Cyril Collard | Alger la blanche (White Algiers) / 1986

secret lovers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cyril Collard and Jean-Marie Guillaume (screenplay), Cyril Collard (director) Alger la blanche (White Algiers) / 1986

 

French director Collard died of AIDS in 1993, three days before winning four César awards for Savage Nights. But by that time, he had already written other books and made short films that revealed his sensitivity to the immense pulls of cultural, sexual, and social differences.

     The central character in his 1986 short Alger la blanche, Farid (Ali Baouche) is a teenager of Algerian descent, a bisexual in love with a young French illustrator Jean (Frédéric Deban), and a boy torn between growing up in the wild suburbs of immigrant France and his own family’s religious and political conservatism.      

     Perhaps to save her children from these tensions, his mother (Sahalia Baouche) is planning to move back to Algiers under the protection and support of her former lover who is also the head of the Algiers opera and the father of her other son, Hassan (Aïssa Djabri). Farid would like Jean to join him, but obviously Jean’s roots lie in Paris and he is frankly tired of being a “secret” lover for whom there is little hope, particularly when they return to Algiers, desiring instead to be openly out and the two settling in a domestic life together. As Farid’s sister tells Jean much later in the film, Farid would never have been able to commit to the life he desires the two of them to live.

     On top of all of this, the basically good kid has been hanging out with a gang that steals motorcycles, and is caught in the act, while the others escape. It is his first criminal offense, and finding himself suddenly alone as a young immigrant facing police interviewers and a possible sentencing, he is completely terrorized. How will his family react? Can he now even be free to travel with them to Algiers?

      More immediately, even though he is freed, he has no way home, no money except for a few coins for the phone, and no mode of transportation available. He calls his family without explaining the situation, but they are slow to respond; he calls Jean who immediately shows up, but seems removed and rather blasé about the situation. When Farid again begs him to join him in Algiers, Jean’s response is simply that he has a friend living there who is writing about Oran. Whether it is sudden jealousy or simply the glibness of that statement which reveals the easy associations and possibilities in Jean’s life as opposed to his own that sets him off is unknowable, as Farid suddenly breaks a glass from which he has been drinking, puts its splintered edge to his face, and runs off, with Jean racing after him to prevent further damage.

      Jean attempts to convince Farid to return home with him, but still hurt by an earlier remark that Jean made, that he believes Farid uses him simply as an easy “lay,” Farid refuses, suggesting that it is Jean not he who is incapable of love. Jean finally walks off without him.

      Farid again makes a desperate call to his family. This time Hassan promises to pick him up by 11 in front the courthouse, only to discover the others finally returning back home without him, delayed by problems with the car, a train-crossing delay, and other events, having been unable to locate him. Frantically they now all gather back in the cousin’s car to pick up Farid; but this time the car won’t even start.

      In the meantime, the police find a dead body, that of Farid, the boy having apparently killed himself by leaping in front of a train.

       The rest of film consists of the family in mourning, with Jean in attendance, attempting to make sense of the boy’s act. No one can fully say what’s on his or her mind. Nahed, the sister, knows fully of Jean and her brother’s relationship, but others suspect it. Hassan’s cousin describes Jean as a faggot and demands he leave, having no place in their mourning. How he has come to know about Jean’s relationship with Farid that has never explained. But in that act, he betrays his own guilt for being unable to get them to the courthouse and his blame of other family members as well, begining a terrible row which ends with the entire family making their way to the police station for answers which they never receive. Stopped even before they can enter the station, they end up violently breaking out the windows of any nearby vehicle and trashing the streets, resulting eventually with the police racing to the family’s apartment. By that time Nahed and Jean have left the violent familial rift, so we do not see the results; but presumably they are all arrested and charged.

      We cannot know how or why Farid was killed. Certainly, as Jean knows and might have told them—but crucially chooses not to speak—Farid’s state of mind was such that he might indeed have wanted to die. But it is just as likely that his fellow gang members might have been afraid of his betrayal and pushed him in front of the train. Some critics, such as David Lagachu have suggested the possibility even of a “honor” killing, certainly something the cousin might have been capable of and others in the community might have wanted or to whom some family member might have assigned the task. And finally, each of the mourners, the family members inevitably feel guilt about Farid’s death, for their failure to bring him home to safety, Nahed, for not taking her brother’s private confession more seriously, and Jean, for his lack of comprehension of the vast range of pushes and pulls in his lover’s life as well as his own lack of action with his friend most needed him.

      Whether the family members are even able to make their pilgrimage back to Algiers is unknown; but strangely Jean ends the film by making his way to what Farid has described as the “white” or “blank” city, a place presumably that tells you nothing about its or even your own existence—or perhaps a place in which one can start all over again.

 

Los Angeles, April l7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Reivew (April 2023).

