Raz Bar David Varon | לילא אחת ביאפא (Layla Achat BeYafa) (One Night in Jaffa) / 2014

a night on the town

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raz Bar David Varon (screenwriter and director) לילא אחת ביאפא (Layla Achat BeYafa) (One Night in Jaffa) / 2014 [24 minutes]

This is a sad film, where Layla (Tzachi Zeev Look), a transexual woman, just offered hormone therapy by her doctors, decides to celebrate a night on the town. Her constantly snacking mother, sitting on the living room couch (Miriam Cohen) vaguely attempts to dissuade her, but Layla, putting on her best shimmering dress, desperate to get out and find whether her new identity will lead to any success in a Jaffa gay bar.

     It does not. The bar is filled with ruffians, gay men, and people totally disinterested in such a beauty. She pushes her way in through the door keep, but almost as quickly leaves the establishment for a much needed cigarette break.

    In this neighborhood, young rough men sit smoking and drinking, one of whom Layla, a bit in desperation by this time, approaches. He is Or (Ori Levanon), who seems harmless enough and is rather attractive, and before long he shows a willingness to return back home with her.

     By this time, Layla’s mother is already sleeping, as they walk by her sleeping body to the transgender’s woman’s room, she explaining that her mother does not permit her to bring back the men she meets.

      Or, perhaps a bit rambunctious, willing joins her, but soon after begins to describe her as a male, and appears more interested in her penis than acknowledging her own identity. It becomes quickly apparently that he likes transgender women more for what might be described as “role playing” that observing their new identities. She protests, but he threatens her, and before she can even begin to complain, he turns her over and basically rapes her, fucking her in the butt. He quickly dresses and leaves.

     Layla, shaken and frightened, not only by the evening’s event, but for what might be her future, sits down before her still sleeping mother and attempts to cuddle up to her, desperate for love that she now knows won’t be at all easy to find in her new world.

   It is a shattering preview of the difficulties transgender women find throughout the world, but particularly in such patriarchal and religiously closed-off worlds as Jaffa is, or that matter, how life is still for many transgender individuals throughout the USA.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Shota Kalandadze | Associations with Wagner’s Music / 2006

work-out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shota Kalandadze (screenwriter and director) Associations with Wagner’s Music / 2006 [5 minutes]

 

It is hardly surprising that the self-described eroticist, Georgian director Shota Kalandadze’s appropriation of the music of Richard Wagner, Associations with Wagner’s Music, employs its short 5 minutes mostly displaying homoerotic images, primarily of young sports figures boxing and participating in a mass Judo session and, most significantly displaying their mostly nude bodies in the shower.

   Relying primarily on selections from Wagner’s Ring cycle, Kalandadze begins with boxers, gradually scrolling up his images so that they reveal, bit by bit, a man showering with other men standing by the ready next to him.

      Eventually the scroll produces a female image, her breast shining in the sunlight of a window as she is transformed from a black-and-white figure to one in color, a massive Judo gathering following which suggests not so much eroticism as it does the programmed calisthenics of sports marathons, particularly those of Hitler and other fascist regimes. But these Judo performers are anything but uniform in their movements, and even this scene turns erotic as some men decide to strip off their shirts and begin their own regimen of set-ups.

 

    The upward scroll of the film clips returns us to the shower room for an even more slightly revealing homoerotic scene, which gradually reveals a smile upon the composer’s imposed face.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024). 

 

David Dean Bottrell | Available Men / 2006

ultimate bloodbath

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Dean Bottrell (screenwriter and director) Available Men / 2006 [15 minutes]

 

David Dean Bottrell’s short film, Available Men from 2006 has got to be one of the funniest short comedies ever written. But for me to successfully convey the cleverness of the work I’d have to read back the full script, and even then you’d need the original cast to properly bring it off.

    The situation is pure farce. Steve (Brian Gattas), a handsome young gay man who has been having some difficulty in finding someone who wants what he desires, a serious, long-term relationship. His psychiatrist has suggested he get out more often and just “be himself.” He’s scheduled a meeting for a blind date named Robert (Jack Plotnick), a truly mild-mannered shy gay CPA from Glendale also seeking a serious relationship.

