Kai Stänicke | Golden / 2015

difference and différence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kai Stänicke (screenwriter and director) Golden / 2015 [3 minutes]

 

In what you might describe as an almost promotional gay short, German director Kai Stänicke presents us with the birth of a child covered head to toe in gold. Despite his “specialness,” however, he seems to grow up rather normally, beloved by his father and mother, camping with his father, having a birthday, going to school, masturbating, getting sick perhaps from too much too drink, fighting another boy, smoking, sitting alone in the locker room, learning how to drive, etc. etc.— until finally we see is parents helping him pack up to go to college. There, after several classes, he runs into another golden boy on the street, the two wondering at the marvel of one another and finally kissing, while suddenly observing another golden man walking by. The end.

    

      Presumably, except for his golden color, our hero, his life is utterly uneventful until he suddenly discovers another boy like himself, the metaphor of the normalcy of being somehow different.

      Sorry, however, something is wrong with this picture. Why were there no other golden boys as he was growing up? Had he never truly wondered about his difference? Had he never seen one of his own kind in the news? Had he never discovered there were golden boys and girls (this film seems to suggest there are no golden females) in the movies? Had he never truly felt different because of his special color? I suppose sitting alone in the locker room is meant to suggest his ostracization, as perhaps the fight he has with another boy. But surely that is something that might happen to even black-, white- and yellow-(as opposed to golden) skinned boys.

       I also find it dangerous to represent sexual difference through the color of one’s skin, a far different issue than one’s inner sexual desires. There is no hiding one’s skin color. And there is no escaping the prejudice of those who don’t like that particular color or find it strange in their community. A black man, an Asian, a Native American cannot hide in a closet. And being a person of color is not at all the same as one’s inner sexual desires, although the hatred it invokes might seem similar.

       This short film’s metaphor is an unfortunate one, and not truly explored in a very effective manner. It is a one-liner approach to a series of far more complex issues and problems. The three minute duration of this film appears to indicate the brevity of thought with which this film was conceived.

     I’m sorry, gay boys are not golden nor particularly protected by their gay status and realization. This is pure gay fantasy, and you know what, I don’t like it.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

Sam Greisman | After School / 2015

love of a different kind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Greisman (screenwriter and director) After School / 2015 [7 minutes]

 

Throughout much of US director Sam Greisman’s short film After School, the central character, 15-year-old Jack (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), sits quietly alone or even in the company of his best friend from childhood Danny (Dante Palminteri) without speaking, at moments appearing to be almost autistic in his one-word and simple responses of agreement.

     We see him at lunch, sitting a few tables over, with his eyes fully attending to the popular Danny’s every movement, but he doesn’t dare approach. After school he meets up with Danny and even accompanies him to his room, but during the school day he remains apart, primarily because his friend is older, perhaps 17, a young man on the cusp of change, who can’t wait to get away to college.

     But as they sit in Danny’s room, after school and apart from the peer differences it enforces, Jack is still tongue-tied, with finally Danny about ready to emphatically find out whether or not something has changed with their relationship. But his comments are interrupted by his mother calling him into the other room.

     Through Jack’s point of view, we hear only intense arguing without being able to get the gist of their discussion; apparently, she has let out his puppy into the neighbor’s yard where it has been killed.

    Danny is horrified by the fact as he returns to the room, his mother assuring him that they will get him a new dog, her son shocked by what he describes as her “heartlessness,” the fact that she is simply ready to dismiss the matter with the lure of new acquisition. In front of Jack and to her face, Danny shouts, “Get out of my room you fucking cunt!” surely one the most truly profane statements I’ve observed in gay films coming from the mouth of a teenager. She slaps his face and leaves.

      Danny turns away in tears, Jack attempting the console him by putting his arm gingerly up to his shoulder. What surprises him is that Danny totally embraces him as the two hug deeply as Danny lets his tears flow, as Jack does as well—although perhaps for a different reason, for the love, now flowing between them, but which we will never again experience. The love Jack is sharing, he senses, is of a different kind from that to which Danny is so openly responding.

