Miguel Lafuente | Mario, Kike y David (Mario, Kike and David) / 2016

choices

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miguel Lafuente (screenwriter and director) Mario, Kike y David (Mario, Kike and David) / 2016 [20 minutes]

 

Despite the fact that most of the LGBTQ community identify themselves as bisexual or lesbian, most of the LGBTQ films being made are about gays, and perhaps the least understood of the alphabet mix are bisexuals, who most gay men believe are simply gay men attempting to deflect the fact that they are truly gay.

      Spanish director Miguel Lafuente’s quite lovely film, Mario, Kike and David attempts, quite successfully, to deconstruct the issue. Presumably on Grindr or some such service, Mario (Almagro San Miguel) has called up for a date, meeting up with the man who describes himself as Kike (Gustavo Rojo) for sex.

     They have a wonderfully joyful sexual encounter, discussing their bisexual situations, and how being so has destroyed their possible relationships with previous girlfriends. They both admit it might be easier for them to describe themselves as gay, which would at least allow them to end their female relationships with some pity and respect.

       They meet again and again over a period of months and begin to develop a relationship but still, Mario in particular, seeks out female relationships, and after their fourth time together, when he is drunk, he leaves his now beloved friend for his new girlfriend, Paloma (Mariu Bárcena).

        In fact, without being able to admit it, they have fallen in love, and the new relationship has resulted in Kike (whose real name is apparently Davide) hooking up with gay man Julián. Weeks or even months later they meet up on what appears to be a LGBTQ Pride Day, Mario introducing Paloma to his old friend and Davide introducing Julián to the both of them.

        Paloma seems attracted to Kike (Davide), wondering how Mario has met him, and suggests perhaps that David isn’t entirely gay and that perhaps they might explore a threesome.

        Whether or not it is now to late for that possibility—one which both Mario and Kike have previously contemplated—is not explored. David appears now to be a committed gay man, although it’s clear he still has feelings for Mario, so we can’t know whether or not such a situation might even still be possible. But this film clearly suggests that when it comes to bisexuality the sexes remain relatively fluid. Mario has made a choice and so, evidently, as David, and the betwixt and between has perhaps been lost to their previous desires. Society demands either or choices, and both of these truly bisexual men have perhaps lost the opportunity to experience the pleasures of both sexes.

       What is apparent in Lafuente’s film is that the male’s sexual encounters were fulfilling and totally pleasurable. We cannot know whether Mario’s relationship with Paloma or David’s relationship with Julián offers them the same excitement that the two males previously shared with one another. And there is a sense of melancholy as they both look back at one another with clear longing.

      In that respect, this film seems to fall into the category of gays describing bisexuals as gay men who aren’t totally able to embrace their full sexuality. But fortunately, director Lafuente doesn’t offer us easy answers. If one seeks out longer relationships, choices eventually must be made, no matter how open one is to both sexes.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024). 

 

 

 

Charlie Tidmas | Pillow Chocolate / 2023

 

leave by the backdoor please

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charlie Tidmas (screenwriter and director) Pillow Chocolate / 2023 [10 minutes]

 

In case you’re never been to a medium-nice hotel, a “pillow chocolate” is what the management puts on your pillow to greet you into their comfortable space. Sometimes there are even flowers.

     Jamie (Peter MacHale) has the comfort of Vincent (Alan Turkington) who is evidently a celebrity of which we have no obvious evidence. And after a most affectionate night and evidently afternoon, the teenager is asked politely to leave by the back door so that no one might dare know that Vincent has been holed with him through the night.

      It’s not “the gay thing,” so Vincent asserts, but worse, which we might not even know except for the movie’s promotion, is that Jamie happens to a trans man, perhaps the worst criminal position left in the sexual world.

      It’s not that Vincent doesn’t enjoy his company, he even signs his photo with a telephone number so that Jamie can get back in touch. It’s just, well you know celebrities, it’s dangerous, impossible, unthinkable to even imagine that he might enjoy a trans man as a bedroom mate.

