Victor Fleming | Captains Courageous / 1937

the little fish

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Lee Mahin, Marc Connelly, and Dale Van Every, based on the novel by Rudyard Kipling (screenplay), Victor Fleming (director) Captains Courageous / 1937

 

The 1937 film by Victor Fleming is basically an intergenerational love story between a young 13-year-old boy, Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Bartholomew) and a Portuguese sailor, Manuel Fidello (Spencer Tracy) who saves the boy when he falls overboard while sailing on a streamliner, accompanied by his wealthy, quite removed father (Melvyn Douglas).

     Before going any further, I should emphasize that this is not a pedophilic work; there is no sex and only at a couple of moments is any physical contact express, Manuel’s hand caresses Harvey’s cheek, and at one point he gently pats the boy’s butt. Their relationship is generally perceived by most critics and viewers, who would surely deny all gay suggestions, to be a father-son like relationship or a kind of sea-going mentorship. But I think anyone who sees it with an open mind will comprehend that there is real love between the two, the older man calling his “catch” a “little fish,” and the previously spoiled child, absolutely in love with Manuel, so much so that when, at the end of work, he is returned to his now chastened father, he can only beg to go back to sea, even if he witnessed Manuel’s death near the end of the voyage when, in Captain Disko Troop’s (Lionel Barrymore) desperate race to reach to Glouster with this catch before his competitor, Manuel is caught up in the rigging of the falling mast and drowns in the sea.

     And yes, there is plenty of patriarchal patronizing of the young willful Harvey, as Alba M. insists in her on-line essay “Captains Courageous: A Critical Analysis,” and as she points out, the boy’s behavior “is explicitly coded as ‘feminine,’ like a ‘sissy’ boy. But Harvey is at first a monster of a spoiled child who lies, attempts to bribe his way into a special club for which he will certainly not be elected (even his peers detest him), and finally threatens the chairman of the club, “the Buffaloes,” with his father being fired by his own wealthy father. He even threatens to report made up sexual abuse by his teacher.

     This is like a spoiled young Trump, raised without any true parental involvement, so selfish that he cannot he recognize it as bad behavior. This was a character which the beautiful Bartholomew, at the time the most well-known actor other than Shirley Temple, played well, not only in this film, but in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) where audience members saw the character as being “sissified” and “emasculated.”

     In this film, Harvey is punished for his actions by being expelled from his school for a semester, and his father finally realizes that he has not properly paid attention to his son’s actions. The streamliner voyage to Europe is supposed to resolve that problem, but once again, he ignores his son while doing business, and Harvey, once again taunting other boys on board, hides on the ship’s deck, leading his fall into the water, he near drowning, and his being saved by Manuel.

     Even once aboard the fishing boat, Harvey attempts to demand that the captain and crew take him immediately back to New York, and attempts to convince them, unsuccessfully, that his father is a wealthy man.

     Assigned the work of a cabin boy, just as the captain’s son Dan (Mickey Rooney) is treated, he refuses to obey orders or even eat, until he becomes so hungry that he gives into some of their demands, and learns from Dan how to cut fish. But if Dan played a major role of befriending the boy, the two forming an almost intimate friendship and bond in the original novel, here Rooney’s role is drastically curtailed, as he, along with the elder sailors, mock the newcomer.

     Soon after they even begin to see the boy as a danger to the ship, a kind of Jonah who will bring them bad luck.

     Only does Manuel actually commune with boy, attempting to explain his own relationship to the sea and his role as someone who sings and finds pleasure in fishing. He even talks about his own father and his unexpected death aboard just such a boat.

     As Manuel continues to develop almost a romantic interest in the boy, tucking him in with his coat (often—as when James Dean, in exchange for Sal Mineo’s gun, lovingly offers him his red jacket—represented as a symbol of romantic love) when Harvey insists of sleeping on deck, the other sailors even notice Manuel’s interest in and protection of the boy, particularly when he creates what is almost a love-song to his “little fish.” Accordingly, Manuel must behave roughly with the boy just to convince them that his has no pedophilic interest in the beautiful child.

      But, in the end, it doesn’t work, as the two become increasingly intertwined.  In a rare moment of friendliness and honesty, Harvey even comments: “Thank you for covering me up with your coat and everything. I—I never did thank you for saving my life, I ought to thank you for, all right.”

