Isak Kohaly | Shots / 2014

the eyes locked upon one another

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isak Kohaly (screenwriter and director) Shots / 2014 [7 minutes]

 

A woman (Danielle Angel) picks up two men at a bar to join her in a threesome, presumably in her apartment. The men, Idan (Ido Zecharya) and Elad (Ori Paniri), are apparently both straight, neither of them having had much experience with threesomes, although Elad admits afterwards that long ago he’s had sex together with girls.

 

     But this time something strange happens. As the girl twists and turns between, moving back and forth as she kisses them both, and going down on one of them, they discover that they attending more to one another than to her, that their eyes meet in an intense gaze that they don’t truly comprehend. At one moment, while she is fellating one of them, it almost appears the two men are ready to kiss, until she pops up between them. But still their gaze at one another doesn’t completely cease.

     After sex, the two men in bed with the woman now asleep between them, share in a rather incoherent conversation, beginning, in fact, a little bit like a Beckett play. “So?” “What?” Neither of them can sleep, Elad suggesting that he never can after sex, although it is well-established that for many men sex often ends in an exhausted sleep. The woman, in this case, has obviously passed out. But then, these men have something else on their minds.

   They talk, as straight men often do, mostly about the woman. How they met her and complementing bodily appearance, particularly her tits.. Yet, they also offer up much praise of each other, Idan suggesting that Elad seems to be experienced, Elad returning his compliments by suggesting that Idan must be attractive in general to women.

     Yet, when Elad asks Idan if he enjoyed the sexual experience, his answer is fairly noncommittal, “Yeah. A little.”

      What they can’t say is more important than what they can speak about. And finally, it is only when Idan where Elad lives, that a true communication between them begins. Idan lives nearby. As they finally turn out the light, Elad mentions that Maccabi Haifa (an Israeli soccer team) is playing on Saturday.

      “Could be….could be nice to watch the game together.”

       Idan eagerly agrees, suggesting that it is a good idea.

       One can only imagine that at the gathering they will further explore those feelings that came up during their sexual adventure.

       I suspect that heterosexual men explore such sexual detours far more than is ever reported. Surely, heterosexual threesomes, gang sex, and orgies are not just about fucking women, but the mutual attraction that the men also feel for one another, enhancing their pleasure.

      Yet these two men seem willing, given they surprised feelings, the explore things a bit further, and Israeli director Isak Kohaly seems interested in where that might take them, without offering us any answer or even clue of how their meet-up might turn out. Nonetheless, I would argue that you could describe their plan to watch soccer together as closely resembling what we usually describe as a first date.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Eytan Fox | Ba'al Ba'al Lev (Gotta Have Heart) / 1997 [appeared on Israel Television, Channel 2 as an episode of the series “Short Stories about Love”]

where dreams come true

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gal Uchovsky (screenplay), Eytan Fox (director), Ba'al Ba'al Lev (Gotta Have Heart) / 1997  [appeared on Israel Television, Channel 2 as an episode of the series “Short Stories about Love”]

 

In a year which portrayed LGBTQ love primarily as a world of indecision, confusion, and inevitable disappointment and violence (some representative films being Alan Berliner’s Ma Vie en Rose, William Roth’s Floating, Tony Vitale’s Kiss Me, Guido, Yolanda García Serrano and Juan Luis Iborra’s Love of Man, Richard Kwietniowski’s Love and Death on Long Island, Adolfo Aristarain’s Martin (hache), Christophe Malavoy’s The Fire That Burns, and Steven Mattias’ Bent, to name just a few) Eythan Fox’s early short film, Gotta Have Heart (Ba'al Ba'al Lev), seems to be a wonderful exception in its fantasy-like musical presentation of events and its ultimately open acceptance of gay love.

