Anthony Schatteman | Petit ami / 2017

two faces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Schatteman (screenwriter and director) Petit ami / 2017 [14 minutes]

 

Vincent (Thomas Ryckewaert), a handsome man in his late 30s or early 40s has rented the poolroom of the Petit ami gay hotel for the 3-day Christmas weekend where Jasper (Ezra Fieremans), a 20-some year-old who looks more like a teenager meets up with him in Belgian director Anthony Schatteman’s 2017 short film Petit ami.

     It is clear that Jasper is an experienced pleasure boy who when the two encounter each other Vincent immediately fucks standing like an animal in rut; the two hit it off, the younger offering the other the lovemaking and, at moments, the enjoyment he appears to be desperate for, Schatteman and cinematographer Ruben Appeltans’ camera lushly capturing their erotic activities which are the focus of this film. Champagne, pizza, and sex in bed, pool, and everywhere else, in fact, seem to resolve the problems faced by Jasper’s obviously desperate Christmas weekend customer. But even the boy who whips up a good time in a mean holiday cannot help but feel some sympathy for a man who, he gradually discovers, has left his wife and two daughters for the comfort of an almost teenage kid.

     The promotional entries for this film all seem to suggest that Jasper discovers the “secret” that Vincent is hiding; but even the laziest of sleuths would have been able to quickly deduce that Vincent has missed this family celebration because of his sexual ambiguity or, at the very least, he is replacing the obviously failed marital relationship with the substitute that may lie at the crux of his familial problems.

      And Vincent's overhead telephone conversations along with Jasper's reading of the beginning of a letter addressed to the man’s wife do not, thankfully, fully explain the reason for his john’s 3-day reservation nor his sudden decision to cut it off now that he has resolved some of his emotional turmoil.

      The depth of this superficially beautiful film lies in how much each viewer is willing to plumb the possible explanations for Vincent’s Christmas fireside absence. Has his wife suddenly discovered his sexual desires and sent him packing? Has he himself, having obviously lived in a kind of closeted marital hell, finally determined to leave those he clearly loves behind? Has he broken up with his wife for other reasons and is merely using this despairing weekend as an opportunity to explore alternative forms of lovemaking or seeking out what he has often done of business trips and covered up through the years?

     Any of these time-worn and predictable narrative solutions, which at least engage our minds, would explain Vincent’s almost brutal introductory rape of Jasper upon their meeting, and his gradual softening as the experienced prostitute applies his sexual balms. What is perhaps somewhat more interesting is how Jasper’s own inner feelings are altered despite his outward charming engagement of his customer. And it is apparent that by the time Vincent is willing to send him packing that he is not sure that he truly is ready to leave, that he has developed a kind of sympathy and perhaps even a bit of love for his customer not permitted in his profession.

       Schatteman’s long focus on Jasper as he leaves in the early daylight a day earlier than scheduled is fascinating when compared with the boy’s nighttime arrival two days previous.

       In the earlier night shot he seems to be wistfully looking off into space, his lips expressing no obvious emotion, the creases around his mouth, although almost straight, are very slightly raised as in a would-be smile. He is, in full, enigmatic, a boy without seeming empathy or even emotional depth, ready to move forward, we soon discover as he enters the hotel where he meets up with his customers, to do whatever is required of him without question or judgment. In a sense he truly does look here like a teenage boy, a bit wide-eyed and open to the world if, we can well imagine, worn out by what he has already at his young age witnessed and experienced.

     The second image shows the man, dressed just as he was two nights earlier, but his eyes glancing away to the left, which transforms his whole face, including the equivocal position of his lips, into what appears as, even if it actually is not a slight frown. Whereas in the first frame his face is represented as a near circle, in the second daylight photo we observe a more ovalene head, which hints at an elongated, less open expression. If nothing else, the second boy is less eager, less sure of his actions, or even of the meaning of those actions. There is a slightly circumspect look, in general about what the camera catches in Jasper’s countenance by the end of the film.    

    He is still an enigmatic figure and we realize that whatever we may be reading in his face represents only a second in time, not necessarily a dramatic or permanent change of being. But there it is nonetheless facing us, the boy who might pass for a teenager and the twentyish youth who has just spent two nights picking up the spirits of a dejected man who it is apparent, as he writes in the short, never-sent note to his wife, was “not able to live up to whom he should [italics mine] be.”

    Has the boy helped him to transition into what clearly will be a new life? The film does even attempt to explore that. But any empathetic viewer might hope that Vincent can gradually convert the “should” into a someone who “would” or “will” be, or at the very least an acceptance of what that being “is,” gradually converting a failed past into a present that can imagine a more successful future.

     In this instance, it appears—at least superficially—as if the young prostitute might have helped point his brief encounter in that direction.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2021).

 

 

Micah Stuart | Johnny / 2016

his first kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brandon Lloyd [as Brandon Crowder] (screenplay), Micah Stuart (director) Johnny / 2016 [19 minutes]

 

Sam (Tony Abatemarco) is an older man who, for first time in his life, picks up a male prostitute, Johnny (Brandon Loyd), a handsome young man nearly beyond his prime as a hustler. But he is perfect for Sam, who after he signs in at the motel desk and checks out the bed springs and pillows, all the time carefully watching his young man get undressed, momentarily stops him—as Johnny moves toward him, grabs his necktie, and pulls Sam toward him for a kiss—“It’s my first time.”

     Johnny gently kisses the man and kisses him again more passionately, pulling briefly away. “Now it isn’t.” As Johnny undresses Sam you can see and almost feel the waves of pleasure pour over his body as he finally gives into a passion that he has clearly been resisting throughout his life. When Johnny bends over Sam’s naked body, you can almost see the older man shake with joy, waiting as if hypnotized by the sheer sensuality that he has been resisting for decades. To call Sam closeted would be to suggest he’s been living a gay life under cover; Sam, however, has been dead and now is suddenly awakening sexually to something he has attempted to deny since his birth.

     In a moment, Sam switches places, topping Johnny and enjoying what almost appears to be the most pleasurable orgasm of his life as he rests his hand on the young man’s neck with a slightly brutal release of years of pent-up emotion. When it’s spent, Sam stammers out the words, “Thank you” with so much feeling of gratitude that you realize just how meaningful this “first kiss” has truly been for him.

     The moment over, Johnny stands, goes the sink, quickly rubs his cock and ass clean with a towel and swigs down water to clear out his mouth. Unexpectedly, perhaps because of Sam’s quite exceptional behavior, Johnny comes back to the bed, briefly tousling with him and laying for a few moments next to his elderly client as Sam strokes the boy’s face.

     Suddenly, Johnny tells of a nearly forgotten incident when as a child, playing with his best friend David he suddenly asks Sam if he’s been in a fight? From Sam’s nod, we gather than he has. But Johnny says he has only been one fight—who he suddenly begins inexplicably to choke, his hands held around his neck. Despite the desperate scratches inflicted to his hands and arms and even, so he recalls, a slug just below his eye, he couldn’t let up. He, who was apparently seen as a weak boy, never felt to powerful, so in control. His whole body shivered with heat.

      Finally, he passed out, later coming to.

      “What happened?” asks Sam.

      “Nothing,” his mother came to pick him up. But things between them were never quite the same. A short while later, David was killed. Attending another school, he was beaten up by older kids and “things done to him,” apparently in attack, it would seem, because David was perceived as being queer. It was just before Christmas, Johnny recalls.

      Sometime after Johnny begin to no longer care about things around him. At 13, almost 13 qualifies, he left home, never to return.

      When Sam later suggests his parents must have suffered over his absence, Johnny insists that he never heard from them again, that they evidently made no effort to seek him out.

       Sam is honored to have had Johnny share his nearly forgotten story, and suggests, as Johnny prepares to leave that he might spend the night. The hustler scoffs. Might he be interested in dinner? Where does he live? All ridiculous questions, Johnny implies, as he puts on his shirt and hurries off in the early twilight.

       Alone again, Sam takes out his billfold, opening it to a snapshot of what appear to be his wife and young son, about the age when Johnny must have left home. The image ties them together somewhat, as Sam breaks down in tears, apparently having left them some time ago, or they having left him if he revealed his hidden desires to his wife.

      Johnny, stopping for a final cigarette on the motel balcony, replays the scene with his childhood friend that we have previously witnessed in his mind. But this time everything is in reverse, the fallen globe uprighted, the hands removed from the neck, the broken stack of blocks reconstructed, and something missing from the first frames, his friend David, bending towards him as he attempts a kiss. This, we suddenly realize, was Johnny’s first kiss, his almost terrorized reaction, and the violence he has never since felt. His first kiss, unlike Sam’s first male kiss, was something that he was not yet ready to accept, and has regretted it ever since, perhaps making his behavior somewhat right by seeking out thousands of kisses just such as the one he has planted on Sam’s lips.

       I’m not suggesting that Johnny lives with a deeply hidden sense of guilt, but simply after that first “fight,” he has never needed to battle with his feelings of same sex desire ever again. He has grown to want and return that kiss and sought it out so endlessly in his daily life that he has nearly forgotten where the feeling first emanated. David has been there always as a kind of hidden elective affinity, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe might have put it, the lodestone of his life. And this night he has passed the first kiss on to another, even if he is only an old man who has almost let his life wither away before accepting it.

       I have now seen this movie 3 or 4 times, and I realized that the wonderful acting of Lloyd and, particularly, of Abatemarco has brought me back to it. The simple chordal composition of composer MadFlags adds resonance to this simple but emotionally effective movie.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2021).

 

Yoshitaro Nomura | ゼロの焦点 (Zero no shōten) (Zero Focus) / 1961

future meets past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shinobu Hashimoto and Yoji Yamada (screenplay, based on the novel by Seicho Matsumoto), Yoshitaro Nomura (director) ゼロの焦点 (Zero no shōten) (Zero Focus) / 1961

 

A newly wed woman, Teiko Uhara (Yoshiko Kuga), suddenly discovers that she does not truly know her husband, Kenichi (Koji Nambara), after he disappears on a short business trip only one week into their marriage. Yoshitaro Nomura’s Zero Focus begins slowly and politely, as the executives of the company for which Kenichi works, reach out to Teiko in an attempt to find out what happened to her husband.

     Traveling from Tokyo to the snowy north of Japan, Teiko attempts to uncover clues to where her husband is or what happened to him. Only a couple of suicides have been reported to local police, and neither of the dead men match the appearance of her husband. Was Kenichi even capable of suicide? A company spokesman refers Teiko to the home of Sachiko/Emmy (Hizuru Takachiho) and her wealthy husband, who had entertained Kenichi several times.

     Visiting them at their home, she recognizes the building as the same as picture on one of two postcards she has discovered in one of her husbands books before her travels. Yet this visit also ends in a dead end.

    Police suggest that Kenichi may have gone to a village, Noto, somewhat further north, and Teiko makes that arduous trip as well, even visiting a famous cliff nearby where many suicides have occurred in the past. There she recognizes a second house pictured on the postcards. Without further leads, however, she returns to Tokyo, leaving Kenichi’s brother Sotaro (Kō Nishimura) to further pursue clues.

     What Sotaro knows, and Teiko does not, is that Kenichi had been living 10 days of every month with a former prostitute, Hisako/Sally (Ineko Arima), who he first met when he worked as a vice cop during the Occupation. Sally was a woman with whom he had intended to break off all relations in order to take good care of Teiko. Sotaro also travels to Noto, but is killed there, having evidently been poisoned.

     Gradually the quiet and obedient Teiko comes into her own, a bit like Agatha Christie’s Mrs. Marple, without her eccentricities. With steely resolve she sets out to discover the truth about her husband’s disappearance and his brother’s death.

      Returning to Noto, she confronts Emmy about the missing and death people, positing a version of events quite close to the truth: arguing that Emmy, herself a former prostitute whom Kenichi recognized, killed Kenichi, pushing him off the cliff and then killing Sally, fearing that one of them might attempt to blackmail her and destroy her wealthy marriage. When Sotaro visited, she poisoned him as well.

     Emmy corrects the details, but in so doing, admits her guilt in front of her husband, and so Teiko brings the murders to justice.

      Nomura’s beautifully filmed black and white work, with its excellent musical score by Yasushi Akutagawa, is a quite but excellent noir mystery, and the fact that its detective is female makes it quite exceptional in 20th century Japanese cinema. If Teiko begins as a passive wife, she ends the tale as a kind of intelligent avenger. And the fact that the murderer is, herself, a strong woman determined not to have her past life revealed, makes Zero Focus a kind of early feminist work, wherein it is the males who are ultimately weak and powerless.

