World Cinema Review

beauty the destroyer

by Douglas Messerli

Jean Gruault and Jacques Rivette (screenplay, based on the novel by Denis Diderot), Jacques Rivette (director) La Religieuse (The Nun) / 1966, general release 1967

Jacques Rivette’s 1966 picture La Religieuse (The Nun), based on Denis Diderot’s novel of the 18^th century, is really four major episodes patched together into a full film. It’s not precisely that the work does not weave together these parts, but that despite the fact that they all center on the adventures of a young innocent, Suzanne Simonin (the always radiant Anna Karina), but that they offer such entirely perspectives of the period that they are difficult to reconcile.

Indeed, perhaps I should say there are actually 5 perspectives, beginning with the seemingly loving home life of the young beauty, which once her elder two sisters are married off with large dowries—a requirement of the day—leave nothing for her, which means for the family that she will have to be sent off to a convent wherein she will nicely disappear from their consciences.

Surely there must be several books on how second sons and third daughters throughout the 17^th-19^thcenturies were horribly destroyed by the fact that their wealthy parents simply couldn’t afford to marry off and support their younger children.

Dozens of novels and plays deal with that very fact, usually leading to comical (in the case of Tom Jones) and tragic results of the financial dealings of the gentile lives of their parents. As if they were all “drunken sailors,” parents had to determine what to do with their later offspring whom they simply could not equally support. In a sense, that is even at the heart of many of Jane Austen’s fictions. When marriage equals money, it produces serious problems even up until the 20^th century when in Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles, the temporary husband of the heavy-drinking Bette Davis is forced to play a billiards game in order to settle the matters of the dowry. Even the peaceful family drama of I Remember Mama must pretend to deal with such issues. Women quite obviously needed to be sold off to their husbands, and younger sons were truly a nuisance. Only if you were the heir apparent might you expect to receive a decent survival in a world, particularly for women, it was not a nice place if you didn’t have cash to spend in it.

What is worse is that the beautiful, well raised Suzanne, like Tom Jones, is the product of an illicit romance her religious mother, in this case, has had with another, unnamed man. Her guilt about her actions is confused with her intentions to send her daughter into hell—supposedly a life in a highly religious convent—in order to resolve their financial difficulties and absolve her own guilt.

Suzanne, given her careful upbringing, is deeply religious young being; but also is a proto-feminist, who resents the very idea of being sent off, to what Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang has described as a true prison. As Chang beautifully described the second perspective of this movie, it “might be one of the greatest prison movies ever made and certainly one of the most controversial.” For that is precisely, after the young girl, dressed in the wedding dress young novices must wait to wed their lives to God, rejects, declaring that she has no vocation in her commitment to religious conviction, which is perceived as a scandal—after all, her mother has also had to pay (through secretly pawned jewelry) for her entry into the convent! Everything in this world is based on financial transactions, which might truly remind us of the world in which we currently exist.

Sent back to the convent, this time with the truth of her birth revealed, the beautiful Suzanne, who a bit like the beauty in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, is resented by her sisters and mother, is sent off to a castle from which there is no escape—but, in this case, without even a loving father who might come to rescue her. There are elements in this story even of Snow White, a woman forced to suffer torture, particularly after the death of the one caring Mother Superior, Madame de Moni (Micheline Presle), and endless sleep without food—in this case with torture and beatings.

Her white knight is the improbable lawyer, Dom Morel (Francisco Rabal), who warns her of what she will have to endure if she brings a lawsuit to escape the clutches of her prisoners. He even fortells, as what we later perceive is far too true, that she may not win her claim to the world. The society who has locked her up is determined, for numerous reasons—hypocritical morality, financial concerns, and simply dispassion—to keep her where she is. And, moreover, the social structure does not easily accept change, while the radical changes she has demanded are essential to the current French culture, with only a few outspoken figures attempting to totally transform the culture in which they exist. One must imagine an outspoken philosopher, if he or she might still exist, speaking out against the imprisonment of blacks or the immigrant children in our own time: their voices might be loud, but they are seldom heard. Suzanne loses her case.

Fortunately, or one might proclaim “unfortunately,” Morel helps the suffering Suzanne to escape to another convent, this one a seemingly loving enclave, where she is treated as a kind of special supplicant to the Mother Superior,Madame de Chelles (Liselotte Pulver), a lustful lesbian who is determined to take the new beauty under her personal “wing,” while others, obviously comfortable in this Sapphic paradise, rush laughingly around one another with joy, behaving nothing like women devoted to God. Only Sister Thérèse, the former favorite of Madame de Chelles warns the new member of their order of the dangers she must face.

The young innocent nun is confused—by everything, her newly aroused feelings of joy and contentment, her own personal commitment to the religion, and, of course, her own inability to find vocation within the confines of the life she has vowed to live. Confessing to the local monk, she is advised to stay far from the truly “Satanic” influences of Madame de Chelles (strangely a term that had previously been applied to herself). Is she Satan or is Satan present in the world all around her? She has no way, apparently, of even comprehending evil.

Sent away through a complaint by the Mother Superior (or perhaps by his own tender feelings for the nun to whom he must attend) the elder confessor simply disappears, a new, younger monk taking his position, a man who confesses to his confessor that he feels very much in the same position a her, locked away in a religiously sanctimonious society in which he does not feel at home.

What also becomes quickly apparent to everyone but Suzanne herself is that he too has fallen in love with her, forcing her to keep a distance from her Mother Superior while he plots her escape. For people like us, he confides, there is only escape or a jump into suicide, re-planting the seeds of what Suzanne has already imagined for herself.

Suzanne agrees to his plot, but quickly realizes, when he attempts to rape her, that her actions have been for no avail; that he simply plans another kind of imprisonment for her. And indeed, when his plot is revealed to authorities, he, himself, is imprisoned. She has no choice but to again escape, this time into the indenturement of a cleaning woman for a provincial French household. The newspapers and gossip of the day warn her even away from this rustic world, and she choses to run again, this time into the poverty of the streets, begging for a few coins in order to survive.

Once more she is seemingly saved by a passing figure, a well-dressed woman who takes her home in order to protect her. Suzanne is once more pampered and given a beautiful dress to wear until she realizes, at the evening party, that the role she has been chosen to play this time is a courtesan in a high-class bordello. The approach of a customer forces her again to flee, this time through the window her previous monk has suggested to her death.

Yes, this is a true melodrama, but it is also an amazingly well-wrought and beautifully filmed New Wave protest against religion, and most particularly, the Roman Catholic Church. Faced with serious challenges by French censorship authorities, Rivette worked time and again to bring the language into a context that did not threaten the church leaders, even adding a ridiculously long introductory statement which expressed that this was, after all, a fiction and did not represent the way the Church had in any way truly behaved.

All lies, of course, and in a later 2007 film, The Duchess ofLangeais, this based on a story by Balzac, some of the same territory is repeated, since the major figure of the work is also incarcerated and tortured in a convent. Religion, we know, has not always been the best source of protection for its believers. Ask the thousand and young men and women preyed upon by priests, or the masses of innocents who have gone to their early graves believing that what the Church spoke was the Holy Word of God.

Even though Rivette had the permission of the censors, when he movie was about to open, the French press and religious figures shouted it down. Only in Cannes did it finally receive a fair hearing, and even then did not appear in Paris theaters until the following year.

Just as importantly, Rivette’s film is not only about religion but about the restraints put upon women, then and now. Suzanne may have never been quite able to comprehend her role as an outspoken representative for her sex—she was clearly just as uncomfortable in the ordinary world as she was in the world of the sacred—but she knew something was wrong, that being forced into a role in which she didn’t feel comfortable to embrace, she was being robbed of her identity. Diderot, long before Rivette, realized that. Instead of being asked, she was being told how to behave and survive in a world not at all accommodating to her own sensibility. And she rebelled against the very idea, again and again, with no choice finally but to destroy herself in the process. The “MeToo” movement, and numerous other contemporary issues all seem, in this film, too close to bone to watch it comfortably. This is an edgy movie even today.

Los Angeles, January 22, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2019).

the man in white

by Douglas Messerli

Kōbō Abe (writer), Hiroshi Teshigahara (director) おとし穴Otoshiana (Pitfall) / 1962

Increasingly, through the years, as I have watched the films of Hiroshi Teshigahara based on writings by Kōbō Abe, I have come to see him as one of the most innovative of Japanese film directors. In even his first feature film, Pitfall, which I saw the other day, I discovered a breathtaking work that brought politics into a kind of surrealist world, as an iterant miner and his young son get involved in Japanese union politics simply because Otsuka (Hisashi Igawa) is a dead-ringer for the a union boss, representing Union 2, who has dared to defy the more dominant union boss from Union 1.

The lookalike Otsuka is stalked and later killed by a man in a white suit (Kunie Tanaka) when

he returns to an abandoned mine, surrounded by a strange ghost-like mining town which now has only one woman shopkeeper (Sumie Sasaki) who seems to sell only candy and trinkets to the ghosts, like Otsuka, who occasionally appear at her doorstep.

The odd mix-up of politics and ghost-stories is heightened by the modernist music of Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yuji Takahashi, and the sets, which present such a deep desolation that one might imagine herself suddenly transported into an ancient gold-mining town of the old West in the US.

Here everything is gray and totally washed out, while the man in white and Otsuka’s son (Kazuo Miyahara)—murderer and hidden observer of all events, stand out in this ghostly landscape, the one because of his costume and determination, the other by his innocent beauty.

The only other witness to the crime is the shopkeeper who is paid by the man in white to tell a false story, further incriminating the lookalike union leader and his opposing union head—even though, in reality, these two have worked carefully together to restrain any worker resentment.

A bit like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, it is the reporters (particularly Kei Satō) who stir up events, suggesting to both union leaders that each other has plotted against one another.

When the two union bosses determine to visit the old mine for evidence, they come across the body of the shopkeeper, who has now also been killed by the man in white, after being raped by a local policeman. These men blame one another, eventually moving into a battle, which ends in both their deaths, while the ghosts of Otsuka and the shopkeeper look on, Otsuka desperately attempting to discover why he and the shopkeeper have both been killed.

As an older ghost warns, there will be no easy answers and what he might discover will be even more disturbing than the facts—truths they gradually discover as the man in white jumps onto his motorcycle, suggesting that everything has worked out precisely as planned, before he rides off into the sunset.

Perhaps the real “pitfall” here has not been a death in the dangerous mines, but Otsuka’s belief, despite his own nefarious attempts to make a living by operating in off-zone territories, that there is a single “truth.” He, at heart, is an honest man. Demanding that when his son steals a piece of candy from the shopkeeper that he pay for it.

Strangely, it is only the son who might be able to tell the whole story, although he is too young to speak it or to even assimilate the events he has seen.

And how might we account for the accidental “doublings” of appearance between Otuska and the Union 2 boss? Are they simply aspects of one another, a kind of earlier apparition of what the second Union boss was as a younger man? Clearly, they are twins of some sort, their lives intertwined in the mining world present and past. And why has the shopkeeper stayed on to serve a community which no longer exists. Both figures were ghosts even before they died.

One can only imagine that perhaps the man in white is the future itself, a kind of Rod Serling-like figure who imposes the demands of the future upon the world of the past. If nothing else, with the murders of Otsuka and the shopkeeper the Old Union mine is now only a city of ghosts. No one is there any longer to even care for it—except, we presume, in the later memories of Otsuka’s wide-eyed son. We might even suggest that this haunting film might be his own story.

Los Angeles, February 3, 2019

World Cinema Review (February 2019).

medea’s mad dance

by Douglas Messerli

Pier Paolo Pasolini (writer and director) Medea / 1969

I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medeaseveral days ago but couldn’t quite bring myself to write about it until now. Part of the problem is that the story itself is so confusing and shifting that it is difficult that it is hard to truly understand the role of Medea in her relationship with Jason (Giuseppe Gentile), his search of the “golden fleece,” and her pain concerning her many children who have been destroyed by Kresus (Massimo Girotti).

Medea, even in the myths, is impenetrable, and even the great Maria Callas, the remarkable opera star Pasolini chose for his Medea figure, hardly speaks in this film—and when she does only in translation. Mostly she glowers over the scenes this ritualistic tribe, who killing men use their innards to return them to the landscape in attempt to reinfuse it with their powers. It is a terrifying ritual that smells of a Euripdean world that Pasolini never quite explains. But then Pasolini is obviously seeking a world even darker than that of Euripdes.

