Keith Forelich | The Toilers and the Wayfarers / 1995, general release 1997

the heart of the heart of the country

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keith Forelich (screenwriter and director) The Toilers and the Wayfarers / 1995, general release 1997

 

This truly wondrous short film of 1995, which sounds a bit like a mass-up of two of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun’s works, is one of the most truly honest and probing films of the 1990s—and looking back now, there were so very many.

     In the German-founded small town of New Ulm, Minnesota, where most of the elders and many of their children still speak German, Phillip (Andrew Woodhouse) and Dieter (Matt Klemp) live their out their last year of high school in a kind of paradisical, homoerotic paradise, without either of them quite realizing how temporary that Preslapsarian world will be. Both love one another without their realizing the erotic nature of their love—that is until Philip truly does realize his sexuality, intensely kissing Dieter on one of their naked swimming encounters. Dieter, whose parents are strict disciplinarians—as it appears most of the German ancestors are in this town, including the school coach (Douglas Blacks) who loves to spank the butts of his naked boys who misbehave in any manner in his school exercises—simply doesn’t know how to respond to his now openly gay friend, forcing Philip to escape to the only true paradise boys such as him can imagine: 1995 nearby Minneapolis, the largest city in their imaginative and affordable existence. These boys never to seem to have ever heard about Chicago, to which they also may not have had enough money for the bus fare.

     I knew Minneapolis well in these very years (for some time in the 1970s my parents even ran a motel in the suburbs), and for a midwestern community it was rather wondrous, with several tall skyscrapers and plenty of good eateries, bars, and run-away boys, as well as a healthy, supportive, and protective network—although little of that is revealed in this film. It was, and still is a kind of model of what US cities might be, as has recently been revealed it its citizens’ demands that ICE (the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) leave after the meaninglessly killing of two its citizens.

      Meanwhile, back in the dying community of New Ulm, an elderly childless German woman, Anna (Joan Wheeler) has decided to adopt her young German nephew, bring him to the US, and fill her life with the German world she has left behind.

     Of course, she hasn’t a clue about what has happened to those young men left behind in the new German society, of which Udo (Ralf Schirg) is a prime example. As she soon discovers, although he is delighted by the fact that his aunt has brought him to “America,” he is simply a drunk who loves to watch US television.

    Through the connections Dieter’s family have, however, with the old Auntie and her German memories, not only is he invited over for dinner to meet Udo, but is asked by his well-meaning but utterly clueless father to look after the German refugee.

     Alone and isolated without his friend Phillip, a relationship, inevitably occurs between Dieter and Udo, although Udo is totally heterosexual. Yet he offers a kind of replacement figure for Phillip, but far more challenging of the restrictions the younger boy has allowed to be placed upon him.

     Although Anna is soon quite disgusted with her adoptive relative, when she suddenly dies, he inherits some money, spending it almost immediately on a red Cadillac car, offering to take his new-found friend Dieter on a near naked drive. Already the narrow-minded gossips have been whispering about their relationship, suggesting homosexuality; and Dieter’s father not only pulls his son out of the automobile but treats his now 16-year-old son like a child, paddling him naked just as the coach has previously.

     This time Dieter is accepting no apologizes, realizing that it is finally time to leave this closed German community with the new German immigrant, suggesting they escape to the magic emerald city of Minneapolis.

     And so begins the remarkable on-the-road sequence, where almost immediately, the police on their tail, their car is discovered and impounded. Dieter manages to sneak into the garage and retrieve the remaining money that Udo has inherited, but soon after, buying a new car that breaks down only a few miles further on their magical journey, results in even further jeopardy. They

finally reach the city of their dreams, where almost immediately Dieter meets up in a café with his former friend and is finally able to reaffirm their love through sex. Udo, drunk, runs into one of the most notorious of the cities’ male whores and is immediately relieved of his small bankroll.

     Dieter discovers that Phillip has finally learned how to survive through male prostitution, and after following him into the empty warehouse which he has made his home, perceives that as a wanted sixteen-year-old, he has no other choice but to display his beautiful young body to the ready older men who might enjoy it. Certainly, he can no longer depend on Udo, who apparently joins of the two of them in their temporary home.

     Dieter becomes rather well-known as the pretty boy to seek out, and finally, as one might expect he is busted by a handsome police officer, Lt. Scallion (Michael Glen) who calls his father. But when Dieter’s parents are told why he was arrested, they are no longer interested in him returning home, and the boy is left, as Scallion describes it, in a “hard place,” locked into detention unless he provides the address of the man they perceive as being behind his corruption, Udo.

