Gabriel Páucar Vásquez | Hotel Paraiso / 2019

escaping paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gabriel Páucar Vásquez (screenwriter and director) Hotel Paraiso / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

Young teenager Pierre (Priya Darsham Acosta) is working in a small textile factory in order to save money, hoping to get him and his kid brother, Abel, a better place than the room in which they live over his father’s gay porn cinema.

     His father cannot even be trusted to look after the pre-pubescent Abel (Piero Arce Alvarez) while he’s working, sending the boy into the streets or allowing him to come and go between the porno rooms. Even the narrow alley outside his father’s porno palace is lined with older boys, prostitutes who frequent the “Hotel Paraiso,” who taunt him with offers of sexual activity.

     What’s worse, is that the next day Pierre is fired from his job due to complaints of some of his co-workers regarding rumors of his sexuality, perhaps more based on his father’s occupation than his own sexual activities, although he does hope to sell some of his home-made designs to “faggot” drag queens. But his articles of clothing are too expensive for the drag queens who he knows, and perhaps too coarsely made with everyday fabrics for the posher drag queen clientele.

    Down below in the porno place, Pierre stares at one of the male prostitutes, Omar (Giannatonio Martinez), obviously finding him attractive, as an older client comments, one of the old kind of prostitutes, handsome and dashing, little soldier boys or like muscley officials; “that’s how you get good cash.” He offers Pierre money or presumably a way to earn enough money to survive. The boy walks away.

    Later the boy talks with Omar, who tells him he rents a room and lives alone. “Why, don’t you want to move in; I can give you a good deal,” Omar jokes.

    Back in the father’s apartment, he catches the man about to beat Abel for stealing a cookie, and as he attempts to intervene the overweight thug slugs his son. The event forces him to take up his little brother and move in with Omar, hoping to sell some of his scarves and other items to drag queens; but he has no success. In the few days he rooms with Omar, however, there is at least one beautiful moment as Pierre, folding up his fabrics, discovers his little brother in the box, the two old boys momentarily playing with Abel in pure delight.

     Finally, he asks Omar to watch Abel for a night, while he goes out on a job, presumably to find a pick-up, hoping to make enough money to seek out a place for him and his brother.

     We see him after sex with the man to who talked in the porno place, having obviously taken up his offer of prostitution. But meanwhile, Abel wakes up, spots a cockroach to which seems always attracted, and climbs a tall set of shelves to try to capture it. We hear his body fall to the floor.

    The last image is Andrés in tears for what the life he has been forced to enter, the older man attempting to comfort him. We don’t know what he faces when he returns to Omar’s room; but it probably will be even worse. As Peruvian director Gabriel Páucar Vásquez hints, there are few other alternatives in his society for boys such as Pierre and his little brother Abel.

   This tragic short movie is so beautifully filmed that it almost contradicts the story it tells. The beautiful luminescence of its central trio of characters shines through the darkness of their encounter, making their situations even more painful to witness.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Tavo Ruiz | Se murió Juan Gabriel (Juan Gabriel Is Dead) / 2018

a different light

by Douglas Messerli

Tavo Ruiz (screenwriter and director) Se murió Juan Gabriel (Juan Gabriel Is Dead) / 2018 [15 minutes]

Mexican-born director Tavo Ruiz who lives in Germany began his filmmaking career in 2008 with The Godmother and 2014 with Earth, but it is his third film, the truly charming Se murió Juan Gabriel (Juan Gabriel Is Dead) that brought full attention to his work, and revealed a talent that has since been expressed in six further short gay films.

      Most US citizens perhaps do not know about the major Mexican pop icon singer Juan Gabriel, who died in Santa Monica, California in 2016. Although Gabriel never married, he had six children, four of them through his “best friend,” Laura Salas. Despite this, he was widely assumed to be gay, refusing to speak explicitly about his sexuality. However, as he got older he began to give implicit responses towards questions about his sexuality, saying to interviewers "Lo que se ve no se pregunta" ("what one sees doesn't have to be asked about"). Although most believed this was a confession of his gay sexuality, the deniers took this to be a further statement of his heterosexuality since he had had so many children. The presumption, of course, is that gay men are unable to have heterosexual sex or to bear children which throughout history has obviously proven to have been a myth.

