High school is a time and a place where people
want to be both invisible and displayed as prominently as possible.
Fourteen-year-old student Ulysses is acutely aware of this paradox. Played by
newcomer Luka Kain, he’s skinny, quiet, gawky, and gay. In reality, he’s
paralyzed in the face of classmates who torment him in the locker room, throw
his gym clothes into a toilet, and sling homophobic slurs his way—slurs made
all the more hurtful because he’s trying like mad to stay closeted and out of
the way.
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| Photo credit: Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films |
But in Ulysses’s head and heart, he’s a star.
The wet and unwelcoming room brightens and the blue lockers pop into a
brighter, more playful shade of blue. His bullies become his backup dancers,
assisting him in a number in which he belts, “You’re gonna see me, you’re gonna
know me,” to the world. His long and too-thin legs don’t shuffle in this
scenario—they fly, they glide, they run nimbly at a 90-degree angle along the
lockers in an assault on gravity and all that is real.
When Fakery Is More Real Than Reality
Through its protagonist’s fantasy, Saturday
Church really announces itself as a film, a thing of artifice that
nonetheless reveals truth in a way that no just-the-facts story could. But,
crucially, this and later fantasies are not an escape from Ulysses’s
reality—they are him grappling with the death of his fallen-soldier father, his
family’s varying levels of acceptance (or nonacceptance) of his sexuality, a
budding relationship with his first boyfriend, and more. These musical scenes
are cathartic, yes, but they are so much more, and they reflect on, rather than
retreat from, the things that weigh on this boy’s mind at this formative time
of his life.
In doing this, first-time writer-director Damon
Cardasis displays bottomless empathy for his central character and an endless
desire to wring beauty out of reality’s ugliness.
Cardasis uses a recurring motif of multicolored
flower petals to elegant effect. Yellows, purples, reds, and blues sprinkle
atop subway platform steps after Ulysses’s first kiss like a wave of
gorgeousness atop a gum-and-rust-covered piece of crumbling infrastructure.
Pastel petals fall from the sky and lens flares pop on the screen like golden
bubbles during another number titled “So Lost Without You” while
cinematographer Hillary Spera’s camera circles Ulysses and Raymond (Marquis
Rodriguez), the boy who matters more to him than anything in the world in that
moment.
This would-be old Hollywood duet takes place on
a New York street that couldn’t be less romantic, with its shuttered industrial
buildings and the omnipresent yellow haze of city street lights, but the feeling
of falling for someone brightens even the drabbest environments—and
Cardasis and Spera don’t miss their chance to capture this.
A Respite From Injustice
Unfortunately for Ulysses, those moments of
happiness, of songs and dances and smiles and butterfly-filled stomachs, are
fleeting. His situation, to put it kindly, is less than ideal. His nurse mother
(a loving if exhausted Margot Bingham) is unable to be around for him and his
younger brother because she has to pick up the financial slack after her
husband’s death in combat. In her place is Aunt Rose (Regina Taylor, in a
ferocious performance), who is only one generation older in actuality, but her
moralizing is stuck centuries in the past—and she wields her outdated,
uber-Christian views as a revanchist weapon against her great-nephew.
And that’s when Ulysses has it “good.” Saturday
Church doesn’t gloss over the challenges LGBT+ youth face, from
homelessness to taking up unwanted sex work for survival to savage beatings.
Ulysses sees it, hears it, lives it all at various points throughout the film.
But he’s there for the friends he meets at the
film’s namesake, a shelter for the city’s queer people where they can safely
hang out and eat a meal in the presence of those who accept them.
And they’re present for him when he needs them,
with words of solidarity, if not necessarily encouragement. They’ve all been
where he is when he’s at his lowest, and they let him know their horror stories
both verbally and with their bodies. Scars are visible on the arms of
transgender sex workers, and it’s left unsaid whether the scars were
self-inflicted or the work of someone else. It doesn’t need to be said because
they tell a story of survival. It’s a way of saying to Ulysses, and also to
anyone in the audience, that there’s no sugarcoating how much life can suck for
anyone outside the hetero-cis-white world—but they’ll get through it. They’ll
be weary and they’ll be wary, but they’ll be alive in the end.
And when the flower petals start falling again,
and the dancing begins again, and the voices start harmonizing again, even for
the most fleeting of moments, being alive will be all that matters.
Well, being alive and being able to knock out an
audience with your voguing skills.
Director: Damon Cardasis
Writer: Damon Cardasis
Starring: Luka Kain, Margot Bingham, Regina
Taylor, Marquis Rodriguez, Jaylin Fletcher, Peter Y. Kim, Evander Duck Jr.
Rating: 4/5 stars
Available now in limited release and on demand
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