by Douglas Messerli
Marco van Bergen
(screenwriter and director) Wastelands / 2013 [14 minutes]
Dutch
director Marco van Bergen’s film is similar to so many other “coming out”
movies that it might not even be worth watching were it not for the film’s own
contention that the “truth” the young gay boy, Marc (Frederik Stuut), discovers
concerning his next neighbor Olof (Daniël Brak) is utterly earth-shattering.
Even the promo bits for this film seem to suggest that love will never again be
possible: “He dreams about a relationship with him, and when the two go
camping, this dream seems to become reality for Marc, until he discovers a
secret that destroys all his hope.”
Oddly, that single sentence about
summarizes the entire “plot” this film has to offer. Marc, a dreamer, spends
the early frames of this short drawing pictures of himself in the arms of Olof
before an almost totally silent breakfast with his concerned father (Henry
Renes) who we later learn is a bus driver.
The two boys meet up at the train stop
presumably on their way to school and before we have even had a full meeting
between the two established they are happily bedded down in a tent on an
overnight camping trip.
Like many boys, they drink heavily to in
order to unleash their inhibitions before Olof actually sexually approaches his
“crazy boy,” Marc waking up the next morning in post-coital bliss. Only on the
phone he hears his new lover talking to apparently his girlfriend, planning to
meet up soon.
So shocked is our naïve young romantic
that he goes rushing off across the Dutch dunes, suffering evidently from the
reality that his new-found love is really straight.
What’s more, he discovers at the train
stop, Olof has the picture he has drawn, evidently given to him by Marc’s
father on a bus encounter, the father suggesting that his son does now go “out”
from time to time, whatever that might mean.
When Marc still cannot resist observing
that his friend is “pretty,” Olof douses cold water on the whole idea that
there could ever have been a real relationship between the two of them.
So, if we are to believe the film
publicists, his hope for a relationship comes crashing down. So? It happens
daily to thousands of young gay boys.
Unless, and it takes perhaps a strange
mind to even admit of this possibility, the father truly arranged for the
encounter between the two boys, perhaps even paid for it? That would certainly
have serious consequences for a young boy on his sexual march out to maturity.
If that is simply a far-fetched perverse
reading, which I hope it is, Marc should simply settle down, look around him,
and find a more fetching boy to draw pictures of, maybe this time actually
attempting to get to know him.
Los
Angeles, October 30, 2022
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (October 2022).
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