Wrik Mead | Closet Case / 1995

escaping bondage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (screenwriter and director) Closet Case / 1995

 

In his 1995 three-minute film Closet Case, Canadian filmmaker Wrik Mead literalizes a gay man, who after hiding his sexuality for however long, finally begins to escape and expose himself to the world.      

     We first see the figure lying on the floor straight-jacketed and bound, barely able to move. Gradually, however, he (or even “it” as far as we know) somehow begins to undo the lower half of the torso, usually the first part of the body which actually does reveal its true inclinations given that it contains the sexual organs of all individuals. Finally the figure strips away all bindings below the belt, so to speak, standing naked, with arms and chest still strapped and bound, a complete covering over the head hiding its identity.

      Gradually, but still struggling, he (since we have seen his penis we can now assume the figure is male) pulls away the bandages of his bondage—and indeed the entire nature of his original state might be compared to a sadomasochistic drama—until we can finally also glimpse his rather thin hairless chest (suggesting he may be younger than we first thought). And finally, with freed hands, he can now pull off his head covering, at the last few moments of the film revealing himself to be a rather handsome young man (David Archer), presumably now ready to face the world if not the camera lens, which having captured his struggle to free himself from bondage, is now suddenly closed.

      Obviously, Mead’s literal rendering of the process is comic, but at the same time it turns what is usually presented as a psychological battle—wherein the individual, after a long series of contradictory actions, admits to the reality of his own sexuality to family, friends, or lover—into a truly physical struggle, helping us to truly realize just how seriously perverted the restraints put upon the closeted man were, how they have hidden his beauty behind what appears to be a version of total madness.

      In a matter of three minutes, accordingly, Mead retells the “coming out” story which commonly in real time takes months or years to perform and in cinematic tellings generally lasts from twenty minutes in a work such as Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) to something close to two hours in films like Get Real and Edge of Seventeen (both 1998), and even several years in series such as the “Will Lexington” episodes from television’s Nashville (2012-2019).

 

Los Angeles, January 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).

 

Herbert Ross | Boys on the Side / 1995

you got it!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Roos (screenplay), Herbert Ross (director) Boys on the Side / 1995

 

Last evening, after watching for the first time Herbert Ross’ 1995 film Boys on the Side, I was pondering just why I so enjoyed this film. This was Ross’ last film in a career that certainly did not distinguish him as a major director, and I actively disliked his films California Suite, Nijinksy, and Funny Lady; and even though I found his Funny Girl, The Goodbye Girl, Pennies from Heaven, and Steel Magnolias pleasant viewing, it was mostly the acting that had made those films memorable. That might have been case with this road film, given that unlike Thelma and Louise, with which this work has many links and even obliquely refers to, it has none of cinematic zest of Ridley Scott’s work and is satisfied with representing the vast American landscape—which might have been used as an important statement about the values of the culture at large as opposed to those of its characters—with brightly lit signs of Shakey’s, Wendy’s, Dunkin Donuts, and other popular chains along with a few glimpses of bleak-and-blink wintery towns en route to Tucson, where they eventually wind up.

 

    Ross, moreover, has a manner of rendering each of his scenes as if it were part of a stage play, bringing out the actors who engage in a heated dialogue before slowly closing everything down to a resolve and blackout. Sometimes it works, but mostly it barricades the overall action of cinematic narrative, forcing us to start all over again.

     And even though I’d argue that Whoopi Goldberg as the film’s central figure, Jane DeLuca, is a magnificent actor, terribly underrated in the several films in which she’s performed, her role here, as almost always, is that of the loving cynic which for most American audiences doesn’t make her terribly likeable—but of course it is the very reason that those of us who her admire her feel she’s a necessary tonic to people like this film’s White Anglo Protestant admirer of the musical group The Carpenters, Robin Nickerson (Mary-Louis Parker) who hasn’t yet found a word as an adult woman dying of AIDS to describe her vagina. Drew Barrymore represents her character Holly Pulchik mostly as a giggling, daffy, and not very bright nymphomaniac who is brought under control only through the law-abiding romantic attentions of the policeman Abe Lincoln (Matthew McConaughey), he perhaps the truly most interesting figure in the entire film (but I’ll come back to that latter.) So one can’t even argue, sanely, that it’s Ross’ brilliant actors who save the day.

