Jalil Lespert | Yves Saint Laurent / 2014

the seminarian and the madman

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Fieschi, Jalil Lespert, Jérémie Guez, and Marie-Pierre Huster (screenplay, based on Laurence Benaïm’s Yves Saint Laurent), Jalil Lespert (director) Yves Saint Laurent / 2014

 

Jalil Lespert’s 2014 film on the life of French clothes designer Yves Saint Laurent is, at least according to the standard biographies of the subject, fairly accurate, although it is clear that much of it is from the viewpoint of Saint Laurent’s manager/lover Pierre Bergé.

     Eventually I’d like to see a film made about Bergé himself, who, on his first day in Paris served as a human buffer as the great poet and film-scripter, Jacques Prévert who fell at his feet him from a window as Bergé moved out on a stroll down the Champs-Élysées! 

 

           At the age of 18 in La Rochelle, I decided to leave my family. The day

           I arrived in Paris, I went for a walk on the Champs-Elysées when

           suddenly I saw a man go through a French window, fall through the

           air, grab at a store sign and crash at my feet. He was bleeding profusely.

           An ambulance arrived and took him to Marmottan hospital. The next day,

           I discovered in the newspapers that it had been Jacques Prévert.

           I have always considered it an omen that the same day I got to Paris,

           a poet fell on my head.

 

    Prévert went into a coma, and was near death, but did survive.    

  

    Soon after, Bergé became the artist Bernard Buffet’s (not, incidentally, one of my favorite artists) lover, and was an important figure in selling that artist’s work. And in 1958, after meeting the young Saint Laurent, he fell in love with the budding seminarian-looking designer from Algeria, establishing not only a romantic relationship, but becoming the guiding force of Saint Laurent’s noted Yves Saint Laurent Haute Couture, which the young designer founded after taking over from the equally renowned Christian Dior. The two first met, without actually knowing it, at Dior’s funeral in 1957, the date in which Lespert’s film begins.

       That relationship, which is at the center of Lespert’s film, was certainly a turbulent one, with Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne)—serving as the saner front-man for the often and increasingly fragile Saint Laurent (Pierre Niney), who despite his first great success at Dior was soon after exiled from the Avenue Montaigne couture heaven with the excuse of the designer’s having been called up for the military (an impossible position for Saint Laurent, particularly had he been called to serve in his native Algeria, fighting to save the very French privileged world in which he grown up). The designer had what was clearly a nervous breakdown, perhaps initiated through drugs and a diagnosis of bi-polar behavior by the military hospital in which he was interred; but again, it was Bergé who came to the rescue, demanding that his lover chose between life or death, sanity or madness. Saint Laurent chose work.

     Yet, it is clear, even in Lespert’s Bergé-approved film, that his protection of the young, always-sensitive—yet, admittedly, “not always nice” artiste—led to resentments among Saint Laurent’s long-time friends and employees, including some of his models such as Loulou de la Falaise (who plays herself). Some even described Bergé negatively as “the pimp who’s found his all-star hooker.”

     And then, as time moved on, and Saint Laurent had numerous successes through his Mondrian shift dress, his Sharienne safari jacket, the “Le Smoking trouser suit, Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe from Belle de Jour, and his numerous kaftans and other lighter wear, influenced by the fact that he and Pierre had established a second home in Marrakech, Morocco, Pierre becoming the CEO of Saint Laurent’s house.

      But, like so many artists of history, success, particularly in the 1960s and 70s, also meant excess, as the former abstentious Saint Laurent, moved heavily into drinking, cocaine, hashish and other drugs, as well as wilder and wilder sex parties. By 1976, Bergé and Saint Laurent had broken up, although Bergé continued to serve him as the administrator of the company.

    Saint Laurent had, meanwhile, taken up with Karl Lagerfield’s (Nikolai Kinski) boyfriend, the equally troubled Jacques de Bascher (Xavier Lafitte), which further resulted in the life-long hatred between the two competing designers. 

