Hobart Henley | Night World / 1932

leaving happy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Schayer (screenplay), P.J. Wolfson and Allen Rivkin (story), Hobart Henley (director) Night World / 1932

 

You might describe Night World’s roving camera as a kind of low-budget rehearsal for the 1934 film Wonder Bar, which also takes us gradually through the regulars’ and backstage dancers’ machinations showing that there’s no true “happiness” in such a night-world bar, even if this one,  run by “Happy” MacDonald (Boris Karloff) is named Happy’s Bar. As the doorman, Tim Washington (Clarence Muse) observes, the people come out sadder than they go in, and “everyone loves the wrong person,” which leads the local cop to describe him as a philosopher.

       Washington has good reason to be sad given that his wife has just had an operation in the hospital—for what ailment we’re never told—and he can’t get any straight answers from the nurse who responds to his phone calls with stock responses such as “She’s resting” or “She’s doing the best she can.” MacDonald won’t let him take off for the night, and he’s rightfully worried; by film’s end he discovers she has died.

      MacDonald has long been unhappy watching his double-timing wife, Jill (Dorothy Revier) try to keep her love affair with the bar’s stage director, Klauss (Russell Hopton), secret. Even the chorus girls see through her ruses, and it’s clear Happy is not blind to facts. He lies to a husband with whose wife he has obviously spent time while the man was out of town on a business trip. More importantly, the mob is after him, and, although he’s got a good quick punch, he knows he needs a gun to settle this score—which his wife has emptied of all its bullets.

     Bar-going husbands lie to their wives, and wives to their husbands. One date spends the entire night giggling so obnoxiously that by the time the couple is ready to leave, her companion is almost ready to strangle her so he won’t have to accompany her home.    

     Most of the savvy chorus girls nonetheless are just hoping some wealthy of good-looking customer will scoop them up for the night. But after their clumsy hoofing during which they share the intimate knowledge of their customers with one another, Klauss orders a rehearsal after closing hours, frustrating their bedside dreams as well. Even choreographer Busby Berkeley can’t get these girls to properly line up for the camera riding under their spreading crotches.

      A handsome young man enters Happy’s Bar and proceeds to nip on his “under the table” bottle  for the rest of the night, forgiven because everyone knows he’s Michael Rand (Lew Ayres), the son of a society gorgon—a role perfect for the later nasty right-wing gossip columnist Hedda Hooper—who shot the boy’s father for just seeking the pleasure of a kinder and caring woman. That other woman, also at the bar this evening, is Edith Blair (Dorothy Peterson), who drops by his table just to tell him how much she and his father were in love and remind him that his father loved him. It surely doesn’t improve the boy’s spirits much.

      And then there’s the standard bar loners and wanderers, the gay patron (Bryon Foulger) who looks so effeminate that you might think him to be a female transvestite. When one of the chorus girls, trying to interact with her audience, sings out “Hi baby,” he responds, “Mister Baby to you!”

      Another jolly drunk wanders about the bathrooms and the dance floor trying to find someone who, like he, is from Schenectady. When he asks a fellow bathroom patron, the man lisps back, “No, Syracuse is where I was born.” When Schenectady takes his search to the women’s room, Syracuse scolds him for trying to enter when men are not permitted, perhaps hoping to lure back in the men’s john. But in the meantime, the women have doodled up his face with lipstick, so that, as he turns around to speak with Syracuse, the pansy screams out “Frankenstein!”—obviously an inside joke since Karloff had created the role in James Whale’s masterpiece that was released only 7 months previous—as he skedaddles off, Schenectady calling after, “Relax, you powderpuff.”

       Other than the doorman Tim, only the club’s singer Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke) appears to be a decent human being, joining up with the increasingly confused Rand, and encouraging him to stop his endless thirst: “You know they can make it faster than you can drink it.” She’s just sung “Prisoner of Love,” which obviously is now her position with regard to Rand, particularly when, after the boy gets violent, Happy slugs him out cold. In the bosses’ office she nurses Rand back to health, to sanity—when his mother seeks him out he suddenly vents the spleen he’s obviously been holding in for months, finally cutting off relationship with the viper—and finally lures him into love.

       But just as the two are about to run off the Bali and Washington is about to rush off to the hospital to retrieve his poor wife’s body, the gangsters show up, shooting down the doorman by mistake and killing the now defenseless Happy and his double-crossing wife. Discovering the two love-happy kids still in the back of the bar, the mobsters determine to do away with them as well. They are saved by the return of the cop, checking up on his friend Washington, who takes them away in the paddy car for questioning. They could care less as long as they remain in one another’s arms for the night. And for the first time someone has come out of the bar happier than they went in.

