Simon Trevorrow | Mary / 2021

death in a family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Simon Trevorrow (screenwriter and director) Mary / 2021 [9 minutes]

 

The name Mary has about as much a relationship to this film as the statue of Mother Mary, which Aaron (Pat Moonie) accidently breaks in his hurried attempt rise from his bed and get dressed, has to with the problems between him and his sister Jane (Raelene Isbester).

    Aaron has returned home for his mother’s death and has been staying in his now empty home, with the assumption that he would help pack up his mother’s belongs so that they might clear out the house to sell it. However, when Jane arrives she sees that no progress has been made. Empty boxes lie standing in the living room with old books strewn across the floor.

 

    Two glasses and a wine bottle sit on the coffee table, and from the evidence of a condom Aaron quickly retrieves from the bedroom floor as he rushes to met his sister, it’s clear he has spent the night with someone in his bed. The arrival soon after of a young man, Tom (Simon Trevorrow), to pick up his forgotten wallet gives further proof that Jane’s brother has spent the night with one of his old gay mates.

     Jane says nothing, but her obvious irritation about Aaron’s inability to attend to things at hand shows an impatience that obviously isn’t focused just on the empty boxes and the junk that remains in their mother’s house.

     As they both work to clean out the rooms, it becomes more and more apparent that there is no love lost between them. And when she finds a broken statue of Mary tossed in the kitchen garbage can, she explodes in a kind a fury which might suggest that it was a holy relic which she had hoped to carry off to her own house.

     But then her quick toss of a Bible into an empty box has already displayed her own disdain toward religion. And it soon becomes clear in their argument that years before they have been asked to leave their church, evidently on account of Aaron’s homosexuality; so neither of them have been brought up in the church. She has no interest in the broken statue, but simply uses it as a symbol to represent her general disdain of her brother.

    Aaron is furious not because she has said anything particularly negative about his having spent the night with Tom, but that she has said nothing, that all their lives she and his mother have never once spoken of the numerous boys he has brought home, never even commented that one might look better than another or asked anything about them. Evidently, the family’s way of coping with Aaron’s homosexuality has been to keep totally silent about it, and in that act they have not truly loved or embraced him in their family love. As Aaron argues in his pique of Jane’s attitude toward him, now that their mother has died, this may be the very last time that they see one another.

      His plane leaves evening, and she invites him over to their house at 4:00, but his suggestion is that they simply forget about it. About to leave, she remains for a moment as if she might respond, turning toward him as if she is about to speak, but the screen goes black, and we realize also that there is nothing to be said. After all these years of silence there are no words that can heal the isolation in which his mother and sister has placed him. He is a stranger even in the house in which he grew up.

       This often happens to gay men even in well-intentioned and somewhat open-minded heterosexual families. They are not attacked or even criticized as much as they are ignored—just as their companions are erased—forced to remain as outsiders even as their families often pretend to embrace them. If there is no rancor between them there is also no deep love, none of the family ties which might bind the uncle to his nieces and nephews, his sister, even a mother. Aaron became an outsider forever the moment he expressed the fact that he was gay.

      Australian director Simon Trevorrow’s short movie is not a work of anger, but of sorrow, of loss. For long before her mother died, Jane had also lost her brother.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024)