Brian To | Audit / 2001

examining his finances, reviewing his self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Spencer Beglarian and Brian To (screenplay), Brian To (director) Audit / 2001 [28 minutes]

 

Even before they enter the dark and drab halls of the Federal building Julie Leer (Judy Greer) and Jack Kroll (Michael G. Kelley) are already arguing. Both are rather terrified about the audit they are about to undergo, but have been told that the authorities are more lenient when the couple both show up and explain their expenses, even though this couple evidently have a tax lawyer.

    Jack tells Julie to take off her sunglasses, that otherwise she looks like a drug dealer, and she, at first resists. And, in fact, she seems as if she will make problems from the start. Julie is a wannabee actor but makes her living as a Feng Shui consultant, helping her customers align their lives in space and rid themselves of clutter in their lives.

    Jack is a beginning actor whose major role of the year was as a dog, which he played part of the time in the nude.

     From the moment that they enter the office, observing the secretary (Sally Kirkland, playing a odd mix of someone with the qualities of Jean Brodie from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [1969] and Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1975]) who in the first major scene of this short film reads the riot act to a man who has just undergone an audit and now owes $8,000.

    Yet she seems friendly to Julie, and merrily sends them off to Richard Valentine (played by the noted transgender actor Alexis Arquette, here playing a male), the auditor.

    For the first moments, any questions posed by Valentine are basically interrupted by Julie as she demands, first to change seats with her husband, and secondly that Richard put away the clutter of pens and scissors spilled across his desk. As she begins to clean them up, he rebels and quickly spills them out upon his desk again, not an auspicious beginning for the couple.

    Soon he gets down to business, questioning Jack about his deductions for props for his roles, one of which has evidently not even been purchased for him, and querying him about whether the play in which he performed a dog was truly a success or a flop. It seems to have been a bit of both, receiving critical notice but sparse audiences.

    Turning his attention to Julie, he cannot explain her deduction of 6,000 for makeup and other expenses as an actor given that she was unable to attain any roles and made no money in that “career.” In challenging her, is clearly ready to categorize her career as a hobby.

     Seemingly stressed by his questions, Julie decides to take a bathroom break, actually in attempt to smoke in a Federal building where no smoking is permitted. In the bathroom she encounters the secretary who immediately comes on to Julie, kissing her and attempting to seduce her, an aggressive lesbian determined to make love to the thin beauty that Julie represents.

    Meanwhile, back in the auditor’s office we discover that, in fact, four years previously Jack and Richard were living together in a gay relationship, and that Richard has basically paid for him to develop an acting career. Obviously, the tension between the ex-lovers is heightened as Jack insists he isn’t and never was gay, and that despite their several years together he never loved Richard, while the auditor reminds him that nonetheless, he licked his ass and fucked him most nights, and even met his parents. He produces a picture of the two together which leads to a bit of name-calling, Jack insisting that, unlike Richard, is his not a faggot until finally he appears to break down and admits that he still has some feelings for him, attempting to kiss him, the auditor backing away despite the fact that he obviously still has the hots for Jack.

    In the bathroom the secretary reveals to Julie her husband’s former relationship with the auditor, and how he supported him for years. At first, Julie refuses to believe it, but upon returning to the office spots the photograph of the two and grows increasingly furious with both of the men, betraying Jack concerning some of his false deductions and putting down the auditor by explaining that, despite his obvious dismissal of her seconding job as a Feng Shui consultant, that she actually brought in $13,000, evidently higher than the amount they had declared. She leaves the two ex-lovers to themselves, furiously leaving the building.

 

    When Jack finally admits he misses Richard, the auditor determines to simply close the case, returning their files without any further changes, Jack giving him a quick kiss on the lips in appreciation for the decision, told by Richard hurry off to his wife to see if he can still salvage the marriage.

     We quickly perceive, however, that Julie had long known of his previous relationship and they had planned all along to use it to manipulate the situation so that all of their false deductions would be forgiven. Indeed, they determine to now celebrate at the Ivy or Morton’s, two of Los Angeles’s expensive hot spots for people in the movie business. Jack chuckles over his success, yet the laughter is clearly somewhat artificial, and when he repeats the celebratory chortle, we perceive it is not so much a real laugh as much as it is a kind of thwarted cry for something that he has lost, a cynical guffaw released in recognition of all that he has been forced to give up simply to find his meager success. His marriage to this empty-headed woman, we perceive, is a sad trade-off for the sake of his career.