    There’s not much here in the way of edification for the LGBTQ audience, but at least we know that Happy’s contains a couple of sissies. And in the 1930s they were to be found, evidently, in every bar and theater in New York or any other big city.

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

Philippe Reypens | L'Échappée sauvage (Escape into the Wild) / 2017

a visual tone poem to childhood love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philippe Reypens (screenwriter and director) L'Échappée sauvage (Escape into the Wild) / 2017

 

A young French-speaking boy is being chauffeured along country roads, a small sitting near him as he either being returned to his country estate or being taken to relatives in the country. His scrubbed ruddy complexion and worried look give him away as a wealthy schoolboy, although obviously we know little actually about him.

     Suddenly the car conks out, stopping in the middle of the road. The driver pops open the engine, gets out and checks it, frustrated that we perhaps cannot find the problem or sees that it is necessary for him to go get help in order to continue the trip.

      He takes off his hat, fans himself with it, and walks to the back of the car where he opens up the trunk and takes out a small petrol can, obviously the problem. He briefly speaks to the boy, a conversation to which we are not privy. It’s clear, however, that he telling him to remain in the car while he walks to a gas station to bring back enough gas to continue the journey.

      The boy falls into a doze, only to be awakened by two young almost feral looking youths, a boy and a girl, staring in at him, pounding on the window which he has previously rolled up. He attempts to ignore them, but the naughty kids play games, the boy running to other side, opening the door and quickly stealing the boys suitcase before they run off back into the golden-lit woods.

     Through the now open window he watches them disappear. He seems to have no choice but to leave the safety of the car and run after them. He finds the children together and the boy hands him back his suitcase as they stand taking in each other. The two walk off, while the traveling boy sits down the suitcase, smiles slightly, and follows them.

      They are now on the run, the new boy after them. He soon discovers pine cones, watches the two, brother and sister(?), fence with sticks, and race off again. The two feral children overtake a drunken man, pushing him to the ground, but when the boy still in his tie passes, the drunk looks up, smiling, almost as if he recognizes the slow look of the stranger as being somewhat sympathetic, out of the ordinary. Perhaps he recognizes him as belonging to the local estate? Or maybe he is simply enchanted by the new boy’s true beauty.

      The three soon reach a stream, a kind of swamp where the new boy suddenly perceives he is now walking on grass saturated by the water. He stops, unsure of proceeding, but moves on nonetheless, seeming to follow.

     Yet suddenly he has reached another road. Is it the same one in which his car has been traveling? Now there is no car waiting. He has now reached a farm where the two wild ones suddenly burst out from under a pile of straw, but soon show him how to feed a young calf. The feral young boy, also a true beauty, rests in a pile of straw, almost languidly, the image suggesting almost a sexual position.

   But soon he is pushing his sister, this time in almost parody of such rustic utopias, on a hay-cart. It no longer matters, because soon after the girl has been replaced by the city boy, and the pleasure on both of they faces expresses the sexual joy of the moment. A moment or so later in this youthful childhood utopia the two boys have found they way up to a tree limb where they sit, the one with his arm around the other, as the girl below almost tosses festoons of straw at them.

   When the city boy attempts to return to the ground he sprains his foot in the short fall, and the girl surrounds it in a wrap, now given her own time to flirt with the newcomer, her brother standing by, quite clearly somewhat jealous. The farm boy quickly moves forward and pulls up the city boy, taking him off to his own territory.

   The girl now sits alone in mute silence.

   The local boy takes the newcomer to a real river, revealing the beautiful spot as if it were a personal treasure, shoving him off the rock before realizing the new boy cannot swim and diving in to save him.

     Now stretched out almost naked in only his underwear, the city boy smiles as the feral young boy stands over him with what appears to be almost a look of pleasure and satisfaction. He has clearly won over his new friend and they have become deep comrades, even if as children they do not quite yet understand their actions as being sexual.

    Finally, the driver, petrol can in hand, arrives back to the car only to discover his charge missing.

   By this time the two boys have whipped themselves up in the dying light into almost a frenzy of joyful play, the city, still without a shirt, jumping on the shoulders of the other. This is most definitely the play of sexually engaged innocents. It is truly love without a name.