       In the end, I guess I’d have say what made to me so love this little film was the way writer Dan Roos represented moral values, in a manner that strangely reminds me how John Waters captured a true vision of a caring and loving family in his absolutely irreligious, sexually twisted tale Pecker (1998). In fact Roos takes his film from three years earlier into even more seemingly perverted territory, asking how might a forlorn lesbian who’s just lost her lover and job, a lost and confused nice girl who has discovered that her bartender lover has quite literally “left” her with AIDS, and a young ditz involved in an abusive relationship with a drug dealer who, mostly to protect herself, she plunks with a baseball bat which kills him, all come together, on the run, to represent what true love and family are all about. They are surely better than any family ever concocted in some contorted picture created and promoted to rhyme with the American Dream, apple pie, and the average Joe by those folks so many Americans hold so dear, Norman Rockwell, John Wayne, or Walt Disney.

      But I well know that all of us who share such odd views realize having such opinions will not make us popular in this ole USA today. I’d never visited nor even known of the Christian film site Movieguide, but strangely ran upon it this morning while researching reviews of this movie. It described it actually quite accurately, while obviously drawing quite opposing conclusions:

 

 “Manipulation abounds in Boys on the Side, which director Herbert Ross calls ‘a film about the creation, evolution and resolution of a family unit.’ On the contrary, this movie is nothing more than an audacious attempt at redefining the traditional family. The script even goes so far as to define one’s family as whomever one ends up with in life, regardless of race, creed, sexual preference, personal taste, or criminal record — sort of a ‘last man standing’ approach. Reasonably well acted (with the exception of Drew Barrymore) but filled with blistering obscenities and sexual immorality, Boys on the Side strongly supports homosexuality as a viable lifestyle, viewed as negative only by unreasonably biased and bigoted homophobes. The movie offers no hope for redemption and only brief solace in crisis, substituting politically correct precepts on social behavior in the place of true ‘family’ values.”

 

      And indeed, this film is very much about manipulation, although I am not sure to what or to whom the Christian critic meant that word to refer. The film does represent a great many forms of manipulation. Holly’s drug-dealing lover goes so far as to beat her up in order to keep her serving him by his side.

      It’s likely that Robin’s bartender lover was playing the field, maybe even bisexually, in not telling her the truth about his health. The film makes no reference to this, but it’s clear through the woman’s fear of the male species, exemplified by her attraction to and yet repulsion of a later admirer, Alex (James Remar)—incidentally, also a bartender—as well as her growing curiosity about the lesbian life that Jane leads, that she has been hurt not just by the disease that her bartender has passed on to her, but his utter betrayal of her sexual trust.

     Jane, in turn, herself has apparently been manipulated by her lesbian ex-lover into believing that their relationship was a thing of permanence. And the entire system in which she works and lives, from the small bars in which she performs her music to the larger American heterosexually normative environment that surrounds, works to make her as a gay black woman feel as an outsider, unworthy of even being heard let alone being believed, realties that are later played out in the courtroom scenes regarding Holly’s unintentional murder of her abusive mate, which uses even Jane’s friendship with Holly as further evidence of Holly’s unconditionally evil behavior and guilt.

      When we finally meet Robin’s mother—although we gradually grow to like her and realize that she too has been changed as a result of how society has treated women—we also recognize that as a mother of the young Robin she has been a manipulator as well.

      Even Jane, in telling Alex about Robin’s AIDS, both to encourage him to attend to her and to warn him of the dangers, is guilty of attempting to manipulate her friend’s situation, which explains and justifies Robin’s temporary breaking away from their relationship.

    But I have the feeling that our Christian commentator was not interested in those sorts of manipulations, but more in the writer’s and director’s so-called manipulation of traditional Christian visions of reality. Certainly, we must admit that Ross’ and Roos’ storytelling is manipulative. They are clearly making a case for a vision that lies outside of the traditional American story, and Ross uses his theatrical skills to make us perceive just how truly likeable, despite outward appearances, these women are. That’s the job of a good director and an intelligent storyteller. But our commentator, I suspect, sees that as being part of what he describes earlier as its “politically correct propaganda,” although I know of no political party in 1995 that might have stood behind any of the values that this movie advocates, and cannot even imagine that most university faculties of the day (or even now) might voice full support of such ideas that the film embraces. In fact, it is the values of the commentator, I might argue, that have become far more “politically correct,” at least a certain party that seeks to reduce the possibility that we might share varying views.

       But he is also right it citing that the film displays a great deal of obscenity, particularly in the way Holly’s boyfriend Nick (Billy Wirth) treats “his” woman, and obviously in the way the judicial system in this work devalues individuals like Holly and Jane. Or even in how Robin’s mother first reacts when she discovers that Jane is lesbian and has been living in the same house with her daughter. A society that permitted presidents such as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush to describe AIDS as a gay disease and accordingly refuse to properly fund research to seek a cure was truly obscene and even criminal, causing the unnecessary deaths of many thousands. A world in which someone like Jane could never marry her lover should is recognized as being obscene. And all of that has led Jane to fully express her anger through her vocabulary, although the language of this film does not seem to me particularly filled with obscenities except perhaps for the scene in which Jane simply attempts to help her friend find a word to describe her vagina. But once more, I presume our Christian monitor was offended by just that and Jane’s righteous cussing.

      I must disagree, however, with our believer’s insistence that his film necessarily argues or even fully embraces homosexuality. Indeed among the three leads, only Jane is gay, and Holly—who has evidently sexually experimented with Jane in the past—warns Robin away from Jane and suggests Jane stay away from Robin. Robin is thoroughly straight, even if she gradually comes to perceive why a woman might be sexually attracted to another woman. She remains a straight woman who in contracting the dreaded AIDS gives evidence of the truth that it is not a homosexual disease. And the film’s only homosexual, at film’s end, remains the only one throughout the film without a sexual companion. Holly, Robin, and Robin’s mother all seem uncomfortable, at least at first, with Jane’s sexuality. Accordingly, I hardly would describe this film as “supporting” homosexuality, although as loving and kind individuals, they all do grow to accept Jane for who she is. But there is certainly no advocation of the gay cause nor are they or anyone else described as homophobes (even if some viewers, including me, may see them that way) by the film itself. Jane is a viable (someone capable of working successful), feasibly living human being, if that’s what our Christian means, and accordingly her sexuality is equally “viable.” I presume he and his viewers would prefer to see her to be presented as incompetent and unable even to survive, the way the court would like to portray her. But such a portrait would not be truthful to the world in which most of us live.

      But again, our nameless cinematic judge (calling himself “Frodo & Harry”) is quite correct when he or she argues that the film is “an audacious attempt at redefining the traditional family.” For the family they together create with others of their community is certainly far superior to any family life that the characters might encounter in the traditional notions of that word. We do not even know what kind of family life Jane and Holly lived before they reached adulthood, but we can imagine, given their behavior and current reactions, that it is anything but loving and caring. Gay people, often abused and totally unaccepted by their birth parents, necessarily seek family in communal forms and successfully live their quite “viable” lives in that manner. And certainly if Holly’s previous relationship might be described as “traditional” it was also destructive and ultimately deadly.

      In fact, Abe Lincoln, the policeman, although a true believer in honesty, law, and order (all purportedly strong Christian values) comes to love Holly so much that he is willing to marry her, despite the time he forces her to serve in jail for having committed “aggravated assault,” and willingly adopts her child, which turns out not even to have been Nick’s baby, but obviously a black or Hispanic man with whom she slept. Abe, it turns out, is the most loving and traditionally Christian being in the entire work, and yet he fully accepts the family community which the women have created.

     I might add, finally, that Robin’s own mother also becomes part of that wonderful familial community. So Boys on the Side has indeed presented an alternative to the traditional family that seems to me to represent everything that the traditional family seldom does: acceptance of its members, love and caring for their well-being, and, as Jane sings to Robin in the closing song of the film, several beings who are unconditionally committed to offering their loved ones what Ray Orbison promised:

 

Anything you want, you got it

Anything you need, you got it

Anything at all, you got it, baby

 

     I would suggest that we all desire just such a family, whether or not the one in this film is truly possible or simply something fondly to be desired.

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

Joaquim Leitão | Adão e Eva (Adam and Eve) / 1995

three fathers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joaquim Leitão (screenwriter and director) Adão e Eva (Adam and Eve) / 1995

 

Despite the radical changes now touted after the 1970s events surrounding Stonewall, even as late as the 1990s—with some notable exceptions—US films were still rather coy and polite in their basic avoidance of the subject homosexuality. The highly serious but still relatively discrete AIDS drama Philadelphia was hyped in 1993 for its daring honesty and deeply felt presentation of gay sexuality despite the existence of the far superior and truly radical independent films on the subject such as Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s Buddies and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances released as early as 1985 and 1986, both directors themselves dying of AIDS.

           To be fair, one must give credit to exceptions such as NBC’s problematic film on AIDS, An Early Frost, with a teleplay Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman and directed by Sherman Yellen, also released in 1985, which instead of focusing as the other two had on the dying gay man, dissipated its energies on the “terrible dilemma” of an ordinary American family having to face up to fact of a son dying of a “gay” disease, without the father ever truly focusing on what homosexuality actually meant for young person during that terrible pandemic or allowing the film to have a fully open discussion of what homosexuality was all about. It muttered niceties and revealed some LGBTQ wounds but steered clear of sexuality itself.

      Similarly, the other “radical” commercial US film Arthur Hiller’s Making Love (1982) carefully tiptoed through a happily married man’s gradual discovery that he was gay and supposedly ruined actor Harry Hamlin’s career for playing the confused traitor to heterosexuality. And Norman René’s moving but terribly late-to-the-subject of AIDS movie, Longtime Companion (1989), viewed homosexuality and the disease which was then killing so many young gay men primarily through the lens of a wealthy TV producer and other fairly well-off acquaintances instead of facing down the pandemic as it suddenly hit those living ordinary lives such as Bressan and Sherwood had attempted basically shirked its reality.

      By 1995, the date of the Portuguese / Spanish movie I am about to discuss, the US had only just begun to hint at what Ruby Rich described as a “New Queer Cinema” in the US which would begin to take on the quirky issues that even the staid, homosexually adverse British had long before brought up in Roger Tonge’s TV drama of two young gay boys who took to the road of 1987 in Two of Us or as in another general British TV release, Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1991) a world in which both father and son reveal their homosexuality at the same moment. No one in US commercial US filmmaking offered up such a radical vision of gay life such as British director Stephen Frears had in his film about a British punk and “Paki’s” unlikely gay relationship in My Beautiful Launderette (1985)—although I argue that underneath its shiny gay sheen it is truly a conservative affair that might have even appealed to Margaret Thatcher—to say nothing of the far more radical forays into LGBTQ life by the Germans such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Rosa von Praunheim, and others beginning a full decade earlier, and to totally ignore the Australian celebration of transgender and transsexual life in Stephen Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the varied political and social issues brought up by popular Canadian gay directors’ works of the 1980s and 90s such as John Greyson and Wrik Mead.* The Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar had already transformed Spanish film in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s with some of his most popular of his films.

