Gary Halvorson and Willy Decker | La Traviata / 2012 [HD-live broadcast]

 count down

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (music), Francesco Maria Piave (libretto, after the play La dame aux camellias, by Alexandre Dumas fils) Willy Decker (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) / 2012 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

In this Willy Decker / Wolfgang Gussman production of Verdi’s standard, there is no consumptive coughing, no overdressed man and women attending the red-plumaged Violetta. Bringing the story into a more contemporary period, the director and designer have established from the outset—through the presence of a gigantic, surrealist-like clock, that the consumptive courtesan’s time is short. The entire set, in fact, appears as a giant waiting room with a long, curving cement-like embankment and an elliptical mezzanine where the choruses, a bit like observing doctors, can look down upon the theater of operation, Violetta’s “apartment,” wherein she plays out the short life she has yet to live.

     In some respects, this expressionistic set overstates everything, and certainly does not allow any dramatic tension about the inevitability of the plot. But it does free up the characters to symbolically enact a ritual which, after all, is not about story in the first place, but centered on the intense musical relationships of the three major characters: Violetta (Natalie Dessay), Alfredo (Matthew Polenzani), and his father Giorgio (Dimitri Hvorostovsky).

     Dessay, a trained actress, begins the opera as a performer about to go on stage, the way many have described Judy Garland offstage just before her entry, her small frame suddenly rising into a figure slightly larger than life. Violetta, having recovered from a recent consumptive attack, is weak, not at all sure she might be able to attend the party she is throwing that night. But bit by bit she pulls together, transforming herself into the party girl in short red dress her guests—men and women all dressed in black and white suits—have come to expect. This “bacchanal,” however, is closer to a mined performance of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge than it is to Verdi’s original salon party. The champagne they drink is from empty glasses, the camellia obviously a silk flower. Dessay has not only to sing of “Sempre libera degg’io,” but, raised and lowered, on a red couch, must balance herself and dance upon the prop. She is, in short, less a consumptive woman confined to a couch than a jumping, singing acrobat. And any joys she may have in her party-life seem those that come from a successful theatrical performance than a lust for life. If Dessay was contrite, during the intermission, for having missed one of her high notes, it was easy for her appreciative audience to forgive her given her otherwise beautiful singing during her energetic apologia to the “good life.”

     It is little wonder that we find her, in the second act, having capitulated, escaping with Alfredo to the country. In the flower laden landscape of Alfredo’s world, Violetta becomes almost young again, wrapped in a flower-laden housecoat, playing hide-and-seek among the flower-covered couches. Indeed, she becomes one with the couches, becomes herself something and someone other than her former self. In this production it is immediately apparent why Violetta has given up her Parisian life; even the dreadful clock, ticking down the hours left to her, is half-covered in the same pattern, and the elliptical has become a kind of garden. The snake creeps into this paradisiacal world with her servant’s revelation that Violetta is selling her Paris belongings to support her country life. Alfred is determined to rectify the situation, rushing off to Paris, allowing the more horrific Satan, Alfredo’s bourgeois father Giorgio, time to destroy her momentary joy in life.

    For Giorgio, Violetta is, at first, nothing more than a selfish courtesan out to steal his son’s money and affections. Gradually, however, when that vision proves difficult to sustain, he employs the usual tricks of men who cannot escape the petty limitations of a societally controlled life: his beautiful daughter will lose her fiancé if Alberto does not return home. Crueler yet, Giorgio tells Violetta of her own destiny, her loss of beauty and betrayal, perhaps, by Alfredo himself. As Violetta notes, the punishment for her libertine lifestyle comes not from God but from man. Even Giorgio, however, finally comes to recognize Violetta’s sacrifice, singing in a beautiful aria (Hvorostovsky at the top of his form) of her love and generosity.

     So pure is Violetta’s love that she agrees, most reluctantly, to give up Alfredo and return to Paris, knowing now that her fate will be an early death. Accepting an invitation to her friend Flora’s costume ball, she pretends to take up once more with her former protector Baron Bouphol.

