giving allowances
by
Douglas Messerli
Christopher
Münch (writer and director) The Hours and Times / 1991, USA 1992
Christopher Münch's 1991 black-and-white film about a weekend vacation to Barcelona with John Lennon and The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein is, like the other two “The Beatles without Beatles’”
I
review, a fantasy. Yet this one has a special poignancy, because it truly might
have happened even in a slightly different form.
In The Hours and Times the
director toys with the possibility that the street-smart singer might have been
somewhat curious, despite his own heterosexual marriage to Cynthia, about gay life.
It wouldn’t be the first time that heterosexual men have toyed with and even
explored the LGBTQ world. And Münch presents Lennon as a highly intelligent, if
a bit course and uneducated man, who’s a tart wit, at times, and is most
certainly curious about the world around him, even if he expresses utterly no
interest in seeing Barcelona; for him it could have been any city in any
country.
The fact that he trailed along after the
ascot-wearing Epstein into strange territory is highly intriguing, and Münch
subtly steers his queer-friendly film around the possibilities, while makes no claim
to suggest that anything sexual between the two ever occurred.
In fact that is precisely what makes this
such an insightful work. The director saw it as a kind of exercise in thought,
never expecting that such a movie would get any distribution or even receive
permission to be shown. Rather amazingly, it won the Special Jury Recognition
award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.
During the flight to Barcelona Lennon
flirts with a more-than-attentive stewardess, Marianne (Stephanie Pack)
inviting her—despite Epstein’s discouragement—to visit him in his hotel when
she returns to Barcelona two days later. After all, Lennon proclaims to his
knowing management, you have to give me “allowances,” to which Epstein grumbles
that is always what he always does.
Yet when the two travelers actually do
reach their hotel destination, Lennon brings up the subject of gay sex—Epstein’s
sexuality being a open secret— suggesting that he sometimes thinks about trying
gay sex but imagines it would be too painful.
To diffuse the tension, Epstein suggests
they play cards, and Lennon returns to his own room alone, receiving a call
from his wife, whom he appears to treat quite badly despite her insistence that
she misses him. Lennon seems to miss only his son, Julian, and hangs
mid-sentence.
The next day Lennon actually suggests that
Epstein take him to a gay bar. The bar, more a “gentleman’s club” than what we
might today describe as a gay bar, is almost empty at the hour, except for Quinones
(Robin McDonald), a gay man who is married, a fact which Lennon finds
intriguing. Quinones, clearly interested in Lennon, takes them back to his
hotel room, but they soon leave, Epstein furious with Lennon’s flirtation,
describing the man as a fascist and an anti-Semite, subtly apparent in the
stranger’s questions and demeanor.
Frustrated, Epstein goes to bed, but not
before casually asking the hotel boy Miguel if he might perform oral sex. But
when the boy queries him, Epstein proclaims he was just joking. Like Lennon, he
receives a call from a domineering woman: his mother.
During a tour through the city, Epstein
encourages his protégé to speak about his relationship with Cynthia, but it is
clear that Lennon is uncomfortable discussing such things.
Lennon is what we call in the gay world a
“come on,” a flirtatious being who will not/cannot carry through—the most
frustrating of all people. Yet Lennon takes this even further, receiving a
phone call from the returned Marianne, whom Lennon immediately invites up to
his room, leaving Epstein to suffer alone again in bed.
Yet even Marianne, amazingly intelligent
and spunky, does not necessarily offer herself up to an easy “rape,” making
that possibility political: “Our country rapes another country.” She also
describes the musician as tormenting his manager.
Yet she has brought a present for Lennon,
a Little Richard record, a singer who Epstein had asked to lead for a Beatles’
concert the year before these events. Given Little Richard’s effeminate exaggerations,
his choice of wearing make-up and other feminine clothing, and his fascination
with voyeurism, it is another subtle reminder to Lennon that his macho behavior
may not get him very far in this world. His evening with Marianne ends with a
quiet dance to that record.
The following day the singer and his
manager turn the discussion to Epstein’s own life, who explains he was sent by
his mother to Barcelona as a young man after he’d been robbed and blackmailed
by a man he’d encountered in sex. And here the film seems to shift slightly as
Epstein almost appears to ask for a date—even if it’s far into the future, 10
years from now, “no matter what you are doing.” Lennon agrees to thank about
it. It’s a little bit like the top of the Empire Building date in An Affair
to Remember, and this fictitious Epstein even seems to hint of it when he
later takes Lennon to his favorite roof-top place, revealing that he has loved
their time together.
In the very next scene we see Lennon
sleeping next to him in bed. Münch is not so much suggesting that the two have
sexually “come together” so to speak, but that they have come to a kind of
arrangement, a comprehension of their differences and desires. It is strange
that, as they plan, on their final day to attend a bull fight, it is Epstein
who is worried about whether or not Lennon might be too squeamish to watch,
suggesting perhaps that the gentle soul here is Lennon not Epstein, who is a
hearty man experienced in the pleasures and terrors of the universe.
The above might simply sound like a
recounting of the plot. But this film is about its details, in the negotiations
such different people, who still admired and loved one another, make with one
another in order to get on. And it is almost a study in the torments of the
sexual frames we put around ourselves and each other. In this case, both were
seeking a kind of fluidity, even if they might never find it.
Accordingly of the three fantasias on
which I focus—The Hours and Times, Across the Universe, and Yesterday—this
film is perhaps most honest, and the closest the The Beatles’ real world,
however unknowable and insane that might have been.
Los
Angeles, July 12, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July
2019).
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