      The “pillow chocolate” nicely disappears through his back door throat and enters a nearby gay bar where he posts the picture to the bathroom wall, claiming that he has refused the invitation.

      This little vengeful piece is well directed and goes straight to the point. But I might have wished to see a bit more development, to comprehend how these two met up, what Vincent loved about their sexual night, and how such relationships might be even conceivable in this mixed-up world, particularly in the still up-tight British society or the downright frightened USA these days.

      This is a UK production. And what, I might ask was Vincent? An actor? Like Laurence Olivier who used to hook up with Danny Kaye in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel every time he visited the US? Or is this celebrity some second-rate record producer, an agent? Worse yet, a film director.

       This film needs far more explanation in order for me to feel that Jamie’s revenge was even successful?

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2024).

 

Philippe Grenier | Muscat / 2023

the punishment of silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philippe Grenier (screenwriter and director) Muscat / 2023 [16 minutes]

 

Canadian director Philippe Grenier’s short film Muscat is a stunningly visually beautiful work that tells a sad story based a personal family story told by his grandmother about her distant cousin who was the victim, as he puts it, of “incommunicability in an emergency situation abroad.” Language clearly means everything concerning comprehension. And for the visiting French/Canadian couple on their trip to Morocco it means death and arrestment.

    Yet, Grenier embeds this sad story in an equally unhappy narrative of a young 16-year-old fisherman, Samir (Ilyes Tarmasti), who is clearly attempting to escape the confines of his small village life by learning English. What he can’t even yet describe to himself is that he is also different in another way, being a young homosexual who is immediately attracted to the hirsute Louis (Alexandre Bergeron) who with his wife Marie (Aline Winant) visits their fish stand.

     Samir’s brother, Nassim (Mahmoud Zabennej) is clearly a hot-head who when the foreigner notes his prices are higher that nearby other stands refuses to even serve the would-be customer, despite the quite attempts of Samir to intervene. As Samir later puts it, his brother seems almost always angry.

      Later in the evening Samir brings a bag of fish to the Canadians to Louis’ delight, realizing that the boy can speak some English, awarding the boy the full price.

     The next day as Samir spies on the couple swimming in the ocean as he hides behind a rock, Nassim catches him and is enraged, not only for his brother’s obvious voyeurism but because he has discovered Samir has borrowed his tape recorder to study the English language, both clearly taboo activities in the closed world of Nassim’s Arabic conservatism.

      When, soon after, Marie drowns after hitting her head on a rock while swimming, Louis drags her body in to shore pleading for a doctor. Although it’s clear that Samir comprehends what he is saying, the other locals simply call the police who take Louis away for questioning, particularly since Nassim attests that the two had been fighting the day before.

      Despite his desires to intervene and Louis’ pleas that the boy help explain the situation through translation, to protect himself from the accusations of not only his brother but the entire community of having been attracted to the man, Samir must remain quiet, deny any involvement, and knowledge of having learned even a few words of another language, closing himself off from all possible outside communication.

       The punishment of silence, of remaining in the closet not only sexually by culturally is so painful that it is clear that either Samir must soon escape his world or suffer the eternal anger that characterizes his brother.

       As Grenier himself describes it “Muscat is a film about incommunicability, resilience, taboos and sexual awakening. Samir must lie to himself and to others to survive. The meeting between Samir and Louis is decisive: like a storm in his heart and body, Samir experiences strong feelings that are impossible to ignore. His attraction to Louis will push Samir to reveal a truth that has been deeply repressed until now.”

      Grenier’s camera wanders over the handsome actor Tarmasti’s face with adoration and wonderment. This is certainly one of the finest short films I have seen this year, 2023.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

Barbara Willis Sweete and Phelim McDermott | Satyagraha / 2011 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

separating language from meaning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philip Glass (composer), Constance DeJong (vocal text), Constance DeJong and Philip Glass (libretto), Phelim McDermott (stage director), Barbara Willis Sweete (film director) Satyagraha / 2011 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

In many respects Philip Glass' pageant opera, Satyagraha, is one of the most frustrating of all opera experiences. It is not that the work isn't, at times, musically splendiferous and even powerful—at least in the MET high-definition live broadcast I saw in 2011. But Glass takes away so much of what opera is really about drama, language, and, at times, musical comprehension—that it is difficult to get one's bearings.