    As commentator Alba M. makes quite clear—although I strongly disagree with her theory that everything in this film should be view through a lens of a patriarchal control of children (children are not empty vessels who learn values by themselves; they need guidance and sometimes even correction; and I don’t mean corporal punishment)—by now Harvey is truly in love with his so-called mentor and, in a scene in which the two began the conversation about having “bad thoughts,” Manuel tells him that when he returns to land, he will go with girls, the boy immediately reacts in shock, “Girls.” Manuel continues, that yes, back in Gloucester he has many girls. Harvey’s reaction is like spurned lover: “Oh, you don’t go with girls?” “Every man go with girl…, begins Manuel before he realizes that in order to maintain the love relationship he has with the boy, he must revise his statement, lying to him that he was just joking and that he most certainly won’t meet up with the girls.

      This is about as obvious as it gets, but the film has now made it quite clear about how things stand between the two of them. Harvey is now a jealous lover, which makes things even more tragic when Manuel, caught in the mast, dies before his eyes.

       In the final scene he attends a memorial funeral with his father for all the men who have died at sea, tossing a wreath into the waters in his final expression of love for the man who has changed his life.

       In J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a prostitute tells Holden Caulfield that he looks just like the boy co-staring Melvyn Douglas, without naming the movie title. Yet, unlike Harvey, Holden never does learn from others, and remains an outsider to his own life.

       

Los Angeles, August 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Charles Reisner | Chasing Rainbows / 1930

happier days

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wells Root (screenplay, with dialogue and additional scenes by Bess Meredyth, Al Boasberg, Kenyon Nicholson, and Charles Reisner [based on the story “Road Show” by Robert Hopkins and Bess Meredyth]), Charles Reisner (director) Chasing Rainbows / 1930

 

Except for it’s special 1249 feet of 2-strip Technicolor footage for the big song and dance numbers by composer Milton Ager and lyricist Jack Yellen—footage that is now lost being only summarized in the black and white segments of the film still available—Chasing Rainbows  of 1930 had nothing special to offer its audiences. Headed by the mild-mannered and, as his cast members describe him, kind and respectful Jack Benny as the stage manager Eddie Rock, the characters of this traveling musical are basically a mean bunch of cynics, with a few notable exceptions.

     The poor tenor lead, Terry Fay (Charles King) keeps falling in love with the wrong women who lead him on and abuse him (he evidently has a rich father who controls New York theaters) before they leave, each time the romantic fool going into to a deep funk and threatening suicide. Early on in the film the wonderful Marie Dressler figure Bonnie comments “It’s his sixth threat of suicide this year!” His so-called “partner,” the loyal and indomitable Carlie Seymour (Bessie Love) with whom he first joined up to create an act which has brought them into theater, is called in to talk him out of his depression and get him on stage for the next matinee despite his suicidal threats.

    Carlie succeeds because, as she puts it, she completely knows him, and unbeknownst to this blockhead deeply loves him despite being forced to watch all the other women go in and out of his life. Despite the warnings of Bonnie and other cast members, she basically cleans up his room, dresses him, and wipes up his messes without so much of as flicker of sincere appreciation. It’s hard to like such a narcissistic clunk, and if, in the end, if we do give him some leeway it’s only because Carlie cares so much.

      But that’s just the trouble with this fairly whiny musical in which Fay keeps repeating his errors and following up with complaints, Bonnie constantly battles with the ridiculously clutzy prompt woman Polly (Polly Moran), and the sleazy Don Cordova (Eddie Phillips) stands in the background ready to join up with the insincere women who pretend to fall in love with Fay. As Eddie summarizes the situation as the company is about the break up at the end of their tour:

 

                       Just think of it, 42 weeks together and only one fight. It started

                       the opening night and it’s still on. You know this company should

                       never have had really had a stage manager. What they really needed

                       was a referee.

    Given the truth of his comments, it’s hard to like this hard-hearted Depression film, particularly when, after the former leading lady leaves Fay and the company, they hire on the gold-digging Daphne Wayne (Nita Martan) whose major talent seems to be insincerely batting her eyelashes at Fay and singing as if she were trying out for the role of Betty Boop. At one point when Fay, after momentarily paying attention to Carlie and actually inviting her out for dinner soon after, announces he just married Daphne, the devastated girl, always trying to take the punches as they come, begins to laugh with a sense of false hilarity that goes on so interminably long that we desperately wish someone like Dressler, who is the witness, would give her a good punch so that she might break out in the sobs she’s holding inside. At times like these, we truly wish the plot called for her to go home with Benny to his beloved mother and binge on the canned preserves he keeps gushing over.

