Patrick Vollrath | Ketchup Kid / 2013

making a friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rob Summerfield and Patrick Vollrath (screenplay), Patrick Vollrath (director) Ketchup Kid / 2013 [20 minutes]

 

The 11-year-old boy, Paul (Finn Bachmann), is known by his friends as “Ketchup Kid” for his love of ketchup sandwiches. But he’s also an outsider in numerous other ways and not happy in school. On this particular day he watches a student he apparently doesn’t know, arrive and refuse

to get out of his father’s car. The child, Aleksander (Matthias Hecht), seems even more troubled by attending school than Paul does.

       Paul is particularly troubled by one bully, Sascha (Max Schachermayer), who has made a cellphone film of him eating his ketchup sandwiches, and the boys fight, with Paul winning the battle. When the teacher arrives, both boys are punished, Sascha insisting that he’s innocent.

       To make matters worse, when Paul goes up to hand in his gradebook, Sascha steals Paul’s ketchup out of his backpack, excuses himself to go the bathroom and pisses into Paul’s ketchup bottle.

      Soon after, Paul himself escapes to the toilet, proceeds to make himself a nice large ketchup sandwich into which he is about to bite as he hears someone in the bathroom whimpering. He stands on the toilet seat and sees Aleksandar in the next stall hunkered down on the floor crying. He also notices that the boy has a knife.

        As Paul returns to the hall he can now hear the boys attacking Aleksandar outside building and observes him trying to run from them. They corner him and throw him into a school dumpster.

         Finally, Alek escapes and tries to make another run for it, but again they corner and begin beating him for hitting one of the boys with his backpack. Observing the incidents, Paul runs to the spot where they’re beating him. Alek pleads with them, but they attempt to take off his pants. Getting on to the top of slide Paul sprays the tormentors with his ketchup and Alek runs off as the bullies go after Paul.

         When Aleksandar turns back to observe, the boys now have his savior in a stranglehold, he turns back, knife in hand. Holding the open knife out he demands they leave both him and Paul alone, but one boy, Phillipe (Skye MacDonald) continues to move toward him, attempting wrestle the knife out of his hand, it the process getting cut.

         Seeing the boy now on ground crying out, Aleksandar tosses away the knife and runs off. For the first time, the bullies are frightened, startled that one of them has been hurt and shout out that someone should call the hospital. Paul, checking him out, pulls up his shirt to see only a small scratch and accuses him of crying like a baby. Paul then turns and runs after Alek, who by this time has reached the train tracks and is sitting on them as a train moves forward. Paul tries to pull him away without success, trying to explain it was only a little scratch.

         The train has actually been moving slowly and stops before it hits the two boys, the conduction screaming after he will call the police on them as finally they run off together. When they stop, Paul calls his new friend crazy, an idiot. He could have died. And finally, Paul simply says thank you, something which no one has probably to Paul for a long while. 

       They sit together for a short while, before Alek invites him over for dinner; on Fridays they have spaghetti with Bolognese sauce, something Paul admits he hasn’t had for a long while. His father, he explains, always made it with ketchup. And where is his father now? He died the boy responds, making it clear that ketchup isn’t perhaps what Paul wants to dine on, but hasn’t a lot of other choices. We hear nothing about his mother; does she work? Is she attentive to her son? If nothing else, the boys have now each made a new friend.

 

         There is no way to know whether either boy is being bullied because of his suspected sexuality; Paul’s outsiderness seems simply to have to do with his eating habits, as do those of Alex, who is overweight. Yet any gay boy knows what it feels like to be bullied just like these two “queer outsiders” do. And this film by the German filmmaker, who shot the work in Austria and Slovakia, would certainly be of significance for any young boy who might be feeling sexual confusion as well—even if I must admit this is not truly an LGBTQ film.

 

Los Angeles, February 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).