Bruno Rose | Lost in Expression / 2015

fraternity row

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruno Rose (screenwriter and director) Lost in Expression / 2015 [21 minutes]

 

Bruno Rose’s university graduation projection, Lost in Expression, although hardly innovative in its narrative, is not quite like most other LGBTQ college films that I’ve seen to date. Yes, at the center of this film is a gay couple who suffer a near break-up, in part for one of the couple’s lack of complete commitment and, more obviously because of the other boy’s sexual cheating—elements you can find in a great many films of this sort. Even the “expression” that has been “lost” are the simple words “I love you.”

     What’s different is that the central figure of this short film, Jace (Casey Mills), is a somewhat overweight, heavily tatted president of a party fraternity whose members all know that he’s evidently trying out a gay relationship with a much younger and far cuter student, Devin (Eddie Waters). There are plenty of zaftig sorority gals who would be happy to welcome him back into the straight fold if the relationship fails. And his best friend Miles (Wilson James Meredith) is only too ready to accompany him back to their football outings. Unable to even know what flowers to select for Devin’s birthday, Jace could clearly use a few sessions from the “Gay Eye on the Straight Guy” gang.

     The night after he breaks up with Devin, finding him standing half naked in their kitchen with another young twink, Chris (Allen Crowell Jackson), Jace’s fraternity fellows celebrate an important fraternity bash which their president surely can’t miss. And several of their members, including Freddy (the truly “pretty boy” singer and director Rose), having heard the news, deeply sympathize.  Indeed, if guys like Freddy had been members of fraternities in my day, even I might have pledged. Things seem certainly to have changed in college fraternities from the way they used to be portrayed and still are in Hollywood movies.

      A few drinks and Jace is even ready to try out a flirty sorority girl to whom he previously was connected; it doesn’t work.

      Indeed, we soon discover, Jace is a haunted being, never truly able to recover from the night his own father left his mother and him as a child for another woman, a scene that is played out a few times in the movie, in fact, perhaps once too many times since we quickly comprehend that his having walked out of the relationship is an act similar to his own father’s simply leaving, the family having to wipe out the memory of his existence.

      It doesn’t help the situation any that Jace has long been unable to fully express his emotions, and was probably one of the reasons for his lover’s seeking out sex with someone else. But the fact that Miles’ girlfriend Michelle just happens to bring along Chris, who Miles describes as Jace’s “homewrecker” certainly doesn’t help.

      Drunk and confused, Jace ends up at a pier where we fear he might have other things in mind. But evidently, he’s texted Devin, who shows up as apologetic as possible but also still resenting the fact that Jace has just left without saying anything.

      When Devin is finally able to ask his friend what he wants, since it was he, this time, who sent a message, Jace finally breaks down and expresses his deep hurt. What he wants he insists is for Devin help him forget their relationship, to disappear—just as he has attempted to do—out of his life. He pushes Devin away, who falls in the sand, but he too falls down beside him, and before either of them can think about the situation, they have interlinked hands.

      Interestingly, Rose also includes an “alternate” ending in which Devin actually does walk away before Jace finally calls him back to tell him he loves him. Although both suggest the same result, I prefer the first, since we can’t expect a man who has spent most of his life trying to tamp down the emotions he feels to find full expression for them in one single night.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

Adam Tyree | Audition / 2015

the target

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Tyree (screenwriter and director) Audition / 2015 [5 minutes]

 

During the second-decade of this century, USC School of Cinematic Arts graduate Adam Tyree produced a number of interesting short gay films that revealed a true talent. He has gone on to become an editor and photographer of some note.

     Audition, a 2015 very short film, certainly revealed some of the frustrations of young actors, but in the end isn’t one of Tyree’s most significant short works of the period. There are others I reviewed that I thought to be much more successful.

     The young actor in this case, Carson (Bret Green), shows up presumably with numerous other young handsome studs to read for a role in a gay film.

     He sits back and, in a sort of mockery of method acting, leans his head against the blue wall and reads the part, as the director (Jake Brown) describes it, as “wasted.” Indeed, the director wonders why he’s chosen to read the role in this manner. Fortunately, he gives Carson a second chance to read the part more “normally.” He does so, although it’s clear the script isn’t so remarkable that a “normal” reading makes it any better.

     The reading over, he’s reminded that it is a gay film, and his character will be shown with full frontal nudity. Accordingly, he’s asked if he’s “okay” with that and is immediately queried if he’d mind disrobing in front of the director and casting director (David Beier).

     “Like, right now?”

     “Yeah, just so we, you know, know.”

     Hesitatingly, he pulls off his shirt. There is silence. And he asks, “You mean my pants too?”

     “Sure.”

     He pulls down his pants and they ask him to turn around, which he does, tossing up his hands in some frustration.

      “How much did you say this pays?”

      “Well, it’s a low budget film, so, 40 bucks a day.”

      He leaves, and exits the building without signing out, presumably without providing whatever else they might have needed of him. In any event, it’s clear he’s given up this particular “opportunity.”

      The writer/director’s personal description of this film reads: “Being an aspiring actor isn’t as glamorous as it seems.”

      The trouble with Tyree’s short glimpse of the inside of gay film casting, is that most viewers of such films probably never imagined that working on such low-budget efforts was ever glamorous. Moreover, I suspect that Tyree meant to suggest that the body check was not only an affront but perhaps represented a bit of unnecessary voyeurism; moreover, the fact that the actor might be chosen for the way he looks instead of the way he acts seems to be an affront.

       Yet, it’s difficult to feel truly sympathetic for Carson. After all, gay films are very much reliant on the appearance of their actors, particularly if there are to be nude scenes. As one commentator on the IMDb site wondered, what was the purpose of the film since, to him or her, it appeared a very ordinary experience of a young actor without any significant difference from hundreds of such interviews and casting sessions. And he is not as glamorous as he might imagine himself to be.

       Did Carson (and by extension Tyree) imagine that he’d be spared a check of his body if the film contains nudity? Certainly, Tyree’s film eschews the voyeuristic moment, and shows his actor only from the navel up. And we observe that, in fact, the auditioner, Green, is little bit chunky. But this isn’t an example of couch casting, and these men surely cannot be castigated simply for checking out the territory they are about to explore in their film. They present it all quite matter-of-factly.

      In short, for me the film doesn’t arouse much sympathy for Carson’s character or, for that matter, I can’t discern a great deal of satiric of critical response in Tyree’s movie. But I am certain that others, in the increasingly sexually scandalized US landscape, will find what Carson has “suffered” as more than a little offensive and perceive Tyree’s film as an insightful revelation. But perhaps we’re all missing Tyree’s possible satiric target, the actor himself.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Todd Haynes | Carol / 2015

flung into space: insider images of outsider sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phyllis Nagy (screenplay, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith), Todd Haynes (director) Carol / 2015

 

Early in Todd Haynes mannered cinematic tale Carol, the exquisitely beautiful and well-dressed Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) observes that the young shop-girl she has suddenly been attracted to and, quite literally, “picks up,” is like an “angel flung into space”—hinting that the character Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) has some connection with the proud Miltonic angel, Lucifer, “Him the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from the’ ethereal sky, / With hideous ruin and combustion, down / To bottomless perdition, there to dwell.”

    Obviously, the slightly mousy and certainly uncertain girl that Therese represents is nothing of the sort. She has not even yet had sex with her current “boyfriend,” Richard Semco (Jake Lacy), who is desperate to ship her off with him to France where he intends to marry and entrap her into everyday American life. Along with her noncommittal positions and almost all decisions regarding almost everything in her life, this can only result, it is made clear, in a disaster. 

     Carol, on the other hand, is a member of the gods, the wealthy ruling class, and has all the beauty of a true Venus bending down to seduce an everyday mortal. The clash of the Titans, ancient and modern—if you can describe Carol and her husband’s Harge’s (Kyle Chandler) domestic battles as representing “modern” Christianity—lies quite beyond the beautiful young girl’s control, although she willingly takes on all the guilt of their titanic clashes over control of both Carol and their daughter Rindy’s life. This Lucifer, even if completely willing, is also quite innocent, as even Carol and her former lesbian lover, Abby, tries to convince Therese.

      Yet the alpha gods, represented by Harge and his lawyers are not amused, and send out a smarmy “notion’s” salesmen Tommy Tucker (Cory Michael Smith) to get the “goods” on his wife’s lesbian dalliances, even though we realize they might exist only in tape-recording sessions of a few pleasurable moans and sighs. One might have imagined that the Sapphic lovers might have even spoken out a few phrases of their love, but in Todd Haynes’, Douglas Sirk-like melodrama, we cannot be assured that they allowed themselves even that sexual pleasure. Everything in this illicit romance strictly occurs behind the arras, even in the sickly motel-beds of Waterloo, Iowa (the city, incidentally, in which I was born).

      This is a world of the gods rule, not the hoi-polloi, despite Therese’s shop-girl and, later, paparazzi credentials (she does, after all, become a photographer of famous faces). What becomes interesting about this film is how, through her encounter with Carol, Therese does discover her own identity and is able, at film’s end, to reclaim the love she has been offered by the gods and then denied—which probably does truly identify her as Lucifer. Certainly, the reverse view of the interchange between her and Carol, shown early in the film, makes it clear, by the end of Haynes’ cinema, that she is not ready to become subservient to the male-dominated world that attempts to reclaim her.

      The problem with Carol is that the film director Haynes, as always, is such an insider voyeur in his presentation of an outsider text, he cannot even comprehend that his highly aestheticized vision has nothing to do with the real lives from the period of 1950s with which he is obsessed and is attempting to depict. As I have written about his Far From Heaven, the sexual reality of his closeted world was not truly what he makes it out to be. There were plenty of gays and lesbians living quite openly during that period; not everyone needed to hide their identities as intensely as did his characters, and particularly many in the elite cultural world to which he is attracted, lived quite openly (if out of radar) “outsider” sexual lives.

       In Haynes’ absolute fidelity to representing every 1950s artifact and cultural reference in his films, he abolishes the reality of the situation. No period in American history refers entirely to its own “identity”—or what we later determine historically after the fact as the attitudes and artifacts of that period. The 1950s, I can assure you also contained furniture, objects, music, and other cultural artifacts from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, just as our own time contains all sorts of images from all periods of American culture simultaneously. Looking across our living room, as I write this essay, I witness a dining table my companion Howard Fox inherited from his parents from the 1960s, sling chairs and a Scandinavian coffee table we purchased in the 1970s, and a large, smoothly sleek green couch we purchased in early 2000 (now a bit worn for wear). What in our room might be described as representing the new century—except for a few digital photographs, framed in 1890-like mountings? Is this the mode of second decade of 2015? People live, and always have lived, in simultaneity with other decades and even centuries. Despite our large library at my right of DVD films, we also sport a stereo (no longer working) beneath which are shelved numerous long-playing records of another time and place.

      Yes, all the images of the 1950s are beautifully represented in Haynes’ films—the warmly lit bars, with their deep-leathered red booths, the slightly smoky New York streets, the nearly perfectly lit Christmas decorations of a wealthy New Jersey mansion, the sleazy Ohio and Midwest motel rooms, the patterned elegance of Chicago’s The Drake Hotel’s bedrooms (where I have also slept and dined in a delicious delectation of the past); yet they have little to do with the reality of the day, just as his long languishing stares, moans, and sighing of the impossibility of expressing real emotions of Haynes’ characters do not represent the reality of that period. Haynes’ is a cinematic reality that, unfortunately, has little to do with the real overlying perceptions of life. And in that way, his work will always be trapped in melodramatic clichés, appealing to visions of reality for those who think in terms of large (and sometimes slightly smaller) emotional crescendos as opposed to the thousands of everyday nuances and utter contradictions through we all generally blunder.

     And, finally, as wonderful as a director such as Douglas Sirk might have been in confronting some of the narrow conventions of his own day, one wonders why we must still confront these exaggerated perceptions of reality even today. One has the strange feeling that Haynes is more interested in a vision of a vision of the past than in anything about own contemporary lives.

