Sam Peter Jackson | The Space You Need / 2025

gravitational pull

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Peter Jackson (screenwriter and director) The Space You Need / 2025 [21 minutes]

 

This silly and slightly wacky sci-fi romance is nonetheless truly charming, particularly since there is absolutely no way to take it seriously, allowing you to just sit back and have fun.

     Leo (Matthew Morrison), whose family business, Coulton Aluminum, formerly devoted to baked beans and potato peelers, has suddenly and quite inexplicably gone into the business of commercial space travel, offering up ordinary people the chance to make space flights, through Dexter Intergalactic Endeavours. Now for a low-cost price once only available to billionaires, as company spokesman, Janet Claremont (Christy Meyer) explains, well-off suburbanites can celebrate birthday parties in space, weddings, baby showers, even bachelorette parties in zero gravity.

     Yet Leo’s partner, Julian (Nick Hayes) is chaffing at having to now spend full time at such company events and their vacations with Leo’s parents at spa events. Julian suggest that he has now seen Leo’s father naked more than he has his own lover.

     Mostly, he regrets that they never do anything spontaneously anymore. They used to escape from every event, where now they are required to remain at events given Leo has become a CEO.

     Julian is a sci-fi writer, author of several fictions, but simply can’t create a new work. Something is missing in his life, and both men feel that despite the love they once felt, they are now living on different planets.

     Leo no longer wants to share Julian’s enthusiastic viewings of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or even various Spielberg sci-fi fantasies. There is utterly no hope, these days, that the two might escape to a Berlin leather bar as Julian might fantasize.

     Indeed, Julian dreams that he is visited by a leatherboy (Branko Tomović) who follows the pieces of candy he lays out straight to his mouth, only to ask him if he’s taken out the bins and bought a cake for his dad’s 70th birthday.

     Even Julian’s best friend Bex (Oliver Cudbill), an effeminate replacement for the usual best girly friend' but, in this case, also a lawyer, is startled by his comrade “having a wet dream with a kind of earthbound extraterrestrial.” We also now learn that Julian’s new book just isn’t happening.

      As if this all weren’t enough, Leo comes home to announce that he is going into space on one of his company’s early launches.

      Julian is distressed, even terrified as Leo calmly packs up to take off in a rocket into space.

     Soon after Julian is telephoned by company liaison Janet Claremont to report that something has gone wrong on the flight, and the travelers, Leo included, have been transferred to a Japanese space station. They are all perfectly all right, but there is a delay before Leo can be retrieved.

      Trying to communicate with his lover during a bad connection further frustrates Julian as he and his friend Bex threaten to sue Leo’s company.  

   Not to worry, Claremont has called into service a young handsome, and gay, assistant, Milo Messenger (Giles Cooper), to help guide the dismayed companion through the unexpected incident.

     If the first session where he can hardly hear Leo speaking does not go well, a visit soon after to a local falafel stand invigorates Julian, and before you know it, Milo, a huge fan of Julian’s writing, and the author himself begin to find they have a great deal in common. His important

question of why, despite hinting of it, Julian has never created a truly gay sci-fi character triggers Julian’s imagination.

      As the week passes, with everyday contact with Julian and Leo, Julian and Milo find more and more in common with each other. This is a romance we have been waiting for, but it is suddenly interrupted as the Japanese report they will have a ship ready to return Leo to earth by the next Thursday.

     Basically, the time has come for Julian and Milo to say goodbye. But there is a further glitch the next day as Leo not only refuses to meet up on screen with Julian but refuses to return home. Janet assures Julian that such a decision is simply not possible, and his lover will be returning on the next Japanese pick-up. But clearly something has happened that Julian has simply not prepared for.

     Leo returns home to a now completely ill-at-ease, troubled Julian, hardly even knowing what to say to the man he loves. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view, Julian doesn’t even have the opportunity as Leo confesses that during his time in space he has fallen in love with a Japanese spaceman, Haruto (Kuni Tomita), the two having a sexual experience in space that can’t even be imagined by those on earth.

     Suddenly, the earthly Leo, realizes that perhaps his friend has been more spontaneous that he has, and rushes off to re-connect with the beautiful and totally compatible Otis.

     A year later, Leo and Haruto celebrate their marriage, an event attended by Julian and Otis, who have, true to form, escaped early. The newlywed open up the gift from Julian of his newest sci-fi book, obviously now with a gay hero.

