a melodrama transformed into a fairytale
by
Douglas Messerli
Eric
De Kuyper (screenplay), Eric De Kuyper and Paul Verstraten (directors) A
Strange Love Affair / 1985
This
rather unknown film from 1985, directed by Eric De Kuyper and Paul Verstraten,
has quickly become one of my favorites. Here, as a kind of homage to US
directors Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk, and with perhaps a backhanded love pat
to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the Flemish-Belgian director employs and explores
the structure of melodrama. Using black-and-white photography by the
cinematographer also of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946),
Henri Alekan, De Kuyper tells the story of a film teacher and semiologist,
Michael
(Howard Hensel), discoursing primarily about what he perceives to be the Western
notion of love as expressed in film, with Ray’s 1954 movie Johnny Guitar
as his prime example.
For Michael asynchrony is the key, love
occurring at different times for individuals that creates tragic or, at least,
unhappy situations for the lovers, who, in their displacement of feelings,
circle around one another, desperately seeking a way to continue or even begin
what both have desired at different moments, yet equally have abandoned, or
attempted to block out of their memories.
Early in the film, Michael falls in love
with one of his own students, Chris (Sep van Kampen), who himself has a crush
on the teacher whose course he has not yet decided he will take. Their
relationship is established almost immediately, first on a school stairway
where the very sight of the boy causes the professor to drop all the pages of
the manuscript he is carrying, helped to gather them again by the boy who has
returned from a higher level on the stairway to join the slightly
discombobulated teacher in gathering the papers.
Chris soon attends one of his lectures and
after stops by Michael’s office to deliver up a paper on the central love scene
of Johnny Guitar. Despite the fact the boy has a kind of girlfriend,
Linda (Lieke Leo) (“Is Linda your girlfriend?” asks Michael; Chris answers,
“No. Yes. In a way.), the boy soon visits his professor at home, lolling on his
couch while the professor types away at his newest book on love, and eventually
shares a meal with him “out of tins.” Here their future relationship is fully
established, Michael declaring as he opens a bottle of wine: “Don’t expect me
to try to seduce you. I never seduce young boys like you.” Yet a moment later,
Michael turns and kisses Chris on the lips.
So, it appears, that the film will
undertake its subject of the love’s asynchrony in respect to the vast age
difference between the quietly gay 40-year-old professor and his sexually gay
curious student, in some ways perhaps almost paralleling one of the earliest of
gay love films, Different from the Others directed by Richard Oswald in
1919. In fact, moments before Michael and Chris’ sudden kiss, De Kuyper and
Verstraten verbally chime with that early German film when Michael asks why
Chris wants to take his course anyway; his answer, “I don’t know, because it’s
different. Because so different from the other teachers.” And the next moment
he is asking the older man if he has always lived like “this, alone.”
Yet Chris Dÿstra is no Kurt Sivers (the
young boy in Oswald’s film); and Chris is clearly beyond the age of consent in
Belgium (which in the year this film was made was determined to be 16). Michael
faces no threats from either other faculty members or strangers. And it’s quite
clear that Chris would prefer to be in Michael’s arms than in Linda’s.
When he returns after dinner to Linda, we
see him bicycling her home, she leaving the door open, while he leaves the
bicycle and walks away, she returning to the doorway to wonder about his
absence.
Although Michael does not apparently let
in the now dancing boy, we see him sitting quietly upstairs fetishizing Chris’
scarf which the boy has left behind.
In the very next scene, we see Chris
gifting that same scarf, now around Michael’s neck, to Linda, she
emblematically, in return, offering her former boyfriend up to the professor as
the two males travel off together, leaving her behind in the fog and smoke of
the departing train, a film trope turned on its head.
They follow this with a visit to an old
family friend of Michael’s, Maria, who clearly approves of the relationship
between the 40-year-old teacher and the young Chris, in a manner that can only
remind one of the grandmother of Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant) in An Affair
to Remember who thoroughly approves of the woman, Terry McCay (Deborah
Kerr), he has brought with him on his visit. Once more, it might appear that
the woman is traveling off by train, but it is the two males who enter the cars
as she, left behind, rushes to the departing train with one suitcase they seem
to have forgotten, making it quite apparent that in this odd melodrama it is
the males leaving the females forever behind.
After traveling by train to the city
where Chris’ parents are living, they attend the opera Eugen Onegin
(which once more supports Michael’s theory of love), when we discover that Michael
used to be an opera critic. That they sit in his very favorite balcony seats foreshadows
his return to a past which he also reiterates is a pattern in the Western love
story.
Later that evening we discover that they
plan to meet up with Chris’ father who will take them to the boy’s parental
home, another strange twist in this work which suggests they are seeking the
formal approval of their relationship from Chris’ father and mother.
It is in the very next scene, however,
where the directors completely throw us off track, as they ditch the
younger/older love affair theme for something much darker and closer to
Michael’s concepts about love.
As Michael and Chris wait in a bar for
the father’s arrival we see another foreshadowing occur, this also about
reversals of expectation. As a rose seller sings the Gershwin’s “The Man I
Love,” Michael comments to Chris, “If you were a woman I would buy you a rose.”
