Derek Price | Distance / 2012

leaving without knowing how to explain why

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Price (screenwriter and director) Distance / 2012 [7 minutes]

 

French Canadian writer and director Derek Price’s Distance is more a proclamation than it is an exploration of its important subject, men who after several years of heterosexual marriage suddenly come to perceive that they are gay.

      Charles (Julien Masterson) has evidently been unhappy for some time, but on the particular day on which this film is focused he has come home early from work and has been waiting for his wife to return home from shopping.

      Camille (Mélodie Courval) is startled to see him sitting at the dining table and immediately wonders if he is well. He has not been feeling well, he admits, but it’s not like the flu or a cold. At

first he backs out of immediate explanation, but soon after, as images of past parties with their friends flash through his mind—particularly an incident when Camille seems to be paying particular attention to the husband of another friend—he wants to talk to her immediately.

      But she is somewhat miffed, having just gotten in the door. Can’t it wait until she gets a drink of wine?

      Apparently not, for Charles simply tosses it out like a commonplace event: “I’m gay.” Camille is not even quite able to comprehend what he’s saying, until he repeats it, insisting that she very much knows what he means. After a period of suffering in silence, he’s finally come realize he’s a homosexual.

      And no, he assures her, he has not been with another man. He has simply come to the realization and feels it is now only fair that they stop playing husband and wife so that they might both find fuller happiness in their lives.

       Her furor, perhaps understandably, immediately flares. Fair? Fair to whom? Is there even such a concept in his statement that their made their entire five years together meaningless? A lie? She throws a bag of food his way moves to strike him, Charles attempting to hold her off. She pulls away, coming back toward him only for both of them to break down.

        For moment, as they kiss one another, it almost seems like the situation the film has brought up has been forgotten, particularly as they retire to the bedroom, surely to try to restore their relationship once again.

      But a few frames later, it is apparent that it hasn’t worked. Charles is unable to have sex with his wife, and sits up at the side of the bed, simply to apologize for his failure, she comforting him as the credits role 7 minutes into this fraught situation.

      None of the more complex months or even years of marital difficulties is spoken of. Nor is anything mentioned about their inability to communicate as a couple. Or about his betrayal of trust or at least the belief she has place in the relationship. Had they spoken of having children? How had they met in the first place? Were their clues to his other desires? When did Charles first begin to suspect his sexual preference, and more importantly, having had apparently no homosexual experience, how is he certain of his apparent change?

      Of course, any homosexual could probably tell you how they know they’re gay, the attractions they have felt perhaps since childhood to other men, the long denials they have made to themselves and others, one of the worst of those “coverups” having, this case, been the marriage itself.

      Yet the director doesn’t feel it necessary to explore any of this. The film simply reports it as an irrefutable fact. What will happen to the two of them; how they will amicably or even angrily split up their possessions; how might Camille be able to support herself? None of these challenges are even imagined in this work, which itself seems to be “distancing” the cinematic representation of the film’s central issue from the actual event.

      Being gay and leaving a heterosexual relationship is surely not a thing that one simply “announces,” unless one is truly a coward and is afraid to even more fully attempt to explain the thousands of circumstances that went into that decision. A couple of flashbacks to a dinner party may reveal a moment or two of suffering, of even hint at a gradual shifting away from another, but does even begin to explain the phenomena that even feature films such as Arthur Hiller’s Making Love (1982), which attempted to treat the subject seriously; or Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), which turns the issue into a one-line joke; or Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), which represents the phenomena as having both tragic and comic results, nor the many others that have featured this subject over the years have been fully able to explain the causes and effects to its own characters and audiences.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).