Pat Mills | Babysitting Andy / 2007

is andy still crazy?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pat Mills (screenwriter and director) Babysitting Andy / 2007 [11 minutes]

 

Andy (Tatum Knight) is a precocious nine year old, more of a tomboy than a girly princess who bedevils her proper parents with questions like, as we first encounter her at the breakfast table, “what does ‘fellatio’ mean?” Her father (Stephen Bogaert) insists she is not old enough to be told, while her mother (Linda Kash), although obedient to her husband’s decision, suggests they just tell her and get it over with. But he recalls the “rim job” incident, which evidently created quite a stir previously within family life. Certainly, Andy knows what that means. The young girl is also a sugar addict.

     Finally, the mother determines to tell her daughter, but almost as soon as she begins she cannot find the proper words to explain it, and the child again is at a loss of what this word must mean that no adult is willing to share with her.

      But also at that very same moment, the mothers goes into labor, immediately calling her brother Paul (Thomas Michael) and his lover Nelson (Ryan Kelly) to come babysit Andy while she rushes off to the hospital.

     At first, after their last experience with Andy, Paul refuses at even this momentous moment. But obviously he and Nelson cannot let his sister down no matter what kind of monster Andy is.

    The two show up, but unbeknownst to us, we perceive that both are physically challenged, wheel-chair bound men. Paul’s first question: “Is Andy still crazy?” says it all. And yes, the nine-year-old kid is still crazy.

   What we also have never before seen is the house itself, made up of numerous open, rail less, stairways, the worst possible house on earth for well-chair bound people. Andy greets them in her fort, which she insists they cannot touch, with a supersoaker gun filled with, as we later discover, cat pee.

      While they are trapped, she sits on the steps, sniffing her magic marker pen, taking out a cigarette to smoke, and eating a full bowl of the sugar her mother has refused her. Paul gladly accepts the cigarette, which when Nelson comments that he thought he long-ago quit, he answers he still smokes on special occasions, such as when being harassed by a nine-year-old.

      Her big question remains: what does ‘fellatio’ mean?”

      When Paul once more refuses to answer her question, she runs off back up the multiple staircase, up to something, as Paul suggests, either eating sugar or smelling her marking pen. From on high she now drops an egg on Paul’s head. Paul, wheels over and grabs her cardboard fort, demanding she put down the eggs. Threatened with her fort’s destruction. Finally, Nelson picks

up the supersoaker gun, and demands she put down the eggs and that his lover put down the fort. Do you promise to put down the eggs if I tell you what “fellatio” means? he asks her.

     Nelson, on discovering what he has in the gun, is now himself disgusted. Why can’t you just tell me what it means. I’m going to find out when I get older, why can’t you just tell me now, Andy reasons.

      But when he begins to explain it, Paul again objects, and Nelson picks up the gun again and forces them both to empty their hands, Andy of the eggs, Paul of the fort he holds over his head.

      Nelson begins the difficult task of explaining that fellatio is when a man puts his penis in someone’s mouth…and almost immediately, Andy shouts out, “Oh my god, a blow job?” totally disappointed that such a mysterious word is simply another name for what she already well comprehends. Why didn’t you all just tell me that?

      Nelson, a bit startled, asks “You know what a blowjob is?”

      She looks directly at him and responds; “Hello. Haven’t you ever heard of the internet?”

     Of course, if she’s that smart she might just as easily have looked it up for herself. And frankly, I don’t believe the whole story. Who with an iota of intelligence would ask two wheel-bound gay men to care for a monster of a child in a completely inaccessible space? And if her parents had already comprehended that she knew what a “rim-job” was, how could they not suspect that she would quickly be able to assimilate the word fellatio?

     We now see her bringing down a mattress from upstairs, and destroying her cardboard fort just so that she might create a ramp to bring them upstairs, have evidently determined that her uncle and his lover are, after all, real friends. And she tells them that she is now determined to become a lesbian, because she finds the whole idea of fellatio to be really gross, no offense.

       In short: cute yes; believable no.

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Jean Renoir | Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment) / 1959

queer by definition

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Renoir (screenplay, based on Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Lewis Stevenson, and director) Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment) / 1959

 

Jean Renoir’s exploration of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story takes the previous Hollywood motion picture route of creating his Hyde, named Opale, and his Jekyll, Dr. Cordelier, to be heterosexual fiends. His is not, as I see it, a LGBTQ movie.

