Jesper Emborg | Two Words / 2018

a strange loneliness

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Blacker (screenplay), Jesper Emborg (director) Two Words / 2018 [23 minutes]

 

I have discussed in several essays how young gay or bi-sexual men enter into marriages in hopes of solving or at least resolving their sexual indeterminacy. And I have argued that such lies to the self and others almost always end in some heart ache not only for the man suffering under the hierarchical demands of the heterosexual world to which he has sold his soul, but for the entire family, including the confused and often righteously pained wife and their equally confused and often abandoned children.

     British director Jesper Emborg’s Two Words is an insightful short film from 2018 that explores just one of such situations.

     The film begins with an evening walk through a park after a dinner out between Gavin (Henry Goodman) and his daughter, Victoria (Sophia Myles). Walking arm in arm, they talk mostly about the wife and mother who has died about a year earlier, both recalling the things they loved about her and which irritated them, but perhaps made them love her more even more because of them. Victoria remembers her sense of humor, the fact that even in the hospital while she was dying she demanded they sneak in a bottle of brandy so that she might out-drink the rest of the young nurses. Gavin most misses her face, how she truly stood out in a crowd.  But he also misses her terrible singing voice, how she used to attempt to sing every song on the radio even though she was completely tone deaf.

      When they reach Victoria’s flat, however, Gavin asks if he might come in for a cup of tea, and we realize that he may have something else in on is mind. They continue, at first, to banter about the mother, with Gavin also making some truly insightful comments about the woman: “She could celebrate things in herself that other people would hide.”

       But when Victoria has turned aside, we observe that Gavin pulls out a pre-written text to recall to himself the words he obviously is about to speak to his daughter.

       Victoria, meanwhile, turns the conversation to how her father is getting along without her mother. And gradually he admits that he has met someone, Victoria delighted for the turn of events. She wants, in fact, to meet his new girlfriend, but is a bit dismayed that he met his new love interest in the last weeks of his wife’s illness. He explains, however, that they begin simply as friends and only after his wife’s death did the relationship develop.

       “So, what’s she like?

       “Oh, younger than me.”

       But when he refuses to tell Victoria her name, she once more becomes suspicious, particularly when he quickly changes the subject to ask after her career which appears to involve psychiatry. 

        As he quickly jumps up to use the bathroom, however, the piece of paper drops from his jacket, and when he returns Victoria is reading it, aghast. She reads the message aloud: “Victoria, I love you more than anything in this world. And I’m gay.”

        He explains that he thought that if he wrote it down it might make it easier to say.

        Her reaction, however, is not quite what we would have expected: “This is real? This is you?”

        As he moves to comfort her, she won’t even permit him to touch her.

      He promises to answer any of her questions and she orders him to sit down, the command, in a sense, being worse than any punishment of a young boy attempting to come out to his parents.

 

      The “person” with whom he is now love is Zachary, the hospice nurse, she now suddenly imagining that as her mother lay dying, he fell in love with the gay nurse.

       But that’s not at all how it happened, he insists. Starting at the beginning he admits, perhaps even for the first time fully to himself, that he is a 64-year-old man who has been in the closet all of his life. Like every other gay boy, even at an early age he felt different, trying to hide it and to be like all the others at school. But what he goes on to describe is what most gay or bisexual boys don’t submit to is a self-imposed world of conformity, liking whoever whom they parents and peers thought they should like, playing with the same toys, picking on whoever “they” picked on. He, however, describes repressing his feelings, denying his instincts to do what other people did. And we quickly realize the true cowardice of such unfortunate individuals who cannot bear that internally-sensed “difference.”

       He was never truly himself, and argued that his contrary feelings represented just a phase, that he’d grow out of it (how well, I recognize those self-lies).

       Victoria, however, seems insensitive to the fact that he felt he had no one to speak about it, that he had no choice, without fully realizing it appears that had he not made that choice she would be there to now challenge him.

      Gavin goes on to explain how he met her mother, a kind, clever individual with he quickly made friends at the university. One day she suddenly proposed to him—another piece of information new to the appalled daughter—and he thought that was what was meant for him. He admits he’s glad she did propose because had she not he would never have had Victoria, admittedly the “best thing that’s ever happened” in his life.

