Nagisa Ōshima | 御法度 (Gohatto) (Taboo) / 1999

attempting to possess beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nagisa Ōshima (screenplay, based on Shinsengumi Keppūroku by Ryōtarō Shiba), Nagisa Ōshima (director) 御法度 (Gohatto) (Taboo) / 1999

 

The great Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima’s last film, Gohatto is a complex and ambiguous movie that might, upon first viewing, be difficult for Hollywood-bred audiences. I suggest for US audiences originally coming to this film that they see the work’s beautiful hero, Kanō Sōzaburō (Ryuhei Matsuda) to be a bit like Herman Melville’s character Billy Budd—without all the Christian trappings.

     Clearly, Sōzaburō (I use Kanō’s first name throughout to give him equal weight to the HMS Bellipotent crew’s beloved Billy) is no stand-in for Christ. He has willingly joined the Japanese Shinsengumi, the elite samurai order of the mid-nineteenth century, specifically, as he puts it, “to have the right to kill.” Unlike Billy, this stunningly beautiful young man has not been stolen, against his will from another merchant ship, but has willingly joined up for the promised sword-play. And kill he does, perhaps as many as three times in a film wherein the other warriors see no violence whatsoever.   

     Finally, if Sōzaburō is tied to any ineffable beings, it is to the world of the ugetsu, the world of the rain and the moon or, more explicitly, to the world of ghosts, not to the human incarnation of the son of God.

     Yet, much like Billy this 18-year-old Japanese samurai, once permitted “on board” at the samurai academy, certainly sets the male hearts aflutter. Chuck Stephens, writing in Film Comment described the new recruit as “some sort of teenage daydream: a pale and lethal alien from the glitter side of the moon.” And much like Melville’s young hero, we know almost from the beginning that all will not end well.

     Melville, writing for a late 19th century American audience could not openly express whether Billy actually gave into his various sailor-mates’ desires and lusts, but for the all-male samurai homosexuality was the highest level of love, and Ōshima leaves no question about the prurient interests of Sōzaburō’s barrack mates and his superiors. From the very first moment that he watches the beautiful boy in a mock fight against Captain Okita Sōji (Shinji Takeda),Vice-Commander Hijikata Toshizō (renowned actor Takeshi Kitano), the Captain Vere of this story, suddenly opens up his usually inexpressive face to a slight grin as he begins to talk of those who are “inclined,” evidently including himself; and even if he does not actively seek out sex with the bishonen (the “beautiful boy”), he watches over him as carefully as a mother hen would care for her new-born chick, assigning him as his own aide, while placing another promising recruit, Hyōzō Tashiro (Tadanobu Asano) to Okita’s First Unit.

     Even he, however, recognizes the dangers of allowing such a figure into a deep pool of unfulfilled, testosterone-fueled desire—and later, the Commander (Yoichi Sai), having heard that the beautiful new recruit has taken on a lover, reminds his second-in-charge, "This has happened before. Passion influences the heart and this in turn means trouble. It must not happen again.—yet Hijikata’s grin says everything. He is delighted for what today we might describe as the “eye-candy” standing before him despite his tentative fears of what might happen to his men—and, of course, to the boy.

    Stephens quotes writer Ian Buruma, referring, in turn, to yet another commentator Nosaka Akiyuki: “a true bishonen has to have something sinister about him. The vision of pure youth, because of its fragility perhaps, reminds one of impermanence, thus of death. In fact, youth is beautiful precisely because it is so short-lived. The cult of cherry blossoms, which only last about a week in Japan, is the same as the worship of the bishonen, and the two are often compared. Taken one small step further [the cult of the bishonen] is the cult of death.”

     And Stephens himself, in his terribly insightful if inconclusive essay, notes the trajectory of this film: “Delicious in design, delirious with detail, Gohatto was photographed in and around ancient temples in Kyoto. Its mysterious appeal is poly-demographic: anime admirers, romance aficionados, fans of Mishima and Hana-bi, young lovers on a date—this is the Ōshima film for you.”

     We get a scene out of Mishima almost immediately in this work. In part to test him his willingness to accept death, Hijikata immediately assigns him the beheading of a fellow samurai who has been caught borrowing money. If the samurai are permissive regarding male on male sexual activity, their codes are highly strict regarding everything else, and anyone who is caught violating the code must disembowel himself. The beheading evidently reveals that the swordsman is only “suspected” of having violated that code.

     Just as Sōzaburō has shown his skill as a swordsman a day earlier, he severs the head with simple aplomb after uttering the traditional phrase before the kill, “Forgive me.”

     Already Tashiro has attempted to claim Sōzaburō as his lover, while the beauty has pretended to sleep; and soon after he visits the bishonen’s sleeping mat yet again, prepared to spend the night. Yet as he turns the boy over for a kiss, Sōzaburō puts a small knife to Tashiro’s neck (later, we discover the knife has been stolen from the would-be assailant himself), making it clear that he desires no lovemaking with the lusting swordsman.

      Soon after, however, when Hijikata pairs up the two for a fight, the perceived better swordsman

Sōzaburō succumbs to Tashiro, which seemingly proves to the Vice-Commander that the two have now sexually entwined, the rumor of which quickly spreads around the barracks. The narrator, who intrudes from time to time throughout the film, makes a point that much in this all-male world is based on just such rumors.

      It is not that Sōzaburō is disinclined for male sex. When Commander Kondö is called to Hiroshima, Hijikata is put in charge of the official residence, and moves his best men, including Sōzaburō, to the Commander’s far more ornate palace. Nearby, wined and dined by an older samurai, Tojiro Yuzawa (Tomorowo Taguchi), Sōzaburō seemingly sexually succumbs to the man’s passion twice, begging him only not to tell Tashiro about the events.

      When, soon after, Yuzawa is found dead, the officers and those in the barracks all suspect Tashiro; later when asked by a sergeant whether Yuzawa attempted to have sex with him, Sōzaburō replies truthfully, but lies when he reports that he resisted.

       To help mitigate further advances, Hijikata insists that his trusted Inspector, Sergeant Yamazaki (Masa Tomiizu) take the beautiful boy to a geisha house, since Sōzaburō is still a virgin when it comes to women. Yamazaki carefully arranges everything, including choosing the establishment’s youngest and most beautiful woman. Three times after the sergeant asks the boy to accompany him to the inn, the bishonen refuses, finally, on the fourth try, accepts. The sergeant, in another effort to enforce normalcy suggests that the boy is now old enough to cut his chonmage, the long ponytail that accentuates his youth. But  Sōzaburō refuses, declaring that he has made a “vow.” To whom and why we cannot imagine. Surely not to the sexually rejected Tashiro; or has he been rejected, we must ask.

       Along the way, Sōzaburō breaks the strap of his shoe and embraces Yamazaki’s hand intensely as the sergeant attempts to help. Finally, he ensconces the boy in the proper room, and returns home. When he returns the next day to check on the encounter, the geishas report that it was a disaster, that Sōzaburō refused to lay with the girl. One proffers her belief that the boy only wanted to go to bed with Yamazaki himself, and had been waiting for him.

       Later Yamazaki is himself attacked back in quarters, but is able to scare the would-be killer away. The knife he finds nearby seemingly belongs to Tashiro.

       To solve the lustmord that is quickly escalating the Commander orders the beautiful boy to kill his presumed lover, Tashiro. He also orders Hijikata and Okita, to whose divisions Sōzaburō and Tashiro had been assigned, to hide a short distance from the encounter to observe the execution without intruding. We are, in fact, not sure that it is it an “execution” and simply not another attempt for their superiors to prove which of the two was truly the superior swordsman.

      In the moonlit quite ethereal landscape—created by an artificial backdrop—all has become ambiguous, and Okita’s questions further confuse us as he challenges Hijikata himself about his relationship with the bishonen. Yamazaki is offended. But Okita continues, describing a long ugetsu tale he has read about a soldier taking an enemy soldier he has maimed in combat into his home in order to nurse him to health. Gradually, the two become friends and find themselves growing even closer before one of them is forced to kill himself for having fallen in love.

      Troubled by all this discussion of male love, Hijikata temporarily turns the table, so to speak, wondering why Okita has been so observant of his and others’ reactions to the boy and querying his interest in such ugetsu stories.

      Okita declares not only is he “not inclined” but, in a kind of early homophobia we now might equate to being closeted, tells Hijikata that he hates both of the young recruits. He reads the ghost stories only for their beauty of their structures, not for their content.

      Sōzaburō and Tashiro approach one another, the younger boy claiming that Tashiro has killed two men over his love for him. Tashiro quickly rejects the charge, claiming that he knows that   Sōzaburō has long ago stolen his knife. As the two swordsmen begin to fight, it becomes apparent that indeed Tashiro is the superior of the two, at one point towering over his would-be lover who cries out “Forgive me.”

       That, we recall, is the cry of the executioner about to behead a prisoner. But Tashiro has arrived too late for that early execution (which it was illegal for him to attend) to recall it, or more likely, he hears it as an impassioned cry of the man he still loves. In any event, he lets up just enough for Sōzaburō to regain his position and thrust his sword in the other’s body.

       Both observers lament Tashiro’s death, recognizing that Sōzaburō has been forced to kill the other simply based on the words and views of those around him. In the brief flashes of light on the dark landscape, however, we can only note that Okita too wears his hair in a mage. Was Sōzaburō’s vow made directly or silently to him?

       If nothing else we now do suddenly recognize our John Claggart, the not unattractive man who as Melville writes, seemed “defective or abnormal in the constitution,” possessing a “natural depravity.” As the story asserts, Claggart more than anything was controlled by “envy” for Billy’s “significant personal beauty,” along with his innocence and general popularity.

       As Sōzaburō, a winner who has lost the man who most loved him, moves off down a road, Okita tells Hihikata that he has something he has forgotten to do, and moves in the direction of that the killer has taken. Alone, Hijikata suddenly comes to the perception, shouting in the direction in which Okita has now moved: “Destroy him. If you did not love Sōzaburō, Sōzaburō loved you.”

       In the far distance we hear a scream as Okita kills the boy.

     A bit like Lear, Hijikata suddenly screams out in a rage: "Sozaburo was too beautiful. Men took advantage of him. He was possessed by evil." And with that, the Vice-Commander takes up his own sword, cutting down several branches of the nearby cherry tree, ending the tragedy into which we have just awakened.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020). 

François Ozon | Une rose entre nous (A Rose Between Us) / 1994

prick of the thorn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nicolas Mercier and François Ozon (screenplay), François Ozon (director) Une rose entre nous (A Rose Between Us) / 1994 [27 minutes]

 

In Ozon’s early study of sexual experimentation and confusion, a young British woman, Rose (Sasha Hails) enters a hair salon to have her hair colored from its raven tones to ginger or “squirrel-red,” which the young apprentice stylist Paul (Rodolphe Lesage) readily accomplishes. But the moment he’s “finished, she, now speaking only in English, pretends outrage for what he’s done to her, and rushes from the shop in anger without paying, Paul fast on her heels in order to be properly recompensed for his efforts.

     After a street incident, witnessed by his fellow hairdresser Rémy (Christophe Hémon), wherein she finally offers to pay after describing him basically as a fag to his boss, he rejects her money and, winning back her power over him, she invites him to a late night club, The Palace.

     So begins what is basically an evening and morning of sexual-shifting and role-playing, as Rose gradually lures the young Paul into an agreement to prostitute themselves to two older men, she to Robert (Jacques Disse), evidently one of her regulars, while the cute hairdresser will have sex with Yves (Francis Arnaud), promising that they will earn a great deal of money, over a thousand francs for a not so difficult evening.

    

     At the same time, it’s apparent that Paul is attracted to his hairdresser friend Rémy, who also shows up at the club, eyeing Paul as someone to whom he is deeply attracted but also with a sense of judging his peer’s ridiculous infatuation with Rose.

      Rémy, who evidently sells drugs at the club, faces off with her alone, describing her as a little “con-girl,” while still attempting to sell her drugs which she promises to purchase the next evening when she will have enough money (although we have already seen her be paid for arranging to Paul to have sex with Yves).

     But for these young kids, it doesn’t seem to matter much. The men finally take both Rose and Paul to an apartment, where Rose sings a cabaret-like song as together they all dance, putting Paul in the center of a ring they form before he finally passes out from dizziness from the champagne he’s been drinking.

     Rejuvenating the boy, Rose finally convinces him to go with Yves. We watch Yves go down on Paul, while in the next room, the far more seasoned Rose refuses to have sex with Robert.

     As we see Yves toss a filled condom to the floor, it’s clear that he has fucked Paul, despite the boy’s earlier insistence that he didn’t want to be sodomized. What Paul also discovers is that Yves has paid 3,000 francs for him, while Rose has given Paul only a single note. Furious with her, he tosses even that amount back at her before attempting to rape her. But when Robert intervenes by appearing at the doorway, Paul runs off, Rose following after, apologizing for the lie and convincing him to come back home with her, where the two do indeed have sex—but a tender sex of the kind of which Rose is clearly not used to. We might even suspect that Rose is Paul’s first woman.

    Finally, he suggests that he is going out for some croissants and will be back soon, she offering him all the money which is still in her purse. He quietly rejects her offer, saying he has enough, as she watches him through window, stroking her cat, realizing that he won’t be coming back.

    The camera shows him having returned to the hairdressers, working now more comfortably with  Rémy, offering him one of the croissants he has purchased, as the two laugh together now in friendship.

     What we realize in Ozon’s work which some may read as representing child abuse, is truly a comedy, in that these three, Paul, Rémy, and Rose have used the adults, at different times, to explore their own sexual desires and orientations.

     The young unconfident 18-year-old Paul of the day before has returned to Rémy with a far deeper knowledge of himself. Like the Balthus poster that Rose has on the wall, these “children” have allowed themselves to be sexually objectified each for their own purposes of discovering how to negotiate the adult world and what sex is all about. Despite prostitution, robbery, drugs, intended rape, and sexual longing none of these youths has been truly traumatized, but are joyful in the discovery of their own desires and its expression through their bodies.

      In the 1990s French director Ozon was one of the few brave enough to explore this territory, as had filmmakers as diverse as Louis Malle, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Delannoy, Mauro Bolognini, Carlos Hugo Christensen, Lasse Nielsen, and a few others had in the more open-minded 1960s and 70s.

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt | Diamantino / 2018

bosom buddies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt (screenwriters and directors) Diamantino / 2018

 

Attractive, likeable, open-hearted, and dim-witted Portuguese soccer star Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta) is a fan favorite, surely the only one that can take his team to win the championship. As the crowd roars its approval Diamantino runs the field with what he sees are monstrously large, fluffy dogs instead of opposing and fellow teammates. He negotiates his movements down to kick in the goal among these amazingly harmless beasts who somehow seem to be joining him instead of preventing his final kick. Time and again he saves the day by weaving dog friends through clouds of pink smoke.

    There’s no attempt to explain or find logic for Diamantino’s on-field visions or anything else in his or the other characters’ lives in this somewhat surrealist, sports-based, science-fiction, dramatic, comic detective romance which is precisely what makes this film so very charming and worth watching despite some otherwise predictable maneuvers.

     As in any other sports film, the hero loses his mojo, in this case during the final shot of the FIFA World Cup championship! His fluffy friends disappear and with their absence goes Portugal’s chances to become great again.

     While usually such earth-shattering distractions of major athletes has something to do with a woman, in the naïve virgin Diamantino’s case it is his discovery on a yachting trip that the oceans are full of starving refugees from former Portuguese territories such as Mozambique and Cape Verde, a boat of which he and his father save on a family outing between games.

      Diamantino’s beloved father, coach and manager Chico (Chico Chapas) dies from a stroke soon after, as after his evil twin daughters, Sonia (Anabela Moreira) and Natasha (Margarida Moreira)—Diamantino’s equally beloved sisters—physically harass him for their brother’s loss. Now, as Diamantino’s managers, having the most to lose by his public disgrace, they quickly sign him up with a rightest government program to clone the boy’s talent and create a whole new team of Diamantinos who will help make Portugal the world power it used to be or should have been.

      The only problem is that in the cloning process, which includes hormones, the boy grows female breasts and he will surely die when the doctor attempts to transfer the knowledge in his brain into the other team mates’ bodies. The twins, however, convince their dumb sibling that his meetings with the James Bond-like villain Dr. Lamborghini (Carla Maciel) will help him return to the sport he so loves and stop him from seeing the waves of refugees that now haunt his vision.

     Meanwhile, working for the current government are two lesbian Secret Service agents, Aisha (Cleo Tavares) and Luica (Maria Leite), who are following the soccer player’s every move, electronically and personally for possible money laundering, having noticed the appearance of his name in numerous off-shore accounts. When Diamantino decides to give up football and adopt a refugee son to give him all the love he never had, Aisha decides to dress up in male drag to become his new son Rahim—and so the fun begins.

     Rahim, of course, discovers his new father to be a truly loving man, fawning over him with meals of whipped cream and chocolate Nutella, while Diamantinos cuddles up with his new son every minute he gets to reassure him of a father’s love. Unfortunately, a visit from Aisha’s lover finds the two, “father and son,” in bed together causing all sorts of complications.

      The "boy" also discovers, in the dark of night when the sinister sisters are in bed, that the offshore accounts are not those of Diamantino but of Sonia and Natasha. On their part the twins, while Diamantino is away at Dr. Lamborghini’s clinic, attempt to convert Rahim into their private Cinderella, doomed to scrub and clean the kitchen counters and floors. When their brother returns to discover his new son’s fate, he determines that he will never again let Rahim long out of his sight, bringing the refugee and his new father even closer, a situation that troubles Aisha’s real-life female partner.

     She returns as a nun dressed in high-heels—recalling the nun of Alfred Hitchcock’s early caper The Lady Vanishes and revealing to the observant twins that something is amiss. Eventually they find the nun and the refugee in bed together having hot lesbian sex!

     Aisha as Rahim also has made several discoveries about Dr. Lamborghini and the plans she and the sisters have for Diamantino. As the twins attempt to kill Rahim/Aisha, Diamantino whisks him off to safety on his yacht where they spend a night together, both surprised to find each other has breasts, but also, in the process, introducing Diamantino to sex with a female and Aisha to heterosexual intercourse.

      Love is all set to win the day until the sisters kidnap their brother and return him to the clinic for the final brain transfer, convincing him that Aisha and her lesbian lover have tricked him. What’s a true believer to do but to submit? Fortunately, Aisha is on his trail and kills of the evil sisters before they do her in; but it appears to she has arrived too late for save Diamantino since the doctor has just switched on the current for the transfer.

      The transfer fails, of course, because of the insufficient brain power of our dim-witted champion. But just as he comes to, Lamborghini shoots Aisha it what appears to be a fatal blow. Not to worry, viewers, Diamantino does in the doctor with his trusty saber and pulls his former refugee once more to freedom, escaping—in a vision that begins with a final nude run through the fluffy dog filled stadium—escaping with her to a tropical island where presumably they live happily ever after as bosom buddies.

 

Los Angeles, June 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Ben Walton | Zinzan / 2017

backing off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Walton (screenwriter and director) Zinzan / 2017 [11 minutes]

 

New Zealand filmmaker Ben Walton’s short film of 2017, Zinzan begins where most coming out films leave off. Long before the first scene of this work, with Mr. Lewis’ (Chris Hobbs) son Liam (Simon Mead) is seen in bed with his gay lover Michael (Dion Greenstreet), and it is established that the father has clearly accepted his son as a homosexual. We get a brief glimpse of his earlier discovery of them making love in the locker room.

        If he’s not yet totally comfortable with the situation, he is basically tolerant to it, hesitantly greeting Michael leaving his son’s room early in the morning, as he goes to awaken Liam for his rugby workouts. He drives both boys to the ruby field, with Michael making the decision to basically remain in the car while his friend goes through the athletic workout and a scrimmage. But even Michael’s daring to stand by the edge and watch the final moments of the game results in taunting by two of his teammates for Liam’s having brought his “girlfriend” along to the exercises, Liam reacting rather violently, but held back by his father.     

        Liam, we discover, is a local hero for his rugby achievements and in a few days we will be considered for recruitment into the national Under 20s team, a high honor which presumably may lead to further national rugby team placement. And his father is worried that something might get in the way of that possibility.

       So too is the affable Liam, who clearly loves his companion deeply and refuses to leave him behind or even uninvite him for an evening home with his dad watching professional rugby on the telly. You can see the tension of Mr. Lewis’ face, yet his response is simply to order up another pizza. The taunting of his son, however, looms large even in the father’s imagination.

       Just days before the event, Liam himself admits to being nervous about the upcoming event. Even Liam and his father’s shouts in support of the television game seemingly embarrasses him, perhaps afraid they will do the same from the stands in his try-out game.

       The next day when they drive to the stadium, the father also remains in the car with Michael. And, for the first time we get to see that Michael is also worried about his lover. He suggests that if the father wants him to “back off” for the time being he will take no offense and will do so. Mr. Lewis says nothing, but it is clear he appreciates the boy’s comments and that he also now recognizes just how deep is Michael’s own love for his Liam.

     The film ends with the two sitting on the back fender of the car watching the game far off from any others’ observation. They cheer Liam on as he once more goes for a win, realizing perhaps for the first time an alliance that they never before had felt.

