Winter on the Blade

The exploitation of young men as prostitutes in the district around the Roman coliseum is the focus of Simon Bischoff's documentary and fiction piece that spares no close-up view of male anatomy. This latter trait reveals just as much about the tenor of this film as it does about the body. Several years earlier, Bischoff met the main 17-year-old protagonist here, "Er Moretto," when he was just a 13-year-old runaway. The intervening years show how he changed into a streetwise vendor of sex, and Bischoff also details how the 17-year-old is picked up by a middle-aged man to be his companion. Fiction segments do not fare as well as the documentary aspects of this work, which in the end, seems at least ambiguous, if not questionable, in its intent.

The film's principal character is Jean Neuenschwander, who left his home in French-speaking Switzerland in 1956 for Canada, where he was soon appointed manager of a large luxury hotel in Vancouver. In 1971, he bought a house in Tangiers where he settled down a few years later, at the age of 51, for a cosy and opulent retirement. “My Sweet Little Ass” is the account of his personal life, which Jean Neuenschwander clearly takes delight in recounting. He is a likeable hedonist who manages his affairs and his pleasures with considerable skill. From this somewhat comfortable existence, Simon Bischoff subtly extracts a group portrait of the homosexual subculture of Tangiers, which for some has the power of myth, particulary when frequented by characters such as Paul Bowles.

Aladdin’s parents separate when he is three. His father moves with him and his brothers to Tangier and re-marries. Then he leaves the family again and goes to Holland. Aladdin ends up on the street, sniffs glue, polishes shoes and keeps afloat by stealing. Years later, his father returns and finds Aladdin completely down and out. The boy steals from his own father and flees to the mountains, to Ketama. When an inner voice leads him back to Tangier, his father, to whom he is indebted, is dead: the trauma of his life. Desperate, he searches for a father figure and finds him in Felix, a foreign writer, who takes on the role of the magician in the story of initiation “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” from "Arabian Nights". He helps Aladdin to come up in the world and leads him to the discovery of his creative power – his “magic lamp”: Aladdin takes up painting and finally manages to reach his long-awaited getaway to paradise, Europe, where he meets his princess and marries her.