People in this world are chopped up, for hardly any logical reason, and their parts distributed back into the earth, with the community participating in a cannibal-like feast. Mostly, the participants look on, including Callas, with severe observation, as if the entire community were transfixed by the central scene in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer.

Whatever the source of Pasolini’s film, we are simply terrified by the brutality. And there seems to be no way out of this horrendous drama of hate and revenge, except in the earliest of scenes with the centaur (Laurent Terzieff) and the young Jason (Luigi Masironi), told, encouraged before he can comprehend the message by the centaur to reclaim his kingdom taken from him.

Although quite beautifully filmed, Pasolini’s movie is a confusing mix-and-match version of the Medea myth. And, since it is mostly presented in images, with very little dialogue, it is almost impossible to comprehend why Jason, upon his return to Corinth, turns his attentions away from Medea to Glauce, and why in sudden revenge Medea repeats the brutal ceremony we witnessed earlier in the film, the time destroying her brother Absyrtus before she turns on her lover and Glauce. As The New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby expressed it:

Medea is a primeval soul who erupts almost spontaneously

when transplanted into a civilization ruled by order. And this,

I think, is where the film goes awry. There is no real conflict

between Pasolini's conception and Euripides's Pasolini's

supplements the other's, but because nothing in Pasolini's

imagery in the scenes in Corinth is equal to the passion of

the original text, or to Pasolini's own scenes early in the film,

the movie seems to go thin and absurdly melodramatic.

Indeed, her vengeance, coming seemingly out of nowhere—particularly since she has not even been allowed to explain her love for Jason—is so difficult to endure that, as in the final scenes of the director’s Salò, we almost feel that we must close our eyes to what we are observing, particular since Pasolini has previously made love to his beautiful star with his camera.

Perhaps, as in that Salò, Pasolini’s point here is that within every human heart there is always perversion and, finally, a monster, and trying to hold on and control the beloved is always a sort of fascist act.

Certainly, Pasolini’s own life and death gave credence to that fact, as his “acquisition” of a young handsome man led to the boy turning on him and murdering the director. One might almost read Medea today as a prescient vision of what love spurned can lead to.

Los Angeles, February 14, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

into a possible paradise

by Douglas Messerli

Nathan Adloff, Justin D.M. Palmer (writers), Nathan Adloff (director) Miles / 2017

Over the years I have watched perhaps too many stories of LGBT boys and girls coming out during their late high school years. Frankly, given my own closeted condition during that same period, I have enjoyed most of these, and even feel there may need to be more—if for no other reason than to assure young men (and women) such as I was, that although in small towns they may feel utterly alone (I believe that in my high school class of about 100, I was the only gay, and in 1964-65 there were no possible models through which I might comprehend my feelings except in the general “world out there”) that there are many individuals in their same positions. Films like David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen, Simon Shore’s Get Real, and, more recently, Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon—while presenting some of the darker aspects of the fear and sense of loneliness, even displaying the actual dangers involved—also make it almost seem “cool” to be a bright gay kid, knowing something about oneself that others simply could not imagine. I wish I’d had such films as a young boy; I looked instead, to the witty comedies of the 1940s and 1950s, reading between the lines of figures such as Carey Grant, Rock Hudson, James Dean, etc.

Yet, while watching Nathan Adloff’s 2016 film Milesyesterday, I became a little frightened that the genre was perhaps wearing itself thin, or, at the least, was now a bit dated.

Clearly, Adloff’s comedy/dramedy (as Los Angeles Times critic Katie Walsh described it), based evidently on his own experiences, is well-intentioned. And this time around, the 1999-situated story has more than a few brushes with the darker aspects of being in a school in Springfield, Illinois while desiring to be instead in the big city of Chicago to the north.

Unlike me at this age, Miles (the talented Tim Boardman) knows precisely how he is different from most of his classmates: he wants to be a movie director and he’s most definitely attracted to his same sex, even if this film shows no actual sexual scenes. For Miles, it appears, his only solution is to communicate on his now rather odd-looking “You’ve Got Mail”-like computer with his luverboi217 correspondent, describing himself as SmallTwnboi_17.

There are also very few villains in this work. Miles, in his senior school year, has an excellent relationship with his mother, Pam (a great Molly Shannon), and serves in the school as a beloved AV assistant. At nights he works the projector at the local movie theater. Generally, he seems to be a very well-adjusted and well-liked. His mother is also one of his teachers.

The only true villain of this work is Pam’s husband (Stephen Root), who virtually ignores his patient wife and treats his son, who describes his dreams of attending Columbia College in Chicago, to which his father responds that he can only go Springfield Community College. Miles is determined to leave what he describes as his sleepy town rather be locked, like so many others including his mother, within its confines.

One almost roots (sorry for the pun upon the actor’s last name) for his father’s death, which occurs with a sudden implosion of his heart, soon after—a symbol clearly for the emptiness of his love. And at the funeral itself Miles’ mother opens up to her son, admitting that she (and her son as well) has long known of his affairs and near complete ignorance of their own lives. What she and Miles are not prepared for is that he has used their meager savings for Miles’ college education to buy a new car for his current young girlfriend. It comes as a shock to Pam, who has clearly devoted her whole life to family, and, obviously, a terrible disappointment for a young man eager to move on.

Yet Miles, seemingly unchallenged by even these dire circumstances, simply seeks out possible scholarships that will allow him to make his escape. The only one that seems possible is an athletic award for something the director has not yet prepared us for: volleyball. Evidently Miles (the movie has been hiding the fact) is a great volleyball player. The only problem is that his high school has only a woman’s volleyball team.

When queried, the dubious but sympathetic woman’s volleyball coach admits that when a young woman attempted to join the football team, they had little choice but to allow her to join. And so too, after a tryout, is Miles allowed to join to volleyball team,

Soon the school is winning all of their games, but their opponents also begin a kind of retribution by refusing to play out the competitions when Miles joins the front line. City patricians also begin to complain, and even the normally kind and bland Superintendent of Schools (the role my father played in my life), who is now dating Pam, becomes forced to question Miles’ role on the team.

This might have been, in a different kind of movie, a great statement about a young man’s break-through in civil rights. But everybody here seems pallid and almost as unresponsive in their love and values as the father has been. The local theater owner finds a way to fire the young would-be film maven, and even Pam, who discovers his computer conversations, never even confronts him with the truth she now knows—this, after admitting with her husband’s death, that the lies cannot be stopped.

One might almost say that “things fall apart” without splintering. Although forced off the volleyball court, Miles still gains a scholarship for another Chicago school, Loyola, and is even presented with a gift from his mother (although one hardly imagines where she might have found the money to pay for it) of a film camera, as Miles leaps unto a bus into his possible paradise.

It’s a touching film, and you can only delight when Miles suddenly finds a way to move off into the proverbial “sunset.” But, I’m sorry to say, it just doesn’t quite make sense. Things don’t quite happen like that. Children who are told they are not allowed to do things, come to resent the world; women who only serve their families, like Pam, grow bitter. The determined Pam and the implacable Miles seems to me to represent myths of an endlessly-loving mother a knowledgeable young gay man totally ready to embrace his new world.

I used to sneak views in local grocery stores of the males in fan magazines (the Gee-Bees had incredible bulges). On one occasion I bought a book of boy porno (still available in those days) in my senior year in Waukesha, Wisconsin, sneaking it into a public bathroom, where the person in the next stall tried to get my attention, presumably for sex. I was just embarrassed; shocked by own desires.

Let us hope Miles and his mother, like the entire school community in Love, Simon, simply represent a new world, where there is no pain for having to rediscover one’s entire life. But Adloff turns his central characters simply into enduring ciphers, unable, it appears, to even be scarred by the world in which they exist. I’d like to think that suffering such feelings of being removed from the society is a thing of the past. But I’m afraid it’s simply not. If nothing else, might not Pam realize her son’s desperate attempt to escape has something to do with her own entrapment in that society?

And I’ve been to Chicago many a time. It’s terribly cold and horribly hot, a city with a very large amalgam of American life. A dangerous city itself. I used to escape there as a young man through bus-trips from Iowa, not for sex (although there was one hotel encounter with a restaurant colleague when I indeed might have realized by sexuality but did not) but for theater and museums.

In the 1980s my poet friend Charles Bernstein and I were both invited to read at the Chicago Contemporary Museum. While watching this film, I suddenly remembered that our sponsors were students and faculty members from Columbia College Chicago, the institution which Miles so desired to attend. The audience was enthusiastic and appreciative. Outside of Philadelphia, it was one of the best readings of my life.

Our hosts, after the reading wherein they declared that both Charles’ and my books had been stolen from their library, took us to an excellent Armenian restaurant, Sayat Nova (I was impressed since I’d already seen the Paradjanov film). They then took us to a party in a distant Chicago community, where I realized that several of these beautiful young men were gay.

Suddenly, in the midst of festivities (drinking and enjoying their young company), I realized that I’d left my carrying bag at the restaurant. A call to the restaurant proved that an employee had indeed found the bag and would gladly meet us at a bar nearby the Loop restaurant at 12:00 A.M. One of the young men drove me there for that late appointment, and she appeared with my bag. I offered her a financial award, but she simply allowed me to give her drink.

I think the cinematic Miles would have adored Columbia College of Chicago and given the total honesty of the people I encountered there, perhaps he chose the right place to drive wide-eyed into his new reality.

Los Angeles, February 17, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

rabelais rewrites robinson crusoe

by Douglas Messerli

Dan Kwan and Daniel Schinert (writers and directors) Swiss Army Man / 2016

The two Daniels, Kwan’s and Schinert’s 2016 film, Swiss Army Man, has to be one the weirdest movies ever released to American cinema theaters. My husband Howard saw it upon it’s original release, and I recall reading a review, sort of aghast by what the critic was describing. I did not see it in the theater, but finally saw it (twice I must admit) yesterday and today on Netflix. I can only praise them for allowing this odd-ball film to be released onto their on-line screenings, although I had previously ordered it up from their mailed CD disks.

I hardly ever use the word “weird” to describe anything. To me, it seems like an almost adolescent description of something one might not quite comprehend, an unusual trope, a kind of surrealist-like series of images, or even a grotesque approach to the material: films as various as The Rocky Horror Show, Frankenstein, or Freaks.

My role as a critic, I’ve always felt, is to try to help the viewer or reader (and I do argue that watching a film is akin to a literary reading) to comprehend how she or he might perceive more or less than simply “strange” or “weird,” something that expresses that the work is slightly outside the standard limits of whatever genre. Great art is always pulled into one’s own ability to comprehend it.

But the central characters in this film, Hank (Paul Dano) and Manny (that charming other “Daniel” Radcliffe) so often throughout this film describe their own experiences as weird, as indeed they are, that I truly feel comfortable with that word in this case.

If you were to try to categorize this movie, it would be near impossible, thank heaven. The intelligent critic Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for the Roger Ebert blog, called it a dreamlike expression. And he’s right; it is most definitely like some of Strindberg’s “dream sonatas.” It’s also a fantasy, a kind of parody of Greek drama, and Ovid-like presentation of an endless series of metamorphoses. It’s also a buddy rom-comedy, a dark, homosexually-infused story about the love the hero, Hank, cannot speak. And, in its deep heart, is a ridiculously-inspired bad-boy satire, filled up with farts, endless erections, magical vomitations of water and shit, and hippie-inspired celebrations which, given the heroes isolation can be attended only by two. It’s a heterosexual love-story in which the beloved is, in this case, a married and happy housewife played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

It’s also, to go beyond what anyone might readily perceive, a kind of pop-opera, given its beautifully ethereal score by Andy Hull and Robert McDowell. I could go on: It’s a funny story about self-hate and suicide, a tale about resurrection, and even an adventure story in the manner of works such as Sky Wars and Jurassic Park, the latter of which is reaffirmed by the character’s appropriation of the song by John Williams (it might be difficult for anyone who has regularly seen my reviews to imagine that I did actually see those movies).

As Seitz summarizes it:

The film is elastic, transmogrifying from a psychological

drama into a literally excremental comedy and then a hard-edged

survival picture, occasionally embracing the cosmic and turning

into an emo hipster answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet

the emotional temperatures of the movie fluctuate so intuitively from

moment to moment, and the situations and editing choices along

with them, that there's ultimately no point trying to deal with

"Swiss Army Man" on any terms but its own.

I’d argue that, in essence, it’s a wonderful Robinson Crusoe story retold by the bawdy writerFrançois Rabelais, who combined most of these elements into his early fictions.

To tell the plot, which I often deem necessary for the readers who might have forgotten or never even seen the films I care about, would be nearly impossible. Let us just say that the moment Hank, obviously stranded on an isolated island of his own creating, begins the film by trying to hang himself from a tree on the cliff above, this movie shifts into another world. At the very moment of his intended suicide he perceives a washed-up body from the sea and struggles to free himself from his rope embracement to check out that being, trying to resuscitate what he soon recognizes is a corpse, perhaps a vision of his own dead self.

It is a kind of mythical friend Friday, quite obviously, a man who cannot comprehend—since he is apparently dead to Hank’s own expressions. Yet, like Defoe’s “primitive,” this corpse has marvelous powers to help Hank survive that involve absurd perceptions of the contemporary world, including ski-jets (propelled, in this case by the dead man’s farts), cellphones (which Hank uses judiciously, since he is losing the message), and the corpse’s ability, when sexually stimulated to point, like the Swiss Army Knife suggested in the film’s title, inevitably north. I must admit, this not a movie of logic, but, as I expressed above, a work of dreams.

For no possibly logical reason, Hank establishes a relationship with this dead being, obviously an imagined image of his own unfulfilled youth in which he was not allowed to even masturbate. And gradually, after he begins to teach the dead man, who saves him but who he must carry around on his own back, the corpse gradually comes back to life, expressing his name as “Mahn…E,” in short, as a kind of everyman, who Hank renames as Manny.

In the new wilderness into which they have escaped, Hank attempts to reeducate his dead childhood into life, explaining the love of women, the joy of dancing, the simple pleasures that he has retreated from, while the flatulent, sexual being of his youth gradually comes back into existence.

Can one develop a sexual attraction and gay love to one’s own image of one’s failed youth? This movie even attempts that, Crusoe’s Friday becoming a kind of being with the now, spiritually- dead Hank, dressed up in to drag to attempt to explain to himself who his beloved Sarah (the locked-up housewife) truly was. Their final sexual encounters, which end in an underwater kiss, are as loving, more loving I’d argue, than any gay coming-of-age film. This is a man finally embracing his own sexuality, his own inability to even fart in public, to enjoy any of the natural experiences of his life.

I’d love to meet the young me, and to finally recognize just how loving I might have been…if only if. This film, like Rabelais, totally embraces it. Life isn’t just nice gestures and well-behaved thoughts.

In a far more conventional version of this, Ronny Commarei of Moonstrucktries to draw his love Loretta into his bed with words that Hank may have uttered to his younger self:

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't

know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything.

It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to

make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect.

Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts

and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit.

Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!

They betray one another, ultimately, and the everyman who Hank once was has, unfortunately, to die, with Hank himself being restricted again by the society in which he lives, in this case being arrested for having almost stalked Sarah, whose pictures the police find on his cellphone.

Yet Hank, once more, tries to release those youthful impulses, grabbing up the morgue-bound former self to allow him to escape in the flatulent world of youth, speeding across the continents in the imaginative farts of the youthful fullness of itself. As in the world of Greek myth, those children are all who we once were, who might create fountains of water that help us to survive far more powerful that we could ever be when we had aged, reviving our love for the world and for one another they might ever allow us to protect ourselves from all of the bears and other horrible beasts we would surely encounter in our older life.

We need, as this film makes clear, to carry those youthful visions of ourselves upon our backs, to take them with us into our futures and to let them die when they will, while freeing them to have been what they were meant to me, Swiss Army Knives of a sort, that directed us to where he finally arrived.

Los Angeles, February 19, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

any day now

by Douglas Messerli

Ronald Harwood (screenplay, based on the autobiography by Władysław Szpilman), Roman Polanski (director) The Pianist / 2002

As anyone who has read My Year volumes knows, I am a big champion of coincidence. Immediately after reading and writing about a totally unrelated film, a piece which I titled “Rabelais Rewrites Robinson Crusoe,” I determined to watch, for no connected reason, the 2001 Roman Polanski film, The Pianist, based on an autobiographical work by the great Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman, who—I hadn’t known previously—was described as one of the central Robinson Crusoes of Warsaw, Jewish men and women who after the 1944 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising chose to remain in their home city until the entry of the Red Army in January 1945, hiding out in bombed-out basements and hiding spots they’d previously established.

Many of these people died of starvation or were discovered by the Nazis and murdered. But somehow Szpilman survived, in part because one of Jewish kapos—men who often worked with the Nazis in order to carry out their policies—knew of Szpilman’s genius and pulled him out a line in which the pianist waited with his family to be taken to the Treblinka concentration camp, where Szpilman’s mother was killed. After months of growing abuse of his family and other Jews throughout the city, this might have been described as the most awful event of what he’d had to endure, since it took him from his beloved father and mother, his sister Halina (Jessica Kate Meyer) and his radically-inclined and quite cynical brother, Henryk (Ed Stoppard)—the only one who apparently actually perceived the truth.

Nonetheless, the kapo does save the musical genius, and one of the powerful understatements of Polanski’s film is how a few gentile Poles and even Germans were not simply monsters but helped these Crusoes to survive.

Particularly, in this work, a beautiful Pole, Dorota (Emilia Fox) and her husband (Valentine Pelka) help to hide Szpilman. Even the dreadful Nazi captain, Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann)—out of far more selfish reasons—hides the great interpreter of Chopin in his attic, if only from time to time luring him downstairs to play Hosenfeld’s grand piano.

The film also does not blink at demonstrating that some of Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto folk were sometimes as venal as the Poles and Germans, using hidden monies to bribe guards and allow secretive deliveries of food and money, often at the expense of the smugglers, young boys and others who, for a few coins, endangered their own lives. One of the most painful moments in the film is when a male child, after having delivered just such a package is pulled into a basement by his legs, with Szpilman, observing what has happened, attempting to retrieve the kid by pulling him up and out. The result of the tug-of-war which only ends in the boy’s death.

In another scene revealing the differences between the Ghetto residents, a man, counting coins at a restaurant table in a bar wherein Szpilman has been allowed to perform, demands the pianist temporarily stop his playing so that he might carefully listen to the sound each gold coin makes as it hits the table, in order to determine whether they are real or counterfeit.

These scenes help establish the honesty of Polanski’s work, which more thoroughly documents the total naiveté of the assimilated Jews of Warsaw, fairly well-to-do families (such as the Szpilmans) or middleclass figures, who when the Nazis first took over the city, believed the English, Russian, and, perhaps, even American forces would immediately come to their rescue. “Any day now,” seems almost to be their general mantra. The pianisthimself (wonderfully performed by Adrien Brody), cannot even recognize that he is truly in danger, attempting to perform the entire of his Polish Radio performance as bombs tear through the studio.

If he survives with only a moderate face-wound, the rest of his family members are ready to relocate to another Polish city until they intercept a British broadcast proclaiming it will come to the support of the Polish cause.

Yet it takes only a few days until they are forced to wear armbands, and by the time that Szpilman re-encounters Dorota—who has attempted to visit him, in total admiration for his music, on the day of the Nazi attack—he can no longer enter one of his favorite cafés, is not permitted walk in the park with her, or even sit on a nearby bench. If she is outraged, he and his family have had already to assimilate these facts into their lives. He can only stand on the street and discretely talk; an elderly Jewish man is told by an SS soldier that he can only walk in the gutter.

A neighbor’s apartment is suddenly attacked by Nazi Gestapo members, and a group of dining family members suddenly exterminated in front of their and their neighbor’s eyes, all in the darkness of their rooms in which they have protectively turned off the lights.

Even when they are located to the Warsaw Ghetto, his mother proclaims: “Well it’s better than I might have imagined it to be.” Little by little, the Ghetto citizens saw their lives diminish and curtailed that even they couldn’t quite imagine what was happening. And that, so Polanski seems to suggest, is what occurs when blind hate meets up with a world of belief. The believers insist upon their belief, their hopes, their possible dreams, while the haters take advantage of their innocence, their faith in the future, cutting them off from life.

These good and not-so-good humans, the citizens of the Warsaw Ghetto—who ultimately did attempt to stand up for their own humanity against the horrors they were daily encountering—were already dead before they might even imagine what it was they needed to fight against. These men and women were not weaklings—in fact, they were quite strong in their instincts for survival and their determination to fight the injustices they encountered—but the only survivors, as Szpilman and Polanski seem to suggest, were those who didn’t speak out, didn’t attempt to go to war with their oppressors. They hid, playing out their lives much like this pianist who is not allowed even to express his own talents. The piano must be kept silent, just as it’s master must hide his face, abandon his own ideals, remove himself from the world he once loved.

The Holocaust took all these people away from our world, packing their lives away into small suitcases and, today, museums of memory. The rich world of ideas, feelings, everyday emotions, just simple pleasures were wiped away, for utterly no reason other than fear and hate, from the planet.

It is quite clear that, despite what anyone might think of Polanski, this is his second-greatest movie, perhaps even his best, although I dearly love his first film, And very few directors have even been more able to show the terrors of what it means to try to love in a world that doesn’t want to permit it.

It’s strange, now I think of it: wasn’t that really the theme of the other “Robinson Crusoe” film I reviewed just yesterday, the crazy Swiss Army Man? And isn’t Polanski’s film just as surreal?

If you’re starving and discover a can of pickled cucumbers which you hug to yourself while wandering a totally devastated landscape, how might you ever go back to Chopin again? Could Crusoe ever return to civilization after having encountered a world of “Fridays?”

Los Angeles, February 21, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

17 babies

by Douglas Messerli

Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara (writers), Yorgos Lanthimos (director) The Favourite / 2018, USA, 2019

As many critics and viewers with whom I communicated felt, Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2018 film, co-produced by companies from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the USA, is a comic romp about two women, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rael Weisz) and Abigail Masham, later Baroness Masham (Emma Stone) who vie for the “love” of Anne, Queen of Great Britain (Olivia Colman).

Americans, the British, and evidently the Irish can’t get enough of the kind of “upstairs/downstairs” intrigue that this film, by the totally eccentric Greek director Lanthimos, provides. Here it’s all evident, as Abigail, sold by her father to a German in a card game, comes filthily into Anne’s court (she literally falls into the dirty mud and pig-slough as she arrives after a long carriage ride). Witnessing, from her new position as a scullery-maid what is truly going on in this court, that Sarah is evidently sharing the bed of the ailing queen, creating a kind of lesbian relationship that might or might not have been the reality of the real Queen Anne.

It hardly matters, since once Lanthimos, through the script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara takes us through an early 18^th century romp filmed within the walls of the Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, and at Hampton Court Palace in Hampton Court, Surrey, we have entered another world which is beyond any concept of realism. This is perfect Downton Abbey territory, with far more treacherous behavior, as the two possible queen consorts battle it out with graceful bows, guns, and drugs. Abigail ultimately wins out over the almost masculinely powerful Sarah, and she shifts the power structure from the Tory-based demand for war with France to a more pacific retreat which will surely allow property owners in the United Kingdom to achieve greater wealth.

And it is delightful at times to see these two powerful lesbian-aligned women fight it out, particularly given the current issues of Brexit, where many of that country’s citizens want to cut off relationships with the rest of Europe as opposed to allowing a deep interrelationship with the continent with which they are divided only by their island isolation.

On the one side is Sarah, determined to conquer the European relationships, while on the other is the beautiful Abigail, who helps the Queen realize that the strategies of retreat might allow for better communication with the European continent. Given the historical context, I might argue that Abigail’s manipulation of the royal cunt (a word used quite often in this film) was highly beneficial.

The much-manipulated Queen, however, is not so certain—particularly when she observes the newly acclaimed Keeper of the Privy Purse pressing her shoe against the head of one of her 17 beloved rabbit bunnies, representing the same number of children whom she has had to suffer their deaths. Why, one must ask, did so many innocents die in her palace? Something is clearly rotten in the Palace of Whitehall in the heart of London.

Lanthimos, accordingly, suggests a complete overthrow of the masculine world, where the males, dressed up in wigs, pale makeup, and rouged cheeks, are the true stereotypical feminine figures of this world, even if they still presume power. We know, through the back rooms of Queen Anne’s kitchens and bedroom, that they are truly mere pawns in the power-struggle they imagine themselves involved with. Anne shifts positions as her vagina is entertained. She may even regret her changing decisions, but we recognize them as realignments with her lesbian associates. In this matriarchically-dominated world, the men are only spokesmen for the queen’s transforming perceptions, which is one of the major delights of this film, which pretends, just for a few moments, that the issues of politics are truly controlled, in this instance, by women.

In a larger sense, what Lanthimos is allowing us to perceive is a future we males have not quite imagined yet. Except that the world we might not even have imagined will surely not be controlled by terribly arthritically pained woman, who can barely read her occasional statements of major of government (which surely must remind us of another now famous government figure). Anne could hardly read her daily messages, and she made many of decisions based on the influence of her sexual liaisons. I believe that in this film Lanthimos has got it quite right, even if we cannot, finally, truly like any of the figures involved in the society which he has presented.

None of his characters are nice people, none of them morally admirable. But then that is true in our own ruling leaders as well. And this film demonstrates just how sad that is—despite our utter enjoyment in watching how it might play out.

Los Angeles, February 22, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

fagin’s den

by Douglas Messerli

Todd Haynes, writer (based on various Jean Genet fictions) and director Poison / 1991

Looking back on the reviews I’d done so far on Todd Haynes’ films, I realize—having just this week seen his first feature movie, Poison—that perhaps I have been a little to critical of his very lovely to watch and carefully structured works. I still believe that his films, so interlinked with the 1950s and early 1960s melodramas, are somewhat stereotypical—although in an utterly opposite way than most early works which involved gays and lesbians—and delimited by their intense historical contexts. One simply must recognize them as rather dour, suggesting the tragically closeted and bigoted worlds in which films like Far from Heaven and Carol.

Having lived through those same years, I, as a young man, certainly suffered some of the homophobic closeting and was aware of the bigotry all around me. I was forced into blackface by my high school drama teacher in the musical Finian’s Rainbow during which its three or four performances I put on the shoe polish to play a young black boy—not to satirize the child but because our school had no blacks, and I am sure Marion Hulin, the singing teacher, must have felt that in a work about poor Southerners and black share-croppers that there had to be a least one black being; and, at 13 or 14, I was chosen for that task. I didn’t even comprehend it as a blackface performance. I was a little black boy—even if I didn’t comprehend what that meant. I didn’t do it for entertainment; it was simply who I’d been told to become.

Yet during that same period many of us did find freedom and enjoyment, and even some deep pleasure in our being different. Unlike Douglas Sirk’s bleak depictions of the period, this Douglas discovered that the real problem was in his own ways of thinking more that in the homophobic values of his father and community. And to this day, I wish I might have realized that I could have had sexual enjoyment with two of my favorite seniors, one of them about which I’ve already written, another Doug, in My Year 2005.

Film helped me to see that the world was much more open to what I feared about myself than were the home and town in which I lived. Somehow, I perceived that Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, and then teenage-girl heartthrob Tab Hunter, and even James Dean (whatever his sexuality) were more like me than the local boys who taunted me for being queer—even though I wasn’t even sure what that meant. I’d had no sex. I’d never kissed a boy, never enjoyed even a winking glance. In many ways I was as naïve as Oliver Twist, and would have loved to be taken in to Fagin’s den.

But Poisonwas a kind of revelation, a work that demonstrated that Haynes was perhaps more radical than I had previously perceived him to be. For in this 1991 film, the young director, born more than a decade later than I, perhaps took the melodramas far too seriously (I’ve also written an essay on how liberating some of life of the period truly was), yet in the era when AIDS was killing so many gay men, Poison, brilliantly interwove three different tales of alternate sexualities and their consequences. All end sadly, alas.

The first, presented in a kind of news-documentary manner, concerns a young 7-year old boy, Richie Beacon, who inexplicably killed his father and “flew out a window.". Yet we know that he must have been abused, either verbally for his sexuality or sexually attacked, and sought a revenge which no one in the community in which he lived might have imagined.

In the second tale, “Horror,” shot in the black-and-white shaky camera movements of a grade B horror movie, a kind of mix of Doctors Frankenstein and Jekyll, creates what might have been a wonderful discovery, worthy of display in the film Barbarella, of a way to turn the sex drive into liquid form. However, after swallowing a dose, he turns into, as film critic David Ansen describes him, a “pustule-dripping fiend,” described in the papers as the “Leper Sex Killer.” This, obviously, is a statement about how many saw AIDS, and the tragedy of his life is made even more evident when only a woman colleague can see any beauty in him.

The final strand owes a debt to the great gay author, Jean Genet, wherein a young man lusts after a fellow prisoner—although in this prison, as in Derek Jarman’s earlier (1971) soldier’s garrison in Sebastiane, where nearly everyone enjoys gay sex. I do feel that this final section, titled “Homo” is a bit over the top, creating what some critics described as an almost “designer prison.” But we can presume, surely, that some of these men have been imprisoned just for their sexual desires. And, although real sex is not depicted, in is the most homoerotic of the three pieces.

I remember the NEA attacks in those years. I was on a literary panel that I found absolutely disgusting, and my companion Howard had been on the art panel that awarded Andres Serrano’s 1987 Piss Christ a grant. An outcry in Congress, led mostly by Jesse Helms of North Carolina, resulted in grants being stripped from several performance artists and the cancelling of the Robert Mapplethorpe show at the Corcoran Museum of Art. The independent Washington Project for the Arts, led by Al Nodal (later head of arts for Los Angeles) and where Howard was Chairman of the Board, presented the show instead.

The “poison” was already in the government and society at large. At the American Publishers annual show that year, an assistant to then-chairman of the NEA John Frohnmayer hissed into my ear of how much damage Howard and I had done.

Given Frohnmayer’s and other’s lack of vision and support for the panels’ more controversial decisions, I refused to even apply for a NEA grant for my Sun & Moon Press, in those days a non-profit organization. I wrote letters to many of the Senators explaining my position, yet only Senator Diane Feinstein from Northern California wrote back, scolding me and insisting that she agreed with the spineless Frohnmayer.

I mention all of this only because in that poisoned atmosphere Haynes and his film was also involved. As critic Dennis Lim writes:

The heightened profile that came with the movie’s surprise

Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival —

combined with the early word on its frank depictions of gay

sex and the news that it had received a $25,000 completion

grant from the National Endowment for the Arts — turned

“Poison” into a target for right-wing leaders, including

Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Sight unseen,

conservative commentators who opposed public arts

financing labeled it pornography; one even called Mr.

Haynes “the Fellini of fellatio.”

Rev. Donald Wildmon, then head of the American Family Association went, as Ansen puts it:

went into in a rage. Upping the ante with characteristic imagination,

he denounced the movie for its "explicit porno scenes of homo-

sexuals involved in anal sex." While one of the film's three

interrelated stories, inspired by the writing of Jean Genet, involves

homoerotic passions in a 1940s prison, anyone rushing out to see

an explicit porno film is going to wonder what Wildmon's been

eating for breakfast.

Those were the days. And today…?

Even Frohnmayer spoke up in support of Haynes’ film. And the work quickly became, along with works before and simultaneous to it, Tom Kalin’s Swoon, Christopher Munch’s Hours and Times, and Gregg Araki’s Living End, as described by critic B. Ruby Rich as the “New Queer Cinema,” which gave audiences and other cinema makers such as Ira Sachs, a new way to perceive their situations.

I can’t say that I loved Haynes early film. There had already been much more before it that has never been documented. But I’ll surely credit its re-empowerment of what being gay, in those years of Reagan and later Bush, was. We were thrown to the wolves and saved ourselves through our own imaginations. As Freddie Mercury sang so very powerfully, “We are the champions.” At least those of us who survived. One of Haynes’ early boyfriends, James Lyons, who played in and edited Poison, died of AIDS in 2007.

Los Angeles, February 26, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

confusions of history

by Douglas Messerli

Ilja Ehrenburg (writer), G. W. Pabst (director) Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney) / 1927

There’s something about G. W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney that is so inexplicable that, after watching it the other day, I wanted to break open the Netflix return folder, which I’d sealed after watching, to see it all over again.

I didn’t, so my confusion and memory shall have to suffice—although I might argue that this is a film you might want to watch several times over.

That may be necessary, in part, because in this work Pabst combines to very many genres—an issue which those who have read several of my essays must know—greatly attracts me. But Pabst, in the movie, attempts to blend a kind of Eisenstein sensibility to what will later be described as an Hitchcockian populist detective story, along with various sentimentalist dramatic tropes of the day. If Jeanne (Édith Jéhanne) is a kind of ur-feminist, determined to fall in love with the Bolshevik, possible murderer (Andreas, played by Uno Henning) of her fatherAndré Ney (Eugen Jensen), a French diplomat and political observer.

With the death of her father both she and Andreas perceive that she must escape back to Paris to save her own life—and probably Andreas’ as well. But it is precisely here where this kind of dark Romeo and Juliet story gets confusing, as Jeanne is suddenly transposed back into a less black-and-white reality of values into a world out of Hollywood melodramas, including situations that will be later played out in deaf-mute/blind girl films such as Johnny Belinda (1948), Peeping Tom (1960), A Patch of Blue (1965), and Wait Until Dark (1967). Without explanation, Jeanne’s detective uncle’s blind daughter, Gabrille (Brigitte Helm) falls in love with the Andreas’s evil colleague, Khalibiev, set upon marrying her so that he might kill her and inherit her fortune.

Even further confusion sets in when Pabst and Russian writer Ilia Ehrenburg overlay their story with a truly Hitchcock-like tale of a stolen diamond that is swallowed by the family’s loving parrot—with shades, here, of the future James Bond entertainments.

As much fun as this silent-film Mulligan stew of stories is, it throws up too many barriers of logic for us to truly comprehend what is going on. Is this a love story, as its title suggests, a kind of muted horror film, a Soviet war story, a detective tale? We can never be certain—which is, obviously, also the film’s allure, and perhaps suggests Jeanne’s own confusion of what decision she ultimately needs to make.

Pabst brilliantly contributes to this mix of emotional indetermination by offering us very few intertitles, forcing us to find the clues of his cinema in the images themselves. Two fish wrapped in newspaper, a handkerchief intended for murder revealing the missing diamond and the guilt of its owner, and the simple vestiges of these not so-likeable beings all help contribute to a vision of a world, so typical of the Weimer Republic era of Germany, which force us to question all our values, as well as those of the film characters and film-maker himself. Fassbinder must surely have relied on this film in conceiving his great Alexanderplatz.

If, at moments, we love the feisty and independent-minded Jeanne in her determination of help and save her Bolshevik hero, we realize her naiveté, and her inability to perceive her own relationship with history. In her heart she remains a lover-secretary, without realizing the consequences of her political, or at least, social effects upon the society at large.

Los Angeles, March 7, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

I was reminded when seeing that Ilya Ehrenberg was the writer, based on his fiction of this piece was in the early years of the 21st century, that, after reaching out to several international authors for writings about other fiction writers, the great Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado had responded with a piece on Ehrenberg’s fictionThe Adventures of Julio Jurenito. Through these two figures I feel, once more, that I have touched history. That piece appears on my EXPLORINGfictions site.

the damned looking into paradise

by Douglas Messerli

Matt Tyrnauer (director) Studio 54 / 2018

I can’t imagine entering the magic doors of Studio 54 at the famed opening in 1977. Besides I was not in New York in those days and would—given my limited time in the city when I devoted my attention to theater and food—ever have found time to even try to get “into” that famed disco nightclub. I like dancing, but perhaps I am not as graceful (despite my 1969 studies at the Joffrey Ballet Company) as I might have once imagined. In a Brazil club, where the dancers moved with the only lower parts of the body, my pumping torso and hand movements looked perverse.

Finally, and most importantly, I am not a night person—at least I wasn’t one in the late 1970s, even if a decade before, when I did live for a year in Manhattan, I spent late hours in gay bars and participating in endless nighttime sex.

