I Know What You Watched This Summer
From Ball of Fire to Fire Island
Watching
Benediction (2021)
One of the great bisexual films, in that it posits the world of gay men as a thrilling yet vicious zoo from which heterosexuality is an acceptable if considerably less exciting escape.
Terence Davies, now 76, shows no signs of running out of cinematic innovations to make you fall out of your seat. Benediction combines the church-inflected homoeroticism of his debut autobiographical trilogy (Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration, all also watched this summer) with the biographical distance and formal pizzaz of his last poet biopic, 2016’s Emily Dickinson flick A Quiet Passion, with which this Siegfried Sassoon picture pairs nicely.
Benediction opens with Sassoon attending a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Davies cuts off the concert audio right before the start of the notorious percussion from “The Augurs of Spring,” filling in that expected revolutionary gap with archival footage of the Great War draped over his digital images like a veil. Davies has been dropping mics like this since the start of his career, as though age has only intensified his self-doubts about his artistic legacy. This strikes me as an especially queer worry; maybe that’s what he meant when he said that being a homosexual ruined his life.
The Hole (1998)
COVID finally caught up with me last month so I did what any self-respecting cinephilic invalid would do under the circumstances and put on a movie to match just how horrible I felt. I can’t know for sure that I didn’t just hallucinate all the musical numbers in Tsai Ming-Liang’s tale of lonely upstairs/downstairs neighbors at the end of the world. In the time since my recovery, it sure has sounded like the people in the unit above mine are trying to tunnel through their floor in search of a friend down below. (If you are my upstairs neighbors and you are reading this: just come downstairs and knock, I have cookies and I don’t bite.)
Fire Island (2022)
A few years ago it was de rigueur for critics who wanted to appear above the fold to chastise movies for having an inadequate “sense of place.” In Fire Island, the confusing if touching film from the mind of internet personality Joel Kim Booster, the titular haven for gay men is more an extension of the online world these men inhabit during and in between their 9-to-5s than a getaway from the grind(r). The movie’s stakes hinge on the impending foreclosure of the one haven of standalone history, a shabby beach house owned by a lesbian benefactress who squandered her fortune on an ill-advised investment in Quibi: not the kind of place you could make a museum out of but one you can fondly look back on in ten years and reminisce about a fire ant infestation.
Andrew Ahn, whose previous credits include a pair of gently observed and somewhat dry movies about Asian Americans and feeling out of place, is the logical choice of director for the parts of Booster’s script that touch on the gay Asian male experience within the predominantly white gay community, but less so for the sex comedy bits. The cast, which besides Booster also includes SNL by way of Las Culturistas star Bowen Yang, Margaret Cho, and a sampling of generally hairless gay actors, got some good laughs out of me, but only in spite of Ahn’s direction, which hews to familiar filmmaking tropes rather than dabble in anything truly queer or unusual.
There’s an uncertainty running through Fire Island as to what gay men should really want. When Zane Phillips shows up as a broke jock with an Only Fans, Booster goes out of his way to offer reassurances that sex work is work and there’s nothing wrong with making porn to make ends meet. Yet Booster can’t seem to pry himself away from the trope that sex workers have disreputable characters after all, as he makes Phillips into a villain who is later found out to have disseminated porn clips online without the consent of the man getting (otherwise consensually) fucked (aside: why is it that the only guys who get any action in this movie are the white ones?).
Booster, who opens the movie by reciting the first line of Pride and Prejudice, has one foot in the world of heterosexuality and the other in the radical and mutually exclusive world of queer possibility. Right up until the end he can’t choose where to plant both feet. When his Mr. Darcy, an uptight lawyer who wears J. Crew 5 inch chinos to an underwear party, incongruously announces that monogamy isn’t for him, one gets the sense that these men feel obligated to dislike the idea of sexually restricted partnership, even though that’s exactly what the movie seems to hold up as the preferred outcome for its main characters. The Ethical Slut gets name-checked by Booster in a throwaway line (“it was formative!”) but otherwise doesn’t seem to have exercised any greater influence on the movie than Austen. Can’t go giving away all our secrets to the curious heterosexual base Hulu will rely on for this movie to come anywhere close to breaking even, now can we.
