Frank Mosvold | Summer Blues / 2002

endless remorse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Mosvold (screenwriter and director) Summer Blues / 2002 [25 minutes]

 

Working in a meat-packing plant, Mads (Kristoffer Berre Alberts) overhears that at a recent party his girlfriend Eva (Hanne Backe Hansen) got drunk and tried to have sex with every man at the event. Mads, a sweet and self-effacing young man, mentions the incident to Eva, to which she replies, “Nothing happened. Nothing serious,” he answering that he doesn’t want to hear anything about it and wants to continue on as “if nothing happened.”

     Although not truly essential to the story that follows, his reaction gives us a clue to his personality, a rather passive, peace-loving man, who also, however, won’t quite face up to the reality of sex, even when it comes to his own feelings.

 

    Immediately after this opening scene, Mads and Eva welcome Mads’ long-time friend Kristian (Tord Vandvik Haugen) and his apparently former local girlfriend Silje (Julia Schacht) for a weekend getaway at a summerhouse by the sea, where evidently Mads and Kristian grew up. The return appears to be an annual event since Kristian has left for the city.

     Almost immediately the boys strip off their clothes, put on their bathing trunks, dive into the water, and frolic around with one another in the manner of boyhood friends, although we sense something a bit closer between them. The two women watch they boyfriends, sensing also that they are not fully welcome in the rebonding of the two after their long absence from one another. It is only now that we discover that Kristian has gone off to study. Mads also tells him how much he’s been missed.

     Despite Mads’ insistence he hasn’t wanted to hear anymore about the incident he’s heard about Eva, he nonetheless brings it up, obliquely, as a subject with his old friends, and Eva sits for most of the time, apart from Mads, moping. Silje certainly senses there is something between Eva and Mads that doesn’t bode well. And Eva later argues that they shouldn’t have “come here”—meaning the summerhouse—they should have stayed at home.

     Eva perceives, moreover, that their relationship is not working out, and she wants to break up.

     Throughout the conversation, Mads maintains silence, almost as if assenting to her conclusions.

    Soon after, Mads shares his feelings about his relationship with Kristian, expressing how strange it feels given the way things have turned out. The two boys had agreed to stay in close touch with each other, but haven’t, and now seen each other so seldom.

   And even Silje, far more comfortable with the situation that Eva, asks Kristian when he’ll be returning. When he suggests “next summer,” she responds, “Surely you’ll be here for Christmas.”

      The group drinks heavily, with Eva remaining apart.

     Soon after, Mads becomes sick, vomiting, with Kristian attending to him, putting him into bed in his own room, and removing his T-shirt. As Kristian returns to the living room, Silje observes

his own indeterminacy, as if he is questioning something. In a matter of moments, he returns to the bedroom, asking if Mads is asleep, and when he receives no response, he carefully pulls off the covers, strokes his friends’ chest, and finally bends down to kiss his belly. As the camera pulls away, we see him unbuttoning Mads’ pants.

      It is now clear that the boys have been far closer than their current friendship suggests, and that, at least, Kristian has been in love with Mads.

      But the next morning, Eva asks if Mads has gone swimming so early, Kristian responding that he thought he was in “their” room (meaning the one Mads shares with Eva), she volleying back, “I thought he was in your room.” Both Eva and Kristian immediately go on separate searches for Mads.

     Kristian discovers him by the ocean, Mads immediately telling him to “get lost,” arguing that he’s embarrassing himself by being there. “Why,” queries Kristian.

      “You undressed me, right? Put me to bed.”

      “Yes.”

      “I was awake, Kristian. I was awake when you touched me.”

      “Why didn’t you say anything?”

     Obviously, that is the most important question. Why did Mads play dead, allow himself to endure what he now pretends was a kind of abuse, a rape? His behavior was surely also an acquesiance. 

       Mads immediately leaves his friend to follow him, returning to the house and attempting to make it up with Eva, his only solution since it’s apparent that he cannot accept in the morning what he permitted in the night.

       It is the same old story, told again and again, in gay film, of how young men who desperately want to be seduced, so often by their best friends or someone to who they have long been in a relationship, but cannot accept the reality of the experience. And, frankly, this time around, in Norwegian director Frank Mosvold’s film—whose work has long been sensitive to straight boys and grown men who have precisely such mixed feelings—I grew angry. Why, after more than a century of watching these would-be gay boys attempting to come to terms with their macho values, are we still encountering the very problems at the beginning of a new century (and, of course, this has continued at least 25 years into that new century)? Do young boys never learn? Must each young teenager involved in such a situation encounter the same angst over and over? Even with all the filmmaking that has gone on since the 1970s, with the increasing recognition of LGBTQ individuals and their attendant problems, we seem, at least in cinematic fiction, to be repeating ourselves endlessly. Are young boys today still so dumb?

        Perhaps what filmmakers are still showing us has nothing to do with today’s reality. Or, more likely, we have simply been deluding ourselves. Maybe many of the changes those of us in the LGBTQ community have perceived were merely superficial, an acceptance of our existence but with the significance of what that means to individuals not truly having sunk into the minds and bodies of the society at large.

    Predictably, the central figure of this short film at first refuses to speak any longer with his now “former” best friend who is forced into a quick retreat, Mads, of course, finally coming round to hug and kiss Kristian goodbye.

     But surely by the time Kristian returns he will have married Eva, if nothing else just to protect himself from what happened between him and Kristian on this particular summer escape. Like most such married men, he’ll find little solace in the monogamous relationship and will someday, when he least expects it, pull at his sexual chains and attempt an escape, severely wounding his wife, any children they may have had, and himself in the process.

     In gay film after gay film, there is a sense of inevitability, of heteronormative-striving gay boys having failed to be able to stare deeply enough into their own consciousness to realize that their queer desires will not simply go away but will be with them until their dying day, that their “summer blues” will likely transform into an endless remorse.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2024).