No, I watched Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary about that famed nightclub, located in the former Gallo Opera house on 254 West 54th Street, which also was used as a CBS studio years later, because I knew and had written about how my friend Charles Bernstein’s mother, Sherry, had been a club regular, dressing up in beautiful gowns and her famed John Pico Johns’ hats. When I first was told of her nightly ventures, Charles and his wife Susan admitted that they too had accompanied her a couple of times into the glorious halls where into so very few ordinaries were admitted. They described it as truly boring, as I imagine they might truly have perceived it, since their interests do not concern the drugs, sex, and generally revelry that characterized the activities of the place.

Sherry does not appear in this documentary, although many figures with whom she was photographed do, including her dear friend, Disco Sally (the former day-time lawyer, Sally Lippman [see My Year 2006]). Photographs with the Studio 54 celebrity denizens, which Sherry collected on the walls of two bedrooms in her Central Park West home, was clearly one of the major activities of owner’s Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager’s perks—and of course a publicity tool that made it clear that anyone of importance was attending their highly theatrical studio events.

Indeed, Studio 54 was not so much a disco bar—indeed Rubell and Schrager obtained an actual liquor license very late in the club’s existence, preferring to rely instead on a day-to-day catering permit that allowed them to serve liquor—as it was a grand theater experience in which anyone who got through the doors could participate. The waiters and barboys all appeared in white shorts only, and the dance floor was placed on what had been the stage. In the balconies people might watch, have sex, and do whatever else they might wish to.

If, at first, I might have dismissed this over-the-top, anything-goes club experience, I gradually began to perceive that these two gay men had, in fact, created a kind of gay-trans-heterosexual space that allowed for whatever one wanted to do, not so very dissimilar to the gay bars I had attended (without all the stars and hype) a decade earlier, when I night visited, not far from the now-revered small Stonewall bar, a big gay bar near the docks on the lower West Side, which contained a back room where, at a certain witching hour, everyone broke loose into a huge orgy of twisting and turning bodies. Anyone who was willing went along to do any kind of sexual act one might have imagined. I loved it. It was a far less theatrically-conceived version of Studio 54. No one there knew who anyone was (you just had to be good-looking or at least attractive to your neighbor) while in Studio 54 there were many well-known figures (not always so beautiful but gloriously famous) surrounded by the beautiful nobodies. For those within, everyone was equal; as one commentator put it, “we danced with the entire club.”

In short, what Rubell and Schrager were able to create was a kind of back room with not only lovely figures but celebrities, lights, music, dance, theater (most of the design and lighting had been created by theater people). You could be a grand dame voyeur as was Sherry, or a mad bacchante, or you could be, as the documentary voices speak in refrain, anything or anyone you wanted to be—if only you were blessed by entry.

As this film surmises, however, that issue, the permission or lack of entery, was one of the downfalls of this paradisiacal world. As Schrager puts it, those on the outside were the like the “damned looking into paradise.” And that hierarchy brought with it a smoldering hostility which ultimately worked against the Brooklyn gay friends who had made this hedonistic world possible.

There were numerous other problems: the drugs Rubell used to lure many of the celebrities in were so obvious that he often simply hid them in his coat.

The very fact of so much press coverage made authorities aware of how they had abandoned the liquor codes. And the vast amounts of money that they daily accumulating surely led the government to question their taxes.

These were the issues which ultimately led to the arrest of the two owners and their later imprisonment. That and the absurd procedures of one of the most horrific lawyers of all time, Roy Cohn, who led the Rosenberg’s to their death, supported Joseph McCarthy, and was also a personal mentor to now President Trump. He was a kind of monster which these Brooklyn boys should have stayed as far away from as they might. But then Cohn was gay, and, I suppose Rubell and Schrager were drawn to him for that very reason. His strategies, involving government officials who had attended the club, brought them into a world of which they were totally innocent, leading to even darker vengeance.

Perhaps even worse, was their timing. It might have been dangerous to attend such gay orgys, as I did, in the late 1960s. But by the late 1970s, hosting a huge gay-heterosexual orgy at the vast scale of Studio 54 was deadly: AIDs had already shown its ugly face. Both Cohn and Rubell died of it, as did many of the Studio 54 participants. The damned, those who might not be permitted entry, were perhaps saved by that very restriction.

It might be interesting to see how many of the Studio 54 participants are still live today. Some of the most famous patrons—Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams, Lou Reed, and so many others, have died for various reasons, many of them having to do with sex. Yet, even if Studio 54 may have been a special place to celebrate one’s personal identity, it also reflected a darker image upon the entire culture than this film seems to suggest.

I must, finally, admit, I too have been to Studio 54, now a theater again owned by Roundabout, where I saw, perhaps significantly, an excellent production of Waiting for Godot.

Los Angeles, March 9, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

i’ve decided to walk down the middle of the street

by Douglas Messerli

Jehane Noufaim El Midan (The Square) / 2013

During a year devoted to “Towers, Circles and Squares” I was delighted to come upon the 2013 film about the attempted Egyptian Revolution of 2011 at Tahrir Square, a documentary that I had never seen and had almost forgotten about. Netflix be praised.

Directed by Jehane Noujaim, with a score by H. Scott Salinas, and a large cast of young Egyptian men and women who were involved in the taking of that square (Ahmed Hassan, Dina Abdullah, Magdy Ashour, Sherif Boray, and Aida El-Kashef among them), this moving film recounts some of the events leading up to the idealistic revolution in which, as one participants notes, “the relationships [between the participants] are becoming very strong,” and, finally, that “There was no such thing as a Muslim or a Christian….We were all equal.”

You can see their caring determination in their faces, or, as one of the speakers declares: “We were looking for a conscience.” As they gather in Fahir Square, putting up tents, and declaring their presence, they declare that they will not leave until their demands are met.

There is a kind of electric energy that brings tears to one eyes as they make quite evident what historian Niall Ferguson has described in his work The Square and the Tower, the effects of networks against hierarchal governmental and other such structures.

These youths, however, describe the “tower” of Ferguson’s work instead as a “circle.” As one young man insists, before the revolution “The same circle, the same regime” ruled. “People went home, and nothing happened.” “At some point,” suggests one young protestor, “I’m going to explode!”

And explode they did, taking over the square as their own territory, their “due” in the society from which they have been locked out. For them, their acts were not merely a revolutionary position, it represented their own histories. “The square means we’ll tell our stories.”

Another warrior summarizes Tahir Square:

They want to suffocate us. The square was tough. The square was not

normal…It was war.

Yet, of course, like so many such revolutions, as profound as they might be for the protestors, Tahir Square ended in violence and dissolution.

“It was too much. Too many bullets.”

As one participant in the square laments, as if he were shouting the news in a telegraphic message of defeat: “2011 Square taken again. The Muslim Brotherhood take over the square, having negotiated with the army. The Brotherhood left us alone to be arrested.”

In utter defiance of new laws, he insists “I’ve decided to walk down the middle of street,” certain death in busy Cairo.

At another moment a revolutionary summarizes the situation: “You think you can do whatever you want? The members were beaten up…the square is empty.”

However, as A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote of this powerful work, "The Square, while it records the gruesome collision of utopian aspirations with cold political realities, is not a despairing film. It concludes on a note of resolve grounded in the acknowledgment that historical change can be a long, slow process."

As the same young person insists: “I’m going to continue to expose them.”

Whether or not that is truly possible, only time will tell. And will these then youths, ever be able to see the changes they fought for within their lifetimes?

Yet these young people who for a moment changed the history of their nation, still have their memories of those moments, and surely will, in telling their histories to others, instill hope for future changes.

Noujaim’s straightforward telling of this tale is part of that history. His subjects are the true focus of this work; I have seldom seen a documentary truly proclaim its own generic possibilities: the ability to “document” (to present a “lesson,” “example,” or “proof”) as in this film. There is no veneer of fiction here. Through this work’s images and voices we see both the excitement and horror of the events, reminding me a bit of the kind fervor many of those in my generation felt when we took to the streets to speak out against our government and the Viet Nam War. We too marched around a square—in Madison, Wisconsin the State Capitol was surrounded by four streets that spanned the Capitol Square. And we too were chased and attacked by police, a few of us, as in Bowling Green actually losing their lives.

Yet, of course, most of us personally had not suffered for all of our lives, and except for those killed, we were not tortured or electrocuted, even if a few went temporarily to jail. In a sense the comparisons are frail. For these young men and women challenged a powerful tower of a regime. Calling attention to the square, they shook that tower to its core, it responding with an even more terrifyingly hierarchal punishment from which Egypt has yet to be released.

Perhaps Noufaim’s El-Midan should be required viewing in any political science course in universities across our country so that we too might perceive what it means to walk down the middle of the street.

Los Angeles, March 11, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

the letter my father wrote

by Douglas Messerli

Mag Hsu, Shih-yuan Lu (writers), Chih-Yen Hsu and Mag Hsu (directors) 誰先愛上他的(Dear Ex), 2018

Chih-Yen Hsu and Mag Hsu’s original film for Netflix, Dear Ex, spins out its tale in a rather simplistic plot, but through small complications, mostly centered around the discoveries of a young 13-year old, Chengxi (Joseph Huang), turns this film into a far more complex study in family relationships.

The movie begins with the Medea-like anger of Chengxi’s mother Sanlian (Hsieh Ying-hsuan), having just discovered that her former husband, Song Zheng Yuan (Chen Ru-shan) has died, leaving his insurance policy entirely to his gay lover, Jay (Roy Chiu) instead as she has hoped would be left to her son for his education.

Try as hard as she might, however, Chengxi, it appears, is not a great student, and is simply frustrated by all adults, particularly his shrill-voiced mother, but by his father as well who abandoned his mother before he was even born. All adults are the problem, he declares, doodling over their on-screen images in a process of teen erasure. At one point during the early battle between his mother and Jay, who unnecessarily taunts the “ex” by calling her Auntie, Chengxi seems to threaten suicide as straddles a high balcony protective barrier.

When Jay pulls him inside to safety, he determines, against his mother’s screams of horror, to abandon his own home to join Jay, who dresses in campy clothes and works as a theater director-actor. Even the boy’s escape from home, however, leads to Sanlian’s intrusions upon his life, as she shows up to make sure her boy is getting to school on time and receiving enough nutrition. While she prefers what Jay calls grass, he eats carry-in fast foods.

Even though Jay perceives that, whether he likes it or not, he is not Chengxi’s “father” or, perhaps, as he jokes, his “step-mom,” he is no more pleased in having to now be responsible for the boy than Sanlian is for Chengxi’s absence and shift of affections. To her, surely, it must appear that she has now been abandoned by both males she has loved and attempted to nurture.

Yes, as The New York Times Karen Han observed, the film often borders and melodrama and, I might add, skirts at the edge of farce. Yet, fortunately, the sparks that fly between Yuan’s ex-wife and his male lover create a kind of furnace for Chengxi, a furor of thought, in which he gradually perceives that all the adults involved, in essence, loved him and one another.

It may be a rather clumsy device to present important scenes from the past in flash-backs, none of which the young boy could possibly have observed, but it does gradually reveal his perceptions, as he discovers that his father, upon realizing, as it puts it, that he simply “loves men,” did not leave Sanlian out of anger or hatred; that Sanlian had desperately sought to keep Yuan close to her; and, most importantly, that Yuan left his insurance policy to Jay because his lover had scraped together his own funds and money he borrowed to pay for Yuan’s cancer treatments.

Despite their hate for one another, the “ex” and the lover do often function as an odd couple in their attempts to parent the troubled boy.

When, finally, Chengxi reads a letter left for him by his dead father, he is encouraged by Jay to return home, where, despite the overprotective nurturing of his mother, he will more certainly thrive than living on Jay’s couch and eating whatever fast food the man brings home for dinner.

This film, finally, is not remarkably profound. It does not answer the early angst that Chengxi feels. But we do surmise the slow revelations he has made might help him in the future. And we do realize that, if nothing else, his two parental opposites have moved ever so slightly closer.

We are not quite told what exists in that last letter he father wrote, but it is clearly a gift for the healing of the 13-year-old, a recognition that love is never simple and often leads to what others might even perceive as a kind of hate. In the end, one has to accept love on its own terms rather than what one might imagine it to be.

Los Angeles, March 12, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

marching into farce

by Douglas Messerli

Laura Jones (screenplay), Jane Campion (director) The Portrait of a Lady / 1997

Watching Jane Campion’s film version of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady yesterday, I suddenly wondered whether or not I had really read the book years earlier, a novel I truly loved. So unsure was I that I quickly checked with the often-unreliable Wikipedia entry to simply re-confirm the plot. Roger Ebert was correct, the plot was basically the same, even if Campion determined to recontextualize the James work within a feminist perspective, a strange thing since if you read James intelligently, the work is already an early feminist masterwork.

Although Ebert felt the acting was quite excellent, I was equally appalled by the Australian-born Nicole Kidman (as the heroine Isabel Archer) playing an American who often pretends she might be British. Barbara Hershey, the usually excellent actress, playing Madame Merle, as an American émigré ineffectually portraying a Rome-living continental. The script by Laura Jones renders James’ involuted and thoughtful sentences into bits of arch dialogue that appears straight out of a kind of comic-theater version of turn-of-the-century wit.

Everything seemed to me like a klutzy vision of what the supposedly beautiful Isabelle Archer—Kidman’s vision was certainly lovely, but hardly worthy of the attentions of all the men, Lord Warburton (Richard E. Grant), her cousin Ralph (Martin Donovan), a beautifully wasted man, and others who long for her. That she chooses the totally despicable and unappealing Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich) reveals that this seemingly independent woman is not only stubbornly willful but utterly stupid. Naivété is just fine, but utter ignorance, which this film projects, makes for a most unpleasant or, at least, uninteresting heroine.

No matter how much we might admire Isabel’s sense of independence and her desire to seek out the world into which she has suddenly been projected by both her supposed beauty and sudden wealth, it is hard to sympathize with Campion’s vision of her, as she turns away, one by one, all the men she should have married for the most odious version of the male species. As Ebert also asks:

Why, for example, does Isabel marry Osmond? In the novel

there is no mystery. He is an Artist--able to pose, at least during

their courtship, as a man who lives on a higher plane. In Campion's

film, Osmond is never allowed the slightest plausibility. Malkovich

plays him as a snaky, sinister poseur, tobacco smoke coiling past

his hooded eyes. The crucial distinction is: In the novel, Isabel

marries him because she is an idealist, but in the movie because she

is a masochist.

No matter how one perceives Isabel’s stubborn eccentricities, we nonetheless know she is desperately unhappy in her marriage with Osmond, and we cannot help but admire her love of Osmond’s daughter, Pansy, who is actually Madame Merle’s daughter—perhaps through a sextual tryst with Osmond or another of her evil lovers. But even here, the Campion feminist does not truly speak out to demand that Osmond permit the girl to marry her beloved young art collector, but rather suddenly bows out of the situation in order to visit her beloved cousin, Ralph, who is now dying—the man whom, unknowingly to her, is behind her sudden wealth.

If Campion’s Isabelle is to be seen as a feminist heroine, we might better look to James’ version, where a high-minded and idealist figure chooses to embrace life instead, as in this film, to embrace death and pose in grief in a typically brutal marriage that allows her no out.

The Isabelle Archer who I knew from the novel, was an amazingly beautiful figure who floated through innocence through a world for which she was simply unprepared but came to comprehend herself through that terrible process.

This Isabelle storms through the barriers without truly perceiving why she has gotten there. Whether or not she comes back as a servant to Osmond and a savior to Pansy hardly matters. She is so unreliable that, in the end, we hardly care whether she returns to her far superior lover, Lord Warburton. Campion and her actors (including Shelly Winters as the impossible to perceive wife of John Gielgud) turns this work from a remarkable psychological portrait into a ridiculous march into farce.

Los Angeles, March 14, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

when worlds collide

by Douglas Messerli

Sridhar Rangayan and Saagar Gupta (screenplay), Sridhar Rangayan (director) Evening Shadows / 2018, 2019

Although Hindi cinema has had several gay films, including works by director Sridhar Rangayan, this director’s most recent film, Evening Shadows, now available on Netflix, is perhaps one of the most nuanced and relevant of LGBT Indian films—particularly given the fact that it speaks contemporaneously of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes homosexual acts.

More importantly, this film, through its focus on a rather well-to-do conservative Hindu family in southern India, reveals the effects of patriarchal privilege and misogynistic behavior that underlines much of the culture.

Our point of view is through the eyes of a young gay man, Karthik (Devansh Doshi), a photographer living with his gay companion, Aman, in Mumbai; Karthik has returned home for a visit for a holy puja ceremony, which involves songs, rituals, prayers, and invocations to the god, often involving fire and special objects. It is clear Karthik does not often visit his birth home, and his mother Vasudha (Mona Ambegaonkar), particularly, is excited about her beloved son’s return.

Karthik’s father Damodar (Anant Mahadevan) is also impatient for his son’s return—but for reasons very different from those of his maltreated wife, a woman expected to do all the cooking, care for the selfish live-in aunt, and attend to all the details of the puja; he has planned the occasion to announce the arranged marriage to a local girl, Neela (Disha Thakur),with whom Karthik has grown up. It is time to come home, he announces, and find a real job in business—photography in his mind obviously not being a true “business.”

This film, in short, is a mini-version of “When Worlds Collide,” as Karthik is forced, quite gracefully, to bow out of the proposed marriage with his beautiful young neighbor, calm his anxious lover back in Mumbai (who apparently is highly involved with the politics of the Section 377 decision) and pay the attention to his loving mother that she deserves. On top of that, he has a married uncle, in the closet about his sexual identity, hotly pursuing him. He calms his ineffectual aunt by taking photographs of her which she might post on a dating web-site. This might have been pure farce, but Rangayan calmly puts the pieces together so that we can easily differentiate the loving and generous life Karthik leads in Mumbai from the conservative, over-heated, often hostile world—particularly for the women—of Karnataka.

We perceive that world, the society in which Karthik grew up, in small, carefully edited flashbacks and poignant memories. There are many lovely scenes in which the young Karthik works in the kitchen with his mother—while the father mocks their closeness—when the young boy, visiting in the “evening shadows” a local cruising place, where he encounters, unexpectedly his uncle, realizing that the man is also gay, and when he recovers a “treasure” he has buried as a young adolescent—a container with pictures of handsome young men and male movie stars. Through these artfully directed throwbacks, we come to comprehend that Karthik’s sexuality has not been a sudden awakening in the big city, but a gradual realization of who he was in a cultural backwater.

It’s odd how much Karnataka and my upbringing in Marion, Iowa have similar parallels. I had no gay uncle, and my father was never intentionally misogynistic. Yet Damodar’s utter hatred for gays and lesbians reminded me so much of my own father. Even an innocent question, as I mention elsewhere in the My Year volumes, about homosexuality before I had imagined myself as gay, brought down a torrent of wrath that I could not even assimilate. The culture that supported both had a conservative religious bond from which, like Karthik, I too had to escape in order to survive. After I met my companion, visits home also grew fewer and fewer. Although eventually loved by my parents and my grandmother, Howard seldom opted for a visit. I don’t have a cell-phone, but my intense calls to Howard during my stays must have seemed like a kind of male hysteria.

Karthik handles it all with much more calm and helps Vasudha, through a trip with her alone to Indian archeological sites at Talkad, to perceive the abuse she has had to endure. But when he finally admits to her that he is gay, she goes into temporary shock, crying, moving into silence and shunning the boy she so intensely loves.

But like many such mothers, she finally comes into a kind of acceptance, and in so doing recognizes the narrow patriarchal world in which she too has had to allow in order to love the unloving husband. When Karthik’s uncle tries to rape him, his wife enters, observing his own version of male rites. Surely their relationship, despite their children, cannot now survive.

In the empty house where Damodar rules, he accidently uncovers pictures from his son’s computer that make it clear about Karthik’s sexuality.

Fortunately, the director does not follow that discovery. It is Karthik’s mother who will now steer the family into the acceptance of her son’s difference.

I should add that this film, at moments, with its many beautiful songs, seems almost like a Bollywood version of a tense gay drama. So much the better. We should sing of the joys of motherhood, of sexuality, of living as we all naturally should.

The shadows may remain, but evenings are filled with joy and, now perhaps, a new kind of understanding—or at least comprehension. The whispers and secret troves can now be spoken and opened for all to see. Damodar no longer rules.

With good reason, this film won several awards at queer movie festivals throughout the world.

Los Angeles, March 17, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

eating the screen

by Douglas Messerli

Jacques Richard (director) Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque / 2005

How to describe the rotund Henri Langlois? He was a kind of genius, perceiving, with-founder Georges Franju, far earlier than other archivists, just how important it was to save older films, particularly “lost” silent films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He was a showman who introduced older films to many French directors, particularly those of the New Wave such as Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, as well as later celebrating their work. He was a kind of cultural hero, saving hundreds, if not thousands, of cultural artifacts from destruction by the Nazis during World War II. Actress Simone Signoret reveals that she helped transport the illegal films in a baby carriage.

Langlois clearly was a kind of charmer, finding finances for his cinémathèque from the most unlikely of sources. And through his regular film screenings, sometimes presenting as many as three showings each night, he might be described as a remarkable educator of an entire generation of film-lovers.

Yet director Jacques Richard’s documentary also reveals him to be a kind of cultural glutton without the real abilities, desire, or talents to create the cinema he so loved. And French governmental authorities, when finally determined to help fund the organization he had created, found him to be a terrible businessman without proper records and budgetary skills.

Richard presents this information and much else through the incredible gathering of at least 80 talking heads from Georges Melies’ granddaughter to Pierre Cardin and Alfred Hitchcock. So many voices shot usually head-on does not itself make for great cinematic viewing. But fortunately Richard intersperses these discussants with brief clips from many of the greatest films Langlois collected along with numerous still and video images of the archivist himself.

As the reviewer from Variety, Todd McCarthy summarizes:

In other words, Richard has filled his 3½ hours with

enormously diverse material that meshes to create a

picture of the man that is satisfying on both the intellectual

and human planes. For anyone with a pre-existing interest

the subject, absorption in the film is so total that the time

passes in a flash; for younger viewers who find their

way to it, pic represents the ultimate illustration of what

devotion to the cinema means, and incidentally underlines

the individual obsession that initiated the now-widespread

effort to preserve the history of the cinema.

Despite the informative value of Richard’s film, however, I felt that, in the end, I would rather have attended the cinémathèque itself rather watch this documentary about it, and it might have been far more interesting, I suspect, instead of simply reporting what Langlois achieved—as significant as

that was—why he chose to collect film, particularly films of the past; what led this man to become a sort of state librarian to cinema art? Moreover, since he espoused the idea that all films of equal interest, since they revealed the life of the times, why did he let a film starring Theda Bara escape his hands? What criteria did Langlois have for inclusion? And how did he convince so many people not so very committed to film of the past to finance his purchases.

Since this was a “collection,” one wonders what he didn’t collect among the 80,000 titles of the cinémathèque? Did he include documentaries such as this one, cartoons, media, highly experimental works such Stan Brakhage? How did he organize them or decide each evening what films he might show?

Finally, I might ask one of the most important of questions that never truly gets discussed. Did the collector actually comprehend the thousands of films and could he write coherently about them? As a film reviewer, I feel this is one of the most important of questions. It’s clear that Langlois loved the genre and had a fairly discerning sense of what might be significant. Yet Richard gives us little idea about how the collector/archivist saw in the thousands of films he gathered.

Chabrol does not discuss any conversations he had with Langlois, for instance, but only wonders what the corpulent Langlois and his equally plump partner, Mary Meerson, might had done in bed: “I tried to imagine them in frenzied copulation, but … .”

If nothing else, Langlois had an enormous appetite not only for food but for “eating the screen.”

Los Angeles, March 18, 2019

Reprilnted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

when home is not where the heart is

by Douglas Messerli

Tanuj Bhrama (writer and director) Dear Dad / 2016

As the reviewer Subhash K. Jha begins his piece in the Hindustan Times about the 2016 film, Dear Dad:

It takes a whole lot of guts to make a film on alternate

sexuality in India, especially when you are a first-time

director. Tanuj Bhrama has pushed the envelope out of

the closet as far as possible. And then some.

We learn almost from the very beginning of this film that the central character, Nitin Swaminathan (Arvin Swamy), married with a son and daughter, has recently come out to his wife as a gay man and that she is seeking a divorce. She, quite rightfully insists, that Nitin also explain the situation to her son, Shivum (Himanshu Sharma); so begins a road-trip drama to Mussourie and other Indian nature spots that is not so very dissimilar from the journey the gay figure of Evening Shadows takes with his mother. And, like that film, the central purpose of the trip is reveal and explain his homosexuality, which in both cases ends at first in confusion and anger before final assimilation.

