Sam McGowan | Heaven / 2019

a chance to fall in love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam McGowan (screenwriter and director) Heaven / 2019 [7 minutes]

 

This short film is a rather clumsy effort of a movie about an equally clumsy and shy young guy at a co-ed party with two boys and 6 girls, one of them an ally. The boy Tom (Indiana Williams), that  shy kid, is desperately in love with the other boy at the party, Jake (Karl Richmond).

    So too is the mean girl Rebecca (Gemma Carfi), who is equally attracted to the cutey. The film begins with Tom so wrapped up in his own thoughts of how he might possibly tell Jake he loves him without even knowing if he’s gay—while Rebecca endlessly jabbers on, mostly about passing the bowl of chisels (the Australian name for a crunchy treat in a beveled shape)—that she wonders if he’s “freaking deaf.”

     Irritated by his mooncalf antics, she stands up and proposes a game of “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” a sort of advanced spin-the-bottle, which even Jen (Mikhayla Dennis) doesn’t know how to play—leading Rebecca to describe her as a virgin. But the rules are simple: leader (in this case Rebecca) chooses someone to wait in the closet while the others spin the bottle to determine who will spend time alone with him or her for seven minutes doing whatever they want. She chooses Jake to wait in the closet for whatever comes his way.

     Tom is terrified, asking Jen to momentarily join him as he rushes to the bathroom, there desperately reminding her of his feelings for the other boy. He’s so upset that his nose begins to bleed. Jen assures him that she will spin the bottle, making certain that it spins in his direction, but Tom understandably remains dubious of the result.

     As he leaves the bathroom to return to the others, he meets up with Jake on his way to the loo, who, observing Tom’s bloody nose, very nicely suggests that he raise arm hand in the air to help

stop the flow of blood, gently putting his hands on Tom’s arm to position it, as Jake nearly faints at the touch.

     Back in the circle of hell, Jen spins, the bottle passing up nearly all the others before it stops just between Rebecca and Tom, the girl immediately standing up to claim it landed nearer to her. When Jake weakly takes issue, Rebecca, as she puts on another layer of lipstick, insists that Jake is waiting for someone like her, that he isn’t interested in boys.

     In tears, Tom rushes into a nearby bedroom, sitting on the floor in frustration and shame.

    But soon we see the door open, and without him even noticing it, Jake sits down beside him. Rebecca isn’t his type, he tells the now clear-eyed Tom; in fact, Jake, is someone he’s been pining for he says, as he awards him a kiss.

     Tom kisses him back and that’s and that truly puts both boys in heaven—at least for the rest of the night.

      If Australian director McGowan is clearly an amateur, he’s got enough heart to hand his nerdy character a chance to beat out the privileged bitch in his search for love.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).  

 

Thomas Dearnley-Davison | The Visitors / 2025

how nice of you to drop in

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thomas Dearnley-Davison (screenwriter and director) The Visitors / 2025 [11 minutes]

 The Visitors is one of those comic works about eccentrics that seem to be the birthright of many British authors. In this quite ludicrous domestic drama Luke (Thomas Dearnley-Davison), being visited by his mother Jill (Jane Morgan) is attending to his Instagram page when she enters the living room and suggests they play a game instead, usurping his cellphone for that purpose. Luke is clearly not pleased.

   At that very moment, like a bad stage play, two burglars, unlikely brother and sister Matt (Omar Aga) and Ronnie (Kirsty Langley) leap into the room through a broken window demanding the evidently famed royal cups and plates that Jill has been collecting for decades, ceremonial ware sold to the collectors on special occasions such as the crowning of King George VI soon after his brother Edward’s abdication of throne or upon the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana.

    Luke is terrified by their arrival, but his mother seems to take it less as an intrusion that a wonderful night visit, only too happy to take Ronnie, who seems to be in charge of the invasion and knowledgeable about the collection, into the back room to show off her treasures.

