Luca Leggieri | Fairlane / 2023

love lost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valerie Betts and Luca Leggieri (screenplay), Luca Leggieri (director) Fairlane / 2023 [16 minutes]

 

Luca Leggieri’s 2023 Fairlane is a beautifully filmed work about love found and lost almost as quickly as the movie’s 16-minute playing time.

 

    New in town, Brandon (Jordan Doww) begins work as a mechanic in an auto shop in order to help his single mother out in paying their bills. Immediately set to work with a cute experienced mechanic, Evan (Bejamin Esqueda), Brandon shows his talent for working on the Ford Fairlane with his fix-up of its generator that he’s learned from his now dead father, impressing both his fellow worker and his boss, Mr. Morgan (Larry Kastner).

      Over a cigarette break the next day, the two boys briefly discuss their lives. Brandon, who previously lived in Atlanta has clearly moved to the smaller town because his mother got job as a teacher. And he’s still feeling hurt and lonely his father’s death of a couple of years earlier. Evan, with empathy, tells of how he lost his mother a few years ago, “so, I get it.” Brandon’s father would fix up old cars and sell them, presumably what the boys are now working at for Morgan’s garage. Evan’s mother was a musician, and he, himself, “dabbles” in music.

      Before the night’s out Brandon is asked to join Evan at his favorite bar-restaurant where the two begin serious drinking and soon find themselves dancing together. Before the night’s out, both having truly enjoyed themselves, we watch them kiss in Evan’s car.

      Brandon is suddenly overjoyed to rush back to work, only to find that he is now to be entrusted with the night’s lockup, since Evan will be leaving. The shock is obvious, and Brandon rushes to the shop early the next morning only to find that Evan has already gone.  

   Has Brandon been hired to simply replace Evan? Apparently so, since, as the boss hands over the keys to Brandon, he observes about the other’s boy’s leaving, “Shame, since he’s a good kid, but I know I got the right person for the job.” If so, Brandon surely cannot give up a job he himself needs to pay the overdue bills he discovers at home. It appears in this lovely film, the sexual joys he’s just begun to explore have just as suddenly be whisked away from him, returning him to the lonely state-of-being with which the short film began.

      Leggieri gives no answers, as the film ends with only a gift Evan has left behind: a mixed tape of his music specifically labeled “For Brandon.”

      If there’s nothing too profound here, we do sense the sweet sorrow of young love that often ends almost as quickly as it has begun, and we are moved through the director’s beautiful handling of character, music, and image.

     Yet, there is a great deal of logic missing in the script, or least questions that it appears Leggieri and his cowriter Valerie Betts have failed to answer. If Evan has been fired, why can’t Brandon still find out where he lives and visit him, explaining his deep disconcertment and attempting to restart their relationship? Mightn’t they again at least meet up at the kicky small-town bar?

      If Evan was all along planning on leaving, why start up a new love on the very week you know you are about to leave? There’s some explaining to do on the part of both the film’s central characters. Moreover, although we know a teacher’s salary is not always commensurate with other workers, surely Brandon’s mother now makes enough that she might be able to pay the bills, permitting Brandon to threaten to leave if Evan is not rehired. These, of course, are not issues the average filmgoer might care to think about. After all, the point is that Fairlane, just like the beautiful car of the 1950s and early 60s, is about something we fell in love with but was just as quickly lost. My family also drove a Ford Fairlane 500 from 1957; and even I, not at all an admirer of automobiles, lost my heart to that car, along with our Robin Egg-blue suburban house with its St. Charles Terra Cotta colored metal kitchen cabinets topped by a yellow counter at 1130 Northview Drive, the same year from September through December, Alfred Hitchcock was shooting Vertigo. This is a movie less about love than its loss.

 

Los Angeles, August 31, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).