Tom McNie (screenwriter and director) Gents / 2016 [5 minutes]
Alex (Alex Dowding) is in a pub with his
friends Brian (Brian Law) and James (James Naylor). James, having just broken
up with his girlfriend, is convinced that he’d have better luck if were gay,
sharing the same gender, liking the same things, feeling the same desires as
another man. Alex and his partner surely have far more sex than he and the
women with whom him he hooks up.
What Alex doesn’t tell them, which we soon discover in an almost
surreal-like manner, is that Alex and his lover Pablo (Pablo Olewski) share
hardly anything except, so Alex discovers in the pub bathroom from a Post-it
Note Pablo left in his jeans, that he is wearing Pablo’s pants. Otherwise, they
only thing they seem to share are the Post-it Notes, pasted, when we
follow him home, endlessly upon the walls of their apartment, on the front and
inside of the refrigerator, and everywhere else they might be positioned.
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Some claim “love,” but most represent complaints (of the wrong kind of
wine etc.) or various demands (“We need light bulbs” and “We’re out of milk,”
etc.). Pablo sits playing a computer game and doesn’t even respond to Alex’s
ironic question, “Good day?”
When Alex leaves a Post-it” message that he needs to be awakened at 5:00
for an early meeting, he awakens at 7:53 with a Post-it note pasted to his
chest: “Wake up, it’s 5 AM.”
Communication in the gay boys’ house clearly leaves something to be
desired.
I
wish I might be able to post a couple of Post-it Notes to the projector
streaming British director Tom McNie’s short movie: “Cute one-note satire. Now
you can make a real picture.” “Incidentally, I liked Leo Appleyard’s jazz
score.”
Los Angeles, May 9, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(May 2024).
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