Moby Longinotto | Smalltown Boy / 2007

carnival queen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Moby Longinotto (screenwriter and director) Smalltown Boy / 2007 [14 minutes]

 

The location of this short British film by Moby Longinotto is the small town of Axbridge. The unnamed central figure of the work, interviewed throughout, responds to the lovely pictures we observe of this village: “The countryside is a beautiful place. I just feel it’s the wrong place for me. I don’t feel like I belong in the countryside.”

     What we see learn about his own background truly helps us to comprehend his sense of displacement. At 15-years of age he had previously been in foster care for 7 years before, when they discovered that he was gay, he was thrown out of his home. He obviously is now in foster care in this village, since we later meet his quite accepting current foster mother.

      The villagers, we quickly perceive, given the looks he receives even while walking down the village streets and through comments tossed out to him such as a 40-year-old some workman who loudly comments, “You make a mockery out of us,” surely are not welcoming of such a young man. Off camera, he shouts, “Stick it up your ass.” But as he comments later, he says a lot of things than help him to survive after his traumatic youth.

       He describes the situation when he was sent off from his earlier foster family: “When I said I was gay, they just didn’t want to know anymore.” And he describes what he characterizes as what led up to his “manic-depression.” He talks about being bullied in school, attacked in the school halls. “I really couldn’t concentrate on anything other than that. It got to the point where I just didn’t go [so school]. My parents dropped me off, and I couldn’t physically make myself walk through the school gates.”

       Despite his horrific past, however, he has become determined to serve as the first ever gay male carnival queen for the fast day’s celebration in Axbridge, proving to those who mock him that he’s “he’s got more balls than any of the men out there who wouldn’t even dream of doing something like that.”  

       As the days click down, and it is now only one day before the event, he gets a call from his friend saying people are going to “egg me and foul me tomorrow.” But he’s prepared, he claims, and has friends will help to protect him.

       As he plucks his eyebrows in front the purple dress he obviously intends to wear, he ruminates,

“People think I’m vain because I say from to time, ‘I’m gorgeous or I’m this or I’m that.’ But I say it because it makes me feel well.”

       But clearly he’s nervous: “It’s like wedding-day big for me.”

       Although there’s no indication that this young man sees himself as transsexual or is even imagining a gender change, a boy on the street responds when asked about the queer boy in town:

 “He’s a bit of a queer and he wants to be trans-sexual. So, I don’t like him. Never did. I think he wants to be more of a woman than he wants to be a fucking man.”

       But an older man, when asked, suggests it’s free world.”

       The day of the event, his new foster mother tells him to stop shaking and calm down. “It’s all in the name of fun remember.”

        We watch the young man walk the long ways from his home to car in which he will ride, and, soon after, watch him in the car, accompanied by two men dressed as Roman soldiers, as he stands, almost coming to life as he waves in mock royalty, joking that they should calm down, since he’s the one in the dress.

        His first comment, as he walks back the seemingly long distance to his home, is “I just don’t want people to thank I’m a woman now,” as we realize that the gesture as been a kind of grand drag queen like expression. It is almost as he in dressing up in drag he is exaggerating the effeminacy that the natives have already observed and made fun of.

        But, in the end, he argues, the good overrode the bad, and there were a lot of positive comments. “I really did enjoy it.”

The good overrode the bad, and there were a lot of positive good comments. And I did really enjoy it, adding, in defiance of the years of working outside the communities in which he has been forced to survive, “They thought they could intimidate me and that I’d back down. But I know no one’s going to stop me from doing what I want to do.”

        If this is not a profound short work, it certainly reveals the vibrancy of your people like the narrator of this film, who survive situations to renew and reveal themselves as the resilient individuals they have become. At his age, I was still a closeted naïve who had not clue of the wonderful world in store for me.

        This young man is so engaging, we might like to know what has become of him.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2023).