Lukas Dhont | Close / 2022

scheherazade

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lukas Dhont and Angelo Tijssens (screenplay), Lukas Dhont (director) Close / 2022

Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s film Close in many respects appears to be a simple tale told in a manner that allows its characters to be seen as full-bodied and complex human beings. And as such it seems to be an easy film to admire, particularly since its two major figures, the 13-year-old farm boys Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are so beautiful to look at and such capable child actors as filmed by cinematographer Frank van den Eeden against a stunningly resplendent background of the Flanders flower fields. The work was beloved by audiences at Cannes at its very first showing where it was nominated for a Palme d’Or and Queer Palm and won the prestigious Grand Prix, with awards from the Sydney, Hamptons, Chicago, and Seville film festivals quickly following.

      The film, moreover, if it is about anything, concerns innocent love, the kind only young children can bestow upon one another without regard to issues of sex and even gender. In fact, such a love is perhaps almost now impossible in an age when children learn quickly through the internet and other sources about sex and experience the world far more through media than these boys do. At times, accordingly, it almost appears as if these close friends, spending their last full summer together before the beginning of secondary school—almost always a traumatic moment for youth—live in another time. Instead of playing on-line video games or constantly texting with their friends on cell-phones they play imaginative games about their world being inhabited by enemy soldiers or monsters from whom they must make a quick get-away by running full force through the fields of weeds and asters. In this seemingly lost rural world, Léo and Rémi rule over a summery place where there are no boundaries, the boys sharing a bed in one or the other of their parents’ homes, and being equally accepted wherever they wind up after a day of their adventures. 

     They love one another as they love their own bodies—thin and tanned through bicycling and running—with the absolute pleasure of simply being able jump, wrestle, and rest their heads upon one another’s chest. They sleep together in a single bed, Léo often telling fabulous tales that spin together disconnected elements in the manner of Scheherazade to help Rémi, the somewhat meeker and fragile of the two, to sleep, the boys ending up in the hugging position of spoons and lovers. 

      If dark-haired Rémi is perhaps the less athletic of two, he is also the more artistically talented, playing oboe as Léo watches him in absolute delight. Léo attempts to sketch Rémi but can only produce a caricature which both boys realize is simply silly. Both idolize one another, just as they idolize their mothers, particularly Léo who seems as close to Rémi’s mother Sophie (Émilie Dequenne) as she is to her own son. The many frames early in Dhont’s film devoted to their seemingly endless summer do not attempt to represent their love but simply documents it just as they would never even attempt to define it.

      In his intelligent review in Philadelphia Gay News critic Gary M. Kramer predictably argues:

 

“Close never explicitly addresses the teens’ sexuality, but reading the film, both boys are gay, and only one is comfortable with his sexuality.” *

 

     So they may be from our point of view, but in their innocent world—so difficult for most of us to remember and which many of us have may have not even known—they do not even imagine the necessity of defining their relationship. They have utterly no concept of homosexuality or even sexuality. Their world is Edenic.

      Enter the serpent in the form of another secluded and seemingly idealized world, educational institutions, in this case the dreaded secondary form, filled with children who have not at all spent their summers in Eden, and who very much know what their “closeness” might mean in what they imagine is the adult world which they attempt to emulate. Enter these two boys still holding hands and resting their heads on one another’s shoulders stage left as the other children look on in fascination, curiosity, and horror. The girls, generally slightly more mature than boys, begin with the questions: “What is their relationship? “Are they a couple? “Are they lovers?” While Rémi, so wrapped up in his private world of himself and Léo, sees no need to answer to outsiders, Léo, more reliant on the world outside himself, denies any of their definitions, simply expressing their relationship as a close friendship like that of brothers. And in his confused expression, we can already begin to sense that Rémi feels somewhat scorned in his lover’s—for him a true lover, not necessarily a sexual lover—remarks.

        But the boys—getting wind of the girl’s questions—who have been taught at home or from their peers far cruder labels for such different relationships, describe them almost immediately with words that Léo perhaps does even understand but senses their hurtfulness, such as “faggots” and “queers.” And in self-protection, an innate and often unthinking reaction, Léo begins to pull himself away from the friend he loves to be more like the others, moving out of position so that in recess Rémi cannot rest his head, as usual, on his stomach. For long periods he doesn’t speak to Rémi, and in one of the worst hurts of all, he befriends the very boys who have labeled their relationship, joining up with hockey-team players even though he is far from being talented in that sport. At recess, he plays soccer with his new friends, while Rémi hangs out with whoever will befriend him.