      Yet Bergé’s love remained, and in 2008, a few days before Saint Laurent’s death of brain cancer (the diagnosis of which Bergé had kept from his former lover—who argued, along with several other friends and the doctor, that Saint Laurent would not have been able to psychologically deal with the truth) the couple were joined in a civil ceremony of a same-sex marriage. And it was Bergé who took over their vast art collections—which sold for millions after Saint Laurent’s death—and who became the head of the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, which loaned out the real costumes to help make Lespert’s movie.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2016

Reprinted from US Cinema Review (August 11, 2016).

 

Emma Gilbertson | Crashing Waves / 2018

dance of desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emma Gilbertson (writer and director), Joshua Hubbard (choreographer) Crashing Waves / 2018 [4 minutes]

 

Even since Jerome Robbins’ and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961) and even more so, after Claire Denis’ version of Billy Budd, Beau Travail (1999), I have been puzzled why more directors of LGBTQ films that do not define themselves primarily as musicals, do not incorporate more dance into their films. Dance seems the natural way to express the bodily desires which are so difficult to express by so many LGBTQ individuals through language.

     But, of course, it is precisely in that bodily expression that the danger of discovery most lies. Two boys or two girls can talk endlessly about sex—as they often do in films—but once the body becomes involved it is an entirely another matter, an expression that becomes itself an admission of sexuality instead of simply a statement of desire.

     Despite this, however, dance presents it in such a stylized manner that it seems more palatable for some audiences, wherein in the languages of love and homophobia become intolerable, restricted by censors and other so-called legal or self-defined moral dictators.

    British director Em J. Gilbertson’s film not only tells a love story between two young men of the projects, but explores precisely these issues, pointing to the fact that is those who attempt to restrict the behavior of individual bodies through words that are most often the true immoralists.

 

     In this beautiful four-minute piece two young men of a housing project (choreographer Joshua Hubbard and dancer Phoenix Chase-Meares) meet up on the grounds below and from the get-go play out the general hostility between young males in such situations, who define their small turf as if were an empire.

      They perform a fight much in the manner of the major figures of West Side Story, which through their bodily contact, instead of ending in murder, ends in an erotic pas de deux as the dancers, darting their heads in either direction to check out who may be watching, as engage in a kind of mock tango before waltzing and moving on to various other dances which quickly escalate into deeper erotic embraces.   

     By the time they are ready for the kiss, their lips move into sweet pleasure at the very same moment when some voyeuristic bullies watch in shock and horror, one on them mouthing silently the word “fuck,” another recording their actions to film.

       Alas, as happens in real life too often, the language dominates the bodily act of love, as one of the pair goes walking off, breaking with the other over the bullying sentences that will surely follow.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

Andrzej Wajda | Przekładaniec (Roly Poly, aka Layer Cake) / 1968

waste not, want not

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanisław Lem (screenplay), Andrzej Wajda (director) Przekładaniec (Roly Poly, aka Layer Cake) / 1968 [34 minutes]

 

One of the most charming and unexpected of films that involve LGBTQ behavior is Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s early experimental short from 1968, Przekładaniec, translated as Roly Poly or Layer Cake.

     By this time Wajda had already made major commercial films and would go on to direct in the 1970s his far more naturalistically based testimonies to Polish history. But in 1967 his great thespian discovery who performed in masterwork Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Zbigniew Cybulski—generally described as the James Dean of Polish cinema—was killed in a train accident. Wajda’s reaction was immediate and profound, almost a detour from the direction most of his films of the 1970s would take. His general grief was first expressed in his very personal work, Wszystko na sprzedaż (Everything for Sale) of 1968 which, for Poles read as an homage to Cybulski, concerning a director who attempts to make a movie with a young rising star, very much like Cybulski, who never shows up for filming.

    Wajda’s next work, Hunting Flies was a highly ironic satire, as was Roly Poly, the 34-minute short produced on Polish television based on a story “Czy Pan istnieje, Mr. Jones,” with a script by Stanisław Lem. In fact, Lem wrote the screenplay for this film, and long after testified that he felt it was the most successful of film adaptations of his work.