Derek Jarman | Caravaggio / 1986

pretty images to not a movie make

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, and Nicholas Ward-Jackson, (screenplay, based on a story by Ward-Jackson), Derek Jarman (director) Caravaggio / 1986

 

Although in the past I have enjoyed many of Derek Jarman’s overheated homoerotic films, particularly his Sebastiane of 1976,  his movie of 10 years later, Caravaggio—although containing some fairly lovely images—appears to have no logical point of view except to, apparently, celebrate the Renaissance painter’s life for its open expression of homosexuality and bisexuality, classifying the handsome artist as a kind of wild aesthete in the manner of Shakespeare’s wild nemesis, Christopher Marlowe.

      Yet Marlowe, who like Caravaggio was killed (in the Italian artist’s case, evidently of poisoning), in revenge for his bad behavior, was highly educated, while in Jarman’s version, the Italian artist, although immensely talented, was little more than a street ruffian.

      All the better for Jarman’s purposes, since between friezes of the prostitutes and street figures who Caravaggio used for painted figures, he can let the handsome young Caravaggio (Dexter Fletcher) and chiseled but decaying older Caravaggio (Nigel Terry), tended to by the mute Jerusaleme (Emile Nicolaou/Jonathan Hyde)—who the artist evidently purchased, with pederastic intentions from Jerusaleme’s Grandmother (Zohra Sehgal) early in the film—play out their own somewhat orgiastic adventures without much meaning.     

       Caravaggio, himself, has also been “purchased,” it is suggested, by Cardinal Del Monte (Michael Gough) who leeringly encourages the artist to produce his art, while evidently keeping the boy/man up many a night with his sexual attentions. Jarman clearly loves a good orgy or two, but mostly in this film he just hints at them instead of exploring their political and social implications as he did in Sebastiane.

     This film seems to be simply a kind of endless narrative, narrated often in a voiceover of the younger Caravaggio, recounting his sexual adventures, interspersed with very badly conceived recreations of Caravaggio’s beautiful art.

   Just to remind us how “contemporary” the late-Renaissance bad boy really was, the director interposes numerous anachronisms throughout the film: courtiers madly typing up messages, Caravaggio standing aside a green truck, a motorbike speeding by, and a bar laced with electric lights. Perhaps Jarman thought his campy-like references might save his pointlessly wavering plot, but, I’m afraid, it points up the fact that he has very little to say about the artist and his art itself.

He might as well have chosen any other wild-living figure of the past. If Sebastiane, as a sensuously sexual explorative Christian, was presented as being torn between the licentious and the pure, Caravaggio, at least in this depiction, simply jumps into the mud.

         Observing a ruddy-faced street-boxer, Ranuccio (Sean Bean), he demands his sexual attentions, which the man, given enough money, is willing to entertain; but with him, fortunately, comes Ranuccio’s girlfriend, Lena (in the amazing Tilda Swinton’s first film role), and in order to get the red-faced streetboy into his bed, it appears that Caravaggio must enter into a meage a` trois. As a threesome they work well together, but when Ranuccio and Lena are observed making love to the artist separately, jealousy, as the cliché goes, “rears its ugly head.”

      Much of this film is, in fact, filled with clichés or, at least, with sentences that are destined to become clichés through just such a film. As Washington Post film critic Paul Attanasio wrote in his 1986 review:

“What's most puzzling is Jarman's view of Caravaggio himself. Throughout, the artist talks in voice-over, a jumble bizarrely composed of overheated poesy, homoerotic dreams and the kind of "insights" that might inspire a sophomore at Bennington to scribble in the paperback margin, "|" or even "|||" Thus: "Man's character is his fate"; "The gods have become diseases"; "All art is against lived experience"; "I am trapped, pure spirit in matter ..."

 

     I have no idea what Attanasio had against Bennington University women, but the script might remind us of thousands of such well-intentioned university-student perceptions throughout the world. I probably wrote some myself.

     Of course, tragedy lies just behind the tapestries. Lena, who is now pregnant does not implicate either of her lovers and now intends to become mistress to the wealthy Scipione Borghese (Robbie Coltrante). Murder seems to be the result of her determination, as Caravaggio and Jerusaleme clean Lena’s nude murdered body in order to capture it in a painting.

   Arrested for Lena’s murder, Ranuccio claims innocence, Caravaggio appearing to believe him and arranging through his Vatican connections to release him.

      But when Ranuccio admits the murder to the artist, Caravaggio slits his throat, while we return to the murderer’s own bed, where he has visions of attempting to deny priests from offering him the last rites.

    Okay, this wild young genius lived large and mostly uncontrollably, a kind of Warhol of many centuries past, which is what I suppose attracted Jarman to his subject. Yet, you want to ask, so what? Was murder by poisoning the AIDS of other centuries? Did he deserve what he got? Was he somehow simply misunderstood by a society that was, in fact, far more open to various sexual deviances than our own? It’s hard to know what to make of the film Caravaggio because I don’t believe the writers had a clue about what they were trying to say.

      Pretty images do not a movie make.

 

Los Angeles, Thanksgiving Day, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).

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).