      For a short while, away from the schoolyard, the boys attempt to hang on to their shifting friendship, trying to restore it, quite unsuccessfully, for moments, before Léo’s embarrassment—both about their relationship and because of his gradual abandonment of it—resumes. One night as they lay in the same bed, Léo suddenly rises and moves to the bed on the floor originally laid out for Rémi, and in the morning the two boys begin a fight over the incident that starts out as a kind of tease but ends in true violence and anger, as Léo commands Rémi to sleep in his own bed.

     Eventually, Léo stops sleeping over at his friend’s house. The next morning, Rémi inexplicably to his somewhat unobservant mother, breaks down in tears at the breakfast table over the escalating situation.

    Writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Amil Niazi perfectly expresses my feelings about what happens soon after:

    

“After some tense moments – moments where I had to hold my breath because they brought back such intense pubescent memories – there are fights, confrontations and finally all-out screaming matches as the two come to grips over what it means to hold and love and be with someone so intimately in full view of the world, however small that world may be. It is devastating for anyone who can recall how much the pain of losing a friendship can feel at that age.”

 

      And suddenly, without full explanation as such incidents generally are, Rémi, as Léo’s mother attempts to abstract the truth, "is no more," evidently having committed suicide. Léo rushes off in horror, nearly running all the way home, but stopping off first just to peer into Rémi’s home as if in disbelief of the facts. No one seems to be there, while a bathroom door clearly broken into suggests where the event may have happened.

      At this point the film shifts, at first quite predictably as the various mourners wander about in a kind of daze attempting to explain a reality they can perceive as only a nightmarish dream. There are no answers, although they seek desperately for them, Léo observing from his classroom window Rémi’s mother Sophie arriving at school one day to remove all the objects from his locker.

     One night, unable to sleep, Léo crawls into his brother’s bed whispering out an overriding question that the adults are also surely asking, do you think they have found something he left behind, presumably which might answer all their questions.

But Léo knows the answers, although he cannot face them and perhaps doesn’t even realize the full truth. It is hard for us to remember he still a boy of 13, not fully cognizant of such a concept by which we might describe his “guilt.” In his young mind, he has only done what he was seemingly been called upon to do, to reach out to the larger world which he had entered in attending school. He has behaved as all the others has encouraged him to.

     But now the director seems to suggest that something else must happen, a tale he so languidly tells that we feel he is somewhat toying with us by taking us again and again to the brink to Léo’s coming to terms with his own actions.

     In a provocative essay on RogerEbert.com, critic Matt Zoller Seitz brings up this matter in what he describes as a problem in the film which ultimately clouds over all the wonderful filmmaking that proceeded it.

 

“But what does it [the movie] find and show once it has gone there? That's the question I have no good answer to.

     This is, when you get down to it, the story of a horrible thing that happened, that nobody who actually helped cause it can understand (or shows any sign of even wanting to understand), that no one in the dead boy's immediate circle saw coming or could have prevented, and that smashes two families' understanding of themselves to pieces. And it leaves poor Léo carrying around an unimaginable and (for him) mystifying burden: he feels like this is all his fault, even though it isn't. The movie generates suspense by making us wonder when Léo is finally going to tell Sophie that (in his mind) he caused her loss. It finally happens in the last ten minutes of the story, and the dead boy's family immediately leaves town, and the film ends with poor Léo looking into their now-empty house.”

 

     Seitz suggests that Dhont’s film is ultimately without purpose, unfulfilling, and even cruel in its last section as we wait impatiently for Léo to realize what part he has played in the events. He questions to what purpose do the writers and director take us there. What does Dhont want us to learn in the process of the boy’s final acceptance of guilt?

     Of course, that presumes that all films have an argument, a message that we might, at film’s end, package up and take home. I’d argue that Dhont’s film is not at all that kind of movie. As I mentioned earlier, this director documents a situation that occurs in varying ways over and over again in the heteronormative societies in which we live. There are no solutions, no answers to effectively provide the viewer except the now oft-repeated LGBTQ doctrine that homophobia must be shamed out of existence. Yet we know that surely hatred and bullying will never entirely disappear since being gay will stand always, given its numbers, in a minority, apart from the “majority sexual behavior.”