     When a film scholar mentions this film in connection with LGBTQ moments such as Richard Barrios briefly does, it’s generally concerning the existence of Benny’s assistant Lester, performed by the great pansy actor George K. Authur—the burbling, snippy, “sissified and funny” Madame Irene of the 1926 musical—who here speaks his few lines as close to straight as was possible given his effeminate voice. In fact, one might not even notice him in this role were it not for the fact that after Benny has lectured “the quarrelling pair”—to steal the title of a miniature puppet play by writer Jane Bowles—about their unnecessary argumentation, Lester finds Bonnie and Polly both nearly passed out drunk hidden behind a standing rack of costumes, reporting it to his boss in near hysteria.

      We soon discover, mid-play, that the two women have spent most of their lives together, Polly having even worked hard for a year, as Bonnie fondly reminds her, to pay for the elder’s surgery years earlier. And we are forced quickly to conclude that these two women who previous to this have done nothing but insulted one another, are in actuality not only long-time friends but a lesbian couple, the reason perhaps for their constant arguing now made quite evident. Nothing more is particularly made of this discovery. Dresler merely attempts to administer a bromide to her completely drunken companion without being able to successfully open the bottle top. Declaring, “In five minutes, I'll have you as sober as I am,” Dressler nearly crashes to the floor before accidentally ripping the sink out of the wall in her attempt to snap off the cap of the precious liquid that might restore her friend to sobriety. It’s never explained how she’s able to perform her final number on stage, which we’re told by the film restoration’s credits was “My Dynamic Personality.”

      Apparently after Eddie announces to the audience that “Since the leading lady has broken her leg, we had to shoot her,” Carlie goes on in Daphne’s place, making a hit of the third act and finally getting her man to see her as the one he truly loves, the cast merrily intoning the musical’s major number, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” After his divorce, I presume, Terry and Carlie will live relatively happy forever. If nothing else, we’re happy that we’ve made it through this basically joyless movie to its end.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

 

Brian Sloan | I Think I Do / 1997

lover and beloved

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Sloan (screenwriter and director) I Think I Do / 1997

 

It’s strange that the mid-to-late 1990s, a time when finally an expression of open sexuality was permissible and a fairly liberal and a Democrat was President of the United States, that there were also so very many “wedding” movies, the most notable examples of which are Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), My Friend’s Best Wedding (1997), and The Wedding Singer (1997), the first two of these also involving minor LGBTQ characters. And in the midst of these films—during a period of flamboyantly gay films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Total Eclipse (1995), Les Feluettes (Lilies) (1996), Body without Soul (1996), Steam: The Turkish Bath (1997), Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and All About My Mother (1999) (it may be useful to note that only one of these was directed by an US citizen, and that was about the British music scene)—Lane Janger would produce Brian Sloan’s I Think I Do (1997), a gay version of the “marriage” movie with tropes amazingly similar to both Four Weddings and My Friend’s Best Wedding.

       It might be useful to think of Sloan’s film as being a gay version of Mike Newell’s British romantic comedy. Instead of weddings, Sloan’s work has a group of close George Washington University college friends attending various holiday celebrations—Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day—before letting his characters loose at a wild wedding scene where, like Newell’s characters, they question the direction their lives have taken them, merrily jumping into other beds in order to determine whether or not those to whom they said “I Do” are the ones with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives.       

    These are, at first, college kids, so there are a great many lame jokes, sentimentally silly phrases (“I’m your bestest friend”), drunkenness, and drugs. The major point of these early scenes is primarily to establish that the film’s central character Bob (the wonderful Alexis Arquette) is gradually coming out of the closet (to himself and to his friends) about his love for his straight roommate Brendan (Christian Maelan), who, as the underground fires bank into heat, begins to create serious problems between the two, particularly since Brendan’s current girlfriend Sarah (Marianne Hagan) seems slightly homophobic. These were the days, after all, when straight kids first started trawling though gay bars as if on a scavenger hunt for new thrills, and Sarah is bored not only by all the cute disinterested boys but is evidently horrified by the advances of the lesbians (I don’t know what kind of gay bars they’re going to, but by this time I believe the two LGBTQ groups had basically gone different directions in larger cities when it came bar life), but the others, Carol (Laureen Vélez), Matt (Jaime Harrold)—already a couple—Eric (Guillermo Díaz, who would also play the charming, clueless hero of producer Janger’s own film, Just One Time) and Beth (Maddie Corman) all seem to enjoy it, leaving time for Sarah and Brendan to check out one another.

