Hirokazu Kore-eda | 怪物 (Kaibutsu) Monster / 2023

the train to paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yuji Sakamoto (screenplay), Hirokazu Kore-eda (director) 怪物 (Kaibutsu) Monster / 2023

 

Somewhat like Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Yuji Sakamoto’s 2023 masterwork Monster presents three versions of the same tale, but it this case it is closer to a peeling away of an onion, wherein as each layer is removed we come closer to what we might describe as reality, yet discover that the reality is even more mysterious and wondrous than the truth we first thought we comprehended.

     At the center of this confusing world are two fifth-graders Minato (Sōya Kurokawa) and Yori (Hinata Hiiragi). Inexplicably, the two have begun feeling joy and comfort in each other’s presence which, as we later discover, might almost be described as a kind of romantic love that deeply troubles Minato, a boy whose father has died and is attempting to grow up, as his mother Saori Mugino (Sakura Andō) has taught him, to be worthy of the memory of her husband.

    Early in the film we observe a sign of the difficulties to come when a high-rise building near the Mugino home suddenly is discovered to be blazing in fire. Mother and son watch the blaze in wonderment from their balcony, which neighborhood gossips later explain held a sex bar several stories up and where, they claim, the boy’s teacher Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama) was a regular visitor.

    As a single mother, Saori works hard in a local shop, arriving home late some nights with groceries as she attempts to live life as both mother and financial support, a role that many women like her sometimes find difficult to balance. But basically, she has what appears to be a good rapport with her son. That is until she begins to observe strange signs. One night she returns home to find several strands of her son’s hair chopped off and left in the sink. Why is he cutting away his own beautiful head of hair?

    At another point she finds that he has returned home with only one of his shoes. Another evening, her son does not return home at all. She desperately goes on a search for him, finding his bicycle parked by the side of the road. She explores the path to find an abandoned train tunnel where she finally discovers her son, embracing him and bringing him home, but troubled about the evidence she appears to accumulate, particularly after questioning the fairly incoherent boy, regarding his former favorite teacher Mr. Hori, who appears to be physically and mentally abusing him, calling him a “monster” and other terms that do not seem at all appropriate.

    Visiting the school, she attempts to have a full conversation with the female principal (Yūko Tanaka), who seems cold and removed as Saori recounts what she has perceived. Indeed, after she has made her accusations apparent, she is met up with others on the faculty, who excuse the principal’s absence by simply suggesting she has other obligations.

     In the second meeting with faculty, Hori makes a hasty and seemingly enforced confession of sorts, but still with no explanation of the facts and without at all directly responding to Saori’s own fears and questions.

     Confronting Hori alone, he suggests that Minato has actually be bullying the fellow, effeminate student, Yori, having for no seeming reason tossed the boy’s books and bookbag to the floor and later, locked him in a bathroom stall. Neither Saori or Hori connect this with a homophobic fellow student who, at one point, the mother even challenges.

     Confused by this new information, Saori visits Yori’s home, only to find the boy alone without any adult in this house. The boy invites her in, serves her a drink, and expresses his caring and worry for her son, far from suggesting any sense of fear or distress. He even sits down to write her son a letter of caring, while, she notices, he reverses several of the Japanese kanji, which she quietly corrects. She may find the young boy somewhat strange, but he evinces no feelings that suggest her son has been abusing him.

   Meanwhile, so that the school can save face, Mr. Hori is fired. He has discovered, as we later discover, a paper by Yori in which the kanji are reversed in order spell out the name of Minato, and rushes back to the school, pushing his way past his fellow faculty members who attempt to restrain him in order to tell Minato that he now realizes that he has been wrong in his assessment of the boy’s behavior, realizing in fact that the two are close friends. But Minato terrified of yet further punishment rushes up the stairs and back down again, finally falling down the staircase.

    Having lost his job and his girlfriend, Hirona (Mitsuki Takahata), Hori now is ready to jump off the elementary school roof in despair, but a strange noise of horns below stops him, and he ceases his suicidal attempts. He attempts again to visit Minato at his house in order to explain to him that he now knows of his innocence, but as a tropical monsoon begins to hit the city, Saori finds her son missing.

