Soman Chainani | Davy and Stu / 2006

taking a bath

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anton Dudley (screenwriter, based on his play), Soman Chainani (director) Davy and Stu / 2006 [13 minutes]

 

All right, the Scottish bog is probably a swamp spot somewhere in southern Florida, the director’s birthplace, and the Scottish highland accents, according to at least one commentator, may be derived from a brough found only in New York City, but I felt Soman Chainani’s and Anton Dudley’s 2006 short film Davy and Stu to be totally convincing, the acting quite creditable, and overall, the work to be one of the very best LGBTQ short films of new millennium’s first decade.

      The film begins with the dreamy boy Davy (Travis Walters) seeming to be where such a child should not be, a Scottish peat bog. In fact, as we later discover, Davy is terrified to be in such an isolated spot where according to the songs and stories he’s been told from childhood about Jimmy Greenteeth who lurking about the bottom of the bog leaps up to grab boys like him around the ankles, pull them in, and eat them up as he has done, evidently. in the case of Bobby Deeham, whose cap was found but never his body.

      Yet Davy has stayed on even into twilight waiting as usual for the handsome footballer Stu (Nicholas Cutro) who we soon discover he meets each day after school.

       The film begins somewhat coyly suggesting without quite revealing what the relationship between the two boys actually is. At some moments, indeed, it seems a bit like Stu is possibly bullying the rosy-cheeked, weak beauty Davy, particularly when he wrestles him to the ground, Davy crying out that it hurts. But we soon recognize through his older brotherly like conversation that he is merely teasing his friend and that indeed he is in love with the boy, the two meeting there each evening for sex.

       The film never reaches that point except for the early stages of gentle touching and Stu’s move in finally for kiss, presenting us instead with a long conversation between the two about their family lives; the cat which Stu has had to “put down” because of its illness, the fact that he has forgotten to ask his mother to bring back some chewing gum that costs less where she works, Davy’s fears, and the wondrous fact that Davy soon perceives that the reason Stu has been late is that he has stayed on “for a bath,” trying to smell sweet for his eager young lover.

    That the tough footballer should have risked his nightly meeting just to please the young boy is truly one of the sweetest statements of love ever expressed on celluloid. It may seem of little matter in the grand sweep of great loves portrayed throughout the history of cinema, but in this film that “sacrifice” of time to please the other says absolutely everything about the deep love between the young, dreamy boy who hopes when he grows up to move to a city and the rugged homeboy who cannot imagine doing anything when he graduates but slopping the hogs as his father has done or working away for days in Glasgow like his mother. Their futures alone cast a pall on their youthful pleasures, as we recognize that the real “Jimmy Greenteeth” is time itself.

       At another moment when Davy, discussing the details of the blog myths mentions the Jimmy Greenteeth does not kill boys in the dark, Stu even imagines them being able to remain together for an entire night of joyful sex; and in another passing comment, Davy wishes that he might be able to stay with Stu in his own home and bed. And even the leaf boat of flower petals and small stones that Davy floats off in the very first scene represents, as he tells Stu, a dream that he is a child in Stu’s arms. In short, these boys dream of finding a way of the impossible in a world in which they can now only express the love at day’s closing in a peat bog away from prying eyes. 

      Yet in that most out of that outpost, an almost unbelievable location, the two express and tender and endearing love that puts the passionate love affairs of most films to shame.

     A gay man, the director Soman Chainani has gone on to become a very successful writer of the popular children’s book series The School for Good and Evil. Playwright Anton Dudley has had numerous plays and librettos performed by the Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Cherry Lane Theater, Houston Grand Opera, Musical Stage Company, Stella Adler Studio, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).