Etienne Périer | La Confusion des sentiments (Confused Feelings, aka The Confusion of Feelings) / 1981 [TV film]

 

a language with no words for desire

by Douglas Messerli

Dominique Fabre and Etienne Périer (screenplay, based on the novella by Stefan Zweig), Etienne Périer (director), La Confusion des sentiments (Confused Feelings, aka The Confusion of Feelings) / 1981 [TV film]

 

For the writers, director, and producers of the television film, based on a 1927 Stefan Zweig novella, the presentation of such a clear-cut dramatization of a homosexual man’s love for his student must have seemed in 1981 to be a rather adventurous and controversial endeavor, particularly since it wasn’t even a decade after the even more muted film, Death in Venice, to which their work bears a remarkable resemblance, had been shown in the art movie houses.

   The director Etienne Périer was quite upfront about what he imagined he had accomplished:

 

“This was the first TV film I directed and also the first and only film with an openly homosexual Subject ... adapted from a Stefan Zweig novel. It is the story of a middle age professor who falls deeply in love with a young student in his class on English literature. The student is a boarder in the teacher's house. The teacher is married and his wife knows he is mostly attracted to young men. She loves him nevertheless. The whole story revolves around a book the professor will write, dictating it to his young pupil... he will only declare his love at the end of the writing ....and it is too late....”

 

   Zweig’s writing, despite its immediate and continued popularity, always carried with it, it seems to me, a sort of 19th century caution when it came to matters of sex or politics, and his writing, particularly when compared to other German writers such as Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, and other greats of the period, generally seems to me written for the bourgeois middle class, dangerous ideas dressed up in a melodramatic language and aesthetics.

    What’s more, what the produces of La Confusion des sentiments could not have foretold is that by 1981 the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and others had totally altered the landscape of gay-oriented film, and over the past couple of years movie theaters for LGBTQ subject matter, what with the release of Carlos Hugo Christensen’s The Intruder, Philippe Vallois We Were One Man, Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem’s Breed of Faggots, Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return and Freak Orlando (the later of the same year), Jean Rollin’s Fascination, Salvatore Samperi’s Ernesto, and Frank Ripploh’s Taxi to the Toilets (also from 1981). One year earlier, TV German television had aired Fassbinder’s truly radical Berlin Alexanderplatz.

 

     Had Confused Feelings had come only a few years earlier, say in 1977 or even 1978, it might have been more controversial and noticed. Today, alas, this film is nearly forgotten.

     Which is a pity, really, since it is a rather remarkable study in gay feelings so closeted that it almost makes it appear that The Boys in the Band of nearly a decade earlier, instead of hooting out their frustrated messages of love and hate in a quiet New York apartment, were shouting it into a microphone while parading down the New York streets.

     Although the young Roland (Pierre Mallet) seems to have be living a rather desolate life while attending the university in Berlin, once he is sent by his father to the rural university where, the moment he gets off the train, he speeds off to attend a professor’s class where in a lecture on Shakespeare the lecturer is supposedly so brilliant that within moments our beautiful bad boy has reformed to become a simpering fool overwhelmed by his sudden mentor’s brilliance.

     And once the professor (Michel Piccoli) gets a good look at his new student, who hasn’t even bothered yet to find a room, it is clearly a love made in hell, the belated pedophile almost panting over the good-looking boy’s enthusiasm and faith, while Roland seems to have found the loving or perhaps we might suggest “lover” of a father he’s always been looking for. In the earliest moments of the film, his real father even admits that he has never found the time to talk to his son; his conversation about his son’s bad habits in the Berlin University seem to be the only full conversation the two of them have ever shared.

     Herr Professor Robert is only too ready to share his soul with the handsome enthusiast, suggesting that he take a room over his own apartment. At least the professor knows all two well what he’s all about, struggling throughout the rest of the movie to resist the temptation to break into the boy’s room and declare his love; but in the meantime, he “accidentally” arranges an outing in the nearby city where he takes him to museums, a fine restaurant, an orchestral concert, and an adjoining hotel bedroom where he prays the boy might possibly open up the latch between their rooms. Despite what appear to be Roland’s latent desires, he doesn’t have the sense to put an end to the tortures of the old man.