       I might add my observation that so many Japanese films portray women forced into prostitution in order to survive, that it has almost become a genre unto itself.

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).

 

 

Adam Ali and Sam Arbor | Baba / 2021

the underground

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Ali and Sam Arbor (screenwriters and directors) Baba / 2021 [18 minutes]

 

The young British Libyan director Adam Ali and Manchester-based Sam Arbor have created a short tense-drama in Baba about a small gathering of queer Libyans, forced out of their homes by irate and endangered parents, live truly underground in the tunnels under the city of Tripoli.

    As the film begins the central figure of this work, Britannia (performed by Ali), as snuck back up into the city to die his hair blond. He is planning a meeting with someone in the British embassy to hopefully obtain permission for immigrant status in England as an endangered being in his own homeland. And even though he knows there are several like him applying every day, he has great hopes for beginning a new life abroad, jokingly describing how he will find a beautiful British lover and live happily ever after in his new homeland.

     The only problem is, as his friends Nour (Elysia Kozinos), Fatima (Colette Dala Tchantcho), and Yo (Usiam Younnis) remind him, his passport remains in the family home from which he was violently ousted by Baba (Al Gadema), his father. Moreover, with his now blond hair, he will stand out even more than usual in the world above ground where they must return each day to find food and supplies to keep their secret lives functioning.

     But the high-spirited Britannia is determined to break into his own home later that night to reclaim his passport, and his friends insist that they will accompany him for his protection. Such an intrusion may not only result in his own death but in the shaming of his entire family, including his beloved mother.

     At least a couple of times in short flashbacks we see the looming figure of his Baba threatening Britannia as a young child and sending him into the streets, a terrifying and nightmarish vision that the young man calls up again and again.

     When the time comes, however, Britannia attempts to sneak out so as not to involve the others; but they quickly awaken and refuse to let him make the trip home alone. They are his family now and their love for one another is in strong evidence.

     He succeeds in sneaking into the house, but cannot find the passport, finally reaching his old room, where he witnesses a small shrine of pictures and a candle his parents have erected there. He finally discovers the passport, but at that moment his father and mother are awakened. Again, they loom up like specters, but instead threatening or challenging him, Baba holds his lost child close and kisses him.

     Britannia is so confused, he doesn’t quite know how to act, as the others remind him it is time to leave both for his own safety and his family’s.

     The next day, he takes a taxi to the British embassy, the cab driver telling him that he is the second young man he has driven to the embassy on that very morning. When they reach the stop, however, Britannia does not leave the cab, but momentarily remains in the back seat contemplating what to do.

     In the end he determines, despite the odds, to bravely remain in Libya, to help in what the directors describe as “a burgeoning underground queer culture sprouting from the rubble of the civil war” in an attempt to “fortify this rare stem of hope.”

      As James Reynolds notes in Buzz Culture: “The film ends with a plea, not to action but recognition – of hundreds of people in present-day Tripoli who must hide themselves for the sake of their families. This really hammers home the bravery of those who dare to live honestly in the face of an openly hostile society.”

     Obviously, this film is yet another cry for queer rights in a world in which so many countries are still so very cruel to the LGBTQ+ community. Yet this 2021 winner of the Iris Prize doesn’t read like a diatribe, but shows us the small joys and pleasures that the lost boys and girls of Libya and found in their small circles of brave queer friends.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

Tamás Fekete | Asszó (Assault) / 2017

waiting

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zsófia Lányi (screenplay), Tamás Fekete (director) Asszó (Assault) / 2017 [27 minutes]

 

The two major figures in this film are half-brothers, a subgenre in gay porn films, which obviously allows the two to have sex without the stigma of incest. I have argued several times that I don’t see gay brotherly love as having anything to do with the incest laws since there is utterly no issue of such a love regarding the diminution of the gene pool or possible consequence of inbreeding. The only time when this might be seen to be a problem, as I see it, is when it involves the dominance of one over the other or a kind of sibling rape.

    But that has little to do with this film in which the brothers, half-brothers, Misi (Tamás Szabó Sipos) (16 years of age) and Áron (Benett Vilmányi) (18 years old), who get on quite well together, with Áron often playing the role of a protective older brother, slowly and perhaps someone reluctantly showing his younger sibling how to properly shave, etc.

    But this Hungarian film is also very much about fencing, of which Áron has long been a student. And now it is the younger, slightly more handsome, Misi’s turn to be introduced to the sport.