     We now witness an abbreviated summary of the events through Hori’s point of view. The same high-rise fire we observed with Minato and his mother from the balcony, is now being observed by Hori and his girlfriend. The gossips were entirely mistaken about the gentle Hori who is not the kind of man to visit the sex club the building may have held. In this version of reality he enters a classroom to discover Minato throwing other students’ books and bags around the room, never bothering to perceive that it is both a reaction to the homophobia shown to his friend Yori and his own attempt to momentarily dissociate himself from Yori when he meets up with the classroom bully’s actions against his effeminate friend.

     Similarly, it is the bully who has locked Yori in the bathroom stall, yet when Hori goes to check out the rumpus, he finds Minato leaving the room, and even returning to watch him as he helps Yori escape the stall locked at the top. What else can he presume but that Minato is bullying Yori?

     When Hori visits Yori’s hope, unlike Saori’s visit he meets up with Yori’s father who, it becomes immediately apparent, is an abusive alcoholic, disgusted by his son’s girlish ways and apparently beating him to cure his effeminate ways.

      To the faculty, it is Saori who is the “monster, an overprotective woman who requires the principal to force Hori to resign to protect her institution. She, meanwhile, has just recently seen her grandson hit by a car her husband was driving; even worse, we later realize, she herself had been driving the car, hence her inability to properly deal with the situation at hand. A public hearing is demanded, Hori let go, and later hounded by the press who declare him a monster for his seeming abuse of the boy. His girlfriend simply packs up her suitcase and never returns.

     In this version, it appears that Hori is the tortured one, made as the scapegoat by his fellow faculty members and hounded by an uncaring press and a mother who simply doesn’t comprehend the details that she begins to perceive.

     It is at this point, finally, that Hori rediscovers Yori’s school paper and realizes that the boys are not at odds with one another, but in love. After attempting to explain his mistake to Minato at the school, he rushes to his home, trying to call him out, only to discover he is missing. Together he and Saori, despite the storm, attempt to visit the old railroad station, but are told by police, now barricading the location that with the rains the area is at any moment about to be enveloped in a landslide. They rush to the site only to discover an old railroad car, now covered over almost entirely with mud, observing only Minato’s book bag.

     Within the car are the two boys, whom, in the third peeling of the onion skin, we discover have created and decorated a private world within the old train, escaping there together after Minato has befriended Yori upon observing that other boys taunt him again and again for his behavior and his almost endless sense of joy in his simple difference from all the others. We now discover that Minato slices off parts of his hair only after Yori has delightfully played with it, the doubts of his sexuality already creeping into Minato’s own mind as he finds Yori so appealing. Yet the young fifth-grader remains torn in his increasing love for Yori, fearing that he is not living up to the visions his mother has painted of his father.

    Nonetheless, the boys grow even closer, and one night when Minato visits his friend, he encounters Yori’s father, who tells him that Yori has been “cured” (of what he doesn’t say, but we know he means of his “sissified" ways), and orders Minato to leave him alone. As the truth becomes more and more apparent, anyone with even a shred of empathy can now hardly hold in the tears for how much these children have been forced to suffer. When Yori appears to tell his friend that what is father has said is not so, we know there will now be further punishments for the child.

    Back at school, in his escape from Hori on the staircase, Minato himself encounters the principal, as discovers himself in a small room full of brass instruments. This basically unsympathetic tyrant now explains to the young boy how she formerly conducted a brass band, and encourages him to try playing a trombone. He blows into the mouthpiece with no result, but she takes up the French horn and together they blow out the brass bellows that Hori, about to jump off the rooftop, hears, saving his life. This formerly failed leader is now also given a second chance in Kore-eda’s totally forgiving story, as she advises Minato to choose happiness instead of fear.