     For most of this movie, in fact, Roland plays an absolute idiot when it comes to sexual matters, unable to comprehend why the professor suddenly escapes, sometimes for a day or two at a time, from his home and even from his classroom. Why he plans meetings with the young student for which, at the last moment he cancels or simply doesn’t show up. What’s the boy to think of his idol when he displays such inconsistent behavior?

     The entire situation becomes even more fraught when, searching for the professor’s famous book on Shakespeare and all Elizabeth culture he discovers from the local librarian that no such book exists.

      Later, on one of his few moments bicycling the streets instead of locking himself away in his room, he espies a beautiful woman swimming naked in the local river, he discovers not only is she aware of his voyeuristic activities and doesn’t seem to mind in the least, but that she is the very same librarian to whom he spoke about the professor’s nonexistent book. How even more startling when, soon after, he discovers that she, Anna (Gila von Weitershausen), is the professor’s wife.

    Anna, it appears is the only sane person in the trio of characters at the center of this work, a beautiful woman, much younger than her husband, who is not only aware of her husband’s homosexual desires, but has come to accept them, to find her own sexual interests in others, and still remain somewhat in love simply by serving him, although she too is tortured by her husband’s closeted behavior.

     Knowing full well what is going on between her husband and the boy, or rather realizing what is not going on, she attempts to get Roland interested in young girls. But once more, Roland seems completely clueless, just as he cannot figure out why at one moment the professor is so friendly and solicitous of his company, and at the next seems to shun him.

   Instead of coming to any sense of awareness regarding the closeted farce going on around him, the boy offers to become the professor’s secretary in order to help him actually write his nonexistent book, now devoting long hours to writing down his would-be lover’s words and staying up late to type up the manuscript—all of which doesn’t help with his other studies or diminish the derision the other faculty members and fellow students demonstrate for his obvious involvement with the queer among their midst.

     Still Roland remains almost blind. Or perhaps, we might imagine—if only he were so clever—he’s really into S&M, torturing both the professor and himself as he marches around in all his beauty while pretending not to have a clue of the sexual tension between the two of them.

     Amazingly, the boy has actually gotten the professor to complete his work and everyone seems to agree, Anna included, that it is a work of genius. But, of course, now the time has come for the genius to admit his love through the apparatus of appreciation, and from Roland he and we expect the acceptance and actualization of that love. Even Anna can’t believe the boy is so dumb not to know what’s coming; and, in part, to save him from the embarrassment, she herself seduces him into her bed, forcing him to finally realize what is expected of him in such situations, or, perhaps even more importantly, what it is that he is truly seeking to get out of the strange “mentorship” with which he has so willingly engaged.

 

   Before the professor can even enter into conversation with his confession and hopes of a possibly positive response, Roland has already packed.

     The endlessly delayed love scene with his Tristan has been stolen off stage by his own beloved wife to protect the dim-witted kid, who finally realizes that his love for his idol isn’t of the of secular world, not involved with the body and earth. As IMDb commentor Juha Varto observed: “They don’t speak of flesh.”

     I once had an English professor who while teaching Mann’s Death in Venice commented that von Aschenbach’s true error was not in loving the startlingly young Polish Tadzio, but in his inability to tell the boy about his love. Most of my class members were simply scandalized by his comment, but I tried to make sense of it, finally deciding that it truly might have helped the situation. As it is, the boy keeps staring back at von Aschenbach simply because he cannot comprehend why the stranger is looking so intensely at him. Had the older man simply been able to tell him, “hey kid, I think you’re beautiful and I love you,” perhaps Tadzio would have been freed from feeling that there was something amiss with himself given the stranger’s endless gaze. He could have said, “Get away from me old man. Go home!” Or, if he truly loved that gaze and the thrill it gave it, perhaps he might have begun to explore his own sexuality, just what that pleasure of enjoying a man’s gaze really meant.