      With each passing seasonal party, the two “bestest” pals grow further and further apart because of the growing sexual tension between them, and by Valentine’s day when Brendan practically ignores the existence of Bob, it breaks out in a wrestling bout—which the two have often used to get their hands on one another without admitting why the needed to—when it turns into violence which ends their relationship. Bob leaves after being slugged by Brendan, returning to find the room tag announcing, “Brendan’s Room.”

      Fast toggle ahead, years later, when they’ve grown up to be in their later 20s, thank heaven! And if you got through the first rough patches, the rest I can assure is fairly easy going. I wanted very much, after the first to scenes, to hate this movie, but found that if I just relaxed and enjoyed it simply as the farce it is, that it was just as much fun, if less well-made, costumed, and decorated, as Four Weddings. In fact, its ragged edges made it far more interesting for me.

      On the occasion of Matt and Carol’s wedding, the group basically joins up again which this time for “the big chill,” enacted fortunately not through conversation but through a series of comic highjinks that most imitations of the 1930 and 40s screwball comedies might envy.

      In the interim Bob has found himself a towering beautiful dumb hunk of a companion, Sterling Scott or Scott Sterling (he often doesn’t remember which is his real name and which is his stage personae) for whom Bob writes TV Soap Opera scripts very much like the roles actor Tuc Watkins performs outside of this movie. Beth is still “sort of” with the even more whacked out Eric, and Sarah is still on the make. To the surprise of nearly everyone, at the last minute Bob shows up, he and Eric evidently not having been able to find a room.

       Conveniently Bob and Sterling’s room has two double beds, and—although Bob assures himself and his lover that he no longer is even attracted Brendan—he invites him and Eric to share their room, the boys sleeping two by two.

       What Bob doesn’t know is that since their college days, Brendan has finally come out as gay man and has realized that he has all this time been deeply in love with Bob. What Brendan doesn’t know is that Sterling has just asked Bob to marry him—symbolically, I presume, since same-sex marriage was not yet permitted in the US. And what Sterling doesn’t know is that Bob once was deeply in love with Brendan; but then Sterling doesn’t seem know much about anything except how to sign his signature for all the women who are secretly in love with him, and his few male admirers such as Carol’s fiancée Matt.

       In fact, for a while Matt and Sterling get on so well, spending the night of the first wedding party alone together on the steps of the Lincoln Monument, and sharing time immediately after the wedding while Sterling sews up Matt’s ripped wedding suit pants that you might almost think these two will become a couple, particularly when Carol seems to get second thoughts about the spending her life with her now husband—she can’t bear it when he calls by her married name.

     Eric meanwhile spends the night with Carol’s sister, who like him, loves drugs and all things that make utterly no logical sense. Beth rolls around Carol’s bed with the wedding photographer.

And Sarah once again stalks Brendan without any luck.

     When Sterling gets drunk and tells everyone about his and Bob’s “wedding” plans, just after Brendan has confessed his pent up love for Bob in the bathroom, Bob gets angry, and Sterling, in response, locks Bob out of his room, meaning that Sloan has plotted it perfectly so that Bob and Brendan must now crash Matt and Carol’s suite as well, the two finally expressing their love the way that both of them always wanted to but couldn’t previously manage.

       But when morning comes around again, and Bob wakes up with a glorious hickey on his neck, everyone seems to have third thoughts, Matt and Carol returning to each other’s arms, Eric and Beth dismissing each’s other’s silly encounters, and Bob attempting to patch it up with Sterling. Were they just temporarily mistaken and now are “sorry about last night,” or were they truly exploring something that they were missing in their lives? It appears only the man who was most confused in college, now knows what he truly wants. Brendan desperately desires Bob.

      Carol’s cigarette smoking, lush of an aunt (wonderfully played by the endlessly uncredited but enormously talented singer Marni Nixon) quotes from Carson McCullers to explain the problem with love: the world is essentially divided into two types of people, the lover and the beloved. The problem is knowing who is who. If Bob was formerly the lover and Brendan the beloved, things have certainly changed, and it is difficult to coming to terms with that major shift in roles

      As Beth attempts to counsel the always desperate Sarah, it is perhaps only when you give up the search that you find the person you have been looking for.