       At the same hotel bar, Rob (Richard Rucccolo) an agent who in the past year has lost several of his writers and actors—and his wife—is truly desperate to sign up a truly strikingly beautiful ex-cabdriver who’s written a new hot Hollywood script, Ultimate Bloodbath. He’s never read the script nor seen the writer Stephen (Kostas Sommer), who along with Steve is already sitting at the bar waiting for their appointments.

      Obviously, there’s a mix-up, Rob convinced that Steve the gay man is his date, and, soon after, Stephen presuming the agent who’s after him is Robert.

       In a sense, the situation is straight out of 18th century comedy, as the languages of both the actor and agent sound so similar to gay sexual jargon that they might be misunderstood and more desperately and far more coarsely speaking about the things expect from a gay relationship. The agent Rob, so desperate for a client, recounts the times when one of his partners has wanted always be on top, and, stressed him out, but meeting every day at lunch time to demand more and something bigger, etc. But he’s loyal and will “ride that pony over the finish line, you feel me?”

       The actor/script writer Stephen makes his own demands on Robert, that he not only provide him occasionally with an Asian hooker but that he wants “to be paid. A lot.”

      “Paid?”

      “Why the hell else would I get in bed with one of you guys?”

      The agent confides to Steve that sometimes it gets hard, on rare occasions, and when it does it get hard, “I’m your man..”

      You get the idea.

      The accountant Robert is the first to react, forcing the writer to put down his cellphone, as he takes off his own glasses, and looks him in the eye. He reports that he is “a level 8 Brazilian jujitsu Black Belt master, ranked 139th in the world. If there were any justice, I would take you out behind this building and beat the living shit out of you, you stupid, soulless, arrogant, little bitch….”

       He gets up to leave, pretty boy Stephen following after, pleading “I want to be with you, you got balls. I want to be with you, I want to be with you,” running after the escaping gay accountant.

       Our unsure gay boy Steven follows suite, saying that he thought that he had problems but hearing the sense of desperation in Rob’s pleas, he now knows that he is fairly healthy. At one point in his diatribe, he asks Rob what is it he really like to do it life. The man replies, after some thought, to open a bookstore.

       So, we are told, Rob now works at Round-N-Round Records and has a new girlfriend. At a party Robert and Steve met each other, fell in love, and are desperately now happy. Stephen’s screenplay never came to be filmed. He’s now looking for something else.

       See the movie; I can assure you you’ll laugh a lot—aloud.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Joel Junior | Strangers / 2021

memories are made daily

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joel Junior (screenwriter and director) Strangers / 2021 [14 minutes]

 

A man (Jake Howarth) is sitting in a roadside tree reading. Another man (Joel Junior), who has stopped his car along the road, seems to be waiting, for what we are not certain, but he is holding a small box in his hands which leads us to certain conclusions.

     After 13 minutes (the time clocked by an intertitle) he approaches the man in the tree, trying to discern how long he intends to remain in the tree. “I need this tree,” he declares in an unusual accent we later learn must come from his Hungarian parentage.

         The reader in the tree treats his requests facilely, not at intending to immediately give up his perch. Whereas the man in a suit seems serious and troubled, the man in the tree is somewhat cynically witty. Indeed, the two types and the strange encounter centering upon an isolated tree seems almost to be out of some parable or fable. And that, in turn, sets the tone for the entire film, generally turning their necessary conversation into a kind of didactic literary device—although the visual distinctions between the two are well drawn, the man in the tree dressed orange shorts, green tennis shoes, a yellow T-shirt topped by a sleeveless denim jacket represents quite the opposite from the man in slick, black coat and pants with an open necked white shirt. They are most certainly from different worlds.

     But as their conversation grows more contentious, we begin to perceive there is a serious aspect to their strange obsession to inhabit the not particularly distinguished tree. Finally, after an absurdly disjunctive series of attempts to get rid of the other, the besuited man decides to give up and begins to walk away, the other calling him back to say he’ll be the one to. “You’re clearly going to do something ‘weird,’ so yeh!”

      Obviously, their stories are about to pour out. The man in the suit explains that he met a guy on “Tindr,” they became friends and found themselves one day underneath the tree, a ring in his pocket about to propose marriage. They had wine, sex, and before he could propose his friend did. That was six years ago, and in the box are his husband’s ashes, who died of leukemia and had asked to his ashes to be spread by the tree where they long ago had made their commitments of love. As he tells the story, tears well up in his eyes and he becomes emotional for the loss, the younger man attempting to comfort him.

