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Film Review: https://t.co/uwFOtQOnxv
#PrideWatchList #8
**if…** (1968)
Directed by Lindsay Anderson
Well-made, but not aesthetically strong enough to overcome the implications of its satirical-surrealist finale. Set in a boarding school, **if…** tracks political recruitment through title cards that eventually give way to stages of rebellion. The socialization into England’s class and citizenship norms, including the sadism that enforces them, eventually defines the military nature of the teenage revolution against those norms.
Charismatic and intelligent ringleader Mick (Malcolm McDowell in proto-**A Clockwork Orange** mode) leads his two friends, Johnny (David Wood) and Wallace (Richard Warwick), against their tormentors: an elite squad of homosexuals with free rein to discipline their fellow students. Mick reveals his nihilism from the start. Anticipating inevitable nuclear holocaust, he refuses to apply himself in school or prepare himself to shape his peers’ future. One could argue that this nihilism develops from the insufficiency of the school’s chosen heirs.
Ironically, despite his acts of defiance, Mick always eventually follows the rules, even submitting to a caning that passes beyond discipline into torture. That punishment flips the switch that leads to the final massacre, meant to conjure Vietnam but now signifying Columbine. The ending recasts contemporary school shootings as a wish-fulfillment fantasy born in the 1960s with anti-war extremists like the Weather Underground and the Manson Family.
Director Lindsay Anderson’s sympathies never switch. He attaches innocence to the anarchists through the mini-narrative that takes shape between Wallace and Bobby (Rupert Webster), servant underclassman to the elite crew. At first, Wallace’s flirtations, especially after an earlier scene in which he licks a female magazine centerfold, seem designed only to infiltrate the bad guys. “You’ve got no ambitions, Wallace,” Bobby tells him during a late-night cigarette assignation.
As played by Warwick, Wallace first gets Bobby’s attention by performing an acrobatic routine for his spellbound pleasure. This extraordinary sequence highlights the qualities that made Warwick a returning favorite for Franco Zeffirelli and Derek Jarman. Anderson punctuates the pairing, proving Bobby as Wallace’s true China, in a semi-comic, semi-sweet shot of them in bed together after lights out. As **Borstal Boy** (2022) proved, the real boarding school revolution starts here.
#PrideWatchList #8
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Full Review: https://t.co/IQ8R1UvP0X
#PrideWatchList #7
*The Rose King* (1986)
*Der Rosenkönig*
Directed by Werner Schroeter
*The Rose King* generates its obtuse network of symbols from the characters’ yearnings and, most interestingly, from their overlapping nature. The movie unfolds as a collective dream. After the father dies, a mother, Anna (Magdalena Montezuma), and her son, Albert (Mostefa Djadjam), move to the country and cultivate roses. In addition to roses—beautiful flowers with thorns—both figures incorporate overtly Catholic iconography into fantasy. Albert discovers Fernando, the Friend (Antonio Orlando), robbing a church while seeking evidence of God’s love. Orlando, who has bloomed into tempting manhood since Pasolini’s *Salò*, catalyzes their confrontations with their true selves.
Anna wants roses sufficiently refined for sale rather than some nebulous Platonic epitome. That impulse manifests in her implied sexual exploitation of her son and a group of local boys. The kids spy on the farm’s ongoings and giggle knowingly. Albert desires the perfection of the roses he tends, and he objectifies Fernando into that ideal. He adopts his mother’s sexual perversion, to which Fernando submits in his confusion of Christ-commanded humility with debasement.
The barn, attached house, and courtyard between them act as the diegetic environment. Non-diegetic spaces include a sanctuary interior with icons, the rose garden they constantly water and tend, and a beach where waves wash over the nude Albert or Fernando. A conflagration collapses these spaces and the characters’ unconscious fantasies into the unholy idol Albert creates.