     Despite the film’s title, however, Juan Gabriel plays only a minor role in the close relationship of two lifelong high school teenagers, Beto (Giovanni Sandoval) and Daniel (Ovido Noval). By the time we meet them in a kind of black-and-white world presented primarily from Daniel’s point of view, Beto’s best friend has already begun to perceive himself as a transgender individual, with long blond hair which he brushes primarily to the right side. And despite their daily discussions about the girls in their school—Beto has an on-and-off-again relationship with Karla (Adriana Olmos)—it is clear that Daniel, now self-defined as Daniela, is far more interested in Karla’s female friend than in Gabriel’s buffed boyfriend Raúl (Andrés B. Durán), who someone embarrassingly senses a female presence in the young boy that, even as they await for Beto and Gabriela to return from meeting up with Karla, forces them to opposite ends of the playground in one of the many stunning frames of this short film.

      Most US citizens perhaps do not know about the major Mexican pop icon singer Juan Gabriel, who died in Santa Monica, California in 2016. Although Gabriel never married, he had six children, four of them through his “best friend,” Laura Salas. Despite this, he was widely assumed to be gay, refusing to speak explicitly about his sexuality. However, as he got older he began to give implicit responses towards questions about his sexuality, saying to interviewers "Lo que se ve no se pregunta" ("what one sees doesn't have to be asked about"). Although most believed this was a confession of his gay sexuality, the deniers took this to be a further statement of his heterosexuality since he had had so many children. The presumption, of course, is that gay men are unable to have heterosexual sex or to bear children which throughout history has obviously proven to have been a myth.

     Beto returns to tell his friend Daniel that his relationship with Karla is back on, and that he’s been invited to a party that evening. Strangely, or perhaps utterly predictably, he invites Daniel to join him. The two, in fact, go for pizza and a kind of cinematic sightseeing tour of Ciudad de México as they look from the top of a roof out over the city, expressing their desires of love which, for a moment or two, seem to reveal their love for one another, again recreated in memorable images by the director.

     The party is the predictable torrid affair, with young boys vomiting into kitchen sinks, girls and boys stretched out in sexually precarious positions playing Twister, drugged-out couples enwrapped writhing each other’s arms, and boys and girls (in this case Beto and Karla) sneaking off into bathrooms to quickly engage in sex. Daniel sits it out uncomfortably on a living-room couch.

     The party is the predictable torrid affair, with young boys vomiting into kitchen sinks, girls and boys stretched out in sexually precarious positions playing Twister, drugged-out couples enwrapped writhing each other’s arms, and boys and girls (in this case Beto and Karla) sneaking off into bathrooms to quickly engage in sex. Daniel sits it out uncomfortably on a living-room couch.

       Without ado, however, Beto suddenly suggests they should be leaving, Daniel only too happy to join him at his house (Beto’s mother, it is established early in the film, works for two-day shifts at a far distance, leaving Beto alone to care for himself) for video games, a regular activity in which the two engage. In the midst of the games, Beto receives a telephone call from his mother, assuring her that all is just fine.

      And within those few moments, their world shifts from the black-and-white fantasy of the reality of the now, as we see in full color, a young boy with a swath of blond hair, but nothing like the long bangs that Daniel imagined for himself in the previous black-and-white segments, finally deciding to make his love apparent.

     Daniel leans forward and kisses Beto on the mouth, immediately suggesting he will leave if necessary and begging him to not let anyone else know what he’s just done. Beto is more than a little taken aback as the telephone again rings, this time reporting, improbably, that Juan Gabriel is dead. He turns back to Daniel, and it is apparent that he will not at all send his friend packing, but, as the film goes dark, may be more than willing to return that kiss.

     This truly memorable short film places everything in a loving continuum for a long-time friendship that gradually bloomed into a love that neither, least of all Beto, fully imagined existed between the two individuals, an imagined love that finally needs to be expressed in a different light.*

 

*A Different Life was the name of an important West Hollywood gay, lesbian, and transgender bookstore with locations also in New York City and San Francisco. The store began in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles in 1979 before moving to its West Hollywood location in 1990. The New York store opened in 1980s and the San Francisco branch in 1985. The New York store closed in 2001, the West Hollywood store in 2009, and the San Francisco Castro branch in 2011.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Jonthan Anzo | Cinturón de seguridad (Seat Belt) / 2018

love, grief, and responsibility

by Douglas Messerli

 

Johnathan Anzo and Francisco Granados (screenplay), Jonthan Anzo (director) Cinturón de seguridad (Seat Belt) / 2018 [25 minutes]

 

Julio (Antonio Gónzalez) and Damían (Alfredo Romero), a gay couple in Mexico, has recently adopted a child, Andrés (played by the wide-eyed charmer, Leonardo Maldonado). It is clear from the very beginning of this film that Damían is delighted by having the boy come into their life, and dotes on him as a father should with a son.

