feet once again, rushing off to the bathroom and almost losing his chance for maturation and true love. Returning just in time, he kisses Elliott, expressing his sexuality for the first time in the very judgmental public of young evaluations of life.

     I presume we are meant to be touched and overjoyed in that fact. But for me, there is something sad in the final image. Let us hope that Elliott does not have to wait for the sexual consummation as long as Claire and we have. But worse, can the otherwise excellent director, Johnson, release himself from this kind of teeny-bop writing to again create a sophisticated adult comedy-drama such as his earlier works? Or have we lost him to Netflix gay “feel-good” fantasies?

     This is not seriously a gay film, but a rather silly tribute to an LBGTQ nostalgia, where all is ultimately just fine as long as everybody just finds their own groove. I doubt that’s the way, even today, that most kids see those difficult years.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2018).