Brian Sloan | Bumping Heads / 2002

various confusions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Sloan (screenwriter and director) Bumping Heads / 2002 [22 minutes]

 

Beginning with the 1993 film he made to complete his Master’s degree in the New York University Film program, Pool Days, US director Brian Sloan quickly rose to notoriety on the gay film circuit for his next two comic short films he wrote and directed, the one discussed here, Bumping Heads (2002), and his 1997 wedding farce, I Think I Do, which I’ve suggested might be seen as a precursor of the next year’s first of the variation B of “coming out” films. Since then, Sloan has worked on less successful TV series and written books.

     Bumping Heads begins with a sense of confusion which, in fact, permeates the atmosphere of this entire 22-minute movie. The confusion at the center Sloan’s third short film has absolutely nothing to do with coming to terms about one’s sexuality and everything to do with coming to terms with whom you’re actually in love. There is a dizzying confusion for the viewer and for the two central actors both from the first scenes of this short film when Chris (Craig Chester) has just been checked into a hospital by Gary (Andersen Gabrych) for a head injury he received in a fight he precipitated in the “Love Lounge” of the local gay bar.

      He’s received a huge bruise to the head and the doctor wants to keep him in the hospital until she can get a scan to check out his neurological condition. But he already seems more than bruised, fighting with is friend, Gary, blaming him, in fact, for the entire incident. Gary describes his a “drama queen,” and you might well imagine that to be the case if it were not for Sloan’s gradual revelation of the situation between them.   

     Even the doctor imagines they are boyfriends, but in fact, as Craig later corrects her, they are just “friends.” Gary has a boyfriend in Los Angeles, a long ways from where they live. We later discover the boyfriend—through a memory of a party to which Craig was invited—is a beautiful model named Robert (Ned Stresen-Reuter) to whom Craig has been speaking, having just asked how he knows Gary. That shock alone sends Craig into a spin, having never heard the boyfriend even mentioned, let alone told that he would be at the party.

      Bit by bit, as they each tell the story of their “relationship”—to their individual therapists as it turns out—we discover why Craig blames his young friend and why Gary insists on staying at the hospital until he’s released. Indeed, they have a history of “bumping heads,” as it were, the first time they met at a party resulting actual collision as they both bent down to fetch a beer out of bucket. But, in fact, they have been butting up, if not bumping up against one another ever since. Gary continuing to invite out his “friend” as Chris attempts to move the friendship gradually into the territory he isn’t quite ready to admit, where Gary might be described as his lover.

      It takes the doctor to perceive their true relationship. If they describe themselves as only friends, they have behaving more as a couple despite the boyfriend down in Los Angeles and despite Chris’ insistence that he doesn’t want anything more out of Gary than friendship. The very fact that by film’s end they are both talking about one another to their therapists reveals that the physical friction between them is caused by their unspoken desires.

      Indeed, we discover that the concussion Craig has received occurred because he discovered Gary in the “Lover’s Lounge” about to have sex with a stranger and could not control himself from punching out the “intruder,” who slugged back far more effectively. It is only now that Craig finally admits that he is not protecting Gary as a friend, but as a potential lover. He has completely fallen for the boy who doesn’t want, so he says, to enter into a sexual relationship with him.

      We imagine that eventually Gary will also wake up to the fact that the reason he keeps inviting his “friend” to join him is that he also has fallen in love with Craig.

       But what the audience also comprehends—what these “friends” do not, the doctor doesn’t seem to perceive, and perhaps even the writer/director won’t admit—is that they are not really right for one another. The young cute, slightly effeminate Gary, who is trying to become a milliner, a hat-maker, is all surface, while the elder Craig is a deeply intense lover whose dark good looks often get missed by those who love the superficial. As one commentator on the IMDb site rather crudely put it: “the appeal of the character played by Gabrych [Gary] eludes me. He's not particularly charming or appealing, just rather shallow and dumb. As a result, Craig Chester's character [Chris] looks even more ridiculous for pining over somebody so vacuous. And there's the matter of why Chester was going to throw a punch. It's too bad that society is trained to think that people like Gabrych's character are so cute and desirable, when it's Chester who, with the nice mature look and handsomely lined face who really should be the object of desire.”

      Obviously, this represents a personal opinion, not a communal assessment of the fictional situation. But I certainly agree with unsigned “reviewer.” While Gabrych might be the perfect young mentor to help a high school boy like Chris Stafford in The Edge of Seventeen (1998) come out sexually, the character of this film, Craig (Chester, the actor of Swoon, Frisk, and Kiss Me Guido) needs an intelligent and passionate mate, not a cute trick who, when he puts a few drugs into his body, falls into the arms of whoever is standing next to him. As he responds when the doctor wants to give him an X-ray to “make sure his brain is working,” “I can assure you, it’s not.”  Perhaps the frustration that Craig feels is not simply because Gary won’t take the next step but that he knows the boy he’s got a crush on shouldn’t be his solution to his loneliness.

 

Los Angeles, March 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).