Zuheir Kredich | See You Tomorrow / 2019

the canvas of a london sky

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zuheir Kredich (screenwriter and director) See You Tomorrow / 2019 [16 minutes]

 

This rather simple film deals once more with gay death, not apparently AIDS, but cancer or something like it. In a bar on a London street Steve (John Skerrit) encounters his old friend, Alex (Richie Bratby) passing by and calls out to him. For a moment Alex doesn’t even recognize him, which Steve explains is probably the KiMo therapy; he has only a few months left before he’s going to die, he confesses.

     After talking briefly about Steve’s upcoming birthday and his birth sign, a Libra, Alex suddenly gives his old friend a deep kiss and apparently a short relationship between the two arises.

     We have no way of knowing how long this relationship lasted or what it truly consisted of. As we get glimpses of it through this short film by British student filmmaker Zuheir Kredich we see the two primarily in argument, at one time Steve being angry that Alex won’t join him for dinner, and at another point while Alex is cooking dinner for Steve, the latter suddenly determines to go out to buy a book and comes back an hour later without any book in his hand. The issue between them appears to be Alex’s inability to face up to the fact of death, particularly Steve’s death, and his selfishness about giving himself over to the other who has so little time left.

     One might even argue that Alex is the kind of lover who spends much of each day off from the other planning for the next day, a man unable to experience the joys and pleasures of the moment.

     But this is pure conjecture since we have no other evidence, and the very next scene after their having kisses is Alex calling Steve to report “It’s been ages,” only to find Steve’s father (Mark Johnson) at the other end of the line able to report only that his son is a hospice. He hangs up before even telling Alex which hospice Steve is in.

      Whatever their relationship, it is clear that Alex cares enough for his friend that he calls around to all the hospices until he finds Steve’s location. And he visits him, bringing flowers and candies and talking to him in a cheerful manner, although the patient is nearly comatose. Steve’s father leaves the room to let the two be together. When Steve finally awake enough to even perceive that Alex is there he attempts to say something that either Alex refuses to hear and simply can’t make out, but which, if we carefully attend, is somewhat negative, hinting that he is trying to tell Alex that he shouldn’t have come.

       Soon after he tells the now sleeping patient that he has to go, but will be there tomorrow, that he should hold on until tomorrow.

       During the next visit he is also quite chipper and caring, somewhat witty in his observations which he attributes to comments he’s learned from Steve. But his friend is hardly awake during any of the visit. Nonetheless, Alex hugs him close and holds his hand for quite a while before once more simply reporting that he has to go but will see him tomorrow, insisting that he hold for next day.

       On the third visit it’s clear that Steve has only a few hours left, so his father reports, Alex insisting that “we don’t have to say that,” and turning to Steve, completely comatose, to tell him not to worry that he’ll be fine. The clues we’ve had about Alex seem to be in evidence. He cannot accept the truth about death, which makes him rush always toward a future which he will never reach, missing the present in his rush forward.

       Steve’s father, for the first time, asks Alex how long he’s known his son, Alex responding simply, “not long,” again suggesting the brevity of even those moments we’ve glimpsed, surely the way his life must appear to him. Without living in the present there is never anything but a few remembered moments; life is not fully lived.

      The father describes how very close his son had been to his mother, and the shocking piece of information that his son left home when his mother died, although he was only 16. Now it becomes clear that at least one time in his life Steve himself could not deal with death, could not allow himself to be reminded of the place in which his beloved mother no longer existed.

      The two men take a break in their short deathwatch, standing outside the hospice. Steve looks up to the sky, hearing some birds singing, and comments that he had never much noticed nature, but Steve “painted me this beautiful canvas of the London sky,” which changed him, so he reminisces forever. Perhaps he has now begun to learn how to stay for short periods in once place, to enjoy the reality of life.

