Dominic Leclerc | Protect Me from What I Want / 2009

hall of mirrors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominic Leclerc (screenwriter and director) Protect Me from What I Want / 2009 [14 minutes]

 

British director Dominic Leclerc’s Protect Me from What I Want might almost be re-imagined as the first encounter between the Paki boy Omar Ali, living in South London in 1981 and the street punk Johnny of Stephen Frears’ 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette. Nothing much has changed except Margaret Thatcher is long dead and the Tory vision of a cultural melting pot has evaporated into thin air.

    Still, the same issues exist. Saleem (Naveed Choundhry) is as devoted to his Pakistani roots as was Omar, and the pulls of his gay sexual desire towards just such a boy as Johnny, in this case Daz (Eliott Tittensor), are as powerful and compelling as they have ever been.

     The couple first meets up in what is evidently a dark street and alley gay meeting place, where Daz attempts to put a truly terrified Saleem at ease without success. But he’s a pro, giving the boy his number and reassuring him of his good intentions despite the cultural split that that leaves either boy on the other side of a cliff that is seemingly not to be breached by their differences, both societal and those of sexual openness.

      Daz runs back home, only to see his cultural world—not so very differently from the equally terrified and culturally closeted filmmaker Terence Davies—from outside the family window. Saleem realizes that he cannot possibly reenter his own past life, despite the fact that he’s terrified and sickened by that very realization.

       He calls up Daz, the “Johnny” of his dreams, who is able to provide him with an evening even more sexually fulfilling and visually compelling than Stephen Frears could conjure up in 1985. This is one of the sexiest short films ever made, as the two fuck and fuck again, enjoying sex in a manner than surely Saleem realizes will never truly ever again protect him from what he wants. He’s wanted it, he’s gotten it, and there’s no way to go back despite his utter hysteria, his quick exit, and his determination to utterly forget what has just transpired.

      Daz, a pro evidently at bringing out young disconcerted boys, watches from his balcony as Saleem pretends to trudge back into his Pakistani home life and its values. He keeps silently pleading with the determined young man to just turn around, like the mythical Orpheus, and look back at his tough natured dryad. Saleem does so with a smile, but unlike the myth, not so very different from the Britain of 2009, it’s clear Saleem will be back, smile intact.

     Sex is just too powerful to keep even the most ordinary of British brutes from breeding new sexual relationships between the Empire’s former subjects, and they are simply unable to resist the British abuse to which they’ve grown so nicely accustomed. No one can protect anyone in this bondage situation from what they want, even if their desires be utterly perverted. Fortunately, sex is more powerful even than the British union.

     Dominic Leclerc’s short film is a delusion: a seemingly quick blink into cultural fright, but actually a long view into the hall of mirrors of British sexual culture.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).