James Perry | Lonely Country / 2023

talking to people without saying anything

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Perry (screenwriter and director) Lonely Country / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

The central character of Canadian director James Perry’s short film Lonely Country is indeed a lonely man, living on a farm homestead just outside a small village. We first observe him writing in his spartanly decorated living room. He writes a few lines and then puts the pages in a drawer, getting in the car to head off to the local grocery for some goods, perhaps just cigarettes, one of which he lights as he leaves the store. There, hovering the door’s edge, he meets up with a handsome young hitchhiker trying to make his way to Winnipeg where someone might fix him up with a job, a very long ways off from what appears to be someplace in Ontario, likely near Lake Ontario since the film begin with a view of a large lake’s water.

       It’s late, and it’s quite doubtful that another person might pass by with whom he might hitchhike further west, so he asks if the man he has just met if he knows of anyone who might put him up for the night.

     After some pause, our silent “hero’ determines that it’s no problem. Finally, in the car they introduce themselves, our lonely man is Eugene (Antoine Guimbal), the hitchhiker being Jack (Euan Lathrop). When Jack asks Eugene what he does outside of picking up hitchhikers, he prevaricates, suggesting, “Nothing interesting. I just try to make myself useful.”

     “Useful how?

     “I talk to people.”

     They reach Eugene’s house, and he suggests Jack can sleep on a cot that he’ll set up. But Jack first asks if he might take a shower, having been traveling for so long.  

    As Eugene makes tea, we can see there is a nervous edge in his motions. When he spots the hitchhiker’s bag he takes it up with the pretense of moving it to a bedroom, but spies of the showering Jack in the process. In his short moment of voyeurism there is a tension in the very air, and we quickly realize that Eugene is a closeted gay man, who may have found the perfect solution, at least for one night, for his utter loneliness.

 

     As the two sit on the bed chatting, he makes a move, leaning in for a kiss. But Jack doesn’t react at all as expected, given the fact that at moments he has seemed to be somewhat flirtatious.

He strikes Eugene, pushes him to the floor and continues to slug him brutally for several punches before quickly dressing and running from the house.

       We don’t know if perhaps the boy has killed his would-be host. And the next morning a neighbor, who either helps out on the place or uses the nearby shed for his own storage, is troubled by seeing no movement in the house. He enters the house cautiously, calling out as he moves to the second floor, finding Eugene’s body still where he was felled. When he goes to move it, there is a cry of pain; the man is still living.

     The neighbor goes to make a call, and in the next frame we see a woman, probably his wife, sponging off Eugene’s several wounds as he lies in bed. No one asks him how this has happened or any other question about what led up to his obvious beating.

      The final scene of this short film shows the stained-glass window of a small church, and we might almost fear that we are now attending a funeral, but our fears are mollified when we see Eugene step up the pulpit, forcing us to realize that the talking he does is to his congregation.

        Director Perry has been quite helpful in explaining the purposes and intents of his quietly powerful work:

 

"The dominant narrative surrounding rural queerness in cinema is one of escape, in which queer characters fulfill their destiny when they outgrow their given community and seek greener, more metropolitan pastures elsewhere. This narrative has never rung true to me. Queerness has always existed, and continues to exist, within rural spaces. Even in times before a visible queer community could safely, visibly exist anywhere, queer people were respected members of rural communities. Their queerness may not have had a name or a common language. It may have manifested in more discreet forms, but it was present. I wanted to pay homage to the queer people who chose not to leave their communities and to the communities that included them, even if by turning a blind eye."

 

      Just how queerness plays out in such isolated communities, however, it not explained. Surely, Eugene will now fear picking up strange boys, and it is doubtful whether he has any gay men in the neighborhood ready to enter his very lonely bed. With such an intense loneliness that this small town minister is daily faced, who could blame him, now that he fully realizes that he needs sexual release, for moving on, like his assailant to a more urban world like Winnepeg or nearby Toronto.

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024)