     Fortunately, just as the romantic figures in both the popular marriage movies I mention early in this essay, Bob does come to recognize finally that he is the beloved, no longer the searching lover, and that Brendan offers him more in every way than the conventional-thinking Sterling, who just like his soap-opera plots has had his own affair which he has simply forgotten to mention to his mate.

     In the end, of course, all is well. Brendon gets Bob; Sterling seems to hook up with an old friend, perhaps the one with whom he had an affair; Beth and Eric return to their impossible relationship, as do Carol and Matt to their surely difficult marriage, based on a relationship none of the others imagined would ever last, despite their having lived together several years before the marriage ceremony which resulted in such havoc.

      And we leave this pyscho-babble fairytale packed with music from the Partridge family feeling just fine. It’s good, once in a while, to have things turn out swell for the gay guys. Maybe we should see this as the first of the new wave of “coming out” films—given Brendan’s long period of closeted gestation—that began in the following year with Get Real and Edge of Seventeen.* And all those new “coming out” films represent just such a positive view for the future—even if we know there are some very deep pot-holes and ruts in the road ahead and that marriage utterly redefined the LGBTQ universe.

 

*As I noted elsewhere, it begin long before those movies with works the late 1970s such as Mark Olmsted’s 1980 (finally re-released in 2022.)

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

 

 

 

 

Bavo Defurne | Matroos (Sailor) / 1997

first love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bavo Defurne (screenwriter and director) Matroos (Sailor) / 1997

 

As commentators have mentioned, Belgian director Bavo Defurne’s 1997, 17-minute short Matroos (Sailor) has the look and feel about it of the photographs of Pierre et Gilles and, to a lesser extent Werner Rainer Fassbinder’s Querelle—without any of Genet’s sadomasochism. Indeed, this sailor on shoreleave (Tom de With) probably only vaguely knows his admirer, a young boy (Joram Schurmans) trapped in the family bathtub fantasizing a relationship with him. The sailor, who appears to be the boy’s his next-door neighbor, has returned home to spend a few days with his sexy wife, while the boy plays voyeur to his uniforms being hung out to dry on a clothesline. Between boy and neighbor not a word is spoken throughout.

      In retrospect we realize the scene we witnessed in the first frames has been cooked in the boy’s fervid adolescent homoerotic imagination. While swimming in the tub, he imagines that he and the sailor motorcycle to the beach, the seasoned sailor tearing off the beer cap with his teeth and chugging the bottle’s contents down in one long swig. He opens the boy’s bottle similarly, takes a sip and hands it over to the boy before they begin to tussle over it, eventually falling down a small dune, the sailor momentarily straddling the boy as if he were about to dive in for a kiss. He pulls out from the deep sea of the boy’s desirous eyes just in time, and the two, again posed quite deliberately against a green screen, motor back home. These pretty scenes, the director hints, are nothing but the soft pornographic photographs of the boy’s cinema of the head.

      While the sailor is at sea, the kid conjures up his sailor’s encounter on ship with another sailor. These two, once more, are not sexually inclined as much as they are interested in wrestling over a bar of chocolate which the boy has sent to his friend, over and over again, as in a loop tape, representing, apparently, the boy’s own lovely memory of it which he repeats in his head. The two sailor’s brief struggle for ownership of the chocolate bar and the cover of the box it came in (the second somewhat jealous sailor presumably desiring to know who has sent the chocolate to his shipmate), reminds us of the tussle of the boy and sailor at the beach. 

      The sailor had previously sent him an exotic flower he plucked in an Ecuadorian rain forest, fascinated by its penis-like white stamen set against the bright carmen color of its flower. And in response to the chocolates the sailor now pulls down what looks to be the Milky Way, gently holding it between the palms of his hand for a moment before slipping it into an envelope presumably addressed to the bathtub-bound boy.

       Within the envelope he also evidently enclosed a letter announcing that he will soon be back home. On the day of his arrival, we see the young boy riding his bicycle to the pier. But if we look carefully, we discern that the technicolor pastels of the previous scene—worthy at moments of James Bigood’s Pink Narcissus—have become closer to the gritty browns and grays of the real harbor. And when the sailor deboards, after awarding the other sailor a gruff pinch of his shoulder, he greets the boy with friendliness, but hardly with the passion that it is clear the young man expects.