     In the small Israeli town in which action takes place, the handsome Guri (Tzak Berkman) is already out to his best female friend, Mitzi (Gisele Silver), who alternately plays the role that used to be described as a fag-hag, as well as appearing to be his girlfriend as a cover. The sissy boy, Nohav (Uri Omanuti), however, is clearly recognized by the community as a gay boy, yet is beloved for his ability to teach the young townspeople new dances at the nightly folk-dance gatherings which seem to represent the town’s major social activity.

      Both Guri and Nohav seek to escape to Tel Aviv, Guri hoping to be accepted by the Academy to study architecture and Nohav dreaming of being a paratrooper or any other possible figure to take him away from the small-town mores.

      Moreover, Nohav also knows Guri’s secret since, as we later discover, they encountered one other one evening at a Tel Aviv gay bar.

      Into this rather joyous community of a hot-dog stand (run by Guri and Mitzi), an ice-cream truck, singing, and more dancing, wanders the beautiful dark and highly sexually experienced Merito, who turns the heads of all the girls, including Mitzi—as well as catching the eye of Guri.

      Mitzi is among the first of Merito’s choices, she, after sex with the stud, completely falling in love with him, only to just as quickly discover that it was meant only as a one-night stand. She has also been disgusted by his seemingly endless bathing habits after sex, as if being with her somehow had utterly sullied him.

      Guri, who sits out the dances at the folk-dance gatherings, is disturbed by Mitzi’s absence, and even though she eventually shows up, along with, soon after, Merito, their relationship is slightly changed by her actions. And she observes him choosing another girl for the last coupled dance, she asks Guri if they can leave.

       Basically, Guri has shied away from Nohav, obviously for fear of being identified as gay. But this evening, as Mitzi leaves his company early, he begins talking with the eagerly friendly Nohav, who it’s clear absolutely dotes on Guri. Before they know it they are talking about Eurovision, the TV musical competition show that has been running for several decades on European TV. The gay boy invites Guri to his home, where he encounters almost a museum to Eurovision, including records of all the winning performances, including Dana’s 1970 winning performance representing Ireland. Nohav’s own mother was a back-up singer Ishhar Cohen who stopped singing when she married. His enthusiasm is so utterly charming, that you might imagine him doing almost anything, certainly escaping as he is desperate to do, to Tel Aviv.

 

    In the midst this, and for the first time, Guri actually opens up and talks about his fears of not being accepted by the Academy. Nohav, in turn, gets an opportunity to praise Guri’s talents, assuring him that he will get accepted because it’s his dream. Guri warns him, however, that dreams just as often fail, and do come true, suggesting that he is “such a baby.” Yet Nohav reminds him that dreams do come true. When Guri himself enlisted, he wanted to become a paratrooper, and it did happen that way.

      It was a goal, Guri reminds him, and he worked hard for it.

      But Nohav, clearly a dreamer, shares with his would-be-lover his own dream. He takes out a tape of Hanna Aharoni. Her picture, in fact, hangs in the dance club. And it turns out that she was the original performer of the “Pomegranate,” the dance, with couples only, that ends each evening of the town’s folk-dancing activities.

 

     In Nohav’s dream, she comes to the Community Center where they are dancing, wearing the dress she wore on the Ed Sullivan show. “I’m on the floor, dancing with the one I love most. We’re dancing really fast, and everyone’s watching. Suddenly the song changes, and there is Frida Boccara,” the famous French singer who won the Eurovision contest in Madrid in 1969 singing "Un jour, un enfant."  In Nohav’s fantasy, the singers alternate before each singing their own song together. Everyone applauds, and they disappear, the audience’s turning back to him and the boy he is dancing with.

        We should all applaud Uri Omanuti’s totally engaging performance.

        As he goes to leave, Guri admits that he saw Nohav at the Tel Aviv bar and knows that his friend has seen him there as well. But that was an exception, a mistake, Guri argues, that he won’t make again, attempting to dash any further fantasies that Nohav may have about a gay relationship with him.

       Over the next couple of days, Merito picks up other women, but finally turns to Guri, inviting him over to his place just before the folk dancing hour.

       Oddly enough, without seemingly any trepidation, Guri shows up, and enters the apartment to find Merito is already lying on the bed in only his jockey shorts. Guri too sits down on the bed, and after an offering of a half of watermelon—perhaps the strangest pre-coital hors d'oeuvres ever served on the screen. Merito begins to seduce the boy, telling him that it’s time for him to get what he wants as well, since he’s noticed him watching him. He encourages Guri to simply follow his instructions.

       Clearly a pro, in the way that Doris Day might have imagined Rock Hudson, the lights go dim, and colored lights begin blinking on the headboard of the bed, as we watch, rather surprisingly, Merito guides Guri into position to fuck him. It’s clear that the bi-sexual lothario enjoys, every now and then, a good fuck.

       By this time there is no turning back for Guri, who without any ado has not only “come out,” so to speak, but engaged in his first sexual experience in a spectacular manner that might almost be said to match Nohav’s fantasies. But he too is put off some as he peeks into the bathroom after sex, where Merito is in the tub busy cleaning up his body. As Guri later reassures Mitzi, Merito’s cleaning fetish has nothing at all to do with her; this is just the way reacts to sex.

       Immediately after, Guri receives a letter from the Academy: he has been accepted! He rushes off to the final folk dance session of the year to share the good news. The final Pomegranate dance is about to begin, and in honor of Guri’s good news, the leader demands that he now join the dance, asking him to choose a partner.

       Merito, realizing that this is Guri’s last appearance—and perhaps his own as well—offers up his services. But Guri walks past him, saying that he has promised this dance to someone else.

 

        He walks over to Nohav, takes him in his arms and begins the dance, the others joining in, as in what appears to be a hologram, both Bocca and Aharoni take the stage to sing, the audience applauding before turning back to watch Nohav and Guri finish out their dance. Nohav’s dreams have come true after all.

       The final quicky piece concerns the future of Mitzi, who will now must be satisfied to marry the dance wallflower, perhaps a nice guy after all. Nohav shows up in a Paratrooper suit, and Guri sings goodbye to Mitzi and all his other friends. Everyone is happy in this small Israeli town, perhaps on the border or even within Gaza. Besides, their most beloved citizens are now all about to escape to the big city where things are more exciting, and where they can truly enact their own sexualities.

      Although, Fox’s film was not exclusively about “coming out,” it certainly takes up that theme in a manner that—a year before what I describe as the first of the thousands of Type B “coming out” films, Get Real and Edge of Seventeen appeared—makes those that follow sound like a echo. Fox’s film, if nothing else, is musical fantasy that lays out the template for all the rest of the Type B coming out films that came after.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

 

 

 

 

Nicholas Zhur | Your Aura / 2019

getting what you wish for

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nicholas Zhur (screenwriter and director) Your Aura / 2019 [18 minutes]

 

This short film is centered around subjects that I’m afraid I have no ability to speak about, observing auras around someone you just met and betting a $100 in your belief that he might be gay. Neither is something I’ve ever experienced, and frankly I hope I never do.

     Finn (Charles-Curtis Sanders) is a handsome young black gay boy who’s somehow found his way to a fairly well-to-do Los Angeles neighborhood where he rents a room. He’s attempting to try-out for acting roles, so far without much success.

 

    Tony (Landon Tavernier) is a handsome white boy, who lives in a nearby quite chic apartment, privilege written across his face (could any casting director found a better actor to play such role than someone named Landon Tavernier?). He’s just landed a small speaking role in a new TV series, and can afford to have his own calling card which he hands to Finn after he accidently meets him on the street, watches him fall from his skateboard, and witnesses an aura surrounding him, to say nothing of obviously finding him quite attractive.