      We sense Jack’s problem, the reason why he has been avoiding his friend, and why he is now a boy of so few words: he is confused over his increasing feelings of love concerning Danny, and in this very moment and the private burial ceremony of the dog later, he is probably the closest to expressing those feelings for Danny that he will never again be. For Danny appears to be unself-consciously heterosexual, not even able to imagine why Jack has suddenly become so removed and quiet. As they stand before the tree where he has buried the pet, Danny puts his arm around Jack saying, “I’m glad you’re here,” Jack replying, “I am too,” even if it is for very different reasons.

      A moment later Danny suggests that it looks like Jack’s mother has arrived to pick him up, and he should probably go back and attempt to make it up with his mom.

      That is the end of this small film in which very little happens. But director Greisman (who incidentally is actor Sally Fields’ youngest son) suggests that for Jack these moments are nonetheless highly momentous and painful, something he may remember the rest of his life, and will continue to trouble him even after Danny has gone off to college. Often, it is the unrequited loves of life that are the most difficult to forget.

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 3, 2023).

 

Lucas Morales | Pourquoi mon fils? (Why My Son?) / 2015

losing a son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Morales (screenwriter and director) Pourquoi mon fils? (Why My Son?) / 2015 [21 minutes]

 

This moving short film begins with two teenage high school gay boys, Louis (Josef Mlekus) and Thomas (Lucas Morales) realizing that it is time they tell their parents that they’re gay and involved in a relationship with one another. They blithely toss a coin to determine which of them goes first. Thomas loses.

    Living alone with his father, Thomas sits across the breakfast table with a man (Yann Babilée) with whom most of us could not even imagine an everyday conversation, let alone a discussion about his son’s homosexuality. And indeed, before Thomas can even begin to describe that his best friend is something more than that, the father quiets him down, insisting he does not want to hear any more, staring into space as his chews on his cereal.

     Frustrated at his refusal to respond, the boy pleads for him to speak. His father stands, goes over to him, and slaps him soundly on his face, leaving Thomas in tears, not so much out of pain as much for the realization that his father will never be able to reconcile the fact: “Why, my son?” he wails.

     At school, Thomas at first pretends to Louis that all has gone well, but quickly reveals the truth that it has been very nasty. It appears from his comments that the father had previously regularly abused Thomas’ mother, the boy suggesting that at least he has been able to move on from those long ago difficulties.

      When Louis suggests he stay at his home that night, Thomas insists that it would only make things worse.

      Meanwhile, in his home, while his parents watch TV, Louis spends no time coming to the point, simply announcing, “I’m gay,” his father pleading wait until the TV show ends. His mother gets up and hugs him, suggesting that they have no problem at all about his sexuality. The whole situation goes so comically well that we find the scene to be more than an alternative fantasy rather than real representation of such an event. Even accepting parents generally have fears and alarms.

     In the middle of the night, we see Thomas up, feet dangling from his attic room loft as he ponders his father’s total silence. At breakfast, his father, for the first time in the boy’s life, reports that he will pick him up after school.

     Thomas is almost fearful of what his seemingly kind offer means, and he sits through his classes, one a long discussion in his philosophy class about making one’s way out of Plato’s cave—obviously referencing Thomas’ own need to find his way out of the world of anger, hate, and love, the contradictory feelings that keep him in his relationship with his father. Instead of taking the bus with his friend, he tells him his father is coming to pick him up, something that even troubles Louis, who tells his friend that his mother can’t wait to meet him and that he’s welcome to stay on permanently in this home.

      Meanwhile, we see Père de Thomas brooding before pulling out a drawer and taking out a handgun, momentarily picking up a picture of him, his wife, and Thomas as a beautiful young son and tossing it angrily to the floor. He gets into the car to pick up his son.

      We already know that the trip home will not lead to where either of them expect. Instead returning by the normal route, the father travels into the country where they stop at the delipidated country home, the house where he lived with Thomas’ mother and conceived Thomas. When finally the two find themselves standing face to face, the father tells his son to close his eyes.

      Thomas complains that the father’s behavior is frightening him, but the elder insists that his son obey, Thomas again asking him to stop behaving so very strangely. The father commands his son obey his wishes, which against his will Thomas does, closing his eyes as his father takes up the gun, pointing it not at his son as we might have feared, but at his own neck.

      He shoots, Thomas opening his eyes to see him making the attempt, but nothing happens.

      Thomas angrily pulls out the bullets he himself has confiscated earlier, scolding his father for being a jerk simply because he cannot accept who his son loves. The elder expresses his fears that his son can no longer love him and that he is no longer worthy of living having failed his son. It’s strange how we never imagine that a father’s anger over his son’s gay sexuality might include a sublimated fear that he is losing the boy’s love to another man.

      Thomas reassures him that despite their difficulties in expressing love that he does indeed still love him and that it is time for both to simply demonstrate what they feel for one another. They do, in fact, just that, hug in an acceptance that both have refused one another for so long.

      I don’t think French director Lucas Morales (who later directed the excellent LGBTQ film Rendez-vous avec Diego) needed the last scene, where the two boys joyfully ride together to an oceanside pier, where Thomas throws the bullets into the water. We presume with that earlier embrace of son and father that things will proceed more felicitously between all in the future.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

Claude Chabrol | Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge) / 1958

the unnecessary savior

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claude Chabrol (screenwriter and director) Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge) / 1958

 

Le Beau Serge, Claude Chabrol’s sudden entry into the French film-making scene, as many critics have suggested, contains a great many mirror-images that would later become a thematic issue in Chabrol’s prolific contributions. But this movie, itself, is also a kind of mirror-image to his second film, Le Cousins. Both stars Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain, representing a city dweller and a kind of country bumpkin, Brialy the innocent city-dweller, François, returning to his hometown of Sardent in the first film, while Blain stands in for the country cousin come to town in Le Cousins.

     In that film, I argued, the heterosexual domination of women is actually a deep statement of the unexpressed homoerotic sexual relationship between the two. And in Le Beau Serge, the same undercurrent is even more clearly established. Serge, the handsome one, has been the best childhood friend of François’ as they were growing up. And now, upon his return to Sardent, supposedly to recover from his vaguely diagnosed tuberculosis, cannot stop asking others about his former “beau” friend, demanding to know why this future architect has become the town drunkard.

     The reasons are those of many a small town hero. He has gotten a girl pregnant, and, instead of being able to realize his dreams, has been destined to remain in a world that offers him little else but the bleak confines of provincial life. His first child, a mongoloid, has died quickly, and what may have been a superficial enchantment with Yvonne (Michèle Méritz), has faded. Although he clearly loves her, his treatment is that of a brutal peasant marriage. When he isn’t drunk, he cheats on her, even with her own sister, the town slut Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and abuses her, we perceive, occasionally even striking out at her, although she is now once again pregnant. If nothing else, Yvonne is the subject of his verbal abuse. From once being a potentially brilliant young student, he now works as a local truck driver, and, along with his drunkenness, he is bitter about the situation.

    François’ return certainly does not make life for Serge better, knowing how his now apparently refined friend must see him. If, at first, the two embrace one another with all the love of the past, their relationship soon becomes a subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—battle between them that involves education, class—and, inevitably, sex.

    François, moreover, is a kind of self-righteous prig who criticizes the local priest for not having worked more closely with his now straying flock, and takes it upon himself to attempt to reform not only his constantly drunken friend, but to alter the entire community. “I think they need me,” he self-righteously proclaims. Yet, François is so visibly confused that he quickly begins an affair with Marie, as in Chabrol’s The Cousins perhaps an attempt to “take over” his would-be male lover’s bed.

     What begins as a possible resurrection of their childhood friendship, quickly turns sour, when, one by one, the so-called ignorant citizens of Sardent begin to perceive that François is perceiving them like insects, desperate to find a way to alter their ordinary patterns of living. The intruder even goes so far as to suggest that Serge leave his wife and return to his youthful dreams.