     As Julie celebrates their lies, she expresses her hope that he didn’t have to actually kiss the auditor to get what he wanted, explaining that the lesbian secretary had been all over her. But we sense, now in retrospect, that perhaps Jack’s kiss of Richard was not all in jest, that he does indeed miss aspects of their truly loving relationship, a sexuality he is no longer able to express. While he may have been able to succeed in lying about his financial situation, the inner audit he has just undergone is not been so easily resolved.

     It was interesting watching this film in 2025 with the fascinating Sally Kirkland, the former avant- garde actor who was once part of Andy Warhol’s factory who died that year at the age of 84 after having suffered dementia; witnessing a somewhat late work in Arquette’s career after she transitioned from a man into women, but had begun shifting gender roles before dying of AIDS complications in 2016.

 

Los Angeles, January 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

 

 

Juan Sebastián Valencia | Pink Trumpets / 2024

on the street where you lived

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Sebastián Valencia (screenwriter and director) Pink Trumpets / 2024 [21 minutes]

 

Gregory Parker (Ryan Kirby) and Hunter Jones (Douglas Jung) were gay lovers six years before this short film begins. Somewhat inexplicably, they have run into one another again in Hunter’s favorite ice cream place back in the states, despite the fact that he now lives in Paris. The meet-up results in Gregory inviting Hunter back to his cabin in the mountains, the place where they regularly met up years before—at a time before Hunter discovered that Gregory was a married man with two children who had been lying to him and not even provided his real name.

   For Hunter, particularly, but for both men, we soon discover their break-up was a horrific time in which Hunter, unable to remain with his memories in the States, escaped to Paris and in which Hunter, we soon learn, gradually realized that he had loved Hunter and through therapy admitted his sexuality to his wife which ended in a divorce. His wife is soon about to marry again, although it’s apparent that he still sees his beloved children from time to time, and that finally his friendship with his ex-wife has been repaired.

    It is a story told time again about gay men who have not been able to be honest to themselves or others about their sexuality. But in this case the focus is on what happens to the other man to whom he has lied and cheated.

    Hunter begins the visit with insisting that he is intending to stay only a short while, perceiving it almost as a closure to such a painful period in his life. As he announces to Gregory: “I’m not the same anymore.” Gregory responding, “Neither am I.” And surely, despite Hunter’s seemingly charmed life in Paris where he is working now at a high paying job, has found a new friend, and has just purchased a lovely new apartment, Gregory’s life has changed far more radically given his divorce, his open admission to being gay, and his complete remodeling of the cabin house, where he now lives, the cabin symbolizing the only legitimate part of his past life, where the two of them spent their time together.

    If their slow series of revelations of their changes is a bit melodramatic, featuring as it does a rather bland picture of a place in the city, photographed evidently by Gregory of the street where they temporarily lived, this short film nonetheless makes it quite apparent of how the man who wouldn’t even reveal his name, in an attempt to protect his wife, children, himself, and, so he claims, even his gay lover, affected all of their lives for the worst.

     Given the fact that Hunter has found Paris and Gregory’s wife has found a new husband and father for the children, perhaps the only one who remains living in a fantasy world is Gregory, who finally reveals his real name, the fact that he has kept their friendship bracelet (Hunter has also kept his, although he has hidden it upon arrival), and now has only the memories of his life with Hunter left to sustain him.

    Soap operas, the genre in which this work basically functions, are the last bastions of romantic fantasies along with gay movies. Even heterosexual rom-coms are far more cynical these days. For here, after finally confronting Gregory for all the hearts he has broken and the pain he has caused, Hunter admits that he has a bag of clothes hidden in the trunk of his car and is willing still to spend the night—or perhaps an eternity with the man he realizes he still loves.

 

Los Angeles, January 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Arnault Labarrone | Petite faiblesse (Soft Spot, aka Little Weakness) / 2005

a last gasp

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnault Labarrone (screenwriter and director) Petite faiblesse (Soft Spot, aka Little Weakness) / 2005 [18 minutes]

 

Although there are perhaps not enough examples to describe it as a genre, there seems almost to be a sub-genre or perhaps a small collection of films in which, while a wife is pregnant, young men seek out other males with whom to have sex. Perhaps being warned against having sex with a pregnant wife, the find release in their own sex so not to appear as cheating on their spouses. Or perhaps they feel that this may be their very last chance to explore other sexualities.

     In this case, a handsome young Frenchman, Marc (Anthony Hallot) finds a young Polish man, Dimitry (Grégory Granier) is willing to do anything the married man asks of him. Presumably he’s paid for his efforts, but he too may just be enjoying his sexuality in a kinky manner.