    The young criminal attempts to explain to them that Udo has nothing at all to do with what Dieter has done, but they cannot dismiss the idea of an elder abuser, even while we know Dieter, now even a scofflaw, but a true social failure, cannot even protect himself. Demanding that he call his parents, Dieter dials Udo to tell him to pack up and leave immediately before they discover his address.

    Udo does so, but now he is living with a sick, feverous Phillip. AIDS is not even hinted at, but we can only suspect the worst, and the movie has already brought up that possibility with an earlier question from Dieter concerning the dangers of his behavior.

    Udo heads off. Finally, Dieter reveals the address, allowing him to be removed from handcuffs, but escapes the actual entry into his illegal abode, locking the door behind him. There he discovers the sick Phillip and for the first and certainly last time gives his body and love entirely over to his ill friend. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful sex scenes I have ever encountered in a gay movie. These boys were destined from the beginning to become lovers, and for a truly amazing moment they fulfill their destiny.

    But, obviously, Dieter cannot remain in Minneapolis, and soon is on his way to New York City, where all gay boys of the period end up, me two decades earlier.

     In the station he runs into a rather wise older, bearded man (also Douglas Blacks), who for reasons unknown is also on the run, warning him not to blame himself, and, most importantly, never to look back: “If you look backward, you stumble over the future.” Yet he bemoans the possibility that the bus might stop in Milwaukee (also a place where I lived for a year), obviously his version of Minneapolis.

    We have no idea whether our young hero will be able to survive New York City, and the more experienced man suggests he return immediately to the Germany that he observes the boy reading about in a book left to him by Udo. But that book is a picture of that country that existed before World War I, left to him by his auntie, not a real world to which Dieter might escape. The real world is clearly going to be difficult, perhaps in 1995 urban living in New York City was even impossible. If that beautiful young kid could only have been born earlier so that he might have escaped there maybe three decades earlier in 1969 when I did, he might have survived. But Dieter is of his generation, and we can only pray for him, even though I don’t truly believe in prayers.

      While the reviews of this film were sympathetic with it’s clearly amateur perspective, they were also somewhat harsh, Dennis Harvey of Variety arguing the story was “haphazard” the character-development representing more than the first-time director Keith Forelich “could chew.”

      Steven Holden of The New York Times was even harsher in his assessment that, “Except for Schirg's sullen, dissipated Udo, who is mesmerized by American television and flashy cars, the performances are excruciatingly inept and self-conscious in the film.” Holden assessed the script to be “meandering, dramatically flat.”

     But Gary Morris, writing in Bright Lights Film Journal understood where the heart of this movie lay:

 

“Philip’s departure paves the way for Dieter and Udo to follow, which they do after one of Helmut’s ‘fatherly’ beatings. But, typical of big city cautionary tales, the trip is disastrous. Dieter’s parents alert the police that the “faggot” Udo has seduced and kidnapped their son. Udo blows most of his money on a lemon that breaks down on the highway. He loses the rest to a street hustler, and ends up homeless and scrubbing floors. Dieter fares no better, following his pal Philip into the grimy world of homelessness, hustling, and police entrapment. Philip becomes “sick” suddenly, and while his problem is never specified, it’s obvious this is a code word for AIDS.

     Still, there are glimmers of beauty and points of connection in these seemingly dead-end lives. Udo meets a grandfatherly German mechanic who confesses he doesn’t understand homosexuality but knows Udo “has a good heart” and lets him stay with him. Philip and Dieter make love in an abandoned apartment. And in one of the film’s best scenes, Dieter confounds the police by speaking German to alert Udo that he’s in danger.

   The Toilers and the Wayfarers gains from fine cinematography, nicely evoking the soulless uniformity of the heartland and the promise of the neon streets of Minneapolis. Writer-director Froelich coaxes sweet, unmannered performances from his actors, with Ralf Schirg and Matt Klemp most effective as Udo and Dieter. And he gets especially high marks for his honest treatment of a subject that’s never been welcome but won’t go away: the sexuality of queer teenage boys.”