     And suddenly even the seemingly docile and quiet Portugal wanted in on the new gay cinema with the production of Joaquim Leitão’s Almodóvar-influenced Adão e Eva. I began this essay with the incomplete history of gay film from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, in part, because despite the relative success in the US of Priscilla, presented as a minor commercial film here, one simply could not imagine that a film like Adam and Eve, produced, in part, by a private TV channel (the Portuguese SIC), might have a success in the US as it did in its home country where it become one of the biggest box-office hits in the history of Portuguese cinema.   

    The doe-eyed seeming innocent, but hard-hitting TV journalist Catarina Meneses (Maria de Medeiros) hardly seems like the kind of woman who might cause a major scandal, but like one of Almodóvar’s hard-headed feminists, she suddenly decides that despite the fact she is involved in a fairly happy lesbian relationship with Te (Ana Bustorff), she wants a baby, a subject to which Te evidently hasn’t been very open.

      In Spain, she calls up a noted Spanish humanitarian doctor Rafael Tristan (Karra Elejalde), offering up an important document that she has obtained from her journalistic channels that could help him in his political cause. She delivers it to him on a bus bench as if it were a top-secret document of national interest, looking about her as she lays it beside him as if spies might immediately be about to pounce.

      Rafael cannot at all imagine her secretive behavior and jokingly calls her Mata Hari, but doesn’t realize just how close he has come to the truth. For by pretending to be hurt by what she does for him, she lures him into a dinner date which winds up in his bed as the two have wonderful sex. She disappears by the time he awakens the next morning and searching the hotel and the name she has given finds not only that there has been no one registered under that name but that there has been no Iberian Conference she claimed to have been attending.

      Back in Lisbon, as she celebrates an evening out with Te she seems moody—she is actually suffering a secret pregnancy stomach ailment. And later when Te attempts to feel her breasts, she becomes adamant that she leave her alone, suddenly explaining the entire situation, and asking that they break up so that she can bear and raise child alone and in peace despite all the great times they have had together.

      Shocked and outraged at her sudden secret, Te grows violent, leaving only after issuing an ultimatum that she will get her revenge for her lover’s underhanded behavior.

        Meanwhile through his medical connections, Rafael tracks down Catarina’s address and discovers her pregnancy, matching the child’s blood-type with his own and realizing that he has been tricked into fathering her baby.

       As if that weren’t enough, Catharina has a vengeful enemy in another studio worker, Helena Amado (Cristina Carvalhal), who is equally determined to find a way to defeat the woman who has increasingly been receiving all the major television awards for her reporting, while she has been ignored.

        When in a single day—after she has been suffering intense morning sickness, she is threatened by her TV rival, Rafael shows up at her front door, and Te barges in to finally confront her ex-lover—chaos erupts. Te has what might be described as a nervous breakdown, tossing pots, paintings, and furniture at the fragile pregnant woman before finally slugging the Spanish visitor Rafael and knocking him out. As Catarina attempts to call an ambulance for Rafael, Te moves in for a further round of attacks and she is forced to strike back at Te to simply protect herself from being interrupted in seeking help. Te also falls to the floor in a coma

       At that very moment, reporters from a magazine show up to interview her. She quickly sends them away and calls up a friendly fellow worker, Francisco (Joaquim de Almeida), who just happens to be Te’s former husband, pleading for his assistance.

       Francisco not only temporarily helps extricate her from the chaos—placing both victims in hospitals and visiting them daily—but contributes to it as during the next few weeks as both recover, Te undergoing mental care as well, Catarina falls in love with her gentle “savior.”

       Three people now claim to be the father of her unborn baby, one biologically, the other through a growing love, and the third through love lost. And the rest of the film is a battleground seemingly littered by their own and other’s bodies, at the very moment her envious fellow journalist Helena, has figured out all of Catarina’s betrayals and threatens to expose her in a TV game show which she hosts.

       Miraculously, as Catharina attempts to both maintain their support and push away those who most love her, in her attempt to focus of the real subject at hand, her unborn daughter, they come together to save the day.