     As Marc’s wife, Marion (Florence Loiret Calle) now many months pregnant begins to paint the room purple in their apartment which they have selected for the child, Marc begins his sexual explorations, first meeting with Dimitry in a hotel room where he awaits him completely naked in position to enjoy a truly raw doggy fuck.

     Curious in regard to Marc’s late nights and disappearances, she opens his computer only to discover the texts he has been sending to Dimitry outlining his specific instructions of their meet-ups.

     At first, she not so much disgusted as intrigued, imagining her own body undergoing the same sexual aggressions in which Marc has begun to engage.

     The second meet-up is far more detailed, describing the precise place in a deserted parking structure where he hopes to be bound, gagged, and beaten up by leather thugs. And as Marion imagines his own pain and sexual ecstasy, she spills the can of purple paint, rolling on the floor in a kind of disgusted fantasy—and perhaps in a brief salute to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up—of being herself redefined by the purple paint in which her body wallows. She showers away her new skin, as does Marc shower away the blood upon his return.

    The beating has evidently been far more serious than he has expected, Marc returning severely bruised and in pain, explaining, in tears, that he has been beaten up by some blokes.

     But this time, as she begins to sew on the buttons broken off his shirt, she becomes angry for his fantasies and lies, and momentary takes up the needle, ready to plunge it into her belly.

     As he lies sleeping, however, she enters his study and writes directly to Dimitry, suggesting that he should come to their apartment and have sex with her as she lies in bed with her husband, in part, as she explains when Marc awakens to find Dimitry straddled over his wife, so that he will not have to choose between her and Dimitry, able to have both simultaneously.

     But Marc is shocked, furious that Dimitry has evidently decided by himself to change the rules; while gradually coming to perceive that it was his own wife who had written to him.

     Angry with the rebuke, Dimitry storms out, Marc chasing after him, but at the door realizing he has now lost his alternative fantasy world.

    Distraught, Marion again begins to pound her belly as if attempting to abort the child, asking herself and Marc how will they now be able to write the fable of their own lives, how will they create the story of their own secret desires. Stopping her from doing any further harm, he explains that the fable lies in her belly.

     It is clear that he has now accepted the fact that any new experiences they have been seeking now exists in the life of their soon-to-be-born child.

     This work, accordingly somehow combines illicit and kinky sex with a love story between the married couple. But it is clear they will both have some explaining to do—at least to themselves if not to one another—what lay behind their searches for something else, what dissatisfactions with their own lives were they trying fulfill in the experiments outside of their relationship? And will they both later regret that they have not been fully able to explore those other worlds?

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Nick Grinde | The Devil's Cabaret / 1930

the hell of it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Unknown writers, Nick Grinde (director) The Devil's Cabaret / 1930

 

This 16-minute short film represents the very essence of the early days’ laxity of enforcing the Hollywood Production Code. By 1934 such musical bon-bon’s as The Devil’s Cabaret could never have been released.

    If fact, this work itself is a remnant of what was supposed to be a feature movie with the The Three Stooges, and a host of film and Broadway stars of the day, Gus Edwards, Fay Templeton, Marie Dressler, Van and Schenck, DeWolf Hopper Sr., Buster Keaton, Albertina Rausch and her dancers, Polly Moran Cliff Edwards, Benny Rubin, Ramon Novarro, Bing Crosby, the Duncan Sisters, Barney Fagan and Raquel Torres. The film, The March of Time, directed by Charles Reisner, was shelved after the failure of Reisner’s The Hollywood Review of 1929, which featured many of the same figures, and which I reviewed of being of gay interest for the 1920-1929 volume of My Queer Cinema. The failure of that film and the general waning interest in film musicals in general meant closing down this work before it was even finished. A few of the lavish scenes were repurposed for inclusion in other films or, as this one, were presented revised as stand-alone works.

     This sketch has never been listed among the several gatherings of LGBTQ films, but certainly belongs there.

     Howie Burns (Edward Buzzell) works as the right-hand man at “Satan & Co.” where Mr. Satan (Charles Middleton) is burned up over the fact that too many people are going straight up to heaven rather than down to his neck of the woods. He tells his secretary, Impy (Mary Carlisle) to call in Howie for a chat.

    When Howie shows up for work, Impy passes on the news, Howie picking up the phone says, “Give me the devil,” but quickly discovers that Satan is in conference, Burns suggesting that he’s simply raking someone over the coals. That someone later turns out to be a newcomer, nuisance fire-eater, who is a danger down in the land of flames.