     Tony’s friend, Alejando (Donnie Luther) is evidently a quite wealthy and nasty queer boy who is quite convinced by his gaydar that Finn is most definitely straight. In fact, he dares Tony to make a bet, something Tony, to give him credit, wants no part, but to which he finally is swayed to agree: his suggestion is that if Finn turns out to be gay, Alejando must pay him $100, and vice versa if the cute new boy is straight.

     Alejandro, clearly jealous, suggests he has no need of the money, and changes the rules so that each other will simply grant the other’s wish. We perceive that Alejandro’s wish will surely involve Tony having sex with him.

      Finn does eventually call, Tony and he joining up for breakfast, after which, at Tony’s suggestion, they stop by his apartment, a place which so awes the troubled Finn that Tony, now clearly perceiving the aura that surrounds the boy, helps him to come out with just a few words about how important it is to be yourself and not listen to what anyone else says.

      Gee, I wished I’d had such terribly sage advice whispered into my ears back in my days. But then I probably didn’t have a bright light emanating from my hands as Finn does in Nicholas Zhur’s short fantasy.

      For a second, time spins forward and Finn and Tony, having fallen in love, dance through the Crescent Heights neighborhood streets, kiss, and obviously make love (discreetly off camera); within minutes Finn, rolling all his possessions in a small suitcase up to Tony’s door, moves in with him.

      Bringing us back to reality, Finn’s phone rings, Alejandro having evidently recorded their voices about the bet. Devastated by the realization that his opening up to Tony has been about a bet to prove he was gay, Finn angrily leaves and refuses for several weeks to answer Tony’s calls.

      Of course, they eventually have to meet up again, with Tony apologizing after he realizes he is really in love. Hesitantly Finn forgives him, while Tony takes him out onto the street where in the hazy sunset of a Los Angeles evening, the moon appears to have landed on earth. They kiss.

      Welcome to fantasyland in this washed-out picture postcard portrait of LA LGBT life.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Stanley Jackson | Coronet at Night / 1963

understanding something

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanley Jackson (screenplay, based on a story by Sinclair Ross, and director) Coronet at Night / 1963

 

The Canadian short film of 1963 Coronet at Night, based on a story by Sinclair Ross, ostensibly has nothing whatsoever to do with being gay and most certainly does not represent or even suggest anything that might represent sex.

     To put it simply, and this is a remarkably simple tale: a young farm boy Tom is sent to town—his father being intensely involved in mowing the hay in a year of a substantial bounty of his major crop—to hire a man to do the important job of hay-stooking, a process of setting the sheaves upright and shaking and packing their mix of wheat, barley, and oat leaves into an upright position so that they can properly dry out in the sun.

     If his hard-working father is a sometimes harsh disciplinarian, Tom’s mother is an obsessively religious woman who encourages her son to play the piano and to love music probably because he may use his talents in church. Happy to be free from their clutches for a day and allowed to skip school for the task, he journeys to find the small Saskatchewan, one-street prairie town nearly empty, with almost everyone at home to reap their crop.

      In the local drugstore where Tom spends the 30 cents his mother has given him for lunch on a chocolate malt, a man sits next to him, a pale-skinned blond, whose hands are smooth, obviously not someone worth hiring for the demanding farm work. But when the boy begins to talk with the stranger he discovers that the youth plays the coronet in a band, and it’s love at first sight—if more for the shiny instrument that the musician takes from its case than for the blond’s gentle smile. And, although the musician has never done any farm work, and probably plays in a jazz band rather than what Tom imagines is a marching band, the boy proudly brings his new-found friend home, while also recognizing that the newcomer is not at all the kind of man his father might have hired.

   

     Over the one night and one day that the musician lives in the bunk-house, spending the early evening with Tom in rapt attendance while playing several lovely trumpet tunes, Tom falls in love, this time with the player and not his instrument. He even plans to rise early to help teach the new worker how to “stook” before he leaves for school; and all day at school Tom is worried, hardly being able to wait to get home and check out his friend’s achievements.