 

    I loved this film and teared up both times I watched it for several moments, a movie which spoke from William Gass’ “the heart of the heart of the country” I know so very well, and in which as a young gay boy I grew up, escaping, as thousands of others, both its dreadfully intense love and it inevitable punishments as soon as I possibly could.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

     

Frank Lloyd | Cavalcade / 1933

keeping the campfires burning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reginald Berkeley (screenplay, with Sonya Levien, continuity, based on the play by Noël Coward), Frank Lloyd (director) Cavalcade / 1933

 

Lord Mountbatten on Noël Coward:

 

“There are probably greater painters than Noël, greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars. If there are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combined all fourteen different labels – The Master.”

     Yet as even Mountbatten hints, Coward the master was not equally the “master” of all he attempted to accomplish. If on some days we was his own wonderful invention, a witty, self-infatuated, self-enchanted quipster, on his off-days he was alas as boring and conservative as Terrence Rattigan. And it was clearly the latter mask that led him to write the hit play Cavalcade (1931) with a cast of hundreds as it oh so thrillingly took a Victorian family via a recurring cavalcade through the Boer War, Queen Victoria’s Death, the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, and numerous other smaller family sad occasions.

      The suffering Jane Marryot (Diana Wynyard) loses her two sons, Edward (John Warburton) who drowns with his newlywed wife Edith Harris (Margaret Lindsay) aboard the RMS Titanic, and Joe to the battlefields of WWI along with the respectability of the family with his stage-door courtship of Fanny Bridges, the family’s former maid’s (Una O’Connor) daughter. Jane’s stiff upper-lip, class consciousness, and almost always tearful mien finally lost me as well, with the help of the Oxfordian Joe, who once the war had been announced simply couldn’t stop declaiming “marvelous,” “isn’t it all marvelous?”

      Cavalcade, made into a movie by Frank Lloyd in 1933, is the kind of film like David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Delbert Mann’s version of Rattigan’s Separate Tables (1958) that demands you to love it if you’re British. But for others, it is a bit hard to know what all the fuss is about. And, of course, I’d forgotten all about the Boer War, and had to Google it to rediscover that it concerned England’s attempt to take over the colonial rule of the Dutch in South Africa, particularly once the gold mines were discovered. The Marryots love another dearly, but don’t like the way things are heading over time, and feel just awful about their sexual inclinations—or those of their sons.

    To give it credit, Coward’s film is strongly anti-war and mocks a great deal of the class consciousness it quietly dictates. But I finally gave the film up entirely when the absolutely “marvelous” girlfriend of Joe Marryot, Fanny (Ursula Jeans)—appearing at a private party where Coward reveals just how awful things have gotten by showing a lesbian couple engaged in conversation before turning his camera on two tuxedoed homo gents, one awarding the other a slave bracelet—belts out Coward’s own "Twentieth Century Blues.” And all this after a  mise-en-scène of various forms of social, political, and fanatical war-mongering and refusals to face the facts of how bad things have gotten!

 

     I presume our friend Noël also wrote this passage with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, but it’s hard to know. After all, he did write this popular mess, which probably paid for a great many gold slave bracelets. But I cannot help but wonder if, despite the humor of his lyrics, Coward hadn’t just before he sat down to pen this pretentious family historical tract, gone out in the midday sun a few too many times. 

      Yet I must admit, the pretentions of the servant class in this film are quite clearly embarrassing, behaving as if they were Americans. Goodbye dear old England, do keep the campfires burning, I may even pop in again to warm up to that song’s composer Ivor Novello’s reassuring visage.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2022

(Reprinted from World Cinema Review, September 2022).

 

 

David C. Jones | Coffee Club / 2011

victims

by Douglas Messerli

 

David C. Jones (screenwriter and director) Coffee Club / 2011 [5 minutes]

 

Canadian director David C. Jones’ short film Coffee Club is a black comedy not only about gay support groups but about all support groups who have stopped identifying themselves for their own shared values and become focused on themselves as victims.

  Yes, most of Franklin’s (Dan Dumsha’s) close friends have indeed been attacked and beaten by homophobes; Trina (Jamie Chrest) sits with a purple eye, Ken (Sean Parsons) has an arm in a sling, and poor Samuel (Minh Ly) has had all his teeth knocked out. But the handsome and charming Franklin has, fortunately, had no direct attacks. He seems to function flawlessly as an attractive young gay man in the city of such homophobic horrors.

      And his friends have determined even before he arrives that this is simply evidence that perhaps Franklin is not really gay. He enters the shop as a friendly man ordering a coffee from the new barista (Nelson Wong), the two of whom lock eyes with immediate desire, and joins the others only to be told by Trina that it appears he is not really gay, and simply cannot share their company any more since he could not possibly have the empathy necessary to comprehend what the others have endured.

