Alexandru Tudor and Alexandru Zepciuc | After School / 2011

a dialectic of young love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexandru Tudor (screenplay), Alexandru Tudor and Alexandru Zepciuc (directors) After School / 2011 [36 minutes]

 

Adi’s mother (Liliana Pana) insists that her son (Cornelius Florin Suciu) sit down so that she can talk to him. She’s spoken to his head teacher and she needs him to answer some questions. But at the same time, she attempts to reassure him, she is not seeking punishment, but simply for him to speak fully and be totally honest with her.

      He has evidently kissed a boy in the school bathroom which was observed by others. She realizes that at his age young people experiment. But is one thing to masturbate, for example, but quite another thing to kiss another boy in school. There are responsibilities that one has, she argues. “I’m trying my best not to blame it your friend,” she explains, “before hearing it all from you, first.”

     However, she interrupts herself, she instinctually knows her son is not the most innocent person on earth. She insists that she will protect him. Even the interview now was her decision instead of letting her husband talk with Adi. He was most upset when she telephoned him, she remarks.

      “Who started it?”

     Adi explains that it grew out of being a game played with others of “Truth or Dare,” but then gradually they simply begin kissing one another and sometimes genitals. But then one boy suggested his friend, Victor, insisted he take off his clothes. Genital touching followed.       

     When the others began not showing up, and only Victor and Adi were left, “We kissed…nothing more.” When asked who suggested it, Adi responds that it was both of them.

      “Do you like Victor?” the mother asks. “Sexually speaking?”

     Adi cannot answer, which says everything. His mother takes off her glasses, tears welling in her eyes. “Adi if there’s one thing I couldn’t bear that’s knowing someone has taken advantage of you. That he had you doing something against your will. I told you, I understand the age you’re at…Yet it’s very hard for me to understand that my son, my only son, might be gay…. But I guess it’s not the right time for me to think like that. Nothing is certain at your age.” Her only hope, she argues, is that he make the best choices for himself. “It’s very important that you never lie to yourself.”

 

     This highly enlightened mother argues that life will whisper about the choices you have to make. “But she’ll always propose, not impose. It’s your choice to make. Choose only what’s good for you and those around you.”

      Her final observation is brilliant, “You’re just kids. At the right age for curiosities and experiments.”

       Adi finally as much as admits to their relationship, suggesting that despite the feelings of fear and worry his mother has, “But we feel good with who we are,” although he admits that the thing in the bathroom was really foolish.

       The film goes dark and begins over again, this time at the school. Students begin to exit their rooms at the end of a school day. A young man, Radu (Anghel Damian) meets up with his girlfriend, while another young man, Mirel (Catalin Lungu) is met by his friend who has been skipping from classes, Ionut (Razvan Popescu).

 

      Radu invites his girlfriend to go to a movie that evening, but she’s already read the book and is not sure she wants to see. He wants to read to book, which means he’ll have to accompany her home.

      Victor (Burcea Mihai) takes the subway home, greeting his mother, who also wants to attend the movie with him that evening.

      In the meantime, Mirel and Ionut have just robbed a man, and empty the wallet in an alley to discover if there’s anything of worth. They leave behind most of its contents, taking only a few dollars and a couple of cards which might contain his PIN number.

        Victor decides to take a bicycle ride during which he passes the alleyway where Mirel and Ionut have just left the wallet and its contents. Observing the cards and papers strewn in the alley, Victor gathers them, seeks out the man’s address and determines to return the contents to him.

       Radu’s girlfriend finally finds the book, as the two kiss and fall in a hug on her bed, the book falling to the floor.

       Mirel and Ionut are on the run, either the man they robbed or an undercover policeman on the chase.

 

        Victor bicycles a rather long distance to the address he’s found listed in the wallet. He goes to the apartment named on driver’s license, but is afraid to ring the buzzer and instead goes back down to the lobby to place it in the proper mailbox slot instead. As he begins to put the papers in the slot, he’s interrupted by Radu and his girlfriend on their way out to the movie, and pauses his actions, pretending to be working on his bike. When they leave, he finishes putting all the papers into the slot.

         Radu and his girlfriend agree that the boy was not working on his bike, she suggesting that they follow him, Radu refusing to. Yet they do pass by Mirel and Ionut, who they agree really do truly look suspicious.

         Victor arrives home, his mother declaring it’s too late for the cinema. Sitting on the couch, Victor takes out the same book from his backpack that Radu never read, and starts reading it.

       Two girls walking across an open field discuss love and then they lay down and speak of their own love for one another.

         Victor joins his mother at their small countertop for dinner.

       This short Romanian film by the Alexandrus Tudor and Zepciuc discusses young love, self-will, and individual decision-making in various manners. Obviously, the first third of the film quite lays out the problems and options in the gentle discussion of a mother with her son, while the later other incidents represent various forms of people making just such decisions, some of them such as Mirel making the wrong decision by allowing his friend Ionut to take advantage of him in involving him in the robbery.

       Even Radu, in a far milder way, is encouraged to demonstrate his love for his girlfriend by returning home with her and sharing the intimacy of her bed, all in the name of a book which he will never be able to read before attending the movie.

         The two lesbian women at least discuss their love openly, while still trying to influence each other in their decisions.

        Only Victor acts solely out of a selfless love for truth and honesty, making sure that a stranger who has been robbed is restored his wallet and its papers. Victor, it appears, is surely the perfect friend and companion for Adi, who has been equally honest with his mother and not found a way out of his situation by blaming Victor.

          Presenting a philosophical issue and exploring various actors engaging with similar issues may be an unusual form for a short gay movie, but it surely is an interesting one—resulting in more of a dialectic instead of a standard naturalist tale of young love. I’d like to see more of such intellectual engagements with the difficulties of young teenagers rather than yet another drama of confession and self-doubt. But then mothers like Adi’s are rare.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2024).