       In the urban dictionary “zinzan” means “a cool person” and in Indonesia, a culture that simply through its geographical position is closely related to Australia and New Zealand it means, in particular, an aspect of being safe, of being protected. Both meanings work in this film as the father and his “son-in-law” realize that together they are “cool” with the situation in offering Liam their love from a safe position, whether he is chosen for the rugby team or not.

 

Los Angeles, March 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

Yudho Aditya | Pria (Man) / 2017

 the english teacher

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Cigarroa, Yudho Aditya, and Dea Kulumbegashvili (screenplay), Yudho Aditya (director) Pria (Man) / 2017 [22 minutes]

 

The central character of US-Indonesian born director Yudho Aditya’s 2017 short film Pria (Man), is a Muslim teenager, Aris (Chicco Kurniawan) living in a highly agricultural region of Indonesia. He attends a school where his English language teacher is a gay American, Peter (Jacob McCarthy), who teaches the language, in part, by distributing US pictures and postcards to the students and asking them to describe the images along with synonyms for their choices of English words.

      Aris is handed a picture of New York skyscrapers, and seeing the photo on the postcard it is hard to know whether he has more quickly fallen in love with the vision of New York or the teacher himself. What is clear is that both Peter and Aris have already formed an unspoken admiration for one another. After class, Aris asks if he might keep the postcard, a request which Peter immediately grants. But as soon as the boy has left the classroom, the teacher runs after him to tell him that it too is one of his favorites and that he hopes he will take special care of it, obviously a ploy just to be able to form a bit closer relationship with the obviously troubled young man.

      The boy has reason to be troubled since his doting mother is so attentive to her son that he can hardly finish his homework as she quite literally pets him as she speaks. Worse, she has determined he has reached the age of marriage and has arranged with a local man for Aris to wed his daughter, whose pudgy face is all we see underneath her dress and head coverings.

      Even with the wedding looming in the near future, Aris attempts to focus his imagination on school, his increasingly attachment to his teacher, and for all things Western. At one moment, alone in his room, we see Aris with headphones listening obviously to a Western song. He slowly begins to dance, a self-created dance that reveals his simple joy in being young, somewhat in love, and able to imagine a world into which he might someday be transformed. As critic Serafima Serafimova writes about that scene:

 

“…one of my favourite moments in the film, is the scene where Aris dances in his room, without any inhibition, his pure joy almost palpable. This is abruptly brought to an end by the following scene, where we see him getting his hair cut and along with it his freedom and only chance of true happiness.”

 

    Describing the same scene, critic Upasana Dandona observes in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal: “His facial expression in this scene shows that he is in great affliction; he is helpless in a society where he is not permitted to preserve what he values deeply—he is forced to forgo a part of himself and his identity.”

     The wedding preparatory ceremonies are highly alienating as the girl’s father takes out a horsetail, forcing the hair into a circular position and sticking his finger through the hole in order to demonstrate to the boy how to fuck a woman. Later, the girl herself declares that the boy, who has been forced to walk through muddy paddy fields to visit her, smells disgusting.

     Increasingly terrorized by the forced marriage, he confesses his fears to his mother. Soon after the we see the boy knocking one evening on his English teacher’s door.

     Peter invites him in, as the boy expresses his horrors in the best English that he can muster up.  Finally, the boy leans over and kisses Peter, who readily returns the kiss, the two embracing deeply kissing several times before Peter finally pulls the frightened Aris away, holding him tightly to comfort him with both of them realizing that there is nothing to be done. As an outsider to a culture that is hostile to homosexuality and which has increasingly come to argue that LGBTQ behavior is entirely a foreign intrusion upon their world—this despite the many documents revealing a long tradition of gay and lesbian behavior in Indonesian culture from ancient times—there is nothing Peter can do, and the boy, already signed and sealed through legal documents that require the ceremony proceed, has no choice but to go along with the parental arrangement.

      Director Aditya, accordingly, offers no solution to the dilemma the film has raised. But his gentle and beautiful depiction of Aris and his hidden desires makes it apparent just how awful it is that children such as Aris and the child bride equally are forced to become man and wife against their personal desires. We can only hope that those fearfully loving moments with Peter and the picture postcard might continue to serve as solace that carries him through with the life imposed upon him; one day he may be able to escape as an adult. But there are still also many men in the Western world who, unable to accept their homosexuality, willingly enter into marital relationships which end disastrously or at the least unhappily, and we fear the same for Aris and his new bride.

     Aditya’s is a brave film at a time in which Indonesia has witnessed increasing hostility and violence against its LGBTQ citizens.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).