       The other explains that the tree is special to him for a far darker reason. Reluctantly, he tells his story. One day his step-father was driving him home from school, not a common event but one that occurred from time to time. He stopped at the field, saying he had to urinate and asked the boy, nine-year-old at the time, to join him. There, by the same tree, he told the boy that sometimes he had difficulty with his penis and asked the son to massage it.

       What seems to disturb the young man more than the event itself, is that he wasn’t threatened but still agreed to the act and never told his mother. His mother being religious, she would have presumed, he fears, that his later announcement of his being gay was on account of the childhood abuse. And it wasn’t that at all, he insists, having forgiven the man but apparently not himself for having let “the incident rot inside me.”

       Now, both men have been able to share what they previously have not, with another being, a stranger—one a joyful event than ended badly and the other a terrible incident that basically left the handsome young gay man intact. That fact alone should have been enough to justify this fabulist-like event, in which an object of nature has served as a site significant for each of them.

       But the director, however, tries to hook it up with far larger issues, quoting Haruki Murakami, that no matter how much suffering we go through, we never want to let go of those memories. “Things that I remember the most are ones that I wish I didn’t.” He explains that coming to the tree that day was an attempt to come to peace with it, seeming to contradict his earlier comments that he had forgiven and almost forgotten that long ago event. Quoting a Hungarian writer, the other suggests that “When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.” And before long it appears that the two young men having encountered one another under the tree has been turned into a near mystical event, where frankly their rather mundane, if painful, experiences of a love and innocence lost were somehow now of near earth-shattering importance. These larger issues may add gravitas to the film, but they also weigh it down in a kind of ponderous dialectic that just doesn’t fit either the characters nor their experiences.

      And finally, I must agree with the Letterboxd commentators, director Junior should have cast someone else other than himself as the man in the suit. Alas, both director and actor, despite some fascinating moments and situations, are in general too obvious amateurs.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).

David Brown | Rural Heat / 1997

a wilde coming out

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Brown (screenwriter and director) Rural Heat / 1997

 

The school is preparing for its annual theatrical productions of various kinds, including a presentation of a selection from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. Various of the performers, directors, and school mistresses are gathered backstage as we hear a constant voice-over of announcements for the performances.

     Meanwhile, one of the boys, Gregory (John Matthews) is brought up, almost by the ruff his neck, by his mother to another of the thespians, Matthew (Brian Glanney) who is told in no uncertain terms to stay away from her son; “He’s told me all about you.”

     Matthew is more than a little startled by the fact his friend Gregory had told his parents all about their gay relationship. Gregory suggests they would have found out in any event and that it’s better this way. He also suggests that Matthew is going to have to tell “her,” since Gregory’s mother is also going to tell “her” as well. Whether “her” refers to his apparent “girlfriend” Bernadette—who pulls in Matthew demanding he help her with her lines—or his mother—who is one of the multiple directors of this affair—is uncertain. In any event, Gregory soon spots Matthew and Bernadette (Mia Gallagher) kissing. It doesn’t help for Matthew to explain that it was her doing, not his. Even his admitting to Gregory that he loves him doesn’t seem to help.

     And meanwhile, Gregory must soon go on as Algernon Moncrieff in the Wilde play, while the John Worthing character, to be performed by Christopher (Darren Stallard), has just been found drunk in the school bathroom; since Matthew knows the lines, he is asked to substitute.

     Chaos is let loose upon the stage in the form of magic tricks, sword-swallowing, and backstage high jinks. But soon the Wilde scene begins, with Jack having to admit that he believes Algernon to be untrustworthy. But suddenly he begins to change the lines, admitting that “We share the unspeakable vice of the Greek.” The backstage prompter is most confused, the schoolmistress becoming quite distraught with the line change, although anyone who has ever seen the play realizes that if Wilde could, he might have written just such a line into that work.

    Matthew stares into the space of the audience, announcing, “We are lovers.” He steps off stage to announce to his mother that he is in love with Gregory, she replying “I know. Go on with the show.” The schoolmistress attempts to close down the show, demanding the curtain be dropped. But Matthew’s mother insists the “show must go on!” And it is too late by this point, anyway, to hide the matter since Matthew and Gregory are almost in each other’s arms.