      Franklin is confused and insists that he has had some emotional abuse, which is completely dismissed by the victimized others. As poor Franklin is about to get up and leave, the waiter suddenly charges forward and sends him under the table, shouting homophobic slurs, the others suddenly coming to his defense as “a noble man, a beacon of the community,” even as they themselves hit and attack him. They determine to take their business to some other coffee house.

     Slightly bruised, Franklin joins the waiter for a lovely dinner as the two begin a relationship that seemingly the others have now denied themselves—although why the waiter has saved Franklin from such feckless friends is never explained.  

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

 

Juan Sebastián Valencia | Now It's Different / 2025

reclaiming the self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Sebastián Valencia (screenwriter and director) Now It's Different / 2025 [13 minutes]

 

A young man, Josh (Reid Schmidt) is turning 30 and feels that he has lost his innocent dreams of romantic love over the few years that he has lived in Los Angeles. He has a regular sexual partner, Dexter (Maurizio Bandi), who has not only never told him he loves him, but probably doesn’t even remember his name.

     And suddenly Josh is determined to somehow rediscover who he actually is, to restore some sense of the romantic wonderment he first felt in the gay world on the city instead of simply meeting up with his Grindr connection(s), adapting to what he perceived were the adult choices.

     The voyage he takes is a rather predictable one in Los Angeles, up several flights of stairs, twisting and turning through the hills until it reaches a look-out point over the city on the opposite side of the Griffith Observatory, a scene used in many movies.

     Josh maps out the voyage and writes a long letter about his personal needs and desire to find himself all over again, making a new start in his life.

     Finally, he leaves both by his sleeping sex partner, wondering if he might join him at sunset to see the beauty of the spot.

     Since we’ve never even glimpsed Dexter in anything but a sleeping position we have no reason to believe he might come or even love Josh enough to pursue such an invigorating voyage. And, frankly, do we even care? We might simply imagine a far better companion for our somewhat embarrassed sentimental hero. 

      Actually, I was even a little sad to see Dexter show up and perceive some momentary beauty in his life. Is this love? He has a hard time remembering his bedmate’s name. Not a good sign in my book, I’m afraid.

      Over the years, Columbian-born director Juan Sebastián Valencia has made several delightful LGBTQ+ films, including Kisses to Kevin (2022), Chasing Coffee (2023), and Pink Trumpets (2024); unfortunately, except for some touching moments, Now It’s Different isn’t one of them.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Victor Saville | The Good Companions / 1933

the sad clown

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ian Dalrymple, Edward Knoblock, W. P. Lipscomb, and Angus MacPhail (screenplay, based on the fiction by J. B. Priestley), Victor Saville (director) The Good Companions / 1933

 

In J. B. Priestley’s creaky but nonetheless effective machine of a story, each of three individuals, Inigo Jolifant (John Gielgud), Jess Oakroyd (Edmund Gwenn), and Miss Trant (Mary Glynne) find themselves on the outs of the worlds they’ve long inhabited and in need of a radical change of location and vocation.

       The elderly Oakroyd, who has just lost his job after 30 years of loyal service, on the same day loses his role as head of the house, and, even worse, loses his privacy and comfort in the house now being forced to daily withstand the endless verbal abuse of his wife (Florence Gregson) and simultaneously the gramophone musical intrusions by a new boarder Albert (Jack Hawkins), a friend of Oakroyd’s shiftless son Len (Cyril Smith). Oakroyd wants nothing to do with a new boarder, but his wife and son Leonard “out-vote” him and suddenly Albert’s friend is in, and Oakroyd, as he promised, in on his way out, hitchhiking down South with a man to whom the local bartender has just introduced, Jimmy. The only problem is that when Oakroyd arrives, the truck is just pulling out, and he’s told to leap in the back. He does so, only to discover hours later that the two with whom he’s hooked up are not Jimmy but a couple of crooks heading up North.

      At an inn run which one of their old girlfriends, they eat and sleep for the night, robbing Oakroyd of the only money he’s brought along before abandoning him. Forced to walk, he ends up at the crossroads to Rawsley, where he happens to meet up with another of our central characters in search of new experiences and new places, Miss Trant.