       Apparently, he is waiting for the sailor to join him on his bike or at least walk aside him, but the sailor, against the washed out colors of the seaside warehouses, proceeds alone for several steps before the boy catches up, almost trapping the sailor in his path. Seemingly confused by the boy’s attentions, he walks around the bicycle and proceeds on his journey, the boy looking startled by the sailor’s inattention. Finally, hurt by the man’s obvious disinterest, the boy cycles off, clearly emotionally wrought by the incident.

       The soldier stops momentarily simply to ponder what the boy’s actions were all about.

       Homosexual desire has once more met up with heterosexual normative behavior, unknowingly crushing its victim. The real destroys all fantasy with which it comes in contact.

      The young boy playing with boats in his bathtub has now become a young adult who in the future will probably shower with the others boy at school, remembering his sailor—if he remembers him—with a sense of slightly melancholic embarrassment. But the colors of his world will never again be so intense.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2021

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

Adolfo Aristarain | Martín (hache) / 1997

whistling roofs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adolfo Aristarain and Kathy Saavedra (screenplay), Adolfo Aristarain (director) Martín (hache) / 1997

 

Adolfo Aristarain’s film Martín (hache) begins with a scene in which the young lead, Juan Diego Botto as Hache (hache is Spanish for the letter “h,” which signifies the word “hijo” or son of Martin, which in English might be described as the equivalent of calling a son named after his father as Junior) is performing in a loud punk concert in Buenos Aires at which his girlfriend announces, in a rather blasé manner, that she is breaking up with the 19-year-old boy.

     Soon after, we attend a luncheon with Martín senior (Federico Luppi) in Madrid with his friend Dante (Eusebio Poncela) and Martín’s film editor and much younger lover Alicia (Cecilia Roth) at which, we discover in the mix of the various personal and business conversations that Martín is a film director, now living in Spain, who is attempting to convince Dante to act the role of a pimp in a new film that he is considering, as they are interrupted time and again by Alicia who, having just snorted several lines of “perfect” cocaine attempts to share her ecstasy, which results in Martín misogynistically abusing her and, finally, sending her off, after which his friend scolds him for his behavior.

     Between the various threads of the three distinctly different conversational modes—with references from their personal lives, their business endeavors, and the drugged sexual connotations—all spoken at such a rapid-fire pace that the English subtitles can hardly keep up with the Spanish spoken language, I felt like a lost outsider listening from a nearby table without a clue of their word’s context.

    I switched off the DVD for a few days just to attempt to assimilate what I had witnessed and to consider whether or not it was worth my efforts to proceed.

    It is perhaps not accidental that in the very next scene, the Argentine director presents his fictional equivalent of himself quietly listening to an exquisite recording of jazz, rolling a joint, drinking a few glasses of wine, and putting on the headphones as he falls to sleep on the couch. And we can also now relate, more clearly, to Martín’s Garbo-like insistence throughout the rest of the film that we would prefer to be alone.

      The trouble is, of course, as Federico Fellini years before made clear in his great study of an endlessly besieged filmmaker in 8½ (1963), a director of cinema is never permitted a moment of isolation except in the convolutions of his own head—where, in fact, he is even more challenged by the ramifications of his encounters with others in the past.

      Dante suddenly barges into Martín’s luxurious home, reporting that family members have been attempting to get hold of him for hours. Hache (or as Junior refers to himself through the rest of the film, Jay) has just attempted suicide by drugs and is recovering in the hospital. Dante has already made a reservation for his friend on the first flight to Buenos Aires.

      We soon discover the wife Martín left behind in his homeland, Blanca (Ana María Picchio), who has remarried a doctor who has saved his stepson’s life, also has a new baby. Moreover, she reveals that their son Jay, who refuses work or the opportunity to study, in her mind is an uncontrollable 19-year-old who behaves as if he were 14. With a new child in their modest apartment, Jay no longer even has his own bedroom. Accordingly, Blanca wants her ex-husband to take his namesake back to Spain with him, or if nothing else for a month or so as they determine whether they can live together. Martín argues—and we soon after almost believe him—that they wouldn’t last a week together.