       The gods, alas, will never approve of the reality that lies outside their purview, which is where the rest of us live and lived in even back then. The Parthenon, we must remember, was not where the everyday Greeks lived, just as the vast cathedrals never housed Milton’s everyday 17th century believers.

 

Los Angeles, November 26, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2016).

Reinout Hellenthal | Anders (Something About Alex) / 2017

sorry caterpillar

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Bontenbal (screenplay, based on an idea by Mariska Breedland), Reinout Hellenthal (director) Anders (Something About Alex) / 2017 [18 minutes]

There is something wrong with Alex (Maas Bronkhuyzen). In the first few frames of this lovely short film, he goes stalking about the woods, hitting trees and fallen tree limbs in a branch. But a moment or later a clod of soil hits his back, and he turns to see his sister’s boyfriend Hendrik (Kay Greidanus), everything seems changed as they playfully toss small pieces of mud at one another before Hendrik finally picks up and tosses the younger boy over his shoulder, Alex demanding “mercy.” They sit for a moment talking, Alex probing at an insect on the stick in his hand. Hendrik demands he leave it alone, Alex commenting “It’s just a caterpillar,” to which the older boy responds, “But one day a butterfly.” He insists he say “sorry caterpillar.”

     The minute they return home, however, both his mother (Marike van Weelden) and sister Annelies (Roos Netjes) express their distress at his appearance, demanding he take a shower and get dressed immediately, his mother having laid out some fresh clothes. Alex undresses, looking at his lean boyish frame in the mirror, but when spying the clothes, he refuses to wear them even though the event they are about to attend is apparently a wedding.

     At the family table Annelies has some important news to share with Alex. She and Hendrik had long ago put their name in for a residence in the city, and it’s now come through; they will soon be moving there. Alex, furious, goes stalking off into the barn, relating more to the gentle cows that to his own family members. He’s in love, so it seems, with Hendrik and the fact that he’s moving away is not just uncomfortable, but a kind of teenage tragedy. To whom can he possibly relate when Hendrik and Annelies are gone?

    Hendrik soon joins him in the barn, suggesting that he must have known that this news was on its way. “It won’t be so bad. You’ll have a place to crash when you come in the weekends.”

     But Alex is still morose. “Everything, everything will change,” he insists, Hendrik admitting that it may be true, but change can also sometimes before the better.

     If we suspected that we were, in fact, witnessing a kind of “coming out” movie it is confirmed by Hendrik’s advice that Alex tell his mom, or maybe his sister, since she would surely understand.

     Yet, we feel something odd going on here. Is Hendrik really the object of Alex’s desire? And if so, does this farm story actually haunt the same halls as Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding (the film version of 1952) in which Frankie Addams imagines herself to be not only a witness to, but a member of the wedding of her brother and his soon-to-be bride. If Frankie might be perceived as a tomboy or a future lesbian who imagines herself as almost encompassing her brother’s role, Alex seems to similarly have a gay attraction to her sister’s future husband. And now that Annelies is taking him away to the city, he has no one to even share his imaginative secret.

     On the drive to the church, all his mother can complain of is the fact that he has worn his fancy shoes into the barn. She suggests that if he’s going to have such a grumpy face, he should sit in the back of the church. Alex does so, watching, as the couple marry at the altar, his own sister joyfully caressing the shoulder of Hendrik, reminding him again that soon she will not take him away merely to another place but remove him from any possibility of Alex and his private and secret love.

    Alex becomes so caught up in his fears that in the midst of the ceremony he stands as if is about to protest the marriage; but when the minister acknowledges him, runs from the church.

    As he returns to town near his farm, he sees a group of boys playing soccer, and oddly calls out to them, asking if he might join them. The leader, Lucas (Joes Brauers) quickly scoffs at the question, laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation, as if a “queer” boy could possibly be able play a game with them. But when Alex stands his ground, he agrees, demanding, however, that he loses he won’t cry.

    Alex not only holds his own, but outmaneuvers the others, controlling the ball and ultimately proving himself a far better player than most of the others.