     Called out of the house during the storm, Minato rushes to Yori’s house only to find him fully clothed in his own bathtub, covered with bruises inflicted upon him by his furious father. And together they hurry off to their hideaway where they wait out what they realize may be their death, and a possibility to be “reborn” into a world of normality where they were no longer perceived as “pig-brained monsters.”

     As the rain ceases, Minato is able to push open one of the car windows from which they escape. Even they are not sure whether they are still alive or have been “reborn,” particularly when they rush off along a now green pathway where before they had encountered a gate closing off their entry. But now that gate is missing, the path open for their further adventure.

     Several gay critics complained that Kore-eda had simply once more killed off the two gay heroes. But I didn’t at all interpret it that way. Nor, apparently, did the director who argued in a dialogue with Mizuki Kodama in “Film Monster: Queer Criticism and Director Hirokazu Kore-ed’s Response; A Three and-a-half-hour Dialogue” that “he intended the ending to be one in which Minato and Yori choose life, and directed it as a celebration of their being alive, while admitting that he now anticipated that about 20% of the audience would interpret it as depicting an afterlife.

   What we can be certain of is that most of the adults in this film sadly suffered for this misapprehensions about children and their lives and loves. Caring as they all were, they could not imagine the true complexity of these two boy's relationship and their reliance on one another for survival.

     As the unnamed writer of the blog Medium (going under the moniker “Justsomethingg”) reminds us, the story begins with fire and ends with a rainstorm, both signifiers of death and renewal. These boys have found a way to transform the old, failed world around them into a new experience for themselves that offers gay boys and the entire LGBTQ+ community new hope.

    This work is greatly enhanced, finally, by the last score of the great musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died two months before this film was released.

    I have always been an admirer of Kore-eda’s transformative works, but this is now my favorite of his oeuvre to date.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

    

 

 

 

Ludvig Christian Næsted Poulsen | Drømmedreng (A Boy’s Dream) / 2023

a better place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ludvig Christian Næsted Poulsen (screenwriter and director) Drømmedreng (A Boy’s Dream) / 2023 [30 minutes]

 

Elias (Lasse Steen) has long been studying psychology, while his lover Christian (Christoffer Rønje) apparently is a wealthy business man, who is often away of business trips. Together the two, in an open relationship, have been living a kind of dream life, with the resources to travel, buy expensive clothing, and designer furniture. They also appear to be very much in love.        

      Elias is beginning a new job as psychologist at a student boarding school for abused and displaced children. Don’t expect too much warns the school’s head, Sanne (Anne Louise Hassing), these children have been so abused that many of them are what she suggests almost unsalvable; power is the major word among the teachers in the school.

      Elias becomes immediately interested in the newest visitor William (Bastian Hoe Friss-Topholm), a young child who has somehow ended up with a hole in the back of his head. The police are investigating the case, and ultimately determine his parents are the villains, the school taking the boy away from his home, which brings about an outburst of violence from his father (Tobias Maj Stelzner).

      Meanwhile, Elias and William quickly forge a wonderful relationship as the elder shows him how to alter the swing to the height which the boy desires, and offers him a belt to help hold up his pants. Later, he takes the boy on a day-trip to the harbor, where they both agree that they prefer the forest with its tree-tops to the harbor. You can immediately sense William as both a total innocent but an intelligent kid still seeking out the world around him. Power his no issue here.

      A few days later, after William asks to see where his new friend lives, Elias takes William on a visit of his own home, the child observing the beauty of his new friend’s world. And gradually, Elias realizes what he has been missing most in his life of luxury with Christian, a child whom he might love and nourish and offer a different life.

       He unsuccessfully tries to convince Christian to co-adopt the boy, but his lover is against the whole idea, prizing the freedom of anything that might hold him down. Christian moves into a hotel, whole Elias proceeds with the adoption.

      The final scene is filled will new possibility when William asks where are we going, and Elias answers, “We’re going to a better place.”        

    Danish director and writer Ludvig Christian Næsted Poulsen has created a quite simple but emotionally deep film in A Boy’s Dream, where we see Elias gradually choosing to give up everything he values in his gay life-style, as he begins to realize what is most missing from his own world.

      And I might add that the message here is not at all simply a positive one, but is filled with temptations and other fears as well since previously Elias has brought home a seventeen-year-old boy named Carl, whom Christian fucked; the age of sexual consent in Denmark, incidentally, is 15.

      But we are assured that Elias intends to bring up this boy with a parentally caring love that will give him the possibilities William has never before imagined, even at the cost of Elias’ previously ideal gay life, even though the details of how he might do that as a single-parent are never quite established.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (June 2025).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evhenii Slupchuk | Маєток (The Estate) / 2025

several centuries

by Douglas Messerli

 

Olexii Hladushevskyi and Evhenii Slupchuk (screenplay), Evhenii Slupchuk (director) Маєток (The Estate) / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

The handsome young Ukrainian soldier Tim (Ruslan Mirosnychenko) returns back home to his now almost abandoned and destroyed estate where his lover Makar (Vitalii Zelenvion) sits waiting, a glass of red wine in hand.

    It has been a long while since they have last seen one another, and when asked by his older lover what Makar has been up to, he describes it matter-of-factly as rather boring: “Netflix. Scrolling TikTock. Jerking off.” He has accomplished a new painting, but basically describes it as rubbish, and we never a glimpse of the work.

    The two begin kissing and soon after have intimate sex, Makar claiming that the soldier is “smelly.” However, there is little hot water and no working shower any more on the old estate, no longer any electricity. We get a quick glimpse of just how old the estate may be by a photo of the two, appearing to playing a landowner and his serf.

     The young lover, frustrated by the fact that it is almost time for Tim to leave again, seemingly exaggerates, suggesting he has now to wait another hundred years between their various encounters.

     Makar has found a piece of fresh meat in the street market, and has cooked it rare just as the soldier loves it. The blood runs out on the plate, as they both again pour themselves out fresh glasses of red wine.

    While the older takes a smoke on the front porch, the younger finds a large basin and fills it with cold water, ready now to bathe his lover, as he cups the water over his body. We see another of their past photos, this when the younger might have been a volunteer, or perhaps just wearing the elder, officer’s long overcoat.

     The lover dries the soldier off, and they return to the living room to engage in further love making. But this time, everything has changed. The elder immediately goes for the younger’s throat, displaying the teeth of a vampire, the young opening his mouth to reveal the same sharp canine teeth. And suddenly we realize than these are vampires, who have indeed lived hundreds of years through Ukrainian history, acting out the various forms of attempts for the people of Ukraine to obtain their freedoms. In their eternal lives and struggle, these two homosexual lovers stand for the entire of the history of Ukraine.

      This estate, outside of Kyiv may have fallen on hard times, but it is still standing, as is their eternal love. As the soldier moves on to return to the front lines, the young man again joins him for yet another photograph of a hundred years of struggles. They represent the history of their homeland.

 

 This film radically compounds the everyday struggles of the Ukrainians with their long history, brilliantly using the vampire myth to allow their gay heroes to represent the continued struggles.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

Paul Morrissey | Flesh / 1968

drop your pants, joe!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Morrissey (screenwriter and director) Flesh / 1968

 

After the intelligent writing and co-directing with Andy Warhol of Ronald Tavel it is difficult to suggest that anything done by Paul Morrissey is worthy of being described as a movie from the Factory. Gone are the days of true experimentation, surprise, and absolute zaniness. The fascinating actors who appeared in the Tavel works have been replaced by highly dim-witted men and women who seem simultaneously incapable of comprehending what anyone might say while absolutely believing in those statements as representing some kind of mysterious truth.

       It is difficult, nonetheless, to completely dismiss it as most critics of the day reacted to his 1968 Joe Dallesandro picture, Flesh.