     Julio, the family bread-winner, however, is exhausted most of the time from his arduous job, and perhaps never was as eager to become a gay father. Although it’s clear he also loves the boy, he must be encouraged by his lover to even attend a film with the child, and just as often as he enthusiastic embraces Andrés, we see the boy attempting to engage his “other” father. If feels distant from the child, where Damían is totally engaged.

      But then, one night Damían awakes in a sweat, gets up and goes to the bathroom where he drops, evidently of a heart attack. He dies a few hours later.

     Now Julio must not only suffer the grief of his lover’s death, but maintain his job, all the while trying to raise a boy with whom he did not simply does not have the rapport with the child as did his lover.

    He is late to pick Andrés up at school, and his chastised by his teacher. The women he has hired as caretakers for the boy are put out by the lateness of his returns home, given the bus routes or are in another case left with the boy in a shop and asked to care for him even as they have been asked by the boss to do an inventory. They equally find that Julio’s unreliability in taking care of his own son, burdens them, and must refuse further care, as much as they love the boy.

     Perhaps just to fulfill his sexual frustration, Julio meets up in a park with someone who is busy fellating him when he suddenly he demands his billfold and slugs him in the eye. For Julio it is final straw; he is not meant to be a father, he determines, and drops the boy off at his mother’s for her to care for.

     But just a short drive away, he observes the child’s flashlight rolling around the car floor, forcing him to stop, turn around and bring the boy home. If nothing else he can perhaps return the presence of Damían and his seemingly endless love back into his life.

     The film ends with Julio trying to sleep just a little longer as Andrés rushes into his bedroom, excited since today they will be attending the fair.

     Perhaps Julio will have to learn to say no to his boss once in a while to provide the proper fathership for his beautiful son.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Timothy Smith | Le weekend / 2007

discovered in translation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nyah Farier and Timothy Smith (screenplay), Timothy Smith (director) Le weekend / 2007 [15 minutes]

 

One might argue that the old enmities between France and England are played out once again in Australian-born director Timothy Smith’s British film, Le weekend.

     French film student Sebastien (Seb, played by Egyptian-born actor Omar) travels to London with his Super 8 camera to finish his required short film project. He begins by visiting only the tourist spots, commenting cynically on how many British monuments seem to display their wrath against their French neighbors. And from the beginning, accordingly, we find Seb a bit like an American tourist in Paris, not really truly interested in uncovering any truths or making any deep revelations about the country he is visiting, as Americans tend to do, for “le weekend” only. And one can only wonder whether his film project might turn up anything of interest given his viewpoints.

      As commentator Mike Kennedy, writing on Letterboxd puts it: “Not to worry, he wanders into queer Soho where he is checked out by and agrees to go for a drink with Rafael ([Brazilian-born actor] Fernando Peres) who then offers to show him around.” (words in brackets are mine)

     Surprised by the friendliness of Rafael—who is seemingly pleased not only to take the visitor on a tour of London which he may never otherwise have seen, but offers Omar a bed for the night—our visitor seems particularly dense as well as rather inattentive in not being able to discern that Rafael is a gay man looking for a boy with whom to spend a night of sex. And when Rafael’s sexuality finally dawns on the “Frenchman,” he resists telling his new friend that he is straight.

 

      Without blinking an eye, he allows Rafael to suck him off, and to continue touring him around the next day as well. Gradually, we witness what the narrator (Omar’s voice performed by Val Rassi) eventually perceives, that his London buddy is growing more and more frustrated by the fact that Omar will not hold hands or even offer up a kiss.

       Finally, even Seb dredges up enough guilt to tell Rafael the truth, and we just as suddenly discover that Rafael’s kindnesses were, in fact, all dependent upon sexual rewards, as he turns away and quickly moves off, leaving his new false friend alone. Perhaps Seb deserves it, but Omar still feels beholden to at least seek out Rafael to thank him for his gestures.

       He finally finds him walking outside a bar where they have previously had drinks. But just as suddenly, another gay man comes up to Rafael, kisses him, and with him in hand hurries off, perhaps the “Londoner,” if he has caught a glimpse of his French stalker, gloating in the delight of ignoring his heterosexual gaze.

 

      If you believe the film’s fiction, Seb, at the expense of the British boy’s sexual desires, certainly is able to finish his film. But, in fact, we finally realize that this is no documentary, and that everything in Smith’s film represents another kind of fiction. A Frenchman, played by Omar, an Egyptian, visits a London actually caught on camera by an Australian filmmaker. Playing a straight man, Omar’s character meets up with a pretend British boy, Rafael, actually played by Brazilian-born actor Peres, the gay man whom Omar deceives. The supposed documentary we are seeing is in fact a scripted movie, itself based on a genre created, in part, by Jean-Luc Goddard.

