Josh Appignanesi | Rufus Stone / 2012

two old men in a final hug knowing they cannot redeem the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josh Appignanesi and Kip Jones (screenplay), Josh Appignanesi (director) Rufus Stone / 2012 [31 minutes]

 

This is a painful reminder of gay life in small provincial villages, this based on social research into the older gay experience in rural south England and Wales by the Bournemouth University School of Health and Social Care.

    The first part of this film is a view back into the youths of the major three characters Rufus Stone (played in the younger version by Harry Kershaw), his male friend Flip (played early on by Tom Kane) and his supposed girlfriend Abigail (Martha Myers Lowe). All three spend a day in the wood, with the boys particularly getting to know one another better, but as they relationship develops, Abigail keeps popping up to drag Rufus away from Flip.

     At one point she actually seems to succeed, pulling him off to share a beautiful view from a hilltop, but suddenly Flip reappears, ramming his body into Rufus’ and dragging him to the ground, where the two pleasantly wrestle together. He pulls Rufus off to the old swimming hole, stripping naked and diving in, encouraging Rufus to do the same thing. The two pleasantly swim around one another and finally meet up for one looks like their first kiss. But once again, up pops Abigail, demanding Rufus’ full attention. When this time he doesn’t respond, she turns to another of the citizens enjoying their local woods, obviously spreading the rumor that the boys are homosexually involved, and that person, in turn, whispers in the ear of the next much like the old telephone game.

     Before the end of the day, Flip’s mother (Phillipa Stanton) is seen dragging her son behind her as, with knife in hand, she arrives at the Stone’s house yelling for him to stay away from her son.

Soon after, we see Rufus, with his head on a table, as he father (Jon Nicholas) beats him, his mother (Freyja Faraday) cowering in the background.

     Soon after, back pack on his shoulders, we watch Rufus hitchhike to London.

     Now, years later, Rufus (now played by William Gaunt) is brought back to the village in order to sell the home after both his parents’ death.

     He briefly wanders through his old home, clearly representing some fond memories, but also quite painful ones. He discovers his old camera, the one he held with him the day of his joyful discovery of love, but as he walks across the room he falls flat to the floor. Had I done so, an ambulance would have had to been called to help get me up. But Rufus can still crawl to his knees, awakening when the doorbell rights, looking out the windows to see the horrible memories of the past with neighbors pointing their fingers and his behavior.

    Hardly is he able to call a real estate agent to come round and check out the house which he immediately wants to sell that he is visited by the now someone heavy hipped neighbor come to check out the new man who has arrived next door, a glass of wine in hand suggesting that she is now an alcoholic who drinks the day-long. He wouldn’t have perhaps ever know this woman who suggests that it “just happens that I’ve opened a nice bottle of white [wine],” before she announces her name, Abagail (Lin Blakley), the same small-minded girl who destroyed his existence in his youth. On the search for any man, she does not recognize her new prey.

     When he denies her offer for a drink, she insists since he his christening his new home and she is his closest neighbor, she will not take no for an answer: “You’re a man after my heart.” But obviously he is a man he detests her for good reason.

     “I suppose you’re the married type,” she proceeds in her selfish interrogation, and she almost gurgles with joy as he responds with a simple “No.”

      “No children?” he asks. She declares some day her prince will come, he recognizing her as “Abagail White still looking. Well, you’ve got stamina, I’ll give you that.”

     And like a bolt of lightning, she recognizes him for the first time as Rufus. Startled as he walks off, she shouts out “I’m sure Flip would love to see you. He still lives down the road.”

      It is nearly all to much for Rufus who still carries with him memories of the boy he loved so long ago. And now those memories get interleaved with Rufus’ own adult return to the woods, his loss of a life that might have been loving and fulfilling, although having lived on in Paris all of these years with a successful career, he now realizes it could never have existed had he stayed. He visits the same pond with some nostalgia but clearly with a kind of bitterness, a profound sadness, if nothing else similar to Bergman’s Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries.

      And there, suddenly out of the blue, he encounters Flip, who suggests when he was a lad you used to bathe here.

       His final recognition of Rufus is expressed with “My God.” They briefly manage an uncomfortable hug, and walk back together. Rufus discovers that he is still “the confirmed bachelor type,” but even worse still looking after his mother, the terrible woman with a knife in his childhood scenes. Rufus explains he’s putting his parent’s place up to sale, and finally allows he might have time for a quick tea before he drives back to London in his lovely yellow convertible.

      And Flip is even slightly embarrassed for the condition of his own quarters. His “old mum” is still the horrific spectre she was long ago, a mean looking woman of the provinces, who his young dream boy has been caring for all these years. And suddenly observing the stare of the old woman, Rufus begs his forgiveness for not having realized how much time has slipped away, suggesting he cannot stay.