    Matt has taken a night off from his job as a DJ just to participate in the heist, and is not at all happy that his sister argues that she must see the full collection before deciding which ones to take.

   Meanwhile, Jill very nicely introduces herself to the intruders explaining why they found both of them at home, when the siblings were expecting the house to be empty.

   The women move off into the back room, while Matt and Luke watch TV together, Luke daring to suggest that since Matt is a DJ and a musical connoisseur he probably doesn’t at all take to musical groups such as Abba. But to his surprise, Matt admits he quite likes Abba, and it soon becomes clear that the two have some of the same musical tastes, and that Matt, in fact, doesn’t at all mind the way Luke is looking him over.

     In the back room, Jill proudly holds up her prized George VI cup, telling of her complete collection of the royal memorabilia in which Ronnie takes great interest. At some point, however, she accidently drops the cup, which breaks into dozens of pieces.

     They return to the living room where Jill invites the would-be robber to take any piece of choice, while Ronnie admits that she knows that the pieces are really rather worthless, but explains that her mother used to have just such a collection, and one day she simply left the family never to return. Perhaps, she imagines, if she could have just found something special and precious among Jill’s collection she might be able to lure her mother back.

    Jill, on the other hand, describes the job as a policewoman that kept her busy for years, explaining just how hot it was in the tiny police vehicles, etc.

    In the hall, Matt invites Luke to see him perform his job at a club, and when they finally agree at which gay club to meet up, Luke is only too happy to accept the invitation.

    It appears that Ronnie has found another kind of mother, and that just perhaps, as ludicrous as it seems, Luke has possibly discovered a new boyfriend.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Samuel Theis | Petite nature (Softie) / 2021

different from the others

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Theis (screenwriter and director) Petite nature (Softie) / 2021

 

In the very first scenes of director Samuel Theis’ Petite nature we see an entire family on an overnight move, Sonia (Mélissa Olexa) moving out of her current lover’s house with her young daughter Mélissa (Jade Schwartz), her 10-year-old son Johnny (Aliocha Reinert), and her elder son Dylan (Ilario Gallo). They find someone to move most of their possessions, but with no car these pre-teens. must walk through the streets of the city in which they live, Forbach, in northeastern France, each with treasured objects in hand, Johnny leading with two plastic bags of fish, hurrying forward to get them before they die back into their aquarium.

      The long-haired blond boy Johnny, the “softie” of the title, is a caring and loving child who is sensitive to what most of the family is simply not—in this case even embarrassed to be seen as part of the procession of displaced family on their way to public housing project. The elder pot-smoking teen is interested in his girlfriend (Romande Esch) and his male friends in the project who hang out mostly in a heavily graffiti-covered tunnel, while it is Johnny who must care for his little sister, walking her to and back from school, dressing and even feeding her, and getting the family groceries, while his mother works for a pittance at a cigarette stand and makes out with a series of male lovers we see throughout the movie, coming home many a night drunk.

      She is dependent upon her younger son, and loves him dearly, but laments the fact that he is such a sensitive boy, unable to even stand up to the neighbor boys’ taunting of their pet dog, let alone for himself, a boy with beautiful long hair who openly reads as a “sissy.”

     It is the new school teacher who has moved from a more affluent area of France to the poorer Alsace-Lorraine region who further opens his mind, which leaves him raw in a world which demands being tough and hardy. Here many of the natives even speak another language, a mix of French and German, Franconian, like the people, a mix of heritages that seem always at battle with one another.

      On the very first day of the class, the teacher Mr. Adamski (Antoine Reinartz) asks each of his students to describe where they would like to be in their lives in 30 years, a question unimaginable to most 10-year-olds, but inconceivable to a childlike Johnny. One student would like be in Miami, married with children, another in Dubai making large sums of money, but Johnny is nearly speechless just for nature of the question let alone his natural shyness. Within a few weeks Adamski has begun to open this beautiful child’s mind—the visual and oral evidence of which is one of the many joys of the movie—and Johnny has fallen in love with him, quite literally, obviously realizing far too early that he loves men, particularly when they might serve as the father he hardly ever sees.