      Miss Trant, fitting the description of what might be described as an “Old Maid,” has lived for her father, caring and cooking for him at the expense of her own happiness. With his death and sale of his house and furniture she’s be left a small sum that will help survive if she takes up of a companion or some such capacity. Frustrated by having devoted her entire life to the propriety of caring for her father, she too wants to get out and explore the world while she still has the possibility. Against the advice of the local clergyman and her lawyer, she decides to take the entire sum left to her on go on a voyage to place in particular until she runs of money. She too runs into a series of semi-adventures on her way; her car is mistakenly taken by a man, Mr. Tipstead (Ivor Barnard) and a young woman with whom he’s run off from his wife (Mignon O'Doherty), the wife arriving soon after and knowing of their probable whereabouts takes Miss Trant in their car to the location to demand that her husband return home or forever remain apart. The husband returns home with her, leaving the distraught mistress in distress, soon after receiving a wire that her poor sister, having just had the traveling show she was in go bust, badly needs a basket which contains the rest of her worldly possessions. The show has closed, you guessed it, in Rawsley, and Miss Trant, having nowhere in particular to go, agrees to take the basket to her sister, there meeting up with Oakroyd.

     The third major character, Indigo Jollifant has for years been a teacher in the conservative Washbury Manor School run by the Tarvins (Laurence Hanray and Annie Esmond), in his spare time writing jazz music. The food at Washbury Manor is nearly inedible, there is no major entertainment, and the only major pleasure that Indigo and his fellow teachers find is in mocking the headmaster and his wife. When that couple overhears his imitations, he is fired. Happily, he too makes his way into an unknown future, taking the train, almost at random so that he too ends up at Rawsley, immediately meeting a traveling minstrel, Morton Mitcham (Percy Parsons), who plays the banjo, reminding nearly everyone he meets that he has traveled throughout the world.

      Morton has actually traveled there to seek out the theater company, “The Dinky Does,” hoping to possibly join them. But they are the very same company who have just gone bust, a member of which, that ambitious lead dancer and singer Susie Dean (Jessie Matthews) is awaiting her basket from Miss Trant. The company has been left without money or future bookings by their crooked manager. So, in some sense, all these itinerant individuals have been taken advantage of, but still look to the positive that their independent status permits them, and in their shared attitudes towards life they find an immediate kinship.

      If they have all been plagued by bad companions previously, they have now met up with the good ones of the work’s title.

      The “Dinky Doos” are a truly amateur performers whose members tell terrible jokes, dance through rather clumsy routines, and sing songs out of the British Music Hall tradition, all the while dressed as figures from the Commedia dell’arte.

      But after hearing of their plight, Miss Trant determines to support the company for a summer tour through the country, Indigo joining them as a pianist, Oakroyd as a backstage handyman, and Morton as a fellow performer. Changing their name to “The Good Companions,” the company bands together with their new friends only to discover that their tour coincides with the hottest summer on record, no one bothering to attend theater of any kind because of the heat.

      Almost at their end, once more, they determine to rent a theater for one more night. In the meantime, Indigo has created several new songs for the company and fallen in love with Susie—the young Gielgud even gets a chance to sing in this film—Oakroyd has fixed up their sets and props, and the entire company has become a far more serious venture. And miraculously, it rains. What was to have been their final performance is a hit!

       The rest of the film entails the details of the continued standoff between Indigo and Susie—the latter of whom has declared that she is devoted to her career and wants to become a London musical star—a jealous musical hall manager determined on destroying the company, and the inter-relationships between members, including Susie’s attempt to arrange a meeting between Miss Trant’s youthful love, now a doctor in a neighboring village.

     Despite an attack, organized by the music hall manager, on their most important benefit performance, Miss Trant meets her former beau, both of them falling in love all over again; the company finds a way to purchase a ticket to Canada for Oakroyd so that he might visit he beloved daughter; and Indigo travels to London to sell his songs to a famous musical theater manager, with the stipulation that he attend the benefit to see Susie Dean perform in person. She gets major billing in London and becomes a star.

       So all seems to end well. Perhaps only Indigo, left without the girl upon whom he’s developed a crush, does not quite get what he sought at the end—although he is awarded a career as a composer. But then, throughout, Indigo wears the costume of Pierrot, the sad clown who never wins his Columbine, the clown usually associated with gay men (think of later films such Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon and the sad mime Baptiste in Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise) which Gielgud openly was. Even Susie mocks him for his prissy, upper-class ways of speaking and behaving, and although she loves him as well, her career is truly her first love.