      Flip chases after, not wondering why he hates his mother for what she did, but admitting that “she’s all I’ve ever had.” “You have to forgive,” he insists.

     Rufus’ response is cruel: “Do you, I never did.” Flip tries to explain that he stayed and this is his life, despite hearing of Rufus’ great successes in London. He wonders if Rufus had ever wondered kind of life he left for him, sneaking off to town once a while for a buggering with no joys, no pleasures. “Go back to London with your fancy friends, you selfish bugger,” he hisses as he breaks down in tears. “I’ve been so fucking lonely, and there’s not a soul in the world who knows it.”

     The pain of this scene, the man left behind in such messes, is almost unbearable to watch. There is no answer for those too fearful to make the same kind of choice Rufus did. Rufus hugs him, but almost immediately several women exit and the tea shoppe nearby, one of them shouting out, “I know you, you’re that bugger Rufus Stone.” Flip has no choice but to escape, still living in such an intolerant community. Rufus gets into his lovely yellow car to make another escape, but this time, quite inexplicably, it won’t start up. And he is forced to perceive that he may have to remain in this homophobic and intolerant world, haunting him with memories, yet another night.

      The dreadful Abagail arrives to tell him the news, Flip has just hung himself, he monstrous mother only able to mouth a few pitiable “Oh, Oh, Ohs,” as Abagail calls the police.

      In dreadful anger and vengeance, Rufus drags out the family’s old grandfather clock and numerous other antiquaries they have treasured, hacking them to pieces on the front lawn to their house and burning them in a bonfire to rid himself of the past and this world. As the terrible neighbors stand about horrified, he drags yet more furniture, one by one, adding it to the huge bonfire, the stupid Abagail attempting, yet again, to stop him. The symbolic gesture is clear, this world needs to be cleaned out from top to bottom, despite the neighbor’s desperate attempt to keep the status quo. As they attempt to stop him, he pushes them away and drags out even more mementos of the post and adds them to the fire, representative also of his own furious anger with the world in which he’s grown up, without now a trace of possible redemption.

     But in the midst of fury and anger, all suddenly witness the same vision, the ghost of the young Flip appearing to bless the world that is so torn apart that there is no way of restoring it’s thread of history. Alas, I don’t believe in ghosts.

     This, Vito Russo, is why gay men still unnecessarily destroy themselves. Abandonment in small provincial towns is a sure death no matter how it is represented on the screen. Even today, some LGBTQ+ individuals are left behind by their societies in undeterminable loneliness and hatred.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

     

Jalil Lespert | Yves Saint Laurent / 2014

the seminarian and the madman

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Fieschi, Jalil Lespert, Jérémie Guez, and Marie-Pierre Huster (screenplay, based on Laurence Benaïm’s Yves Saint Laurent), Jalil Lespert (director) Yves Saint Laurent / 2014

 

Jalil Lespert’s 2014 film on the life of French clothes designer Yves Saint Laurent is, at least according to the standard biographies of the subject, fairly accurate, although it is clear that much of it is from the viewpoint of Saint Laurent’s manager/lover Pierre Bergé.

     Eventually I’d like to see a film made about Bergé himself, who, on his first day in Paris served as a human buffer as the great poet and film-scripter, Jacques Prévert who fell at his feet him from a window as Bergé moved out on a stroll down the Champs-Élysées! 

 

           At the age of 18 in La Rochelle, I decided to leave my family. The day

           I arrived in Paris, I went for a walk on the Champs-Elysées when

           suddenly I saw a man go through a French window, fall through the

           air, grab at a store sign and crash at my feet. He was bleeding profusely.

           An ambulance arrived and took him to Marmottan hospital. The next day,

           I discovered in the newspapers that it had been Jacques Prévert.

           I have always considered it an omen that the same day I got to Paris,

           a poet fell on my head.

 

    Prévert went into a coma, and was near death, but did survive.    

  

    Soon after, Bergé became the artist Bernard Buffet’s (not, incidentally, one of my favorite artists) lover, and was an important figure in selling that artist’s work. And in 1958, after meeting the young Saint Laurent, he fell in love with the budding seminarian-looking designer from Algeria, establishing not only a romantic relationship, but becoming the guiding force of Saint Laurent’s noted Yves Saint Laurent Haute Couture, which the young designer founded after taking over from the equally renowned Christian Dior. The two first met, without actually knowing it, at Dior’s funeral in 1957, the date in which Lespert’s film begins.

       That relationship, which is at the center of Lespert’s film, was certainly a turbulent one, with Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne)—serving as the saner front-man for the often and increasingly fragile Saint Laurent (Pierre Niney), who despite his first great success at Dior was soon after exiled from the Avenue Montaigne couture heaven with the excuse of the designer’s having been called up for the military (an impossible position for Saint Laurent, particularly had he been called to serve in his native Algeria, fighting to save the very French privileged world in which he grown up). The designer had what was clearly a nervous breakdown, perhaps initiated through drugs and a diagnosis of bi-polar behavior by the military hospital in which he was interred; but again, it was Bergé who came to the rescue, demanding that his lover chose between life or death, sanity or madness. Saint Laurent chose work.

     Yet, it is clear, even in Lespert’s Bergé-approved film, that his protection of the young, always-sensitive—yet, admittedly, “not always nice” artiste—led to resentments among Saint Laurent’s long-time friends and employees, including some of his models such as Loulou de la Falaise (who plays herself). Some even described Bergé negatively as “the pimp who’s found his all-star hooker.”

     And then, as time moved on, and Saint Laurent had numerous successes through his Mondrian shift dress, his Sharienne safari jacket, the “Le Smoking trouser suit, Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe from Belle de Jour, and his numerous kaftans and other lighter wear, influenced by the fact that he and Pierre had established a second home in Marrakech, Morocco, Pierre becoming the CEO of Saint Laurent’s house.

      But, like so many artists of history, success, particularly in the 1960s and 70s, also meant excess, as the former abstentious Saint Laurent, moved heavily into drinking, cocaine, hashish and other drugs, as well as wilder and wilder sex parties. By 1976, Bergé and Saint Laurent had broken up, although Bergé continued to serve him as the administrator of the company.

    Saint Laurent had, meanwhile, taken up with Karl Lagerfield’s (Nikolai Kinski) boyfriend, the equally troubled Jacques de Bascher (Xavier Lafitte), which further resulted in the life-long hatred between the two competing designers. 

      Yet Bergé’s love remained, and in 2008, a few days before Saint Laurent’s death of brain cancer (the diagnosis of which Bergé had kept from his former lover—who argued, along with several other friends and the doctor, that Saint Laurent would not have been able to psychologically deal with the truth) the couple were joined in a civil ceremony of a same-sex marriage. And it was Bergé who took over their vast art collections—which sold for millions after Saint Laurent’s death—and who became the head of the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, which loaned out the real costumes to help make Lespert’s movie.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2016

Reprinted from US Cinema Review (August 11, 2016).

 

Emma Gilbertson | Crashing Waves / 2018

dance of desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emma Gilbertson (writer and director), Joshua Hubbard (choreographer) Crashing Waves / 2018 [4 minutes]

 

Even since Jerome Robbins’ and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961) and even more so, after Claire Denis’ version of Billy Budd, Beau Travail (1999), I have been puzzled why more directors of LGBTQ films that do not define themselves primarily as musicals, do not incorporate more dance into their films. Dance seems the natural way to express the bodily desires which are so difficult to express by so many LGBTQ individuals through language.

     But, of course, it is precisely in that bodily expression that the danger of discovery most lies. Two boys or two girls can talk endlessly about sex—as they often do in films—but once the body becomes involved it is an entirely another matter, an expression that becomes itself an admission of sexuality instead of simply a statement of desire.

     Despite this, however, dance presents it in such a stylized manner that it seems more palatable for some audiences, wherein in the languages of love and homophobia become intolerable, restricted by censors and other so-called legal or self-defined moral dictators.

    British director Em J. Gilbertson’s film not only tells a love story between two young men of the projects, but explores precisely these issues, pointing to the fact that is those who attempt to restrict the behavior of individual bodies through words that are most often the true immoralists.

 

     In this beautiful four-minute piece two young men of a housing project (choreographer Joshua Hubbard and dancer Phoenix Chase-Meares) meet up on the grounds below and from the get-go play out the general hostility between young males in such situations, who define their small turf as if were an empire.

      They perform a fight much in the manner of the major figures of West Side Story, which through their bodily contact, instead of ending in murder, ends in an erotic pas de deux as the dancers, darting their heads in either direction to check out who may be watching, as engage in a kind of mock tango before waltzing and moving on to various other dances which quickly escalate into deeper erotic embraces.   

     By the time they are ready for the kiss, their lips move into sweet pleasure at the very same moment when some voyeuristic bullies watch in shock and horror, one on them mouthing silently the word “fuck,” another recording their actions to film.

