Iván Zulueta | Arrebato (Rapture) / 1979

i lost my life in the movies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Iván Zulueta (screenwriter and director) Arrebato (Rapture) / 1979

 

My title, of course, echoes Pauline Kael’s early collection of her film essays, I Lost It at the Movies.

I always presumed that by “it” such meant her emotional stability, that the film itself had so moved or wrought her up that she finally had a sort of momentary emotional breakdown. She herself referred to the “it” as “various kinds of innocence” she had lost over the years, relating it almost to a kind of sexual defilement. My husband Howard always felt she meant that the “it” was her metaphorical virginity, and that may indeed be closer to what she was expressing, much to my surprise.

    In the movie I am about to explore, a deep and dark exploration of what making and watching film can do to one, it is far more serious. Here lives are lost, and not at the movies, but in them, not only in their making, as the central figures of this film do. José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela), a filmmaker of definitely grade B horror films, most recently with a working title of Wolf Men, which the studio wants to change to the much more literal The Curse of the Wolf Men. It may be simply a minor change, but for him, along with his argument with the cuts and reshoots his editor/cutter insists for the final scenes, it is just too much for a man who is still trying to make something out of nothing. José still believes in cinema, despite the fact that his assistant suggests he has been behaving over the past few months in strange and troubling ways, arguing over issues which he is no longer is interested in. As if taking control of José’s own movie, he demands the director simply go home and patch up his relationship with his supposed lover, Ana Turner (Cecilia Roth).

     But things have gone far deeper than anyone can imagine. As we slowly discover in this truly unusual film, by this time presumably José has already broken up with Ana and met up with a young would-be filmmaker Pedro (Wil More) who is the cousin of one of his former lovers Marta (Marta Fernández Muro), who has invited him to her aunt Carmen’s (Carmen Giralt) house where Pedro is currently living, as a possible shooting spot for a future film.

    Pedro is not only beautiful and strange, as Marta describes him, but a sort of mad filmmaker, filming at nearly all moments of the day, who behaves like a child, crying in despair whenever he views what he has filmed for its numerous flaws. He is particularly disturbed about not being able to get the rhythms of his films right, which he studiously counts out. An interval timer, which José, later sends him, changes his entirely filmmaking and life. At the moment, however, he attempts to magically “charm” his new acquaintance, perceiving him as a professional filmmaker who might serve as a mentor to him so that he can make the films to which it is clear he is utterly committed to.

     The charms, however, which include a doll, an old picture book of King Solomon's Mines, and other actions seem to superficially fail. But there is something deeper going on, we perceive, already in this first meeting with Pedro and José, far deeper and more disturbing that simply a “charming.” Despite the sometimes rough and tumble intellectual tangles which commentators Joe Lipsett and his co-anchor Terry get into in their discussions on Queer Horror Movies, Terry actually observes something that most other critics have failed to mention:

 

“Pedro mentions that he’s been creating the same images for centuries. It’s such a bizarre statement that a viewer could take as an exaggeration; that the art of discovering new techniques or perfecting one’s filmmaking skills feels like centuries. But his supernatural knowledge of people and ways to “enrapt” them makes me wonder.

     I’m sure you could look at Arrebato under a multitude of lenses to pick at and analyze what the film is trying to say (if that’s even possible), but one refrain kept coming back to me while watching it. Zulueta imagines filmmaking as an extended form of lovemaking; one that might have no release. After telling José that he’s been making the same images for centuries and apologizing for “all that build-up just to watch that junk,” he compares the creation of film almost as a long, protracted and endless jerk-off session: “one long wank without cumming.”

    Later, when they meet for a second time, after José sends him the all-important timer, Pedro seems even stranger as he, this time, makes sure that José joins him for what both now clearly desire, a sexual encounter with one another.

    Terry, on Queer Horror Encounters observes: “I do wonder if Pedro is more of a metaphor than a real person. Or a personification of the art of filmmaking. Hints are dropped throughout the first half of the film that he might be somewhat supernatural. He talks about how he must “enrapture” Ana, when she shows up with José. He even stages a goth Betty Boop doll, one that is the exact same doll that she had as a kid, including a tear. ‘Isn’t that strange?’”