       When Marie is raped by her own “supposed” father (it is clear that she is not his child), whose house she cohabits, the prudish François drops her—particularly after Serge seemingly sides with the old man, who, he claims, had waited for years for the “chance”—and with total disgust hides out in his room at the local inn, realizing that he has caused more devastation than his hoped for “salvation.”

      Reappearing at a local dance—itself such a grim affair that it is almost painful to watch—he rejects Marie, with whom Serge dances, but worries over Yvonne, now quite close to childbirth. But, of course, the inquisitive viewer can only ask whether this might not be yet another attempt to get closer to Serge through his women friends.

     Indeed, Serge brutally beats his former friend in what is clearly a psychological response to François’ intrusions upon his unhappy life. In a sense, the bloody face he rewards François is not so dissimilar to the beatings of women he has given to his wife and others. Violence and murder are always, in Chabrol’s films, intimately interconnected.

     The film attempts to “save” both of its heroes, ultimately, by Yvonne asking, during the final moments before her child’s birth, that François drag in both a doctor and (quite literally) her drunken husband to her through the snow. Her new baby, a boy, is a beautifully “normal” child, and perhaps will grow up to be just as handsome as his “beau” father.

     So does Chabrol’s bleak film offer some sort of spiritual resolution; even as we perceive that, perhaps, François will not survive the winter to be able to return to the clinic in Switzerland and to a normal life. The hardy drunkard, in this case, is the survivor, as opposed to the country boy’s death in The Cousins. But we now also know that their fates will always in intricately interlinked.

     Le Beau Serge is often described as the earliest film of the Nouvelle Vague or the French New Wave. Certainly, despite its on-site filming, it looks and behaves unlike like many of the New Wave’s later films by Godard, Rivette, and others. But there is some subtle humor throughout, particularly when “handsome” Serge introduces his friend, filmmaker Philippe de Broca to another New Wave filmmaker friend, Jacques Rivette. Clearly Serge keeps better company than the wan city-dweller scolding the rest of them.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2017).

 

Ford Fairchild | Blueneck / 2021 [music video]

who we are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Housman (composer and singer), Ford Fairchild (director) Blueneck / 2021 [3 minutes]

 

In country singer’s Chris Housman’s title song for his album Blueneck, he truly explores the possibility of someone growing up in a conservative Red state valuing and caring for all sorts of controversial issues, in including black and gay rights. In this brave song, Housman not only expresses his commitment to his own gay values, but values that are not all approved in the country western states to which his singing style and songs reference. He is, in fact, challenging the very redneck notion of the genre in which her performs, a quite brave act, and even it his song is not quite profound, I award him the for his singing talent and the lyrics of this song:

Grew up with corn fields in every direction

That’s where I learned all of my lessons

‘bout life and livin’ without fences

In the land of the free to have opinions

If you work a job, you oughta make a livin’

George Straight or George gay, there’s no difference

People need help and I think that we should listen

3 chords and my truth is...

 

I’m good old boy with a bleeding heart

Just a homegrown hick with a hybrid car

I think y’all means all

And I know we all just wanna know that we belong

There’s a lot more color in the mix

When you’re loud and proud out in the sticks

I am what I am, you get what you get

Yeah I guess I’m a red state blue neck

 

My American dream is wide open spaces

Plenty of room for us all to be safe in

Yeah that’s the future that I’m chasing

So I’m gonna go make it

 

….

 

Can’t a country kid wanna see the glass ceiling shatter?

Wanna see a world where Black lives matter?

Liberty and justice for just some of us

Ain’t how the heartland brought me up

 

    How can anyone of conscience argue with that? Well, of course our current leaders do just that. But Housman continually reminds us, hopefully, of whom we really are. And that is why he remains an important performer.

 

Los Angeles, March 22, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

 

 

 

Robert Ian Simpson and Sara Wolkowitz | Lightning Bugs in a Jar / 2015

family life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Ian Simpson (screenplay), Robert Ian Simpson and Sara Wolkowitz (directors) Lightning Bugs in a Jar / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

It’s truly rare these days when a short US film featuring gay figures is not about the problems and difficulties of their relationship, but employs the strength and love of their relationship as a support for other family problems.