     In 1996, the year previous to this short film, Hettie Macdonald’s Beautiful Thing had demonstrated two boys coming out without the full public announcement of this work, and by the next year, British director Simon Shore’s Get Real and American director David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen would establish the basic format of the genre as a feature film that I’ve described as the “Coming Out” movie, version B. But this short Irish work has to be described as the first film to represent that genre’s essentials: the admission to each other of their gay love, a temporary or permanent break in their relationship due to the unreadiness of one of the lovers, and the final public announcement of gay sexuality, accepted or rejected by parents and society in general.

     The quality of the DVD I saw was far from excellent and, as so very may amateur productions, the sound along with the heavy Irish accents create problems for Brown’s film school project, particularly for the American ear. Let us hope that this important 13-minute work will soon be restored and brought into a better format with subtitles.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Henry K. Norvalls | Shower / 2012

invitation to a sexual act

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henry K. Norvalls (screenwriter and director) Shower / 2012 [7 minutes]

 

There is, at first, something rather charming about Norwegian director Henry K. Norvalls’ horrific short film, Shower (2012). A swimmer (Svend Erichsen) is showering in a public facility. Another hunkier man (Per Magnus Barlaug) enters and takes another stall. Within a few moments, the first showerer hears strange noises coming from the other stall, pauses the flow of water, listens, and returns to his cleanly business.

 

     Soon after, he hears the sound of pleasurable groans, and again he stops momentarily what he’s doing, only to return to bathing himself. When it happens a third time, his curiosity, and we can presume his hormones, are somewhat aroused, and he turns off the water, darts out of the stall, and quickly moves into a stall closer to the sound of the pleasure.

      Finally, witnessing the man openly masturbating in the stall, he chastises him for his inappropriate behavior. Almost in total innocence, the man says, he enjoys it.

      A bit flummoxed, the swimmer suggests this not the place for that kind of behavior, with the man responding once more about how much enjoys it, moving out into the changing room, presumably with an erect penis.

      Even more angered by the recalcitrant masturbator’s behavior the first man once more expresses his disconcertion about the second’s public sexual activities, although one might argue with only one other being to observe him, his actions are just slightly “public,” and Barlaug’s character even suggests something like that, arguing that if the other man truly found such behavior so abhorrent he might have left immediately, but instead has stayed and even moved closer to the engagement.

     The first man briefly turns away, but turns back when the sexually aroused man tells the first that he is even more excited by the other’s observation of the acts, and outrightly asks him, “Put your hand on my shoulder.”

     Almost as in slow motion, Erichsen’s character moves forward as if in a trance, putting his hand on the other’s shoulder as the man again proceeds to jack off.

     The first man’s eyes widen in witnessing the immediate action, stuttering out the words, “Is there something else you want me to do?” He seems to almost be pleading for further involvement, for an invitation to participate in the sexual act.

      After what seems like forever in a 7-minute film, the second responds: “Kiss me when I come.”

It is, when one thinks about it, a rather strange request. One might presume he would ask the other man to help in the masturbation, to perform fellatio, or even become involved in other sexual services, but the very innocence of asking him almost to award him for the success of his self-pleasuring is a bit odd and distancing even if at the same time there is a kind of utter innocence in the request.

     An even longer few seconds of only the sound of the hand slapping across his penis ensues, followed by a growing moan in the masturbator’s chest, as he cries out “Now, now,” the first man, wearing a gold chain from which hangs a tiny cross, moving toward the other’s lips for a kiss.

       At that very moment, an older man (Bjarne Hjelde) enters the showing room, obviously witnessing their acts. He says nothing as the camera returns to the expectant faces of the two men.

     Without warning, the first man slugs the second, sending him to the floor, bending down to hit him again and again and again—so many times that it is difficult to even believe what we are suddenly witnessing immediately after his previous gentle and almost teenage-boy like behavior. His obvious wonderment and even joy has turned, with a blink of the eyes, into hatred, as the camera pans back to show the body of the dead showerer, blood pooling up beside his head.

        Every openly gay man probably has long heard of such stories. In the late 1960s when I was active in the New York City gay scene, I heard time and again such tales of how a simple sexual encounter turned murderous the moment the act came to an end, legendary stories of how a friend of the teller’s had been picked up for sex never to be seen again, or, surely a common urban legend, how a stranger involved in fellatio suddenly bit off the man’s penis the second the sperm began to well up. And we all later read of the repulsive perversions of the Milwaukee madman, Jeffrey Dalmer, who killed and sometimes ate parts of the bodies of 17 boys and men from 1978 to his capture in 1991.