   The two boys arrive back at the car, jump into the front seat together, with the farm boy driving off, only to stop a few feet later for the girl, who joins them in the backseat. God knows where they are going, perhaps to heaven.

  Belgian filmmaker Reypens’ film, broadcast on French TV, is a visual tone poem to childhood pleasures, with all the sexuality that those experiences involve. Although there is nothing overtly gay about this, it is clearly recognized by most gay film individuals as being stuffed with childhood versions of queer sexuality, and appears on most LGBTQ+ lists.

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

Tamer Ruggli | Cappuccino / 2010

poor boy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tamer Ruggli (screenwriter and director) Cappuccino / 2010 [16 minutes]

 

In Swiss filmmaker Tamer Ruggli’s 2010 film Cappuccino we encounter yet again another sort of coming out and semi-homophobic film, not really one or the other since our young hero Jérémie (Benjamin Décosterd) has hardly had enough experience to either fully announce his homosexuality, nor does he encounter the intense bullying that we have encountered in so many other films.

     The problem with Ruggli’s Cappuccino is that it consists only in a slight event that may be of great importance to the shy teenager who dreams of having passionate sex with his beautiful classmate Damien (Anton Ciurlia), but is so truly insignificant on the larger scale that we have difficulty to totally emphasize with his now-standard tearful admission to his more than sympathetic and loving mother, Gina (Manuel Biedermann) that he likes boys, not girls.

     Damien is one of those “straight” boys, always more knowledgeable about sex than any gay kid, who is perfectly willing to take advantage of the boy he immediately perceives has a crush on him. He quickly agrees to meet up with Jérémie in order to get an easy blowjob. What can a gay boy do but oblige, even if it isn’t the deep romantic encounter or even the remarkable fuck he might have wished for?

     He’s just happy to have been offered up the chance to suck up the semen which he declares tastes somewhat like the sweet drink his mother offers him every morning, cappuccino (not what the English translation declares to be “coffee”). But when he goes to kiss the self-satisfied recipient of his homosexual gesture, he is immediately pushed away and called, indirectly in this case, a “fag”: “I’m not a fag!”

     Compared to a gang of boys or even one straight homophobe threatening to beat you every day, the expletive seems negligible, something he even might have expected. But for Jérémie, it dashes nearly all his young dreams and hopes, leading him to such a flood of tears that when his mother merrily bounces home in her sequined gown, she still discerns his wet cheeks.

     She offers him one of her cigarettes and hugs him to her inquiring about how his date with a new girlfriend has ended in such a fuss, while he, letting loose with a new flurry of tears, admits the “she” was actually a “he,” and…well, in this case he doesn’t even have to explain his dilemma as she quickly swallows him up in her arms.

       All we can say is, “O the travails that still await this poor mamma’s boy.”

     Of course, we feel for him. But we might have suggested he watch a few other coming out films before making his first date. Hopefully, that’s what young boys can now share that in my generation was impossible.

      I couldn’t even imagine that a straight boy might have enjoyed, now and then, a good gay suck. Or that such “gay boys” often pretended they were straight, even to themselves. And certainly neither my mother or father would have held me in their arms while I cried out after having been described I was a fag. There was nothing to do but take the beatings, run away from bullies, and pretend that everything was “normal,” when you knew inside everything was all fucked up.

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

 

Robert McKimson | Daffy's Inn Trouble / 1961

competing establishments

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Detiege (story), Warren Batchelder, Ted Bonnicksen, and George Grandpré (animators), Robert McKimson (director) Daffy's Inn Trouble / 1961 [6 minutes]

 

Daffy’s definitely in trouble in this 1961 film, but so too is Porky Pig, one of his last films (his final film was also with Daffy in the 1965 release, “Corn on the Cop”) in which inexplicably the animators have turned his usually recognizable face into a couple of abstract squiggles that even the voice of Mel Blanc can’t quite save. Moreover, this is a Daffy Duck cartoon which Porky is only an ancillary figure.

     Daffy fed up with having to use his brilliance merely to sweep up Porky’s floors at the Bristle Inn, is finally fed up when Porky presents him with a surprise present—merely another new broom.

Determined to go into competition with his former boss, Daffy quickly constructs his own Duck Inn Tavern just across from the Pig’s hotel.

    Despite his touted offerings of free lunch, Plaid stamps, Free TV, and assurances that “Western [is] spoken here,” Daffy’s new establishment just doesn’t draw in the customers the way Porky’s

place does. Even his own schilling to bring in the crowds. What it does attract is a robber who demands Daffy’s money or his life. The robber takes away Daffy’s empty till.