    As the two boys, Lucas and Alex, walk down a lane together after, Lucas wonders whether Alex has learned the game on the farm, admitting that he is “pretty good.” A few second later, however, an even stranger event occurs. Lucas suddenly almost touches and quickly rubs against Alex’s hand, and as the farm boy turns in some confusion, he attempts to kiss him, Alex pulling away and storming off as Lucas cries out “Sorry. Sorry.”

     Back at home, we see Alex’s mother looking out the window in consternation, obviously wondering where Alex might have gone off to.

     When he returns, it is Hendrik again who rushes out to wonder what has happened, as Alex’s mother soon joins him, wondering what has brought on such behavior.

      Alex begs insists upon returning to his room, his mother insisting he come back, after several calls of Alex, demanding: “Alexandra come here!” Alex turns, glowering, “Don’t call me like that!”

     The mother continues, “No listen, you’re my little girl,” he yelling “No,” as she finally slaps him, Alex turning again to reveal a much smaller female with long, straight hair. And in that moment we perceive the reality of the situation, as Dutch director Reinout Hellenthal visually spells it out for us, forcing us to reexperience several previous scenes with the young would-be transgender girl who sees herself as the boy others, with the exception of Hendrik, do not.

       It is a brilliant way to help us perceive how a transgender individual might feel trapped in a body in which at every moment she is attempting to escape, and imagines herself having left behind. He is Alex, not the young girl his mother perceives him to be. He is Alex, another boy, and not the girl Lucas has thought might like a kiss. Alex refuses to wear a dress that his mother has put out for him to wear to the wedding. And the wedding itself sparks the confusion within him that heteronormative marriage presumes.

      At film’s end the two, Alex and Alexandra stand in a field, both in tears, as Alex gutturally growls out at his female self in an attempt to scare her off. A moment later, Alex feels Hendrik’s hadd upon his shoulder, his mother soon running to him as she calls out Alex, taking him into her embrace, admitting, “I just don’t know how to deal with this, you know.” She continues, “I noticed, but…” ending mid-sentence as the family gathers round to create a presence of support. It’s clear that in this loving family, at least, Alex will be in good hands. Unlike Frankie, he is indeed a member of the wedding even as his sister and Hendrik move off.

 

Los Angeles, September 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Krailas Phondongnok | มะลิซ้อนออกดอกเป็นมะละกอ (The Same Is Not the Same) / 2015

realities of chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Krailas Phondongnok (screenwriter and director) มะลิซ้อนออกดอกเป็นมะละกอ (The Same Is Not the Same) / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

We know that homophobia exists everywhere, although one might hardly imagine it in the seemingly LGBTQ-tolerant Thailand. Yet that is precisely the subject of Thai director Krailas Phondongnok’s short film of 2015.

     Watching her favorite TV film on the Zodiac signs, the Mother (Somkhuan Phondongnok) at the center of this film is interrupted by her daughter, Ap-Sorn (Siriporn Chaireun) who is fed up with her mother’s devotion to all things magical and spiritual, and changes the channel to her favorite subject, a boy-love film, a phenomenon of great popularity throughout Asia.

     As she begins to watch the images of the boy lovers laying together in bed, the mother grows angry, disgusted by such TV fare and amazed that it is even permitted to be aired. She walks away cursing how low society has become.

       In the same room, his back turned away from the TV, is her son, Inn (Nattapat Sookwongsil) who is disturbed by his mother’s homophobia, particularly since, as we soon discover when he hooks up with his friend Mac (Faseethong Phanwong), that he and Mac are a gay couple. When Mac stops playing basketball and joins him, Inn relates the news that his mother is totally unaccepting of his own identity, and fears that he will never be able to relate the truth to her. Indeed, he soon tries by wondering what he she discovered that her son was a “ladyboy”—unfortunately one of the ways in which Asian culture male homosexuality is still described. She perceives it only as an issue of gender, related to the dog she and her friends have worshipped because of its hermaphroditic features, beloved as a token to help in their choice of numbers for the daily lottery. “How many cocks or pussies do you have?” she flippantly asks.

     He explains he has only one penis but he still likes other boys, but she refuses even to deal with his statement, busy as she is in consulting her chart of numbers from which she will make her lottery choice.

