Johan Vancauwenberg | Blessure (Fair Play) / 2009

a reckoning

by Douglas Messerli

 

(Roland Javornik and Johan Vancauwenbergh (screenplay), Johan Vancauwenberg (director) Blessure (Fair Play) / 2009 [8 minutes]

 

This short film reveals a situation that, alas, still happens far too often even in our presumably more open world with regard to LGBTQ+ experiences.

     Steven (Tom De Hoog) is a married man, in what appears to be a loving relationship with his wife Marie (Janne Desmet). We see her busy cooking dinner as the film begins.

      She is interrupted by one of her husband’s soccer friends, Tom (Steven Boen), who has stopped by to deliver up Steven’s locker bag which he left, so he explains, in his van. Since Steven has not shown up to their soccer games recently, he hasn’t been able to return it, and, he insists, it’s beginning to smell up his auto.

     She rushes back to her pot, inviting Tom in who surprises her by saying that he’s not seen her husband at the soccer game, since he went to play soccer yesterday.  He didn’t even show up last week, he explains.

     Maybe he watched from the side, they both cover up the matter.

     He’s on “Me time,” she explains. It’s when something’s bothering him and he needs to take a break from it all. She mocks him describing “Me time.”

     But bit by bit, we quickly discover what “Me time” is all about. Steven and Tom have been having an affair. It’s a ruse he uses to explain his time away from her and the house.

     Marie is finally beginning to wonder that if he doesn’t play soccer during “Me time,” where does he go?

     Tom tells Marie that her husband loves her; he always talking about her.

    At that moment Steven returns home, shocked, obviously, to see his lover—actually, we soon discover, his ex-lover, since he and Tom have just broken up—in his house.

    What brings you here? he asks Tom suspiciously, Marie explaining, as she continues her meal, that he’s brought the bag Steven has left with him.

      Tom seeks out an immediate exit, thanking Marie for letting him taste her excellent cooking. But Steven has good reason to walk him to the door.

       In a testy interchange, Tom explains that he’s told Marie nothing, but tells him the rest of his things are also in the bag.

     By this time, Marie is already down on her hands and knees, tossing her husband’s dirty soccer clothes into the washing machine. But she soon discovers, at the bottom of the bag, two sealed condoms and a box of unopened ones. She says nothing.

      But we watch as Steve climbs into bed with the cute boy Tom for the last time. Tom attempts to tell him that he loves him, but Steven insists that they’ve already discussed that: “I’m in love with Marie.” “And not with me,” he retorts.

      Steven insists that he does love Tom, but it’s different.

      “Then maybe you should go and love someone else differently.”

      It is as almost as if the self-deceiver has been waiting for this moment, as he sits up in an attempt to explain the obvious: “You can’t imagine what kind of situation I am in.”

     We all know all too well what kind of situation he is in. He has been lying to himself, his wife, and to his lover for a long while, particularly to himself. He probably does love Marie, but as a closeted gay man he also needs outside sex. The pulls in such a situation are intractable. There is no solution but truth, which would collapse Steven’s world. But refusing to face up to it, only makes it worse, the punishment of love perpetuated for all parties involved.

     Tom perhaps summarizes it best, if somewhat selfishly: “No, you’re just too stupid to understand that you’re never going to be happy with Marie.” It’s that realization that women in love with gay men also have gradually come to perceive, cutting their hearts open with something like the blade of a knife. But Steven is a coward, and leaves Tom.

    We now have to wonder, what has he been doing these past weeks on his “Me time,” seeking out a new gay companion? What lies was he about to again tell his wife as he entered the door, beginning his sentence, “You’ll never guess who I ran into?”

      “Bye Tom,” is all this gay deceiver can say as he walks out the door.

      And, finally, one truly wonders, as one viewer asked, “Who could ever leave a boy as cute as Tom alone in his bed?”

      As Belgian director Johan Vancauwenbergh’s camera backs away from the washing room scene, with Steven at the door watching as Marie angrily slams the rest of his clothes into the machine, we know his reckoning has finally come. For once in his life, he will have to face someone else in their time and speak the truth.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2024 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).