Mazhar Moin | Plum Cake / 2023

a mother discovers her son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shah Yasir (screenplay), Mazhar Moin (director) Plum Cake / 2023 [18 minutes]

 

This 2018 short film by Pakistani director Mazhar Moin, presents a mother (Hamza Abbasi), represented well in East Asian cinema, who adores her son, but also clearly attempts to control his life. The son, Robert (Fouzia Nasir Ahmad), moreover, is a rather passive boy given the total, loving control she has exerted over him. Despite her insistent attempts to marry him off to a “beautiful” girl, who is the daughter of one of the dear friends of her sister Christine.

     In truth, Robert is in deep love with his best friend Usman (Ahman Kahn Bhatti), who stays at the house many a night, always suggesting that the two were watching movies before falling asleep. His mother adores Usman, who often arrives with special food, helps the mother cut up her onions—a job which despite her devotion to housework, she hates—and is generally loving and caring about her, without realizing the role he plays in their daily life.

     She is surprised, however, to hear that he will soon be moving away, without recognizing her own role in his decision.

      The mother is also a devout Roman Catholic who attends services each week with her always obedient son, who dares not speak out against her powerful demands, and the endless lover she has apparently always poured upon him. She finally determines an occasion where he will meet up with his new fiancée.

    But meanwhile, the two men continue to sleep together under her own roof, one morning Usman showing up with what looks to be a “hickey,” but which he insists is just a mosquito bite, which she lovingly, as always, warns him against.

      Finally, the day has arrived for the meeting, but as early the next morning she makes goes into her son’s room to make up his bed, she discovers a condom wrapper in his wastepaper basket, and suddenly the truth of the situation hits her painfully.

      She calls her friend, cancelling her son’s meeting with her daughter, arguing that he does not truly deserve her. It also seems apparent that she has a conversation about the situation with her local priest.

      But this is a mother who has spent her entire life loving and caring after her son. And despite her great pain, she still makes the plum cake she has promised. She cuts out a piece, as the film closes, choosing love still over her disgust and pain for what she now realizes about Robert’s sexuality.

      Whether Usman will now remain is almost beside the point; if nothing else, the always loving mother now recognizes that her view of son was a mistaken one, and she must come to terms with him just as he has come, long ago, to accept her vision of the world. Real love often requires new perspectives.

   Perhaps together they can even convince Usman that he remain in their sense of familial love and need not escape their grasp for fear of his own future. This movie, however, is not about familial happiness but about its deep love that sometimes goes against our greatest expectations for one another. The plum cake becomes almost a peace offering.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

 

 

Luke Landis | Pink Lemonade / 2016

leading nowhere

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luke Landis (screenwriter and director) Pink Lemonade / 2016 [7 minutes]

 

Alex is one of those high school boys who a girl, in this case a first-class bitch (I don’t generally ever use that term, but this girl could be the star a Mean Girls, 2004) who is convinced she has already wound him around her finger and is now ready to go in for the kill, a deep session of kissing and dancing that will certainly lead to sex. But it’s apparent from the beginning that Alex is simply lost when it comes to sexuality, his girlfriend Clara (Audrey Shapiro), meanwhile, bad-mouthing the sexual behavior of her fellow classmates and displaying some of the most narrow-minded and homophobic attitudes possible. For her nearly everyone who does something of which the others girls to not approve is a “pervert.”

     From out of nowhere, Alex catches a glimpse of a cute boy selling pink lemonade, and immediately goes up to him, laying out a dollar for a glass. The boys hit it off almost instantly, but then Clara is there to remind him of where he is and to whom he really belongs.

     She takes him back home, and attempts to bring him closer to her, encouraging him to share a dance and attempting to engage him in kisses. But he keeps moving off, now gradually having visions of the cute lemonade seller, and each time she moves in to his imaginary lover to make it clear that she is still waiting for his attentions.

     When he pulls away again, running off to the bathroom, she finally begins to suspect the worse, and when he returns, and finally admits he just doesn’t want to have a relationship, she grows furious, calls him a perv, and walks off.

      Poor Alex is revisited by his imaginary pink lemonade-selling friend Jacob (Jordan Officer), but of course, in actuality, he is now left alone, without anyone, having to come to terms with the fact that he may, indeed, be gay.

      Unfortunately, this film takes it no further, and we are left alone to realize that Alex may be having a sexual crisis, but he is far too ignorant, passive, and seeming disinterested in taking his fantasies any further. Why doesn’t he head out the door himself in search of Jacob? But Landis’ movie seems itself too disinterested to take its conceit any further, leaving the work in the lurch and the viewer completely dissatisfied.

       This film ultimately leads nowhere.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

 

Tramaine Raphael Gray | Becoming / 2023

good family vibes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tramaine Raphael Gray (screenwriter and director) Becoming / 2023 [24 minutes]

 

A black young man Shawn is openly gay to his family, and although regularly abused on the school playground and elsewhere, he is supported and protected to a certain extent by his older brother Rashad.