#PrideWatchList #7
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Full Review: https://t.co/4EshlJWmUQ
#PrideWatchList #6
Man of Desire (1971)
L'Homme de désir
Directed by Dominique Delouche
As Fellini’s assistant director on *La Dolce Vita*, *Nights of Cabiria*, and *The Swindle*, Dominique Delouche understands the conflict between carnal temptation and Catholic moral teaching centered on the dignity of the individual. Although he never achieves Fellini’s sublime spiritual purity, Delouche reaches something original in *Man of Desire*. He contrasts overt Catholic symbolism—especially the drinking of blood at the end—with his characters’ unorthodox lives.
A loving rural bourgeois couple, Etienne (François Timmerman) and Valentine (Emmanuelle Riva), keep their marriage open to outside intimacies. Leather-jacketed, tight-jeaned Jean (Eric Laborey), whom Etienne picks up while hitchhiking, runs with a gang of gay hustlers and thieves in Paris. Jean haunts Etienne, prompting him and Valentine to track the young man down and invite him into their home. There, Etienne’s charitable impulse reveals to him the romantic love concealed within it. Cracks soon open in the couple’s delicate arrangement before inevitable tragedy arrives.
He recognizes that compassion and even sacrifice, like all human endeavor, take sexual desire as an impetus. The unseemly demimondes he explores likewise show how erotic drive invites corruption and sustains entire economies that exploit it. A priest even offers a benediction as Jean embarks on his quest in a beautiful long take that recalls both the urban existentialism—the grace—of the French New Wave and Fellini’s neorealism.
#PrideWatchList #6
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Full Review: https://t.co/AumOQkr0ay
#PrideWatchList #5
*Plagio* (1969)
Directed by Sergio Capogna
Sergio Capogna’s *Plagio* begins and ends with Mita Medici’s Angela walking alone through the expansive grounds of a Catholic church during a funeral Mass. The framing signals the devastation wrought by three college students who extend the activism of the 1968 protests into a radical sexual arrangement. When the threesome finally forms at Guido’s (Ray Lovelock) family estate—with a baroque garden filmed like an Italian *Last Year at Marienbad*—one hopes it might resolve the familial yearning that neglectful parents have awakened in Guido and that helped spark his participation in the protests. A melee resulting from that activism first brings him together with Angela and Massimo (Alain Noury), who rescue him as bystanders. Guido discovers in their intervention the parental care he lacks, a bond that eventually draws the three into a shared home in Rome.
Creeping ennui prompts Guido to betray Massimo by seducing Angela. Once Massimo disappears from the pairing, ennui strikes again. Capogna directs the consummation of the angelically beautiful threesome with more discretion than I prefer. Guido joins Massimo and Angela in bed, and the two men kiss a surprised Angela. Yet the brief interaction between moody Guido and a softened Massimo—blond Lovelock and brunet Noury complement each other perfectly—suggests the aftermath of an attraction too obvious to ignore. Guido leaves the couple in the manner of every runaway husband: he tells Massimo that he only plans to step out for cigarettes.
The ménage à trois—see also the stage musical *Hair* and Bernardo Bertolucci’s *The Dreamers*—often stands in for both the hope and disappointment of 1968. It imbues the era with romance and doomed excess while isolating the psychosexual foundations of political action and the inability of politics to satisfy a spiritual yearning for peace and love.
Full Review: https://t.co/hgoRfkLcjV
#PrideWatchList #4
*A Brother* (2018)
*Un frère*
Directed by Victor Habchy and Martin Escoffier
Habchy-Escoffier’s *Un frère* begins with two families (the parents always filmed at oblique angles that hide their faces like *Peanuts* cartoons) dealing with the fallout from a miscarriage. When 15-year-old Tom’s mother receives news that her best friend has suffered a miscarriage, she explains to her children during a car ride to a vacation spot that she also lost a child before Tom’s conception. “You could have had an older brother or sister,” the father says. Tom gazes longingly out the window. The mother’s best friend joins the family to mourn in an environment of comfort and support. Doing so fulfills Tom’s unspoken wish by bringing along her 17-year-old son Félix (Marin Lafitte—skinny, flirty, skater look).
