Eric Bizzarri | Cold Hands / 2017

bullies and their victims

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Bizzarri (screenwriter and director) Cold Hands / 2017 [17 minutes]

 

Canadian director Eric Bizzarri’s Cold Hands is exploration of high school bullying that goes far beyond and around the usual depictions. In this case the bullies are not, at least at first, heterosexual homophobes beating up on a gay boy, but a gay man himself. The victim is a new boy in school, Lucas (Carson MacCormac), a cute straight kid who is immediately attracted to the gay boy, Jonathon’s (Jordan Mills) best friend Paula (Cassandra Williams).

      For the new kid, school relationships, social, and sexual situations are all obviously unknown, but Lucas seems immediately disturbed by Jonathon’s inordinately friendly greetings hugging, touching hands, etc. from which he immediately pulls back. Clearly Lucas is fearful of male/male bodily contact of any sort, so much so that he first we might presume him to be a closet homophobe. 

     But Paula attempts to explain that with Jonathan it is “all a game,” obviously the description Jonathan and his male friend Casey (Dennis Nimoh, Jr.) attach to their gay sexual explorations or, as we later begin to perceive it, exploitations.

     In some respects, Paul attempts to protect the confused new boy Lucas, telling him when they suggest he join them for an evening in the forest, that he doesn’t need to go. Or explaining to him at one point, when Lucas asks why Jonathan keeps touching him, simply that “Maybe he likes you.”

       Clearly something happens in the forest, but for the central portion of this 17-minute film we’re quite literally left in the dark as suddenly the touching explodes into something far more serious about which Lucas and his entirely supportive mother take to the police and to a judge. We see Lucas beginning to explain that night to the judge, and we also see the police, at another point in time, explaining to the mother and son that all the others at the nighttime event have denied that anything happened; that Lucas doesn’t have a case, with the lame and standard justification of all female rape cases: “Boys will be boys.”

      Unfortunately, but perhaps intentionally, by interweaving events in time, the director Bizzarri doesn’t allow us to know quite how to feel. What was the level of the “touching” that went on in the forest. Was a momentary touching of a hand—which we have witnessed Jonathan doing to Lucas in the school hallway—or even subtle sexual threats by a taller, somewhat older, and more intimidating gay boy on the shorter and frailer Lucas worthy of describing it as sexual abuse?

       In short, the film asks us to question, without providing an answer, just what is sex abuse? Who determines when a joke, even a dare, or a touch is full-out abuse, particularly among individuals of the same sex, in a world that presumes boys are more able that girls to protect themselves and resist any non-violent incidents of abuse.

       When finally, however, we see evidence of what happened that night in the forest, our perspective inevitably is altered. It begins with the common high school game of “Truth or Dare,”—although we might argue that it begin even earlier when Jonathan lured Lucas to join them in their nighttime outing by promising to bring along Paula—Casey daring Jonathan to give Lucas a blow job.

       Lucas is startled, suddenly frightened by the turn of events, and once more Paula attempts to calm him by arguing that they’re just behaving like “jerks,” another common way of excusing inexcusable behavior. Even the two boys laugh, explaining their actions once again as just a joke.

But soon after, when Lucas attempts to leave, Jonathan also rises and pulls him away, while Paula and Casey remain by the fire ignoring the boy’s protests.

      Presumably, Jonathon attempted to proceed with Casey’s dare, although the film doesn’t show us that. But at least we now can imagine what Lucas and his mother’s attempt to take it before the justice system is all about.

      Certainly Jonathon loses our sympathy when he later confronts Lucas in the school halls after being questioned by the police, once more claiming it was all a joke, and attempting to intimidate the new boy by declaring that without them (whoever they may be) Lucas is nothing, nothing at all.

      A late night call from Paula to Lucas explains that her silence has just been the result of attempting to help both her friends. She begs him to realize that if he continues in his legal suit against Jonathon that the young man’s life will be ruined, to which Lucas coldly replies “Well, maybe it should be.”