     Still crowds pour into Porky’s place, and Daffy is determined to find out what “he’s got that I don’t haven’t got?”

    What he discovers is a full line of female barroom dancers offering up what might be described as a French Can-Can.

     Daffy gets into his drag costume and attempts to lure the men to his place, but the record gets stuck and the admirers turn in “sore-losers” as they plaster him with tomatoes and other vegetables.

    Daffy next attempts to lure Porky into becoming a partner, but the Pig argues that he has all the business he needs, and refuses the agreement.

    The only choice now that Daffy has to try what he always does, to get even. He spins around his revolver and shoots himself in the face. The next step is to levitate a gigantic boulder over-looking both the establishments in order to crash the Bristle Inn into pieces. The large rock bounces, of course, and crashes into Daffy’s Duck Inn, totally levelling it. For an instant, Daffy turns into a total jack-ass.

    Again dressing up in drag, this time in the dress of a traditional pioneer woman, Daffy straps explosives to himself, sits down at the table in the Bristle Inn and orders “service,” ordering up lasagna, a glass of paté de foie gras, and “a half of dozen medium rare truffles.” Porky suggests that her order will take a little time, giving Mlle. Daffy the opportunity to plant the explosives and run out to hide behind a rock.

   Yet even there, Porky reappears to remind her that she hadn’t ordered anything to drink. Suddenly the bomb goes off resulting in an oil gusher, she suggesting “How’s about a drink of oil, on the rocks, in a tall glass?”

      Now wealthy, Porky has opened a swank Hotel where, once again, Daffy works. Porky awards him a new office, one filled with mops and brooms.

      So quotes Daffy: “You know, I bet if he put his mind to it, he could be positively obnoxious.”

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

 

Alice Rohrwacher | Felice Lazarro (Happy as Lazarro) / 2018

the happy saint

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Rohrwacher (screenwriter and director) Felice Lazarro (Happy as Lazarro) / 2018

 

Without creating a precise allegory or even pushing her film into complete fantasy, Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher has created a significant work in her Felice Lazarro—meaninglessly translated into English as Happy as Lazarro, when it might have been far more felicitous to simply title it “Happy” or “Lucky” Lozarro—that reads like a mix of fable and a metaphoric tale of a young Christ-like being. Lazarro, the Italian medieval name for Lazarus, the believer who Christ restored to life four days after the man’s death, and for whom Jesus wept. In this film he is presented as a beautiful, young, cherubic teenager (stunningly performed by Adriano Tardiolo) as a true “holy fool,” who lives in the small central Italian village of Inviolata, a place that seems a bit like Brigadoon, a town that has mostly escaped contemporary life.

     Unlike the Scottish village, whose citizens joyously are brought back to life for one day in each century, the Inviolataese work hard every day for the bitter Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), the self-described cigarette queen, who also raises other vegetables which help to make her rich, while her citizenry are kept ignorant and in debt. Each month her overweight overseer (Natalino Balasso) arrives to declare each of them guilty of spending far more than the amount of pay for their labors owed to them, creating an indentured world that might almost match the Jim Crow US South.

     Nonetheless, Inviolata’s workers make the best of it, while cursing, under their breaths, about the ruthless, yet patriarchal Marchesa, who knows that even if they hate her, they need a system in which they can work in order to survive. And despite their living conditions, wherein, in some small homes there are 18 inhabitants, they seem to make the best of it, celebrating love, enthusiastically sharing the little quantities of wine, cigarettes, and food they have, even as they gripe.

     At the very lowest level of this horrible hierarchy is Lazarro, who is never offered anything to eat at these celebratory occasions—and, in fact, consumes no food throughout the film. He is the go-for of their world, the one they order about to fetch up the tobacco leaves they pick from the fields, to lift their crates, to carry off the crippled grandmother who appears to be his only relative. At one point, Lazarro runs off to fix coffee for the field workers only to discover, upon his return, that they have all wandered off.

   Strangely, none of this abuse disturbs the happy Lazarro in the least. He works endlessly and willingly, always with a smile pasted to his face. And he is also one of the few villagers invited into the Marchesa’s house—for she too makes use of his absolute servility—and it is there he meets her most unhappy son, Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), who has been brought home after, apparently, several debauched years, and is now locked away in the virginal world of Inviolata.