       It is notable that at one exasperating moment at home, he suddenly becomes frustrated with his role as a parent in some ways more substantial than his own mother, and suddenly blurts out that he doesn’t want to work in a cigarette stand, he does not at all intend to grow up to become a MacDonald’s manager. 

     At another point, seemingly out of nowhere, Johnny tells his mother that because of their financial situation and his intelligence he might be able to attending boarding school in Metz that Adamski has told him about. But, of course, Johnny’s mother won’t hear of that possibility either, given her need of the boy to raise his sister and keep order in their house.

     Johnny becomes so quickly infatuated with his teacher, that one afternoon he picks up his sister and stakes out Adamski’s house in a fashionable neighborhood, peering into the empty home and, from behind a tree, watching his teacher arrive home with his girlfriend, Nora (French rock singer Izïa Higelin). Arriving home late, Johnny is faced by a distressed mother who, when he refuses to tell her where he was, queries his little sister and finally beats him when he refuses to explain the situation.

     Having been beaten and momentarily forced out of the house, Johnny has no alternative but to actually visit Adamski and Nora. He charms Nora as well, in way that becomes dangerous to the teacher himself, particularly when she invites the boy along with an older girl to an evening open celebration at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where Nora works. There, among the strong works of contemporary art, he stalks his teacher from room to room, associating Adamski’s interests with his own, at one point even perceiving him, as light pours in from a video installation of an opera house, as being part of the artwork itself. Later, after dinner in a local restaurant, the older girl and Johnny are left alone for a moment to talk, she immediately sensing that he’s “into boys,” and asking him he’s found someone he likes. Johnny admits he has, and agrees that he’s in his school, although he doesn’t believe, he admits, that the friend knows he loves him. Wondering how he can tell, the elder girl suggests he casually touch his body somewhere, his arm and hand, during everyday conversation to see what his reaction might be, and hints at other tricks such as wetting one’s lips to see if the other might be ready for a kiss.

     The boy, however, has his own plan already in mind, a disastrous trip to Adamski’s home during school vacation when he knows that Nora will not be there. He hopes in might be invited in, but when the teacher says he is busy correcting papers and has no time to entertain him, Johnny simply asks to use the bathroom before leaving, and returning to the room in which Adamski is at work, attempts to kiss him before striping off his shirt, seating himself in a chair, and as best as he knows how, tries to seduce his teacher by rubbing his nipple.

      Shocked and rightfully terrified given most of Western contemporary cultures’ hysteria about pedophilia, he demands that he boy immediately dress and hurries him out the door with no niceties or friendliness about it, knowing that if this event ever even got out, he would lose his job. In attempting to help the child, he and his girlfriend have gotten too close.

     It reminds me of the horrible scene in in Norwegian director Gjertrud Bergaust’s 2018 film Jakt (Hunt), where an empathetic farmer has offered a young local bullied gay boy a job, but is suddenly forced to fire him and lock him out of the house when he realizes that he is being set-up for a charge of pederasty.

     Obviously, any 10-year-old is devasted when his idealized teacher must now resist from showing him any special attention, particularly when he has imagined that he was his teacher’s sexual pet. One day during a simple class lesson it as if the trees themselves call out to him as suddenly he attempts to leap from the window of his third-story class room, his fellow students preventing him from the jump.

      The principal attempts to help Johnny’s mother comprehend that such an act requires that he talk to a psychologist, but like many working and rural folks, she is resistant to the idea, fearful that others will think her son is crazy. The principal reminds her that Johnny behaved in this manner in front of his entire class, who themselves will have to be visited by a therapist because of the incident, but she refuses nonetheless. And she demands a further explanation of his behavior afterwards, Johnny dangerously coming close to hinting about his love of the teacher and his belief that he is his teacher’s pet—so close, in fact, that Sonia herself becomes fearful that pedophilia has been involved. But fortunately, Johnny insists that he has never touched him or shown him sexual affection. And being of the working class, she is calmed by his denials.