     But on this particular day when Rashad and his friend pull Shawn away from the bullies’ blows, the elder brother seems stand-offish and a bit irritated by his younger’s brother dilemmas. This time he has confronted some boys who were giving his female a friend a hard time, and as Rashad’s friend notes, when they turned the attack on him, calling him faggot, he at least held his own until they got there.

     Shawn expresses his love and appreciation to Rashad, but he doesn’t answer, simply telling his brother to run upstairs and fix his eye and face up before meeting with their mother.

     In fact, their mother, upon discovering that her son has again been attacked, is more than consoling as she tends to his eye. She’s protective and reassuring. When the father returns home, we witness the whole family as a sort of wondrous unit who give their full and unconditional love to one another, accepting each other’s differences and helping to protect each member of the family. Wouldn’t all wish to have such percipient brothers and parents?

     When Shawn expresses the fact that Rashad has been distant and unfriendly, the father, after suggesting that he will have to take the matter up directly with his brother, also explains that he comprehends what the problem may be, that perhaps Rashad has his own personal difficulties to which Shawn is not being sensitive.

     Indeed, without the movie actually explaining it, it’s clear that Rashad finds it difficult to constantly be on the defense for a brother who is so sexually different from himself. Although he has been there for his brother, it has often been translated into a form of hard love that has made Rashad feel that he has not simply been “accepted.”

      Rashad attempts to explain that he envies his younger brother for being a dreamer, while he has stopped dreaming and is chained to reality filled with pain and uncertainty

      But the brothers do come together and realize their love for one another.

      Unfortunately, to give evidence of it, film moves the direction of what one might almost describe as being an inspirational statement in the manner of “alternative” and “new wave” theology, preaching the philosophy of unconditional love in a rather simplistic manner (“sometimes love is not what one says, but what one does.”)  When Rashad says the only dream he has is of “freedom,” Shawn demands his brother close his eyes, the chorus swells up with lovely sounds, and the screen fills with white and purple clouds, as the boys, sitting back-to-back, let their heads fall to one another’s shoulder as they imaginatively fly off with “a love that becomes freedom.” And for the film’s last five or six minutes we are greeted with a view of planet swirled with yellow, white, and purple streaks while singers weave their voices in and out in a melodious riff about drifting free.

     Although it’s been done so often to become almost a cliché, it might still have been far more interesting to go back in time and discover how this supportive family dealt with Shawn’s original revelation and how Rashad first determined that he would devote much of his time to protecting his younger sibling. At this point in time, the film seems more an advertisement for the continuation of good family vibes.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Zeno Graton | Le paradis (The Lost Boys) / 2023

the perversity of love

by Douglas Messerli

Zeno Graton, Clara Bourreau, and Maarten Loix (screenplay), Zeno Graton (director) Le paradis (The Lost Boys) / 2023

The original title of director Zeno Braton’s Belgian film Le paradis (2023) is quite obviously a reference to paradise or heaven, having absolutely nothing to do with “lost boys,” which immediately sets me to thinking of Peter Pan’s associates in another childhood paradise of Neverland. Graton’s home for “lost boys’ in what we in the US would describe as a reform school for teenage criminal offenders.

     At first, indeed, this Belgian school, compared with such US and British institutions, might be seen as a kind of paradise. The boys’ immediate contact Sophie (Eye Haidara) is a black woman who works closely with them, sympathetically explaining the rules and attempting to help them through the process to be freed from the institution as soon as possible where, with the educational and manual skills such as soldering and woodcutting they learn, they might find support by the state until they have full-paying jobs, be relocated to their own apartment, and eventually reassimilated back into Belgian society. Judges and other authorities speak regularly to the boys about their aspirations and personal social difficulties, and evaluate each individual on their emotional and mental well-being.

      Even though they are locked up as in a prison each evening, the juveniles are relatively free to move about the facility during the day, to participate in group sports, and encouraged to discuss their problems in group sessions that further encourage their linguistic and social creativity. On some days they are taken on public exercise sessions and are allowed to visit local museums and other institutions.

      But in this seemingly best of all possible worlds their behavior is closely watched as in the prison of Jean Genet’s prison in Un chant d’amour, and for the slightest of infractions the judge may turn down their early and even their regularly-scheduled releases for their not properly attending to lessons or, in the case of figures such as Ilyas (Jonathan Couzinié), Tom (Matéo Bastien), Desar (Samuel Di Napoli), Fahd (Amine Hamidou), and Yanis (Nlandu Lubansu) for being more immature than others or simply not as intelligent and likeable. Their reassimilation into society becomes a thing postponed again and again until they so lose heart that they longer even care about obeying the rules of the world which has seemingly permanently removed them from the world at large.

      Some boys are visited on weekends by their parents, but many, such as Joe (Khalil Gharbia, having just performed one of the major roles in François Ozon’s Peter van Kant), the central figure of this film, have been banned from their own homes for their sexual behaviors or utterly ignored for the very reasons why they have found themselves in such a situation. The system, in fact, has punished them yet again for the failures of their parental environment and their familial sense of unwantedness that encouraged them to act out their hurt and anger.