       It dawned on me as well, as I was writing this essay and even debating whether—despite its inclusion on some gay lists—this film might truly be described as an LGBTQ movie, that the relationship between Oakroyd’s son Len and his friend Albert seems quite suspicious. The two of them, without any source of income, seem to still dress as dandies, and obviously, if gay, have every reason to want to share beds in the same house.

      No British film of 1933 could do anything but nod in the direction of gay behavior, since it was not only something, if made more evident, that would bring down the blade of the censors but might get men like Gielgud arrested and imprisoned, his career ended. The subtle references to possible homosexuality here one might describe as coded, but are almost insignificant in their importance to the full fiction of the film itself. It was assumed that Susie would chose her career over love from the first moment we met her in the movie, and even if Len’s friend had been a heterosexual, it wouldn’t have altered his father’s decision to seek out other worlds. Yet these nods remain and, I’d argue, shouldn’t entirely go unmentioned.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

Jon Fitzgerald | Apart from Hugh / 1994

the pull of gravity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jon Fitzgerald (screenwriter and director) Apart from Hugh / 1994

 

Jon Fitzgerald’s 1994 black-and-white film Apart from Hugh begins with a young man, Collin (David Merwin), sitting in a small village coffee house, apparently late in the evening, writing a letter. From the looks on his face and the accompanying score we know it’s a rather sad letter which, when finished, he folds up and puts into an envelope. That letter will, in fact, follow in this superficially likeable tale throughout, appearing next in a sketch book hidden away in one of the drawers of the country house in the Pacific Northwest where he lives with his lover Hugh (Steve Arnold), and eventually is set out for Hugh to read two days later.

      It is a letter, so we later discover that attempts to explain why, despite Collin’s love for Hugh, he feels he must leave their relationship, at least for a while, until he can explore more of life. Being several years younger than Hugh, who we gradually discover has toured Europe with a backpack, swam in the ocean alone in the middle of the night, and done numerous other things that Collin knows nothing about, the younger man naturally feels a desire to discover some of these things for himself.

      Their relationship is partially established the next morning as they wake up in bed together in a large brick building, apparently an old schoolhouse or apartment building, which inside their first floor rooms Hugh has decorated with numerous rugs, pillows, and knick-knacks enough that it looks to be quite comfy. Hugh has just had a “bizarre” dream: “I was back in high school...in my English class taking an exam in my underwear. The period was almost over and I couldn’t answer any of the questions. I was so frustrated. I got up and I walked over to the window, unlatched it and flung it open, and just totally flew out. Or was I sucked out? ...I flew over the city and the mountains and the forest. It was so beautiful! But it was so hard to fight the gravity.” Evidently, it is the kind of dream Hugh often has.

     When asked about his own dreams, Collin says he never remembers them. “I always wake up and there’s nothing there. Just kind of a vague gray feeling, like dirty white socks. I guess it’s just lack of imagination. Not to be flying around like Superman all the time.” For Collin, Hugh has all the imagination, “always inventing, always wandering into buttercup meadows. Always wondering about all the ‘what-ifs.” For Collin, everything has to have its opposite, “rain/shine, dark/light, you/me.”

     So we learn almost immediately that Collin feels a lack of experience and a paucity of wonderment, while his mentor, Hugh, is always questioning alternatives. Indeed, the dream Hugh has just had is not about him, we can guess, but about his own somewhat frustrated lover, who wants to escape the exam with which Hugh is constantly testing him: the examination of his own life.

     We also quickly discern that despite the likeability of these two gay figures, they speak in a world of clichés, not only of “buttercup meadows” and notions of everything having its opposite, but, as we soon discover, with lines such as “Love at first blight,” “You feel sexy when you grovel,” or interchanges such as:

 

              Collin: “You know you’re something, you really are.”

              Hugh: “What? What?”

              Collin: “No. Nothing.”

              Hugh: “Is there something you’re not telling me?’

              Collin: “You know it’s funny how you can spend so much time with someone.

                 Do all sorts of criminal, crazy things with them, rely on them so

                 much. And then one day...poof...it all comes to a sad screeching halt.”

     There are so many of these periods of dialogue which are so badly performed by these two actors that we might almost imagine that we are watching an amateur play performed in this small rural community. Were it not for the obvious sincerity of this work and the appearance of thorough commitment to Fitzgerald’s play by Merwin and Arnold we might slip out the side entrance or more literally quietly take our earphones from our head and click off the DVD.