     It is indeed most strange, as he basically renders her motionless so that he and José can finish their love-making before she again wakes up. Here we have suggestions that perhaps Pedro himself is a kind of vampirish figure from the beginning, not one who sucks blood (although later in the film he seems to do just that with his former female friend Gloria), but so vitally attracts a fellow cinephile like himself that there is no longer any escape. Both are also, it needs to be stated, drug fiends, José deeply addicted to heroin (as was director Zueleta), while Pedro appears to prefer cocaine, although he seems to be far more intoxicated throughout with the drug of cinema.

    When Marta and her aunt sell the house and move to Lourdes, Pedro goes in search of the world, finding the alluring charms of bisexual life, yet finally returning to film with a deeper commitment and vengeance

     His “charms” so attract the already addicted José that for him there is no going back to his persistently now drugged-out girlfriend, particularly when a now gravely spoken half-ghost of Pedro offers him evidence of an even greater escape into the camera lens, explaining how after one last encounter with his girlfriend Gloria and a pickup male, during which he makes love to both, but actually draws blood of the girl, his own self-regulated camera, comes to life, and films him while sleeping, whereupon he discovers frames in which the as he sleeps, now in the complete rapture of being part of the movie itself, in red, as if the being as disappeared. In the final film which he sends José, he and even his cousin Marta who has attempted to return to him in order to bring him back into reality, also disappears into the red, luring José into further action, having given him the key to his own apartment.

   As José attempts to watch the movie, his girlfriend Ana tries to engage him in sex. He pushes her away and finally says he’s leaving, she saying that she has made the same decision, but he replying that it doesn’t matter anymore. She can stay. It is he who is moving on.

    He enters Pedro’s now highrise Madrid apartment to find it totally empty, the final film waiting for him. He simply needs to develop it, which takes at most, three days. During that time he compares the reels Pedro as left behind and sees the increasing red frames that spread across the reels. When he views the new film, Pedro has complete disappeared except for one frame which seems to continue in motion of its own, impossible as that may seem, luring José into Pedro’s own bed. Finally, having now broken in a complete sweat of both having taken no drugs for several days and his own anticipation, he covers his eyes in a tear of the sheets and enters, the camera of itself again coming to life, presumably bringing him into the red “rapture” into which Pedro has previously been consumed.

    Most critics have perceived the metaphor, and some of them have even recognized how possible it actually is to have occurred in their own lives. In Carlos Aguilar’s 2021 review on the Roger Ebert site, for example, he ends his review:

 

“Arrebato invokes cinema as an otherworldly entity that possesses, just as addictive and destructive as mind-altering substances injected into the bloodstream. The camera itself is an apparition that devours the lifeforce from those enraptured in its powers. It’s a movie about losing oneself to the dangerously numbing power of experiencing life on a different level of consciousness, whether chemically induced or through a lens. The more removed the men are from devastating sobriety, the closer they are to being forever trapped inside the reel. To an extent, aren’t all cinephiles susceptible to such fate?”

  

     My “first” addiction is alcohol, not drugs. And throughout my life I have also been equally addicted to, first drama, then fiction and poetry, before film, time and life-consuming activities that completely transformed my own way of perceiving and living, forcing me to disappear at times within their productions, pages, and screen images. My husband Howard has certainly complained vehemently about just such vast distances that occurred between us because of those addictions. Although, for many years, he was equally involved in the world of art, much larger than the mere adoration of what an artist puts on a canvas or constructs or performs. The world of art is a completely surrounding world of needy others equally involved in the adoration of their shrines. The worlds I chose were singular, “raptures” one had to experience mostly alone and apart, in “the red” zone so to speak.

     As strange as Zueleta’s film must have seemed in 1979, and still does to many today, for me it is a history less than a horror or ghost tale. The oddities of it make total sense, such as the dubbing of Ana’s voice early on in the film by noted Spanish direct Pedro Almodóvar which makes her, at least for a few moments, sound almost like a transgender figure as opposed to the woman she no longer can be. Almodóvar, accordingly, cites this movie as one of the best of Spanish cinema—as many others have—and has highly influenced him, as many observers have also argued, although I see only superficial similarities, except the obvious sexual fluidity of this film’s characters.

