As many of you are aware, I embarked in late 2007 on what I called, at the time, a "yearlong survey of gay-interest cinema". It lasted quite a bit longer, in the event, until late 2009, by which time I had begun a second "yearlong survey" of cheap, shitty zombie movies. I ended both when they coincided in the same title, which will be reviewed at the end of this series. For now, enjoy, over the next several weeks, a series of capsule reviews of films which are, to varying degrees, gay or gay-centric or gay-related.
Sommersturm
D, 2004
Robert Stadlober, Alicja Bachleda
dir. Marco Kreuzpaintner
Overall rating: OO 2 cock rings out of 5
Fag Hag Hotness Index: 10 out of 10
Fake Sex Rating: 3 out of 10
The scene is a small town on Lake Starnberg, in Upper Bavaria: The dour village hall and the thick-as-mud regional accents substitute for creating a meaningful sense of place. Tobi (Robert Stadlober) is a gangly, weird-looking young man in the end stages of secondary school, and he and his swarthy, conventionally-attractive BFF, Achim (Kostja Ullman), are inseperable. Ten minutes of exposition show a friendship full of gleeful—dare we say gay—athletic competition, banter, hijinks, and ew, what's this? A joint masturbation session! Of course as one lies on the floor of the locker room next to one's best friend, one is meant to dutifully close one's eyes and imagine girls, but director Kreuzpaintner decorates his thematic Warhammer models with a billboard-size calligraphy brush, so the entire wank is filmed from such an angle that we can see Tobi doing a Xerox scan of Achim's naked body while they're rubbing one out.
It soon becomes clear that, for Tobi, the worst part about his BFF is that second F: we're treated to a montage of stock teenage awkwardness, misinterpreted glances, awkward leanings-in for a kiss after a fat joint, and all the rest. Then it's time to go camping at the boat race, where Redneck Bavaria Boat Club must compete for the trophy against a number of other subtle, realistic teams: the stern, humorless east German team ("ve vant to train on ze east side of ze lake"), the all-girls Catholic team (of which there is one shot, consisting of them singing Jesus songs on the guitar), and—the plot thickens!—the "QueerSchläger", aquatic faggots aus Berlin. I don't need a sextant and a coxswain to point me to where this is going, and neither do you.
What follows is useful because it serves as a primer for the stock elements of all of these films: there's Tobi, the nervous, innocent, wide-eyed—the Frodo of nascent gayness, lurching fitfully towards the Mount Doom of self-awarness while his reptillian CGI fag hag crawls along desperately behind him; there's Georg, the personification of over-the-top gay panic, and there's the fruitful, if unintentional, discourse on gay male misogyny. Why do we do this to girls who like us? Why do we feel entitled to use them to hide behind? This movie begs these questions, but it's too stupid to ask or engage with them.
Instead, we get Marquez-esque dream sequences: Georg goes into the camp of the gay team and, his head spinning, sees penises and penentration everywhere he looks; Tobi, whose closet door is the gate of Mordor, brushes through a corn field to see the spurned, clueless girl whose dreams he occupies (Bachleda) radiant and ready-for-it on a beach towel, out of nowhere. He eventually gets with one of the rowers from the QueerSchläger, and they get two sex scenes: one on a dock, at whose climax they both rather look and sound like they're being tazed, and one in a youth hostel at the end, which consists of namless Berlin rowing hunk peeling Tobi's sunburn. Rawr. Meanwhile, straightboy Achim and his nasty girlfriend are in the woods copulating in lush vegetation and golden light, showing us what the boning would have looked like in Paradise Lost.
It's tough to tell what the point of this film is. It's too flat and too judgemental of the gay characters to be sentimental fantasy for old gay fogies: the gay Frodo has no agency, he is but the object (the victim, the film insinuates) of older, more lustful, more experienced gays; but it certainly stops short of condemning them, as long as they keep to themselves and don't—Aha. That's it. Sommersturm is a piece designed to make middle-class Germans nod along in confirmation of their mere tolerance, in the abstract, of same-sex desire: something far away, dangerous, but confined to a couple of neighborhoods in Berlin. When the bus drops Tobi off at home, alone, the last second of the film is the one with the clearest message: You thought you were gay, kid. Phew, glad that's over.