      Turning the question, we have to ask “has Lucas’ life been ruined? Is he psychologically suffering? Was he actually raped or did he finally escape what might been a rape? Does that question even matter? These are important concerns that the movie doesn’t attempt to explore and which leaves us with an even more confused sense of what should be our moral position: a feeling that Lucas has simply overreacted or outrage on his behalf.

      In a final scene Lucas stands outside a classroom where we see two beefy students toss down Jonathon’s books as they push him into a chair and leave the room, obviously the two bullying the gay boy, a scene so common in gay high school stories.

     Having observed the incident, Lucas enters the room and helps Jonathon pick up the books, extending his hand as Jonathon introduces himself and Lucas provides his own name.

    What is this scene? A trip back to the day in which the two first met? An alternative to the relationship the boys have had? A complete change in the way Lucas now sees things? An attempt to rescroll the narrative of their relationship? We have no guide to help us in evaluating these events. But it least it suggests the possibility that none of us deserve our lives to be ruined by others, destroyed by those who would impose their reality upon others. And it forces us to see Jonathon and Lucas as bullies and victims both. Certainly after seeing this film we must realize that not all victims of gay bullying are queers but heterosexuals as well.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (June 2022).

Jon Olb and Madeleine Parry | Nanette / 2018

speaking up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hannah Gadsby (writer), Jon Olb and Madeleine Parry (directors) Nanette / 2018

 

As philosophers and others such as Henri Bergson have long argued, laughter—although seemingly giving us pleasure—is not always grounded in joy, but much like growling, is often a way we have of dealing with the tension between reality and what we would like to be the truth. As comedians well know—John Osbourne showed us this in his The Entertainer, just as Robin Williams demonstrated it in his suicide—comedians are not always happy folks, often using humor as a kind of armor, deflecting their own feelings of insignificance and fear to hide what they most feel inside.

      The wonderful Tasmanian-born stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby explores this territory in her performance titled Nanette, which is filled with laughter but also with a great deal of anger, aimed particularly at self-privileged males.

      Born lesbian into a society that simply did not accept the idea of homosexuality, time and again, throughout her youth, she was awarded for her successful golf tournaments with dishware, while the male competitors were given money and other more solid awards. Her grandmother, she quips, kept telling her that “Mr. Right was just around the corner,” forcing her to be very warry about the corners in her life.

      Gadsby takes the opportunity of her stand-up show to help educate us about comedy and how it works. She argues that basically a comic line depends on a two-part structure, the short narrative which builds the tension and the release of that tension with a quick twist in the tale.

      Yet Gadsby’s performance, in this case, is basically written in three parts, the first of which—part of the build-up—reveals the problems of her childhood, those problems, as in most comedy conclude with quick zingers that shuffle those problems into another dimension, as we, seemingly with her, laugh them off.

      In the second part, this skilled dialogist, suddenly declares that she may be giving up comedy, as she explains the nature of a joke and how for all these years she used those quips to protect herself from having to actually face those childhood difficulties. Still, she allows some remarkable releases, allowing us to share some of her informative explanations of her craft in between bits of laughter.

      By the third part of her amazing “talk,” one that bears similarities to another comic-dialogist, Spaulding Gray (who also committed suicide, he by drowning), Gadsby switches gears, letting out the very anger which has allowed her to deflect the truth over and over again, and turning against the male aggressors in her life, whether passive simply in the male presumptions of priority or active in what appears to have sexual abuse (she insistently names no names and refuses to indicate what relationships these men might have had to her), but as she recently mentioned in an interview with The New York Times, this film-version of her piece was the very most difficult since her mother in the audience.

      What we have previously released in our growls of laughter now quickly turns to tears, particularly if you have any empathy, which even uncomfortable straight men in the audience should have developed by this time given the amazing talents she already revealed. Many critics have characterized this last section as going “beyond” comedy, of taking the genre into new territory. But I might suggest that she is simply returning to the first part, the narrative build-up, but projecting with an entirely different lens, of opening herself up to show us the real pain and suffering she endured for all those years. Instead of continuing to protect herself through the armor of laughter, she has permitted herself to talk to us straight-forwardly, to ask us to truly hear her pain and anger that she still retains for having to suffer in silence for so many years.