 

     The New York Times critic A. H. Weiler pretty much summarizes the feelings of most critics who bothered to even write a review:

 

“A year ago, Andy Warhol introduced Bike Boy, a repetitiously seedy screen saga of a pursued Adonis for the delectation of the delicate. And now, Paul Morrissey, his associate, is exposing Flesh at the Andy Warhol Garrick Theater to prove once again that even audacious, unadulterated sex can be a trashy bore. In listening closely to his master's voice, the writer, director and photographer of Flesh has illustrated, in essence a male hooker's handbook. It might rate marginal credit as a social document if it weren't so leeringly obvious. But as produced in gaudy color, a haphazard soundtrack and slapdash editing, it becomes transparently clear that Flesh is simply what its title shouts.”

 

     Even Roger Ebert who, although dismissing Warhol’s films from early on, generally attempts a fair-minded review—and in this case even apologizes for his lateness, 4 or 5 months into its run—veers closely to a homophobic attack on Warhol and his filmmakers:

 

“Flesh is not exactly a Warhol film, however. It was written and directed by Paul Morrissey, a Warhol associate, and it's at least interesting. It isn't very good, though; if it hadn't come from New York under Warhol's sponsorship, we'd never have seen it. Warhol is one of the chief beneficiaries of that unholy New York in-group of art investors, social climbers, fashionable first-person writers, intellectually precious homosexuals and critics too insecure to dare to seem to miss the point.”

 

    Ebert’s description of the film’s story, moreover, seems almost to be of a movie I didn’t see:

 

“The story involves a day in the life of Joe, a male hustler who is married and has a baby, and whose wife's girlfriend needs an abortion. The wife sends him out onto the streets to hustle the necessary $200 (and instead of seeming sordid, this scene and indeed the whole film ranges between being funny and being banal).

     During the day Joe meets an aging artist with theories about the muscles on Greek statues, a kid who wants to break into the hustling business, a go-go dancer, a semi-sincere lover and eventually even his wife's girlfriend.

     Morrissey keeps the film moving more quickly than Warhol might. He isn't adverse to editing when absolutely necessary. But the film's appeal depends mightily on Joe Dallesandro in the semi-autobiographical leading role. Dallesandro is pleasant, naive, engaging. He is also, alas, not very bright and terribly narcissistic (especially in a scene where he feeds a cupcake to his baby and you wonder which one is more self-satisfied).”

 

     So dismissive is Ebert’s piece that I’m also surprised that he sees anything even vaguely humorous about the work, but I’ll come back to that soon. At least he didn’t as many a critic today might represent Dallesandro’s naked body holding his equally naked son as some sort of child abuse.

      Finally, in a review by John Fortgang in the current century looking back, more fairly reevaluates Morrissey’s work, bringing up both the weaknesses of Flesh and its strengths:

 

“Flesh is, in conventional terms, a primitive film. Sound and images are erratic. Morrissey's camera drifts in and out of focus like a junkie struggling to regain consciousness. It's also unusually explicit. Here is a rare example of an erection in non-hardcore porn, prompting the police to raid The Open Space where it shown in London in 1970. Sex replaces emotional intimacy, the characters remaining benign but disengaged—as, of course was Andy—in a bid to keep the real world at bay.

     Dallesandro, beautiful but blank beneath his trademark bandana, is an entirely convincing (non)-presence, well-suited to Morrissey's naturalistic style. Here too is most of the cast from Lou Reed's '”Walk On The Wild Side”: the transvestite Candy Darling, who came from out on the island; Jackie (Curtis), who thought she was James Dean for a day, and Little Joe himself, who never once gave it away.

     In itself this may be an insubstantial slice of life on the street, but the barriers it broke were significant, not least on a generation of artists and filmmakers who saw that it was possible to make independent—in every sense—films about those on the margins.”

 

     In several respects, Fortgang is correct about this film’s outspoken statements of LGBTQ values, Dellesandro insisting verbally and most certainly cinematically that “Nobody’s straight or not straight” as he explains to a young street hustler. His gymnast friend, moreover, reiterates a common viewpoint held by hustlers, body builders, prison inmates, and others who daily participate in homosexual activity: “We’re not queer but other people don’t know that,” the “queer” here rejecting not so much the idea of homosexuality, but the idea that there might be anything unusual in having sex with another male or, in his gym friend’s case, even wanting to live with someone like Joe forever.