       Alas, as happens in real life too often, the language dominates the bodily act of love, as one of the pair goes walking off, breaking with the other over the bullying sentences that will surely follow.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

Andrzej Wajda | Przekładaniec (Roly Poly, aka Layer Cake) / 1968

waste not, want not

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanisław Lem (screenplay), Andrzej Wajda (director) Przekładaniec (Roly Poly, aka Layer Cake) / 1968 [34 minutes]

 

One of the most charming and unexpected of films that involve LGBTQ behavior is Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s early experimental short from 1968, Przekładaniec, translated as Roly Poly or Layer Cake.

     By this time Wajda had already made major commercial films and would go on to direct in the 1970s his far more naturalistically based testimonies to Polish history. But in 1967 his great thespian discovery who performed in masterwork Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Zbigniew Cybulski—generally described as the James Dean of Polish cinema—was killed in a train accident. Wajda’s reaction was immediate and profound, almost a detour from the direction most of his films of the 1970s would take. His general grief was first expressed in his very personal work, Wszystko na sprzedaż (Everything for Sale) of 1968 which, for Poles read as an homage to Cybulski, concerning a director who attempts to make a movie with a young rising star, very much like Cybulski, who never shows up for filming.

    Wajda’s next work, Hunting Flies was a highly ironic satire, as was Roly Poly, the 34-minute short produced on Polish television based on a story “Czy Pan istnieje, Mr. Jones,” with a script by Stanisław Lem. In fact, Lem wrote the screenplay for this film, and long after testified that he felt it was the most successful of film adaptations of his work.

      In this short Lem and Wajda explore a world in which individuals themselves become amalgamated pieces of other beings in much the same way reconstructed and retooled autos and other home-constructed gadgets often were. But in this case it is part of the socialist society, in which one shares with all, or vice versa, the science of transplanting human parts being taken to a new level by an almost rock star-like Doctor Burton (Jerzy Zelnik).

      The film begins with the rather hyena-like giggling sports car driver, declaring himself much like Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd in “Two Wild and Crazy Guys” to be a “bunch of loonies,” Richard Fox (Bogumił Kobiela) who suits up with his brother Thomas (Marek Kobiela) to speed off from Thomas’ wife (Anna Prucnal) and child on a rally which they are assured to win. Somewhere along the way, however, their car crashes, killing Thomas. But no matter for Richard, who survives, most of his brother’s body parts being implanted within Richard’s frame, including evidently the man’s penis.

       He recovers and the stitches are finally removed, but finds that the insurance policy his brother has long ago purchased, which upon his death leaves half of his estate to his wife and the other half to his brother, has not been paid.

       Richard hires a lawyer (Ryszard Filipski) to look into the matter, who in turn discovers that since 46% of Thomas’ body parts continue to live on in the form of his brother he is not officially dead. Yes, he has died, and his wife is a widow, but not “actually” since Richard carries much of his brother’s body within him alive. Indeed, although he is his brother’s kid’s uncle he is, legally put, he is also still its progenitor since he now bears his brother’s penis. And although he cannot legally marry Thomas’ widow, since the husband is formally not yet dead, he is now responsible for the woman who cannot describe herself as fully widowed.

       The ridiculous exceptions go on and on as if in some absurd version of the Monty Python show. But, in sum, Richard having run out of money without the insurance payment, is now being sued by his sister-in-law, and cannot pay his lawyer.

       He has no choice, accordingly, but enter another sports car rally, sure to win the 100,000 that this one offers to the winner. He hires a new driver, who he admits is quite handsome, and again is seen off by his sister-in-law who wishes him good luck with hopes that he will pay her support.

       Once again, the race begins well, but eventually Richard and his new partner crash, this time into individuals in the crowd, a woman Salomea Tintel and a man with a dog on his leash, who are killed in the crash. Once more Richard Fox is saved with the brilliant intervention of Dr. Burton who implants much of Salomea, the man with the dog, and even the dog itself into Richard’s body.

      This time when the sports car driver shows up to the lawyer, there are several litigants, including Salomea’s fiancé and a dentist who has implanted her teeth with gold crowns as a gift he now wants back. Moreover, the man who was Richard now looks far more like a woman, attired in a dress and sporting breasts. Speaking and behaving far more effeminately than previously, he describes himself as a man who in the inside feels more like a woman—a phrase which today reminds of the many transgender males who transition to the female gender. He ends the scene by pulling out a powder puff and mirror to fix himself up. We now understand why he has described as his new driver as “rather handsome.”

      And suddenly an earlier scene in which several people were waiting outside the hospital, a couple of them male crossdressers and others trying to sell their own body parts, makes sense.  Clearly these folk, former patients of Dr. Burton no longer need certain things, like a penis, or another man with apparently three sets of eyes. Like Richard Fox, they surely now need the money. And the ghoulish scene cannot help but remind us, in turn, of Stephen Frears’ 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things about immigrants who offer up their body parts and sex acts to pay for passports and jobs.