Yet, unlike Rangayan’s lean telling, wherein he reveals the love the hero and his friend feel for one another, Bhrama’s Dear Dad has little to do with sex—Nitin is single and apparently has no lover, nor do we get a glimpse at his sexual preferences, although he does mention that he is not attracted to “all men.”—so that the film becomes a statement of the father and son relationship more that it is a gay film.

If the movie represents, at first, Shivum as a fairly typical self-obsessed kid, far more interested in his cellphone and a “celebrity” (Aman Uppal) whom he spots at a local restaurant (requesting a signature), it suddenly shifts when the two stop by Nitin’s parents. There his overly-loving mother greets Nitin and Shivum with joy; but it is the sad empty relationship between Nitin and his dementia-inflicted father that provides deeper psychological perceptions.

While Shivum seems mostly bored in the company of his father, Nitin quickly leaves the arms of his loving mother to attend to the old man, who has been left in the yard with shaving lotion pasted across his face, apparently awaiting his daily shave from his wife. It is an almost a surreal scene, as Nitin takes up the razor—hinting at both true love and perhaps a little hate—to accomplish the task of shaving his father. During the gentle scrapes of the razor he explains, knowing the father will comprehend very little of what he is saying, that he is a gay man. The camera focusing on the older father and son, however, gradually pans away, revealing that Shivum has overheard the conversation.

Through this device, quite early in the work, Bhrama sucks almost all the expected drama out of his cinema, while for the rest of the film the focus shifts to the hurt and angered son who must suddenly come to terms with a father who he has never truly known.

The only bit of drama, other than the son’s growing angst, is provided by the fact that the duo again encounter the “celebrity” (we’re never truly told why he is famous) along the road, hitchhiking, Shivum insisting that they give him a lift, if no other reason than to put another being between the intensity of his father and him.

The two, father and “celebrity” even share a bedroom—hinting even that the easy-going and quite accepting “guest,” could have shared Nitin’s bed. Yet Bhrama does not suggest any sexual actions, and the “celebrity” expresses a kind of standard “heterosexual trope”: “But you’re married, with kids!” So too was the hero’s uncle in Evening Shadows.

However, it is the “celebrity” who, after Shivum has fed his father something to make him very ill, who nurtures Nitin to health again and who advises the boy that he must accept his father for who he is, admitting that he too left his father out of hatred, and hasn’t been home in 15 years. By film’s end, we recognize that his journey has been one to see his family again.

Shivum moves on to his boarding school, still harboring anger that “things can no longer be the way they were.” He, so a pop song proclaims must still grow up and “learn to fly.” Which he eventually does, winning top honors in mathematics in his school.

For the honors celebration, his mother, with her new lover (“Isn’t he a bit old?” asks Nitin; “Well at least he’s straight,” she quips. “Ouch,” is his response); but the loving Nitin, after a long emotional scrapbook of images from Shivum’s and his close relationship years earlier, does unexpectedly show up to congratulate his son, who finally is able give him the inevitable hugging forgiveness.

If this is not a great queer film, it is an important one simply because within a very homophobic culture it takes a different trajectory, exploring a married adult coming out—with all the numerous issues that decision represents—as opposed to the more common young man coming out to his parents or to himself. Yet there seems to be something missing here, particularly when Shivum asks his father, near the end of the movie, “are you going home?”

The film might truly have explored this question further. For a man who has had to abandon everyone and everything in order to no longer live a “false life,” where is home? Clearly for such an individual, “home is not where the heart is,” but in a larger world of possibility and desire. It is quite clear that for Nitin his love lies with his son and younger daughter. But his access to them will now be limited, and his ability to show that love or any love will lead to constant searching.

Yes, this is a brave film, a work that truly explores what is next in mid-life after you made a major decision to change your lies into truth. Where do you go from there, and how to obtain whatever dreams or even illusions are left?

And for those left behind, well patriarchal relationships, as this film makes clear, are always so far more difficult that matriarchal ones. Just ask Freud.

Los Angeles, March 19, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

the beautiful neglected son

by Douglas Messerli

Paul Osborn (screenwriter, based on the novel by John Steinbeck), Elia Kaza (director) East of Eden, 1955

It had been decades since I last watched East of Eden, and I wouldn’t probably have watched it the other day had it not been that I found little of interest on the live stream of Netflix that I hadn’t already seen. I’ve never been a great fan of Steinbeck (although I do love the movie version of his The Grapes of Wrath). Screenwriter Paul Osborn, moreover—although having written one of my favorite stage plays, Morning’s at Seven—is better known for his overwrought and/or sentimental adaptations of works such Wild River, Sayonara, Point of No Return, and his own The World of Suzie Wong. As a young man I saw all these films in the movie theaters, and even back then felt that they were sexist and somewhat racist.

I recalled East of Eden, furthermore, as an angst-driven drama wherein the young “hero,” Caleb Trask (James Dean), spends most of the time pouting as the black sheep outsider of his family, which includes his far-too-righteous and religious thumping father, Adam (Raymond Massey), and his “goodie-two-shoes” brother Aron (Richard Davalos), along with Aron’s fiancée Abra Bacon (the wonderful Julie Harris).

The film’s melodramatic feeling is also supported by a score, complete with an overture by Leonard Rosenman, hinting at the work’s operatic qualities. Actually, I think this work would make a wonderful opera and hope some younger experimental composer will take up the challenge.

Like many of the 1950s films, it seemed far too melodramatic for what the narrative provided, in this case a thinly veiled updating of the biblical Cain and Abel story. Even this time around, after having much more sympathy for the seemingly outcast Cal and even more pleasure in simply watching the beautiful Dean perform the role, I still couldn’t quite believe in his tears and poundings—although this time he reminded me more of myself at his age, faced with feelings of frustration and helplessness.

But my mother was a saint compared with the would-be murderess (Jo Van Fleet, who reportedly shot her husband before running off from their home and leaving her two boys to be raised by Adam alone) now a madame of not one but two houses of prostitution in the outskirts of Monterey Bay, a short ways from where Cal has grown up in Salinas. Obviously, she was not a happy woman in Adam’s would-be Edenic home. We get a wonderful sense of this from the local sheriff played by Burl Ives.

Looking back on it, living with a hard-working housekeeper and a kind and generous father, my life was the real melodrama of my own making. Perhaps it is just that Dean, a feast for the eyes, had not yet found how to act with any great subtlety. Kazan’s direction and Osborn’s script certainly gave him a great deal of slack.

Some of these acting “ticks” were quite brilliant, as when, forced to read a Bible passage about guilt and forgiveness, Cal names the passage numbers again and again, even when told by his father to leave them out of his recitation. And his slumping stalk of his prostitute mother is absolutely perfect. Despite the delirious hoots of one of Kate’s prostitutes—she shouts out “Hey, Pretty Boy,” a standard description of gay boys throughout history—Cal is too shy and intimidated to actually visit his mother and discover the truth.

On his return home, he uses his sweater almost as a kind of shroud to protect himself what he knows is reality. And, later, his first illicit kiss with Abra—who has previously been terrified of the younger boy and now, discovering his personal dilemmas, almost falls in love with him—is beautiful, as Dean reveals a kid who simply wants to please, to become a kind of blessed figure as his brother is to his father and his fiancée.

Yet, he and we know he is not blessed, nor will he ever be, even after his father’s projected business—shipping refrigerated vegetables for the West to the East—bankrupts him, and Cal, raising beans with a loan from his estranged mother, makes back the money. For one moment, knowing that he has finally become a successful farmer, Dean dances through the bean fields in a kind of manic whoop of victory. But Adam finds the money, gained from profiting on the nation’s needs of World War I, to be ill-gotten and rejects it. The gift he planned for his father’s birthday is utterly rejected, while Aron’s sudden announcement that he is marrying Abra receives the beneficent joy of the elder.

It is not, as Cal believes, that he is truly bad, simply that, in his father’s eyes, he, reminded of his once-beautiful mother, cannot accept him. And, in this sense, he has ousted Cal from any possibility of normality. It used to be thought that parental relationships had a great deal to do with homosexuality and lesbianism. Perhaps they do play a part, although it is now pretty evident that one is simply born with another sexual inclination. But if there ever was any truth to this Freudian concept, it is clear that Adam has turned his son not just into an “outsider,” but a pretty boy, someone who cannot be with women, since they will always remind him of his “evil” mother—and his societally evil self.

The rumors of Dean’s homosexual relationships are extensive, and it has become apparent that, if not truly gay, he bedded down with many homosexual men, perhaps including Marlon Brando and Rock Hudson. Many other gays have claimed to have sex with him, imaginary or real.

Kazan’s film does not outwardly express this, but in my reading this Cain is damned only because of his special beauty and his inability to live within the organized society his father demands. In Steinbeck’s work Cal kills his brother not with a stone or a knife but by luring him, like a kind of male Eve, to visit their mother, forcing his brother to face a truth has been unable to conceive. One might almost imagine such an act to carry with it some justice; but it is, in fact, an act of vengeance for Cal’s inability to join what his society determines is the natural course of maturation. Cal is still a troubled child who may never be able to define what it means to be a male adult in his world.

In reaction, Aron rushes off to war where, he can only imagine, he will die, forcing Cal to be even more of an outcast to this society.

The original and the film attempt to ameliorate this possibility by employing a truly sentimental trope: Abra pleading with the now dying Adam to allow his son entry into his love. Adam dismisses his nurse (an uncredited Barbara Baxley) to allow his son to attend to his dying.

This was precisely the role I played during my father’s death, I the bad boy who had come home to care for the grand patriarch (see My Year 2002). Even if Abra remains to share her love for Cal, we sense that Cal, given what he has done to his brother, will never truly be able to accept it. He is now a wounded figure, a boy begging, far too late, for his father’s reluctant love.

Los Angeles, March 21, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

the right person in the wrong place

by Douglas Messerli

Ritesh Batra and Rutvik Oza (writers), Ritesh Batra (director) Dabba (The Lunchbox) / 2013, USA 2014

The 2013 Indian film The Lunchbox is a likeable film that grew out of an idea of director Ritesh Batra to do a documentary on the famous lunchbox delivery system of Mumbai, where lunches, cooked by wives and restaurants, are regularly delivered just before lunch by dabbawala, highly efficient street-runners who deliver up the lunches to office workers throughout the city.

Spending time with the dabbawala, however, Batra began to hear tales and personal stories that, apparently recounted errors and mistakes in the system, which helped the director reconceive his tale in the form of an epistolary cinema, in which one morning, suddenly without explanation, a senior worker, Saajan Fernadez (Irrfan Khan), a widower about to retire, is delivered the wrong food. Instead of the standard cauliflower-based, over-salted cooking of the restaurant from which orders his meals, he receives a deliciously-flavored series of dishes cooked by a young married woman, Ila (the beautiful Nimrat Kaur). Ila and her husband, incidentally, are not getting on so well, even though they share a young daughter, and when the pack of lunch dishes is returned completely licked clean, and Ila’s husband describes his lunch as “good enough,” she realizes that her special lunch—concocted with special ingredients and suggestions by Ila’s aunt, who lives above them—has gone astray.

The next morning, after cooking an even more special lunch, she adds a note, explaining the mixup, and thus begins a series of short letters, at first just filled with bits of information and advice, but gradually opening up, particularly in the case of Ila, to reveal aspects of personal life. Before each of them know it, their daily correspondence has grown into a kind of intimate conversation, in which Saajan reveals his loneliness, as Ila admits that it appears that her husband, Rajiv (Nakul Vaid) is having an affair.

To reiterate the changes going on in the mind of the less loquacious Saajan, the writers and director introduce a likeable if inept future replacement for Saajan and his job, a young man Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who is ready to please his trainer and in love with a young woman whom he is about to marry. He is also a good cook. Yet, at first, Saajan entirely ignores him, refusing to teach him or train him in the job. After a few days, however, Skaikh’s eager face and Saajan’s increasing pleasure and even slightly exciting sexual correspondence, opens him up to actually listen (in both Hindu and English) to the young man’s hopes and own joy of life. Bit by bit, he allows Skaikh to take over some of his duties—all of which ends disastrously, when it is discovered that, after long years of spotless bookkeeping, the files have gone terribly awry. Refusing to blame Skaikh, however, Saajan corrects the books and even accepts the orphan Skaikh’s request to stand as his witness in Skaikh’s marriage to his young lover.