     As she insists: “You wrote the rules, and I read them!”

     I was startled, I admit, to hear her report that as a child she become silent, seemingly appearing to be shy and unsocial, when she obviously was a quick-witted, intelligent woman. Just the week before I had read an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Guy Branum, describing how, even as a young man, his obviously effeminate gay voice while growing in Sutter County, California—a place clearly not that very different from the Tasmanian island of Australia—altered his behavior, as he puts it:  

 

                   By the fourth grade, I learned that there was something about me that

                   made me audibly different from the other boys my age. I could not mask it,

                   I could not change it, I could not fight so well that I could earn the

                   respect of my classmates. My voice evoked rage and disgust from

                   my peers and teachers. I kept it hidden and tried to fit into a role that did not

                   fit me. I played football, I tried to date girls. None of it worked, so I

                   became quiet, very quiet, for a long time.

 

     And suddenly I recalled a piece I’d long ago written about my own childhood, something to the effect, after being terrified on the playground by the school-yard bully, that for years after I grew silent, turning in to read, write, and dream in private. I am sure that no-one who reads this today might ever believe it! When you're quiet for so many years, perhaps you feel you have to make up for it.

     I was, nonetheless, still a privileged male, and was never abused by a grown-up that I know of—except for my father’s almost hysterical view of homosexuality. And Gadsby is still very righteously angry at a time that I realize I led a rather fortunate gay life. We all adapt differently to the bigotry against lesbianism and gay life. Moreover, things have changed much, if not yet sufficiently.

     I think Gadsby’s moving performance ought to be perceived as both a Kaddish for all the lives of those in the LGBTQ community who have been traumatized by the dominant heterosexual world and, particularly during the AIDs crisis, even died for their sexual identities. Here, finally, we have a new conversation that needs to be heard and at least listened to by even those who may feel uncomfortable by its truth. Simply being quiet or laughing, for that matter, is no longer a solution.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2018).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Los que odian la navidad (The Ones Who Hate Christmas) / 2018

i saw santa kissing santa claus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Los que odian la navidad (The Ones Who Hate Christmas) / 2018 [4 minutes]

 

Two men (David Laguía and Adrián Panadero) wake up in bed in Spanish director Roberto Pérez Toledo’s mini-film of 2018, both of them complaining about the alarm clock awakening them. They hate their job which involves handing out brochures; they can’t stand the children or their parents, they hate the filled shopping center and the endless Christmas carols (particularly the songs of Mariah Carey); in short, they “hate Christmas.”

     As they rise to dress, one dares the other to tell him something “cool” about the holiday. One gets a chance to see one’s parents, he tosses out the first reason that comes to mind. But the other puts that down with the fact that if you have avoided your parents for the other 364 days of the year, it’s a not a logical reason.

      Well, then the gifts. Given that his parents have not bought him a gift since he was 18, outside of maybe a pair socks, and that his lover cannot afford anything since they’ve already spent 200 euros of the 400 they are earning, “gifts” is clearly not the answer.

     They begin dressing, and we quickly realize that these two are playing Santa Clauses in the shopping mall they hate. The one who has tried imagine what is good about Christmas finally looks at the other, half dressed in his Santa suit, to say, “So I now know another reason why I like Christmas.”

       “What?”

       “Because last year I asked Santa Claus…”

       “Yourself?”

       “No, the real one. …For someone like you in my life.”

       They kiss, and we all watch Santa kissing Santa Claus.

       As they walk in hand to work, one of them says that in the toy shop a kid asked him if Santa had a girlfriend.

       “What did you say?”

       “That Santa can have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Santa can have whatever he wants.”

        This piece of candycane-sweet filmmaking goes nicely in your Christmas stocking.

 

Los Angeles, December 22, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (December 2022).

 

Araz Eleyasian | The Paper Rose / 2018

tutoring the teacher

by Douglas Messerli

 

Talin Agon and Araz Eleyasian (screenplay), Araz Eleyasian (director) The Paper Rose / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

A very frustrated English teacher, Toni (Bronte Pearce) is nervous about her day in school. She’s teaching Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, a book she clearly loves. But when we see the antics of her students, each spending the classroom time sending text messages to the others when they’re not taunting the quiet Johnny (Damian Hempstead), we comprehend her trepidation. Her lesbian lover, Maggie, has given her a red paper rose, which remains as a book marker in her book to help remind her that she’s loved at home.

    When a bullying student throws Johnny’s book the floor as he leaves the classroom, the teacher finally has had enough, taking away the student’s cellphone and telling him he can pick it up at the end of the day. But he even challenges her, coming at her and pulling her copy of Great Expectations from her arms and tossing the paper rose to the floor, and stopping on the paper flower as he storms out of the room.

      As Johnny bends down to pick up the objects, the occasion of the rose, moments of joy, and more importantly, moments of extreme tension between the couple quickly reel through the teacher’s mind. The rose has clearly come to represent a great many events in her life. As Johnny hands back the book and rose, he suggests that he might be able to make another one, but Toni observes that it was a gift, and irreplaceable for that very reason.

      Still, he argues that she might be able to make another one that can’t be destroyed unless she takes into rooms where angry 14-year-old boys can stomp on them.

      A short while later, Toni passes by the same boy with another like him, asking “where’s the fruit,” presumably referring to Johnny, the other replying, “Probably at home in bed crying.” The teacher stops for a moment to glare at them before moving on.

 

      She pulls opens a locker door—presumably inspecting it as she may have forced to in the past—to witness a calendar marked up with the word “fag,” a glob of what looks like cum, and a picture of a naked man marked up with the words, “Lick if off Johnny.” In a split second she recalls her own youth when someone threw a soccer ball at her head, screaming out “Hey dyke.”

 

      As she leaves the building, she discovers Johnny sitting reading the Dickens book, she responding, “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

      “They screwed up my locker again, didn’t they?” he half laughs. “I don’t care if they think I’m gay.”

     She assures him that they won’t get away with it. But he is more interested in the book she has assigned, telling her how “awesome” he finds the novel. She’s clearly pleased that at least one student is enjoying the book. But she quickly returns to what she perceives as his dilemma. “You have it tough, don’t you?”

      But his response is again amazingly aloof: “Shit happens. I like to come here with Pip and….”

      She finishes his sentence, “…disappear.”

      “No, just read.”

     Toni argues that she always identified more with Stella, Johnny arguing “But she’s so damaged. You’re not like that.”

       She confides, in a round-about way, that the reason she stays late at school is because she doesn’t want to go home. “Teaching is one of the only things I’m good at.”

       “Don’t get lost in stories, Johnny,” she advises her new confidant.

       Johnny’s answer is surprisingly mature. “But I’m not lost. I know who I am.”

      What we observe here for one of the first occasions in queer cinema is a young man, perhaps gay and certainly bullied, revealing a greater sense of self possession, knowledge, and maturity than both the kids around him and the troubled adult teacher. He even dares to go further, asking Toni if she knows who she is. A strange half-smile registers on her face as she hands him back his book and wishes him happy Valentine’s Day.

       In it, is a white paper rose. Johnny smiles with joy.

       We see Toni knocking at her lover’s door, having apparently previously left or broken up with her. The two greet one another with reluctant smiles, which we know will certainly shift to fuller expressions of love given that behind Toni’s back she holds a whole bouquet of paper roses.

     Australian director Araz Eleyasian has provided us with a film that quickly pulls its LGBTQ characters out of their usual hurt and passive positions, giving them a self-awareness that makes it clear they are not simply survivors but are whole beings who will prevail.

      I have to admit that basically through the days I my teaching experiences I was blessed with multiple good students, and these, being college kids, did not behave like high school thugs. But there was always one special student to change your day. 