    At first he is slightly shy and clumsy, as Áron introduces him to his fellow fencing team members and to the strict coach. Misi cannot even fit into the proper fencing attire until his older brother makes it clear how to dress and position his fencing helmet. When the “new boy” (Misi) is assigned 50 push-ups, Áron claims he was at fault and takes the push-ups for him.

    It only takes a brief introductory period, however, before Misi proves himself quite capable, and it takes only a couple of visits to the gym before he begins to outshine his elder brother.

    Moreover, there are some nights when Misi prefers to spend with his father, obviously not Áron’s father, who seems to be totally missing, whether he simply disinterested in his former family or perhaps has died we never know.

    The boys are at their best with their shared mother (Sára Mészáros) whom they tease about finding a new boyfriend, even looking on line to match her up with a good-looking man.

     What never gets openly spoken in this film is the two young teenagers as they probably feel far more drawn to one another sexually than they can admit to themselves.

      Moreover, when the fencing coach begins to criticize Áron for his style and praise Misi, the tension begins to rise between them until finally, almost in a slightly sexual frenzy Áron attacks his young brother, symbolically playing out the Cain and Abel myth in which Áron attacks him straddling his brother’s body as he also strikes him, while Misi refuses to hit his brother back. It is far more sexual, an expression of hidden desire than an actual assault, but it is both, a potential rape, a desire that comes from Áron’s competitive macho self that borders on a deep desire of love he is unable to fully express.

    Suddenly, he denies even being Misi’s brother as if both to admit his brutal treatment of him but to dissociate any blood ties so that his love cannot be perceived, even in his own mind, as incestuous. He has not behaved as a true brother nor does he desire to given his inclinations. It is a powerful moment, an almost unbearable admission.

     Given the situation, Áron does not even show up at their next fencing practice, Misi warning him that the coach is furious. Áron can only assure his brother that he will be waiting for him when he finishes. The waiting is both a reassurance of their relationship and, just perhaps, a waiting for a response to his sublimated love.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

 

Ramin Bahrami | 99 Homes / 2015

in the grip of the python

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ramin Bahrani and Amir Naderi (screenplay, based on a story by Ramin Bahrani and Bahareh Azimi), Ramin Bahrami (director) 99 Homes / 2015

 

The dilemmas portrayed in Ramin Bahrani’s 2015 film, 99 Homes, are not precisely tragic events, although the work begins with a suicide. Rather, Bahrani’s film slowly uncoils, along with its character’s loves, like a python seeking to slowly strangle each of them to death. And like the python’s grip, the more these figures struggle, the more deeply entrapped with the destroyer’s grip they become.

     The “destroyer” here, working in conjunction with the bans and the US government, is Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a seemingly slimy house “flipper,” who forecloses on houses whose owners have failed to pay on their mortgages. Using two hired cops and a team of brutes, he evicts families, demanding the tenants leave their home immediately, with only three moments to grab whatever they can scoop up, before his men remove all of the family’s beloved possessions into the street. If things get violent, as they sometimes do, he has an ankle gun, the two “hired” comps, and a phone on speed-dial to the local police. The more the family argues, the lest time they have to collect their trinkets and to plan for their new lives.

     Carver, having begun his life as a real estate agent, has quickly come to see that the real money lies not in helping people to find their dream house, but in helping himself to the remnants of what their unaffordable dreams have cost them. And, in that sense, he stands at the reverse end of the American Drea. Yet Carver, having been able over the years to justify his dirty doing, has long since ceased even believing that society is democratic, that if you work hard and do good you will receive your just award. Set sometime during the huge American economic turndown of the first decade of this century, the events of this film only prove to Carver that only those smart enough to grab hold of what others can’t afford, allows for survival. In his cynical view of the world, it is he who is on the side of the law, while the others have simply been criminal in their abuse of their lives and loved ones.

     We quickly are forced to look, however, from the other side of the lens, as we follow a good, if already broken family, trying to go about their lives. Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a skillful construction worker who, working on a new house, is told to go home because the would-be owners have been unable to obtain their loan. Times are bad, and new jobs are not to be easily found. Living with his mother Lynn (Laura Dern) and his child, Connor (Noah Lomax)—whose mother’s absence is never fully explained—Dennis and his family are suddenly unable to pay their mortgage, and despite their delusion that they may have 30 more days before the house, in which they have lived all of the lives, will be repossessed, they are forced by Carver’s tactics to immediately move to a run-down motel, filled by people just like themselves, with no imaginable future. Their sudden descent from good, middle-class folk to American outsiders, just a step up from the Oakie’s of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, is so painful that it is difficult to watch.