As Ila’s hospitalized father dies, and her husband continues to distance herself from her, the epistolary relationship between her secret food lover and her becomes even more important in her life, and, finally, she requests to meet him in one of her favorite restaurants. Sadly, Saajan fails to show up, and the next morning she sends him am empty food box which, when returned that afternoon, explains that he had, indeed, been there, but that, when he saw the beautiful young woman before him, he realized that as an older man closing down his life, it would be wrong to continue such an illicit relationship. The tender missles of Ila had deluded him into believing, for a short while, that he was young again.

Determining to meet him, nonetheless, Ila drills the dabbawala, insisting that he has been delivering to the wrong man, and tracks Saajan to his office, only to be told that he has quit his job and moved to Nashik.

In the very next scene, Saajan returns to Mumbai, now determined to seek out Ila; Ila, almost as in an O. Henry story, has, in turn, sold her jewelry and moved with her daughter to Bhutan, a location which Saajan had previously suggested to where they might escape. Whether these two lonely and lovely souls ever do find each other, we never know. But we can presume, by the tone of this soulful “comedic” work, that neither of them will ever hook up with each other, and what might have been at first perceived as a light-hearted “mix-up” has been transformed into a serenade of lost opportunities and love.

Perhaps that most poignant aspect of Batra’s film, at least for me, is the fact that the over eager and incompetent, men and women like Shaikh and his young wife, as well as Ila’s philandering husband Rajiv, all find love and live life quite fully, while the honest, capable, and truly nurturing figures such as Ila and Saajan are left on the outside, lonely and joyless, a theme reiterated through the film as night after night, Saajan is seen quietly drinking and smoking upon his balcony as he looks down, almost like a voyeur, upon a family enjoying their joyous dinner below. Ila too, in her daily chores of cooking and washing, seems completely isolated from world around her, despite Mumbai’s busy streets, a woman, whom we fear, may turn out like her Auntie, trapped in her room by a man who stares incessantly at a ceiling fan, she forced to change his diapers. It is almost as if their competence and special gifts keep them from enjoying the fruits of their behaviors. To give freely of oneself does not mean that the world will give anything back. All one can do is to continue to true to one’s own nature, and perhaps even the recognition that someone once noticed those special qualities is all the reward one can expect. Perhaps the dabbawala, who defensively argues that there can have been no mistake in his delivery, has handed up Ila’s lunchbox to right person, after all, while putting it down in the wrong place.

Los Angeles, March 19, 2014

Reprinted from Nth Position (April 2014).

three indian gay films

swimming back to life

Onir (screenplay, story, and director) My Brother…Nikhil / 2005

For either budgetary reasons or, perhaps, the sudden hiring of a gay programming wizard fresh out of India, Neflix (god bless them) have suddenly issued on the live-streaming venue several new gay Indian films, movies that got made despite the restrictions of Indian censors and, even more importantly, the homophobic aspects of that culture.

Onir’s My Brother…Nikhil, the earliest of 3 films I saw in the past few days (from 2005), is surely the most emotionally wrought and the harshest in its critical evaluation of India’s anti-LGBTQ attitudes. For in this film, a strapping young champion swimmer suddenly is diagnosed with an HIV infection and thrown into the nightmare of early (late 1980s and early 1990s) hysteria about what people then described as the “gay” disease.

Nikhil, although asked whether or not he has been having sex with women prostitutes, is also almost immediately accused of being a homosexual. He secretly is gay, an Indian reality that is explored in all of the three films I saw. Being closeted is also terribly destructive in this culture.

Not only is Nikhil Kapoor (Sanjay Suri) immediately isolated from his former swimming colleagues (when he attempts to return the pool all others immediately remove themselves from the water), but he is virtually arrested, taken away from any contact from his family, his father Navin (Victor Banerjee) and his loving mother Anita (Lilette Debey), and is thrown into a lockdown rat-infested room with no proper necessities. Goa, where this movie takes place, represents the capitalist tendencies of its former Portuguese rulers. Here Nikhil is not even permitted a phone call to his now-alienated family.

Fortunately, in this film, Nikhil has three individuals who care enough to find him and seek for his recovery back into the society: his handsome lover Nigel D’Costa (Purab Kohli), his beloved sister Anamika (Juhi Chawla), and her boyfriend, Sam Fernandez (Gautam Kapoor), who hire a lawyer to release him from the horrible imprisonment and work to help make people perceive that AIDS is not an outwardly communicable or a singularly gay disease.

The pain of this almost complete isolation from the lovely world in which he has grown up—in a beautiful Goa home with a loving family around him—makes it quite clear how almost anyone in this period, suddenly diagnosed as HIV-positive, was shaken from everything he or she had previously known, the ability to be who they had been, the ability to love, and, most importantly, the inability to be loved. Fortunately, Nikhil has the trio of individuals who fight for him, despite the fact that both he and they know it is a terrible downhill battle. Even the lawyer warns them of the ostracization they will surely face.

It’s odd (one of my ongoing coincidences) that the day before I had seen Kurosawa’s 1946 film No Regrets for Our Youth, in which an entire family was similarly rejected because a son, opposing the rise of Fascism, was accused as being a spy. That film was based on a true story, as was this one, recalling the life ofDominic d'Souza. But Onir was forced by Indian censors to disclaim the reality of the work simply so that he might get this movie approved.

Perhaps the history of the film is even worse than what that film depicts. But it is, nevertheless, a brave project, although often sentimental, that reveals what happened the earliest of AIDS victims.

Onir, quite brilliantly, turns his film into a direct encounter with its audiences by having the characters speaking, quite often, directly to camera, recounting their own memories and, most importantly, their regrets for not having acted more forcibly to help create the changes needed to accept their loved ones. The statements of Nikhail’s mother, wherein she recognizes how she should have spoken out against her husband’s prejudices, are particularly moving.

What can any of us say? In those days, the 1990s and even earlier, the entire culture didn’t know what to do with those who suddenly were dying and wasting away, who were marked by terrible bruises on their faces, welts across their bodies, stomachs that no longer could allow them sustenance.

At least in this Bollywood version, there is a lot of plaintive singing, a longing to be whole again, an empty desire to rejoin the society from which they have almost inexplicably been ousted.

Fortunately, as in Tony Kushner’s great duo of dramas, Nikhail has angels—lover, sister, friend—to help carry him into the next world.

Onir clearly was influenced by Kushner’s work, but his version of it is so specifically Indian, with its overlayers of years of colonial Goa rule, that Roy Cohn seems like a slight distraction. Goa is this film, is Cuba, imprisoning its gay-infected inhabitants. This is Russia, who proclaimed again and again that AIDS was not occurring in that country (after all, gay sexuality had been banned). This is Reagan territory. It is about people who didn’t want to admit that a whole new world had become infected, simply through the act of the most beautiful joy possible, sex.

Los Angeles, March 24, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

times dooms its keepers

by Douglas Messerli

Anthony Veiller, Decla Dunning, John Huston and Orson Welles (the latter to uncredited), Orson Welles (director) The Stranger / 1946

The other day I was delighted to discover that Netflix is now streaming Orson Welles’ 1946 film, The Stranger, a film I had never before seen. I quickly sat down to watch it.

Although this film is often dismissed since Welles, anxious to be able to direct a new film after 4 years of silence, made a sort of devil’s pact with the producer, Sam Spiegel, and the studio, promising to produce it on schedule and allowing for the numerous deep cuts that his overseers demanded. The ruminations and philosophical conundrums of his previous films he promised to resist. And, indeed this film was a true money-maker, one of the very few of Welles’ checkered career.

Since this movie is set in a small Connecticut town where evil has been installed in the form of a seemingly well-respected teacher in the town’s all-boys’ school, the work is sometimes compared with Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. However, in Welles’ original there was a long sequence is South America which I would have loved to have glimpsed to help contextualize those parallels.

Moreover, despite the film’s homey qualities, enhanced by the beautiful Loretta Young, playing Mary Longstreet—daughter of Supreme Court Justice Adam Longstreet—who is about to marry the hidden Nazi in their midst, Franz Kindler (played by Welles himself), Welles’ film is a far darker noir than Hitchcock’s wonderful work. Hitchcock’s creepy Uncle Charlie, after all, has murdered only a few elderly women for their money, while Kindler has evidently been responsible for the death of thousands or even millions of Jews and during the course of the film kills the first of the strangers to

arrive in the town of Harper, a former colleague, Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) who has purposely been allowed to escape from prison so that he might possibly lead authorities to Kindler (now living under the name of Charles Rankin). We never quite learn why the highly nervous Meinike, now a born-again Christian, wants even to meet with his former associate—perhaps simply to try to convert him—but the visit, during which he leaves his suitcase at the local drugstore, which seems to be the heart and soul of Harper, quickly results in Kindler-Rankin strangling him, presumably because he realizes the reason behind Meinike’s miraculous “escape” and is terrified that some of his students, racing through the woods on a “paper chase,” have spotted the suspicious looking outsider.

The second, and more predominant stranger come to town is the US Wartimes Commissioner, Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), who has followed Meinike to that small village but, since his target has attempted to kill him as he enters Rankin’s school, has no clue to what the former Nazi, now teacher, looks like or knows anything about his current identity. All he knows is that the ex-Nazi has an extraordinary interest in clocks, which, obviously, echoes the lecture of Welles’ villain in The Third Man about the Swiss gift to the world of “cuckoo clocks.” Welles wanted Robinson’s role to be played by his long-time friend, Agnes Moorhead; it might have been a brilliant coup to have a feminist sleuth, but it was not to be.

Despite all the limitations with which the producer and editor presented him—Welles described editor Ernest J. Nims as “the great supercutter, who believed that nothing should be in a movie that did not advance the story. And since most of the good stuff in my movies doesn't advance the story at all, you can imagine what a nemesis he was to me."—the director got the upper hand by inserting long discussions between Wilson and the local, laid-back druggist, Potter (the ex-burlesque actor Billy House) while the two play checkers as they attempt to check out one another, Wilson and Potter struggling to eke out as much information from the other as they might.

Wilson loses the first round but later, paying the 25 cent fee, receives more information than he reveals, discovering the local church in the town square contains a large Habrecht-style clock mechanism, which Rankin is attempting to repair as part of his hobby.

But even when Wilson realizes he has found his man, he needs the testament of Rankin’s new wife, Mary—or at least her recognition that she is living with a man who opposes all of the values which her family has believed in. Another cut scene revealed the long patriotic military history of the Longstreet’s through a tour through the local cemetery.

Yet Welles, always the clever dodger, tells this part of the story through a bizarre combination of the wonderfully evocative score by composer Bronisław Kaper, with images right out of Fritz Lang’s M (menacing shadows overlaying the images of the town’s innocents), through the murder of Mary’s dear dog, Red, and the help of her wised-up brother, Noah (Richard Long), who, along with a sawed-off staircase (straight out of Shadow of a Doubt) incriminates and finally destroys—in a scene that might have come straight out of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist—Rankin/Kindler, allowing our villain to suffer the justice that the Nuremberg Trials could not provide.

This isn’t Citizen Kane or (without the last scene) the brilliant The Magnificent Ambersons, but it comes close, at moments, to revealing the great director’s genius. And I’ll watch it any day over so many other less challenging movies of its genre—whether it be noir or Nazi conspiracy tales.

Los Angeles, March 28, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

Jacques Rivette | La Religieuse (The Nun)

Hiroshi Teshigahara | おとし穴 Otoshiana (Pitfall)

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Medea

Nathan Adloff | Into a Possible Paradise

Dan Kwan and Danel Schinert | Swiss Army Life

Roman Polanski | The Pianist

Yorgos Lanthimos | The Favourite

Todd Haynes / Poison

G. W. Pabst | Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney)

Matt Tyrnauer | Studio 54

Jehane Noufaim | El Midan (The Square)

Chih-Yen Hsu and Mag Hsu | 誰先愛上他的 (Dear Ex)

Jane Campion | The Portrait of a Lady

Sridhar Rangayan | Evening Shadows

Jacques Richard | Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque

Tanuj Bhrama | Dear Dad

Elia Kazan | East of Eden

Ritesh Batra | Dabba (The Lunchbox)

Onir | My Brother...Nikhail

Orson Welles | The Stranger