Stéphanie Anne Weber Biron | Fragments / 2015

the eccentricities of an undesirable drone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphanie Anne Weber Biron (screenwriter and director) Fragments / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

Chloe (Weber Biron), a young would-be filmmaker, tries to convince he bestie male friend, Sam (Douglas Smith) to be in her next film. But he is convinced that it’s all just an excuse to getting him to make out with her. She tries to reveal the absurdity of the situation, that she wouldn’t hire a full film crew just to make out with him in a movie. And before he knows it, the New Orleans boy is involved with another boy, Alex (Connor Jessup) whom he inexplicably discovers as he is dressed up as a lion, sharing with Alex who that he just failed to get into medical school.

     Actually he’s done well in almost all of his tests, except for the bio exam; and incidentally, he hasn’t walked out of a high school production of The Wizard of Oz, but is working as a mascot for his uncle.

   Alex, a hypochondriac, coincidentally has just been accepted to med school, but doesn’t really want to be a doctor. His controlling father has handpicked most of his girlfriends, insisting that they should all be models. Alex just happens to have a couple of bottles of beer in his knapsack and the two boys sit down to talk. Perhaps his father, Alex suggests, is a pervert who is living viciously through his son.

      But the thing is, Alex suddenly admits, is that he is gay.

     Sam suddenly has a weird question that he poses to Alex: “Why do gay guys have lisps. Is it from sucking cock?” He immediately realizes the stupidity of his question since girls suck cocks and they don’t have lisps. And neither does Alex. Alex suggests that some people just naturally talk that way, but others might do it to be recognized among themselves. But it is the question itself that reveals Sam's fear that being gay might turn him into someone that he not that is important here; not the half-ass answer to a meaningless question.

      His filmmaking girlfriend suddenly sends a message via a drone: “She’s wet and she wants to fuck.”

    While this short film, I am sure, sees its eccentricities as absolutely original and delightful, most audiences I would argue would easily see through Weber Biron’s fey disconnected scenes and heavily theatrically ladened sets as a kind of youthful adulation of slightly daffy love films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982) or even Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985). The first has a gay sensibility without actually involving any LGBTQ+ situations, while the second has a straight plot that quickly turns into an underground gay, lesbian, and BDSM fantasy.

      Here the director sings Shaffer Smith’s, Sony Bono’s, and Charles T. Harmon’s memorable “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” after which the two proceed to have a very open discussion of how women truly do like men with slightly larger cocks and how being rejected for not having a larger cock destroys men’s egos. Presumably we are witnessing both the end of the relationship and the open feminism of Chloe, who doesn’t yet quite perceive that perhaps her Sam has just fallen for a gay boy.

      Sam’s reaction is, simply put, that he’s not use to girls to talk as straight-forwardly about sex as Chloe does. Which makes it quite apparent that she is the very opposite of the kind of girl Alex’s father keeps wanting him to date. But as she points out, his attitude also hints at the kind of male viewpoint that perpetuates that males still control the discussions of sexuality.

    In short, Sam has just proven himself somewhat incompetent regarding both his possible heterosexual and gay relationships. Perhaps he has just met up with the wrong people, and needs someone with more normative values. But clearly the cute Sam is out of place in the current world in which he exists.

      The open-minded Chloe, to give her credit, suggests that perhaps Sam should try out sex with Alex, despite Sam’s denial that he received any sexual vibes from the gay boy. Something has obviously happened in between, as we finally begin to understand that perhaps this film does truly represent “fragments” of their friendships over a longer period of time, which is also to say that perhaps the director is simply too lazy to make the links.

      In any event, our open-minded hero, Chloe argues that she simply wants the best for her man, and that everyone understand that you can love more than one person, sounding a lot like sexual cliches she’s picked up in some liberal sexual handbook. Mind you, I’m for her; this may be one of the first truly open-minded women when it comes to trying out gay sex that someone has represented in film for a long while. Someone who openly wants her boyfriend to question traditional sexual roles is someone who can join my corner anytime.

   Yet the whole set-up of this film, centered on a sort of one-sided dialogue, seems highly disingenuous. As the boys suddenly share their excitement for a new Steve Reich album we feel as if he have been transported to perhaps the back halls of a Julliard School for music dorm, as the boys kiss and, of course, fall immediately (or finally) in love, with Chloe’s drone zooming down presumably to congratulate them and wish the good luck. This is after all, just Chloe’s movie.

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).