    Is Zueleta’s a great film? Yes…and no. In its attempts to link the crazed student Pedro and his self-determined mentor José, the trickery of charms and mesmerist behavior doesn’t always work, unless you truly do read this as a kind a latent vampirism that he possesses. What finally draws José to Pedro is desire, first for the body but just as much for the talent of the young man who has not yet abandoned his cinematic talents and is truly willing to fall into tears, cry, and give up his life for them, something José devoutly wishes he had been able to do, before he gave into the studio-driven film world. The musical passage from Wagner’s final strains from Götterdämmerung which end this film call up both a sexual and spiritual release to what has truly made his life meaningful. There is nothing more to be said. He too, is ready to be “red.”

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).

Tabea Blumenschein and Ulrike Ottinger | Madame X - Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X: An Absolute Ruler) / 1978

the women’s collective of death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ulrike Ottinger (screenplay), Tabea Blumenschein and Ulrike Ottinger (directors) Madame X - Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X: An Absolute Ruler) / 1978

 

Obviously, Virginia Woolf’s fictional biography Orlando was central to Ulrike Ottinger’s early films. The figure first appears in her 1972-73 work Laocoon & Son and is the central focus of her 1978 prequel Madame X: An Absolute Ruler to her “Berlin Trilogy,” the centerpiece of which is Freak Orlando (1981). Using yet another trope of feminine empowerment, this Madame X is a brutal sea pirate, who like James M. Barrie’s Captain Hook has lost one of her hands in an attempt to save her female lover Orlando from a poisonous species of sea anemone which she thought was a flower, and dived in to retrieve.

      Calling out to women around the world to join her, Madame X accrues an odd assortment of females representing various stereotypes of unhappy women, both lesbians and formerly heterosexually married individuals, among them a housewife whose husband has left her for another woman, Betty Brillo (Lutze, who will later be central to Ticket with No Return); a worn-out artist seeking new subjects and landscapes, Joseph de Collage who roller skates away from her entrapment (noted dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer); a German woman living outdoors with her trusty rifle at hand, Flora Tannenbaum (Claudia Skoda); a beautiful “Tahitian” girl, punished by her husband for some action or inaction by being manacled and sent off in a small paddle raft, Noa-Noa (Roswitha Janz); along with a medical psychologist and a female pilot—all lured by her calls for “gold, love, and adventure.”

     While these may on one level represent various feminist figures, they are also presented by Ottinger as satirical, and many of the women taken aboard by the Orientalist figurehead—Madame X also serves as the maidenhead of her dinghy—do not survive the voyage, some of them destroyed by their leader herself. And although at moments the women do join together in a kind of feminist collective, just as often they plot, bicker, and gossip against one another. Neither are all of them true to the lesbian cause, Betty Brillo, in particular, later being punished for her interest in a sailor illegally brought aboard.

      When early in their voyage they also bring on board a castrato/fool, Belmondo (Mackay Taylor) who has been set afloat by a crew aboard a wealthy yacht simply for being so “different,” one might almost argue that Madame X’s dinghy acquires a slightly “rainbow” quality. But even the obvious effeminate “fairy” is so kooky and bizarre in his behavior that the medical psychologist immediately interviews him in a hilarious series of quick-fired questions which accuse him more than attempting to explore his peculiarities.

      One of the first things the crew must accomplish is to simply attract the attention of their cruel and absolute ruler, who seems oblivious of their presence, so much so that fear they might never even be served something to eat. Through a lottery it is decided that Noa-Noa will be the one to approach her.

    The encounter at first results in a fury of hostility (with the help of the canned sound of snarling tiger), but gradually as the Tahitian offers her onions and, the most absurd of offerings, large flowers of broccoli, as well as her own enticing body, Madame is calmed as Noa-Noa and her make symbolic gestures of love, the girl becoming her favorite thereafter.

     Almost immediately after this quite charming enticement, Madame X orders her ferocious-looking servant Hoi Sin (obviously jealous of her master’s attentions to Noa-Noa) to feed her crew with a large Chinese cooked fish, which the hungry female collective consume with the speed of a gathering of locusts.

      When the speechless Belmondo mimes the story of his being cast away, he describes the yacht filled with the mindless well-to-to individuals that have had no place for him, Madame X determines the course of the first (and only) adventure depicted in this film, which is clearly meant to be an ongoing series like the old silent serials such as the Fantômas crimes series of the 1920s or the Pirate Gold series of the same decade.