      As with Hugh’s dream, the person who Collin is describing is not the one we might think, not Hugh with whom he is planning to end things, but Frieda, a woman with whom he lived previously who one day he simply left very much in the same way he’s planning to leave his current lover. It appears that our handsome young man has a history of leaving others in order to further discover himself; or perhaps he is just prone to seeking out strong personalities who help to mold his personality.

      Fortunately for the viewer, Frieda (Jennifer Reed), is a highly eccentric being who has already arrived in town and headed over to the local bar, drinking several beers with a ridiculous British couple, playing pool (badly) with a couple of local yokels whom the lesbian bartender quickly challenges and beats, and hearing the sad tale of a cowboy who has just lost his male lover.

      Hugh has invited Frieda up from the city (my guess is that the two lovers live near Bellingham since Hugh is described as attending the university) for a party that evening to celebrate his and Collin’s first anniversary.

      To give you an idea of just how wild Frieda is, Collin describes the time at a party when she served Oreo cookies, having removed all the white frosting and replaced it with horseradish!!

    The Freida we meet, thank god, is much more entertaining, and now lives in a polyamorous relationship with a married couple who paint houses, happy with her sexual relations with both husband and wife. She, moreover, takes an immediate liking to Hugh, advising Collin, when he reveals his plans to her, to think carefully about leaving his new lover in a manner similar to the way as he previously left her. She understood why he had to leave, she reveals, but was nonetheless hurt for a long while.

     The gay boys’ party, which takes up a nice chuck of the film, is a carefully constructed exercise in representing diversity to which Hugh has invited local heterosexual couples, appealing gay men, two competitive heavyset drag queens, a black woman or two, and a poet who, after the group finishes playing charades, reads a Beat-inspired poem.

      Collin is still determined to leave in the morning with Frieda with the intention of finding a life as rich as he believes Hugh’s has been. Actually, however, we realize that Collin probably has lived a much more adventuresome life with Freida than Hugh did in his vagabonding year, particularly after Hugh tries to remember the smells of France (bread and coffee beans), Holland (chrysanthemums and beer), or Norway (sweaty men and fish), all of which seems to suggest that the writer has never ventured out of his world atlas.

      If, as a sentimentalist of sorts, I first might have wished Collin try to stick it out with Hugh, by the time of his and Frieda’s departure, with Hugh tucked safely away in bed, I truly hoped the boy might escape if not into a long trek across Europe or at least into a better script.

      But the young Collin, evidently cannot escape the force of gravity any better than Hugh describes feeling in his flights of fancy in the first lines of this film. He returns, scoops up the letter he has left upon the bookcase, and breaks eggs into the frying pan just in time for Hugh’s breakfast.

 

Los Angeles, February 21, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).

Derek Jarman | Glitterbug / 1994

lost horizons

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman (director), David Lewis and Andy Crabb (editors) Glitterbug / 1994

 

The antithesis of Blue, Derek Jarman’s one-hour collation of home movies which he worked on with David Lewis and Andy Crabb during the last full year of his life, Glitterbug almost literally takes one’s breath away in its fast-motion scenes of Jarman’s London life.

     Boys literally leap in and out of his London apartment couch, gay boys get up in drag and perform in various manners, including Jarman. He and his friends speed through (one suspects with that drug’s help) party after party.

     At other moments the Felliniesque costumed and half naked beautiful boys of Jarman’s 1976 film Sebastiane stand smoking and chatting in English presumably instead of their on-film’s Latin. Fiction writer William S. Burroughs reads from his work. Andrew Logan celebrates his alternative Miss World contest. And singer Adam Ant, occultist sculptor Dave Baby, abstract artist Duggie Fields, dancer Michael Clark, and musician/artist Genesis P-Orridge all dive in and out of the film accompanied by the rhythmic and often lyrical score by Brian Eno.

      One of the most quiet and relaxed moments reveals Jarman and his actor muse Tilda Swinton visiting her family estate, weaving through the small maze of trimmed hedges and boxwood trees.

      While Blue is all talk and no images, its companion work, the very last of Jarman’s oeuvre, is all image without a word. Perhaps there are no words for the swinging, adventuresome pre-AIDS gay world that Jarman and his friend inhabited, unafraid in a world of closeted fear until disease, fear, and the British Thatcherites suddenly attempted to push even their world back into the British cuddy, pretending that they had never even existed.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).