     Te takes Helena on a wild goose chase ending in a roll-over of the car in which they have been traveling, leaving the mean-spirited reporter in an isolated location the very night in which she had promised to meet the producer with the full evidence, which assures that she misses her TV opportunity to spill all she knows to her rapacious public.

      Having been brushed off, Francisco quietly stays near her just for her protection.

     Rafael has written her a letter explaining that he is now determined to return to Spain and leave her in peace, but hopes that he might remain in touch just for his own child’s sake.

     As Catarina wanders home eating an ice cream cone that she has long craved, she suddenly spots Francisco nearby and smiles as if possibly allowing him back into her life. But at the same she spots Te, obviously having come to meet Francisco to share what has happened to Helena. Taken aback by their being together again, Catharina steps back into the traffic. At that very moment Rafael, having left his package in Catarina’s mailbox, exits her apartment building, and being closest to Catarina, he leaps to save her from being hit by a taxi, himself falling to the ground with her.

      Francisco reaches the spot a few seconds later and calls for an ambulance—once more. But this time Rafael is not hurt and thankfully not dead, but opens his eyes and returns to the crazy world his almost sacrificed for her sake.

       In the next frame the three of them waiting outside Catarina’s hospital room where she has just borne a healthy daughter. Each of them claiming the father, they demand to see her and the baby, which she has named Eva. Francisco jokes that it’s good that Rafael survived for if he had not, the baby might be named Isolde (Tristan, if you recall, being Rafael’s last name).

        Order has been restored to Catarina’s terribly messy life through the love she had engendered from everyone who has met and known her—except, of course, for Helena, who undergoes her punishment through having to appear as the substitute guest on her own TV show, and who, when she refuses to answer a leading question about her feelings about her producer, is doused with a bucket of cold water.

        If Adam and Eve is not a great film, it is certainly a lot of fun, and takes its audiences to a much better place for understanding of the complexity of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual relationships than almost any US film of the early 1990s had succeeded in doing. US studios were being gradually dismantled or reestablished simply for the purposes of pop youth entertainment, leaving independents and small filmmakers with the possibilities of offering audiences more complex film experiences. Whether or not they succeeded is still open to question, but by the end of the decade LGBTQ concerns were no longer considered something that the movies could ignore.

 

*And I’m ignoring the many innovative French, Italian, and Scandinavian innovative gay films of the same period.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Ofir Raul Grazier | האופה מברלין (The Cakemaker) / 2017, USA 2018

undiscovered territory

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ofir Raul Grazier (writer and director) האופה מברלין (The Cakemaker) / 2017, USA 2018

Israeli director Ofir Raul Grazier’s first feature film is a gentle realist work, with little experimentation involved, but which is nonetheless complex and watchable. The Cakemaker might almost be characterized as one of the numerous food-based films (think Babette's Feast, Tampopo, Julie & Julia, and Chocolat)—except that this work explores, along with baking in this case, the issues of religion, sex, and cultural separation that are also the subtexts of two of the above films, Babette’s Feast and Chocolat, in an even more challenging manner.

        Not only are the major protagonists, at least in the early part of the film, an Israeli and a German, a married man and a single baker, but together they have a gay relationship in Berlin.

     They quickly fall in love with one another in Thomas' (Tim Kalkof) small café, which the Israeli-based Oren (Roy Miller) has apparently visited previously, since he not only orders up the baker’s German Black Forest (Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte) Cake, which the thin man chows down with relish, but orders a container of Thomas’ cinnamon cookies, which his Israeli wife, Anat (Sarah Adler), he reports, loves. After finishing his sweets, the stranger asks if the baker might suggest what Oren buy as a birthday gift for his young son. After inquiring what the father does for a living—Oren works for an Israeli-German train corporation—he suggests a nearby toy shop where model trains are made and painted by hand. And we suddenly realize, when he asks if Thomas might accompany him to the shop, that something is a bit odd here. By the next scene we see are the couple about to kiss. 

