Alex Lampsos | Thylacine / 2014

trust

Alex Lampsos (screenwriter and director) Thylacine / 2014 [10 minutes]

 

US director Alex Lampsos’ Thylacine is, unfortunately, a rather amateur exploration of an important question that remains of essential importance in gay relationships. After centuries of gay men being forced to roam alone, without monogamous relationships, will they be able to sustain the heteronormative notion of exclusive marriage? Or more importantly, should they demand of themselves monogamy? Isn’t that the heterosexual conception of love that has destroyed so many thousands of straight relationships?

      Poor pouting Charlie (Peter Michael Biondolillo), having suffered, we vaguely sense, a father who could not remain true to his wife—as if millions of children, straight and gay, haven’t suffered from the same dilemma—sees himself as an outmoded breed, a kind of Thylacine Tiger, the Tasmanian animal now extinct. He has been in a relationship now for nine months with Nick (Trevor LaPaglia), and is deeply in love. But the problem is that Nick, being unsure of himself, seeks the company of other men, acting, as Charlie describes it, “inappropriately.” Does he mean that he flirts?

      The film seems to indicate that he only has lunches or short meetings with other male friends, no sex; but pouting Charlie is jealous even for that. And if they are to celebrate a tenth month Nick, so his companion declares, has no make Charlie “trust” him, presumably by refusing to see all other male friends. The English word trust has always loomed, for me, as a word that mixes a kind religious faith with issues of monetary worth, a problematic word choice on which to build a relationship.

   It sounds to me like Charlie is something close to a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist who disallows himself and his loved one to be alone with other people to whom he might be sexually attracted. If I were Nick, I’d skip out in an instant. Such a confining notion of love is surely something that should become extinct as soon as possible.

   But Lampsos’ movie settles the matter with a short conversation, Nick explaining that none of us are perfect, a trite response set to Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” And the two, by film’s end, seem to have settled back into their monogamous rut to last at least another month.

      Not only do I disagree with the seeming premise of this film, if Charlie is its hero, but I am a fairly appalled by the simplicity with which it deals with its truly problematic central theme.

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).