by Douglas Messerli
Wayne Kastenbaum (screenwriter and director) Intimacy / 2024 [3
minutes]
In Wayne Kastenbaum’s short film, the narrator attends with his camera
to a friend (Maxwell Harvey-Sampson) with whom he has evidently been out on a
long journey or some ordeal. The guest asks he might lay down on the bed, not
feeling well.
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But his open-eyed stares at
the narrator, the guest, also being a photographer, entices and excites the
narrator who feels growing palpitations of his heart and apparently a growing
fondness for the man on the bed, who doesn’t blink at his shared sexual
feelings. The two have simply what he describes as a “unstoppered intimacy,” an
intimacy composed of accidental glances, mind readings, and astro-lucunae, shared
aspirations,” where in the end the guest slightly smiles.
The short film moves clearly
toward a sexual encounter without actually going there, simply expressing the
felt relationship between the two men in a manner that might occur even between
two straight men, although the statements in this case are certainly homoerotic
and hint at a possible later relationship, since the narrator writes to him of
what he feels, although the narrator reports that he later too became ill.
Was it finally a rejection
or simply an exhaustion from the excitement the narrator relates? No answer is
provided.
Los Angeles, July 25, 2024
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