       The movie ends there, with that simple statement and its possible revelation. Evidently Kredich, a student at Central Film School at the University of Gloucestershire, based this film on his own life since the film is dedicated to “Steve.” And obviously he has now attended to a past in honor of a present in which he could not.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

William Stead | The Last Summer / 2019

the last moments of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Stead (screenwriter and director) The Last Summer / 2019 [8 minutes]

 

It’s 1936 in Germany and two young boys, a little old to be doing so but nonetheless enjoying the game of it, are using a sling shot to see if they can hit some tin cans they’ve set up. One of them, Felix, wonders if the other’s father might help him get a job the next year and asks if his friend Ben will be soon joining up in the ranks of the army. Ben doesn’t know, but queries if that is what the other might be planning. Felix responds: “If it means I get to be around all those army boys.”

 

     These two kids are clearly in a homosexual relationship in a time when they cannot yet imagine the dangers. But the film demonstrates how quickly they will need to discover what is just ahead.

       The two head back to Ben’s home to “listen to some music,” obviously having other plans in mind. But even as they head home along the path, they are met up with a young Nazi officer, Heinrich, with whom Felix decides to have some fun, his friend trying to dissuade him to stop his antics. Felix hits Heinrich in the head with a small rock.

       The reaction is immediate as Heinrich turns, calls Felix a “fucking faggot” and knocks him down kicking him with his boot several times while Ben looks on in utter dismay. Heinrich then turns on Ben, calling him a faggot as well, and warns him “Wait until your father finds out.”

      His father, it turns out, is the local commandant, seen a bit earlier typing up the categories for undesirable young German men, including the notorious pink triangle.

      The boy helps his friend, the best he can, to return back to his luxurious home; Felix is clearly seriously hurt and is suffering. But finally, they come staggering into the house, Felix sneaking upstairs as Ben is called by his father. The father, sitting at the end of a long table, typewriter in front of him, seems about to say something, but proffers only the word, “Goodnight.” The father looks back at the sheet of paper on which he is typing, featuring the pink triangle, and we are aware, suddenly, in his stare of surety, that this man is willing even to offer up his son to the cause without even a warning.

       The two boys sit on the floor of their room, separated by a space that might be described as the distance of two bodies of land across an ocean. Felix comments: “Henrich is an ass. You have nothing to worry about. Your father is the commandant.” 

        Ben is now in tears, suffering for everything he suddenly realizes, as Felix reaches out to assure him, “It’s okay,” presumably suggesting that he recognizes that their relationship must now come to an end.

        They hug as Felix assures him “Everything will be okay.” But we know and they know, everything is not okay. Their hug is the embrace of death.

        If Stead’s story is somewhat naïve, telling a story that might never truly have happened given the long, long hostility of the authorities and others of even the Weimar Republic against homosexuality given Paragraph 175, it nonetheless brings forward an interesting historical viewpoint, in which apparently Stead is most fascinated in his filmmaking, that reveals that even the children of such hateful beings were never truly safe. British-born Stead’s film is not about a “last summer” but concerns the very last moments of possibility of love for its youthful heroes.

 

Los Angeles, August 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023)

Jackson Lennon | Farfalle / 2024

discovering acceptance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jackson Lennon (screenwriter and director) Farfalle / 2024 [14 minutes]

If Irish director Jackson Lennon’s 2024 short film Farfalle seems to get off to a slow start, it is because we see its central figure simply as a young boy, Jake Ellis (Elliott Douglas) dancing under his headphones, his mother (Linda Ryan) attempting to tell him that he is soon to be visited for only a week by an Italian exchange student, Maria Bacco (Sofi Sabbatini), whom she has invited to stay with them.

    At first, he is reticent to even deal with her, almost disallowing her entry to their home when she suddenly appears, with dyed lilac hair at their door. She, moreover, can hardly speak coherent English.

     But gradually over the few days she is with them, sharing tea together at a regular time, she manages to show him that when she seems him dancing, she thinks he’s “cute,” and finally noting the scars among his tattoos, asks him about them.

      He quickly admits that they are from his operation; that, in fact, he is a trans man, something we previously might not even have imagined, but which suddenly makes sense for his slightly off-center behavior. In fact, he has spent much of his life in England with his father, which, as she notes, makes for a slightly different language pattern than that of his mother’s.

     Her response is unusual, not to probe more deeply into his past, but to simply ask if he is “happy.

     In this encounter between the two, they have their first kiss, which presumably leads to their closer relationship.

