Blake Pruitt | I Feel Love / 2012

falling in love again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Blake Pruitt (screenwriter and director) I Feel Love / 2012 [6 minutes]

 

This short black-and-white film begins with two young men (Evan Powell and Max Sheldon) in bed together, one of them speaking as a narrative voice evoking the importance of the smell of someone else with whom you’re in love. He returns to the bed and wishes he might stay there forever.

 

    Soon after, as they make coffee together in the kitchen, however, their relationship seems far more tangential: “I stare into his eyes sometimes to see if there is anything there.” The other’s attention to his cell-phone during their morning coffee certainly doesn’t seem encouraging.

     “I’m the crazy one in this relationship,” continues the narrative voice, as the coffee cup spills out its overpoured contents unto the floor. He describes himself as a pessimist, accepting only the bad news as truth. “Am I setting myself up for failure?” he rhetorically asks.

     Meanwhile, as the film’s soundtrack plays Otis Reading’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is” in the background, the narrator moves to kiss the other, who gets up and walks off. “These guys always fall for me. And I fall too. But they get right back up and walk all over me.”

      “I feel empty when he touches me now. As if he’s taking something away from me.” Our narrator even speaks of the sweet sadness of knowing that you can’t have what you want overwhelms him.

      “He says he loves my body. But I don’t think I can understand how you can a body without something inside it.” Our young narrator feels distressed because the “other” has no comprehension of the fact that his inability to love is what is torturing the young speaker. “What happens when you need the one who hurts you to give you comfort?”

      The other finally, frustrated by the mass of romantic feelings that other is trying to impose upon him, leaves. Our narrator clearly so wants to fall totally in love that he conjures it up with everyone he meets, assuring his constant disappointment. In the gay hook-up culture in which he is involved, he will clearly never find what he wants.

      Pruitt’s film, with a sometimes hard-to-hear soundtrack and weak acting, is unfortunately not very profound either. It wants to tackle the difficult issues of the one-night sexual stands or short-lived involvements rampant in the gay community, but doesn’t present characters that have the depth to embrace such issues, the result of which simply makes our troubled narrator sound utterly self-centered and shallow.

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).