     There is a moment in his film, Le Testament du docteur Cordelier, when the mother of a young man brings his case before the famous psychiatrist—just after Cordelier (John-Louis Barrault) has narratively admitted his “immoral” attraction to his young nurse—explaining that her 18-year- old son has been behaving perversely because he has been sleeping with their maid, in which we wonder whether or not the doctor, in fact, is toying with the possibility of finding a way to further corrupt the boy through his own sexual involvement. The “crime” seems so absolutely ridiculous, even by 1959 standards of moral rectitude, that when the doctor arranges for a time to meet with the boy we have to wonder what he might be planning, particularly given his own backroom activities. Why arrange to see a boy who seems to be a perfectly healthy heterosexual kid?

       But it comes to nothing. We never find out what happens or even if he actually meets with this “patient.” Does the good doctor actually believe he needs “curing?” That his actions are indeed “perverse?”

       In fact, Cordelier’s problems seems to be that he is so psychologically confused that he has mixed up normal heterosexual desire with perverse desires that must be kept under control, despite the fact that the nurse is far more ready to have of sex with him than he with her gives us some idea of the delusions which lead to his attempt to develop of a formula for releasing all feelings of transgression.

       The crimes this Jekyll, Cordelier commits as Opale, are so truly monstrous that they make that the S&M-like scratches and whip-marks of the Hyde of the 1931 and 1941 US films seem almost benign. Even the murders of Hyde in the Hollywood films are far more logical representing as they do women and men that stand in Hyde’s way or may possibly expose him.

       Except for the case of his psychiatric competitor Docteur Séverin (Michel Vitold), a man nearly as possessed as Opale, Opale kills seemingly a random men or women, even in the terrifying early scene in this film, attacking a young child—a scene that could never be realized in a US film of the period, not even perhaps in 1959.

       But perhaps, just for that very reason, because Opale is so absolutely wild and uncontrollable, he is, particularly as Barrault performs him, almost comic. If in the US films there is an odd sense, left over perhaps from the Stevenson work, of Hyde being a still compelling being—even if he appears as a hairy monster—in Renoir’s work Opale is not all “attractive,” but somehow charming and oddly appealing, nonetheless. 

      In his complete “freedom” from all sense of moral duty he stands almost as a healthy alternative to the people around him, the ordinary street people who gang up for moral retribution and Cordelier’s circle of friends whose views are so narrow that they seek to protect each other from even seeming to be involved with the real world, particularly working to keep their friend Cordelier’s name from in any way being connected with Opale, to whom his lawyer Maître Joly (Teddy Bilis) fully knows Cordelier has left his entire estate.

      If nothing else, Opale serves as a wonderful counterbalance to a world in which everything is a sin and all behavior must be controlled.

      Opale, in Renoir’s hands, is almost a Beckettian fool, behaving so very bizarrely that all normal people naturally avoid him; it is he who comes after them just because they are so absolutely terrified of anything out of their narrow limits of defined normality.

      It appears that most critics read this work as a sincere lecture by Renoir of the disaster when the natural is separated from the intellect, when raw desire is segregated from rational decision-making.

      From this perspective it is understandable why these critics might perceive Barrault’s performance as being extreme and “lacking balance” as film commentator Tom Milne ends his otherwise quite perceptive description of Barrault as “prancing, twitching, moving with the animal grace of a dancer...creating an extraordinary, chimerical figure whose intrusion into the real Paris streets lends them a bizarre, unsettling air of menace.” For him and others, Barrault takes those qualities, however, beyond characterization. But for me that is just the point. Opale is outside the limits and definitions of the world in which he discovers himself. He is so far beyond rationality, that no one can even begin to make sense of his actions, let alone explain his possible whereabouts, or even remember what he looked like.

      Moreover, except for the physical pain Opale seems to suffer, this variation of a wolfman seems perfect happy in his perfidious behavior, almost pleased with himself, a bit cocky in his seeming imperviousness. Barrault looks truly more pained with the suave smile of Cordelier at his dinner party than he is walking like a mad Charlie Chaplin down the city street, ready to knock the first person he encounters over the head as many times as possible with his cane.

      In short, his behavior almost seems to be justified by the tightly restricted beings who surround him, forever attempting to impede his motions.

