by Douglas Messerli
Joshua Coppenbarger (screenwriter and director) Opening Night /
2023 [14 minutes]
Not long before Josh (Jack Walz) is due on stage, a performance in
which he must kiss the school beauty, Kate (Yahm Steinberg), the cute kid is
getting more and more nervous. First of all, he has never kissed Kate yet even
in rehearsal, and everyone at school knows it the big scene they’ve all been
waiting for.
Moreover, he’s never kissed
a girl before, in fact he’s never kissed anyone. His eyes keep going toward the
tall dancer Tyler (Jeremiah Brannan) who he’s watched in rehearsal, and who
performs in the intermission of the play in which he is in.
We realize by this point we
have entered the world of a boyhood fantasy and somehow freshman
writer/director Coppenbarger will get his two cute boys to hook up for a bit of
kissing practice.
The clumsy manner in which
Coppenbarger gets the boys together is to gather up all the freshman boys in a
kind of pre-play initiation ceremony wherein the actors are forced to accept a
handful of foot power, rub it into the cocks and balls and then slap their
still dusty white hands on the wall. For what purpose they engage in this
activity, we’ll never know.
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The rest of the boys get it over with as they
can while Josh and Tyler tarry, finally getting up the nerve, after everyone
else has left, not only to talk to one another but to actually practice that
first kiss, which, of course, quickly becomes a second, an intense third and
more as the two boys quickly fall in love, and Josh has no problem kissing the
heavily red lipped female while, presumably thinking only about Tyler.
The film is cute, but truly
pointless—a film of first love and first kisses without any clue about one
comes next or even if anything else might follow. This is what you might
describe as pre-adolescent cinema at its best. The boys are cute, and the stage
lights up in lovely colors as they share their first sensation of a mouth put
to mouth.
Los Angeles, January 23, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).
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