    If this British film is about a breakup, not usually a very pleasant topic in gay cinematic literature, in this case it is a fortunate event in which both the original lovers have found a new space in which to explore their lives.

 

Los Angeles, June 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).     

Jean-Pierre Melville | Le Cercle rouge (The Red Circle) / 1970, USA 1993

on cue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Pierre Melville (screenwriter and director) Le Cercle rouge (The Red Circle) / 1970, USA 1993

 

It is a somewhat shocking that Melville's great detective-gangster film did not get its USA premiere until 23 years after its French opening. So many similar but lesser films—including the entertaining The Hot Rock (1972)—might have learned a great deal from Melville's masterful direction. Like many a heist movie, much of Le Cercle rouge is devoted to the clever tactics of its robber-heroes, Corey (Alain Delon), Jansen (Yves Montand), and Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté).  But Melville takes his work much further by exploring, at least for the first half of the film, their abilities to outwit the police and others who might wish to stop them, while also taking us into the minds of their pursuers, particularly Le Commissaire Mattei (Andre Bourvil).

     Much of the entire film is shot in silence, so much so that Le Cercle rouge might almost have been a silent film with just a few story board titles. Indeed the film begins with a kind of story board to explain its own title:

 

                     Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece

                     of red chalk and said: "When men, even unknowingly, are to

                     meet one day, whatever my befall each, whatever the diverging

                     paths, on the said day, they will in inevitably come together in

                     a red circle.

 

Buddha said nothing of the kind, but Melville's fiction is perfect to establish from the very beginning that fate is at the heart of his tale. No matter how hard the men at the center of his story try, no matter how clever they are, how blessed or damned may be their lives, they will  one day meet their fate. Accordingly, we see the film from the very beginning less as an adventure the likes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (filmed a year earlier) than as a stunningly beautiful playing out of these men's destinies.

     Each of them is somehow charmed, intelligent—even Mattei admits that about Vogel—but doomed, which, in turn, despite their embracement of evil, makes them sadly appealing. We watch them play out their fates with the same kind of impassion with which they treat their victims. Vogel shoots down the petty criminals about to kill his new "friend" Corey with the kind a cool cruelty that one might devote to killing a cockroach or silverfish found in the bathtub. In truth, I become far more emotional about that bathroom activity than he is with humans.

     We are, however, free to admire this sinister trio simply because we know, just as Corey knows as he chalks up the red circle at the end of the billiard cue, he will one day lose. Indeed, he does, admittedly, lose the game a few moments later when Rico's men discover him at the billiard hall.

     That is not to say that Melville's "heroes" are necessarily admirable. Each lives a life of almost utter misery. Corey has just been released from five years in prison, Vogel has just escaped from a train taking him to prison breathlessly outrunning squadrons of police, and Jansen, a former policemen, is suffering from the DT's. But then, none of the policemen seem to live particularly harmonious lives either. The Chief of Police (Paul Amiot) is a bitter paranoid, convinced that "All men are guilty. They're born innocent, but it doesn't last."

     Mattei, Melville suggests through his immaculate dress and behavior, his lonely pleasure of three fat cats, and the several rings he wears—which he cautiously removes before his final meeting with the Chief of Police—is gay. Not that he has any time for sexual encounters. In fact, none of these men have time for sex—heterosexual or homosexual! There has perhaps never been a film that so utterly removed from the female sex. Only one woman plays any part in the action, Ana Douking, described as the "the old girlfriend of Corey," who lies in bed and hovers about Rico's bedroom door when Corey appears to demand money. She has no lines, and Corey leaves photographs of her on the prison desk from which he retrieves his other possessions. The only other women who appear in the film are a bartender and the chorus girls, who ridiculously sing three numbers in Santi's resturant/bar. The red circle, at least in Melville's vision, is a male only club, a world for Clydes without Bonnies.

     Henri Decae's photography, moreover, portrays the world they inhabit in dreary, muted colors. It is cold, it rains, it snows. Paris never looked so unpleasant—except in the beautifully lit-up jewelry store, shining with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. You can well understand, given the emptiness of these men's lives—in their lack of sex, money, food, drink (Jansen has gone sober), without even Mattei's beloved pets—why they are drawn to those shining jewels. And they will do nearly anything to capture those lit up tokens of wealth which might give them the possibilities of a life they now live without.