    In that sense, finally, although this Hyde, Opale and his Jekyll-like creator Cordelier seem to be locked into normative heterosexuality, we can certainly agree that Cordelier is closeted and Opale is the figure he has released. The closets of Cordelier’s own studio are constantly being open and closed, just like the doors to various rooms of Séverin’s clinic. Trucks and cars arrive en masse upon which the doors are opened to show policeman exiting and entering. Clearly, this is a world in which things are kept behind doors, and letting them out generally represents danger.

    Whereas the friends and staff in all of the Anglo variations of Stevenson’s tale behave with incredible restraint and rational behavior, here people gang up in groups demanding justice, the police are called the moment danger is sensed, and even while their master suffers locked away in his laboratory, his servants all seem to be having their own mental breakdowns, unable to simply stand up and do something about the screams and shouts they hear emanating from the outbuilding. Everyone in this work appears to be suffering from a kind of hysteria, certainly Docteur Séverin and, at times, Joly. Only Opale, despite his utter unpredictably, seems slightly sane, able to carry through with action.

      If there is no question that his actions go beyond social, political, and cultural bounds they are at least actions, not the gestures of individuals unable to imagine even how to move or proceed. They are certainly queer, but liberating by that very sense of being apart from all normality.

      In short, if Renoir’s version of Hyde is not sexually queer he is in every other sense. And, in that fact, he at least is interesting. Joly’s final insistence that Cordelier, lost in the body of Opale, must suffer his fate in punishment for his deeds speaks volumes for the society that has forced Cordelier to seek out such an alternative in the first place. And even the would-be obedient Docteur defies Joly’s dictum, destroying Opale so that he will die looking at least like the man he desires to be even if that version of himself could never live up to what was expected of him.

      And in that sense only, Cordelier “gets away” with all of his crimes. He has freed himself from the consequence of having attempted to escape. 

      In the end, we have to wonder whether the “horrible experiments” to which the English refers were not less horrific than the terrible restrictions the society itself has put upon its own existence. Even before Opale’s manifestation, Cordelier’s world was one where nearly every kind of variance in behavior was queer by definition.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).

 

Mikio Naruse | 乱れる (Midareru) (Yearning) / 1964

the shock of truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zenzo Matsuyama (screenplay), Mikio Naruse (director) 乱れる (Midareru) (Yearning) / 1964

 

Having now seen my third Mikio Naruse film, I am beginning to think that, although his subjects and themes are limited, he may be a better director than those of his generation, Ozu and Mizoguchi. This is an extreme overstatement, of course, and I have never been a critic who pits great directors against one another, although I do have some obvious preferences when it comes to French film. In this case, all three deal with trapped, yet forceful women, although Ozu’s heroines more often find solace in the family. But there is a kind of feminist strength in Naruse’s characters that makes them far more complex and interesting, leaving us, at film’s end, to want to still know them better.

      Not that the hard-working widow, Reiko Morita (Hideko Takamine) would allow herself to imagine that she is a feminist or even that she lives a complex life. For her, survival is a necessary thing, and working in a small mom and pop grocery store for 8 years after her husband’s death is simply something that she sees as her responsibility. Besides, her mother-in-law is now quite elderly, and that woman’s two other older daughters have husbands and jobs of their own. And who else would care for her husband’s younger brother Koji (Yūzō Kayama), although he has gone to college and worked for a short period at a job, is now a troublesome loafer, who prefers to drink and gamble, now and again getting into fights? 

    Reiko treats the young man as a mother might, lying for him and cooking late meals when he arrives home, sometimes after midnight. The one thing he seems to most enjoy is to eat, and we see the handsome boy several times in this film shoveling in whatever Reiko serves him.

    In any other film, particularly if it were to have been made slightly later, we might have even imagined that the morose and alcoholic brother-in-law is an unhappy gay man, but that is not what plays out in this far more complex heterosexual film.

     Reiko, from the very beginning of this film, begins to sense that something is in the wind, that despite her dedication to family and the traditions of the past, something is beginning to dreadfully change. First of all, a new supermarket has opened up in her part of town, and, as a dreadful advertising truck announces time and again, its prices are much lower than the older, smaller grocers. Consequently, she and other small store owners have begun to lose customers. One local shop owner, foreseeing financial collapse, commits suicide.