     Might Roland have run away if the professor had actually broken through the adjoining room of their hotel or knocked on his bedroom door and asked to spend the night? Or what if Roland had been more honest with himself and admitted what was happening between the two of them, perhaps realizing that it really wasn’t a fling in bed that he was seeking but a father whom he might be able to please as much as he seemed to be able to please the Professor on his good days.

     Or maybe, as one of the Letterboxd commentators argued, there “may actually have [been] a deeper completely repressed erotic root” to his love. But then, perhaps not since they don’t have a language for their desires.

     By the time Roland realizes what is happening, a kiss is all that is left. Any homosexual love has dissipated like a sour perfume into the air.

     Mann’s and Zweig’s tortured discreetness didn’t mean much in the wildly wicked late 70s and early 80s when this film appeared. And, accordingly, it was forgotten. But as a historical document of the painful hot-house gay romances that apparently went on so many early 20th century households, this TV movie is a necessary work of cinema art, with a wonderful performance by Piccoli and the eye-catching physiognomy of Mallet to boot. And von Weitershausen’s role is everything open and joyously free of spirit that the boy and his teacher’s friendship is not.  

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).  

     

 

 

 

René Clément | Plein soleil (Purple Noon, aka UK, Blazing Sun) 1960, USA 1961

hollow men

by Douglas Messerli

 

René Clément and Paul Gégauff (screenplay, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith), René Clément (director) Plein soleil (Purple Noon, aka UK, Blazing Sun) 1960, USA 1961

 

René Clément’s 1960 film, Purple Noon, is the first major movie role of the incredibly beautiful (but later rightest-leaning, homophobe) actor, Alain Delon. I have to admit that when I was young I might have been in love with Delon, and this film, in particular, makes it clear why; even as a 13-year old, I might have secretly had a crush on him, even though I did not see this movie at the time. I believe I first saw him in The Yellow Rolls Royce, courting Shirley MacLaine, four years later.

  In this film, he plays the dreadfully charming murderer, Tom Ripley, based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Ripley’s talents include his good looks, a remarkable ability to deceive (including a gift for forging signatures), and his talent to imitate the ways of the wealthy whose lives he desires. But we have to wonder whether behind his lean, bronzed body, there is anything inside: the same question we might have asked of the actor himself, making him nearly perfect for this role.

     I haven’t seen the “re-make,” Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, but I just can’t imagine the cute Matt Damon as a convincing replacement for Delon.

    Delon is perfect simply because he is so desirable, as the wealthy Philippe Greanleaf (Maurice Ronet), not a bad looker himself, who obviously is equally self-involved (the director keeps their shirts unbuttoned for most of the film). The bond between them, at least at first and despite their open womanizing in Rome, is clearly homoerotic; they are beautiful men who like to hang out together, even if they might never come to terms with their hidden sexuality. Instead of making love, their sexual tensions are expressed in their mockery of, and in Greanleaf’s case, abuse of, one another. 

      If Ripley is evil, Greanleaf is detestable, which is how we come to side with the murderer as opposed to the victim. In the first scenes of Clément’s stunningly scenic film, the playboy Greanleaf has not only skipped out, without telling his “serious” girlfriend, Marge Duval (Marie Laforêt) that he is traveling to Rome, but treats Ripley like a lackey, forcing him to pay for their meal on the Felliniesque Via Veneto (where Marcello Mastriano hung out in La Dolce Vita, a film that shared with this one the music of Nino Rota). In short, they have run off together under the guise of a wild weekend, which consists primarily of conning a blind man, whose cane they take away as an award for Greanleaf’s charity, and lying to and basically kidnapping a woman in order to publicly kiss and grope her in a kind of buddy gang-bang. It’s quite clear that they are not really interested in the middle-aged woman but in the sexual titillation of watching each other make love to her. When the always perceptive Ripley suggests that Greanleaf might pacify his back-home girlfriend, Marge, with a text on Fra Angelico, on whom she apparently is writing a book, he sends his lackey off to purchase the would-be gift of reconciliation.

      Only Greanleaf’s old friend, Freddy Miles (Billy Kearns) seems to immediately sniff out the potential evil-doings of Greanleaf’s supposedly childhood friend, a friendship that has evidently bought him a ticket to Europe by Greanleaf’s father to bring him back to the US. But the young heir is obviously having too much fun to ever want to return home to take over the family business. And besides, his father has awarded him the Adonis, Ripley.

      If these first scenes seem to suggest that Ripley is simply a hanger-on, enjoying the pleasures and power of being in a playboy’s company, we soon see a far darker side of the man when, back in France, he quietly invades Greanleaf’s bedroom, donning articles of the man’s clothing (shoes and a coat) to play out an imitation of his friend beside a mirror, making imaginary love not only to himself (a scene right out of Cocteau’s Orpheus) but to Greanleaf’s girlfriend Marge, one of the more creepy scenes in all of cinematic history. Not only has Ripley fetishzied his friend's garments but has adopted his personality. And once Greanleaf catches him performing that act, the balance between them quickly shifts with the playboy gradually beginning to play out a series of increasingly hostile “tests” of Ripley’s allegiance to him.

      As the threesome flee to Sicily on Greanleaf’s yacht, Ripley is forced to play a sailor boy, despite his obvious lack of experience, while his benefactor goes below to have sex with Marge. But even in his now obvious position as cabin boy, Ripley further shifts positions as he becomes a voyeur to Greanleaf’s acts, perhaps even tacitly with his master’s approval. But in further tests, wherein Greanleaf forces Ripley into a tethered dingy, which while, he and Marge are below, breaks free of its mooring, it is clear he has gone too far. When the yacht turns around to search for the missing dingy, finding Ripley seriously burned by the sun (the UK title of this film was Blazing Sun), everything has shifted once more.

     The tale now turns again into a kind of revenge love tragedy, as Ripley plants an earring from their Rome encounter into Marge’s clothes, which results in her own rage for Greanleaf’s behavior and her dismissal from the yacht at the very next island stop. Now Ripley truly does have Greanleaf to himself, but rather than consummating their relationship plays out the revenge, even sharing part of the plot with his would-be victim, finally stabling him to death and tossing his body into the sea.

    For me, the rest of the movie (in apposition to some critics who saw the earlier scenes as uninteresting), where Ripley quite successfully takes over Greanleaf’s identity, even bedding Marge, is far less interesting, reminding me some of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. Much like that character, Ripley successfully forges Greanleaf’s passport, assumes his personality, and lives, at least for a while, the highlife on Greanleaf’s own fortune. It’s all very clever and very much like a Jean-Pierre Melville catalogue of what a truly intelligent deceiver is able to accomplish. But as a character, Ripley no longer exists; he has become a version of Greanleaf, a not very-likeable figure in the first place, about whom we no longer care. The beautiful rooms and houses he inhabits are as hollow as the man, who later also kills Greanleaf’s friend, Freddy, in order to protect his new identity.

      A true humanist, Clément could not permit in his film for Ripley to get away with his murders, which Highsmith had. But by that time, I suggest, we have lost most of our fascination with this formerly passionate desirer, who has now simply become a facsimile of the despicable man he longed for and admired. It merely demonstrates Ripley’s failure to imagine or live out his own possibilities for doing something else in the world, choosing, instead, to envy what he doesn’t have, a true personality. In the end, we realize, he is simply a skilled imitator, like so many of Eliot’s walking dead in The Wasteland. So pretty, but staring down at his borrowed shoes, so hollow after all.  

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2017).

Nathan Keene | Disarm / 2010

fear of the possible self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Will Faulkner and Nathan Keene (screenplay), Nathan Keene (director) Disarm / 2010 [18 minutes]

 

The central figure of Australian director Nathan Keene’s short film Disarm (Tris Tyler) begins the work by standing on his bed, his hand down his underpants while watching TV porn and shouting at a business associate on the phone. A Grindr pick-up, a young boy (David Ryan Kinsman), after knocking on the hotel door, enters the room.