     I don't mean that the opera, itself, is difficult. The plot, if it can be said to have one, is quite apparent if you have a program. The seven scenes in three acts of the work represent significant moments in the early career of M. K. Gandhi, as he transformed himself in South Africa from a Western-dressed lawyer to a political advocate for the poor and suffering. Beginning with an imagined scene from the battle field of Bhagavad Gita (The Kuru Field of Justice), Glass and his co-librettist, Constance DeJong, take us from 1910 to 1913 in Gandhi's life, exploring his attempts at collective farming on his Tolstoy Farm (named after the great author and social experimenter), through the "vows" of South African Indians to resist registration, to Gandhi's return to South Africa greeted with violence, from a view of his newspaper activities on Indian Opinion in which he first expressed his concepts of "satyagraha" ("insistence on truth"), to the 1908 protest against the Black Act, in which his supporters burned their government certificates, and through to his final strike march to the Transavaal border, where many were arrested.

     Each of Glass' acts are overseen, furthermore, by an historical figure who influenced Gandhi or over whom he would have an influence. From the past, we see Leo Tolstoy, from the present, Gandhi's close friend, the Nobel-prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, and from the future, Martin Luther King.

   The program notes explain in some detail what we are experiencing. However, that experience itself is much less lucid. As Richard Croft (playing Gandhi) explained in an intermission interview, it is difficult to act because what is occurring is happening inside, not in the actual drama on the stage. The chorus, and more important, the Skills Ensemble, often play out—in a highly imaginative use of masks, puppets, and through staged acts—what is symbolically occurring, but the actors, somewhat like those of Wagner, are allowed little movement. Yet, unlike Wagner's figures, the major actors here are not even communicating with the audience in a language they can comprehend, since they sing the entire opera in Sanskrit, quoting spiritual fragments of the Bhagavad Gita.

     I am sure that when he first got the idea to use the language and images from a book which Gandhi knew intimately, it must have seemed a brilliant concept to separate language from meaning, but it ultimately cuts us off from true communication and, more importantly, given Glass' minimalist repetitions, presents us with long passages in which we only have a vague idea what is happening—not that it would help to know, at any moment, that Gandhi, for example, is reaffirming his ideals...or whatever. We sense the emotional impact, and Glass' simmering music often seduces us, but, nonetheless, it is sometimes a long endurance test, particularly in the last act, when Glass almost sentimentally links Gandhi with the future American racial revolutionary King—over and over again, so that eventually we must ask whether Gandhi or what he has wrought.    

     The most successful act of this opera is Act II, when puppets, chorus, and major singers all come together to create the horror of the wealthy Dutch landowners and the busy industry of putting together the newspaper, and the dramatic bonfire of government issued certificates.

     The cast, including Croft, Rachelle Durkin as his secretary, Miss Schlesen, Kim Josephson as a supporter, Mr. Kennenbach, and Alfred Walker as Parsi Rustomji were all quite adept, and the Met chorus was absolutely stunning in its ability to learn the Sanskrit score while counting Glass' tricky rhythms. The costumes and settings by Julian Crouch and Kevin Pollard, as well as the stage direction of Phelim McDermott and conducting of Dante Anzolini were all spectacular.

     The Met audience seemed thoroughly charmed by the opera, remaining through the entire series of applauses. Yet, for me, that was just the problem: long on charm, the opera was too short on substance, despite focusing on such a substantial historical figure. But then it is difficult, if not impossible, to think without language.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2011

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2011).

 

Juan Gil García | Un Buen Hijo (A Good Son) / 2011

an attenuated life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Gil García and David Hauslein (screenplay), Juan Gil García (director) Un Buen Hijo (A Good Son) / 2011 / [21 minutes]

 

In many respects the 1998 short film by Robert Little, despite its shared English title, A Good Son, bears little resemblance with the short film of Mexican director Juan Gil García from 2011.