     When he discovers the fields only partially finished, with most of the stooks still remaining parallel to the field, he knows the coronet player has failed, and when he reaches the house his father tells him, more gently than the boy might have expected, that the man tried hard but became winded and ill. The father is momentarily taking him back to town and suggests his son say goodbye, the musician suggesting that they may meet up again the next year. As Tom recognizes, however, his new love is about to leave his life forever, as the boy looks on in inconsolable sadness as the horse-cart with his father and the man retreat into the distance.

      He narrates, however, that his music-hating father still remembered that particular year of getting in the crop, and continued long after to occasionally wonder whatever happened to the coronet player.

      So this Truman Capote-like memory of a special day ends, the narrative having expressed a treasured memory of a young boy’s coming of age. Certainly, that is the way most early viewers, I am sure, will read it.

      By this time, however, my readers must realize that I will not leave that simple and blandly nice narrative alone. Even the most literal of viewers might grant me that this is not just a tale out of a child’s mental diary, but a statement of adulation and even love for a being who stands totally outside of his world representing ineffable desires for what he is not even yet know exists.

     The genre here is not merely another “coming-of-age” story—although even that now often connotes, in LGBTQ speak, the story of a young man or woman coming to terms with his or her sexuality or gender.

    More than any other work in this volume, this film shares in the genre I described in my comments about Shane, and bears some resemblances to other such “boy and his older male pal” works I pointed to in Billy and His Pal (1911) and Rebel without a Cause (1955), although the last two are far less innocent, simply because of the ages and gender of the characters involved.

     In Shane, however, the boy’s—and other family members’—admiration of the stranger who has come to work for them has only subtle tones of homoeroticism, while in director Stanley Jackson’s fable it is far more explicit.

     Forget the fact that when Tom asks the blond stranger early on in the story whether he had ever “stooked,” that in his Canadian-accented delivery of the Scottish-derived word it sounds eerily like he is asking “Have you ever stooped?” which means “to lower one's moral standards so far as to do something reprehensible” or, in basic Yiddish calls up a related question “Have you ever shutpped,” which asks if the man has ever had sexual intercourse. The trumpeter cracks a sly smile before answering “No, but I can learn,” the scene playing out a bit like one of the oldest of vaudeville skits.* But, as I’ve requested, I ask you just to ignore that aside.

     Any card-caring gay man would nonetheless recognize the new man in town as a homosexual simply because of the clues the writer provides us: the man is fair-haired, pale, smooth-bodied, and sickly, in short, a faggot from the city who has none of the rough and experienced look and mannerisms of Prairie boys and girls his age. Furthermore, he can beautifully play his instrument, which translates easily in gay camp lingo as suggesting that he is more than sexually adequate.

     What young Tom immediately sees in this man, enough to want to bring him home to meet his mother and father, is the kind of being he recognizes that he too may grow up to be. The child’s gaze of the man playing the trumpet signifies his absolute pleasure in being momentarily exposed to a new world that he has never before imagined, a world in which he desires to live, even if he subliminally recognizes that is not yet possible.

     Just as in Shane, moreover, Tom’s parents seem also altered by the stranger’s visitation. Without the bodily sexual potions Terence Stamp brings the family in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), the blond boy of Coronet at Night brings the boy’s mother the pleasure of his music and his father something in the stranger’s gentle demeanor that forces the young Tom to recognize “That something had happened. I knew my father had understood something.” Metaphorically speaking, we wonder whether perhaps Tom actually might have brought home a man he loves who they can also love and accept, someone not in the present, but in the boy’s future perhaps.

     I realize many will believe my reading of this film to be prurient. I don’t see it that way, but I do comprehend their response.

     I can only say that it came with no great surprise, however— having written the above I chose to do a little research about the man who wrote the original story on which this short is based—to uncover significant corroboration of my reading. 

