Eldar Rapaport | Postmortem / 2004

replay?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eldar Rapaport (screenwriter and director) Postmortem / 2004 [16 minutes]

 

Can a relationship that ended badly and with rancor be revived? Can both men, after meeting up again and discussing that relationship, begin anew? Or will it simply be a repeat of the first failure? Will they be afraid of seeing the old patterns, of performing the rituals that they had in the past that destroyed their love.

     Rapaport’s film is not nearly so profound to even consider these basic ideas. And although it is described as a “postmortem,” there is actually little discussion of each of their failures in the past other than vast generalizations and vague regrets. The most complex statements in this film consist of Troy simply repeating that he has been thinking of Thomas for a long while and has returned to the city in order to further reimagine what happened.

     Instead, using the wonderful music of Harel Shachal and Anistar (the music, according to Rapaport was how the idea for the film began), director Eldar Rapaport creates a backdrop that might stir up anyone’s nostalgia, along with placing two pretty boys Troy (Murray Bartlett) and Thomas (Daniel Dugan) across a table from one another, serves, if nothing else, to arouse our interest and hopefully reignite their old flame.

    Although the two leave each other in near despair after their breakfast meeting, with Thomas riding off on a motor scooter with his buff friend Raul (Francisco Valera), they do soon after meet up again in the small apartment Troy is renting and have what appears to be delicious sex. Although Troy has earlier insisted that he has quit smoking, after their sex we see him lighting up a much-needed cigarette, presumably symbolizing, one imagines, that he is ready to return the past he once shared with Thomas, presumably the good along with the bad.

      But can this event, however, restart something that has died? Can Thomas forgive a man who literally walked away from his life?

      The director clearly has no intention of answering our questions, and this short film ends with Thomas putting back on his shirt and walking off down the New York City streets, with absolutely no indication of a long term or even temporary reconciliation. Perhaps the nostalgia of their bodies bumping up against one another again with simply satisfy the itch.

      Yet clearly that surface scratch did fully satisfy the itch for Rapaport, since in 2011 the director returned to the subject, set this time in Los Angeles, the characters now named Troy and Jonathan, the latter in the feature version August now in a relationship with Raul. As soon as I see that movie, I’ll obviously let you know more about this mysterious couple. But until then, I can only say that the postmortem of 2004 did little more than declare that the relationship was dead.

      During our early years of marriage, my husband of now 55 years and I had such terrible fights that time and again we declared our relationship over. But the difference was that, although we may have left the house for a few hours, we returned and remained with one another; and that continuity gradually sustained us, helping us to realize that the sharp breaks were just that, momentary pauses in something that was far more sustaining to us both. Had one of us left and gone to Europe for a substantial period of time, I would suggest that whoever remained would have been forced to move on, and without the continuity any relationship would have meant starting all over again—not a choice I think either of us would have wanted to undertake. The fact that we stayed together despite everything begin to mean something in itself. And as we matured in our relationship, we realized that the difficulties we were having were typical adjustments to one another that all strong-headed individualists had to make. I think a true break in the relationship, one or the other cutting ourselves off from the other, would have ended our partnership for good, as we would sought out others more compatible than we were to one another.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).