     I do get a little irritated, however, with the notion that the sexual nudity of such a film that reveals even an occasional Dellesandro hard-on is somehow “barrier-breaking.” Kenneth Anger, Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Passolini, Carlos Hugo Christensen, Jack Smith, and even Andy Warhol himself, along with others catalogued by Vito Russo and my own essays in this volume all have showen various degrees of male nudity if not as literally as Morrissey does in Flesh in sometimes for more sexually stimulating ways. I might even suggest that Dellesandro’s earliest porn films, shot by Bob Mizer, editor of Physique Pictorial magazine, had grown so popular with gay followers before this film that they might almost be seen as part of the larger LGBTQ complex of movies, particularly since some of these clips later made their way into Thom Fitzerald’s 1999 documentary Beefcake, a film I will be reviewing in these pages.

     The very fact that so much of contemporary LGBTQ filmmaking is now actually quite sexually explicit furthers the idea of such a larger inclusion of what might once have been isolated as gay porno. And, of course that open seseme allows entry to many classic gay porn movies by far more talented directors than Paul Morrissey, including Peter de Rome, Joe Gage, Jean-Daniel Cadinot, William Higgins, Kristen Bjorn, the list goes on. I don’t intend to entirely go there, but…perhaps in the future others might.

     But this is not really the important issue about the critical reactions to Flesh. What strikes me most about nearly all the critical commentary about Morrissey’s films—or perhaps we should say, Dellesandro’s films which represent Morrissey at his best—is its absolute lack of a sense of humor. If nothing else, as Ebert perceived, at times, and I’d argue most of the time, underneath the seeming banality of Little Joe’s day on the streets as he attempts to hustle up $200 for his wife’s girlfriend’s abortion, is the ridiculousness of those entering and exiting our handsome sexual hero’s life.

     Beginning with the absurdity of the very driving force of having to raise money to get rid of a baby with whom your own baby son’s mother is having a lesbian affair, Joe makes the rounds of pick-ups and so-called friends who live life as if it were directly based on a cartoon book or, if you want to elevate it, right out of the pop-cultural art world of Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, and, obviously, of Warhol.

    The very first trick he picks up on the street wants to see him again. “I’m on the street,” Dellesandro states the obvious. In other words, he’s openly available, yet the man with whom he’s just had sex apparently wants more perhaps than an occasional event which he will have to seek out. Clearly he’s thoroughly enjoyed what appears to have been simply sucking Little Joe off.

     Joe’s second pick-up, a far more lucrative one, is an older artist (Maurice Braddell), who not only wants to photograph Joe in various athletic-poses (not so different one presumes from those in the Physique Pictorial for which Joe has previously posed), but the opportunity to explain in art historical terms what those classic positions meant for the Greek, Roman, and Italian artists of history and philosophize about the importance of the athletic body to love and sex, as if imparting some unperceived knowledge that few others have before discovered.

    It’s clear that the true aim of his photographs and crude drawings is simply to capture the image of this male nude beauty a bit longer than the normal voyeur (he pays $100 for the privilege), and even he, who obviously done this several times in the past, is pleasingly amazed at just how easy it is to get Joe to whip off his shirt and pull down his tight-fitting denims. If Joe seems to be attentively listening to every word this poseur spouts, he later admits to his two street friends, one his own brother, Bob, that it was an absolutely boring event except that he was paid well and got a free dinner.

     Talking at length with his two compatriots, Bob, and a new kid on the block (Barry Brown), Joe seems for a moment or two to be honestly imparting wisdom on how to pick up tricks—indeed, one critic asserted that this was perhaps the most honest and natural moment of the film—but is also apparent that he is quickly growing bored by the insistence of the scrawny rather unattractive new hustler boy from Wisconsin and Alabama (the subtle look that comes across Dellesandro’s face as he even mentions these names, says everything about where the boy was and where he now is), suggesting that the worst thing they could all do was hang together which would surely not attract any john. Rather that the kid should go up to Third Avenue near the 40s or 50s to hang out near a newspaper stand. It’s clear that Joe simply wants to get rid of the inquiring pest, but the boy keeps insisting upon knowing the exact location of the newsstand while attempting to get a commitment that one day soon the two might hang out together so that he can “learn the trade.”