     It's interesting, in passing, that this film—so different from Eyes without a Face—was also chosen by Pedro Almodóvar for inclusion in the 2011 AFI Fest. Unlike the other film, Almodóvar mentioned, this did not particularly influence his current The Skin I Live In. Yet there is commonality; just as the woman in the Franju film, the three robbers must cover their bestial identities, hiding their faces with masks.

     Like dancers, tight-rope walkers, perfectly-timed performers, the three mount stairways, climb through ceilings, cross buildings, miraculously cut open windows, skillfully circumvent protective beams, and shoot out other warning devices, scooping up a suitcase of the baubles with such success that they cannot even find someone to serve as a fence.

    Forced to turn to the mob, these men have clearly been led back into the red, the bloody world which they have helped to create. In his own way, Mattei is their perfect match. As skillfully as they have been able to complete their heist, so does Mattei manipulate his informers, picking up the young son of the mob-involved Santi on a trumped up marijuana charge. The only flaw in his plan is that the son, just as the Chief has argued for every man, is truly guilty; he has been selling pot and attempts suicide when the police turn away from questioning him. But the ruse still succeeds; Santi must play along if he is to free his son, turning into the informer he insists he will never become.

     One of the most remarkable scenes in the film, and one that suggests that Corey and Vogel have grown closer in their days together, is the moment when Corey takes the elevator down from his flat, the bag of jewels in his hand, to deliver them to the head of the mob. Melville's camera follows Corey down, panning up to Vogel waiting in the apartment. Again, it moves down with Corey, and up to Vogel, the latter positioned atop of Corey. Clearly the image is sexual, but we recognize it primarily as a linking of the two; Vogel is troubled about Corey's next step. Something is wrong, and he knows it. He picks up the rose—another kind of red circle—which has identified Corey to the mob connection in Santi's restaurant.

     His attempt to save Corey by rushing into the mobster's villa, demanding that Corey take the bag and run, results in his own death as well as Jansen's (awaiting in the car) and, ultimately, Corey's. All three are killed on the run, and Vogel can painfully report to the Chief, the lives of at least these three guilty men have come to an end.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2011).

 

 

Peter de Rome | Encounter, or Paul & Richard & Michael, & David & Alan & Buddy & Hugo & Tom & Terry & Peter & Richard & Carlos / 1970

twelve gentle men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter de Rome (director) Encounter, or Paul & Richard & Michael, & David & Alan & Buddy & Hugo & Tom & Terry & Peter & Richard & Carlos / 1970

 

Born in Juan-les-Pins, Côte d'Azur, France, Peter de Rome grew up in England, where he worked as press agent for Arthur Rank and Alexander Korda. In 1956 he emigrated to the US, where he worked for a while at Tiffany’s, later as a civil rights campaigner, and eventually as publicist for David O. Selznick.

     In the 1960s, during which he spent a great deal of time on Fire Island, he began to make films, shot with an 8mm camera, of himself naked, having sex with someone he picked up on the streets, etc., intending the films only for the viewing of friends, but many of which were later collected in his 1973 anthology, The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome.

      Not part of that collection, Encounter was made in 1970, just a year after the earliest of his erotic film, Double Exposure (1969). The much larger cast of Encounter, including 12 men credited in the subtitle by only their first names, represents a move away from the “personal” work, paving the way for his only two feature films, Adam and Yves (1974) and The Destroying Angel (1976). Although he continued to make a few more shorts in the late 1970s, he stopped creating new works in the 1980s out of a kind of disgust for what film critic Alex Davidson describes as “the increasingly explicit but poorly filmed pornography” of that period. In an introduction to The Erotic Films, issued in 1984, de Rome wrote: “Until and unless I can make the sort of films I want to make, I am not interested in making any.”

      Although Encounter presents us with a gay sex orgy, it is less about the actual sex between the 12 men—some of whom were hired from a list of models and others of whom de Rome simply encountered upon the streets of New York—it is not really about sex but suggests rather a kind of ceremonial group activity. The original music was by composer Olivier Messiaen (much of whose work might be described as religious), but for the British Film Institute DVD he commissioned a new work by Stephen Thrower.

      One might even suggest there is something a bit comical in the film’s portrayal of what first seems to be a gathering or a secret society or cabal, as various men walking the Brooklyn Bridge and the lower Manhattan streets suddenly jut out their arms in a salute not that much different from the Nazis—except that a few of them, I observed, who were noticeably limp-wristed. Following the inexplicable salute, they begin moving, somewhat like the pod-people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, all in the same direction, much to the perturbation of the “normal” passers-by.

      Obviously, what de Rome is satirizing here is the common heterosexual myth that gays recognize one another through a secret code, just as their late-night hangouts are secretive dens of disrepute where they meet to socialize in a private world outside of the sexual mores of the society at large.

       These twelve, representing almost every racial type, style of clothing and hair color, appear out of the blue, from traveling by bus, taxi, bicycle, and foot, to follow one another a bit like automatons, entering, one by one, a seemingly derelict loft space where they march up a long set of stairs, by the second-landing already tossing off their shirts to reveal their handsome lean chests.

     As they enter the loft space and their eyes adjust to the darkness they slowly reach out to one another, first caressing one another’s faces before slowly moving their hands down across pectorals, backs, and eventually buttocks. Soon, as if by magic, they are all nude (BFI writer Davidson notes that the one thing all these men have in common are “their luminous buttocks left free from tan lines).

      On cue, they begin bending, sitting, and rolling to simulate orgiastic sexual behavior, but except for the appearance of an occasion semi-erect penis, de Rome does not portray any of these sexual acolytes actually engaging in sex. Their actions represent more of a ritualistic dance instead of the pawing and groveling of sex-starved men.

      In the darkened room, the camera lovingly pans over their swaying and shifting bodies before presenting them in a perfect circular formation, their backs facing out, which suddenly opens up—almost as if they were dancers in a film choreographed by Busby Berkeley—to reveal floral-like petals of interlocked legs. Immediately the credits announce “The End” to what we might imagine is actually only the beginning.    

     De Rome, in this lovely work, has accordingly combined the ridiculous—the normative society’s absurd ideas about what it means to be gay—with the subline—the actual kinship and bodily fraternalization of men who sexually desire other men. Even the political implications of their early salute drop away as we now recognize that the outstretched hands represented a greeting and reaching out to one another instead of a coded statement of hidden bonds. These 12 men are the very opposite of angry men in judgment (as in the film Twelve Angry Men of 1957), but rather undertake a peaceful retreat to a place where they are no longer fearful of being judged.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2020

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

 

André Leão | Nesta Data Querida (Many Happy Returns) / 2025

how to survive living

by Douglas Messerli

 

André Leão and Vitor Rocha (screenplay), André Leão (director) Nesta Data Querida (Many Happy Returns) / 2025 [27 minutes]

 

A young 25-year old man, André (co-screenplay writer Victor Rocha) suddenly turning 25, is under a Peter Pan-like syndrome, terrified and frustrated that suddenly he has gone beyond the age when he might be described any longer as a prodigy, or a young genius. As he sings in a brief ditty in this Brazilian comical-fantasy musical film, he has now entered the world of politics and elections. His youth has been squandered, and he is depressed. His best friend’s visit with a cake and his mother’s call wishing him the happiest of birthdays does nothing to qualm his apprehensions.

    The film begins with a view of him lying on bed, ass up, not at all a truly beautiful odalisque.

   Others arrive with joyful greetings, but all André can do is sing “From here on, it’s all downhill.”  “No room to be rebellious, No time to discover myself.” We all feel that way, of course, when we are young—although I admit at that age I was perhaps still too busy in discovering myself to worry.

     “Next year it will be worse,” he sings, “Just like each and every day.”

     His good friend Sofia (Leticia Helena) suggests they can start paying for his coffin tomorrow, but today they’re going to celebrate!

     André argues that he doesn’t want to be “real,” “I want to be Peter Pan. I want to believe that the boogeyman’s coming to get me if I’m not a good boy.”

     His friend João (Lucas Drummond) reassures him that it most definitely won’t happen since he’s gay.

      Sofia, on the other hand, can’t wait for things the change, to be married, have her own house, a daughter. She believes she was born to be a mother.

      André argues that society simply put it into her head.

      João dreams of leaving his agency and starting his own.

    But none of these comments help André, who has no intentions of adopting a family or starting a company. João suggests that as a gay man he can simply adopt a cat a be happy.

     And André asserts that nobody with a cat is happy. And moreover, Leo, his boyfriend, is allergic to cats. The others can’t comprehend what he sees in Leo.

    So this clever conversation goes on until suddenly the party goes into full swing with dozens of friends drinking and partying in that boozy haze of screened blue and red lights that we know well from dozens of such movies. Everybody is drunk or drugged out. The younger Leo (Caio Mutai) shows up, wondering how does it feel for André to turn 25.

