sorry, wrong number
by Douglas Messerli
Christie
Viggers (screenplay), Christie Viggers and Dale Norton (directors) Love in
Brisbane / 2015 [15.21 minutes]
Christie Viggers and Dale Norton’s Love
in Brisbane, obviously an Australian production, is perhaps the least
complicated of romantic gay films I’ve ever seen.
Chef Tom (Jonathan Tuck) leaves his kitchen after cleaning up and begins
to cross a Brisbane bridge. At the same moment, in the other director
business/economics student Sam (James Dyke) is leaving either a class or the
library from the other, when suddenly a point in the bridge where bike riders
are told to disembark their vehicles due to construction. Tom does so, but
another rider speeds through crashing to the pedestrian Sam, knocking him to
the ground and shouting “Out of the way faggot!”
Tom rushes to his side, observing that Sam’s knee is bloody. Tom insists
they return to his restaurant wherein he keeps bandages and mercurochrome
since, as he admits, he often cuts himself. He bandages Sam, and asks to walk
him to his train connection; but the couple wanders the streets instead for the
entire night talking, presumably in the manner of Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke
in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset and Before Midnight,
although we get only a few snippets of their conversations. Sam mouths the most
complex word of the work when he suggests that their meeting has been a matter
of "synchronicity."
Clearly they’ve fallen in love, and Tom writes his e-mail address on
Sam’s arm before they depart, insisting he call him the moment he gets safely
home.
Sam does so, and both are seen playing
over the scenes the two shared together as Moby performs a song about falling
in love. We watch carefully, however, as Sam changes the final digit of the
number to a 3 instead of a 6, assuring that his phone call will never reach its
intended destination.
Both boys accordingly wander through
their next day or days feeling sadly rejected and unable to explain why they’ve
not heard back. The lesson of the film seems to be that gay boys should stop
writing down their e-mails or phone numbers on their potential lover’s arm or
hand, a tendency I’ve noticed over the years that gay boys have acquired in
several LGBTQ movies.
We see Tom again cleaning up his restaurant
kitchen just as he has done in the film’s first frames, and as he proceeds to
cross the bridge he re-encounters Sam, both young men tentatively greeting one
another, wondering why the other hasn’t responded. They quickly realize it’s
all been a mistake, and now joyfully bend into one another to for a deep kiss.
Surely they will live happily ever after,
since Love in Brisbane is a pretty valentine without even enough profundity
to imagine what words the two might have spoken to one another to put them into
such a romantic frame of mind.
Los Angeles, September 4, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (September 2022).
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