      Obviously, a man who wants to be alone and who is about to embark upon a new film venture that will take him for weeks or even months away from his homebase, wants no part of caring for aimless, possibly still-suicidal son, even as he declares his love for his son. And, obviously, both Martín and Jay realize that the month of “vacation” represents, in fact, a permanent relocation.

     Although Jay insists his near-death was not intentional, but rather the wrong mix of alcohol and the drug called “dog,” which friends demanded he try, apparently no one in his family will believe him that he did not intentionally seek to die.

     Fortunately, Dante—who clearly adores the kid and even tries to convince his director friend that if he tires of caring for Jay he will be glad to take on the responsibility—actually listens to what Jay says and believes his argument that although his life is aimless, he has no desire to end it. The only problem, as we increasingly discover, is that his remarkable “uncle” is, as he describes himself, is a true “epicurean,” a gay actor who has and continues to try every drug created (although he later reveals to the boy, that except for heroin, a habit he later kicked, he has never let a drug control him), goes to bed with males and females not because of their bodies but the personality they evoke, and lives permanently in a small hotel suite. Martín absolutely refuses his “faggot” friend’s offer.

     Jay’s father is also worried about the effect that Alicia may have upon the boy. When she shows up unexpectedly bearing a gift of her newly acquired Bolivian coke, he becomes incensed, once more abusing her so severely that she leaves him seemingly forever, throwing the keys he has given her to his house in his face, while warning him that even if he pretends to never take drugs, his son will nevertheless find drugs elsewhere and experiment. 

     Both she and Dante, in short, seem more in touch with Jay than their father. And it is no surprise that a few days later Martín—in search of shooting sites and a place to rewrite the movie script— leaves Hache’s care to Dante, while luring Alicia back to join him at the seaside villa he’s been loaned as a place in which to work.

     As frenetically crazy as Dante is, his short-lived parenting of Jay out of the shadow of the brooding Martín, is the first time in the film that we begin to see the boy poking his head from under his shell of quietude. The bond between the impetuous epicurean and Jay is natural, both being true outsiders who don’t fit the conventional definitions of adult behavior. Although he plays the guitar by ear, Jay has no musical training and no intention of seeking any. He dismisses Dante’s suggestion that he take up filming as many sons of renowned directors have. And he absolutely refuses the roles his entire family has suggested that all young men embrace, being a student or a novice employee. He is a self-defined underachiever. Or, to put it as he does at other moments, he is still seeking a way into adulthood.

      In his intentional embracement of everything prohibited by others, Dante may be a force to reckon with, but he is also quite mad, since almost all of his one-night stands and his brief tenures in theatrical roles leaves him lonely and penniless. He takes his temporary charge to the theater to see him perform, but mid-scene Dante breaks out of character, lecturing the audience about the revolutionary play they are watching as being utterly meaningless since they will return home without even thinking about enacting any of its tenants. Without him specifically saying so, art has utterly no effect, he suggests, upon life. And although this hedonist argues brilliantly about his desire to embrace only people who represent the whole of being, later in the film we find him in bed with a girl who appears to be without the ability to speak and almost brain dead. Like all this film’s characters, what Dante says is not always what he does.

     But what Jay now wants to do, to experiment with heroin and return to Argentina, awakens Dante from his self-infatuation as he shifts the boy’s intentions to focus on another form of escapist adventure, a road trip which, obviously, will end up in Martín’s seaside villa.

     There, to convince Martín to take on some responsibility, he tells his friend of Jay’s intentions and lies about the boy having again attempted suicide.

     For much of the rest of the film, Aristarain employs his now-gathered cast of Martín, Dante, Jay, and Alicia to simply speak out about what they have all bottled up: their love, hurts, pain, and a recounting of the tortures they have inflicted upon one another causing their suffering.

     As one might expect, it doesn’t end well. Clearly the aging man who’s used to being in charge, Martín is revealed as truly villainous through the others’ words. Even the normally restrained Jay realizes that although his father may love him he has completely given on his son. As the boy expresses it:

 

                   He gave up on me. I robbed him of a parent’s golden dream:

                   one day to be proud of what his son achieved.

 

     And later, Jay summarizes for Alicia what all those around him—and even the film’s audience—have come to perceive about the famous director:

 

                  Dad is locked away in himself. He’ll never say he loves you

                  or that he needs you or anybody.

