"SALVATION ARMY": A SURPRISING AND BEAUTIFUL FILM

Said Mrini as the young boy

Netflix decided I would like to see “Salvation Army,” or at least their formula did.  Maybe they thought the movie was religious.  Maybe it is.

Most directly, this is a “coming-of-age” movie set in Morocco (Casablanca, actually) that is simple in the best sense, just a portrait of a “gay” boy in a big family with a trapped father, a handsome big brother, a mother barely coping, and way too many sisters.   So far -- in my limited experience -- I understand that there are at least two kinds of gay: the kind that compensates by being educated, well-socialized, achieving -- and the kind that simply physically desires men and just lets it be.  This is not a embarrassing porny movie.  The sex is not explicit.  A child would not realize the implications of the scenes.

If I were capable of writing good poetry, I would try to express the attachments of tactile relationships that might or might not be expressions of sexually driven yearning.  Much of it would be about environment, esp. in nature and in very old "built" places like the cement and stone of humble Casablanca.  Cleaned by wind and sun, the colors are limited.  The just previous movie I had watched was “Tracks,” about the young woman who crossed Australia with four camels and her dog, which echoed.  The feet of camels on sand.  Sifting and scouring by wind.  Boys cleaning each other with poured water, rubbed soap, mud.  Skin caressed.  Men holding lonely boys against their breast.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/movies/in-salvation-army-growing-up-gay-in-morocco.html

I disliked the NYTimes review of “Salvation Army” -- I often do.  I think the problem is that NYTimes hired a reviewer who would not approve of any part of this film except the wealthy gay academic who was happy enough to relate to the hero in Morocco, but rejected him in Geneva when the boy arrives too early for his grad school scholarship to start.  The young man could not have survived without the Salvation Army, which asks no questions, simply feeds and shelters him.  But he could not have gotten this scholarship, or even wanted it, without soaking up what he could from the professor and more than that, because of his brother’s example.  Too bad the professor could evidently learn nothing.  Reciprocity is a good thing.

A sample of the film:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZXquBMN_kY

Where I meet Taia emotionally is in an old movie, “Black Narcissus.”  “Taïa has said that Michael Powell’s film Black Narcissus “directly influenced Salvation Army., says Jon Frosch.  [ "'There's a Place for Gays in Islam'". The Atlantic. Sept.6, 2013.]   “According to film critic David Thomson, "Black Narcissus is that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns.”  I’m not so sure it’s rare.  I saw the  Rumer Godden book-derived film in 1947.  I was eight and it went to my heart.  Suppressed desire in Tibet.  It’s on Netflix.  For years I looked for this film but confused it with “The Black Rose,” so never quite got hold of it.  Deborah Kerr is in it.  She often plays this sort of part, as in “Tea and Sympathy.”

According to the Wiki, Taïa, the author and director, was an effeminate boy who "always knew he was gay”.  That’s not what comes across in the film.  To me he doesn’t seem effeminate (whatever that is).  No doubt I was missing a lot of signals and subtext, but what I saw was a pure human sculpture poured full of emotion.  I saw beauty and essential loneliness, looking for a way to embrace life.

Karim Ait M'Hand, playing the adult

The following story was in the book but not in the film.  (Wiki again.)   “When he was 11, a mob of men gathered outside his family's home and shouted for him to come out to be raped. "Everyone heard, not only my family but the whole neighbourhood," he later recalled. "What I saw clearly was that this is how society functions and that no one can protect you, not even your parents. That's when I realized I had to hide who I am."  You remember the Biblical version? If it's Biblical, it must be at least archetypal, but this is what actually happened to Taïa. In Sodom men come demanding sexual access to some angels who are staying as guests and the man who is protecting the angels offers his daughters instead.  (Genesis 19)  Was that coded homosexuality?  “Angels in America”?  Sodomy?  It's usually presented in church as a story about the obligations of hospitality.

 Abdellah Taia, author and director

But this boy was not Christian: he was paying attention to pop culture and Western novels. “Taïa’s older brother, Abdelk'bir, was a cultural influence on Taïa, introducing him to the music of David Bowie, James Brown, and Queen, the films of David Cronenberg, Elia Kazan, and Ang Lee, and the books of Robert Louis Stevenson, Dostoevsky, and Tawfik al-Hakim.”  Al-Hakim, (1898-1987) was an Egyptian, wealthy, educated in Paris -- a trail breaker.

For my own selfish reasons, I see an affinity and alliance between young gay men and old women who choose to live alone, which in our society is often seen as a kind of perversion, marginally better than being considered a witch. Jon Godden,  sister of Rumer Godden, author of “Black Narcissus,” wrote a book called " The House by the Sea.” about a stubborn old woman who preferred solitude.  This is the epigraph:  “There is a fish called a Hermit, that at a certain age gets into a dead fish's shell, and, like a hermit, dwells there alone, studying the wind and the weather, and so turns her shell that she will be protected in life and that she makes it defend her from injuries that they would bring upon her.." Isaak Walton, inscription before Part One of book.  (Walton means hermit crabs, not fish.)  That book also struck to my heart.  (The branch librarian used to worry about my reading. She was right to do that.)

Rumer and Jon Godden

Perhaps the earliest and most universal situation of physical erotic yearning that society demands be suppressed is the child’s desire for intimacy with an adult.  This attachment is necessary to protect babies and young children.  Going without it would be as serious as going without food.  It's not a question of denying this love, but of guiding.  I am not arguing against the necessity of the taboo against too much closeness with aroused children, because the unequal balance of power and the introduction of sexual goals are destructive to children, both physically and psychically.  But blanket taboos mean that such a situation cannot be handled by education in the way of other inappropriate relationships like those across “race” or political categories.  That is, honestly but with awareness of risks.  In this context, Taia's use of physical cleansing as a parallel for sexual intimacy is a universal metaphor, especially in the Abrahamic religions where the people are always conscious of water.

Rumer Godden (remember she’s the author of “Black Narcissus” about a nun yearning for a powerful and charismatic man) wrote another of my early-forming film loves, “The River,” about three young women loving a damaged veteran.  One woman is Indian, one is red-headed, and the third is too young.  What makes some stories so powerful is being ambivalent, challenging their supposed culture, evoking emotions so deep that they are hardly perceptible -- even denied by the culture, disrupting the rules of the family of origin in favor of a new community of affinity.  They are ambiguous -- hard to figure out what is “winning” and what is “losing,” pitting safety against achievement, the individual against his or her culture.

Casablanca, Morocco

This film is a poem: a simple evocation of yearning on the cusp between childhood and something much larger.