Jerry Tai | Diffidence / 2010

the broken pencil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Tai (screenwriter and director) Diffidence / 2010 [7 minutes]

 

So diffident was the Canadian writer and filmmaker Jerry Tai with regard to establishing his character and explaining his central figure Darrel’s (Ryan Erwin) motives that it is nearly impossible to write coherently about the movie.

     Apparently Darrel has been long working on a screenplay or some writing assignment and is late in completing the work. The Producer (Aurora Buchanan) is ready to fire him, but a friend, Ryan (Dan Dumsha) to whom they’ve turned to help finish the script has evidently begged for them to keep Darrel on the project.

      The anger and bitterness Darrel displays can be summarized in the only fairly transparent scene of the film when, after Darrel storms out of the meeting, Ryan looks for him, commenting, “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” to which Darrel replies, “Go fuck yourself!” And with cigarette hand, he storms off.

     Evidently, from the repeated image of Darrel attempting to write, the pencil breaking on the paper pad, we glean the fact that it is not merely writer’s block that is preventing him from finishing the project. And when the two do meet up again, from the interwoven frames of the two making love, it appears that Darrel and Ryan were once lovers, the feelings still remaining despite the apparent breakup.

     Beyond that, however, we learn nothing. The film’s basic theme seems to be uttered in Ryan’s line: “I’m not a stranger to what you’re hiding right now. And maybe I still have feelings for you.”

     The rest of the short work is a kind of interrogation with seemingly no results by Ryan in his attempts to discover why Darrel is still so resistant to admit his homosexual feelings, which are apparently also holding back his creative ideas. The central enquiry of the film seems to be, despite some success that Darrel has achieved, Ryan’s query: “Are you happy?”

     Darrel responds that nearly all of his decisions, to get his college degree and even to seek out a career in writing have been to make his parents happy. And he has, apparently, no intentions of now disappointing them. He sees his decision to pretend he’s still heterosexual as part of his “responsibilities” in return for his parents work of 20 years in raising him.

      By this short film’s end, Darrel is still stuck in rut of determination to please the world of his past. Being happy evidently has no part in it.

      Why this film is titled “diffidence” is rather inexplicable. Darrel, in his blind commitment to family and past is anything but modest and shy, although he is most certainly unconfident about himself. He seems proud of his own ability to wipe away his own identity for the sake of family ties. But frankly, by this time, I suggest the audience has so tired of this 20-some-year-old’s inability to question his own motives, despite Ryan’s rather simplistic challenges, that we truly don’t care any longer whether he finishes the damn script or not. His life is already a broken pencil, something that can longer carry him forward with the story he might create for himself. Besides, Ryan has already done a rewrite.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2022 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).