Nick Corporon | Last Call / 2009

missing out on life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Corporon, Johnny B. Dunn, and Gareth Dutton (screenplay), Nick Corporon (director) Last Call / 2009 [17 minutes]

 

Having just made an appointment to meet up with his ex-lover, and while driving to the location to meet him having run a red light and caused a serious traffic accident, Gavin (Travis Dixon) shows up at a bar, where a friendly bartender (Jody Jaress) inexplicably knows his lover’s name, Mark. Terrified, Gavin attempts to leave only to find himself re-visiting the bar through another door. We have entered the “twilight zone.”

     “Now, how ‘bout that drink?” the bartender calls out.

     All Gavin wants to know is how to get out of there, but the bartender serves up three shot glasses, explaining, “For the longest time you’ve used drinking to forget. Tonight you’re going to use it to remember.”

      The first drink takes us to an earlier, happier time when the two, Gavin and his younger lover Mark, were still very much in love, although even here Mark is aware of his companion’s alcoholism, a drink perched on the ledge of the tub in which he’s taking a bath.

       By the second drink, it’s clear that he and Mark have serious problems. Gavin returns home with alcohol on his breath the night before the couple, now obviously married, is planning to go for an interview about adopting a child. Even Gavin has second thoughts about the possibility of an alcoholic and a “kid” who sits around playing a guitar all day of being responsible parents. And surely no sane adoption agency would permit such a child to enter such a house—but that is not an issue which with this short film concerns itself.

       Gavin leaves the house again, declaring that drinking is what he’s best at, while Mark tears up, realizing the hopelessness of their situation.

       Indeed, so we soon discover, Gavin left the relationship that day for almost one and a half years, only to make the appointment to see Mark again, finally admitting to the bartender that in the accident he died. “For a moment,” Gavin declares, “I had it back, but fate had something else in mind.”

      The bartender tosses out the alcohol in third shot glass, declaring that he’s wrong. 

      She pours him out something else instead, which he drinks, discovering himself back in the car as in the first frames of the movie, on his way to possibly make it up with Mark.

       As he approaches the meeting place, however, he discovers Mark with a child, a little girl calling him Daddy, and soon after, another man entering to pick up the child to take her away as Mark plans his visit, he tells the child, with “an old friend.”

        Mark has clearly gone on to make a new life with another partner. And now Gavin has no choice but to turn away, realizing his mistakes were irredeemable.

      Back at the bar, he realizes that Mark had no other choice, despite their love. And when that realization comes, as the bartender puts it, “you just have to let go.”

       Gavin does so, opening another door into a kind of heaven, only to discover he’s been given the chance to start all over again, as he meets up with Mark for the first time.

 

      This is a professionally filmed student work, with excellent acting. It’s just too bad that its script is so centered upon a basically Christian presentation of a moral conte, taking it into the science fiction framework that I hinted at in my first paragraph. Perhaps centering the work on the actual relationship and developing the characters and situation in which they discover themselves instead of focusing on the hokey “after life” perspective, might have enriched the plot to give it the dark beauty of this film’s visual elements.

 

Los Angeles, June 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).