     Koji and his sisters, however, see what’s coming clearer than Reiko, and Koji becomes determined to turn his small shop into a larger supermarket. Although Reiko has been unbelievable loyal to the family, the two sisters do not wish to have her be one of the corporate heads, while argues to do so would only be just. Naruse demonstrates their lack of feeling through dozens of tiny gestures, a flip of the hand or a turn of a head, as they attempt to convince their mother that it is time for Reiko to remarry and move on.

     Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your viewpoint), Reiko is unaware of their hostility and Koji’s plans, and feels it’s still her duty to remain and keep the store going as best as she can.

    When Koji finally does tell her about selling the shop, he has also tells her another secret that finally forces her hand: he has left he job because he did not want to leaver her sine he is and always has been in love with her. This is now the kind of drama that one might imagine in US melodramatists such as Douglas Sirk, and the results are equally “over the top.”

     That confession alters the very atmosphere of the shop, as the two, Reiko and Koji circle in avoidance of one another. The only way to end the potent push and pull between them is for Reiko to go, as she suddenly determines to return to her original family home in another city.

     Many a Naruse film would end there, but this time he appears ready to take us into that new complexity of character, as Koji followers her, and the two are drawn even closer and closer together as the train moves forward into space.  

     In his intelligent review in Slant, critic Ken Uhlich captures the experience:

 

“What ensues is probably Naruse’s most brilliantly sustained sequence. As the train races on to an unspecified destination, Reiko and Koji play out a romantic, yet foreboding courtship-in-miniature. The melodramatic tensions of the second act fade away (it is as if the characters have gone beyond the movie they inhabited into entirely new surroundings) and it seems possible that the duo can build a life together. But their initial sense of excitement (one that Naruse implies could only continue if the train never stopped) eventually erodes, and with the end of the characters’ journey comes a kind of emotional atrophy.”

     As I write, there is a kind of lightness here as the two gradually move closer and closer to one another, and at one stop, where Koji leaves the train to eat, Keiko signals him to quickly return before the train leaves the station.      Perhaps these two, we might imagine, can actually find a way to break with customs relation to their age different and family internal relationships. Before they arrive at her hometown, Reiko even suggests that they spend the night in a small mountain town.

    There the air is almost white with a thick fog, intimating that she will be unable to see her way to clarity. Once more she tells Koji that his love cannot be returned, offering him, like a child, a ring made of string.

     Like so many nights in the past, Koji finds his way to a bar. Upon awakening the next morning, Reiko watches for her window men carrying a dead body they have discovered under a cliff. Observing the ring of string on the man’s finger, Reiko pulls back in horror much like Brecht’s Mother Courage, in the realization of her lack of ability to change and speak her heart has been responsible, in part, for Koji’s death.

     This is a truly powerful film, one of the best of the great tradition of Japanese cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).

Ofir Raul Graizer | Tfilah Be Yanuar (A Prayer in January) / 2007

bread, love, and abandonment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ofir Raul Graizer (screenwriter and director) Tfilah Be Yanuar (A Prayer in January) / 2007 [12 minutes]

 

The short film was Ofir Raul Graizer’s senior film offering at Spair School of Film, long before he went on the make the remarkable feature The Cakemaker, ten years later (2017).

     Like his later film, however, this work is high nuanced and quite subtle, and also involves a lot of work on baking, in this case, despite it being Sabbath, a loaf of Challah, generally served on the Sabbath, and in this case for a small celebratory lunch with Yaron (Yaron Green) and his lover Nati (Ofer Regirer), his lover who has long lived with him on their farm in Israel.

    Although this beautiful loaf, made carefully from scratch by Yaron, is a gesture of love, the man himself is not at all happy when Nati arrives, ready to finally offer some help, Yaron arguing that he has never helped with anything before.

     As he endlessly kneads the dough into the proper elasticity, it is clear, in fact, that Yaron is angry, not only for all those days Nati has left him alone while working on his religious studies, but, in reaction, as we soon discover, for Nati’s decision to leave the farm and their almost paradisical relationship for further religious studies elsewhere. In short, he is abandoning, as certainly required, his loving gay relationship, in order to become a religious man.