     The film ends the only way it might, with the man who offered him the world having to remove himself slightly from the boy’s further education. But Johnny nonetheless, like his classmates, takes his first communion, an event attended of necessity by Adamski and Nora, who congratulate him as they do his other classmates. And at the party for him, Nora’s current boyfriend, seeing Johnny apart from the celebrants they’ve invited, pulls him up into his arms and carries him into the room of other males who similarly carry him on above their heads, the perfect kind of love for a boy who so desperately needs but cannot find open expression of male affection.

      As usual, his mother drinks too much, and is carried home drunk by two men, Johnny being forced to undress her and lay her out on the couch, putting a blanket over her passed-out body.

     A moment later he puts his hand around her jaw, as if he would pull her out of her stupor, demanding that she listen: knowing she cannot even hear him, he insists in no uncertain terms that she remember what he says, that he plans to attend the boarding school the next year in Metz.

      Despite everything, this child is determined to get a better education, refusing to become what his family and local society has planned for him. He may be a softie, but he a tough-minded child with the intelligence and desire to be someone, if not more important, at least different from the others—which takes us all the way back to Richard Oswald’s 1919 film wherein a concert violinist makes the mistake of falling in love with his own special student.

     Fortunately, Adamski has not made the same mistake. As Pat Brown of Slant magazine recognizes, while “Theis’s account of class and sexual precarity remains knotty and unresolved in ways that one doesn’t expect from the typical melodrama about impoverished youth, Softie ventures into territory that, with Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, proved to be relatively volatile: the sexuality of marginalized French pre-teens.Rather than teaching a lesson [however] Softie seems much more interested in conveying an experience. Theis proves much more interested in the pain of small mistakes and miscommunications than he is in grand drama. Providing a straightforward glance into the experience of navigating a queer identity when one’s environment provides little to no models for expressing it, Softie is a noteworthy repurposing of the coming-of-age social drama.”

      The saddest thing, however, is that open-minded men such as Adamski are forced to keep their hearts in terrible check when it comes to helping the youth of their classrooms. In our society, love is such a confusing force that it must be denied the very individuals who sometimes need it most.

Yet I can imagine that Adamski might have dealt with the child’s torturous farce of love in an entirely different manner, laughing it off while demanding he dress and leave, attempting to make it clear to the boy that there is a vast different between caring for another and a physical expression of love. As it was, Adamski and Nora behaved almost as hysterically as do our general societies in such situations. And had the boy attempted to act out such a rejection in another manner, he might not have been so easily saved.

      But I loved this film, nonetheless, for the child who in the end not only was saved but redeemed himself recognizing perhaps for the first time that despite his gentle assimilation of responsibilities and recognition of the failures of those around him, that he might be someone of greater worth.

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Quinn de Matta | Into Temptation / 2021

nothing about love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Quinn de Matta (screenwriter and director) Into Temptation / 2021 [20 minutes]

 

Into Temptation begins with what seems to be an older man, Michael (Juan Manuel Salcito), perhaps a father, playing hide and seek with whom he might assume is his son, calling out the numbers from 10 down to 1 before he goes on the search presumably for the running and hiding child.

      But almost immediately we recognize something here is terribly amiss, as the older man looks into a couple of places before entering the bedroom where, in fact, an even older man lays tied up, gasping through a mouth gag for help.

      Michael asks if he’s ready to talk, pulling out his cell phone presumably to record whatever the older man says. The gag, we realize is a jock strap. Pulling it out of the man’s mouth, the elder asks him to “stop.” He asks “Who else is here,” presumably having heard Michael speaking to another, but we almost immediately recognize that the other is his own childhood version of himself, a young Michael (Jaxon Ballenger) which we presumed was the child on the run.