      “Wouldn’t Leo like everyday to be like today?” queries André. No, suggests Leo as he moves to ward André, what he would really like….André holds his breath…is “a gin and tonic.”

      They all sing happy birthday, and André, like all children throughout history, wishes before he blows up the candles.

       We know what André’s wish is, and almost like Dorian Gray, this wish turns out to come true.

     In the very same position as he was in the first scene, André hears his doorbell ring. João returns, bearing cake that he jokes he found in the hallway. Once again his mother calls to wish him a happy 25th birthday. Suddenly, all the others return to again wish him a 25th birthday. All seems to be repeating. They are disturbed by his memory of the year before and his repetition of the events. They still wish for many of the same things, but something has changed. They are a year older, although he is not. He again attends the party, remembering almost everything from before, including Leo’s order of a “gin and tonic,” which when André beats him to his request of “gin and tonic” he ascribes to déjà vu. But yet again, nothing happens between the two of them.

       And suddenly as everything repeats itself, André discovers, quite to his pleasure, that his wish of the previous year has come true. He is still 25. Nothing has changed.

        As he now sings, waking up the following year, everything as changed. He is no longer afraid: time can’t get to him anymore. “Every day is a party, and we’re just gonna have fun.”

      Again, as he sings in a dark dance with his friends, he no longer has to worry about the past. “No more wrinkles, no distress.” Imagine the possibility of “living without having to thank about the future?”

      But things have changed. João leaves the party early because it’s going to be a big day at the agency, particularly as the boss. André has no idea about what he is talking.

       Sofia, now quite drunk, explains that he has indeed opened up his own agency. She, it turns out has discovered that she cannot get pregnant, and has become quite an alcoholic. Women best friends of gay boys often do not turn out well in gay movies. She is now 38, too late for children, while our Dorian Gray hero has remained 25 years of age. Leo introduces André to his fiancé Denis.

      Things have changed for everyone else, while André has remained a young 25-year-old ready to party every night.

       Time and again he blows out the candles celebrating his 25th birthday while everyone around him changes and grows older.

    The new 25th birthday begins with a now much older João arriving with his annual cake, complaining of André’s usual grumpiness. But what André has now wished for, than things return to normal, has not been granted.

      Like the Harold Ramis’ 1993 movie Groundhog Day every day since his magical wish, André wakes up to celebrate his 25th birthday, which by this time is no longer a matter at all to celebrate. João announces that he is now 39. “Time flies, doesn’t it?”

       His mother calls again to wish him a happy birthday, but reports that his father in now well. “He woke up confused the morning.”

      Life and death are going on around this Peter Pan that no longer includes him. Has his own life traveled to a closet of old memories? Suddenly André realizes that he must break the cycle, only to have his best friends, Sophia and João sing an old song-and-dance number about how whatever the problem is “it will pass in no time.”

 

      Another call from his mother reveals his father has died. No, time is not kind to others, and suddenly André realizes he is losing out to the experiences that, for better or worse, all his friends are suffering. It takes an old man to realize that despite the pain each death of a close friend tortures you, you comprehend the meaning of their death which the young cannot even imagine.

       He discovers yet another cake, this one actually lying in the hallway, suggesting through a note that it might indeed grant all his wishes. But this year, on his actual 52nd birthday anniversary, he realizes something has gone terribly wrong. His whole life has passed and he didn’t even notice. He is stuck in the same year forever, the curse of many a gay fictional figure like Dorian Gray and Peter Pan. How to escape?

      The real question, of course, is whether any of us really notice how quickly our lives pass. Is it truly possible to perceive that each time we blow out our birthday candles we are suddenly wishing ourselves, without us imaging it, into a future which will suddenly haunts us as old men and women in just a matter of what seems like moments later?

      This film makes those young boys desperate to turn of age for gay sex at 17 or younger that I commented on in in my 2000 essay, “Crossing the Divide,” about young teenagers who couldn’t wait to grow to age of permission in order to engage in gay sex to be absolute fools. But, no, they are not. They are young and eager without any possibility of knowing their beauty, their desires, as passing by at the very moment when they recognize their possibilities. Perhaps their very eagerness suggests that they are only too aware, without actually knowing what that actually means. Time is beyond human comprehension.

