Sam Max | Chaperone / 2022

evidence of a murder

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Max (screenwriter and director) Chaperone / 2022 [16 minutes]

 

US director Sam Max’s Chaperone has the horrific reverberations of works such as David, Hoyle, Gary Reich, and Mike Nicholls’ Uncle David (2010) and Osama Chami and Enrique Gimeno Pedrós’ Young Diego (2021) in which young boys, urged on by older men, determine that it is time to die.

   

      The young figure in this film, simply called “Client” (Russell Kahn), meets up in a car with a stranger called the Chaperone (Zachary Quinto) with whom he’s obviously been in touch through the internet, as they check off the pre-determined details: that he has deleted everything from his computers, that he has sent his telephone and its messages to an agreed-upon location (presumably for destruction),  he has drawn the curtains, closed out all of his bank accounts, and in this “client’s” case has not even been out of the house for four days. Even the Client’s backpack is checked.

      We can already guess that our young friend will not be returning to his previous life, but if there is any question left, when the Chaperone later sees the young man through something out the moving car window only to discover that they were his house keys which he’d forgotten to get rid of previously, and the driver screeches to a halt, going back to retrieve the keys, we know that they are on a serious mission, particularly since the Chaperone cannot even permit the keys to somehow be possibly found by others.

     Yet the Chaperone remains friendly and gentle with his Client, asking him if he’s a little nervous, the boy saying, “Yeah, I guess so.”

    The Chaperone, however, certainly doesn’t have a very developed sense of human, and he comments, “People usually haven’t done something like this before,” to which the young man asks, “Usually?” the Chaperone declaring “It’s a joke.”

       That comment, however, most certainly clues us in that people do whatever it is that he is about to do only once, and that death is involved. For the rest of the film, accordingly, we attempt to discern why and how the young man is determined to meet up with death.

       Suddenly he asks if they can stop, evidently at a fast-food shop where he asks for “nuggets” and for the toys, this a Halloween ghost, that such places given as toys to children.

       The isolated country house which they soon reach, is fully appointed with a kitchen, fireplace, and comfortable furniture, even if it is fairly barren in appearance.

        Our young man asks him a rather strange question. “Is this where you take all the boys?”

        “This is it,” answers the rather taciturn elder man.       

      Does this man’s job only entail young men, we wonder. Is he a kind of Charon only for boys? And if so, what does he first do to or with them, we have to ask ourselves. Like David’s older uncle in the 2010 movie I mention above, does he first provide them with a party and sex? Or like the man about to carry off “young Diego” in the 2021 film, does he have cannibalistic urges? This clearly has the makings of a horror film.

 

      But director Max soon makes it clear when the Chaperone sits down on the plastic-wrapped furniture to count the numerous stacks of bills that have been in the boy’s backpack, that whatever is in the store, the Client has highly paid for it, a fact which I found even more menacing, realizing at the same moment that had I not been watching this on a DVD collection devoted to gay film, there would be no reason at the point in the film, at 6 minutes, to even lead one to believe that this might be a film about homosexuals or a gay boy.

       The bedroom is empty except for a plastic-covered bed, presumably the furniture all protected from human body sweat, skin imprint, or any other DNA information. However, the death will occur for whatever reason, it will obviously not be a bloody mess. There’s something terribly cold-blooded and premediated about this whole affair.

      No, there will be no sloppy partying, no cutting up or tearing a flesh in this country house. A drawer in the bathroom cabinet, however, is filled with trays of various drugs, all for the young boy’s use.

        And we soon see the young man in his yellow Calvins, dancing on a coffee table as he puffs on a marijuana cig in from of the bemused Chaperone. He asks for the name of weed he is enjoying, called Skullcap. Our young man reaches out, at the same moment, for the older man to join him in the dance, which he does fully clothed in black and swearing gloves to so his own skin won’t become contaminated with any evidence of the boy’s touch. The boy whispers, “Will you fuck me now.”

       So there is to be sex. Well, not real sex, so it appears, as the Chaperone pulls a dildo out of a drawer and wraps even it in a condom. Laid out on the bed like an etherized patient, the boy has to beg the elder to pretend it’s his, to at least act like it is his own penis penetrating his ass.

       The older man unzips his pants and puts the other end where his penis is, asking “Are you ready?” The sex occurs off screen.

       We observe the boy after sex, not at all looking so joyful, as the Chaperone rolls up the now plastic-covered dildo in a towel, presumably for burial in some distant corner of the universe. If this young man were going this this process for the sex, I’d suggest that he would be far from satisfied. But obviously, the major event as still not taken place.

       The boy walks over to a window, the elder following him and in Quinto’s deep baritone voice asks if everything’s okay, the young man responding, “Yeah, I think it’s time. I think I need to do it now.”

       In the dark, with a lamp in hand, they walk several yards from the house where the Chaperone spreads out a cloth almost like it was a picnic, as they sit down on the grass.

       The boy holds out his hand to accept the pill. “It doesn’t look so scary, does it?”

       The Chaperone responds quite surprisingly, with a half-smile on his face. “I think it’s kind of cute.”

       Swallowing the pill, the boy lays down, the older man stroking his face with his black gloves. “All of a sudden, I’m scared,” the boy responds, “Will you play with my hair?”

       The finally asks if the older man can take his clothes off, but the man replies that he can’t, he’s sorry, but he can’t.

 

       A single tear wells up and falls from the boy’s eye, as the glove wipes it away. A few minutes later the Chaperone turns out the light.

        We feel something coy and even tawdry about this film, about these scenes in which we’ve never even had a hint of why this young man, seemingly in good health, has been so intent to seek out assisted suicide. Does he have some fatal disease, AIDS, a brain tumor, a rare kind of cancer? Or is he simply fed out with his life, in spending his days alone, and has decided to do himself in?

        Any single answer, of course, would have been pointless. There’s a reason why assisted suicide is not permitted in this country for young boys of his age, and why this Charon has so gone out of his way to cover all his tracks. It is a kind of murder, no matter what reasons the boy might have given us to explain his desire to die.

        This film ends with a long scene in which we observe the older man vacuuming, even his shoes cover in plastic, and where every wrap and scrap of clothing is gathered up and put into a large plastic bag. The sink is scoured with heavy detergents.

        With a gas mask in place, the Chaperone finally pours whatever lethal chemical he has in the plastic container upon the boy’s body, now placed in the bathtub, obviously naked, even though we see only his feet as evidence of his former existence. Presumably the chemicals will dissolve the body. He surely will successfully get rid of all the “evidence” of the murder.

        Only one small object remains, which we see the Chaperone, now sitting alone outdoors, holding and rolling over in his hand, the fast-food outlet’s child’s toy, the ghost of the young man he has helped to kill.

 

Los Angeles, December 12, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).