       These ominous warnings were part and parcel of living in a hostile environment wherein homophobia was a natural result of the culture’s general fear and even terror of gay men and the growing LGBTQ community as whole. But to see it so lucidly laid out in Norvalls film came as something of a shock. As commentator Ivan Kander writes:

 

“With one location, two characters, and minimum dialogue, Norvalls crafts an undeniably engaging scene that exposes its protagonist to his bare core, both literally and figuratively. ...In other words, it’s a character drama about sexuality, repression, and identity that essentially feels like a suspense film. Quite simply: it’s tough to look away from.”

 

     As Norvalls himself described his response to an international short [movie] challenge that asked its participants to interpret the theme “naked”:  “I came to the realization that naked for me meant to be caught in a lie or have a secret revealed, when others knew what I did not want them to know.”

     It’s the “not wanting” others to know that leads to the swimmer’s attempt to blot out the very existence of the evidence, in this case a human being simply enjoying the pleasures of his penis.

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2020

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

Miguel Lafuente | Lo que quiero de ti (What I Want from You) / 2012

the stalkers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miguel Lafuente (screenwriter and director) Lo que quiero de ti (What I Want from You) / 2012

[13 minutes]

 

As we approach Halloween again, my least favorite of holidays, I thought it might be time for a new gay horror film, my least favorite genre. As I ask elsewhere, don’t LGBTQ+ individuals have enough danger to face up to without having killed off by their own kind?

     Spanish director Miguel Lafuente’s short film of 2012 begins as a kind of throwback to the romantic films of the late 1930s and 1940s, or even to the kind of world described in Knut Hamsun’s fiction Hunger of 1890, wherein men, becoming suddenly obsessed, followed women—or in this case men—in an attempt to get to know everything about them and, ultimately, to meet up with these fantasy-like figures. Today we call it stalking, as the stalker Daro (Jaime Astuy) describes himself late in the film.

      Daro has first encountered his beautiful “victim,” Victor (Juna Luis Peinado) at a film showing of Nosferatu, an appropriate venue for what we soon discover about Victor. For if we might feel sorry for Victor—who early on, through Daro’s surveillance of him, we observe getting locked out of a lover’s apartment—we soon discover that Victor himself is a handsome psychopath who the minute he ejaculates wants to immediately rid himself of his newest lover.

      Victor, in fact, might be described as a stereotype of the old school queer, men who never getting enough of sex quickly move on to another. That was, after all, why AIDS so quickly spread throughout the gay community, so the legend has it.

      But Victor is a more complex figure, he two stalking his companions for long periods before he finally moves in for sexual contact. And if, after that moment, he becomes absolutely disinterested in his “victim,” he realizes that his compulsion is quickly developing to not only “love ‘em and leave ‘em,” to torture them and send them off. Particularly with one young man, he plays a bondage game which turns nasty when he suddenly becomes a kind of vampire figure, stabbing his sexual companion in the next and sucking up his blood (actually, he doesn’t like the taste and spits it out) before further torturing him and sending him off into the horrible night.

       Having had wonderful sex previously with his own private stalker, Daro—the two naturally share a love of classic movies—he has simply ignored him since the event. But Daro has continued on, creating cinematic scenarios, as he did the first time he encountered Victor (see above), following him closely and almost daring him to arrange for a further meet-up.

       When the two finally do meet up again, perhaps Victor, more smitten by the young and beautiful young Daro than he admits, and Daro, in turn, explains his own compulsion, when things take a different turn.

     When Victor asks Daro what he wants from him, the possessive romantic youth immediately responds, “I want you. I want life.”

        That is, of course, perhaps the very worst thing to say to someone who wants only to move ahead, like Don Juan, in search of his next sexual conquest. As Victor admits to his psychiatrist, when he told me we wanted my life, I took his.

         Perhaps the lesson we learn from this fascinating metaphorical short work is to never match up a possessive individual with a man who wants total sexual freedom. In the late 1990s and early 2000s young would-be married men were not truly compatible with gay boys of the pre-AIDS days. 

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).