Brian Rowe | Lonesome Bridge / 2005

world without love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samantha Marazita and Brian Rowe (screenwriters), Brian Rowe (director) Lonesome Bridge / 2005 [12 minutes]

 

Brian Rowe’s short film Lonesome Bridge explores various notions of violence in response to sexual behaviors, centering on a love-stricken gay college boy, Kevin (Ben Gaetanos) who shares a bathroom in his college dorm with his heterosexual heartthrob Rusty (Austin Beckford).

     It’s hard to imagine a worse pairing, given that Kevin is a true innocent who has become obsessed with the self-centered ladies’ man, who, according to Kevin’s best friend Liz (Aimee St. Piere), who has dated Rusty, likes to slap around his female partners.

     Liz is afraid of what he might do to Kevin if he were to discover his suite mate’s feelings, which actually begins to happen as Rusty catches Kevin watching him shower and, later, discovers him jacking of to a computer photograph of him.

     Kevin escapes from the first situation by lying about a need to urinate; but finally gets firmly told off by the rightfully angry Rusty for his having appropriated a personal image for his own desires.

     Liz hopes that her friend will come to realize just how absurd his infatuation is, but Kevin feels Rusty was justified in his verbal attacks, and continues in his hopeless love. But when he observes Rusty obviously discussing his suite mate’s audacity with a friend, Derek (Nick Puliz), he senses danger.

     Soon after, Derek meets up with Kevin one night on a campus bridge, clearly the “Lonesome Bridge” of the title, and, in a homophobic frenzy severely beats the gay boy.

      Kevin’s anger is more about his belief that Rusty has asked his friend Derek to enact the “punishment” instead of meting it out himself.

      In fact, Rusty is furious with his friend for having beaten Kevin and cuts off his relationship with the thug. But Liz misinterprets Kevin’s comments to suggest that Rusty himself has gone on the homophobic rage; and in an act of revenge, she hires Derek, ironically, to take down Rusty.

      We never witness the act of revenge, as the film ends with Liz attempting to minister to a hurt and disillusioned Kevin. But we realize that in this world in which nearly everyone chooses violence to resolve sexual matters, there is no end. Each person involved—except for the thoroughly violent and truly homophobic individual Derek—seemingly must suffer for the other’s desires.

      All will be left hurt and fearing to return to normal love, however one defines that, becoming damaged figures for not having been able to tolerate the various forms love takes.

      The thematic of this work is profound, but unfortunately the believability of the characters is put into jeopardy by amateur acting and the realization that there is perhaps no one quite as dense regarding love as Kevin nor any woman in real life as pettily spiteful as Liz. These figures behave more like manikins for writers Samantha Marazita and Brian Rowe’s ideas than as flesh-and-blood figures. And at the point when Kevin confronts Rusty about not having himself had the nerve to beat him up, we can only perceive the gay boy in this work as a sadly masochistic being, just as he charges Liz for being basically unlovable because of her cynical attitude toward one of the most important emotional responses in life, love.

      But, in fact, a great deal of sexual violence is intwined in just such a complex web of desire and masochism and feelings of worthlessness and envy that this short film portrays. The bridge these figures attempt to create with others, accordingly, will always leave them lonely, without the possibility of connecting because of their own and others intolerance of difference.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).