pleasure is complicated
by
Douglas Messerli
Paul Donagy (writer and director) Story of a Bad Boy / 1999
One has to wonder whatever happened to filmmaker Paul Donagy, or for that matter whatever happened to his charming, if inconsequential 1999 gay film, Story of a Bad Boy? Although it is now available for viewing on Amazon Prime, it was evidently extremely difficult to even view copy in the USA for many years after its release. There is not even a Wikipedia entry, and apparently there have been no archived reviews, with only a couple of brief synopses. Even if this Story of a Bad Boy is sometimes a superficial, yet another “coming of age” movie, it’s far superior to some in its genre that continue to be touted as popular entertainments for LGBTQ or curious open-minded teenagers. One commentator described it, rather appropriately I think, as “the horny cousin” to David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen of a year earlier.
If the 17-year old of Donagy’s film, Pauly
(Jeremy Hollingworth), is seemingly “hornier” than Moreton’s character, it is
because Edge of Seventeen is far more honest about portraying sex.
Donagy’s cute, doe-eyed kid is ready for everything (“I want some day to do
everything” is his creed), for much of the film he doesn’t have much
opportunity to do anything. His confused and always exhausted parents, Spryos
(Stephen Lang) and Elaine (Julie Kavner)—who besides their worrisome teenager have
a young baby to care for—have permitted him to change religions, from Greek
Orthodox to Roman Catholic, without a clue that his inexplicable switch has
mostly to do with Pauly’s attraction to an Irish altar boy, whom he soon
discovers through his masturbatory voyeurism, is interested only in girls.
When Pauly’s “pretend” girlfriend—always a
necessary accessory in films about budding gay boys—suggests he change back to
public school for his senior year, he demands his folks allow him yet another alteration in his life.
Troubled by what they can only describe as his “weird” behavior, they argue instead
he try basketball, playing the age-old parental game of “wait and see”
regarding his newest reversion. Showing absolutely no interest in throwing a
ball into hoops, Pauly assures his expulsion
from Catholic School by kissing a nun. As an aside: Story of a Bad Boy may
be the first film to show a gay teenager kiss more girls than boys in the
process of coming out.
At the new school he immediately is
befriended by a popular black girl, Carla (Cherelle Cargill), a wacky clarinetist,
Ludmilla (Lauren Ward), and a male punk-like audio-visual technician and school wrestler—all who try to convince him,
along with his friend Colin, to seek out extra credits by engaging in anything
but the “faggety” drama club.
Ludmilla would have him try-out as the
band’s drum major, a position overseen by a closeted older gay man, Mr.
Fontaine (Gerry Becker). Carla and Colin argue for any sports activity,
particularly track. The AV tech wrestler prefers to wrestle naked at home with
Pauly in bed. Given his mantra of “try everything,” Pauly passively attempts to
balance all their demands—that is until he gets a glimpse of this year’s drama
teacher, Noel (Christian Camargo), a student teacher who, as a sophomore in
college is just a couple of years older than the eager Pauly.
And archetype and
are
A is for Antigone
For anarchy, for angst
A is agricol
And every day in every way....
Even The Producers would not have been
so unlucky to save this turkey. But Pauly is so enamored of his new teacher—whose
bed he has now shared and to whom he has provided more
With parents as clueless as his are,
Pauly like so many young people, empathically declaims the empty truisms that
every failed creator loves to hear: “They think they know. They don’t get it.”
But these obviously won’t alter the fact that Noel has failed as a teacher and,
soon after, told that he must return to attend to his studies at school. He’s
certainly not ready for the big time of local high school yet, nor is he
able to sustain the magical relationship between him and Pauly the younger boy’s
imagination has cooked up. They will not be moving, as Noel suggested they
might, into a teacher dorm, not a “dorm-dorm” which Noel had promised,
particularly after he quite literally disappears from Pauly’s life.
On a previous date, Pauly and Noel,
dining at an Interstate highway restaurant—presumably a safe haven Noel has
chosen so that they might not be recognized—they run into a former friend of
Noel, Guy, a rather flamboyant gay man living presumably in New York, who
leaves Noel his telephone number, which when left behind, Pauly pockets.
Without Noel and seemingly anyone else
with whom he can commiserate, the would-be bad boy calls Guy and invites
himself to a wild party. Meeting the young boy without memory of the context,
Guy calls up his fashionista friends to remake Pauly up for a weekend of
endless drinking, drugs, and sex—although by the time they get to the latter it
seems more like an orgy out of Jack Smith, the in-drag and drugged out
participants mostly rolling around in the skivvies as they hug and kiss one
another—that inevitably lands Pauly in a hospital, tended to by friends, his
now awakened and forgiving parents, and a spacey therapist that makes Ken Kesey’s
Nurse Ratched look like Florence Nightingale. Handing him a sequined
arrangement of plastic flowers and what looks to be a swan, she asks, like it
were a Rorshach test, what it reminds him of. He quietly answers, he likes it, he likes its shape. “Yes?” she
leans forward as hoping to glean some profound insight into his attraction to
gay beauty. It gives me pleasure, he admits. “Pleasure is rare. Pleasure is
complicated. But pleasure is good.”
By the time he’s freed from lockup, he’s
too late to claim a graduation gown, that is until the popular Carla decides to
break away from her normative crowd (“The next time you see me, I could be less
popular”), handing over her white robe (the males are dressed in dark blue)
which Pauly proudly wears to the graduation ceremony which finally brings his
parents out from their homelife hibernation. As it begins to rain, the camera
pans away from the small crowd gathered after the ceremonies to capture Marta exiting
from the back of the building to join Noel in his car as they speed off into
the future. Noel opts obviously to attempt to live out his life as an unhappy
closeted man, restating what we long ago perceived even while the innocent hero
of this tale, Pauly, could not: he is a fraud.
Pauly’s father has provided him with
money to buy tickets to the Poconos where, he suggests, his son might be able
to pursue his painterly activities with other family members who plan to retire
for the summer to Water Mountain. Although he purchases the tickets to Water
Mountain, his eyes catch the departure of another bus to New York.
A few minutes later when the bus pulls
away, we see his white robe laying on the concrete as that bus to New York
moves out of the frame, a bus which evidently the boy who wanted to experience
everything has embarked.
Donagy’s alternatively loud and quiet
film, with equal parts of farce and wit, may not be a profound film, but it’s
certainly not worth having been entirely ignored as seems to have been. If
nothing else, it certainly represents an entertaining hour and a half. View it,
I argue, for what it is.
Los Angeles, November 30, 2020
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November
2020).
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