The Wedding Banquet (1993)
The sense of place in Ang Lee’s first, and better, gay film is supplied by a rotating set of shirts worn by Mitchell Lichtenstein’s boyfriend character. The Keith Haring and ACT UP tees situate the story, wherein a Taiwanese landlord in New York disclaims his male lover and fakes his marriage to a female tenant to avoid coming out to his parents, firmly in the New York City of the AIDS crisis, which is otherwise invisible. A deeply disturbing movie before you even get to thinking about the implications of a gay landlord in this time and place.
Ball of Fire (1941)
In which Barbara Stanwyck crashes an incel colony and unintentionally sets off another round of gifted kid discourse.
Three Colors: Red (1994)
When I first saw Red ten years ago, I liked it without knowing quite what to make of it. During my early twenties it became a family tradition to rewatch it when I was visiting home around the New Year. Each additional viewing helped to demystify it, as I knew in advance where the movie was going and knew what to watch for, but only now, on my fifth viewing, am I really making more sense of it.
Valentine (Irène Jacob), a fashion model with an offscreen boyfriend, is committed to truth-telling to the point of naivety. The camera makes the viewer a witness to her honesty; anything she tells her boyfriend over the phone, no matter how it would sound out of context (oh yeah you couldn’t come to the phone because there was chewing gum in the front door keyhole, a likely story), we’re instantly able to corroborate. The interplay between what you do, what you say you’ve done, and whether others take you at your word, is especially important in this film, as in any age where relationships are mediated by telecommunication devices.
It somehow didn’t cross my mind the first four times I watched Red that Jean-Louis Trintignant’s judge is probably gay. The hint is there with the first phone conversation Valentine hears on his surveillance device, a steamy exchange between the judge’s neighbor, who has a wife and child, and another man; the judge raises the possibility again himself when he explains that the only woman he ever loved cheated on him with a man who could “give her what she wanted.” I like this reading, wherein Valentine doesn’t mind spending so much time alone with the judge because she doesn’t sense any sexual interest from him, more than the alternative (old male European filmmakers don’t understand women; I suppose there’s always at least a bit of that at play).
Through the years I’ve seen a lot of critics, and I might count myself among them, hone in on an apparent mystical quality in this movie. A secular take on destiny and fate, goes one line of thinking, the judge as an imperfect divinity figure in another. As the final film in Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Red ends with a surprising apocalypse, a boat crash that brings together the protagonists from all three films. This initially struck me as a weird ending, an unearned coincidence at worst, but knowing that Kieślowski started working on the trilogy from this premise—a boat capsizes with only a few survivors; who are they?—reveals that the trilogy is properly speaking eschatological, each film pointing toward a final and unforeseeable unification of all things planned by an author at once entirely outside the text while also at work everywhere within it. Blue even revolves around the composition of a song “for the Unification of Europe,” though this doesn’t say much about the thousand or so people who don’t survive the shipwreck.
With time many parts of Red have taken on new meaning since I first saw it as a college student. The parallel story of the young judge-to-be who lives across the way from Valentine and keeps showing up where she does seems far less perfunctory now that I live in a dense, walkable urban neighborhood where I keep running into the same people all over the place. The supposed wisdom of the judge, which I took for granted when younger, falls apart on inspection. When Valentine goes to confront his neighbor’s wife about her husband’s infidelity, she catches their daughter on the phone, snooping on her father’s dalliance. Valentine lies—the only time in the film I think she does—that she has the wrong address, then scurries back to the judge, who calls her on her shame about almost breaking up a family with such a loving and unknowing wife and daughter. But he’s wrong on at least one count—the daughter does know what’s going on, in some sense; for all we know the wife does too but is keeping a secret, don’t ask don’t tell–style.
Words are imperfect conveyers of truth in this film, whereas a camera under Kieślowski’s direction gets us closer to reality. Or does it? When Valentine enters the judge’s house for the first time, the camera approximates her point of view as she walks from foyer to kitchen, only for Valentine to suddenly break the illusion by walking into frame from an unexpected angle. A sixth viewing may still be in order to get closer to understanding all of Red’s commonplace mysteries.
Coming Soon
MIT Press next month is publishing a collection of nearly 20 years of film criticism by Serge Daney, Cahiers du Cinéma editor after Rohmer and Rivette, with an intro by A.S. Hamrah.
No Bears, the new film by Jafar Panahi premiering soon at Venice, has a trailer and looks gripping: