how to lose your best friend
by Douglas Messerli
A great many “coming out” and other LGBTQ films focus on men and women who have long been close friends, one (or sometimes both) of whom suddenly discovers that he feels something more than mere friendship for the other. Since, as is the usual pattern in these films, they have both maintained their friendship in the context of a heterosexual bond—one of the pair usually exhibiting a strong and boastful attraction to the opposite sex—that sudden awareness (often building up over a period of time) not only endangers the friendship, but since it is interpreted a betrayal of both their mutual commitment and is perceived as an unwanted sexual advance, often ends in some sort of violence or other retaliation before the two can either patch up their friendship or, in the best case scenario, develop a sexual relationship built upon their long friendship. Most often, the possibility of such a sexual acceptance is left open by the writer and director. And we never know whether or not friends can truly become lovers, a situation that is often metaphorically expressed by the two being pulled apart from one another by their families or other circumstances, including maturation, the time when such childhood friendships often naturally end.
I
have discussed some of these issues already in my essays on Robert Lambert’s Follow
You, Follow Me (1979), Jacques Duron’s Une histoire sans importance
(A History of No Importance) (1980); Roger Tonge’s Two of Us
(1987, 1988); Reid Waterer’s The Kiss on the Cliff (1993); Frank
Mosvold’s Bølgene (Waves) (1998); Miguel Arteta’s feature film Chuck
& Buck (2000); Alfonso Cuarón’s feature Y Tu Mamá También (2001);
Hong Khaou’s Summer (2006); Mark
Thiedeman’s Last Summer (2013); and Chadlee Skrikker’s Hand Off
(2019). The list of such films would be nearly endless.
In
this instance, I’ve chosen to gather five such films to discuss from the years
of 2011-2014, which share not only the same time-frame but significant thematic
threads: Dear Friend by British director Sophie Boyce (2011), Anochecer
(Nightfall) by Argentinian director Lucas Mac Dougall (2012), Prora
by Swiss director Stéphane Riethauser (2012), Reel by Swedish director
Jens Choong (2013), and Tomorrow by US director Leandro Tadashi (2014).
But obviously, this genre being one of the most popular of LGBTQ cinematic
expressions, there are various other sub-genres closely related to this one. In
my next essay I discuss one of these, a comic variation of the “best friends” homosexual/heterosexual
encounter which involves both the “I’m Not Gay” syndrome and, often, a version
of the gay Don Juan myth. Perhaps it might make sense to read these two
different collations together as mirror images of each other, one often ending
in tragedy and the violence, the other almost always resulting in a kind of
comic sense of ridiculousness.
Los Angeles, July 9, 2021
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment