Rachel Ward | The Big House /2000

dropping the soap

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rachel Ward (screenwriter and director) The Big House / 2000 [24 minutes]

 

Among a very long list of male prison love stories including William Dieterle’s 1928 masterwork Sex in Chains, Jean Genet’s Un chant d'amour (1950), Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), Harvey Hart’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1971), Wolfgang Peterson’s The Consequence (1977), Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978), Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s I Love You Phillip Morris (2009), Sebastián Muñoz’s The Prince (2019), Josza Anjembe’s Freed (2019), and Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom (2021)—these representing but a handful—Australian director Rachel Ward’s 2000 short The Big House is not insignificant and is visually much tougher. Filmed in the real Maitland Goal of Australia, the work dares to truly reveal the prison conditions and activities. A short, however, as both Anjembe’s film and Ward’s work are reveals the form as perhaps not the best medium for a subject in which the dominant motif is about serving what seems like an endless period of one’s life. Indeed, in both these works there is a sense that the prisoner about to be released might wish, given his love interest, to stay a while longer—which, in fact, is the theme of both Freed and Great Freedom.

     In Ward’s work new prisoner Sonny (Kick Gurry) is almost immediately saved by his own good looks and long-term prisoner Williams’ interest in him; Williams evidently has permission of the entry guards to pick his new roommates. And he has a reputation, apparently, of choosing well, given the general chaos that occurs when he passes with pretty boy Sonny the caged prisoners suddenly appear to behave like excited gorillas, hooting, masturbating, and showing off their bums. Ward creates a palpable tension by refusing to show Sonny to the audience until we finally catch a glimpse of him in Williams’ cell mirror.

 

    In his very first shower, Sonny is almost raped by four burly men headed by William’s competitor, Jacko, as he plays the game based on the long-held myth of dropping the soap in a prison shower, used here as a purposeful in-joke, if you can describe an actual attempt at rape as being something of humor.

     Williams not only picks his cellmates carefully, however, but protects them, saving their virginity for his own more gentle techniques which begin as a long massage and a night of cuddling before he fucks his new boys.

 

     Recognizing that he is better off under Williams’ mentorship—if you can describe it as that—than the brutal lust of Jacko, Sonny quickly comes to accept his situation, just as the young man did in The Prince. And gradually he not only grows to love his cellmate, if it can be described as  such, but extends his own form of protection by teaching his illiterate roomy how to read. Over his 9 months of imprisonment, indeed, the two form a kind of bond that might be described as love, Sonny in particular getting to know the man who has fathered his own son who may now be just a little younger than Sonny.

     If Ward smooths some of the prison violence over, there is still plenty of occasion for potential rape and Williams’ needed protection, and her vision of a prison is a lot more realistic that Hart’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, with its witty transvestite repartee or Requa and Ficarra’s comic prison love affair in I Love You Phillip Morris, and she wisely delimits the sexual longings that characterize the works by Genet or Peterson’s man/boy love affair of The Consequence. If Sonny develops a love for Williams, it is no deep affair of a lusting heart, but simply a respect and admiration for the man who fucks him in return for his protection, perhaps not so very different from Muñoz’s far more complex The Prince.

     After hugging his lover goodbye upon his release, Williams wastes no time at all in picking out an even younger boy, Shay, for his next cellmate, a boy that might indeed be the very same age of his son. We wonder if it might, in fact, be the boy whose photo he has kept so long on his wall. And when the newbie asks who the other boy is, Williams quickly tears up the photo Sonny has left behind.

     Ward’s work may be somewhat simplistic, but then it does more in its 24 minutes than some of the dozens of prison films do regarding male-on-male sex over hours.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).