     And the two soon become deep friends, and even more importantly, possible lovers. As he proclaims, even though she does speak the same language, she is the first person who has truly understood him.

   As all true first love stories often claim of their lovers, however, their love is short-lived, and as Maria prepares to leave, Jake lies in bed pouting, afraid, as he tells his worried mother, that he will never again find someone who so understands him. She assures him he will, but also argues that he will regret forever for not having come down to see Maria off. But imagine how difficult it must be for a trans man to find a woman who will fully accept and love him for he is. If the gay and lesbian pools, particularly in rural areas, are narrow, it is nearly unimaginable for how such young transgender men might find someone to love.

    He finally does so, handing her a short love note, which she carries off with her, later reading it aloud to the film audience, reiterating all I say above.

     Farfalle may not be a profound or even complex short film, but it captures something that I haven’t yet seen in the many troubled transgender films I’ve witnessed, presenting a completely accepted and open trans figure who is totally likeable, basically untroubled by his world, and able to more forward with full love for the gender into which he was previously born.

    I loved this film because of it’s total openness and compassion for its hero without condescension, apology, or resistance to his new identity.

    Why on earth transgender people in the US and elsewhere are tortured and punished for their identities is totally inexplicable. In this lovely Irish film, Jake is as normal as any young man seeking new love, but, obviously, still haunted by a past that is not catalogued by the film itself.

     We don’t know what his true relationship to his English father was, but there couldn’t be a more loving mother that his, who not only accepts him, but encourages him in his attempts to discover what can only be now described as heterosexual love. This film seems almost a kind a break-through from all the painful transitions I had previously encountered in films about transgender individuals.

      So why, one might ask, are transgender figures folded into the gay, lesbian, and bisexual world? Frankly, where else might they find a home but in the LGBTQ community. That is the wonder of the colorful umbrella of its embrace. Not everyone within the folds of its seeming protection might find all the others to be equal sexual brothers and sisters, but they all recognize that in the larger community, they are all outsiders who might, at least, attempt to help one another find their footing.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Lucho Bender | Uno de cada diez hombres es gay (One in Ten Argentine Men Are Gay) / 2004 [commercial advertisement]

a gay ad that doesn’t seem to understand who gay men are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucho Bender (director) Uno de cada diez hombres es gay (One in Ten Argentine Men Are Gay) / 2004 [50 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

This Argentina commercial, directed by Lucho Bender, is actually quite obnoxious to the gay community even if attempts to connects the brand of Fernet Cinzano with the gay community. It plays on the notion of masculinity and gay stereotypes to get there.

     There are ten men socializing at a house party, when one of the, reading evidently a newspaper article, notes that “One in Ten Argentine Men Are Gay,” the usual 10% quoted for representing gay behavior, although even that is today under question.

      Suddenly this group of presumably straight men, counting down the number of men in their group, begin to readjust their behavior, the first man quickly hiding up his pink-striped socks. A second man immediately removes his arm from behind his friend.

      A third man quickly uncrosses his legs, the fourth covers over his golden bracelet. A another covers up the necklace he wears, while a sixth takes the earring from his left ear.

      But finally, one of their friends, an ice cube in the front of his mouth, moves forward without any regret, a Cinzano in hand while the announce shows its product and suggests, “You can call me Fernet.”

      Strangely, it is the last man whom these scared, maybe gay boys, suddenly identify as the gay man in their midst, presuming that the Cinzano itself may be associated with the gay experience.

      Yes, there is indeed a strange irony to this short ad, and a willingness to fully identify with the gay experience, but to have to play it out through fear and all the stereotypical gay tropes is truly mind-boggling. What are they trying to say, that these men might as well just relax and drink their gay Cinzano or that all of them are already gay?

        My Facebook friend suggested that perhaps the ad was simply "making fun of the fact that people in Argentina have these outmoded and stereotyped views a gay people." Maybe, "given what a homophobic country it was for many years, should we maybe give the ad a bit more credit." All that is true, but contemporary Argentina I would argue is more homophobic that many another country, including the US. And the ad gives not evidence that that is its focus of irony, since it can't quite move on past the sudden fear these men demonstrate. 

