Jude Bourne | Keep on Climbing / 2022

you have to go home again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jude Bourne (screenwriter and director) Keep on Climbing / 2022 [26 minutes]

 

Eli (Joe Bruce), a boy from a small town in the provinces arrives in London and before he can even get his suitcase unpacked, discovers himself in a park, where two girls immediately invite him to join their group and to attend a party that evening.

 

    Eli may be a bit uncomfortable about the sudden activity, but on meeting Riley (Sami Sumaria), and particularly good-looking and fairly well-off young man, how can he resist—particularly when, after getting a look at Eli’s slumlord room, he invites him to stay with him. And meanwhile Riley initiates the newcomer in how to use makeup, do over his hair, and have a truly fun time.

     While Riley himself seems unable to find a job, Eli manages at least to help him create a reasonable resume.

     Riley also reveals how he was bullied as a young boy, but the act seems to be primarily about his missing out on the opportunity to have perfect school attendance rather than, as Eli makes clear, feeling that if he stays where he had stayed in his small home town he would never have been able to escape. Someone how the comparison between the two boys’ situation seems inappropriate, the one about an award for perfection, the other about the necessity of survival.

    A romance, however, quickly gets brewing, and all seems to being going wonderfully, that is until Riley discovers that the money Eli has brought with him in order to survive until he finds a job has been stolen from his mother. Eli insists that when he finds a job he intends to pay her back. But that isn’t nearly good enough for the permanently jobless Riley.

     It’s hard to imagine that Riley, who seems to live a rather wild and empty life, might turn out to be such a moralist. But he quickly demonstrates his anger about Eli’s lies and demands his friend return to the small town where Eli was, as he explains it, literally suffocating as a young gay man. When he asks how much of the stolen money Eli has left, he writes out a check for the missing amount and sends him on his way.

    Eli returns home, and evidently—although we never discover how—is able to get a job to return to the magic world from which he had been ousted. He returns to Riley’s house, but there is no answer when he knocks at the door, and we can only presume that Riley no longer lives there. The idea that he simply might not be home is never introduced, as sadly Eli is turned away and must now find someone else to help him make his way in his new life.

     The young couple, Eli and Riley, would have made a perfect pair; and British director Jude Bourne’s film is quite beautifully shot. But the narrative has the feeling of a moral fable more than a true gay narrative. It seems almost as if a church group might have funded this little work with its moralistic insistence that no matter how bleak one’s life is, one has to honestly earn one’s way to escape. The title says it all: life is a constant struggle to get where you want to go. Even a slightly suicidal kid from the sticks has to earn his way to get to the big city where he can truly discover his identity.

      I’d much have preferred for the new boy to take the money and run, and I might ask to discover who Riley really is and how he found his way into such a nice situation. It appears he must have come from a privileged Anglo-Indian family which makes his moral incantations sound rather hallow.

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).