    Yet this warm afternoon, he also wants once more time to share his love with Yaron, and almost forces himself on his friend who finally cannot resist abandoning himself to their sexual delights, before he moves the table on which he was made the bread into the sun with its flowering trees nearby, to share his final offering of their domestic life. Certainly, this early short work, , reveals, as critic David Hall points out in his review on Gay Celluloid “far more passion between them, than that of the gay relationship depicted in Graizer's impressive debut feature.”

    If you watch this film again after perceiving the story, the whole lovely sharing of the bread becomes an almost tear-jerking experience before Nati walks away, on his way to the nearest bus or trains station, one imagines, to take him away forever.

     When Nati leaves, Yaron puts on a recording of what might be the least expected song to record the sorrow of a Jewish boy, Schubert’s Ave Maria, perhaps one of the most Roman Catholic songs imaginable. But there Yaron is clearly an outsider in his sexual behavior from the Jewish community.

     In the distance, we see Nati walking on his way, but then suddenly stopping, pausing, and just perhaps deciding to turn back to love instead of walking away to his religious identity. We don’t know what his actual decision is. Graizer’s work is far too subtle to answer the pushes and pulls of this relationship, which after all clearly doesn’t eventually knead easily to an elastic relationship of chemicals. But the prayer is there, in the bright January Saturday sun of an Israeli settlement, where Yaron awaits just such a possible miracle of his lover’s change of mind to match his heart.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026

Samantha Rebillet | The Suitor / 2004

the unsuitable suitor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Gordon (screenplay), Samantha Rebillet (director) The Suitor / 2004 [7 minutes]

 

Cindy Kwok (Renee Lim) is a 20-year-old woman from Hong Kong who still lives at home. She has a beautiful Australian boyfriend, Brett (Leon Ford), but her traditional parents stand opposed to that relationship, and attempt to interfere with it through the introduction of more proper suitors and refusing her late-night outings. Brett is growing frustrated with Cindy’s respectful handling of the situation, and suggests that if she cannot take a stand against her parents their love has little future.

    In the very next scene, we see her parents (Jane Shen and Harry So) introducing her to a new suitor from Hong Kong, Elton (Paul He). Elton is certainly an attractive man, but as she quickly “sets him straight” in her bedroom, she doesn’t have a broken heart, she has plenty of friends, and she doesn’t need a boyfriend because, as he pushes a photograph of Brett into his face, “I’ve already got one.”

     “He’s cute,” Elton replies. “Are you fucking him?” he unexpectedly inquires.

     Cindy turns back, startled by his question. “That’s not any of your business.”

     “Why not? If he was my man, I would every chance I got.”

     Suddenly Cindy is perfectly happy to go to the party with Elton. She seeks out Brett in the kitchen, whispers to him that Elton is gay, and suggests he introduce him to some of the partygoers.

Brett is only too happy to hook up Elton with two gay boys, as he and Cindy are now allowed to make out in complete freedom, escaping upstairs for their own entertainment.

     When they return to the dance floor, however, they see Elton in his short underpants shimmying between two cute boy’s bodies. He is also drunk.

      Together they take him back to Cindy’s room where, immediately confronted with the mother, Cindy explains that he got so drunk that she had to call Brett to help. The mother is outraged that the white boy is in her daughter’s room, but appears not at all appalled that Elton is passed out on her bed. Furious with her mother’s attitude, she insists that Brett is her boyfriend and she’s sick of her mother trying to control her life.

       “You don’t know how to choose the right man,” Mrs. Kwok insists.

       Pointing to the gay boy on the bed, Cindy inquires, “And you do?” She prepares to leave.

       Her mother shouts out, “What about him?”

       “You brought him here. You deal with him.”

     In the very next frame, we see Brett with Cindy trying to carry on a formal interview with his girlfriend’s parents. After his first question, “So, Mrs. Kwok, you mind if I call you Janice,” he is left only stuttering out words that being with the letter “J.” But presumably, this time at least, Cindy will approve of their choice.

      This charming short work by Australian director Samantha Rebillet, is now rather blurred. At least in the DVD I watched on YouTube. Rebillet, whose career included a substantial number of acting roles, of directing short works, commercials, and noted documentaries such as Butterfly Man and The Last Goodbye, and performing with her husband, the noted musician Ilan Kidron in “The Freaks in Love,” ended sadly. In 2010 she was operated on for a life-threatening brain tumor, but recovered. The couple and their children moved to Paris and then Los Angeles. But in November 2017, at age 45, she committed suicide.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).