      If this scene appears to be banal in its serious discussion of their job, it’s really quite the opposite; just as Greta Garbo proclaimed, “I want to be alone,” it is something Joe desperately needs just to go about his business.

     The next stop is even more hilarious as Joe visits a female friend Terry (Geri Miller) for a free blow-job. She gladly provides him with what we can only imagine is a strange desire for someone who has come from one only a few hours earlier and intends soon after to scour the streets for yet more sex.

     Moreover, the act of fellatio is jealously witnessed by Geri’s two transvestite friends, Candy (Candy Darling) and Jackie (Jackie Curtis) who, in an attempt to both ignore and mock Terry’s indelicate act, pretend to read every article in a Hollywood gossip magazine, commenting on each word as if it were an important element of some sort of Holy Grail.

     It’s not enough that Terry sucks off the hunk in from of them, but after talks endlessly upon having liposuction to enlarge her bosom in order to be more successful as a topless go-go dancer.

     If this scene is absolutely “funny,” however, it is also extremely sad, as she recounts a past encounter with Joe in a room where other men corner and rape her several times after Joe has left (or perhaps escaped). Terrified and suffering at the moment, she now admits the entire event was sexually exciting, while meanwhile the other girls, still drooling over Joe, try to understand why he has actually married his wife, let alone fathered a baby.

     A visit to his gymnast friend, David (Louis Waldron), is an attempt to get a loan. Evidently, for a little friendly sex, Joe has taken such “loans” from the man who he refuses to describe as a customer. Although David, like the pick-up artist, is almost entirely concerned with the athletic body, he admits that he is losing some of his muscular development and can no longer get an erection. Yet he too cannot at all comprehend why Joe doesn’t simply move in with him and leave his ugly lesbian wife, Geri (Geraldine Smith). Like all the others before him, his major demand of Joe, however, is for him to take his clothes off, as he attempts to snuggle up to the hustler in partial payment for the loan. But Joe, as with all the others, quickly pulls away and speeds off.

     The last scene of the film consists of Joe lying in the nude on his own bed just as in the film’s very first scene, attempting to sleep with his wife and her female lover, Patti D'Arbanville, the two obviously stoned and giggling as they nuzzle up on the left side of the bed while Joe sprawls out on the right.

     The entire film might be said to be structured around this single image representing the contradictions of the film and Joe’s life: the nude body displaying his complete openness while his sleep suggesting a sense of closure and emptiness. Throughout it is as if everyone he meets demands of him, “Drop your pants, Joe,” only to reveal the complete meaninglessness of engaging with this god’s body. Of course, that is always the ephemeralness of any sexual act; it may be lovely but only while it lasts, and no matter how much any of those who worship it no one can hold onto its joys for long. If everyone wants Joe to give up all other beings and activities for them alone they will always find themselves wanting what they can never have, locked out from the world of continuous joy they seek. Flesh is only the cover for the heart, mind, and soul.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).

 

Anthony Schatteman | Petit ami / 2017

two faces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Schatteman (screenwriter and director) Petit ami / 2017 [14 minutes]

 

Vincent (Thomas Ryckewaert), a handsome man in his late 30s or early 40s has rented the poolroom of the Petit ami gay hotel for the 3-day Christmas weekend where Jasper (Ezra Fieremans), a 20-some year-old who looks more like a teenager meets up with him in Belgian director Anthony Schatteman’s 2017 short film Petit ami.