      The ad is so confused, between its bordering homophobia and its readiness to announce itself as something perfectly comfortable with being the one-in-ten, that the power that any ad might have had to embrace the gay community is completely lost.

       Perhaps this work might be described as making fun of heteronormative views of the gay world, but we are totally unsure of its own point-of-view, and the ad stands on very shaky ground.

      But I guess that if Fernet promises to suddenly turn me into a gay person, I will be happy to drink it.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (August 2026).

      

Arthur Cahn | Totems / 2023

that’s what friends are for

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Cahn (screenwriter and director) Totems / 2023 [25 minutes]

 

At an after-mass ceremony, the mother Marianne (Anne Alvaro) has arranged for a small gathering with catered food for family members and some of her recently dead son Bastien’s friends, Paul (Arthur Cahn), Delphine (Victoire Du Bois), Cyril (Solal Forte), and Eve (Lucie Gallo).

     When they ask her if there is someone to help her clean up, she explains that no, she prefers to work alone since it keeps her mind of the sadness of the event, and that she even plans later that afternoon to visit Bastien’s apartment and clean it out of his possessions.

      But that alerts one of his friends of the fact that Bastien had quite an extensive collection of dildos, and as they share the fact with one another, all four determine, with the spare key that Paul has, to visit the apartment and remove the dildo’s before the mother arrives. Although she knows her son was gay, she might indeed still be startled and even shocked to discover his vast dildo collection.

     They too are in mourning, but they realize their duties as friends and leave the gathering somewhat early.

      As they enter the apartment, almost immediately in pictures and memories sadness sets in, as it is revealed that although it was thought that Paul was a sexual partner with Bastien, and certainly he wished for it, but, as Cyril points out, it never occurred. He suspects, however, that they should check out the bedroom first, but they also all wish to snoop around for a bit. Delphine has discovered a beautiful picture of her from the past.

     But Delphine asks a far more important question, as they don rhinestone crowns that their friend obviously kept, “What if we find something that we don’t want to find, that he wanted to keep secret?”

 

      Cyril asks, “Like what?”

      And Delphine reminds them “Aren’t there things you’d prefer not to know?”

     They witness pictures of Bastien with each of them taken in a photo booth, as Paul reaches down under the bed, pulling out the totem box of dildos. They also find a cock ring or two, which the women can’t recognize. But they laugh solemnly as they look over the collection, Delphine suggesting one of the purple dildos is “cute” and even kissing it. “What do we do?” asks Paul, “Toss them? The Salvation Army won’t want them.”

      But Eve still cannot quite comprehend what it should be a secret from the mother? “We’re ashamed of who he was, and what he liked?”

      Delphine first suggests its for his mother, but also for Bastien. “There are things don’t share with their parents. If I were to die I’d hate my mom to find by sexts.”

      “When I die, burn my phone” says Cyril.

      Paul jokes, “You mean that you screw conservatives?”

      In short, in the midst of their sincere best intentions there are put-downs of each other, some comic mockery, etc, since they know one another so very well.

      They obviously have been a tight group wound around Bastien.

      Eve chastises him for evidently having seen “Pierre” again!

      Cyril explains that he just needed some bodily warmth, it being the day after the accident, obviously now explaining to the film audience how Bastien died. “I didn’t want to sleep alone.”

      Paul takes off his crown, obviously realizing that perceiving that Cyril did have a sexual relationship with Bastien that he did not.

      This is a subtle and complex film as secrets are revealed, loves, lies, and realities are rawly put on display.

      Eve suggests that perhaps they should each take a dildo in memory of him, but Delphine mocks the idea as creating a kind mausoleum, the idea of which she hates, particularly the idea of fetishizing him.

      But Eve argues that Delphine is simply whining. That she herself might put one on one of her necklaces and accuses her of being heartless.

      “I do have a heart, that’s why I don’t need all of this,” she retorts.

       But realizing this is no time to fight, she soon after apologizes.

     Paul gets a paper bag, Eve and Cyril both claiming their own favorite, while the others just get tossed into the bag to be chucked away, Paul refusing to select one.

    They walk away, tossing the many remaining dildos in the trash. Then, hug one another, and basically separate, each on their way to other business.