      The frail, young blond Tancredi, who appears to be suffering from consumption, or, perhaps, is just suffering lung cancer from smoking too many of his mother’s cigarettes (as he explains to the innocent Lazarro, “Every time I cough, I need to smoke a cigarette.”) slyly befriends Lazarro and seduces him into helping to pretend that he has been kidnapped in order to get the money to escape her clutches.

    If this is no sexual seduction, it might as well be for the innocent one, who is convinced, when Tancredi tells him the truth—that the Marchessa originally was just another woman from the village with whom his father had sex and that, for all he knows, Tancredi, who has never known his parents, might as well be his half-brother—is reconfirmed in the innocent’s mind when Trancredi, unable to prick his own finger in order to seal his signature in blood, uses Lazarro’s blood. In the mind of this child-like believer Lazarro this truly does make them “blood-brothers.”

      Lazarro takes his new and perhaps only “friend” away to his version of the Wuthering Heights’ Peniston Crag, a high mountain crevice where he has secretly made his own place of escape. Bringing his new friend there is as close to a sexual rendezvous that Lazarro will ever encounter, and in his attempt to feed his new friend, who has now moved into a deep ditch (a symbolic burial grounds), after Lazarro has fallen into a “fever”—surely not just a sudden illness, but a psychological reaction to his new-found friendship—results in this saint’s fall from a high cliff.

      With both boys having now gone missing a maid calls the police, who discover a village that in its horrific conditions that stands against all Italian modern codes of living, clear out the town, arresting, presumably the Marchessa who has created these insufferable conditions.

      Most of the critics writing about this film, who I read, suggest that there is now an incredibly sudden shift in the film, concerning which, as A.O. Scott, for example, writes:

 

“Midway through, just as we’ve accepted the semi-fantastical parameters of Lazzaro’s world — his half-secret friendship with the Marchesa’s son, Tancredi (Luca Chikovani); his chaste infatuation with a young woman named Antonia (Agnese Graziani) — our perspective changes. We suddenly see the landscape from above and hear an ancient folk tale in a woman’s voice, and the film takes a double swerve, into harsher realism and more explicit magic.”

 

     But, in truth, Rohrwacher takes us quite gently into to this new world by suggesting that the police have ousted most of the previous Inviolata tenants simply in order to save them, to allow them entry into the modern world. Only Lazarro—who like Lazarus and a bit like Rip Van Winkle, wakes up again into life, after having been sniffed out and rejected by a wolf (a major metaphoric figure in this film) who refuses to eat him, declaring that he has sniffed out a totally “honest man”—returns to the village to find thieves removing whatever they might find of value in the Marchesa’s abandoned house. If he frightens them, he still innocently leads them to her drawer of “cutleries,” and even begs them for a ride into the urban future. When they reject him, he walks into a world he might never have imagined. And it is a wonderment to behold, as he discovers, still dressed in his light sweater and loosely knit pants, huge power-lines and gigantic towers of communication.

      The world he discovers in Milan and other northern cities is made up of the same people of his small village, now, given their newly established hierarchical roles, forced to steal and sell their gains in the underground. Only there is now a very big difference: they have all aged terribly, almost forgetting their past, while the happy Lazarro has remained ever young. Not only do they, at first, not recognize him, they reject him—until Antonia, the woman who was serenaded in the very first scenes of this film (now played by Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s sister) recognizes him, and forces the others to allow him into their own current metallic hovel.

      Here, Lazarro, despite the same conditions, essentially, in which he has suffered in the past, is still in love with life, eagerly willing to help out with everything. But his sad re-encounter with Tancredi, where we perceive the young blond now as an old, stringy-haired barfly, says everything. The wolves have won, and the old world he knew is about to die.

       Throughout the film, Lazarro is seen as going into a kind of trance during lonely removals from the world in which he exists during which he seems, despite everyone else’s perception of his intelligence, to be considering things, to be evaluating a world in deep concentration.

        Near the end of the film, when his fellow travelers suddenly hear a heavenly music that has left the local cathedral simply to follow them, the innocent turns away again in deep thought. They joke about returning to Inviolata to reclaim what is left to them as squatters. But we know these now somewhat agèd street-folk will never be able to reclaim their virgin state. And, so too, must Lazarro know that the past cannot be reclaimed.

