Chantal Akerman | La chambre / 1972 || News from Home / 1976

revealing being by showing us what it is not

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chantal Akerman (screenwriter and director) La chambre / 1972 || News from Home / 1976

 

In Chantal Akerman’s La chambre of 1972, a camera begins by focusing on a wooden chair who back and seat has been swathed in red fabric, swings gradually to the left to reveal a dining table whereupon sits some coffee cups, fruit, and a few other objects, and gradually makes a 360̊ revolution, revealing a large bureau, a huge metal teapot and, most surprising, a beautiful young woman awake in her bed before continuing on its way. The camera makes three such long travels before moving a bit beyond the woman, now apparently trying to rock herself back to sleep and back a bit beyond the girl again, who is now beginning to eat an apple.

    Although we might get some sense of who this woman is by the many objects the camera reveals to us; yet her appearance in this room of seemingly second-hand objects, seems so very different from the fresh your face, indolently lying in bed, which given the bright light suggests it may already be late morning.

    A final swing around the room reveals her, having finished her apple, lying again under the covers as if attempting to return to sleep.

    Although we can never be certain, what we do suspect from the careful surveillance of the scene is that this one bedroom apartment is filled with furniture and objects that—except for a desk and drafting table upon which we see numerous unidentifiable objects—have little to do with the woman, as if they have either come with the apartment, previously inhabited by an old woman, or have been purchased from nearby used furniture shops. The woman, quite obviously, has little money, and lives as cheaply as possible. Yet she, herself, is young and, except for her refusal to rise, is obviously quite strong and capable. In short, we come to any conclusions about her identity not in terms of association, as if these “things” somehow told us who she was, but because they seem so apparently oppositional to the being we observe in bed.

     Certainly she loves fruit and coffee or tea, but otherwise the room gives us very few cues to her identity except her poverty. In other words, she is not whom the room might portray her to be.

 

Akerman uses the same device, to far greater effect, in her film of 1976, News from Home. What we witness on camera are merely scenes, usually shot head on, of intersections, street life, and subway travel in New York. The sound has been turned up to full blast so that, even when the streets are fairly empty, or when we witness scenes that occur early in a rainy morning, we hear every roar of car motors, squeal of tires, and grind of giant trucks. At times the noise becomes almost unbearable. The only sound we cannot hear is the chatter of human voices, and we seldom observe any human interrelationship. At one moment we observe a couple kissing, at another a woman offers another subway rider a seat, a father pushes his child ahead of him; but by and large, these figures appear to be all loners with little connection with the others around them.

     Yet, miraculously, we do discover a central character in this work through the occasional reading of letters from a woman in another country (in this case Belgium, Akerman’s birthplace) writing to her daughter (presumably the director) who is staying for a period in this rough and tumble city.

     Like all loving mothers, this invisible woman comes alive in her worries about her daughter, in her gentle scolding of her child for not writing more often or for not reporting whether or not she has received the small amounts of money the mother has sent. Little is expressed about her and her husband’s own life, except that they work hard and are often tired and ill. Lists of other names, Akerman’s sister, relatives, friends, etc. make up the other “news” reported in this brief epistles, but generally the meat of these messages “from home” concern her love of her daughter, the pain of separation, and yet the mother’s acceptance of her daughter’s choices. Clearly both mother and father get their greatest joy from the daughter’s irregular answers, and often the joy of having received a new letter seems almost overwhelming.

     We never see the daughter. The only evidence of her is through the world, the run-down lower Manhattan streets and occasional travels (mostly through the riverside corridors) up town via automobile and subway. The daughter, so we learn from the mother’s letters, works at several

different jobs, changes addresses several times, is meeting a few friends, and is learning English. But otherwise we only have the harsh streets and heavily graffiti-covered subway cars to judge what the daughter’s city life might be like.

     I lived in the city just before this period, and visited New York regularly during the mid-1970s; but I had forgotten just how deteriorated the city was in those days, and how badly we all dressed. Here we have none of the color of the mid-1960s, but see nearly everyone dressed in drab, ill-fitting garments. The only colors in the city come from the luridly-lit diners and restaurants and the brightly spray-painted underground cars in which the city’s denizens gather.

     Given the care, love, and deep concern heaped upon this young woman who still is not completely able to speak the language by which she is surrounded, we can only wonder how our invisible heroine is coping. Is she excited by all this concrete and metal filled with such high decibels of noise that, at a couple of moments, we cannot even hear the voice who reads her “news from home,” or does she feel isolated and ostracized?

    Again and again, the Belgian mother longs to see her daughter, reminding her of birthdays and other celebrations she is missing. Can someone so beloved, we can only ask, survive in a world of such constant clamor? I recall that noise, and today remember that it was the endlessness of that roar that finally exhausted me more than living in Manhattan day by day.

    If nothing else, we receive a clue in the film’s final few moments, as the camera begins to move away from lower Manhattan, the mechanical roar being increasing overtaken by the lapping sound of waves. As in La chambre, the camera gradually scans the city horizon as it moves further and further away from it. The very last scenes, remarkably, reveal the two looming towers of the buildings destroyed twenty-five years later. Our would-be heroine has obviously left us to return home.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2015)

 

Jafar Panahi | تاکسی‎‎ (Jafar Panahi’s Taxi) / 2015

awarding a rose to the invisible audience

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jafar Panahi (facilitator) تاکسی‎‎ (Jafar Panahi’s Taxi) / 2015

 

What at first seems to be a kind of comic homage to Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who in his films Taste of Cherry and Ten centered the action in a taxicab, goes beyond those issues when one realizes that this taxicab driver is none other than the noted Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has been sentenced to house arrest and to a 20 year period in which he not permitted to make movies. As in his 2011 This Is Not a Film, a film shot entirely by a colleague within Panahi’s apartment about a movie that the director could not make but acted out nonetheless, and his “thriller” Closed Curtain (again shot by a colleague), Taxi was not actually filmed by Panahi but by a camera attached to the dashboard of his cab which he describes to his seemingly random pickups as a “security device.” Accordingly, there are no writers and not even a true director; it is simply titled Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, a description of what it actually was instead of a mere movie title.

     His first customer, seeing the camera, immediately perceives it as precisely as a security device and goes on a long rant against thieves who steal tires from ordinary folk, insisting that, under Shiria law they should be executed. An outspoken woman school teacher, sitting behind him, speaks out against his convictions, arguing that Iran needs no further executions, and pointing up the ridiculousness of his viewpoints; viewpoints which he emphatically disputes, demanding “justice.” When finally the two leave the taxi at different places, a third rider, Omid, smilingly tells the driver that he recognizes him, having sold him banned pirated movies in the past, while suggesting that the two other passengers may actually have been actors.

     The film’s audience, in fact, has no way of knowing for sure whether or not the film’s action has been planned or happened quite accidentally, and for the rest of the movie it is almost impossible to determine whether what we are seeing is a fiction or a real series of experiences. In short, one is never sure—and Panahi’s subtle shrugs disavow any knowledge of—whether this is a real piece of cinema or a series of convenient coincidences. Did Panahi “make” a film or was he merely recording a series of Tehran encounters?

     In any event, we soon are convinced that this door-to-door movie pirate is, in fact, a kind of hero, bringing art to an audience to which it would otherwise be unavailable because of censorship. Because Panahi is at the wheel, he is able to convince another customer he brings into taxi to buy more DVD’s than he usually does.

       Soon after, the cab picks up two elderly women, quite outspoken also—it is women, in this film, who truly speak their feelings—who, with a fish bowl in tow are in a rush to visit a fresh spring. Unlike the outspoken schoolteacher, the opinionated traditionalist, or the friendly film dealer, these women are superstitious believers, who fear that if they cannot get their fish to the spring by noon their very lives are in danger. These are the very believers who allow Iran’s complex series of irrational laws to exist, and Panahi, it is clear, although sensitive to their concerns, cannot wait to rid himself of them, shuttling them off to a “real” taxi driver who can better speed them on their way.

      Besides, he is late in picking up his own niece from school. The niece, the charming Hana Saeidi, is also outspoken, chastising her uncle for his lateness and expressing to him her feelings about what her teacher has told her about her desires to make a film. With camera in hand, the young girl also films her uncle and aims her camera at the street, while expressing a long list of what she is not permitted to film. Women and men must not be seen together; women must wear a hijab, and male heroes cannot wear a tie. She is to “show what’s real but real real. As Panahi suggests, “There are realities they don’t want shown,” clearly what lies behind his own “crime.”

      Later, when she accidentally (?) films a young boy picking up money dropped by a stranger, she lectures him for making her film “unvirtuous.” How does one film “the real” accordingly if one must censor the facts?

       Soon after, Panahi encounters yet another vaguely sinister friend who takes his niece for a fanccino (iced coffee), a man, apparently, who is also meeting with Panahi on the side. Hana even describes him as a bit sinister, but is happy for the drink.

      But it is Panahi’s last customer, a woman carrying a bunch of roses, who truly helps to reveal the director’s film as a truly transgressive act, and helps us to perceive just how brave Panahi has been in making this work. The rose-laden woman just happens to be the famous Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, on her way to visit a hunger-striking prisoner, who reminds the director that they have also met previously on hunger strikes in the past. As The Guardian film critic, Jonathan Romney, writes: “she extends a rose to the camera, and implicitly to the world audience ‘because the people of cinema can be relied on.’”

     When the camera goes black there are no end titles. Panahi simply notes that he cannot name anyone because Iran’s ministry of culture and Islamic guidance only approves the credits of distributable films.

      This film, sneaked out of the country, won the Golden Bear prize at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival, proving Sotudeh right. Panahi, not allowed to attend, sent his niece to receive the award. I can’t wait to see what films she might someday make.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).

Marcin Wrona | Demon / 2015, USA 2016

inner demons

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcin Wrona (screenwriter and director) Demon / 2015, USA  2016

 

Marcin Wrona’s 2015 Polish film Demon is a fiercely eccentric work using several different genres. Many critics—I believe mistakenly—have described the film as a horror or ghost tale, and certainly it does have some elements of those genres, in particular a great many skeletons rattling in the closets of the Polish landowning family at the center of this work. It is also right out of Yiddish folklore, replete with a dybbuk and possession. There are also a number of absurdist-like and very humorous elements akin to a great many of Polish short and longer fictions. But primarily it is a sophisticated political study of both the highly anti-Semitic Poland of World War II and today’s continued desire among many Poles, including their current government—who has recently outlawed references to the Holocaust “death camps” in their country—to white out Poland’s haunted past.

     Living in London as a Polish émigré, the “hero” (or perhaps we should describe him as the “victim”) of this story, Piotr (wonderfully played by the Israeli actor Itay Tiran) meets the lovely fellow-countrywoman Zaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska), and quickly falls in love. She desires a traditional Polish wedding, which as Wrona’s wife, Olga Szymanska describes it, often lasts up to 4 days: “There’s much alcohol,” she wryly comments, which often results in a kind communal insanity. And in this sense, Wrona’s film shares yet another genre, that of the drunken banquet film such as Wojciech Smarzowski's The Wedding.

      Although Zaneta’s parents are somewhat disturbed by the short period of their romance and by the fact that Zaneta has not chosen some “nice Polish boy”—even though Piotr is of Polish descent and speaks the language fluently, he is still considered an outsider—they nevertheless plan the huge celebration in a large barn on their crumbling estate, which they intend to pass on to the married couple.

    The outwardly joyful Piotr enters this community—now primarily a territory destroyed by strip mining and built up after the war with Stalin-like housing developments—excitedly, even planning to help to reconstruct their local bridge which has been destroyed during the war (suggesting that he must work as an engineer).

      Accidentally, while searching out the land surrounding the house, he encounters the remnants of a body. Perhaps, we can guess, he suspects what he doesn’t want to know, that these remains are of some World War II victim. And he quickly covers his discovery over with soil without saying anything to his fiancée of his soon-to-be parents-in-law.

       The wedding is performed and the celebrants retire to the large bar to drink and dance away the night—and perhaps several days and nights after. The beautiful young couple mix with guests, including Zaneta’s brothers, one of whom had introduced the couple to each other back in London. A friendly professor Szymon Wentz (Wlodzimierz Press)—the “invited Jew”—gets up to speak, boring his now half-drunk audience with his academicism. The local priest and doctor are also in attendance.

    As at all such events, the time comes for the groom to dance with his new bride, as the crowd draws back to watch them. But suddenly as they begin the groom’s nose begins to bleed, and he is forced to pull his head back. The slightly worried Zaneta quickly shuffles him off to a cellar room to recover, as the bride’s father (Andrzej Grabowski) and mother take to the microphone to assure everyone that all is well, the music starting up once again.

      Back in the cellar, the bleeding has stopped, and Piotr is ready to return to the party. But when he once again reaches the floor, he strips off his shirt, bends back his head in what appears to be an impossible affliction and falls into what seems to be an epileptic fit. Has he ever told Zaneta that he had epilepsy, ask the worried in-laws?

      Dragged down into the cellar once again, Piotr now begins speaking in Yiddish, a language which the family does not even recognize; is it German they ask one another. The doctor is quickly called, who provides a sedative, but when that doesn’t work, the priest is called whose placid words of faith accomplish even less. Only when the Jewish teacher arrives, hearing the Yiddish and the name of Hana does he realize what has happened. Hana, a beautiful Jewish girl, with whom he himself was once in love, disappeared during the war, he explains, and has now apparently taken over Piotr’s body. We know this to be the truth because Piotr has seen visions of the beautiful Jewish girl (Maria Debska) just prior to his possession.

     Zaneta’s parents, terrified by the situation, order up more vodka, demanding the guests celebrate in drink, assuring them that all is in order. Before long, all are so utterly drunk they are beyond any rationality. And they now speak openly about their xenophobia and ancient bigotries, one guest saying "In the old days it was simple. Everyone was Polish[...]And then the bad ghosts came in and divided all the Poles[...] First Germany, then Russia, then finally Israel." 

       The professor takes a group of former banquet-goers on a lecture-tour of the past, while the younger brother tries to dig up the ground where Piotr has now told them he has seen the bones of the dead woman. When, finally, Piotr completely disappears, the father brazenly attempts to tell the celebrants that the entire event has been simply a hallucination, that the wedding itself never happened. "We just have to sleep it off.” Like the party guests of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, they are finally released into the night, determined to forget whatever they might have learned from this terrifying experience, just as much of today’s Polish population is determined to forget the horrible events of the long ago past.

     The last scenes of the film show large caterpillar trucks tearing down the old farm estate, as if attempting to wipe out even the slightest of traces. A car belonging to the couple is tossed over a cliff into the waters below. The events of the film itself have been erased.

       Even sadder, the terrible lessons of this morality tale may have taken their toll on the film’s director. Quite inexplicably, the newly married and increasingly acclaimed young filmmaker, Wrona, during his film’s premieres at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival and at another festival in his native Gdynia, Poland in September—the year before I finally saw this film—apparently committed suicide, his body found hanging in a local Gdynia hotel bathroom. The demon, evidently, came from within.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2016).

Martin Brest | Beverly Hills Cop / 1984

learning how to lie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Petrie, Jr. (screenplay, based on a story by Danilo Bach and Daniel Petrie, Jr.), Martin Brest (director) Beverly Hills Cop / 1984

 

Martin Brest’s 1984 comedy is basically a vehicle for actor Eddie Murphy’s infectious laugh interrupted by his naughty policeman antics and skits in which he mimes various types. It’s a likeable enough film, particularly given the good-old-boy restraints of the Laurel and Hardy-like team of Beverly Hills cops, Detective Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Sergeant John Taggart (John Anton). Yet the more I see this work, the more I realize its true emptiness with its often misogynistic and homophobic tropes, and its vaudeville-based comedy antics.

     In fact, there is hardly any meat to it. Viewers early perceive, almost from the beginning, what is about to happen. Axel Foley—bad boy, foul-mouthed cop is a man born to get into trouble. And in this case, after witnessing the death in his hometown of Detroit of one of his best friends, Mickey, he is ordered almost immediately to stay off the case, disciplined for a recent unauthorized sting of a theft of a truck filled with cigarettes. Realizing that the case leads back to Los Angeles, Foley demands a vacation to secretly search out the villains, having heard his friend mention he had worked for a gallerist in Beverly Hills.

    The shift allows the film full range to satirize the wealthy and the pansy art world that has been at the heart of film comedy since its beginnings, even hinting, in this case, at elements of just such an evil trio—the art collector Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff) and his evil male companion Zack (Jonathan Banks), along with a female friendly-spy who works for Maitland, Jenny Summers (Lisa Eilbacher)—we have previously encountered in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest.

    Once out-of-towner Foley stumbles into the chic enclose of Beverly Hills, he begins to rack up havoc almost everywhere he goes from a hip city art gallery to the hallowed halls of a private club (actually filled in Pasadena), with the Beverly Hills coppers bumbling along after. Before you can even say Rodeo Drive, Foley has topped them in their tracks using—as have so many vaudevillian acts—several servings up of food involving cakes in the face and bananas that slip up the chase.

    Jenny provides the misogynistic fodder while almost everyone else, including the sexually innocent Billy Rosewood and Maitland’s gallery assistant Serge (Bronson Pinchot) kick off the fag jokes.

    Pinchot’s imitation of an effete gallery assistant whose accent (filled with various layers of French, Israeli, and Russian mispronunciations of English mixed together to make him almost incomprehensible) almost gets away with it, beginning with his introductory question “and what is pertaining?,” scolding his handsome open-shirted underling (“cover dis up, you look like a dog to scrub”; “it’s not sexy, it’s animal”) and renaming Axel as Ahmed as he offers him something to drink, “a wine, a cock-tail, [emphasis on the tail], espresso,” “I make it back there myself with a little lemon twist, [almost winking] try it.” In fact, his mishmash of affected art jabber is one of the funniest moments of the film, since he at least Pinchot’s Serge represents a truly original stab at a gay stereotype.

     Everything else from there, however, is downhill beginning with an absolutely fruity black waiter at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, played by Damon Wayans, flailing with limp wrists and a lisp that I had presumed had gone out of style in the 1930s. 

     The writers follow this foul joke up by Murphy’s own pretense of being a highly effeminate lover of Maitland who slips into a private club for absolutely no purpose other than to confront his evil nemesis by telling the host that his 

doctor has just informed him that he is infected with “herpesimplex” 10 and therefore needs to warn the art dealer before things begin to fall off his body. The reverberations of the active AIDS crisis in this scene from 1984, when the media was finally becoming aware of the so-called “gay disease,” makes this one of the most homophobic jokes ever screened, so disgusting that almost any level-headed, sensitive LGBTQ viewer should have fled from the theater, although like me, probably didn’t, having become so resigned to cinema mockery of sexual difference. In fact, Foley even rewards his gallant Beverly Hills foes a free evening at an out-of-jurisdiction heterosexual strip club.

     Any fun the film might offer have offered is now reduced to Murphy pretending to be a customs’ inspector where, after forcing open a piece of freight addressed to Maitland, he discovers coffee grinds associated with the smuggling of cocaine.

     With Taggart and Rosewood on his trail, Foley finally breaks into Maitland’s armed compound where he encounters the whole force of Maitland’s protective gunmen, the three (Foley, Rosewood, and Taggart) shooting up havoc before the Beverly Hills police Lieutenant Andrew Bogomil (Ronny Cox)—a man who goes “strictly by the book”—arrives with a squadron of black-and-whites only to find that Foley and his fumbling friends have killed the gunman and Maitland, vindicating Foley’s suspicions. Nothing like a cops and robbers shoot out to end such a disgusting American concoction.

     Several times throughout the movie, the honest Taggart and Rosewood have admitted the truth when questions, with the fast-talking fibbing Foley scolding them for having “fucked up a perfectly good lie.” This time around, Bogomil himself fabricates a story to his superior, Chief Hubbard (Stephen Elliott) about the chaos spread out before them. The Beverly Hills police have finally learned how to lie. Surely it’s only a step from there to a constant creator of false realities such as President Trump to call in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to get rid of any other undesirables who might have stumbled their way into that wealthy small city in the middle of Los Angeles.

     In the end, Axel Foley himself, is literally shepherded out of town. Yet we knew that even this clearly racist riddance of rubbish in 1984 would only mean a later meet-up, given how easily Foley has found access to the wealthy white world of criminals. There were two later sequels which only revealed the true tawdriness of the original, which it is almost impossible to believe was the highest grossing movie of the year in which it was released, and shamefully was selected in 2024 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Sorry to say, it probably does truly represent the US experience.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2012; revised January 14, 2026.

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2012)

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin J. Nguyen | Blue Suit / 2020

best friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kevin J. Nguyen (screenwriter and director) Blue Suit / 2020 [15 minutes]

 

John (Ivan Mok) has a problem. Over the few months since he has gotten to know Henry (Andrew Gee) his relationship has turned from seeing the other man as a friend to his feelings of love for him.

     In so very many short gay films, the young heroes inexplicably decided to spill their feelings about the other the day before he’s traveling to another city to work, and this film is no exception. Andrew is on his way from Los Angeles to New York where he has a new job lined up—with his own nameplate.

     John is determined, nonetheless, to express his feelings for Henry over a specially planned dinner. He even puts on his special new blue suit for the occasion. But as often happens, John texts him that he’s running beyond in his packing and that he can’t join him at dinner. What other choice does John have but to help him pack over In-N-Out burgers, still aching to tell Henry about his feelings for him. He also notices, however, that Henry is pretty well finished packing; that, in some cases, he is moving things out of boxes to put them back again.

    Just when he is about to express those hidden emotions, however, the doorbell rings and a home group of friends appear at his doorway for a surprise going-away party. What’s such a well-dressed boy supposed to do. Pout a little perhaps, but still make the best of it.

    Meanwhile an openly gay boy, Mike (Jason Dennis Lee), introduces himself to John, complementing his suit, but also apologizing for crashing in on their “intimate gathering.” “So are you two, like dating?”

    John repeats the truth, that they’re just friends, but Mike sees through it all. “Two cute guys hanging out together the night before one of them moves away. That sounds like more than just friends.”

     John smiles, obviously wishing what Mike has said is true. But when he looks he sees that both Henry and the acquaintance he was talking to have disappeared. And now he’s on the chase to find out where Andrew has gone.

     But, no, Henry has not escaped from the event with another guy, but sits alone in his bedroom deeply pondering something, inviting John in to join him at his own party. Actually, Henry is in tears. He has nothing against the party, but, he admits, it just makes saying goodbye that much harder. He wanted just go to bed and wake up in New York tomorrow, he insists.

 

    This might be the perfect time for John to tell his friend about his own feelings, but John is a better friend than he is a lover and insists that Henry still has a room full friends out there, and that he’s wake in the morning hating himself he stayed away from them is bedroom.

      Henry hugs him for his wise words and is about to pull John out with him rejoining the party, except that John, once more the selfless idealist, suggests he go first otherwise people will think they might have just had sex or something.

      What’s a boy working so very hard against his own emotions supposed to do? Finally, they partyers have left, and John remains to help Henry clean up. Finally Henry insists on driving John home.

      Now is the time, and John tries again, reminding him of his comments that just because he’s moving, it doesn’t mean the end of friendships…. It’s a clear move to suggest that he want to maintain their friendship out of love. But this time Henry interrupts to tell him: “I was so scared that once I moved away everyone would forget about me, but you reminded me that’s not the case. Relationships still go on. I guess what I’m trying to say is I took your words to heart and I told Mike how I felt about him, and how I’ve felt about him for the past year. He even said he’d be out to visit me in a month or so. Can you believe it?”

    Unfortunately, John can as all sound is now just reverberations. There is way now that he can express his love to Henry.

    When they finally reach John’s house, Henry gets out, gives him a hug, and coos: “Friends! I gonna miss you bud.”

     “I’m going to miss you is what I meant to say. And thank you for sharing so much tonight.”

     So John stands there left with unanswered prayers, not future with the man he thought he loved.

     But writer/director Kevin J. Nguyen doesn’t end where it’s supposed to. Four months later, he wakes up to a short message from Henry, and in the process rediscovers his old letter, unsent, to him written the night Henry was moving away.

     John deletes in, no tears, no long pause of sorrow. He has simply moved on.

 

Los Angeles, January 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).