      A few minutes later, however, Paul returns to the trash bin to pull out his own selection. He returns to his own apartment and sits in out on display on his coffee table. He goes back into his bedroom and uses it, perhaps imagining the sexual relationship he might have had with Bastien. But he quickly breaks down in tears.

      He calls Eve, suggesting that perhaps Delphine was right, that we should have each left it all. “After all, Bastien liked controversy.”

      Maybe we should have left one dildo. One isn’t fifteen.

      “But I was happy to do that with all of you,” admits Eve.

      Eve invites him over, but he claims that he has to learn to do it on his own, to survive after the man he clearly loved as disappeared from his life.

      Paul sneaks back into Bastien’s apartment to return his dildo to its proper place, but finds the mother asleep in her own son’s bed. He quietly creeps in and puts the one remaining dildo under the bed.

      She awakens to ask Paul if Bastien was his boyfriend, and he answers, no, he as just a friend. She is curious, having met just one boyfriend Jérémie, and that was ages ago. She wonders if maybe he was too selfish to be with someone—or too busy.

      He suggests that he is on his way, but she begs to stay and talk, asking if he has a boyfriend.

      “No, I don’t,” he admits as he sits down on nearby chair.

      She continues, noting that they were such good friends, close, and asks him what he is hiding from her.

      He assures her, “Nothing.” She begs him to take whatever he wants. It’s absurd, she admits, sleeping in his bed. The loss for both of them without a full possibility of communicating their full sorrow across generations is palpable.

      Now she suddenly admits that she knows what he was replacing under the bed, since she noticed they were missing. “I’d already stopped by, you know? I saw the trunk had been moved, was that you guys?” She admits even as a child she noticed wads of tissues under his bed, a “pretty racy” page on his computer. “Bastien knew how to enjoy life. I always admired him about that.”

      “I just hope he made love—with men in the flesh,” she finally explains.

      “It was beautiful what you said at the ceremony. ….He loved you a lot you know?” Paul, almost now in tears, turns and leaves, while Marianne falls back into her beloved son’s bed.

       We might only wish that Paul could have assured her of something, that he had loved other men, that he more in his life than the dildos. But even we don’t know that. He certainly had dear friends who needn’t have worried about his mother’s response to what she found, but perhaps might have paid more attention her heart, her fears, and desires for her own son. But that is always the generational problem: parents will never learn everything.

       This is a truly profound drama by French director Arthur Cahn, that begins as a kind of comedy, but soon after makes tears well up in one’s eyes. Cahn, who has now released nine videos is certainly a filmmaker to hold one’s attention.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Victor Fleming | Captains Courageous / 1937

the little fish

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Lee Mahin, Marc Connelly, and Dale Van Every, based on the novel by Rudyard Kipling (screenplay), Victor Fleming (director) Captains Courageous / 1937

 

The 1937 film by Victor Fleming is basically an intergenerational love story between a young 13-year-old boy, Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Bartholomew) and a Portuguese sailor, Manuel Fidello (Spencer Tracy) who saves the boy when he falls overboard while sailing on a streamliner, accompanied by his wealthy, quite removed father (Melvyn Douglas).

     Before going any further, I should emphasize that this is not a pedophilic work; there is no sex and only at a couple of moments is any physical contact express, Manuel’s hand caresses Harvey’s cheek, and at one point he gently pats the boy’s butt. Their relationship is generally perceived by most critics and viewers, who would surely deny all gay suggestions, to be a father-son like relationship or a kind of sea-going mentorship. But I think anyone who sees it with an open mind will comprehend that there is real love between the two, the older man calling his “catch” a “little fish,” and the previously spoiled child, absolutely in love with Manuel, so much so that when, at the end of work, he is returned to his now chastened father, he can only beg to go back to sea, even if he witnessed Manuel’s death near the end of the voyage when, in Captain Disko Troop’s (Lionel Barrymore) desperate race to reach to Glouster with this catch before his competitor, Manuel is caught up in the rigging of the falling mast and drowns in the sea.