     Robert Ian Simpson and Sara Wolkowitz’s film begins in the house where Max (Devin McDuffee) grew up. His mother, Farrah (a wonderful Betsy Aidem) is selling the place in the beautiful Catskills after years of no one living there, and her son Max and his lover Ben (Ethan Slater) have come over from their university to help pack up. Indeed, by the time the slightly ditzy and seemingly independent-minded mother arrives, the boys have finished the packing, she complaining only that she thought it perhaps would look more “tidy.”

     Yet, she is hardly a “tidy” individual, in the very first scene in which we see here demanding the driver stop so that she can pee by the side of the road. In fact, she is the kind of woman with whom Max’s lover Ben gets on very well, seeming to be a sort of buffer between her and Max, who clearly can’t bear to be around his mother with a history that we discover later on he has never revealed to Ben.

     Most of the early part of the film, in fact, appears to be almost a mystery story as we attempt to discover why Farrah, clearly a larger than life figure and certainly an untypical mother figure drives Max crazy, leading him to demand sex with him the moment her car is heard in the driveway—ending obviously in her discovery of the two boys in the middle of an orgasm—or why, quite inexplicably, he leans far out of the car to smoke a cigarette as they drive to a grocery, Ben explaining to Farrah that he doesn’t usually behave in this manner. Her answer: that she realizes that he saves up all his craziness to react to her the very few times they encounter one another, the two behaving like “lightnings bugs in a jar.”

      There is certainly some truth to her metaphor, as we observe Max buying up 12-packs of beer as if they were intending to stay on for weeks, although Ben reminds his boyfriend that they’re leaving the very next day.

      Farrah meanwhile buys a birthday cake which she asks, in a truly unthinking and spontaneous moment, to top with the name, Tanner, who we soon learn was Max’s adored younger brother, suffering from autism. Knowing that it will send Max into a frenzy, she quickly smashes out the red moniker, making it look like an absurd childish finger painting, which when Max comments on its dreadful appearance, she declares reminds her of one of his butterfly finger paintings when he was in second grade, this one, in particular, she recalls “I can close my eyes and see everything about it, the white spots, the pink wings, how it looked in flight…like it was already leaving us. You captured something right before it was gone.”

      If there was ever a moment for Ben, who has been there with her during the whole time since she rubbed out the name Tanner, to realize the marvelous and daffy creativity of Max’s mother, it is this moment, and the humorous incident draws us closer to her character is well. She lies so deftly about what, at that moment, seems so meaningless, that we are almost left in wonder at the ramblings of her mind.

     But soon after, several drinks and slices of cake later, when she suddenly demands the two boys drive with her, we begin to perceive the truth behind her and her son’s enmity. As they travel along a road when Ben driving and Farrah signaling the directions, Max suddenly becomes aware of where she is taking them and becomes furious, demanding to get out of the car, racing off into the woods.

     The two sit alone in the car together, Ben startled by the event asking her, why his Max still so angry about his brother Tanner’s death. She suggests that he imagines it still as his responsibility, his failure to protect him. But Ben continues in his speculations, why should he feel that way about a boy who died of meningitis.

     Is that what he told you? Farrah, more than little taken aback, replies. No Tanner did not die of meningitis, but following his elder brother’s kite, entered onto the highway where was hit, first by one car and, then immediately afterwards, by another, all in front of the young Max’s eyes. She comments that she doesn’t know if he was already dead before the second hit him.

     Just as this is slowly sinking in to Ben’s and our own imaginations, she adds, and I am so appreciative that he is still protecting me after all these years with his story about meningitis, because he hasn’t explained where I was, drunk and passed out at 2:00 in the afternoon. Her brave admission sadly explains everything and forgives what has earlier appeared as a childishly resentful behavior of her gay son.

     Ben and she drive on to the cemetery to where she has been heading, paying brief homage to the autistic child killed in a meaningless traffic accident. As they drive back home past the place where Max has left the car, she wonders whether they shouldn’t look for Max, but Ben assures her that he’ll call when he wants to. Perhaps it will do him good to be alone for a while.