       Confused by his client’s multiple changes, the lawyer visits Richard’ psychoanalyst—surely a necessary being with Richard’s now multi-existing identities—who puts him through a series of association tests consisting of sexually-suggestive words which the patient has previously compared only with multiple auto parts and now associates with mainly menopausal women’s problems. When the psychoanalyst pushes him too far, he growls and begins to bite him, obviously effects of the small element of his being made up from the dog. The psychoanalyst asks the lawyer whether he thinks he ought get vaccinated, the lawyer incredulously asking, “Do you think Fox has rabies?” he responding, “Not Fox, the dog.”

        Now more than ever, however, Richard needs one last race to bail him out of his multiple debts. In the last scene his “rather handsome” co-driver shows up at lawyer’s office, having been referred to him by Richard, he having been saved from yet another crash with his driver’s amalgamated body parts.

       In a world in which we blithely replace our livers, kidneys, hearts, and other vital parts with those of others in order to survive, is it any wonder that we might define ourselves as a collective, not only of male and female individuals, but of individuals who no longer need distinguish between gender but can’t forget the bodies in which they functioned?

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 15, 2021).

David Snyder | Yeah No Definitely / 2007

a desperate standoff

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Snyder (screenwriter and director) Yeah No Definitely / 2007 [14 minutes]

 

A couple of the Letterboxd commentators argued, simply, as they usually do, that this film goes nowhere. And on one level they are absolutely right. This film, unlike most of today’s gay cinema, presents us with no resolve.

    Cam (Vincent Piazza) is a sad young man, portraying himself to others and his best friend Kiff (Alan Barnes Netherton) as being totally heterosexual. But it’s clear from the beginning as the two hurry off to a party thrown mostly by rich girls about to head off to their chosen colleges, that Cam is desperately in love with Kiff, and that Kiff despite his even more open heterosexual bluff, probably would be glad to have Cam admit his love; although it is also probably that were Cam to do so, that Kiff would have to rebuff the love and leave his friend behind.

     Even being able to provide his friend with his necessary shot of insulin becomes almost an opportunity to symbolic “enter” his body. It is a sad symbol of their needs and desires.

     In a sense, the two buddies continue to live out their bromance while clumsily stopping around in territory in which they are basically unacclimated, Kiff, in particular, presenting an affable but clueless demeanor.

     But by the time this movie opens it’s also apparent that Cam is fed up with playing his heterosexual role, having recently broken up his girlfriend, who he claims wanted something of him that he couldn’t provide. When Kiff probes, he claims she wanted him to be an adolescent, which in fact is what he truly is. The two boys join the “chichi” party in which they are basically out of their league, by smoking a couple of joints.

     Kiff moves off to make out with the “hot” Nadia (Alejandra Amrosi), while Cam attempts to join up in conversations where the women are talking about heading off to college at Oxford and elsewhere without participating in any “real” conversation.

     He heads off, eventually getting so drunk that he vomits and passes out, Kiff taking him upstairs, removing his shoes and socks and putting him to bed.

     But too soon, Cam, feeling obviously alone when perhaps he hope Kiff might watch over him, staggers down the staircase, insisting that he has to get a new shirt. He attempts to drive off in Kiff’s car, but his friend suddenly appears to remind him that he is in no condition to drive. Cam almost runs him over as he moves off, however, soon stopping a few yards off.

    Kiff enters the car takes over, as they drive off into the night, finally back home, still without being actually able to really talk about the issue: their shared loved.

    They both remain adolescents, Kiff arguing that he is not Cam’s mother, upon which his friend reminds him his mother has recently died and breaks down in tears, Kiff hugging and comforting him. Alas, given their inability to look inward, they can go no further. Their pretense as best buddies is the best they can hope for. The writer himself, in the blurb accompanying this film explains: “The film is a study in self-deception, a theme worth exploring now, when Americans seem particularly desperate to avoid dealing with reality, and grasp at any diversion rather than look in the mirror.”

      This film was made in 2007, but at what time were not Americans “desperate to avoid dealing with reality,” and since that time it has only gotten worse. There are thousands of Cam and Kiffs through the American landscape, young men desperate for love but not being able to explain their same-sex attractions. We know that at least Kiff will eventually marry, probably with unresolved homosexual feels for the rest of his life. Cam may eventually have to look into the mirror or become an alcoholic or drug addict to disguise his suffering. This is the “American” way.

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).