Brian O'Neill | Lillies in the Forest / 2017

serendipity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Dolan (screenplay), Brian O’Neill (director) Lillies in the Forest / 2017 [5 minutes]

 

I have no idea and little interest in what Brian O’Neill’s very short film Lillies in the Forest might be attempting to say, and I’m sorry to report, I don’t really feel any necessity to dig for deeper meaning.

  

     It begins with an obviously gay elder man, Ben (the film’s writer Andrew Dolan), dressed in a yellow shirt and a long coral-colored scarf, his lips appearing as if he might have applied them with a bit of rouge, creating the look of what you describe as that of an old-fashioned queen. He is waiting for the subway and enters a car when it arrives.

       There he spots a rather grumpy, heavily whiskered man, Virgil (Victor Verhaeghe), whose fingers, most of them bandaged, has obviously encountered some mishap. The new passenger moves closely to the stranger, watching him take out another Band-Aid which he applies to one of nails.

       Ben sits down on a nearby seat, and leans toward Virgil, speaking the words, almost as they represented a kind of secret code, “Sometimes when the autumn winds bristle, I like to mix gin with my jasmine tea and look at picture books of Myrna Loy.”

       The grizzled gentleman pauses for a few seconds before reaching into his duffel bag and pulling out a book about Myrna Loy: “Is that this one?

       Together the two men immediately begin to attend to the pictures in the book. And at the same moment a man with guitar (the director Brian O’Neill) begins singing “Free World” (a song written by O’Neill). Four female passengers suddenly pair up and couples and along with a young man and woman begin to dance, as the camera swings back to observe the two men ensconced in their picture-viewing now with interlocked pinky-fingers.

      I supposed this love-fest is meant to show that you can’t judge people by appearances, and inside each of us there a desire to be loved if only we lived a world free enough to reveal those innermost feelings. Perhaps this little hippie-love lovefest is a kind a regular thing, these individuals picking out a time when most people might be using the subway, and coming together in a specifically numbered car just for the fun of it.

      I too like Myrna Loy and would gladly read the biography shared by these gay man. But really, I have utterly no interest in leafing through its pages on a New York subway where a man loudly sings a homemade paean to freedom while people slow-dance in the aisles. Moreover, I seem to have missed those misspelled lilies for all the film’s invisible trees.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).