SATURDAY CHURCH Review: 2018 Didn't Wait Long For Its First Excellent Film


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.

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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