      The later scenario already establishes that the men have become regular lovers, Oren living with Thomas every time he visits Berlin. Yet, Grazier creates an even more subtle relationship between the two as Thomas queries the obviously bisexual Oren about his sex-life with Anat, suggesting that he, too, might share an interest in women. In short, before we have gone far into this film the director has already established a vision, so we might imagine, of sexualities that accords with his equal presentation of massive cultural differences, a young German male living with an Israeli Jewish man.

      When Oren leaves to return to Jerusalem this time, he forgets both his keys and the cinnamon cookies, leading Thomas to call him on his cellphone. There is no answer, again and again, until finally he attempts to contact his lover at his office, where he told that Oren has died in a car accident. And it is at this point where Grazier’s would-be tale of an odd gay couple becomes something even stranger, as Thomas determines to travel to Jerusalem to discover, so we might imagine, what happened to his former companion.

      My clause, “so we might imagine,” is important since the director never tells us what his characters are truly thinking, but represents it only in their silent actions, made even more silent in Thomas’ case when he arrives in the Hebrew-speaking world of Israel, where people can communicate with him only in English. Things are not made easier by the fact that, as Grazier clearly shows us, this world does not easily embrace outsiders—particularly German outsiders.

      Moreover, the audience is itself put on edge as we recognize that this particular outsider is almost literally stalking Oren’s wife and child Itai, going so far, with the use of Oren’s left-behind keys, as to open up a locker at a local swimming club and slipping in to the dead man’s swimming trunks.

     Ultimately, he even finds employment as a dishwasher in the café that Anat owns, gradually inserting himself into her and Itai’s life. Given the stresses on Oren’s widow and son, not only the sudden loss of their major provider and clearly a loving husband and father, but along with the constant religious reminders impressed upon her by her brother Moti (Zohar Strauss), it is not terribly difficult for Thomas to enter their lives. When her son suddenly goes missing as a runaway from school, the baker is asked to take over the kitchen, pitting peppers so that that they might be stuffed. We know what she does not, that he is an expert chef, and that he now will be unable to resist the empty oven. Yet the very fact that he opens the oven to bake his delicious cookies is perceived by some as a grave indiscretion.

     When Itai arrives at the café, Thomas skillfully handles the situation by serving him up a hot chocolate and, when Itai finally comes into the kitchen by his own will, allowing him to help decorate the cookies. It is a lovely scene wherein we realize that Thomas might also be a loving father to a child, one which the returning Anat witnesses from a nearby window.

       Yet her brother is furious when he discovers that Thomas has dared to open the stove, which might mean that his sister would lose her Kosher status. And just like the endless microphonic calls to Sabbat, his are shouts of exclusion rather than embracement. However, the not so religious Anat continues to sell Thomas’ cookies to great success. Although Moti may be wary, he helps to find Thomas a nice apartment and invites him to Sabbath dinner. When he later shows up, invited, to Itai’s birthday party with a delicious cake in hand and somewhat drenched from a rainstorm that has impeded his visit, Anat tells him to change into her husband’s clothes, and the tale spins round to an artful conclusion.

      Finally made curious about her husband’s remaining documents, she opens the box to discover his numerous receipts from Thomas’ Berlin bakery and begins to perceive the truth—which in this lovely film is never openly spoken. Eventually the two, Thomas and Amat, have sex, soon after which her brother hands him a ticket back to Berlin.

       Amat, the seemingly accepting one, however, follows him to Berlin. We don’t know whether she plans to confront him or to begin a new life with her husband’s former lover in another world. As throughout so much of this lovely film, the intentions of the characters, even their intimate feelings, remain secret and are kept in silence. Individuals behave in ways that cannot always be known, only witnessed in their actions or what we believe are their actions. Love and sexuality are always an undiscovered territory that cannot be easily explained.  

 

Los Angeles, December 12, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).