      Farrah turns to him, almost for the first time admitting his existence, replying that sadly she doesn’t even know his last name, but is so happy that Max has him as someone to love and rely upon.

      As twilight falls, Max calls and is picked up by Ben, the two returning for lovely sex, the curative of sorts for a soul who lost a part of himself in a moment of mutual neglect. The next day, before their return to their college campus, Max visits the grave, Ben obviously waiting in the car, Max’s life support, his gay lover.

      I repeat the sentiment with which I began this essay: it is rare when being gay is not the problem of a film, but rather the answer to the trauma facing all of us, in different ways, of family life. And this beautiful filmed work by Robert Ian Simpson and Sara Wolkowitz is a near masterpiece in that respect, a work justifiably chosen for inclusion in the short film corner of the Cannes Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Alejandro Ibarra | Safe and Sound / 2015

having everything to do with all of us

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alejandro Ibarra (screenwriter and director) Safe and Sound / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

Alejandro Ibarra’s 2015 short film, Safe and Sound, begins with a kind of rehearsal being performed by a handsome young gay man, Sam (Eddie Gutierrez), in preparation apparently for comments he is soon to make to his mother Maggie (Candi Milo), sister Paula (Michelle Prendes), and her husband, Diego (Cesar Sebastian):

“Mom everybody, thank you so much for coming. I invited you here to tonight because no, no, no

     no.”

“Hey guys guess what oh no, I can’t do it like that.”

“You know what, life is just a journey filled with obstacles and stupid speeches. God damn it...”

“Mommy, my heart, my life.”

 

     Nothing seems to be working. We suspect that the young man is perhaps gay and that what he’s about to confess to his family is that fact, all substantiated by the return home of his companion, Daniel (Michael Gmur), who kisses him, explains his lateness (he’s a teacher), and commiserates with Sam’s nervousness about the upcoming event. “Look it doesn’t matter when you tell them or how you tell them. It’s not going to be any less shocking or anything.”

     Sam, who’s been cooking the dinner is also distressed that he has burned the chicken and put another bird into the oven, meaning that dinner will be late.

     We also sense another underlying issue with this couple when Daniel suggests that it’s best to serve the meal first, “your people” respond better when they have something in their stomachs. Sam responds that the statement is extremely racist, but agrees with the sentiment nonetheless.

    Apparently, we now realize not only this gay couple now needs to convey whatever they are intending, but that the difference in their cultural backgrounds makes it even more difficult.

    In short, Ibarra somewhat manipulates us into believing that this short film is going to be the standard “coming out to the family” work, with possibly further kerfuffles due to their cultural differences.

     Enter, earlier than expected, the trio, pregnant sister, somewhat dense brother-in-law, and the mother, who is obviously reticent about the entire situation, while adoring and protective of her son. Sam explains that dinner will be late since “The oven went a little crazy,” a description of the kitchen appliance which more clearly describes his own state of mind.

     Dan is missing from this early scene, so we might wonder if he is purposely hiding out until the news is conveyed, although the family seems to be cognizant that Sam is sharing the stylish apartment with, if nothing else, a roommate.

     The family begins with the usual small talk, but even here there seems already to be rising tensions. Maggie pushes forward with the details of family events: “So let me ask you something you’re gonna ride with us to Lorena’s quinceanera or you gonna take your own car? Also, I couldn’t get a plus one just so you know.”

      Sam’s response, “Couldn’t or didn’t want to?” hints at his mother’s resistance to the inclusion of Daniel in the family events. And at this point we begin to wonder if perhaps the family does perhaps know more about their son and brother’s sexual life than we at first suspected.

     The conversation quickly flips back to the occasion. Why have they been invited? Just as suddenly as there has been a change in focus, the mother puts it all out on the table: is her son breaking up with “what’s his name?”

      Both the derision in which she holds Daniel and the fact that we suddenly recognize that she is quite aware that they have been in a relationship, now puts Ibarra’s audience in the same position as Sam’s family members. Although we now perceive Maggie’s hostility to her son’s gay partner, we now have little clue of what kind of confession to which we are about to play the role of voyeurs. Sam’s uncomfortableness suddenly creates a kind of nervous expectancy within our minds as well.

    As if on cue, Daniel enters the room wondering, quite obviously, who’s breaking up. He briefly kisses is “mother-in-law,” addressing her as Maggie, she coldly replying “It’s Mrs. Gonzalez.”

     Still seeking for answers for their being called together, his sister Paula blurts out, quite in opposition to her mother, “Oh my God, you guys are getting married,” an announcement of which her husband also approves, but further upsets Maggie.

      A bit tired of playing a game like “20 questions,” Sam suddenly blurts out: “I have cancer.”

The pause puts us all on edge, particularly those of us who have lived through the worst of the AIDS decades.

      “Cancer cancer?” asks the rather slow-minded Diego.

      Sam, completely flummoxed by his brother-in-law’s ridiculous question is forced to explain that his disease is skin cancer.

       The family is briefly relieved. After all, that is often an easily curable form of cancer, sometimes with just minor removal of the cancerous skin patches, But their relief is short-lived as Daniel explains: “Sam is sick.”

        Sam, however, returns to the positive in his assurance that he has a “great” doctor who’s positive about the prognosis. “So I just have to start treatment.”

        I’m being specific here just to make clear that the radical alteration that is about to occur is given context. For at the very next moment, like a cobra which has been waiting to strike, Mrs. Gonzalez, pointing at Daniel, hisses out the words: “This is because of you.”

       Perhaps in our illusionary “post-AIDS” day these words seem utterly illogical, which is how Daniel, Sam, and the others all treat it. Yet for those of us who lived through that period, we comprehend that the kinds of cancers caused by the full name of the disease, “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome” focuses first on the acquisition of the ailment from another human being with whom the victim has had sex.  Maggie clearly recalls the time when patients and their doctors were forced to link their sexual partners with their own suffering.

      For her, as she puts it to Daniel, “Ever since he met you his own life has fallen apart.  Everything that is wrong with him is here right now.”

      From the young teacher’s point of view, her accusations are utterly without foundation. Is she trying to blame him for Sam’s cancer, he lashes back, before reminding her of the many instances, evidently, of her recriminations since the two young men first met. As he argues, she is afraid of losing the power she has over her son. But she also has not yet completely assimilated herself to her son’s homosexuality and his needs for a love other than hers. And in that respect, the film is strangely connected to what we first thought Sam was intending to confess.

      Finally, Sam, unable to bear this new squabble between those who love him demands for it all to stop. What is the very worst thing for a cancer patient he demands someone tell him? Quieting down Daniel states the obvious: “stress.”

      During the melee, the chicken dinner has again burned up in the oven. Diego and Paula joyfully call out for pizza and the family sits down at the kitchen table to share the carry-in dinner, the soon-to-be mother Paula chowing down on several slices of a Hawaiian version of the Italian favorite.

       After a few moments of communal dining, Daniel’s seemingly racial epithet seems to be a true assessment, as Maggie, turning to her son, conciliatingly inverts the focus of her former charges against Sam’s lover: “This has everything to do with us. This has everything to do with all of us.” Focusing on Sam, she emotionally stammers: “I cannot lose you. I cannot lose you.”

     “And Daniel,” she continues, “I just want—”

  

     Daniel interrupts her: “I know. Me too.”

     Sometime after, the two are sitting on their bed, with Danny observing “As weird as that was I would say it went surprisingly well.”

     Sam pulls a large tuft of his hair out. This will only be the beginning, he indicates. We’ll shave your head, I bet you’d be stunningly beautiful as bald man, suggest Daniel in an attempt to calm his lover.

      But their fears are hard to contain. And Sam wonders about whether he might still be loveable in his altered state. Daniel, who has been hiding a gift for him, retrieves it: a ring, with Sam gradually realizing that he is being asked to marry Danny.

      This is a comedy, after all, not an AIDS-era drama. Sam joyfully says yes before realizing: “Oh you know what? I guess we’re going to have to invite my family over again to tell them what happened.” “I take my proposal back,” Daniel laughs.

 

Los Angeles, November 18, 2020

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