Kalil Haddad | Farm Boy / 2019

paradise lost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kalil Haddad (screenwriter and director) Farm Boy / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

Mostly without dialogue, Canadian director Kalil Haddad explores gay desire and regret in his 2019 film Farm Boy, a work which also focuses on the beauty of the rural landscape in which it is filmed.

      The short begins with one of the two major characters of this film, played by Hayden Gallagher, sits in a car waiting for a few moments as the rain pours down around it. We soon see the cute 20-some year old looking over at someone else and, after some pause, stripping of his shirt, and unzipping his pants. The camera moves back to reveal an older, bald-headed man (Chris Glesason), not at all the kind of individual with whom we might have expected the younger to be having gay sex. 

     This beginning, it soon becomes evident, comes after the series of somewhat paradisical interchanges between Gallagher’s character and a his then young teenage friend played by Cairns Nolan. Like many a film about gay teenage love, these two boys wander through the fields and woods, often quite aimlessly, unable to even fully communicate with one another. They seem to be studying the world around them in an attempt through most of the film in order to better comprehend their growing feelings for one another.

      There is a would-be moment of their close bodies as they sit together in the grass, one eventually laying down flat, the other joining him. But nothing happens. They simply lay beside one another in a deep bonding of desire.

      Their major sexual encounter is that typical of teenage boys when they sneak into a shed attached to the barn to mutually masturbate. It begins with the two of them jacking of while standing rather far apart. But slowly they begin to move a bit closer to one another, and yet closer until they are finally touching, Gallagher’s head on Nolan’s shoulder. A moment later they are holding one another’s cocks.

 

     They cum and Nolan leaves, Gallagher looking out the window already in longing for that special moment.

       Although they twice are seen dancing at what may or may not be a gay bar—it probably is just the local dance club open to all sexes—there are no other indications of how their gay relationship has developed or whether or not it truly has progressed. The only thing we know is that Gallagher sits in his bed nights ready to grab his cock, presumably thinking of his special relationship with Nolan.

 

      As the mentioned at the beginning of this essay, however, time is fluid in this work, expanded seemingly endlessly at moments while compacted in the next. All we know is that there was evidently a break, a traumatic incident represented in the work by an almost extra-terrestrial force of white light that draws the young Gallagher to his window in wonderment and fear. What caused it or even what happened between the two is never explained.

        All that we know is that in the very next frame on the darkened dance floor of the club the boys visit they seem to be dancing together, the noise of the music drowning out all other sounds, in its pounding domination almost creating a void. Suddenly a young girl’s face appears as she sips on a cocktail, hinting that perhaps the Nolan character has spotted her, causing a rupture in the boys’ intense relationship.

        Yet it is after that event when the two boys masturbate together, so we do not know which came first in time. Yet immediately after that scene, we are back on the dance floor so it may indeed have been Gallagher’s memory at the traumatic moment when the female enters the plot.

        In fact, it is a much later time, Gallagher alone at the bar since an unseen and unheard voice speaks the words, written out across the screen in yellow: “I heard he’s married now.” And an answer “That’s how it is. They’re always curious…till they’re not.” “It’s hard,” and an answer, “I know.” Another voice asks “What is?” The response this time is unexpected, “Aging.”

        Now we see an older man’s face on the screen, presumably Gallagher’s, but it could be Nolan’s. In a sense it doesn’t matter. The older man speaks: “He would have loved me.”

        The film ends with the young Gallagher experiencing the white light, and a scene in which Nolan is walking off through the beautiful landscape, away from his friend.

        Whoever remains has deep regrets for having lost of the love of his youthful paradise.

        In rural Canada, it is clear from that first scene, there are very few others to take its place.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).