     He also attempts to make clear that he did love Victoria’s mother deeply, with every ounce of his being. But there are further remarkable revelations. He hoped that the gay part of himself would vanish. “But it didn’t. It just, it was always there.” He gradually came to realize that being married didn’t mean he was not gay, just as having a beautiful daughter didn’t mean he wasn’t gay.

      “So all this time you just making do?”

      “No, I was surviving. “

    Victoria asks him one of the most important questions that seldom gets asks. “At that point, how were you so sure about being gay if you hadn’t been with another man?”

     His answer should be printed out in children’s textbooks so that a new generation of citizens can grow up to comprehend: “Oh, being gay isn’t about who you sleep with. It’s not even about who you love. It’s about who you are. Inside. It’s not an act. It’s an identity. If I were celibate for the rest of my life I’d still be gay.”

     Soon after, he explains that eventually he had to explore that part of him and, accordingly, had an encounter with someone at work, his wife sensing it even before seeing them together and asking him—now speaking through his tears—was he gay? The dread reality facing both husband and wife, the moment that men in all such relationships are in most terror.

     In this case, however, the wife didn’t leave him, and he promised never again to betray her. Soon after, she became ill and was dependent on him, a time when perhaps they were most seriously together in their entire relationship.

      Gavin admits that he was relieved that it didn’t appear to affect his daughter.

   But soon after, Victoria demands to know, given all his lies, whether he’s really her father, a statement, as he suggests, with the purposeful intention of hurting him. She insists he leave. Needing to assimilate all that he has told her, she shuts herself off in her bedroom, while he refuses to leave, sitting down on the other side of the door to continue their pained conversation.

     What Victoria reveals is that his being gay, the strain on the relationship between him and her mother, in fact, did affect her. She admits that she always felt that she and her father were so close, but could they truly have been when he put so very much effort into hiding who he was? She describes a strange loneliness in their house that went unspoken. On the surface everything seemed fine, but she too noticed the separateness of their lives, even as a child.

      She explains that she herself has had difficulty in being close to men, that she seeks out men whose lives are highly complex, even confusing so that she might figure them out as if they were puzzles, the way perhaps she instinctually approached her father.

       Gavin laments that it is simply two words, “I’m gay,” words that you can say in a few seconds, that have a terrible power to utterly change lives. How can that be so? Isn’t he still her father?

      In antiphon, Victoria argues that there is nothing wrong about being gay, nothing he should have been ashamed of, but that it was his lies, his cowardice and his inability to share the truth that caused the loneliness, the feelings she now has, the confusions she obviously felt as a young girl.

      Secrets are toxic and imply shame, she reminds us. And being gay isn’t something to be ashamed of. So, as the two basically reconcile, does the film end.

     But it is in this final “righteous” message that this truly moving work seems to me to fall apart. Neither Victoria nor writer David Blacker seem to have any memory that when Gavin was a young man pondering how to react about his feelings of difference in Britain it was against the law to be actively gay; those discovered to be engaged in homosexual acts faced imprisonment or worse.

        The society itself, according, must also be recognized as a force that would not permit the truth, as Oscar Wilde had long before perceived. Can an individual simply bowing to the deceits of the world around him be totally responsible?

      Morally, as we have argued against the Nazis and other obedient totalitarians, yes. Each man must be responsible even if the society in which he lives is not. Cowardice is not an excuse, nor is obeisance to what is wrong recognized as an excuse to not face up to the truth. 

      Yet, had he this gay man by birth acted on those feelings and even escaped the societal net put around gay men like himself, he then would have never found the love of his wife, nor bore the daughter now reminding him of the sins of mendacity.

       If Victoria and the film itself it appears to want to place the blame on not being able to accept the truth about one’s own sexuality, it is difficult to further shame the men who were taught from childhood that their own inner feelings were shameful while they were simultaneously faced with prison or utter societal rejection for acting on those feelings. Given the intelligence of Blacker’s script, I would have liked to have seen this film explore answers to these inevitable contradictions rather than taking simply taking the high road out of this intellectual thicket.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).