      Michael straddles the man, erotically touching his body, explaining that he has thought about this so many times, what each of them would say, how they would behave. All the other can say is that people will soon be looking for him. “I don’t want you to get trouble,” he lies, attempting to project the protectiveness of an elder man to a younger.

      Michael smiles, fondly stroking the man’s face: “No one’s coming.”

      He bends to kiss the man, who screams and pleads for help.

      “Isn’t this what you want? You and me?”

      The child goes racing through the room again, Michael in chase of him, following the image of his own younger self, imaginatively capturing the boy as he, himself, has become the elder. “Now the last one back has to hold the vestments.”

      This film, we suddenly perceive, is a revenge tragedy, a work in which a now very disturbed adult is playing out the sexual tortures of his own childhood by the man, a priest, Father Graham (Tom McLaren) whom he now has captured and controls, just as the other had been in control of the young boy.

      This psychodrama plays out in alternating scenes of the young priest and the boy and the interchanges, such as that which we just observed, of Michael and the now much older priest.

    In the re-imagined past, we see the priest presenting the boy with a special present he has bought him, a cross he puts carefully around the boy’s neck. Conflating God with his own personal attentions, he tells the boy that “He and I will always be with you all the time. And you’ll always know how special you will be to us both,” his devilish clever linking of himself to God making it almost impossible for the child Michael to separate the physically loving attentions of the priest with his spiritual values supported by his parents and the community.

      The priest tells the child that he has one more for him, a special gift, demanding that he not move.

     The adult Michael brings his captured priest a bottle of wine, declaring “Only special boys get to have some,” as he pours wine down his victim’s throat, obviously just as the priest did to the boy to get him drunk or put him into semi-consciousness to facilitate his sexual actions. He strokes the older man’s face, reporting “I didn’t like it either, but you get used to it.”

    As he strokes and kisses him, the elder Michael plays the role of the young priest, “The feeling inside, it feels good, doesn’t it. Some say it feels like butterflies, but I think it feels like angels—hundreds of them.”

     Michael again straddles him: “They never understood what we had.”

     But now the priest responds: “They call me a monster. But what was I supposed to do? They put me in the garden. And then they punished me for taking a bite. That’s all it was. A little bite.”

     “No, no, no,” shouts Michael, now caught up in his own version of their past sexual interludes, again revealing just how manipulated the boy was, momentarily reliving another past moment: “Do you feel that? That’s you! And that’s me. He wants us to be together. But you have to promise. If they find out, they’ll send me away.” One can easily visualize what is happening, and how the priest turns even the special adolescent feeling of an erection into emotional quagmire of guilt if he dare to share the experience in language.

     Observing the childhood memory, the priest now begs that he will never tell anyone if only Michael will let him go.

     But the boy become the man cannot let him go. And we’re not quite sure of the full reasons. Is it just revenge, the full expression of what it meant to live under the total control of an older man, or is it his own now perverse deep feelings for the priest who has been forced to abandon him for his sinful behavior?

     Playing the priest again, he demands the old man stop crying. He didn’t hurt him. But clearly the boy Mickey did feel hurt, had reason to cry out, just as now the older priest does.

     The adult Michael admits, “I’m not letting you go again.”

     But the now cynical old priest clearly cannot comprehend anything, has not learned anything, asking “How much to you want?”

   Michael, shocked by the suggestion, makes it clear the kidnapping has nothing at all to do with money. When the priest asks him to call people to and tell them want it wants, the formerly abused adult says something that is hard to comprehend: “You are what I want. We made a promise.”

    The priest mocks him, did he keep his promises to Santa, to the Easter Bunny. “Go ahead, tell them about the mean old priest who touched you.”

     “No, no I won’t” shouts the adult Michael, still committed to the love he believed he and the priest had long ago committed to. The horrible truth is almost unbearable. He won’t tell anyone, he insists, “Because I love you.”

     How does a man who manipulated a young boy into touching his penis and allowing him to touch the boy’s erect young cock explain to himself the horrifying results of his endless series of lies, of the deep intertwinement of his relationship with the boy and the boy’s own very belief system. If love is godly, if Christ preaches love, and the priest argues for the child to engage to that love, how can a boy, even later as an adult, ever be able to separate the spiritual from the profane? How can the man whose job it was to truly educate young men in spiritual matters, now undo his twisted and perverted teachings?

     Even the priest finally admits it, makes it clear what this film argues, sexual abuse of an elder man with a boy has nothing at to do with gay love: “Nothing about then, and nothing about now is love.” As we have witnessed, pedophilia is about control, not about love.

     But Michael is now forever deluded, answering in tears, “When they came for you, no one believed me, no one listened. And I waited. And I prayed. I prayed. He brought us back together.”

     Misunderstanding everything, the old priest responds, “Then, why am I being punished?”

   Michael doesn’t comprehend his control of the priest as punishment, however, any more than the priest would have accepted the fact that he was controlling the boy Mickey.

   There is a strange element of such relationships that is very much akin to sadomasochism, of capturing and controlling the other in order to make certain the lover will remain, keep silent, and return their love. If there is any love involved in such situations, it is accompanied by a deep fear that the love is not truly available, that it will not be returned, that it will be utterly resisted and ignored. And given that fact, any love that may have been involved is converted to control, fear, self-doubt, the fear of discovery of its existence by others. The forbidden remains forbidden even after the rules, the sin of breaking those rules, and the disdain of the law—whether social, cultural, or personal—has been fully expressed. It is the very forbiddenness of the act which helps to render to even more irresistible.

     “You’re not being punished,” Michael cries out again and again: “I love you.”

     Michael again strokes the priest’s face and finally kisses him fully on the lips.

     As he begins to attempt to masturbate the older man, the priest argues “None of the others behaved this way.”

     Michael points out it was the others who sent him away. He kept their secret. “I am, I am special,” he insists.

     As he momentarily backs off, we see the scars on Michael arms that clearly represent a suicide attempt, he arguing that “He brought me back to so that I could keep my promise. We made a promise to God. And I’m going to keep that promise.”       

    Who is now is the monster, the Frankenstein who created the other or his creation? The issue is unanswerable. And it no longer matters. Both have destroyed any possibility of real love for a strange and perverse notion of love that wasn’t/isn’t what it pretended/pretends to be.

      As Michael undoes his belt to strip himself of his clothing, we suddenly move into the past again as the priest reads pontifically from “The Song of Solomon”:

 

                            Close your heart to every love but mine.

                            Hold no one in your arms but me.

                            Love is a powerful as death.

                            Passion is as strong as death itself.

                            It burst into flame and burns like a raging fire.

                            Water cannot put it out. No flood can drown it.

                            That is the word of the Lord.

 

    Amen, says Mickey, the child, as Michael lays down with his elderly priest lover, having just turned on the gas burners of his kitchen stove.

     I have encountered only a couple of other films as powerful as this 20-minute exegesis of cultural and scriptural texts, complemented with Paul Spaeth’s almost queasy-feeling musical score (featuring the unlikely combination of timpani and flutes). If there was ever a film I might point to in order to explain the horrors of male child abuse, I’d name this movie.

     But it is dangerous matter, as I have pointed out time and again, in our current society terrified of discussing just such complex issues. Just this week, Google brought down years of blog writing for my sites about poetry, theater, opera, art, fiction, and film because of a meaningless accusation—without mention of any specific text—concerning my comments on this very subject. While we in the US like to complain about the censorship in other countries, it’s also become quite apparent that we do not have free expression in this country on the internet, that although the internet sites allow numerous examples of false political statements, it monitors and cuts away free speech on numerous subjects which frighten the general populace just by their existence.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).