     And we know well that even Léo coming to terms with his own actions will offer no solution to the problem. Admittedly, I too grew frustrated with the long last third of this beautiful film in its seeming incessant toggling between Léo’s self-revelation and his attempts to escape that truth.  At one point Sophie comes to watch him practicing hockey, Léo moving over to her and even expressing his happiness to see her. It seems he is about to speak, but he suddenly grows cold and hurries away to the showers. At another point when Sophie and her husband are sharing dinner with his family, after gentle questioning about how things are with them, the husband suddenly breaks down in sobs, Sophie wandering off with Léo joining her, surely now realizing how much Rémi’s parents are still suffering; but he still does not speak up. And on yet another occasion, Léo visits Sophie while she is alone at home, and this time even asks if he might look at Rémi’s room, seeking out objects as if they might reveal something, she even commenting on several of the boy’s papers spread across the bed that she has looked through everything—presumably to find some explanation for what happened. But suddenly Léo, scarred off, prevaricates by saying that he has something to do at home.

      Even more frustrating to me as a viewer is that between each of these incidents, Léo returns to the hockey rink to play the tough macho game with the other boys he has chosen over Rémi, falling again and again on the ice or crashing into the stands head first, his coach urging him, like all those who train young men in how to suffer the violence they are expected as males to suffer, to stand up and move ahead: “Get up Léo, you’re doing good.” But Léo is not doing good, and at one point he falls over several times and again until he has no choice but to skate off without returning to the “game”—which is, after all, what studying such survival methods truly is.

       Part of the problem is that Léo is not yet fully aware of what he actually has done. He cannot take on responsibility until he grows enough to know that humans are indeed responsible for their relationships with each other. For a long while, Léo only knows that he has not behaved like he once did toward his friend. Only when he begins to truly miss Rémi, to realize that there is no one quite like him—something he comes to realize, in part, by spending a night sleeping over at the home of one of his hockey player friends—can he begin to comprehend that he has helped to destroy the world he and Rémi inhabited, and further, that he has pushed his friend away from his own love.

      The painful scene when Léo finally travels all the way to town by bus to visit Sophie in the hospital where she works, and the voyage home in her car, doesn’t “answer” anything. Sophie in turn, pushes her “other son” away, forcing him to get out of the car. The boy, now utterly at odds, rushes off into the woods feeling more unloved that he might ever before imagined possible and, yes, finally realizing that his actions have put him in that place. Fortunately, Sophie quickly recalls that she, as an adult, is not permitted such childlike behavior and comes looking for him, as they both hug one another in tears of forgiveness for their mutual rejection of others.

       But no, it does not answer for anything that has happened. When Léo again visits the house, Rémi’s family have moved away. And the last painful view we have of the boy is as he turns back to look over his shoulder at the camera with a remorseful half-smile that we realize will perhaps never leave his face. But his tale has been told. Like Scheherazade, telling endless and incredible tales such as he used to tell Rémi, his story itself (and in the end, it is Léo’s story) perhaps is the boy's true talent, his gift to us and others. He provides no solutions, but in telling his tale simply survives. 

 

*The director himself supports this argument. In an interview in The New York Times with Thomas Rogers on January 27, 2023, Dhont observed that growing up the small town of Dikkelvenne near Ghent, that he too “often felt like an outsider.”

      “Other boys saw him as too feminine and mocked his interest in dance, except one named Félicien, with whom he shared a close friendship. But as the two approached puberty, Dhont felt social pressures pulling them apart.” Rogers continues, “’In that moment, that tenderness started to become looked at through the lens of sexuality,’ Dhont, now 31, said in a recent interview. ‘People were divided into groups and boxes, and we were confronted with the idea of labels.’ As they became fearful of being ostracized, their friendship evaporated, and Dhont, who is gay, was fiercely bullied for the rest of his school days.” Dhont admits that Close was, in part, influenced by those events, thus suggesting that being gay, without even knowing it, is an aspect of the relationship between his fictional Léo and Rémi.