      Catching up with yacht, the dinghy provides the rich and bored people on cruise such an exotic sight filled with magnificently dressed (and in Noa-Noa’s case undressed) beings that they invite them aboard, muttering endless banalities and oohing-and-awing over the strangeness of these figures as they poke and prod them like so many pieces of art, snapping photos as if on one of Ottinger’s later ethnographic visits to an alien world. A wheel-chair-bound female singer serves as the center of the fatuous folk looked after by beautiful young sailor and others who might serve their sexual needs.

      Madame X and her crew, sans Belmondo, allow themselves to be the subjects of outsider fascination until the sun sets when one-by-one they kill off the entire batch of the idol and rich, and plunder their safes below deck of jewels and money. The young sailor, however, dives overboard and swims to the dingy crying out for help, where the confused Belmondo saves him and the two, enwrapped in a small cocoon of a glass-surrounded room begin to make love so intensely that they do not, at first, even recognize the return of the pirates, who stare in intently at their love-making, Betty Brillo, in particular, becoming so jealous that even when the others report the incident to their cruel leader and she has put the sailor upon a net hanging over the waters, Betty is still determined to join him, as is Belmondo who fight for possession of the beauty.

     Belmondo finally gives up, and as Betty crawls into the net in an attempt to have sex with the sailor, they are dropped together into the ocean, only Belmondo escaping death. His punishment by Madame X soon after is surprisingly allayed in a gesture of mercy that she does not show the others who soon after begin to resist her cruel behavior. One by one, some of her crew members are killed off for their various mutinies and offences. The pilot is poisoned with cake (see the second photo in this essay).

     After taking a long bath, the hairy-chested Madame X orders Belmondo and another to kill someone watching nearby.

     Another is killed as she attempts to stab Madame X as she performs her role as the maidenhead (see the first image of the essay).  Finally, as they reach port, she has the medical psychologist who has kept a private log of her wrongdoings, shot through by an arrow.

     What Madame X has not warned these women is that their servitude in the new cause may also result in their deaths.

     Back in port, Madame X and her dinghy magically attract a whole new series of women, a hot-dog stand owner, a park sweeper dressed in what looks like a prison uniform, and others who are the same actors, in many cases, as the previous ones she has destroyed in their former personas, as if they have metamorphosed into new women desiring “gold, love, and adventure.” Indeed, this time the voyage is treated almost as a park ride, as the women sail out of port as if they soon will be returning from a tour adventure not so very different from the one of those on the doomed yacht.

     As in nearly all of Ottinger’s works, it is the visual splendor of her images and cinematic wit that most matters. Nothing is ever truly predictable in the world in which this director takes her adventurous viewers, and every time one takes the cinematic voyage with her, new discoveries are there to be uncovered.

 

Los Angeles, December 5, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Luis Fernando Midence | Dejá que fluya (Let It Flow) / 2022

disconnected

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Fernando Midence (screenwriter and director) Dejá que fluya (Let It Flow) / 2022 [12 minutes]

 

Two estranged brothers meet at the family vacation home after their father’s recent death, the elder disturbed by their having to meet so far from the city in the hot weather, and moreover, irritated by the fact that the lawyer has not yet shown up and only he has the keys.

      They greet briefly, obviously having not seen each other for a long while. The younger, Andre, attempts to hug his brother, with a somewhat cold response. He enquires whether his brother is still with… “Santiago,” interrupts the elder, five years now.

       So it is established that the one is gay, and Andre, more like his father who obviously disapproved of his elder son’s behavior, is at least uncomfortable with the fact.

    The younger asks about whether his brother Nelson has gotten yet more tattoos, the elder immediately reacting that Andre is just as judgmental as “your” father, the other attempting to correct him, “our” father. But the heat has forced Nelson to try to find a way into the house. He jumps a wire fence and goes around to back, but that too is locked with no way to enter. Distraught about trying to break in during full daylight, Andre suggests that they’re demonstrating to the thieves the way to enter. His brother responds no one is around on a Monday, and again is disdainful of their having to meet there.

       Andre reminds him once again that it was their father’s wishes, Nelson responding that even after 10 years in Europe, his brother is still “kissing ass” to his father.

        Evidently there is a grounds keeper who also has a key, but he comes on Thursdays.

        So why didn’t we meet on Thursday, the elder asks. It turns out that Andre is returning to Spain on Wednesday which causes further rancor, Nelson accusing him of organizing everything around his own schedule.