      In this short Lem and Wajda explore a world in which individuals themselves become amalgamated pieces of other beings in much the same way reconstructed and retooled autos and other home-constructed gadgets often were. But in this case it is part of the socialist society, in which one shares with all, or vice versa, the science of transplanting human parts being taken to a new level by an almost rock star-like Doctor Burton (Jerzy Zelnik).

      The film begins with the rather hyena-like giggling sports car driver, declaring himself much like Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd in “Two Wild and Crazy Guys” to be a “bunch of loonies,” Richard Fox (Bogumił Kobiela) who suits up with his brother Thomas (Marek Kobiela) to speed off from Thomas’ wife (Anna Prucnal) and child on a rally which they are assured to win. Somewhere along the way, however, their car crashes, killing Thomas. But no matter for Richard, who survives, most of his brother’s body parts being implanted within Richard’s frame, including evidently the man’s penis.

       He recovers and the stitches are finally removed, but finds that the insurance policy his brother has long ago purchased, which upon his death leaves half of his estate to his wife and the other half to his brother, has not been paid.

       Richard hires a lawyer (Ryszard Filipski) to look into the matter, who in turn discovers that since 46% of Thomas’ body parts continue to live on in the form of his brother he is not officially dead. Yes, he has died, and his wife is a widow, but not “actually” since Richard carries much of his brother’s body within him alive. Indeed, although he is his brother’s kid’s uncle he is, legally put, he is also still its progenitor since he now bears his brother’s penis. And although he cannot legally marry Thomas’ widow, since the husband is formally not yet dead, he is now responsible for the woman who cannot describe herself as fully widowed.

       The ridiculous exceptions go on and on as if in some absurd version of the Monty Python show. But, in sum, Richard having run out of money without the insurance payment, is now being sued by his sister-in-law, and cannot pay his lawyer.

       He has no choice, accordingly, but enter another sports car rally, sure to win the 100,000 that this one offers to the winner. He hires a new driver, who he admits is quite handsome, and again is seen off by his sister-in-law who wishes him good luck with hopes that he will pay her support.

       Once again, the race begins well, but eventually Richard and his new partner crash, this time into individuals in the crowd, a woman Salomea Tintel and a man with a dog on his leash, who are killed in the crash. Once more Richard Fox is saved with the brilliant intervention of Dr. Burton who implants much of Salomea, the man with the dog, and even the dog itself into Richard’s body.

      This time when the sports car driver shows up to the lawyer, there are several litigants, including Salomea’s fiancé and a dentist who has implanted her teeth with gold crowns as a gift he now wants back. Moreover, the man who was Richard now looks far more like a woman, attired in a dress and sporting breasts. Speaking and behaving far more effeminately than previously, he describes himself as a man who in the inside feels more like a woman—a phrase which today reminds of the many transgender males who transition to the female gender. He ends the scene by pulling out a powder puff and mirror to fix himself up. We now understand why he has described as his new driver as “rather handsome.”

      And suddenly an earlier scene in which several people were waiting outside the hospital, a couple of them male crossdressers and others trying to sell their own body parts, makes sense.  Clearly these folk, former patients of Dr. Burton no longer need certain things, like a penis, or another man with apparently three sets of eyes. Like Richard Fox, they surely now need the money. And the ghoulish scene cannot help but remind us, in turn, of Stephen Frears’ 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things about immigrants who offer up their body parts and sex acts to pay for passports and jobs.

       Confused by his client’s multiple changes, the lawyer visits Richard’ psychoanalyst—surely a necessary being with Richard’s now multi-existing identities—who puts him through a series of association tests consisting of sexually-suggestive words which the patient has previously compared only with multiple auto parts and now associates with mainly menopausal women’s problems. When the psychoanalyst pushes him too far, he growls and begins to bite him, obviously effects of the small element of his being made up from the dog. The psychoanalyst asks the lawyer whether he thinks he ought get vaccinated, the lawyer incredulously asking, “Do you think Fox has rabies?” he responding, “Not Fox, the dog.”