    The older man hangs up and calls the boy over to him. For a few moments they tussle as they kiss, alternating as they force themselves on the top of one another, the younger boy finally kicking the older one off. The elder comes back with his fist in the air ready to beat the kid, but only growls “No one fuckin’ kicks me.”

      The young boy is about to slink off, but the older man calls him back for a drink. So begins a discussion between the two beginning with the elder asking how many guys the young trick has a week, and the younger asking the elder’s age. After establishing his superiority of the quantity of boys he has each week, the elder demeans the still puny younger boy for going to the gym to work out 5 times a week, arguing that he’s just burning off his body mass.

      Asked if he has a boyfriend, the younger argues he doesn’t want one. Life should be an endless party, he argues, a bit like Cabaret’s Sally Bowles. But his life of going out clubbing on weekends and getting fucked while sitting home the rest of the nights to wait for the weekend doesn’t sound like much fun as the elder points out.

      Indeed, our young trick has never had a boyfriend. The younger can’t imagine having one guy, “it would get fucking stale.” The elder admits that he’s had a few boyfriends but they haven’t lasted “cause my minds always racing.” It’s just a vicious cycle, he admits.

      Asked why he clicked on his site, the younger man argues that he likes masculine looking men. “Skinny, queeny guys annoy me.” He goes on to tell the story of a young gay boy at his high school whom he describes as a pansy, flailing his arms with a fem-lisp.

      The elder asks if straight boys beat him up in high school, but the younger says he had a girlfriend even though he knew he was gay. What isn’t being said is that he had the girlfriend as a cover and that what he saw in the effeminate boy was a vision of a possible self, a fear of what being gay might really mean for him.

      The older man asks him what he’d like to do, meaning what career, but the younger hardly has a clue, even though we’ve established that he’s 22. He asks the older one what he does, the man responding, “Guess.” The boys responds “business,” to which the elder argues he chose it because of the money, but admits it’s boring. When the elder again asks the younger what he actually wants “to be,” the boy responds vaguely, “To be like you.”

      The conversation turns back to the subject of fighting, the elder observing that as gay men they are supposed to charm their offenders, the younger arguing that he would fight a gay man if necessary.

      The elder cuts to the core, responding that it’s just because he wants to be “straight.”

     “I just want to be a man, what’s wrong with that?” to which the elder argues, “What the fuck is a real man anyway?” And soon after he tells the younger, “Acting like a straight won’t make you a man.”

     Noticing a scar on the elder’s body, the younger asks where he got it, but the older man refuses to discuss it, saying only that he got it in a fight. And finally, the younger boy admits he fought the gay boy in his school.

    “Did he fight back?”

     “Not really.”

    “Did you hurt him.” The younger kid shakes his head. “He was a fem, there was a whole group of us.”

     The elder berates the younger for his actions arguing that he was probably the only one who knew what the other boy was going through. He finally recounts his own story. “I was beat when I was 16 until I went unconscious. That’s how I got my scar.

     “I had feelings for my best friend. But when I told him, he wouldn’t reciprocate, not at all.” The elder admits that it resulted in him finding hard to get close to people, that he pushes them away.

       The younger responds that “It’s easier to cut yourself off.”

      And suddenly the elder comments: “You know I can’t remember when was the last time I did this with someone.”

       “What?”

       “Talk.” The man calls the boy over to him, trying to discern what color eyes he has.

       “So we gonna fuck?”

       The man leans back, obviously no longer interested in the kid.

     The boy angrily gets up to leave, fed up with the older man’s lack of sexual interest, the elder shouting out, “Fuck you. You’re just like the rest of them!” Apparently, the kid did not comprehend one idea within the elder’s communications.        

     The boy pauses a moment outside the hotel room door, but then quickly walks off. The elder turns back on his porno station.

