Pepi Ginsberg | The Pass / 2022

you’re not supposed to be here

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pepi Ginsberg (screenwriter and director) The Pass / 2022 [15 minutes]

 

I don’t know what drug the reviewer of the IMBd site was on, but she/he certainly couldn’t quite wrap their mind around the truly marvelous short film of Pepi Ginsberg, The Pass.

 

   Let us begin again, as Ben (Angus O’Brien) clearly new to this vaguely Texas-like world, who rather subtly asks a beautiful black man Sam (JaQwan J. Kelly) where he might find some gay action, and is told that he should bicycle out to the The Pass.

     Without specific directions he finds his way to an outlying river site where he strips off his pants and is about to dive in, until he is told by a local, Christopher (Paul Bomba), a nice looking regular, that “he’s not supposed to be there.”  

      Chris, who doesn’t like the nickname, is obviously a voyeur who loves to watch the beautiful swimmer enjoy the local waters, and follows him closely as they engage in conversation. Inexplicably, helicopters hover in the background as Christopher keeps insisting that Ben leave his leisurely swim, as if there were truly some significant danger about diving into the waters of “The Pass.”

    When Ben finally emerges, a straight woman and her daughter are daringly ready to enter the waters, whom he nicely greets. Why he isn’t welcome is not explained, but evidently, we have to presume, the authorities, are out to make sure that no queers can enter their swimming hole. Instinctually, Ben leaves Christopher to his own worries.

   That’s fine, however, since he soon encounters Sam nearby ready, apparently, to join him in a bedroom interlude.

 

    If The Pass is a somewhat silly narrative, it nonetheless conveys the sense of terror that gay men and women must daily face in any new, clearly sexually unfriendly, territory. Nothing actually happens in The Pass to suggest the dangers of being gay, and it is not totally apparent that its central figure, Ben, is actually gay, or that Christopher and Sam are queer. The problem, as this quite nicely directed short film reveals, is the unknown, the world surrounding any possible gay or would-be gay action, even the look—in this case a quite nicely muscle-bound swimmer—of someone who might be “different” is tricky territory.

     It is a world a paranoia, of a world of problematic behavior such that even a nice swim at a local isolated spot might be seen as an entry into an inconceivably dangerous territory: the world every LGBTQ+ figure must enter into every day of their lives.

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).