     It is clear that Jasper is an experienced pleasure boy who when the two encounter each other Vincent immediately fucks standing like an animal in rut; the two hit it off, the younger offering the other the lovemaking and, at moments, the enjoyment he appears to be desperate for, Schatteman and cinematographer Ruben Appeltans’ camera lushly capturing their erotic activities which are the focus of this film. Champagne, pizza, and sex in bed, pool, and everywhere else, in fact, seem to resolve the problems faced by Jasper’s obviously desperate Christmas weekend customer. But even the boy who whips up a good time in a mean holiday cannot help but feel some sympathy for a man who, he gradually discovers, has left his wife and two daughters for the comfort of an almost teenage kid.

     The promotional entries for this film all seem to suggest that Jasper discovers the “secret” that Vincent is hiding; but even the laziest of sleuths would have been able to quickly deduce that Vincent has missed this family celebration because of his sexual ambiguity or, at the very least, he is replacing the obviously failed marital relationship with the substitute that may lie at the crux of his familial problems.

      And Vincent's overhead telephone conversations along with Jasper's reading of the beginning of a letter addressed to the man’s wife do not, thankfully, fully explain the reason for his john’s 3-day reservation nor his sudden decision to cut it off now that he has resolved some of his emotional turmoil.

      The depth of this superficially beautiful film lies in how much each viewer is willing to plumb the possible explanations for Vincent’s Christmas fireside absence. Has his wife suddenly discovered his sexual desires and sent him packing? Has he himself, having obviously lived in a kind of closeted marital hell, finally determined to leave those he clearly loves behind? Has he broken up with his wife for other reasons and is merely using this despairing weekend as an opportunity to explore alternative forms of lovemaking or seeking out what he has often done of business trips and covered up through the years?

     Any of these time-worn and predictable narrative solutions, which at least engage our minds, would explain Vincent’s almost brutal introductory rape of Jasper upon their meeting, and his gradual softening as the experienced prostitute applies his sexual balms. What is perhaps somewhat more interesting is how Jasper’s own inner feelings are altered despite his outward charming engagement of his customer. And it is apparent that by the time Vincent is willing to send him packing that he is not sure that he truly is ready to leave, that he has developed a kind of sympathy and perhaps even a bit of love for his customer not permitted in his profession.

       Schatteman’s long focus on Jasper as he leaves in the early daylight a day earlier than scheduled is fascinating when compared with the boy’s nighttime arrival two days previous.

       In the earlier night shot he seems to be wistfully looking off into space, his lips expressing no obvious emotion, the creases around his mouth, although almost straight, are very slightly raised as in a would-be smile. He is, in full, enigmatic, a boy without seeming empathy or even emotional depth, ready to move forward, we soon discover as he enters the hotel where he meets up with his customers, to do whatever is required of him without question or judgment. In a sense he truly does look here like a teenage boy, a bit wide-eyed and open to the world if, we can well imagine, worn out by what he has already at his young age witnessed and experienced.

     The second image shows the man, dressed just as he was two nights earlier, but his eyes glancing away to the left, which transforms his whole face, including the equivocal position of his lips, into what appears as, even if it actually is not a slight frown. Whereas in the first frame his face is represented as a near circle, in the second daylight photo we observe a more ovalene head, which hints at an elongated, less open expression. If nothing else, the second boy is less eager, less sure of his actions, or even of the meaning of those actions. There is a slightly circumspect look, in general about what the camera catches in Jasper’s countenance by the end of the film.    

    He is still an enigmatic figure and we realize that whatever we may be reading in his face represents only a second in time, not necessarily a dramatic or permanent change of being. But there it is nonetheless facing us, the boy who might pass for a teenager and the twentyish youth who has just spent two nights picking up the spirits of a dejected man who it is apparent, as he writes in the short, never-sent note to his wife, was “not able to live up to whom he should [italics mine] be.”

    Has the boy helped him to transition into what clearly will be a new life? The film does even attempt to explore that. But any empathetic viewer might hope that Vincent can gradually convert the “should” into a someone who “would” or “will” be, or at the very least an acceptance of what that being “is,” gradually converting a failed past into a present that can imagine a more successful future.

     In this instance, it appears—at least superficially—as if the young prostitute might have helped point his brief encounter in that direction.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2021).