     The brothers carry on, back and forth, repeating their dislikes as to how the other lives and behaves. And it doesn’t take long before once again Andre is dismissing his elder brother because he’s gay and, as Nelson himself puts it, “likes to suck dick.”

    And finally it comes out, as is often the case, that the elder son has had to put up with intense criticism from the father all his life, while the younger was allowed to be who he was. Those who are first born are so often the rebels, reacting against the expectations and the strictness of their upbringing, while the younger children, when the parents realize that they needed not to worry so much about protecting and shaping their daughter or son’s life had an easier time that allowed them to more easily assimilate. At least Midence seems to argue this fairly standard point of view, even though we all know hundreds of examples that don’t fit the pattern. Certainly, in my relationship to my own siblings, I fit that pattern myself.

     Nelson has become so heated that he strips off his clothes and jumps into the pool naked, Andre startled by his behavior, asking what the neighbors might think, his brother reminding him that there are no neighbors. And how is he going to dry off? He asks. By sitting in the sun, Nelson suggests, his brother worried about the reaction of the lawyer if he should show up. The difference between the two is nearly laughable. As Nelson repeats, his brother Andre is the “incarnation of our father,” Andre cracking out a laugh for having finally forced Nelson to admit that the man was his father as well.

       Later, as Andre sits on the beach, soon joined by Nelson, he reports that traffic has been so bad that the lawyer has turned around and returned to the city. Their meeting has been for nothing.

       Finally, Andre admits that their father has left the house to both of them.

       Nelson suggests that he never even imagined coming back to the beach house again. Taking his brother’s hand, he forces him on walk down a nearby path to remind him that that are completely different from another, in both looks and personality. If he seems to be hinting at something, it’s immediately lost as Andre again insists, “But we’re brothers,” Nelson reiterating that for 33 years they not have communicated except for brief telephone calls on their birthdays. We could write one another more often, Andre pleads, as if it might truly mean something to him to imagine a family that has never existed.

       But Nelson summarizes the issue, he should let it flow, let nature take its natural course. If they are meant to become closer it will happen, otherwise…. And we’re sure it will be otherwise, as Nelson suggests that his brother keep the beach house for himself, as he abandons all rights to it.

       When Nelson leaves, Andre stands alone by the pool, looks quickly around him as if to check out the scene, pulls off his clothes and enters the water. For a moment he has learned how to “let it flow,” has taken the advice of a man obviously more comfortable in his own skin and with his life than he has ever been. The occasion, after all, has given him something at least to remember.

      Guatemalan director Luis Fernando Midence’s film is not profound, and neither character is established in enough depth for us to glean anything but their general dispositions and Nelson’s alternate sexuality. Does Andre even date women? What does he do in Spain? What will he even do with the inherited beach house far from the place he now calls his home? We can’t even imagine answers to these questions because the figure remains a cipher.

      But this short film nonetheless expresses a moment in the lives of these two men which may offer a turning point for them, a recognition at least that even brothers often turn to be so very different that they might as well have been born of other parents, which he only suspect is what Nelson is attempting to hint at. Perhaps he was someone else’s son. It doesn’t matter truly since his father apparently did not behave as a real loving father should have. Nelson has survived. Now Andre must accept his own heritage is not necessarily his brother’s.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2023 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023). 

Marco Fettolini | Lucky Fares / 2014

holy animals

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marco Fettolini and Alain Kortazar (screenplay), Marco Fettolini (director) Lucky Fares / 2014 [12 minutes]

 

Spanish director Maco Fettolini’s 12-minute short, Lucky Fares, might almost be described as a gay surrealist work, particularly since it begins with one of three wise men, Balthazar (Jose Ramón Gómez Friha) stopped by the police with Santa Claus (Luís Deogracia Meíja), two boys, 18 and 21, who thought by dressing up as Christmas saints they might escape the border guards in migrating into a new country. Caspar has already been arrested having gone for beer when Balthazar mentioned myrrh. Santa Claus was to have been the third wise man, but they couldn’t find the right costume.

     Balthazar attempts to quiet down the scared Santa—the youngest of their group—but even that doesn’t work when he suggests the police will “fuck around” with them during the interview, Santa taking it quite literally, presuming they might in fact rape him.

      Balthazar proudly hints that he’s been through the process a bunch of times, with Santa responding that it means he has failed just as many times.