    In retrospect, Little’s film seems retrograde in a year in which such notable coming out movies as Simon Shore’s Get Real, David Moreton’s The Edge of Seventeen, and P. J. Castellaneta’s sexually problematic Relax…It’s Just Sex appeared. In Little’s film the central character discovers in one afternoon that he is gay but chooses to remain closeted.

      But then, so too does the central figure in Gil García’s movie 13 years later make the same decision, although it’s also clear his circumstances are very different from the Southern California University student of Little’s work, and his desires are perhaps much more radical.

     The young farm boy, Ausencio, nicknamed Chencho (Hoze Meléndez), bound to his traditional macho father Clemente (Jesús “Chuy” Padilla) and his slightly more understanding mother Cándida (Laura Kaplun) is enchanted by the nearby small-town performances of the drag queen Katherine (Carla Aráncida), a kind of spider-woman whom he observes through a barroom window.

      Observing him at the window, Katherine invites him into her life and even promises to teach him, demanding he show her whatever talents he proclaims. His talent is so slight to be almost laughable, a few quick turns, an attempt to dance that looks more like a teenage turkey than a skilled drag performer which is his desire. But still she insists she will use him in her act, awarding him a red scarf and the promises of a mentorship.

       The father finding not only the red scarf in his bed but the pictures under his mattress of his idol Ausencio has collected, bans him from returning to the nearby village. He mother reassures him, quite strangely, that if he simply waits his time will son come, as if she were hinting that her own hard-working husband was soon to die.

        Although the boy packs his bags and appears ready to bolt from the farm immediately, he is late to the performance and bicycles home almost obediently, head bowed, as if giving himself up to his indenturement to a future that may not be as immediate as his mother has predicted.  

        Even if the situation is somewhat radically different, however, we sense the same sort of temporary abandonment of self-expression that we perceived in the earlier film. Being a “good son” is clearly not a route to escape for anyone who identifies as LGBTQ, or perceives oneself as being different. We can only imagine Ascencio working in the maize fields for years, perhaps his entire life with deep pangs of regret.

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2021).

Robert Little | A Good Son / 1998

a view from the roof

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Little (screenwriter and director) A Good Son / 1998

 

Very little actually happens in Robert Little’s 1998 film, A Good Son, yet, to use an anaphoric paradox, everything happens. A young man, Tim (Eddie Ebell), having drowned out the world on his headphones as he reads a book, is sitting in the stands with father (Ben Martin) at a Southern California University diving meet; the diver is his brother and sitting next to him is his brother’s girlfriend, Christie. His father attempts to return him, as he describes it, “to earth” in with the hopes he might observe the expert leaps and spins of the divers as they hit the water (both divers performed by the Olympic winning brothers Justin and Troy Dumais, the later listed as “Justin” in the credits).

     Suddenly Jack (Drew Bell), a USC student which we as suddenly recognize Tim to also be, sits down near to him and begins to talk with the boy, mostly asking questions such as what book he’s reading, what music he’s listening to, etc. They exchange the names of their favorite poets, Tim enjoying Eliot while Jack prefers Rimbaud, while recognizing that they are a year apart in the university, Jack being a senior while Tim is a junior. Before long Jack asks if Tim might be interested in joining him for a coke, and Tim, agreeing, tells his father that he’s taking a short break.

     The boys continue talking, Tim finding Jack to be an agreeable and knowledgeable person with whom he appears to share many interests. Before long Jack has managed to lead to him the roof—a place usually closed and unknown to most students—in order to take in a remarkable view of downtown Los Angeles.

    There the two boys, after taking in the view, sit down next to one another and continue their conversation. Just as suddenly as he first appeared to Tim, Jack leans over and gives Tim a kiss on the cheek.

      For a long while Tim just sits in place, Jack finally standing and walking a few feet away while Tim remains sitting in apparent astonishment. He doesn’t bolt, even when a janitor suddenly appears on the scene asking why the boys are there yet allowing them to remain a short while longer before he closes up the rooftop door. It is as if Tim has hit a pane of glass like a bird dropped in his tracks to consider how to recover before taking flight.

      Finally Tim stands, Jack asking if they might at least change phone numbers. Tim claims he has a poor memory for numbers. They have no pens or pencils, so Jack says he’ll give him his e-mail address, but as they begin to go back down to the swim meet, Tim suddenly suggests they leave separately—after all his whole family is waiting below. It is almost as if the two have had sex and may prove the fact by appearing together in public immediately after.

      He returns to find his brother, his girlfriend, and father all standing by their car, the father suggesting they were ready to leave without him.

      As they are about to drive off, Jack again appears, the car slowing down, the father apparently wondering if the stranger has something more to say to his son, but seeing no sign of recognition in Tim’s expression, Jack says nothing, and the car drives off.

        It’s a sad story actually. Two obviously gay boys might have started a relationship had it not been for the evident reluctance on Tim’s part to assert a friendship with the other boy. Yet we also know by his refusal to give himself away even a little, in his near-desperate insistence on remaining the “good son” to his father, that something momentous has just happened, something that he has changed him forever. We now recognize Tim is no longer the “good son” compared with his athletically-achieving brother who has found a serious girlfriend. Tim is now a different person than he previously was.

         This is not really a story about a new relationship between two boys, but concerns one boy’s new relationship with himself. If Tim does not meet up with Jack again, there will be other such young men in his future.

         Finally, this is a story about a father who not only will soon no longer recognize his son, but a man who perhaps has never quite known his child. Had he been less attentive to his other son’s athletic achievements he might have noticed that Tim went off with Jack and that, in the boy’s final refusal to recognize his new friend, something of great significance had happened between  them. It is almost as if his son, turning back to look at where he had just been (a sudden vision of Sodom), had been turned to stone. The son named Tim whom the father drives back home is no longer the same boy he drove to that event. Nothing has outwardly changed, but inwardly everything has. 

 

Los Angeles, May 8, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).   

 

 

Damian Overton | Arlo and the Sea / 2023

message without evidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Damian Overton (screenwriter and director) Arlo and the Sea / 2023

 

Recently I have been encountering a great many LGBTQ short films that instead of using dialogue have returned, quite strangely, to the techniques if silent cinema, employing narrative voices instead of intertitles.

      These are often very lovely to look-at works, as is Australian director Damian Overton's Arlo and the Sea, with quite lovely-to-look-at actors, who remain voiceless, thus not giving us a real clue to their acting abilities. Perhaps it’s simply cheaper. You buy pretty boys for their looks instead of their acting talents.     

      The pretty boys, as in so very many gay movies these days, lay out on the beach and smile, sometimes pretending to engage with the other.

     Consequently, since we have no voice involved we are dependent entirely upon the storytelling-like narrative, which frankly, in most cases, is quite empty. Arlo (Ruben Russo) a young man who loves the sea, falls in love with Finn (Paris Moletti). How they meet, what is the basis of their love, and most importantly since this is the film’s apparent theme, why Finn leaves him is absolutely and almost insistently not established. This reads like a fairy-tale of disappointment and resilience.

      Poor Arlo goes into a deep depression, as in many a gay 21st century gay films bathing fully clothed in a bathtub under whose water he sinks for endless minutes.

      Despite the funk into which Arlo retreats after the disappearance of his magic lover Finn, life goes on for Arlo, who, we are told, will eventually discover another lover.

      The end. Good for the myth, but how this film empties out everything else but pretty pictures and an overly-annunciated narrative voice (Kieton Beilby) doesn’t give me a clue why I should care about anything that happened to Arlo or what he might do in the future.

       This film, along the several others of these narrative-told movies, are some of the emptiest cinematic productions I have ever encountered. I never much liked the New Critical Theory dictates, but I certainly must agree, in this case, that a story should show us instead of tell.

       And I have to admit, like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, frankly Arlo, I don’t give a damn.  

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).