Responding to Tom’s hidden glances, Félix surprises the smitten young man with initiations into erotic intimacy. These moments achieve perfect pitch because they balance Félix’s burgeoning sexual identity with Tom’s transition into the role of older brother after his mother’s second miscarriage. Tom maneuvers seamlessly—and carelessly—through his bisexuality. Cue the post-*Wild Reeds* pillion bike ride that, here, ends with an impromptu blowjob in a field. Tom’s younger sister completes the sibling constellation. Not at all as an erotic component, she nonetheless participates in a secret that binds them and ensures her inclusion: sharing the money they find after a bully attempts to steal her toy on the beach.
Tom and Félix emerge as ideal brothers. The three miscarriages introduce the film’s pattern of correspondences: the ages of the three youths and the temporary arrangement amongst them. Although a conventional narrative, its poetic foundation finds fulfillment in Félix’s older-brother insistence on Tom’s safety. Habchy-Escoffier’s resonances convey the innate desires enacted through kinship bonds that define mature sexuality.
Full Review: https://t.co/qhAEIi3FWX
#PrideWatchList #3
Noted for his use of Soviet-style montage combined with a psychologically expressive camera style—which I associate more with French surrealism—American experimental artist Kenneth MacPherson achieves striking effects in his sole feature-length film, especially in relation to Paul Robeson and his real-life wife Eslanda. Robeson appears in sharp focus against a cloudy firmament pulled close around him, while a reverse shot renders Eslanda out of focus against a wall held in perfect clarity. Borderline’s Lost Generation demimonde—Americans abroad at a mountain hotel in Switzerland—provides one pillar of the film’s enduring appeal. As in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night—the great (and greatest) American novel—anxieties surrounding race and sex bubble up through the love quadrangle involving a racist white woman, her white husband, his Black mistress Eslanda, and her lover (husband?) Pete (Robeson). Another attraction lies in one of the singer-actor’s rare screen appearances. MacPherson films him with sculptural appreciation, particularly the popping veins on his muscular forearm, which, in isolated shots, assumes an imposingly phallic quality. Combining the demimonde with an eroticized screen presence, the hotel restaurant-bar frequented by the principals and their nosy fellow guests also includes a lesbian couple who run the establishment and a gay white pianist who keeps an adoring photograph of the star on the piano’s music stand. These details give breadth and border lines to the sexual liberation pursued by the main foursome.
Full Review: https://t.co/nwgnhsHUB2
#PrideWatchList #2
Although critics typically understand Habeas Corpus as a reaction to Peronist oppression, the Argentine Acha instead sublimates and integrates that repression. He employs a series of stultifying juxtapositions: political captivity and beach memories, a guard’s physique magazines and a captive’s nude form, Catholic radio speeches and graffiti-covered urban landscapes. Unlike the blessedly short Genet film Un chant d'amour, an obvious point of reference, Habeas Corpus never generates resonant erotic symbols. Compare Genet’s exchanged cigarette smoke between prison cells with the jarred fish that Acha repeatedly employs. Then contrast the daring pastoral idyll of Un chant d'amour with the captive’s sexless memory-fantasy in Habeas Corpus. Drops of water trigger visions of wrestling in the ocean and playing with a mustachioed companion in tall grass bordering the beach. Yet these memories lack the release and sense of erotic liberation for which both captor and captive yearn, and which their political circumstances distort. Acha conveys the torturer’s desire and the escapist impulse that drives the detainee inward through a handful of striking images, especially the Caravaggio-like lighting that models his confined form in the cell and the superimposed hallucination of ocean water into which he releases the fish.
Congratulations the amazing leaders on the @CityAndStateNY #Pride50 and #PrideWatchList! We're especially proud to see our board members @gabrielblau & @adrianogle, and many EQNY partners & supporters & and Advisory Council members on there! https://t.co/FeN5qtVWM2 #LGBTQI
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