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

Robert Gauldin and Bryan Berrios | Leche con Cereal / 2022

falling on a roof

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Gauldin and Bryan Berrios (screenwriters and directors) Leche con Cereal / 2022 [14 minutes]

 

One of the oddest films of the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Film Festival, (NewFest) this year was Robert Gauldin and Brayan Berrio’s comic hallucinatory trip, Leche con Cereal.

     Starring an almost Jerry Lewis-like awkward nerdy figure, Tobi (Justin Rodriguez) and a hunky countryboy-like electrician simply named as “the Visitor” (Ben Mandell) this 14-minute film immediately takes the viewer to territory he might never have suspected.

      Tobi is housesitting for an obviously very wealthy woman who lives in a magnificent house in the woods overlooking either a lake or river. Waking up one morning he watch him begin to masturbate only to quickly see a red-headed bearded stranger walk in front of the bedroom’s floor-to ceiling window and look in. He quickly disappears from sight but reappears soon after, Tobi gathering up a blanket and rushing clumsily to the door to demand who he is.

      Evidently the man is an electrician the owner has asked to check out a fuse; he’s a friend of hers he explains, and wonders just as insistently who Tobi is and why is he sleeping in his friend’s bed, easily explained by the fact that she has gone of vacation and Tobi is house-sitting.

     The visitor asks if he might come in just to check the fuse, which he quickly does, saying he’ll be back the next day after he buys a new one.

      Meanwhile, Tobi sits down to breakfast munching on what appear to be fruit-loups doused in milk spooned and sipped out of is surely one of the biggest cereal bowls ever witnessed on screen. Why he’s doing this, along with the film’s title commemorating the event is never explained.

      There is a great deal to be explained in this short work. Why would such a connoisseur of domestic architecture—as it is apparent the homeowner must be—ever entrust the care of her house to such an awkward, discombobulated figure such as Tobi? And mightn’t a more enlightened electrician, discovering such a terrified being in the house, wait until his friend returned from her vacation to repair the fuse?

     In any event, alone again Toby ruffles through his employer’s bedroom drawer’s until he finds a small bottle of dried mushrooms, which he immediately recognizes must be hallucinogens and swallows several of them up, apparently overdosing.

    By the time the hunky electrician returns later that day, having found a new fuse among the items in his workshop, Tobi is nearly incoherent as the visitor quickly repairs the socket and prepares to leave.   

     By this time, however, Tobi is clearly frightened of the distorted images cinematographer Gareth Smit has conjured up, and the boy pleads with the visiting electrician to stay on just a little bit longer to make sure he doesn’t “fall off the roof of something.”

     The electrician is prepared to do, he implies, with the proper payment, insinuating something we are not quite sure of. Tobi apprises it to be a request to ingest some of the mushrooms, and quickly obliges him, the two now seen sitting on the floor together, and soon after in various contorted positions around the living room couch.

      Before we can even focus on their hallucinatory gymnastics they are moving in and out of other’s articles of clothing and apparently engaging in gay sex.

      They awaken, somewhat sober, but clearly not entirely so since suddenly Tobi does really wander up to the roof and walk unsteadily across it, the visitor soon joining him as they sit at the apex of the roof overlooking the amazing view of nature spread out before them. 

      But whether or not they are witnessing the same view as we is not certain, particularly since the electrician wonders whether he might just jump over those trees into the waters in far distance.

    At the moment Tobi finally does fall of the room, just as he had feared, the electrician moving down to the lip of the roof to look at where he might have landed, responding with a “Oh shit,” before the credits begin to come up.

     Is Tobi dead? Has his uninhabited sexual pleasures resulted in a fatal accident? Eventually an image reappears, as the camera scans downs to the ground, where we see a picnic table atop which Tobi has evidently landed, he ever slightly lifting up his head in an attempt to determine where he might be and why.

     What US directors Gauldin and Berrios where attempting to say in this movie remains as one of the other unexplained secrets of this picture. Clearly the cinematographer had a great deal of fun fumbling with his lenses, and they may have gotten a good giggle out of the absurd adventures of their mentally confused hero. But whatever he and his momentary sexual partner have to do with one another is beyond comprehension. Illuminating, sexy, imaginative do not define this film; comic and quirky move closer to what its intentions must have been. But it is the words insignificant and silly which ultimately remain upon this reviewer’s tongue.