        Yet he attempts just that, awkwardly trying to enter a bank, setting off their alarms as he approaches through the wrong door. Behaving, as he does always, rather oddly, the customers suddenly determine that he is armed, and in terror, move away from him. When he perceives their own odd behavior, he moves toward them, trying to explain to himself why they are so fearful; all he wants, as he pleas the tellers, is that everything left behind be returned the Tancredi—not, evidently, even a customer of that particular bank.

      When the terrified customers perceive the intruder’s innocence, and that the gun they thought he was carrying is simply a slingshot, a gift of Tancredi, they attack him, and one by one, beat him to the ground. The wolf reappears, evidently now ready for his feast. By the time the police arrive, the “holy innocent” is bleeding and appears to have died.

       The movie leaves us with the notion that, if he is to survive and come to life again, it can be only in our belief, in our imagination. I wept for his death, as I would for Christ. Happiness is such a rare thing.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Adetokumboh M'Cormack | Irish Goodbye / 2018

like-minded friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Feit and Adetokumboh M'Cormack (screenplay), Adetokumboh M'Cormack (director) Irish Goodbye / 2018 [18 minutes]

 

The US film Irish Goodbye begins neither in the US or Ireland, but in Syria, where best friends and perhaps lovers Nizar (Abubakr) and Amir (Youness Ouder) have just pretended to go on a long race only to end up, on Amir’s request, at a meeting of “like- minded friends.”

     It quickly shifts to Los Angeles where Nizar is now working as an Uber driver, picking up a very drunken Eric (Jack Lowe) who admits that he has just successfully achieved an Irish goodbye, when you leave without saying goodbye to anybody.

      Asked if Nizar has ever done such a thing as leaving all your friends without saying goodbye, Nizar gently replies, “I don’t have friends, I just have family,” to which Eric responds, “Well fuck me, you’re no Irishman!” A moment later, Eric is leaning out the window screaming, Nizar attempting to coax him back into the car proper. It’s clear that in the few hours Eric has left in the city before his flight home, he’s ready and willing to party. “Life is not a dress rehearsal!”

      They end up at a concert venture for Cole, a singer evidently Nizar is also fond of. Eric invites him to join him for the concert, but Nizar insists he has to work, besides “I’m not….”

     Eric interrupts, “What gay, homosexual, queer? None of us are.” Before he even knows what’s happening, Nizar has joined Eric at the concert, for after drinks, and a meal, loudly proclaiming about his sexual experiences in a restaurant, at which point Nizar begs him not to be so loud.

      “Oy! Life is loud, Nizar. It’s supposed to get under other people’s skin, not swim around it like some lost sperm in the wild.”

      We quickly discover that the restaurant they’re in is one chosen by Nizar, a spot run, as he points out by Muslims, who Eric proclaims seem to be a “tightly wound” folk.

     “These ‘tightly wound’ people you’re judging escaped from a place I hope you never have to see. They saw friends and family die enduring similar trials.” He quickly tries to explain what’s been happening in Syria since 2011.

       Recognizing that he’s “being a dick,” Eric suggests that after they finish their “fat tush” (fattoush) and that they get out of the place. As they sit on a spot overlooking the city (how they reached it so quickly is inexplicable) Nizar admits that he thinks Eric is quite amazing, but that “Not all of us can live as untethered as you are. Some of us have lives and responsibilities, families. And we can’t just drop everything to live in the single moment the way you do.”

       “Yep, but what are you living for?”

      Before the night is out Eric has invited him into his hotel bedroom, into a long kiss, and into his bed.

     Eric asks after if he’s ever had feelings before for a man, and Nizar recounts what happened the night after he was invited to that gathering of “friends and independent thinkers” with which this short film begins. There was a raid where they grabbed everyone and dragged them. Having captured his friend Amir, they forced him, on the threat of death, to hit him with a heavy piece of concrete. Word spread, and the family was no longer safe. “And I made to here, California, to live with my aunty and my uncle. It’s the typical story of the American dream. Amir always wanted us to be free.”

       Before sunrise, Nizar’s phone rings, and when he reaches for it on the floor he also discovers Eric’s billfold, inside of which is a picture of him with his wife and daughter, leading Nizar to also take an Irish goodbye.

      A cellphone message from Eric admits he should have been more upfront about his life, but also he rhapsodizes about his special night with Nizar, hoping that he finds what he wants from life.

      A written paragraph reminds us after the story has ended, that since 2011 465,000 Syrians have been killed in the fighting between the various forces attempting to occupy it, with over one million injured, and 12 million people displaced.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).