      In short nothing is what it seems to be. The characters are not of the same nationality as they claim to be, their sexuality, in truth, is unknown, and the British landscape is being framed as well by an outsider. In short everyone and everything lies outside of what the fiction tells us it is. This is a film, in other words, about outsiders trying to recreate a world defined by others, the dilemma faced by any gay filmmaker who chooses to portray anything outside of his own cultural, social, and sexual identities. We have to wonder, accordingly, might outsiders be able to tell truth better than those within? Or do they add further layers of fiction onto what we perceive as reality?

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Gregory La Cava | Bed of Roses / 1933 || William A. Seiter | Professional Sweetheart / 1933

the catfish eaters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wanda Tuchock, Gregory La Cava, and Eugene Thackrey (screenplay), Gregory La Cava (director) Bed of Roses / 1933

Maurine Watkins (screenplay), William A. Seiter (director) Professional Sweetheart / 1933

 

Near the very end of Gregory La Cava’s 1933 comedy Bed of Roses Franklin Pangborn suddenly shows up in his usual overstressed squirrel-like role, this time selling women’s panties as a department store floorwalker where the central character Lorry Evans (Constance Bennett) also works. There is no true reason why we even need to identify him as being gay, except that, as usual, his character gives off a prissy, too proper, and overly harried sense of being, selling what we are certain would never cross the hands of a normative cinematic he-man except perhaps for pulling if off from a female body. In the few seconds devoted to his busy dialogue, moreover, he even gets the opportunity to show his appreciation for the piece of clothing that he holds up to display, while also taking a second to assure an inquiring customer, the Mae West-like hip- swinging Mrs. Minnie Brown Oglethorpe (Pert Kelton) that her friend is still working at the store a few yards from where he stands. The scene has no reason to be Pangborn’s except that he has played similar roles so very many times and so well that we even recognize him as the type, much like Pangborn was in real life, a man who lived with his mother and an occasional boyfriend, and accordingly is totally comfortable in an atmosphere of pushing, squealing, chattering, eager women. He made the act of coping with shopping women an art in the way that Humphrey Bogart made lighting up his own and a blonde beauty’s cigarette.

     Vito Russo quotes a RKO studio release of the same year for another of his roles, this for Professional Sweetheart:

 

     “Call Franklin Pangborn a sissy offstage and he’ll plant five hard knuckles on your proboscis. But call him a sissy on the stage or screen and he’ll pat you on the back and call you “pall”....for Pangborn is famous for his portrayals of “sissified” characters....those chaps generally known as Adelbert, who go in for the arched eyebrows and a mincing walk...and in RKO’s Professional Sweetheart, he plays a typical role...that of a male dressmaker who flutters about...adding to the general hilarity of the uproarious satire.”

 Pangborn may have winced if you described him as a pansy, but I doubt very much if he might have slugged you. He knew that he had a power over women that few other of the males in his films might even have imagined.

      Strangely, one of Evan’s central male beaus in this tough comedy, New Orleans publisher Stephen Paige (John Halliday)—best remembered today as Katherine Hepburn’s father Seth Lord in The Philadelphia Story (1940)—who Evans encounters on the boat that might have taken her from prison to New Orleans, might be best described as a “woman hater.” When she finally arrives in New Orleans, she looks him up pretending to be a West Virginia news reporter, in truth seeking an eligible bachelor to prey upon, knowing that such a smooth-speaking, straight-thinking, respectable man is the easiest to push into a comprising situation which, with any luck, will keep her in room, board, and fashionable rags for a long time to come.

      He admits immediately, when told a woman reporter was waiting to meet him, he expected a “fat frumpy sort of thing,” and quickly sizes up her “interview” as being less interested in his career than in his personal being. Being the kind of man who openly supports the legal restrictions of prohibition, he sports of fully stocked bar which, with a little of her natural-born chicanery permits the double-crossing man-hater to get him drunk, and before he can even wake up from what knocked him out, convince him that he owes her and his entire society an explanation for a night-long affair that never happened.

       Paige perceives her money-grubbing tactics immediately for what they are and calmly swallows his pride along with the stomach pill with which his butler provides him. “How much do you want?” he calmly inquires, to which quite expectedly Evans, taking up her various well-learned rhetorical poses, answers: “I just want you?”

       “Well you can’t have me. I’m a respectable citizen. At least I was a respectable citizen until you tricked me into doing something I didn’t want to do.” As she threatens suicide and terrifying racket to announce to the world just how wronged she has been, he quietly tells his butler to “Tell Henry to get the car ready. We’re going out to look at apartments.”