 

Los Angeles, October 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

 

Herbert Ross | California Suite / 1978

losers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Neil Simon (screenplay, based on his stage play), Herbert Ross (director) California Suite / 1978

 

When I started the immense project of My Queer Cinema I have to admit that I was rather naïve, presuming as I did that there would be several hundred LGBTQ movies over the last decade and a half, from which I might select my favorites or even a few of my least favorites to present a solid view of a genre that I had just begun to realize had been important to me throughout my life.

     Yet, as I bravely moved forward, uncovering in the years since (and at simultaneously within) those years so brilliantly catalogued by Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet a wide range of queer representation, it became increasingly apparent that, although much had been written on LGBTQ cinema in general, we needed a more encyclopedic and expanded viewing of the thousands of films, many hidden and others who because of their niche audiences were now simply forgotten or lost.

      Accordingly, films I once thought I would never have to review now seemed to be a necessary evil if I wanted to put these films into the larger context, suddenly part of a constellation of thousands of films in which the fewer films to which I had been first attracted to were created. What I was originally viewing through a monocle shifted as I took out a pair of reading glasses and, finally, attended to the lens of a telescope.

     Herbert Ross’ version of Neil Simon’s California Suite was one of the dozens of films to which I might otherwise have never given a second thought—or perhaps even a first thought. Besides, I might once have argued, was this truly an LGBTQ film?

      Well, you can’t have it both ways, delving into pre-1960 films that merely hint at gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transsexual behavior and to then ignore other heterosexual impressions of LGBTQ life would seem somewhat hypocritical. And, in the case of this particular tired mess of four shorts strung together, as was Simon’s previous but somewhat more interesting Plaza Suite, the best of the now clumsily interwoven episodes at the Beverly Hills Hotel was the shtick about the bisexual Sidney Cochran (Michael Caine) married to the British actress nominated for a slight comedic role in a Hollywood movie, Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith). But I’ll save that for last. 

       At least Neil Simon who occasionally forgets that his forte is one-line zingers and decides to dabble to the physical comic tradition of Hal Roach. But Roach was far better at throwing pies than Simon and Ross are in throwing punches. Not only does a story about two couples—the males sharing careers as doctors—joining up for a California vacation made in hell make utterly no sense, but even more offensive is rather racist situation, since this quartet consists of veteran actors Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Gloria Gifford, and Sheila Frazier, all blacks who in this skit, can’t seem to drive a car, can’t quite get the hang of tennis, and can’t obtain the rooms they’ve booked in the posh hotel, while taking out their understandable anger upon one another by punching, slamming into, and breaking apart one another’s bodies piece by piece. Even their character names, Dr. Chauncey Gump and Dr. Willis Panama with wives named Lola and Bettina seem like something out of Amos and Andy or even worse, a lost script for a minstrel show. I can’t imagine how this might have played on the New York stage, but certainly it’s without a shred of decent humor in Ross’ rendering.

       Simon regular Walter Matthau (as Marvin Michaels) this time plays against type as a sexually faithful and far more socially responsible being compared with his sexually obsessed brother, Harry (Herb Edelman), who hires a prostitute to entertain Marvin on his one night alone in Los Angeles awaiting the arrival the next day of his wife Millie (Elaine May).

       Matthau is at his most loveable as a kind of sheepish, clueless miscreant as opposed to the loud-mouthed, cigar-smoking slob of The Odd Couple. And in this film he is fortunate to have as his fictional wife, Elaine May, who upon finding a hooker in her husband’s Beverly Hills Hotel bed forgives him, instead of flying into a fury, before going on a shopping spree that may empty his bank accounts.

      Still, this sketch is still a one-liner, dependent entirely upon the old theatrical convention of trying to find a place to hide the lover about to be discovered in flagrante delicto. Unfortunately, this dead-drunk bimbo cannot even hide in a closet, under the bed, or  on the balcony, and a blanket, in this instance, does not a good cover make. Marvin has no choice but to come clean, accept the consequences of a leaner bank account, and share a taxi with the friendly prostitute on his and Millie’s way to the bar mitzvah they had flown in to attend.