       Finally, the elder attempts to wise young Santa up, explaining that he should never give out his name; that way they won’t be able to trace him to his home and might let him go. And if they are let free, perhaps they can marry a woman and gain legal citizenship.

       Santa is not sure he wants a woman, maybe an older one. Balthazar wisely suggests he might marry a man, but that choice is dangerous as well because often they just want to fuck young boys and might not come through with the marriage part. This time, he explains, he really means that they’ll fuck him.

      In any case, you have to prove you love the man or woman by kissing them in front of the authorities. It turns out, however, that Santa has had no real experience, having never kissed a woman or a man before.

       Balthazar suggests they practice, and before Santa has even had a chance to think about it, the two are in a heavy kissing session in their cell, Santa seemingly overwhelmed the discovery of the pleasure of a male kiss.

       Taking off his turban, Balthazar finally reveals his true name, Fares, Santa admitting to the name of Lucky. Perhaps, in fact, they might be “Lucky Fares,” a team who together can make their way to a new life.

       To calm the younger man, Balthazar suggests they’ll probably let them both go and then they can marry one another and travel the world together.

        But all such dreams come to end, when Balthazar is taken away. A few moments later we see Santa undergoing interrogation. Asked for his name, Santa refuses, the policeman truly fucking with his mind: “They told you how it works, right? Since you’re underage, if we can’t find your parents we can’t do anything and you don’t give a damn. If you want, we can give you problems. You oughta know that your friends are already on their way home, oh yeah. Your little friend too. Do you know what they do to fags in his home country?”

        The film ends with a desperate shout, the boy Santa spitting out the words: “I will kill you.”

        A sentence appears upon the screen: “The human being, deprived of a future, becomes an animal.”

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

 

Darren Swanson

new horizons

by Douglas Messerli

 

Darren Swanson (screenwriter and director) Blue Shirt Green Tie / 2014 [7 minutes]

 

In this truly farcical short film, Bob (David Bannister) is celebrating at a restaurant with his wife Diane (Sara Ellis Holland), who pretty much dominates his every thought and behavior, from when they put on their napkins (simultaneously), sip wine, smile, and speak. But he seems particularly troubled tonight, and even she attempts to discover what might be wrong with him.

     Yet the moment he attempts to open his mouth to express anything, she demands he “hold that thought” as she wiggles off to the bathroom to pee.

     To demonstrate his feelings, however, he takes out the anniversary card he had planned on giving to his wife, and draws in horns on her head.

     Meanwhile, Simone (Artemis Jay), a local drag queen, is looking to hook up with her presumed date, wearing a blue shirt and green tie, just as Bob is dressed.

     Quite improbably, Diane finds herself locked in her bathroom stall with no way of escape.

    In this quite cheaply made Australian short, things are now nicely arranged for a new world to open up for Bob.

     In the corner, meanwhile, just to create a false sense of reality, the camera focuses momentarily on another man dressed in similarly bad taste, blue shirt and green bow tie.

     The food comes immediately, Simone delighted that he has already ordered for her.

   Simone, however, proves just as controlling as Bob’s wife, describing how her father stopped communicating with her for one single orgy. When Bob even attempts to open his mouth in wonderment, she suggests he’s judging her, and immediately unfriends him, announcing to him that blue and green should never be worn together without another color in between.

     Diane finally returns in a fury about the hell she has had to endure. She is angry about the fact that the wine has entirely been consumed as well as the fact that she has no dinner, while his remains on his plate. “What have you got to say for yourself?” she demands.

     Poor Bob, however, has not been able to say a single word to either woman the entire time.

     He finally stands up, slams the table, and throws down the card he has manipulated. Before she can even speak, he shouts out his only word to date: “Don’t!”

     He walks out of the dive in which they have been dining, undoes his tie, and breathes in. There he again meets the drag queen Simone, still having difficulties with her cellphone. He takes it from her and corrects the problem. “You want to grab a drink?” in asks in his first full sentence of the film. She agrees, and arm and arm they walk off together, her arm linked in his, as he covertly pulls off his green tie and stuffs it into his back pocket. Perhaps he senses that this drag queen needs his help far more than his dominate wife.

     This film is not only pure fantasy, but not really that funny. You need to think of it more as a failed comedy sketch, not a serious narrative.

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).