     And yes, there is plenty of patriarchal patronizing of the young willful Harvey, as Alba M. insists in her on-line essay “Captains Courageous: A Critical Analysis,” and as she points out, the boy’s behavior “is explicitly coded as ‘feminine,’ like a ‘sissy’ boy. But Harvey is at first a monster of a spoiled child who lies, attempts to bribe his way into a special club for which he will certainly not be elected (even his peers detest him), and finally threatens the chairman of the club, “the Buffaloes,” with his father being fired by his own wealthy father. He even threatens to report made up sexual abuse by his teacher.

     This is like a spoiled young Trump, raised without any true parental involvement, so selfish that he cannot he recognize it as bad behavior. This was a character which the beautiful Bartholomew, at the time the most well-known actor other than Shirley Temple, played well, not only in this film, but in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) where audience members saw the character as being “sissified” and “emasculated.”

     In this film, Harvey is punished for his actions by being expelled from his school for a semester, and his father finally realizes that he has not properly paid attention to his son’s actions. The streamliner voyage to Europe is supposed to resolve that problem, but once again, he ignores his son while doing business, and Harvey, once again taunting other boys on board, hides on the ship’s deck, leading his fall into the water, he near drowning, and his being saved by Manuel.

     Even once aboard the fishing boat, Harvey attempts to demand that the captain and crew take him immediately back to New York, and attempts to convince them, unsuccessfully, that his father is a wealthy man.

     Assigned the work of a cabin boy, just as the captain’s son Dan (Mickey Rooney) is treated, he refuses to obey orders or even eat, until he becomes so hungry that he gives into some of their demands, and learns from Dan how to cut fish. But if Dan played a major role of befriending the boy, the two forming an almost intimate friendship and bond in the original novel, here Rooney’s role is drastically curtailed, as he, along with the elder sailors, mock the newcomer.

     Soon after they even begin to see the boy as a danger to the ship, a kind of Jonah who will bring them bad luck.

     Only does Manuel actually commune with boy, attempting to explain his own relationship to the sea and his role as someone who sings and finds pleasure in fishing. He even talks about his own father and his unexpected death aboard just such a boat.

     As Manuel continues to develop almost a romantic interest in the boy, tucking him in with his coat (often—as when James Dean, in exchange for Sal Mineo’s gun, lovingly offers him his red jacket—represented as a symbol of romantic love) when Harvey insists of sleeping on deck, the other sailors even notice Manuel’s interest in and protection of the boy, particularly when he creates what is almost a love-song to his “little fish.” Accordingly, Manuel must behave roughly with the boy just to convince them that his has no pedophilic interest in the beautiful child.

      But, in the end, it doesn’t work, as the two become increasingly intertwined.  In a rare moment of friendliness and honesty, Harvey even comments: “Thank you for covering me up with your coat and everything. I—I never did thank you for saving my life, I ought to thank you for, all right.”

    As commentator Alba M. makes quite clear—although I strongly disagree with her theory that everything in this film should be view through a lens of a patriarchal control of children (children are not empty vessels who learn values by themselves; they need guidance and sometimes even correction; and I don’t mean corporal punishment)—by now Harvey is truly in love with his so-called mentor and, in a scene in which the two began the conversation about having “bad thoughts,” Manuel tells him that when he returns to land, he will go with girls, the boy immediately reacts in shock, “Girls.” Manuel continues, that yes, back in Gloucester he has many girls. Harvey’s reaction is like spurned lover: “Oh, you don’t go with girls?” “Every man go with girl…, begins Manuel before he realizes that in order to maintain the love relationship he has with the boy, he must revise his statement, lying to him that he was just joking and that he most certainly won’t meet up with the girls.

      This is about as obvious as it gets, but the film has now made it quite clear about how things stand between the two of them. Harvey is now a jealous lover, which makes things even more tragic when Manuel, caught in the mast, dies before his eyes.

       In the final scene he attends a memorial funeral with his father for all the men who have died at sea, tossing a wreath into the waters in his final expression of love for the man who has changed his life.

       In J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a prostitute tells Holden Caulfield that he looks just like the boy co-staring Melvyn Douglas, without naming the movie title. Yet, unlike Harvey, Holden never does learn from others, and remains an outsider to his own life.

       

Los Angeles, August 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).