     Meanwhile, Howie dictates a letter to his good friend Pete (St. Peter) to complain of stealing his customers, explaining that it costs a lot to keep the old fires burning, and they’re in the red. He may be up to “Golden Gate” later tonight and “I’ll drop in to see you. I may be a little late so don’t wait up for me. Just leave me the key under the mat.” Presumably they’ll settle things in bed. Clearly that’s how Impy reads it, suddenly mistaking the invitation to be for her instead of Pete. Howie sets her right.

     As Howie moves to leave, a hot flare briefly torches his ass, Imply asking in some shock, “What was that?” Howie turns and in a fey voice and a slight limp of the wrist declares, “Just an old flame of mine.”

     Burns is finally let in to see his boss, who explains his dilemma. The quick-moving dialogue goes something like this:

 

-" . . . this business of going to Heaven has got to stop. Now isn't there some way that we could direct the traffic down here?"

-"Well, we might add a few detours on the straight and narrow path, or widen the road to ruin."

-"But suppose that didn't work?"

-"Then you'll just have to raise the wages of sin."

 

     Together they consider some likely candidates, including the creator of miniature golf courses. Certainly, Howie Burns would like to “bring him down.” Satan is keen on getting a noted radio announcer. But insists that there should no stockbrokers let into Hell. “It’s bad for business.”

   But Howie does have a good idea. Arriving at a nightclub in front of which a Preacher (Nelson McDowell) warns the people who dare to enter of losing their souls to Hell, Howie offers them far more fun and entertainment inside, no sweet music and a harp, but hot music, hot jazz. He previews a short number as several of the women, vaguely dressed as Puritans, gradually strip to their undergarments. As the girls dance in, all the others rush in behind them.

   There they get the lavish musical number which must have been featured in The March of Time. what can only be described as a satanic ballet.

   After the rather remarkable performance, Howie demands that all men go to the dormitory of the left, and women to female dormitory on the right. The entire crowds out “No.”

    Howie argues, didn’t I show you a good time tonight? “Yes,” they all agree. But one woman, who stutters, asks, but what’s the meaning separating us.

     Howie’s face lights up in gleeful delight: “Ahhhh. That’s the hell of it,” hinting that it was where the fun really lies. The women group together, as do the men dancing their way to the credits.

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

 

 

 

Jerry Tartaglia | Ecce Homo / 1989

reclaiming desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Tartaglia (director) Ecce Homo / 1989

 

One of the most important films released at the very height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s was Jerry Tartaglia’s experimental film, Ecce Homo. Not only did Tartaglia, as Vito Russo argued, “reclaim desire in the age of A.I.D.S,” but through his film set out not only to untangle the impossible web in which homosexual cinema and gay porno found itself entwined, but to dissociate those who claimed the power through guns and governmental authority to determine what sexual images and behavior were permissible and those who actually held that power through their communal desire depicted in the images they are watching for very different reasons.

      As his base image, Tartaglia borrows the frames of the guard watching his prisoners have sex through the “stonewall” in which there is a slit for observation and feeding in Jean Genet’s important gay prison film Un chant d’amour (1950). The guard watching in Genet’s film becomes a symbol of the police who determined to close down the New York bar Stonewall in 1969 and the police and their surrogates represented in this work as the “doctor” who watch over gay events and films to determine whether people will be permitted to view them with perhaps some of the same “pornographic” desires the guard in Genet’s work. But the actual “personal” desire as expressed in the sex of Genet’s prisoners, the men who have sex in gay porno films, and by those gay men who watch the porno films out of desire is where the true power lies despite those who attempt to usurp it, as the events at Stonewall in 1969 made apparent.

       Tartaglia does not claim that this desire is “safe” nor even suggests that it should be; indeed because it is perceived of as impermissible by those who desire neither the gay bodies nor the sex it details, all gay sex, real or observed is unsafe; but once more in that very fact its enactment is a representation of power that Tartaglia demands that the gay world reclaim.

        His “preposterously” inverted film reveals this through several methods, first by his recitation of a mad mass-like incantation, with Gertrude Steinian logic, chanted with the musical accompaniment of something like a Gregorian chant by monks. While focusing on the Genet image of the guard peeping in the cell, the director overlays what the guard observes in his prisoners’ sexual activities with gay footage of men having sex from porn films, tinted various colors—purple, green, red, blue, yellow, and sometimes in the original colors or black-and-white—which render the images of men with their penis’ inserted to men’s asses and penis’ endlessly spouting semen almost as something like Hallmark greeting cards. No matter how shocked heterosexual onlookers—the doctor, the women and others who might make up any such board of decency—might be when realizing what is being portrayed, they cannot help but recognize them as standing apart from whatever one might describe as pornography: “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”

     And Tartaglia’s wonderful verbal narrative with its endlessly shifting sense of logic as it unweaves the idea of power and its actuality takes the mind on a flight of alternating logic and illogicalness of any “others” making a decision about what an already “marginalized” and “disappeared” society might or might not see.