       But as the boy makes his way back to the car he does, in fact, rehear some of the elder’s comments, particularly how he is attempting to hide his own effeminacy, his own “fem-lisp.” He sits for a moment in the car staring at himself in the car mirror. There is a knock and the window. The elder stands there, the boy rolling down his window, the older man leaning in to kiss him before walking off.

        Although writers’ Faulkner and Keene’s dialogue is fairly unbelievable as a realistic event, it is nonetheless a rather moving exploration of gay men who are still caught up in the myth of masculinity and sexual performativity. And if the conversation itself is unconvincing, its representation of gay types who persist in performing basically heterosexual values within the gay world is quite accurate. In a sense, these men, although they outwardly declare their gay sexuality, are inwardly still battling with their fears and sufferings they carry within almost as a scar of their own somewhat unsuccessful coming to terms with their youthful sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Søren Grinderslev Hansen | Sidste Kys (Please Stay) / 2009

the scream

by Douglas Messerli

 

Søren Grinderslev Hansen (screenwriter and director) Sidste Kys (Please Stay) / 2009 [4.48 minutes]

 

Søren Grinderslev Hansen’s short comic melodrama, Please Stay, which I might have translated as “The Last Kiss” given the original title is Sidste Kys, begins with a seemingly strange disclaimer from the director: “Dear You Tube. This is a fiction. The penis is not real.” I’ll come back to that.

      The scene begins with what sounds like sex between two lovers, ending in orgasm, with the words “I love you.” But almost immediately after a voice, presumably the other, announces, “Mikkel, it’s over.”

      After the initial shock, Mikkel (Allan Hyde) answers, “How long have you felt this way?” receiving the answer “For a while.” Obviously “their” relationship has come to an end, unexpectedly for Mikkel.

  

      Is he seeing someone else? Anders, Thue, Nikolaj? Doesn’t he know that he sees how excited his friend is when he walks into the room? He does realize that he’s straight?

       When the other declares they’re just not a good match anymore, Mikkel insists, “We’re the perfect match. You’re a part of me.”

       The other voice insists that things have changed, “You’re not twelve anymore.” And they argue about Mikkel’s inability to change, his friend suggesting he’s in a rut.

       But suddenly Mikkel reveals his right hand, covered in plastic wrap, and we begin to suspect that perhaps something else is going on that we had not counted. Particularly when the voice wonders why he won’t share him with others, Mikkel angry that he wants to sleep around. Obviously the unseen “other” in this comic “dialogue” is Mikkel’s own penis, reprimanding him for not having come out, for being attached only to himself through his hand.

       The penis finally insists that he “wants to come out,” to which the intransigent Mikkel can only reply, “We can’t do that.”

        But the other insists that if he doesn’t “share him” that simply can’t be together any longer.

        Like any lover fearful of his loss, he demands his friend “stay.” But the answer is obvious: “Then let me out. Tell the world about me.”

        It’s the same old story, Mikkel insisting that if he told his parents about them, they’d disown him. “They’d kill me at school. My life would be over.” Sadly, these are the logical excuses made by all boys of his age who cannot deal with the possibilities of peer rejection and homophobia in general.

        But what are the alternatives, the real alternatives, the director asks indirectly, by playing out the absurdity of a solution that does not involve sexual openness.

       His final cry, an absurd one—“people would think I was insane!”—is answered even by his inner voice with the truth: “You are insane. …Talking to your own dick.”

       The only solution for someone so insane as to not accept his sexuality, is to entirely abandon one’s sexuality suggests the director. Mikkel pulls out a grater and apparently dares to do what he threatens since the final image of the boy is of a mad scream.

      But then it is madness, isn’t it, not to be able to love the way you were born to love?

     In Danish director Hansen’s short fable, I take the scream as the metaphor for the logic of boy not listening to what his own desires advise, to share himself with the world, to seek out others outside the closet no matter what pain that costs. Surely it is better than the pain of symbolic-castration, of sacrificing one’s sexual organs to the demands of normative society. And of course, this metaphor can be taken much further than a 17-year old boy trying to come to terms with his homosexuality at home in his bed.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).