       André explains to his invisible god that “I just…liked my life. And I wanted to be the way it was forever. I didn’t want anything to change. I didn’t want anything to threaten or ruin it.”

       The gods tell him that he can’t go back, he cannot change his decision. The secret, so the cellphone god reveals, is always to look forward.

       I realize now that perhaps that has been what made be a proselytizer of change, even if along the way that role has not always been so very comfortable and has been mocked often by those around me.

       André once again, this time all alone, lights the candles on his cake, this time inverting the 25 to read 52. He lights the candles and blows them out, wishing for another future.

       Suddenly, he has become so appears, a pianist playing the melodious song we hear at film’s end while the credits scroll up a quote by Mario Quintana:

 

        “And if one day I were given another chance, I wouldn’t even look at the clock. I would just

keep moving forward. And I would toss along the way the golden and useless shell of time.”

 

         Time and again we are told by the sages, presentism, the moment of the now, is the only way to move through life. Life is survived only by living it. There is no other possible solution.

         If André Leão’s comic short film Many Happy Returns is not a particularly profound work, it certainly offers something close to it.

 

Los Angeles, June 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

 

Vuslat Karan and Burcu Melekoğlu | Mavi kimlik (Blue ID) / 2022

yes, i’m blue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vuslat Karan and Burcu Melekoğlu (directors) Mavi kimlik (Blue ID) / 2022

 

It is one thing be a famous cis-gender actor in Nigeria such as Bisi Alimi who comes out on the air—putting him in a such a life-threatening position that he was forced to escape the country—but it is quite another, as this wonderful documentary reveals, to be a noted, sexually desired female actor in Turkey who has just received her first testosterone shot on October 4, 2012 in order  to become the male he has long felt himself to be.

   Having just made that important first step in gender affirmation, Rüzgar Erkoçlar had already attempted to escape from public life by leaving his acting job and finding employment in a small bakery. But family, friends, and even his doctor will not let him smoothly move into the important transition, one which demands not only enormous physical but psychological changes as well.

  Vuslat Karan’s and Burcu Melekoğlu’s documentary, revealing the intense homophobia and transphobia of Turkey, stays focused on the incredible good-looking young man into who the female star has already disappeared. But the Turkish public, traditionally bound through religion and social tradition, intrude at every possible moment, swarming and photographing Erkoçlar whenever he attempts to leave the house, losing him his employment, and threatening his life. Even his sister and to a certain degree his mother plays into the public curiosity and sense of outrage.

     Erkoçlar is forced, just to protect himself and give him some time to adjust to the situation to become an indoor recluse, going out only in disguise and walking short distances in known neighborhoods.

   Simply trying to adjust to his new life, attempting to assimilate to the new feelings that the testosterone shots create results both in doubts, fears, and a strong sense of his new strength and emotional release; but if that doesn’t make life complex enough, Erkoçlar must go through the process in public as well.

     The symbolic event of his full transformation arrives when he attempts to confirm his new identity by changing his pink identity card for a blue one—the sexist Turkish society defining people’s gender even by the color of their official identification. The court, perversely refuses since he has not gone through the entire operation, meaning he has not had an operation to transform his vagina into a penis-like configuration. The society that disdains transgenderism legally requires the individual to make a decision to completely alter his or her gender in what might be described as a nearly absurd catch-22. Their illogical argument seems to suggest that “Now that you have shamed yourself half way, you must allow yourself to proceed in the full gender change before we will recognize you for who you’ve become.” Presumably males undergoing a gender change must equally have their penises removed before being allowed to call themselves women. Or maybe not: being benighted males by birth, do they have more power to describe themselves as they wish? This documentary doesn’t pursue that issue, which I wish it had. But it’s clear that this society has no conception of gender fluidity except perhaps for Zenne dancers.*

     Erkoçlar finally chooses to undergo the operation. But even then his new life is constantly put in jeopardy by public attention and threats. What is absolutely amazing about all of this is just how the truly handsome male, former actor, has become as he moves little by little through all of the mazes of Turkish society with sanity, grace, and a great deal of levity.

     If you’re a cis-gender individual who still has negative feelings about transgender individuals, you should meet Rüzgar Erkoçlar in this documentary masterpiece. He makes it all so human that you want to cry. Finally, in the illogic of the world in which we live, this lovely man can openly declare “Yes, I’m blue.”

 

*See my discussion of Caner Alper and Mehmet Binay’s 2011 film Zenne Dancer.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).