    Regarding women, it has long become clear that Martín is an inveterate sexist. He has left Jay’s mother and now is willing to let Alicia go without bothering to listen to any of her ideas or even plead her hopeless love. The only thing, at this point, for which she can truly blame herself is for having continually believed that her older lover might be able to change. And his final drunken disdain of her attempts to even enter into the conversation involving his relationship to his son, represent the final closure of his and Alicia’s relationship. After a brief illusion that she might take revenge on him by having sex with Jay, she breaks down in the boy’s arms as he gently embraces on the beach, trying to explain to him that all she really wanted was to be his “mother” if only Martín had allowed her the role of being his symbolic wife.

     Having given her no hope of true equal-standing in his life, Alicia becomes the victim that Martín feared that Jay might become. Combining barbiturates with tequila always works, Dante mutters, as he pulls her body the next morning from the pool.

      Dante breaks into his friend’s room after dragging the body from the pool to put a curse upon Martín: that he suffer intense pain for the rest of his life. And, later, after the funeral, as he prepares to leave he attempts to make clear to his friend all that has happened:

 

                First you lost your wife without doing anything to keep her.

                You didn’t want to lose her. Now you’ve lost Alicia. It wasn’t

                suicide, you killed her. She did it because of you. You didn’t

                want to lose her, either. You always lose what you love most.

                Now you only have Jay. You’re losing him, too.

 

     Yet Martín’s comeback is somewhat unexpected and represents one of the most memorable moments of this sad but beautifully evocative work:

 

                What about you? What right do you have to say that? What

                about you? Do you have a wife, a son, a lover? You don’t

                have shit! Take care of yourself.

 

Dante responds, “I used to have a family. Jay, you, and Alicia were my family.” So the gay man openly admits what poor Plato in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955) didn’t dare to say out loud to its US public.

     But Martín takes it one step further, asking a question behind the expressions played out in Sal Mineo’s gaze into James Dean’s face: “Your family or your secret love?”

     Martín takes this all one step further when, in discussing the final terms of the film he is about to direct, he is told that after Dante’s most recent theater rant along with his long history of drug use, the investors refuse to hire Martín’s choice. He walks away from their offer, telling Dante and his son that they wanted to shoot it cheaply, refusing to live up to their commitments.

     And yes, Martín—despite his admission of his love and admiration to Jay’s face and a reconciliation with the boy—ultimately loses his son.

     One morning Dante suddenly appears on his doorstep with a tape Jay has filmed at the airport saying goodbye to his father, explaining that he must return to Buenos Aires not because of the problem with their relationship, but because he feels he doesn’t truly belong in Madrid. He misses, strangely enough, the roofs of the Argentine city with their dirty water towers; everything is beautiful about the roofs of Madrid, but he feels at home in the Argentine capital without his having to define or explain his being there. Perhaps, he suggests, he can only find his future career in the city with which he so innately feels to be a part.

     If the moving film clip he sends his father is any evidence, perhaps he will go into filmmaking or at least into acting. For once he has stepped out of the frame, he returns closer to the lens to send a last message to Dante: what his father has not told them, and which he discovered through a telephone call he answered while his father was sleeping with his headphones over his ears, was that the studio was still asking for Martín to reconsider despite the fact that they cannot accept the actor he insisted upon.

     Together, the messages left by his son reveal deep love between father and son and, just as importantly, between Martín and his incorrigible friend. Martín recalls that when he first came to Madrid, he too almost returned to Buenos Aires because he missed the whistling of that city coming from the streets, the citizens there whistled while no one in Madrid did. A rationalist as always, however, Martín scoffs, “I missed people whistling in the streets....Ridiculous. You can’t go back ‘cause you want to hear people whistle.”

    Interestingly, whistling, like directing, like loving moreover, is an act—all acts in which Martín seemingly refuses to participate. While a roof is a place, somewhere to go, the highest place you can reach to get out in the open and to stand under the stars. As Jay says, he is still always thinking...imagining perhaps what he might do or where he might go in life.

     Once more, Dante attempts to provoke his friend back into action, picking up the phone and dialing the studio head as he hands the phone to Martín demanding he accept their offer. “I won’t do it,” Martín insists.

    “They’ll think we’re lovers,” Dante adds as he hands over the phone. The director takes the phone to plant his finger down upon the off button. After all, aren’t they now clearly lovers?

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2001

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2001).