     Sinclair Ross, born in Saskatchewan in 1908 worked as a banker for The Union Bank of Canada most of his life, while also writing stories and novels, the most famous of which, For Me and My House (1941) became a Canadian literary classic, establishing a model for Canadian prairie fiction.

      After Ross died in 1996, biographer Keath Fraser revealed in a study of the novelist, As For Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross (1997) that the author had been a closeted homosexual.

 

*The acting in this scene alone makes me wish the director would have listed the names of his actors in the credits.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2020

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

Kon Ichikawa | 雪之丞変化 Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge) / 1963

loving yukinojo

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nato Wada (writer, based on a film by Daisuke Itō and Teinosuke Kinugasa), Kon Ichikawa (director) 雪之丞変化 Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge) / 1963

 

Film historians report that after a string of financially unsuccessful films—films that, however, were often critically acclaimed—Ichikawa was assigned to remake Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge), based on an older novel by Otokichi Mikami and previously made as three-part serial by Teinosuke Kinugasa in 1935 and 1936, starring Kazuo Hasegawa. Critic Donald Richie humorously describes the task to be “like asking Buñuel to remake Stella Dallas.” Yet Ichikawa, working with his wife and life-long collaborator, Natto Wada as the screenwriter, brilliantly rose to the occasion, even employing the original actor, in his 300th movie role, in the lead role of the Kabuki female impersonator Yukinojo and in the role of her secret admirer and the film’s narrative commentator, the thief Yamitaro.

     With the use of highly saturated colors and a score that—despite the film’s setting in the Tokugawa period of Japanese history (1603-1867)—employs romantic theme music of the 1950s melodramas as well as contemporary jazz, Ichikawa creates a work that might easily be compared with the films of American directors of the 1950s such as Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray.

      During the midst of her performance in Edo, Yukinojo catches a glimpse in the audience of the wealthy merchant Kawaguchiya, accompanied by the corrupt magistrate Sansai Dobe and Dobe’s daughter Namiji, the mistress of the powerful shogun. The two men, along with another merchant, Hiromiya, have been responsible for her father’s and mother’s deaths, the facts of which have been kept alive in Yukinojo’s mind by her manager-mentor. After all these years, it is now time for revenge.

 

     It is clear from the very first scene that the beautiful Namiji has fallen in love with Yukinojo—the fact of which, given Kazuo Hasegawa’s advanced age and his retention of the mannerisms and dress of a woman throughout the film, merely accentuates the theatricality and artificiality of the work. Combined with the introduction into the film of Yamitaro, a charming thief from whose attempted robbery and murder Yukinojo escapes—and who comes to admire and perhaps even love Yuinojo—along with Yukinojo’s repeated run-ins with Yamitaro’s competitor, the woman thief Ohatsu, who ultimately declares she too has fallen in love with Yukinojo—An Actor’s Revenge might be dismissed as a strange black sex comedy ahead of its time were it not for the Hasegawa’s brilliant acting and Ichikawa’s refusal to permit what we would now describe as post-modern intrusions to alter the focus of his larger- than-life historical adventure: the destruction of the evil men who destroy anyone in stands in the way of their greed and lust for power.

     Through repeated gestures of servility to these proud men, several swordfights, wile, stealth, and outright lies, Yukinojo gains entry to their houses and is a given a modicum of trust which permits her to carefully weave hearsay and rumor into a net of consequences in which each man is ultimately trapped, as they turn against one another and, particularly in the case of Sansai Dobe, destroy themselves.

     Unfortunately, the delicate Namiji, a woman—unlike Yukinojo (a man behaving as a woman) or Ohatsu (a woman with the physical prowess and unchecked confidence of a man)—finds herself trapped in the net as well, and as her innocence is betrayed, dies. Yukinojo leaves the theater, disappearing from sight and, eventually, we are told, even from memory.

      In telling her story, however, Ichikawa has clearly created a legend that explores the complex issues of human sexuality more thoroughly than most films of the day.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2008

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2008).