     Even though this family manages to gather most of their possessions, Dennis discovers that some of his most important tools—necessary if he is ever to return to work—have been stolen by one of Carver’s men, and goes to Carver’s offices to confront him. He is unable to retrieve his tools, but there again encounters the read estate dealer, who offers him a day job to help clean up a house whose tenants, in anger, have backed up the sewage, literally, leaving a ring of shit inside their abandoned home. It is obviously the most disgusting job one might imagine, yet Dennis is so desperate that he takes on the task.

     Within days, the skillful charmer, clearly in league with the devil himself, has been able to convince Dennis to join his workers, stealing air conditioners and pool cleaners from empty houses to resell them to his clients before they can move in. Dennis does such a good job, he quickly finds himself doing his own evictions. Although it is clear that he hates the task, he is being paid such a good amount, and he is so determined to restore his family home, that he swallows his pride and does Carver’s bidding.

     However, he cannot come to tell his own family where the money is coming from—even though he is soon able to buy back their house, with the caveat that he cannot move in for three weeks. While they are living in the motel, however, a man and his family, whom he has evicted arrives at the motel and recognizes him. Observing the man’s violent anger, Dennis’ son and mother suddenly perceive the truth, despite his continued attempts to cover it up.

    Even given this new terrifying development, Dennis is unable to quit his now hateful new job. Like a punk version of Donald Trump, Carver has convinced his new “apprentice” that everyone who doesn’t succeed in this manner is a “loser.” When Dennis explains that he must get his family out of the motel, but is legal unable yet to move back into their old home, Carver tries to consul him not to be sentimental about homes: “They’re just boxes,” he argues. But another home, two other homes, he cautions. Forget about the “family” home.

     Although, in some respects, is inability to comprehend the sentiment so many families attach to their homes, is some large context, may make sense, the real problem for Dennis does not really concern his family domicile—he does in fact buy another home for his loved ones—but that he has not been able to be honest about his moral abnegation. Taking them to their “new,” far more luxurious home cannot assuage their own disappointment in him, and the grandmother and son arrange to live with Lynn’s brother in Tampa rather than stay with Dennis.

     Carver, who now truly believes he controls the young former carpenter, involved in a grand real estate plot, attempts to squelch a lawsuit by illegally placing a missing document in the original file. The family suing is one that Dennis has met early on in the courthouse, and Dennis delays in handing over the fraudulent file to the corrupt court clerk. At the last moment, however, the waiting clerk spots him, pulling the envelope from Dennis’ hand, allowing the judge to maintain that since the document in now in the file, the family has no case.

     As if testing Dennis, Carver demands that he join him for the actual eviction; arriving at the home, however, it becomes apparent that the former owner, brandishing a rifle, has hole up inside with his family, determined to defend his little domain. The police arrive and a stand-off with assuredly violent consequences seems inevitable.

    To save the day, Dennis dares the shooter, moving directly toward him to explain that indeed the house does legally belong to the family, since he has placed a fraudulent document into the file.

     Up to this point, Bahrani’s film has been a powerful neo-realist work somewhat in the manner of David Mamet (but without the stagey dialogue of the playwright), a work perhaps even closer to the brilliant Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (yet without their humor and grace). But suddenly 99 Homes switches into a slightly sentimental and certainly murky tale. Dennis, for speaking the truth, seems to be awarded the appreciation even of Carver, as he is carted off by police for the criminal act to which he just confessed. Carver, on the other hand, is assured by the police that he is off the hook.

     Has Dennis simply gone to prison in order to save Carver’s back? Has Carver suddenly realized the error of his ways? Surely even the would-be violent acquaintance, despite having been returned the ownership of his house, will also be spending some time in jail. In short, the moral ground which Bahrani has attempted to restore is still so shaky that we can’t be assured that anyone has been saved. We can only imagine that Carver, with his close governmental relationships, will soon be back to threaten the unfortunate homeowners who have no recourse.

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2015).