Charlie Schultz | Out / 2017

returning to normal

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Coult (screenplay), Charlie Schultz (director) Out / 2017 [9 minutes]

 

It’s almost as if the young British Bournemouth University student who made this short film has never before seen a gay film, given the unoriginality of both the title and the subject of his short work. We have to presume it’s based on a personal experience of either the writer or the director that they simply couldn’t resist sharing. But it also reveals, yet again, just how potent the coming out phenomenon is to young gay men.

 

     In this case, the young man, Andy (Jaime Lee-Hill) does not willingly confront his rather curt and generally critical father Joshua (Nick Bankiyan-Monfard), obviously a widowerer confused in how to raise his own son. Andy mistakenly leaves his cellphone in his coat pocket as he returns home from school. When the phone rings, the father intercepts the call from his friend Luke that not only speaks about their relationship but chastises the boy, writing “You need to stop hiding this.”

      When the young high school student discovers that his cellphone is not in his room, he races downstairs to retrieve it, too late. He is confronted by his father who demands that he explain himself. Andy grabs his coat and school bag and runs, unable to face his angry father, who continues to demand his son answer him as the boy makes his escape.

      In a rather sentimental incident, the father’s head goes crashing against one of the photos in the hall, a picture of him and his son, which reminds him how much he loved—or at least previously loved—his son.

     Andy, meanwhile, sits for hours on a park bench debating what to do, where to go. He has enough money for a train or bus ticket, but what is he supposed to do wherever he gets there? What choices does he have as a 16- or 17-year-old? It’s the he problem that all gay runaways must face. Our young “hero” certainly doesn’t look like he’d last long on the streets.

      Although he calls his friend Luke, it’s clear that Luke’s not quite ready to run off with him, apparently having an important family event to attend to first. As the runaway oddly agrees, “Family comes first,” although in his case he has just severed family ties.

       The father, meanwhile, talks to the boy’s sister Zoe (Gina Holloway), who explains that she’s known about her brother’s sexuality and attempted to get him to talk about it with their father, but he has simply been too terrified to do so.

       He argues that he “doesn’t have anything against them (presumably gay people), but when it’s my own son. I can’t just pretend.” When he asks his daughter what her mother might have said, Zoe argues she would have been happy that he was simply healthy and happy. And magically this convinces the foul-tempered man.

       Eventually, of course, Andy has no choice but to return, explaining that actually he’s happy his secret world is over. “I’ve spent years of my life walking through that front door, thinking my head would explode every time you asked me where I’d been.” As with many young men in his situation, he wants to feel “normal” again, presumably by that world meaning “accepted,” that the relationship between him and his father will return to what it was before he realized his sexual difference.

       A surprise hug from his father changes everything.

       No such hug was ever offered by my father even though I realized that he continued to love me; but nothing could ever return to “normal,” nor perhaps had it ever been. But it’s always nice to think, as many of the current “coming out” films seem to confirm, that there is far less hysteria about the issue than there used to be.

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).