     While in Verdi’s original, the costume ball was replete with gypsies and bullfighters, the new Met version has mixed these with costumed performers from the partygoers, along with a male dressed as Violetta in mockery of her return to their world. If the whole scene is a kind of confusing mish-mash at times, it still makes more sense than the presence of these “types” at the grand ball, and their taunting tales only reiterate what we know, Violetta’s life as a grand courtesan is over. The clock itself is now transformed into a gambling table where Alfredo, who in revenge has rushed back to Paris, wins, tossing his winnings at and stuffing them into Violetta’s orifices in what is clearly a kind of capitalist rape. Even Giorgio, having followed his son to the party, is shocked by Alfredo’s behavior, but then propriety is at the heart of his torturous demands.

     The party-goers, now carnival celebrants, reenter this cold waiting room once again, this time with another women, clad in red dress, strapped to the clock. Violetta is no longer the life of the party; she has almost been drained of life.

     Sick and suffering, with just a few hours to live, she awaits the return of Alfredo who, having survived his duel with the Baron, has discovered the truth of Violetta’s abandonment and has written of her determination to see her once again. As in any grand opera, the lovers reunite to imagine the possibility of life as they once lived it, a reunification that the audience has known is impossible from the start. For a second, just before her death, the courtesan is relieved of all pain and age, until she faints away, both Alfredo and Giorgio left to face their own failures of faith in her love.

     Some of the subtlety of this opera may have been lost in the symbolic posturings of Decker’s and Gussman’s vision, but the overall dramatic impact, particularly in Dessay’s powerful performance, remains, and La Traviata seldom wavers in its musical splendor as this grand courtesan had in her past.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2012

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2012).

Mat Plendl | Revenge of the Wicked Witch / 1993

the wicked witch of the west gets a gig in las vegas

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mat Plendl (screenwriter and performer) Revenge of the Wicked Witch / 1993

 

Despite The Wizard of Oz’s truly iconic position as a gay classic, I have always felt a bit uncomfortable describing it as a LGBTQ pic. Yes, there is the cowardly “dandy-lion,” a girl who feels quite unhappy with her current identity, and an entire world of fairy pixies she dreams up as an alternative to her rural Kansas life. The witches of her real world represent strictures of authority which she would like to escape but has no way of doing so despite the love of her practical Auntie Em and uncle. In visiting the wonderful and colorful world of Oz, Dorothy has clearly entered a queer world of possibility. In the process she rediscovers her ability to think, her heart, and her courage, all the things a young possible lesbian girl might need to come to terms with herself. But…this is a world that is coded even beyond what one might describe as a 1939 coded film. It’s a truly wonderful fantasy that isn’t truly about sex—which I’d argue is at the heart of all LGBTQ films. But The Wizard of Oz is a coming-out story for anyone who feels compelled to be like everyone else in his or her community, straight or gay equally, which is why it is so totally appealing.

      But then there’s this wonderful 1993 deconstruction of the film by Mat Plendl, which deliciously and quite queerly explores the wickedness, several years before the far blander Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz Wicked (2003), in a manner closer to the later gay comic entertainer Randy Rainbow.

      Plendl has reclaimed the original story, like a fractured fairy-tale, as an evil Grimm-like story in which the witch is no longer villain but a secret hero, desperate for the ruby slippers in order to prove herself to her family who have obviously disowned her for her wicked ways. She is the true lesbian hero to which the sweet Dorothy might only aspire to, witches long being associated in literary and cinematic presentations of lesbian behavior (read my essays on Bell, Book, and Candle of 1958 or Ulrike Ottinger’s Laocoön & Sons from 1975, and there are others).

      Through his wonderful performance addressed to plastic flamingos, a representation of the famed Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, this dissatisfied bitchy witch wants the ruby slippers simply to get the powers from which she, the outsider, has so long been refused. (“The shoes sure are pretty. Pretty enough to kill for? I bet you’re just about do go tippy-toe down the yellow-brick road to break ‘em in.”)

       But since the story doesn’t really permit it, she sourly settles on forgiveness and a new act in Vegas where Plendl pelts out several witchlike songs, including Lorenz Hart’s and Richard Rodger’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic,” and Carolyn Leigh and Moose Charlap’s “I’m Flying.”

      Plendl’s movie displays a true camp spirit that, in a sense, redeems the somewhat saccharine tale of Dorothy in dusty Kansas, to end by suggesting to Auntie Em “There’s no place like Vegas.”

     This version of The Wizard truly confirms its queerness and over-the-top excess.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

 

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).