       The text is so brilliantly loopy in its logic that it has often been reprinted, which I feel the need to do again here, just so if you haven’t previously, you might experience it’s philosophical equivalents of “pulling out the rug from ‘those in authority’s’ feet.:

          I am watching a segment of Genet’s film, in which the guard is watching

          the men, and when he removes the gun from inside his jacket, he puts the

          gun in the mouth of one of the men and then I am watching two men kissing

          each other on the mouth and then I am watching homo sex and I am seeing

          men having homo sex and watching the guard having the gun having sex and

          watching the film with homo sex, I see the men and I watch how they have

          homo sex in the porno film which the cop said was Genet’s film and the cop

          with the gun was porno and they said when Stonewall was with the cops and the

          gun, and the film was porno and they said Stonewall was porno and they said

          the men were not men and the women were not women, and the men with the

          women were not porno, and the film with the men kissing on the lips was porno

          and the cop who was watching the film was a doctor who was watching the film

          which was not safe porno because it was not safe to be watching a film with a

          doctor who was a cop in a film of the men having sex which was porno when

          they said Stonewall was porno, which was not the film they desired to watch 

          when the film of desire was the film of men having homo sex in the film with the

          men, and this man, and this man, and their desire which was burning in the film,

          and the homo sex of the cop who was watching the police, who have the power,

          and the doctors, who are the men with the women, which is not porno, which is

          what they said was Stonewall, which was the film with the women and the men

          who were not the men with the women, which was not porno, when Stonewall

          was power which was personal and not porno when it was never really safe for

          porno which was in the film in which a cop was watching with a gun when the

          men were having sex with the men, and when personal desire is power when it is

          unsafe to be watching porno with a doctor who is not Stonewall and a cop who is

          not porno, who is watching men having sex with men, which is not safe if per-

          sonal desire is power and the doctor with the power watches the cop in the film

          by Genet, which was not porno, and the doctor watches the power which is unsafe

          and the porno, which is the cop watching with the gun which is in the film which

          is Genet, who was Stonewall, which was not safe when desire is power, and the

          doctor and the power are watching us watch the film with the men and the

          homosex and the personal desire which is power in the film with the Stonewall

          homo sex, which is not the doctor and the cop, which is not porno, in the film

          with the strength of the person and the sex which is power in the film which is

          unsafe when the doctor is power and the person with the sex, when the men and 

          the men have homo sex and desire the love which is in the film which was 

                Stonewall

          which was not safe, which was power, which was in the film which is not safe to

          watch, when the doctor is the power with the cop, and the film which is not porno 

          is safe, which is not Stonewall, and the men who love the men who desire in the 

                film

          which is power, which IS Stonewall, are the men who are alive, which is power

          which is not safe, when desire is not safe, which is the doctor who is power with

          the cop, in the film which is Stonewall, which was not safe, which is power!

     After a pause to savor the multiplying images the director is presenting, the verbal narrative returns as a two-short line summation which might almost be described as the Mixolydian and Hypomixolydian modes of the final phrases of the Gregorian chant:

 

           Personal desire is power. Reclaim our desire, reclaim our power.

           Collective desire is power. Reclaim our desire, reclaim our power.

 

     Coming after more than a year and a half of the sad news of death after death of members of the LGBTQ community—Tartaglia himself working intensely on three important A.I.D.S cinematic screeds gathered as The A.I.D.S. Trilogy (1988-1990): A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M (1988), Ecce Homo (1989), and Final Solutions (1990)—this work speaks almost as a joyous invocation of gay body and sexual desire at the heart of LGBTQ filmmaking. Tartaglia, as he himself proclaims, was less interested in pushing a queer normative story which by this was becoming more and more popular to diffuse the fears of the heterosexual community over their associations with the LGBTQ community and disease. Rather, his was an aesthetic that accentuated the differences. As he wrote:

 

“I am not very interested in creating narrative forms, which generally are used to show how gay people are supposed to become lavender carbon copies of straight people. Instead, I work with short, personal, experimental forms which explore and celebrate another kind of conscious human identity.”

 

     In the decades’ long debate in the gay community between Genet and François Reichenbach, Tartaglia had emphatically chosen the former.

 

Los Angeles, May 6, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).