      The Jane Fonda-Neil Simon bond goes way back to 1967 when she starred with Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park, and in some ways she is a model Simon ingénue, innocent even if a bit wacky in her embracement of even the oddest events in life, yet, nonetheless, intelligent and witty when the chips are down. But a lot has happened in her career since that early work, having been suspected of murder in Klute, reported on a Pennsylvania nuclear meltdown in The China Syndrome, and traipsed through Nazi territory in Julia, to say nothing of her off screen appearance as an on camera appearance of “Hanoi Hannah,” Fonda is a wiser but sadder girl.

      In California Suite she and Alan Alda switch roles, as he dresses up in California whites and a light pink sweater to play the straight man, Bill Warren, to her endless cynical witticisms. Yet you know you are in trouble when even the script calls on the straight man to praise the cleverness of the sour comic’s one-liners. Worse yet, Simon seems to have been channeling Woody Allen in his spew of vitriolic California put-downs. Beautiful as she is, Fonda’s Hannah Warren is so brittle that a single match might set a whole California forest afire.

      She’s come to settle a million scores with one symbolic act, to retrieve her disaffected daughter who has run away to join her screenwriter father in Los Angeles. Clearly, Ross was able to convince Alda to play his character as laid-back as a Malibu maven. Since all the chips have fallen into his lap, Bill can simply sit it out, letting his ex-wife spin out her webs of fear that she may be losing her daughter forever because of her clever ability to pin down everyone and everything with a suitable barb.

       There is obviously some pathos in this, and every once in a while Simon’s suffering character hits her head on the nail so expertly you expect a bit of bloodied truth to ooze out. It does so gradually, but in the process drains away the humor upon which the tale is based. If Hannah has seemingly led the perfect life, she has ended up with an alcoholic lover dying from a heart condition, along with an endless craving for nicotine, and an empty house at the very same moment when Bill, with daily exercise and a repudiation of cigarettes and alcohol, has turned his life around.

      I can only say that when a writer and director get me to actually root for Alda, I know something must have gone wrong. He actually wins the battle over who will care for their daughter, while Hannah is merely assured by the daughter that their love remains intact. Sob!

     That leads us to the now chopped-up story of the bi-sexual Sidney (Caine) and his audaciously tenacious wife, Diana (Smith). Despite everyone advising him not to play a gay man, Caine comes off in California Suite as a credible bisexual, a role which must have agreed with him, since he kissed Superman (Christopher Reeves) in 1982’s Deathtrap. And god knows, even as her character admits in Simon’s script, Smith has played enough queens to certainly know one when she sees one; it’s just that this time, after she’s just lost the Oscar for which she’s been nominated, observing her increasingly indiscreet antique dealer-husband making a date with a handsome young actor to meet him in London, it is something in her drunken disappointed soul she cannot quite endure.

       It doesn’t help that Sidney looks after her with the fussy attention of a slightly frustrated housewife while his witticisms always strike their targets more precisely than Diana’s despair-driven put-downs of a world to which she truly doesn’t belong. Pretending she doesn’t care about the hoopla provided her only to be whisked away immediately after the award is announced, she’s starving—quite literally it appears since she goes on a scavenger hunt of room service tray-top leftovers outside their neighbor’s suites—for attention, even if it means sex with her bisexual lover who when he obliges her, generally closes his eyes.

      I don’t know, but I presume truly bisexual men just might, in fact, enjoy their heterosexual encounters as much as their homosexual ones. And did Simon really have to use the cliché of antique dealer to define Sidney’s attraction to the same sex? Moreover, since this fairly long-lasting couple do truly seem to love one another, why does she appear to have so many druthers on this particular night? Yes, her ego has taken a blow. But so too it must have when she was offered the role in the trite comedic flick in which she’s just starred.

     She’s aging and she fears that. We have to presume that the character Diana has no way of knowing, like the actress who played her, that she might get plumb roles as aristocrats and countesses later in life. So, we can surmise, she’s simply spilling a few tears over some spoilt semen. As soon as she gets back to London to be killed off as Desdemona she’ll be all right.

     If there is a common theme throughout the four segments of California Suite, it arises from the suggestion that all of the major figures of this film are losers or would-be losers. The vacationing doctors, Gump and Panama, are surely now afraid of losing each other’s friendship. Sidney Cochran has lost, if nothing else, his marital virginity; surely he will never again be the patriarchal head of the Cochran house. Hannah Warren will continue to be terrified of losing her daughter. Diana Barrie will be equally fearful about losing her husband and her status as an actor. But profound or even truly humorous cannot describe this work.