     When he returns to Max, they get the idea to visit her as a couple and do so, in her presence engaging in a deep kiss—a kiss caught by his sister on her cellphone, she absolutely delighted to spread the word to her friends that her own brother is involved in boy-love. Furious, his mother is offended by their behavior and bans him from the house forever.

     Together, the two boys mull over the consequences, both trying to figure out what to do about the situation which has obviously gone awry. Suddenly, a smile creeps over Inn’s face. Soon after they show up to his mother both in the green robes of Buddhist monks.

      Monks in Thai culture are not only representatives of authority and, accordingly, in his mother’s thinking are images of good luck, but are permitted (more recently with great controversy and increasing hostility) some sexual latitude since there is nothing in Buddha’s teachings about homosexuality or transgender behavior.

      Inn asks his mother’s permission to enter into a relationship with Max. Seeing only the green robes of cultural significance, the color itself which she believes represents good luck, she has little choice but to bless their relationship. But immediately after, they tear their robes away, standing now only in their underwear, Inn asking the very same question.

      This time the mother doesn’t quite know how to respond, having just given the permission but now being faced with them as being mere boys with precisely the same request. Clearly, even as illogical as she is in her life, she cannot fail, we hope, to realize the absurdity of a rejection as a son and friend as opposed to the acceptance of a green-robed religious figures. Yet, as the film’s English title suggests, for some people “the same is not the same.”

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

 

Elnura Osmonalieva | Seide / 2015

cutting off childhood pleasures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elnura Osmonalieva (screenwriter and director) Seide / 2015 [13 minutes]

Kyrgyzstan director Elnura Osmonalieva’s 2015 short film Seide cannot truly be characterized as an LGBTQ movie, particularly since the young girl at the center of this film, Seide (Kaliman Kalybek Kyzy), is not even perhaps aware of her sexuality and certainly not in touch with a conception of “outsider” sex.

     She is simply a young child, growing up in the cold, snow-ridden plains of Kyrgyzstan who loves her horse and enjoys racing through the fields with the local boys. In the US we would describe her as a tomboy, and perhaps ascribe her love of horse-riding to lesbian tendencies. The lesbian astride a horse has long been a common image and a trope represented by the female warrior riding horseback throughout history (one need only think of Joan of Arc or the Germanic legend of the Black Fighter Johanna) to represent outsider and lesbian behavior.

     But here there are no symbols, just acts. Coming of age, Seide suddenly is the subject of her father and a neighbor concerning marriage, and without even telling her, it is decided in the traditional manner that she will marry the boy next door. Even worse, following the tradition of his ancestors, the father (Kanat Abdrakhmanov) intends to slaughter her beloved horse.

     Osmonalieva expresses all of this with the calm of inevitability—after all, what other choices in this isolated world does the young girl have? But it is Seide’s personal revolt against that inevitability which is at the heart of this emotionally touching film.

      Rising early one morning, she rides her horse far into the cold distance, perhaps to a location where she or the horse have never before traveled, with the intention of leaving her animal behind as she sloughs through the cold snow back to her home. She hugs the horse close to her, removes its harness, and tells it to run. She walks off, but when she turns, she sees her beloved animal following. He cannot leave her any more than she can him. “Run. Go!” she insists again and again.  “Go away! Silly beast.” Repeating this several times, she finally falls to a seated position in the snow in desperation, pain, and anger for the situation. Because of her love of the animal, she recognizes now that the horse must die to be replaced by another through her dowry. One wonders if the tradition was not purposely concocted to break off all contact with a childhood that saw no gender borders, and in the process to cut off all childhood pleasures in preparation for the hard life of heterosexual love a female of age will have to endure.

      The final scene shows her dressed as a bride, looking out over the winter landscape with nothing but trepidation for a future that has cost her all she loved.

       Perhaps this is less an LGBTQ work than it is a feminist statement, a sad pliant for all those women whose fates are sealed simply because of where they live. But I can’t help but feel that had Seide grown up elsewhere, in Western Europe perhaps, she would have become another woman than the one to which she has been confined to be in her homeland.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).