      Despite his terrible maternal upbringing, however, Joe is a near-model student, intelligent, skilled, sociable, and good-looking. His only problem is that, as he realizes all too clearly, what the years of hibernation in the prison institution has already done to him. Moreover, although the movie doesn’t explicitly say this, he is an outsider, an Arab in French society. As critic Aurore Engelen points out in her review of the Berlinale 2023 Generation feature of this film, “"If a fish gets trapped in ice, it doesn’t come back to life. It dies." In The Catcher in the Rye, the young hero wonders where the ducks in Central Park go when the water is frozen. The voice we hear is that of Joe—a modern Holden Caulfield, of sorts, whose feelings have caught up with him—at the beginning of The Lost Boy, as he wonders about the fate of these fish who seemed to be a family, but whose hearts has stopped beating.”

      He realizes that his childhood belief that the frozen fish were simply hibernating was terribly mistaken; that in fact they had died in the icy cold water as they attempted to swim to the surface from where he can seem them below the ice.

      But Joe seems anything but dead or even hibernating. He is about to be released, and assured by Sophie that if he doesn’t get into further trouble he will be given his own apartment and the ability to begin his life all over again.

      Enter William (Julien De Saint Jean, fresh from Lie with Me of 2022). If Joe’s future finally suggests that his struggle to the top has ended him in the slightly warmer melting waters of societal acceptance, now everything—just as in other recent films such as Josza Anjembe’s 2019 short film Baltringue (Freed) and as early as Rachel Ward’s The Big House (2000)—puts his current situation into jeopardy as he falls almost immediately in love with the newcomer. The dilemma becomes a kind of Marxian (as in Groucho, not Karl) contradiction: how to stay when you must be going.

       Critic Austin Estrada summarizes the plot rather succinctly:

 

“William is the new kid in juvenile hall. Rumor has it that he murdered someone. William keeps to himself with no interest in the other guys in the center. But when he meets Joe, the two lock eyes and find a mutual attraction and empathy for each other. Their relationship grows as the two become vulnerable with each other, physically [involved] with each other, and learn to trust someone else again. Yet William and Joe fear their time is short-lived, as Joe also tries to earn his freedom from the juvenile hall and his mom. Joe is faced with the impossible task of earning his freedom while leaving his love in the process.”

 

       Suddenly the metaphor of Genet’s film takes on fuller meaning as, just as in the 1950 film William and Joe learn how to knock on the pipes and listen dutifully for the illegal radio with which they might share through their imaginative experiences of a love they cannot openly express. Joe’s artistic talent becomes an occasion for William to ask him to create a tattoo on his body, an event which allows all the boys to share in the S&M-like suffering of pain as William later imprints Joe’s body with the image created by his would-be lover. Whereas before, every act was symbolic, now even the slightest of touches, the sharing of looks, the reading of a rap-like poem by Joe becomes a truly sensual/sexual experience for all the boys. The orderly system of the educational institution has been existentially corrupted by their desires or, at least, voyeuristic pleasures of queer sex.

       Joe’s first major violation of the rules occurs when the boys are permitted out on one of their group health sessions, where both Joe and William find a way to escape the others so that they might engage in love-making.

       They are caught and reprimanded, rather sympathetically by Sophie, who simply attempts to make Joe understand that such behavior will have to wait until after he can free himself from the institution’s demands. But how do two young boys, long panting with unspoken desire at the very prime of their testosterone-controlled life live up to those impossible demands?

       Moreover, the system itself only helps to force the boys into an absurd catch-22 when it rejects Joe’s petition for release for the infractions he has committed due to love. Only the wild William can find an out that seemingly also destroys all their hopes to find a way to live together once they have returned to “normal” society. He creates a major fire in the physical workshop, sending everyone into escape mode. Only Joe, realizing that William remains in the room, about to be killed by the flames, races in to help him escape, the two also fleeing the premises together.

       William, however, is soon caught, while Joe cleverly makes it to the ocean, a symbolic journey to warmer waters which might thaw out his hibernation as a fish trapped under the ice.

        He too is caught, and, as Sophie has long warned them, three strikes and the boys are passed on to the adult prison system from which there is no easy escape and with no commitment at all to return them back into the Eden from which they have been falsely banned.

         Joe awakens from the effects of his capture, dizzied and terrified of the truly serious world in which he is now meaningless entrapped. When he is well enough to join the others in the exercise courtyard, he finally catches a glimpse of William. We realize that these two boys have now fully become the prisoners of Genet’s painfully poignant Song of Love, that they have been imprisoned by a society that ultimately prefers hate to its “perversities” of love. Perhaps, from Genet’s perspective, the lost boys have now, in fact, found their way to his kind of paradise.

        For me, The Lost Boys was one of the highlights of New York’s Newfest 2023.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

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).