Anna Maguire | Sacrifice / 2018

silent deaths

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leigh Smith (screenplay), Anna Maguire (director) Sacrifice / 2018 [17 minutes]

 

There are dozens of films in which the wife must suffer the news of his soldier husband’s death, and that represent her and the family’s grief. But there are very few such representations in LGBTQ cinema.

      Before 1992, as the film observes in an afternote, “LGBTQI Military were forced to hide their sexuality, facing discharge if exposed. Until now these individuals have been written out of Australia's Military history.”

      The plot here is a simple and straightforward one. Blake Robinson (Jesse Everett) and James Hunter (Leigh Smith) are a loving gay couple who are finally at a point where they had hoped to settle down to lead a “normal and quiet” life. Blake has been committed to a military career and James is a humanitarian rights lawyer, although the latter career is not even mentioned in the film.

       The central story revolves around Blake who, without fully revealing it to his lover, has volunteered for a 9-month deployment that he assures James, along with their female military friend Julia (Anna Maguire), will be safe and uneventful. As they pack up his belongings, however, James grows angry with the situation, realizing that since the military know nothing of their relationship, they are able to extend his deployment; after all, as he puts it, he’s not missing out of his child’s first words or special birthdays, etc. Yet Blake assures him of his love by asking him to marry, presenting him with a wedding ring.

       As we might have feared, toward the end of his deployment Blake is killed in a military action for which he had volunteered. And the film ends with his husband having to deal with the sorrow alone and in silence, without even a body to bury and perhaps without even Blake’s parents being fully aware of their love. As the movie makes clear, since such relationships were not recognized by the government or society at large, they remained unrecorded, the widow having to suffer in silence.

       Yes this film is sentimental, but so too are the dozens of straight films which had long represented their heroes as men who gave up his life, along with their love of wife and children, for their country. But so too did plenty of gay men and women, who could not even speak of their loved ones, of the homes and families they had created for themselves. This short film, directed by Maguire, and written by Smith attempts to make some sort of amends for the painful silences that their companions had to endure.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).