by Douglas Messerli
Robert Lambert
(screenwriter and director) Follow You Follow Me / 1979
Lambert’s work remains somewhat tepid when
compared with Tonge’s simply because the two boys of Follow You Follow Me,
although defining themselves several times as “best mates” have not even begun
to explore their sexuality, while the boys in Tonge’s film, although at times
confused about their sexual identities, are clearly in love with one another
and see their “on the road” journey as a kind of “marriage.”
Lambert’s boys, Joseph (Francis Gibbon)
and Peter (Stephen Bratt) get no further than the next town before they are
forced to give up their journey, and they end up, after a brief train ride, in
the very city, Southampton, where Joseph’s family are moving. The boys may
remain friends over time—although even that’s uncertain given their societal
and spatial separations—but it is highly unlikely that they will ever explore
their sexual identities, with the likelihood that Peter, in particular, will
fall in with one of the girls with whom he practices kissing, get married, and
lose contact with the shyer, more innocent, and far sexually confused Joseph.
Any speculation, however, is pure fiction
that lies outside of the verisimilitude of Lambert’s drearily mostly brown-,
pea-green-, and rust-hued color film. Perhaps in Southampton Joseph will meet
another young boy and return to the far more exciting and eccentric road trip
that Tonge’s work features.
Yet, there is something almost daring
about Lambert’s attempt to play out the tropes of a gay coming of age movie
against the backdrop of the growing division between worker and management
being played in the small town of Hythe.
Joseph’s father (Gilbert Wynne), the
owner of J. Cook & Co., is having financial difficulties and is in danger
of losing his factory which hires 80 local workers. He’s even put up his family
home as collateral, and is now in danger of losing everything unless he lays
off half of his employees or sells the business. Peter’s father (Kevin Moore),
on the other hand, is the local union leader, heading the picket lines
demanding remuneration for the 40 soon-to-be furloughed employees. It’s no
wonder, accordingly, that neither father approves of their son’s relationship
with the other boy, while their wives beg them to leave their children alone.
But in keeping the boys uninformed, their sons come in danger of being swept up
in the larger local political upheavals.
The two go everywhere together, each
night joining up, sometimes just to hang out in Peter’s room talking while
Peter toys with his childhood soldiers and Joseph pages through a copy of Mayfair
magazine his friend has found while cleaning out his father’s shed.
Together the boys attend a teen dance, where Peter gregariously dances with a
girl while Joseph sits it out like a wallflower. Yet all during his encounters
with girls, Peter looks over at Joseph and smiles with affection. One has the
feeling that he is exploring the opposite sex out of a sense of duty more than
any intense desire. And when he finally encourages another girl to pay
attention to Joseph the two sneak out for kissing practice which Joseph
miserably fails, the girl responding that he is “slow,” both girls moving away
in disappointment with their male companions.
At another point they consider purchasing
what we called at their age a “girlie” magazine, but when Peter considers
“nicking” it, Joseph disapproves, and they leave the store without the item
that brought them in.
Yet again Joseph displays the differences
in their upbringing when, after someone at school has described him as a
“wanker,” he asks Peter what the word means. Obviously, he is a “wanker,” a
male who masturbates instead of having sex with women, another way of
suggesting he might be queer.
And those very differences, Joseph’s
polite and sheltered upbringing as opposed to Joseph’s working class,
streetwise learning, lead to violent expression given the labor issues facing
the community. Joseph is grabbed by several of his classmates while his best
friend punches him in the stomach.
Forced to take the action by his
classmates, Peter quickly moves off while the other boys mock him for not
continuing and move in to further kick and pummel their fallen prey. It’s one
of three instances that reveal just how emotionally involved the two boys
really are. As Peter turns away, watching from the corner of his eye how his
“mate” his being beaten, tears stream down his face and, after a few moments,
he rejoins the fray in order to break it up.
Obviously, such actions inevitably result
in a severance of their friendship. Joseph is sent away to a far posher school
in Southampton—as he later tells Peter he must take courses in “Latin and other
things”—and the two are no longer able to “hang out” together. Soon after, his
father announces that the family, now that he has sold the factory, will be
moving to Southampton. Heartbroken, Joseph steals away from school taking the
Hythe ferry back to his hometown to wander the streets and finally to encounter
his old friend. At first he runs away from him in partial fear that he will
mock his new school uniform, but also still unsure of Peter’s feelings toward
him. “When you hit me,” he finally asks, “did you really mean it?”
peter: They made me
do. They hit me as well.
joseph: Why?
peter: Because I’m mates with you.
joseph: We’re still mates?
So begins their brief adventure which, as
I state above, ends nowhere. Unlike Phil and Matthew in Two of Us Joseph
and Peter never make to Sussex—but then they live in the neighboring county of
Hampshire in sea-side cities. What could Seaford mean to them? These two never
truly leave home and probably will never escape their societal designated
identities that thoroughly delimits the definition of “best mates.”
Los Angeles, March 14,
2021
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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