       In a sense, he punishes her perfectly, locking her away in a bed of roses from which she is permitted little escape to mix with her friends or the other man, from whom she’s also swiped a significant amount of cash, the handsome cotton barge captain, Dan (the favorite hero of the decade’s comic romances, Joel McCrea.)

       While Paige traps her in a closed relationship based on his complete knowledge of just who she is and his needs for filling his stomach and satisfying his occasional sexual desires, Dan has unintentionally captured the heart that she and her friend Minnie never knew she even had.  Ensconced in an elegant apartment overlooking what appears to be the French Quarter, Evans becomes so stir- crazy that she truly imagines herself joining up to serve her life on a barge in the arms of the lean stargazer eating nightly meals of catfish.

       Strangely, Paige is even amused by her “ridiculous” love and is willing to let her go if only she tells Dan everything about herself, a request she simply cannot fulfill for fear of losing the one man whose kisses finally reveal to her what love is all about.

       Trapped between two extremes, Evans goes to work in the department store from whence the selfish Paige, eager to amuse himself through her, as he has in the past, tries to woo her back. It doesn’t work, of course, and inevitably Dan finds her, and asks her all over again whether she’s willing to roll down the river with him—with such silly plot that fear it will never cease until we hear the heroine say yes.

       The original critics and audiences evidently could not quite forgive Bennett’s Evans for her double-dealings, but adored Pert Kelton’s courser man-handling character Minnie who definitely wore the pants in her marriage to the Boll-weevil terminator, Ogelthorpe.

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Kon Ichikawa | 炎上 (Enjō) (Conflagration) / 1958

the believer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kon Ichikawa, Keiji Hasebe, and Natto Wada (screenwriters, based on the novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima), Kon Ichikawa (director) 炎上 (Enjō) (Conflagration) / 1958

 

Young Goichi (Raizo Ichikawa), whose father has run an out-of-the-way Buddhist center, witnessed his mother and uncle having sex shortly before his own father died, perhaps of complications for his wife’s affairs.

      Having been convinced of his father’s continued statement that “the Golden Pavilion of the Shukaku Temple is the most beautiful thing in the world,” the young innocent Buddhist acolyte determines to study there under Dosen Tayama (Ganjirō Nakamura).

       Although he is a true believer, there also seems to be something slightly backward about the likeable Goichi, who is not only unbelievably naïve but also a stutterer, a condition perhaps brought on by his rather abusive family life.

       The seemingly affable Dosen even offers to send him to further schooling, and, later hires Goichi’s mother who suddenly appears in her son’s life again, to work in the kitchen. In debt now to the kindness of the Dosen, she demands that her son study hard and, ultimately, replace the Dosen after he finishes his studies. But things do not go well, particularly when Goichi discovers that the Buddhist leadership, although giving an outward pretense of abstinence and piety are, in fact, running the Pavilion as a tourist stop and making a great deal of personal profit in the process. The Dosen even has a geisha mistress in town.

       Ichikawa reveals his hero’s inner feelings through a careful mix of flashbacks and plot extensions, revealing Goichi’s rather fragile ego developing as a being who has sought spiritual beliefs as a way to escape from the daily realities of post-World War II Japanese life. He, it is clear, has mistakenly perceived the shrine as a kind of Shangri-La, a world lying entirely apart from the everyday world. In short, the sad incidents of Goichi’s home life get purposely confused in Ichikawa’s telling with the young boy’s illusions of a kind of paradise. And before long, it has a profound impact not only upon his studies but, particularly when he meets a young woman, with his sexual fears.

      We might almost describe Giochi as a religious purist or, even, an over-zealous believer—despite the fact that we still sympathize with his spiritual crisis. What Ichikawa does not focus on is that the boy, with his love and devotion to his father and his utter hatred of his mother, may also be a closeted gay man who is simply unable to come to terms with his sexuality. Whatever the case, it is clear that for most, Goichi is not an entirely appealing figure. As The New York Times reviewer, Howard Thompson wrote upon the film’s original US premiere: “For all Raizo Ichikawa's righteous indignation as the painfully stuttering protagonist, he remains an extremely neurotic and naive whiner, and a dead duck from the outset.”

      As often the case in Mishima’s work, whose novel provided the source to this film, such inner turmoil, especially at the crossroads of sex, familial duty, and spiritual beliefs, results in great violence. In Goichi’s case, it erupts by him trying to burn down the “golden temple,” being arrested, and he committing suicide before he was to have been imprisoned.

     Like so many of Ichikawa’s films, Enjō profoundly explores how Japan’s World War II imperialist pretensions effected the generations that followed.

     This film was apparently Ichikawa’s own favorite of his oeuvre.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).