When she finishes her son the flower girl moves over to the table, pulls back
Chris’ head and gives him a deep kiss. Chris soon after rises, and moves off
screen momentarily, bringing back a rose for Michael, commenting, with great
irony, “Now you can give me one.” Clearly he is not interested in the
traditional role-playing that Michael maintains.
He then proceeds to describe the place
where they sit drinking as his father’s favorite café, a place where, after
football matches, his father and his friends would regularly gather, sometimes
even including Chris, then a young boy. And Michael responds that he also knows
the place well, regularly writing his reviews there and occasionally meeting up
with a friend for a drink.
The place might also very well remind us
of the small train eatery in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945),
another film wherein true love is found and lost as the central figure returns
to her faithful but boring husband.
The arrival into this café, where the Cafébezitster
(Ann Petersen) grows increasing impatient to close up, of Chris’ father is one
of the most understatedly shocking events of film history. Jim (Karl Scheydt)
enters late, arriving from far back in the screen, moving quickly and noisily
from our left to right. Dressed in a leather jacket (his son and tutor, you
recall, are dressed in tuxedos) he suddenly stops and turns to the bar midway
without so much as greeting his own child. He looks down, then over momentarily
to the two where we see Michael himself now sitting erect with anticipation.
Finally, Jim picks up their suitcases and
moves toward their table, pausing one more time to glance at Michael. Chris
stands, introducing his film teacher “friend” of whom he has told him. Michael
also slowly, almost regretfully stands, Jim speaking, acknowledging him as his
son’s teacher and repeating that he is the father, Michael responding: “I know,
I didn’t know, but now I know.”
Jim suggests a drink. There is a sad and
sour look on his face as he pulls up a chair to join them.
No conversation follows in the film, but
what soon is revealed is that Jim is Michael’s former lover of 15-years
earlier. And we have suddenly been thrust into a past of which Chris has
utterly no comprehension or is given any explanation.
The constant return of the failed lovers,
what Michael has described as their need to meet over and over again, has been
realized, throwing Chris and his mother overboard in the process, as the two men
begin to try to work out their former relationship in the present, just as do
Johnny “Guitar” Logan and Vienna.
The rest of this film consists of
tantalizing bits of information about the past, where we discover that Jim’s
wife Ann (Pascale Petit) and Michael were also sexually involved, and that she
apparently knew about the two men’s relationship or even participated, at
moments, in what may have been a love triangle, Ann even intimating that Chris
may, in fact, be Michael’s son.
Jim has broken with Michael, apparently
choosing Ann over Michael, but he is clearly still in love with the former
opera critic, now professor; and without much ado, they take up their old
relationship once again, displacing the others in their life in the process.
When Michael determines to travel on to
England, he encourages Jim to join him. But it appears from the message that
Chris bears to him that Jim has determined to remain behind with Ann and
attempt to restore his parental relationship with Chris.
The message that Michael holds in his
hands is the standard tale of two lovers meeting up, coming back together, and
pulling away yet again, proving once more that time most often does not
correspond in Western portrayals of lovers in film and opera, that there is no
beginning or ending.
Yet, this time, as Michael acknowledges
to Chris, he was wrong. There is, in fact, an ending expressed in the letter’s
text.
At the last moment, miraculously, Jim
comes running. The “destined” love prevails.
Yet, we also know it will be a love embedded
in pain as well, a little like the kind of love portrayed on that on that
important night long ago when Chris first dined with Michael in the film the critic
shared by playing a recording of scenes from Now, Voyager, which concerns
the love of Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) and the married Jerry Duvaux Dorrance.
Jerry becomes the architect of a new wing of a psychiatric clinic where
Charlotte, thanks to the doctor who has also helped cure her, she will be able
to care for Jerry’s psychologically impaired daughter Tina—as long as her
relationship with the father remains platonic. Both are delighted for the little
bit of territory they have scratched out for themselves, as Charlotte invites
him to regularly visit her and his daughter, ending the film with the lines,
“Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.” In a very strange sense, I
was reminded in her famed line of the US military’s former requirement for
gays, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
So must the lovers of Eric De Kuyper and
Paul Verstaten’s remarkable queer melodrama forever face the fact that they are
now denied the arms of Chris and Ann. However, for one moment in cinema
history, queers win out over everything against them, including the Western
patterns and myths of love.
At one point in Michael and Chris’
travels, the boy asks about what might happen if the two lovers actually did
get back together again. Michael suggests that should that happen it would be
like a fairytale where the couple lives happily forever and ever. The
melodramas of Michael’s preference would be subverted. In the end of this film
his theory of love is proven untrue. Fairytales do occur in semi-realist
dramas, at least in gay versions.
As commentator Chris Cassingham
rightfully bemoans, however, very few people in the US have been able to see or
have been unwilling to watch this major motion picture. On the Letterboxd site,
he notes, “fewer than 50 people…have seen this. That’s homophobia in action.”
Los
Angeles, August 3, 2025
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).
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