     If you’ve never quite understood the true meaning of irony, here’s a definition: for her role in this slick and mediocre comedy Maggie Smith was nominated for an Oscar. And she won.

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

 

 

Christopher Banks | Communication / 2010

the guilt of abandonment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Banks (screenwriter, based on the play by David Blakey, and director) Communication / 2010 [20 minutes]

 

This is mostly a film of regret and lost opportunities of love.

      Jacob (Rudi Vodanovich) is an Orthodox Jewish student involved in a relationship with his mentor over what is apparently for several years. Because of his religious tenants, the boy does not engage in an actual homosexual experiences with Andrew (Alexander Campbell) who has his own lover Charles (Richard Lambeth).

    Yet the boy intrigues the elder man, the two meeting regularly both for lunches and kosher dinners cooked by Andrew in his rather palatial home.

      Charles seems to be missing most of the time, but upon one invite, Charles, a true pretty boy, has suddenly returned to Auckland and when he meets Jacob at the door, calls into Charles that the stripper has arrived. From there on he continues to abuse the young student until finally Jacob is forced to leave, humiliated for his friendship with his teacher by his own lover.

     What is clear, since he has been able to buy his own house of Mulholland drive, Charles must be doing quite financially well in his Los Angeles activities.

     Yet, Jacob also realizes that his attraction and friendship with Andrew, is far more than a simple admiration and that he actually is gay, as he struggles through the Jewish texts explaining their outlawing of homosexuality.

     Finally, upon graduation he determines to return home to Christchurch, which he insists is home, Charles arguing no, home is where you feel you belong, trying once more to lure the young man on with new possibilities.

     Jacob, however, is toying with the possibility of spending some time in Israel, which he feels might be the right decision for him. Of course, that decision is also somewhat based on his own sexual insecurity. Because it is clear that he does enjoy Jacob’s company, their intellectual engagement, and their intimate discussions.

     The film begins, however, sometime after all these college-day experiences, when he returns to Auckland, having suddenly inherited Andrews’ large house. A great many of the facts of this short film are revealed as he reenters the house he quite inexplicably has inherited and finds mementoes which now remind him of their days together.

     As he moves slowing through the house, he suddenly hears sounds from the upstairs bedroom, and rushes up to see the television on with Andrews attempting to explain his decision of leaving all his wealth to him. Charles has finally left him, and he admits that their relationship had always been a mere distraction, while his friendship with Jacob and been intensely intellectual and engaging. Of course, he admits, he had always hoped to make their relationship something deeper, hoping to bring the boy into his home; yet he doesn’t regret what they had, consisting of some of the most meaningful moments in his life.

    We later learn, moreover, that it apparently has not always been purely intellectual, and perhaps was physical from time to time, something that clearly has been even hidden in Jacob’s own consciousness.

    But suddenly, now he is also confronted by an angry Charles himself, revealing that Andrew has died, after falling for a ladder, trying to repaint the house, a task which he had invited Jacob to help him with. Charles, in his hate and spleen, basically summarizes the truth, that Jacob had run off in fear of love he could not fully embrace, leaving his teacher alone.

    Shocked by the reality, Jacob staggers away down the beach, finally perceiving his own kind of abandonment of the loving Andrew. 

     Unfortunately, the film writers have not sufficiently found a way to resolve Jacob’s sense of guilt and suffering for his loss. Instead, it sends a female stranger, noticing the boy’s distress to ask him if he is okay. Finally, admitting he is not at all okay, Jacob breaks down in tears, and she (Rita Lefau Ryan) attempts to comfort him.

    In short, this film is itself afraid to fully confront the sexuality behind Andrews’ love, while also never being able to even question the appropriateness of their deep friendship. Presumably the house remains now his property, and he will somehow have to explain to himself and his family how he has possibly come to inherit it. And frankly, for all the kind love Andrew shows him, Jacob appears throughout as a somewhat sour and cold fish, simply not able to pull away from yoke of his religious beliefs to challenge himself to fully engage in love. As terrible as the mean and boorish Charles is, there is finally a truth to what he says, although given his own wealth and abandonment how and why he has returned to the Auckland house is unclear except as a gesture of his spite. Yet, it is also clear that Charles feels guilt for his own abandonment.

 

Los Angeles, October 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).