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Michael Pearce | Rite / 2010

the man without a clue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Pearce (screenwriter and director) Rite / 2010 [14 minutes]

 

Mike (Martin Herdman) picks up his estranged son, Gary (Bradley Hall) whom he has not seen in a long while, to take him out for the for his 17th birthday. Even as he arrives and leaves the car, he realizes that he has locked his keys without the car. Picking up a brick he smashes the car window, finally walking up to pick up his boy in one of the near brick row houses of so many British suburban areas.

     As he begins driving down the freeway, Gary asks, as any child might, where they are going. His father suggests he open the compartment, where he finds nothing. A thorough search of the of the cars contents provides nothing. He has evidently lost the tickets he’s purchased for an important soccer game.

     Even worse, Mike decides to now stop along the way at a local roadside pub, sneaking in to get a few pints. The manager finally invites the boy himself to leave the car and join his father. His father is also attempting, unsuccessfully, to get more tickets.

     Meanwhile Gary attempts to bring over for glasses, but drops them before they can even reach the table, Mike reassuring him, as others around them makes gestures about the boys lips piercing.

It is a loud, noisy, and hostile atmosphere.

     The bargoers are now gathering abound the tele for the soccer game to begin. Although the father has brought his son a new drink, the boy admits he does not imbibe, the father wondering what it is he does in his life. The boy suggests exhibitions, gigs…his father summarizing his activities as culture. Spotting a fairly good looking slightly older girl, his father says, “I bet you wouldn’t say know to that kind of culture.”

      Gary takes a quick look, and replies simply: “Not my type.”

      His type, he explains, is “black,” but says nothing about their sex.

      Finally, they ready to move on without obtaining any tickets to the next match.

    But before they leave, he is offended by what he perceives to be a gay man in the bathroom and whether actually or in fantasy, knows his head up again the wall, and leaves him for dead.

     They move forward to god knows where, by this time the son having totally missed out in any possible joys which might have even been imagined, the father having no longer any comprehension of who is son is.

     Finally, at the stadium, he desperately scrambles to see if he can obtain tickets, trying to find someone ready to sell, again without success. He finally attempts to bull his way through a guard into the stadium, as the guard, terrified for his life, closes the door, locking himself in. If nothing else, Mike has certainly made a great case for why he wife has long-ago divorced him. This is a violent man of narrow values and opinions, a drunkard, and a bully. Gary finally walks away, unable to observe his father’s actions anymore.

      Gary decides to finally explain to him that “he doesn’t give a shit.” He hates football. And for a moment Mike is again about to act with violence, while Gary responds “Well, you gonna hit me Dad?” If ever things are broken down, this film reveals the condition of so many father/son relationships.

       Mike backs off, turns away, and walks off knowing that he and his son do not share the same world. It is a sad moment of self-revelation, particularly for a drunken bully, whose life, we perceive, is no longer ever truly joyful.

       His father drives him back home, and suggests he will see him in a couple of weeks. “Maybe we can do something else,” Gary reacting, “Like what?”

      When his son walks off, Mike gets out of the car, only to observe Gary, now in a nearby park with a young black boy of his age, his had laying on his shoulder. We now know the sex he prefers as well.

     Mike, now clearly in crisis, pauses for a few moments, his had across his brow is recognition perhaps of how much he has misunderstood his son.

      Beyond all belief, by this time, he walks up to the park where he son sits, calling out his name. The boys freeze, surely afraid of the consequences.

      Instead, Mike simply introduces himself to Tristan (Aaron Gordon) as Gary’s day, Tristan reaching out to shake his hand to say “nice to meet you.” “I’ve just come to say, maybe next time we can go to the coast or something.”

      “Sure.”

      “And if Tristan wants to come….”

      Mike walks off, if not a new man, certainly a chastised one for his thoughtless presumptions.

As he drives off, he notices his son has left the device upon which he was listening to his music. Mike puts on the headphones, and drives off.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).