etude for a clueless queer
by
Douglas Messerli
Bill
Douglas (writer and director) Come Dancing / 1970
There’s
something incredibly sad about British filmmaker Bill Douglas’ 1970 work Come
Dancing. First of all, the director of this seemingly gay film was not
himself a homosexual—or at least was not able to admit it. Although he lived for
years with fellow film enthusiast Richard Jewell, who he had met while serving
in the Royal Air Force in Egypt, Douglas as Jewell speaks of their relationship
in his 2006 documentary Intent Upon Getting the Image was not gay:
We weren’t a gay couple. A lot of
people assumed
that were because [we lived]
together….but Bill
wasn’t homosexual…we were all sorts
of other
things to each other. Practically
everything but
sexual.
Douglas’ well received trilogy of movies, My
Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), and My Way Home (1978).
although, as British Film Institute curator Alex Davidson observes, “returns
repeatedly to the subject of relationships between male characters,” some of
them— particularly Douglas’ last film, Comrades (1987)—verging on the
homoerotic, yet “Come Dancing is his only work in which homosexuality is
explicitly mentioned.”
As Jewell continues to comment on the 1970
short, “His two characters [in this early film] bear no resemblance to Jaime
and/or Robert [the two characters of Comrades]. But, with the benefit of
40 years’ hindsight, [his last film] is
perhaps autobiographical, in that Bill may have been pondering what on earth he
was doing shacked up with another guy for the past decade—as, indeed, I had waxed
poetical over the same conundrum a few years earlier.”
Just as importantly, however, is how
Douglas represents the short-lived meeting between the two figures of Come
Dancing. “The visiting man” (Clive Merrison), with whom the picture begins,
is seen sitting on a chair with a dart in hand which he hurls at a map of
Britain. It hits Southend, which, we realize is to be his destination. Behind
him, meanwhile, sits a woman, intentionally exposing her breast as if
attempting to woo the man to remain with her, obviously in order to share her
now rejected love.
In Southend, meanwhile, the “Local man”
seems quite joyful, dancing alone upon a pier before delightedly pissing into
the ocean below.
The visitor already sits in a nearby
coffee shop, disgusted by the taste of the liquid he’s already half swallowed
and amused by the older waitress (Nicole Anderson), utterly consumed by her
telly, broadcasting what appears to be a national competition of ballroom
dancing of the kind that Baz Luhrmann satirized in his movie Strictly
Ballroom.
So inattentive is the woman and so empty
is the café that the stranger is clearly bored and begins to construct paper
airplanes which he sails as close as he can to the woman transfixed by her TV
set.
The local man enters, an almost
immediate bond of recognition passing between the two, if for no other reason
that they seem to be the only men in Southend at the moment. Indeed, after the Southender
orders up the same vile liquid that the stranger is drinking, they eye one
another, the newcomer yelling out, “Were is the action around here.” “It
depends what you’re looking for,” his would-be friend responds.
Just few seconds later, the local man
has joined the outsider at his table where they share lighters, the dancer
offering his new acquaintance a cigarette. The newcomer refuses, obviously
preferring his own brand, but offers the other a light. Before long the two are
whispering to each other, apparently about the café waitresses inability to
focus on anything but the ballroom competition to which she has tuned. They briefly
giggle and in mockery of her fascination gradually dance out the door
together.
As they reach the pier where, one
supposes, the local man has hinted there may be a space for “action,” they
briefly tussle with one another, mock-wrestling almost as teenage boys might,
seemingly just for the delight of touching one another.
Yet suddenly, as the two seem about to
share an erotic moment, the stranger, pretending to urinate, turns on his
partner, knife in hand, calling him a fag and letting loose what Davidson
describes as a “tirade of homophobic abuse.”
It is difficult to make sense of this
sudden shift. Did the local approach him too quickly? Has the outsider randomly chosen Southend so that he might
accidentally encounter a hated homosexual? And for a second or two we fear that
the suddenly pent up hostility which the visitor has displayed might in fact
turn into physical abuse.
Yet the Southender seems unfazed, almost
fearless, as he stands his ground with a broad smile pasted upon his face,
almost as if he expected the other to finally come round and admit his transparent
desires.
Defeated by his own inexplicable game,
the stranger moves away toward to end of the long pier, while the happy local
begins to spin off in his own version of a ballroom dance, just as we have seen
him performing, we now realize, in the earlier scene.
Where the homophobe might be going we
never discover, although we fear it will not end well, maybe even with his own
death. Whatever might occur to him we recognize as representing a great
sadness, a great emptiness, certainly a refusal to join openly in the dance the
other offered to share with him.
If the waitress watches her dance
passively, her charming fellow citizen has offered up his own sexuality in his
dance, which the repressed visitor has sadly been unable to participate.
In the end, we might describe this lovely
short work as an étude to a clueless queer.
This lovely film was one of Douglas’ first
films made while he was enrolled at the London Film School. He died of cancer
only 4 years after completing what might be described his “bookend” creation, Comrades.
It appears that he was never able to live out the joyful sexual possibilities
he had so lovingly captured on film.
Los
Angeles, September 19, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September
2020).
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