        Now more than ever, however, Richard needs one last race to bail him out of his multiple debts. In the last scene his “rather handsome” co-driver shows up at lawyer’s office, having been referred to him by Richard, he having been saved from yet another crash with his driver’s amalgamated body parts.

       In a world in which we blithely replace our livers, kidneys, hearts, and other vital parts with those of others in order to survive, is it any wonder that we might define ourselves as a collective, not only of male and female individuals, but of individuals who no longer need distinguish between gender but can’t forget the bodies in which they functioned?

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 15, 2021).

David Snyder | Yeah No Definitely / 2007

a desperate standoff

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Snyder (screenwriter and director) Yeah No Definitely / 2007 [14 minutes]

 

A couple of the Letterboxd commentators argued, simply, as they usually do, that this film goes nowhere. And on one level they are absolutely right. This film, unlike most of today’s gay cinema, presents us with no resolve.

    Cam (Vincent Piazza) is a sad young man, portraying himself to others and his best friend Kiff (Alan Barnes Netherton) as being totally heterosexual. But it’s clear from the beginning as the two hurry off to a party thrown mostly by rich girls about to head off to their chosen colleges, that Cam is desperately in love with Kiff, and that Kiff despite his even more open heterosexual bluff, probably would be glad to have Cam admit his love; although it is also probably that were Cam to do so, that Kiff would have to rebuff the love and leave his friend behind.

     Even being able to provide his friend with his necessary shot of insulin becomes almost an opportunity to symbolic “enter” his body. It is a sad symbol of their needs and desires.

     In a sense, the two buddies continue to live out their bromance while clumsily stopping around in territory in which they are basically unacclimated, Kiff, in particular, presenting an affable but clueless demeanor.

     But by the time this movie opens it’s also apparent that Cam is fed up with playing his heterosexual role, having recently broken up his girlfriend, who he claims wanted something of him that he couldn’t provide. When Kiff probes, he claims she wanted him to be an adolescent, which in fact is what he truly is. The two boys join the “chichi” party in which they are basically out of their league, by smoking a couple of joints.

     Kiff moves off to make out with the “hot” Nadia (Alejandra Amrosi), while Cam attempts to join up in conversations where the women are talking about heading off to college at Oxford and elsewhere without participating in any “real” conversation.

     He heads off, eventually getting so drunk that he vomits and passes out, Kiff taking him upstairs, removing his shoes and socks and putting him to bed.

     But too soon, Cam, feeling obviously alone when perhaps he hope Kiff might watch over him, staggers down the staircase, insisting that he has to get a new shirt. He attempts to drive off in Kiff’s car, but his friend suddenly appears to remind him that he is in no condition to drive. Cam almost runs him over as he moves off, however, soon stopping a few yards off.

    Kiff enters the car takes over, as they drive off into the night, finally back home, still without being actually able to really talk about the issue: their shared loved.

    They both remain adolescents, Kiff arguing that he is not Cam’s mother, upon which his friend reminds him his mother has recently died and breaks down in tears, Kiff hugging and comforting him. Alas, given their inability to look inward, they can go no further. Their pretense as best buddies is the best they can hope for. The writer himself, in the blurb accompanying this film explains: “The film is a study in self-deception, a theme worth exploring now, when Americans seem particularly desperate to avoid dealing with reality, and grasp at any diversion rather than look in the mirror.”

      This film was made in 2007, but at what time were not Americans “desperate to avoid dealing with reality,” and since that time it has only gotten worse. There are thousands of Cam and Kiffs through the American landscape, young men desperate for love but not being able to explain their same-sex attractions. We know that at least Kiff will eventually marry, probably with unresolved homosexual feels for the rest of his life. Cam may eventually have to look into the mirror or become an alcoholic or drug addict to disguise his suffering. This is, alas, the “American” way.

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Julien Duvivier | Lydia / 1941

love lost and forgotten

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein, André De Toth (uncredited) (based on the Duvivier film, Un Carnet de Bal, Julien Duvivier (director) Lydia / 1941

 

My guess is that most Americans, particularly those under the age of 75, have ever heard of French director Julien Duvivier’s 1941 American made movie, Lydia. One of just a few films he did in Hollywood, Lydia is a melodrama, and although quite well acted by figures such as Merle Oberon, Edna May Oliver, and Joseph Cotton, the film, overall, it does not rise to greatness. Of course, that doesn’t at all mean it’s not worth revisiting, particularly at a time when (at least in Los Angeles) Duvivier’s French-produced Panique has been revived in local theaters. By accident, I had recently watched another of this director’s American films, The Great Waltz, so when I saw that Film Struck was featuring the Criterion version of Lydia I was determined to see it.

     The story itself is rather static in its structure, although Duvivier’s beautiful imagery takes it down various different lanes. An elderly beauty, Lydia MacMillan (Oberon), has become famous for the school for the blind which she has founded years before, and one of her old beau’s, Michael Fitzpatrick (Cotton) decides to revisit her after decades. Lydia, now a decided spinster, is delighted by his visit and agrees to a dinner date a few nights later.

      As a surprise Fitzpatrick invites all of her former lovers—most of whom have asked her to marry them—to dinner as well. They include a rambunctious former football player, Bob Willard (George Reeves); a blind pianist who has worked with her at the school and composed a piano and orchestral piece in her honor, Frank Andry (Hans Jaray); and, arriving late, the real love of her life, Richard Mason (Alan Marshal). Over drinks the now reflective and quite witty Boston beauty recounts their loves and why she has turned down their marital offers. What becomes clear in the process is that, although she has loved Mason, Fitzpatrick might have been the best man for her. But, as she herself perceives, in her youthful willfulness she was not a coherent being.

      In some ways, she has loved all of them, but held out because of her passion for Mason, who having left her alone in the family’s seaside cottage, leaves her to clear up vague events concerning what may be another relationship, promising to return and marry her; for a long while he sends her messages, each with a ring inside, but he never does come back to marry her. It was while seeing both Willard and Fitzpatrick off on their way to war, that Lydia met a young blind boy who, after visiting the hovel in which he lives, determined to help him and his family, thus establishing her life’s commitment.

      Each of the men is still entranced by Lydia’s grace and beauty, and evidently none of them have married either. When, finally, out of curiosity Mason arrives, he does not seem to even remember the woman who loved him so deeply—a kind of ending that seems to come right out of the stories of O. Henry!

      In short, Lydia is long on talk and chronology, yet Duvivier’s sweeping camera (something  he shares with Max Ophuls), the stunning sets at the McMillan mansion, the several dance halls (Willard and Lydia remember a unreal version of reality with dozens of harps), and the seaside cottage, along with the costumes and the wit of Ben Hecht’s and Samuel Hoffenstein’s script (particularly as delivered by Lydia’s grandmother), make this an absolutely enchanting 140 minutes which is so much better than most of today’s Hollywood films that one longs again to return to the period of the studio star-system. Having just watched Oberon early on in career in Wedding Rehearsal and never having been able to forget her from Wuthering Heights, I’ve now become a great Oberon fan, although I do wish she’d been offered more remarkable roles; in this she mostly resembles the great Bette Davis, even though her gown is not red, but only pink (again in black-and-white). And I now feel that Joseph Cotton never played in a truly bad movie—at least until the 1950s—he performed in Citizen Kane the very same year as Lydia, and followed this film up with The Magnificent Ambersons and Shadow of a Doubt in the very next two years. Before he died, he sent my Sun & Moon Press the manuscript of his autobiography in the late 1980s, which was published by another press as Vanity Will Get You Somewhere. I wish I’d grabbed it up, but I seem to remember that the title turned me off, and I surely felt that we couldn’t pay enough to obtain the rights.

      Cotton and Oberon, along with Duvivier’s fluid camera, should send everyone back to Lydia for another or first look.

 

Los Angeles, May 10, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2017).

 

Tom Kietz | Fredagsbarn (Friday's Child) / 2010

the sound of the tiger

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Kietz (screenwriter and director) Fredagsbarn (Friday's Child) / 2010 [11 minutes]

 

A 14-year-old-boy has a fight with his father and races from their apartment down a long flight of stairs from their high-rise unit in the Danish suburbs. The boy, Rune (Bjarke Sørensen) gets on his bike and rides to the isolated and desolate shore-line, power plants with their silos dominating the landscape.

     This film is dominated by sound. In the first few frames we hear, vaguely the sounds of that argument, but the film comes alive with the click of the boy’s shoes as he descends the numerous steps, and the whoosh of bike tires against the asphalt and the creak of its chain dominates his rush away from his home. The plash of the waters hovers over his dock-side stroll.

     As the boy wanders out over the bleak industrial landscape, a new sound now can be heard, a kind of rattle and hiss of a spray-paint can where in the distance we can see another boy, slightly older, creating a large graffiti painting against a concrete structure. Rune approaches him, and the two, who slightly know one another, talk. The older boy is Benjamin (Frei Spangsberg Lorenzen), who explains what he is writing the word “Bomb.”  Benjamin, in turn, notices a button on Rune’s coat for The Smiths, a group he’s never heard, about which Rune speaks, lauding the 1980s band with the lead Morrissey. He wishes he lived “back then,” in the 1980s. Benjamin proffers that he’s more interested in “hip-hop.”

      Indeed, these boys aren’t very much alike, so it seems, the one a slightly older graffiti artist, the other a more moody, introverted boy who his brother describes, as Rune later tells Benjamin, “Friday’s Child,” because he was born on Friday, a “slacker day.” The boys break up their first meeting quickly, but obviously something clicked between them, as Rune checks out graffiti paintings on his computer, and Benjamin describes, the next time they meet, that he has listened to the Smiths and finds their music more interesting that the other things his friends listen to at school. Both boys describe themselves as feeling apart and different from their peers. Rune lies on his bed thinking of his short time together with the other boy.

     During this time together, we see Rune as the far more imaginative of the two, seeing the two of them, as sit on a derelict couch in the middle of field of wild weeds, as being stalked by a tiger who has already eaten two others and is now out to devour them. Benjamin resolves the “play,” as he describes, it by pulling out a dagger at the last moment and killing the tiger.

      They laugh, Rune lamenting that it’s sad they are now too old “to play.” Benjamin adds that it’s now all football and girls. Rune admits he hates football.

      But the next moment is crucial as Benjamin takes it the next step: “And girls?” Rune wisely remains silent.

      Benjamin, however, pursues the issue: “Have you ever kissed a girl?” Rune has to admit he has not. After a moment of silence, he asks Benjamin, “Have you?” to which the boy answers, yes.

      Here Rune pushes into new territory, “What was it like?”

      Benjamin’s answer, however, suggests far more than what is saying: “I don’t know. I guess it was all right. Like now I’ve tried it, you know.”

        Almost predictably, Benjamin wonders if Rune might like to try it, since he has never experienced a kiss; and after a short pause, Rune agrees the boy’s lips meeting for a brief kiss.

   Both sit back in silence, with seemingly no reaction, perhaps a bit afraid of the consequences. But soon a smile comes across Rune’s face, and a sly grin on Benjamin’s. They have obviously enjoyed it, and will surely try it out in later meetings. As if to reassert that possibility, director Tom Kietz’s sound man, Ole Fugl Hørkilde subtly reassures us with the sound of a roaring tiger and the shake and spray of a paint to indicate that their imaginations have been brought to life, and that these boys have found a new game which they can play together for a long while to come, resolving the loneliness they feel in their outsider status. Indeed, they might even be able to define the reason for the sense of being different from the others.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).