Heath Daniels | Ageless / 2013

the joys of older love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Heath Daniels (screenwriter and director) Ageless / 2013 [4 minutes]

 

In this very short comic film, Howard (Michael Massei) becomes the narrator of a discussion of his current elderly relationship with Charles (played by director Michael J. Saul) comparing and contrasting it with what he imagines their relationship to have been 30 years previous.

     In the current relationship the couple seem content, quietly enjoying one another’s company, sex more a matter of cuddling than an intense sexual encounter, while their younger versions, David (Windham Beacham) and Tom (Derek Efrain Villaneuva) must deal with other’s eccentricities and “outstandingly irritating” differences. Of course, the younger sex (strangely performed with underwear) is phenomenally acrobatic. We might just suggest that it’s a comic presentation of young sex.

      While the elder Charles brings Howard a lovely birthday cake, the younger pair fight, Howard recalling that he fought intensely and nearly endlessly in every relationship in which he was involved. “I thought that that was romantic and passionate. If you really loved someone, you fought.”

      We contrast that with the gentle ministrations of Charles to Howard as elderly men.

      Frankly, I can’t completely buy in to the portrayal of either couple. Having lived now 53 years with the same person, we are no less argumentative, no more cuddling and attentive than we were 30 years ago; in fact, age brings on other irritations, bodily pains, the sadness of losing friends, the tiredness of facing the same patterns of childish behavior in one another with which we began. If one is a little quieter as an elderly couple it is perhaps primarily because of a lack of energy, not a sudden possession of rational facilities.

       But that may also be Daniels’ point. What we see in the elder couple is only a product of the younger, even if the coupling consists of different individuals. We are, after all, also strangers in older age to who we were in our youth.

 

Los Angeles, August 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).