Rhys Marc Jones | Burn Bridge / 2017

the woes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rhys Marc Jones (screenwriter and director) Burn Bridge / 2017 [16 minutes]

 

Harry Kiteley (Charlie Rice), when he’s not at school—an activity this short film chooses to ignore—he’s basically up to trouble, stealing pot from under his mother’s panties, carefully placing a piece of sharp glass in front of the tires of his mother’s current boyfriend, and even trying out his mother’s dildo, kept in the same drawer with panties and pot.

     More that anything else, whoever, he’s troubled. His close friendship with his life-time chum, Jamie Johnson (Macaulay Cooper), and with whom he suddenly realizes he is in love, is in danger as Jamie’s attentions have turned almost entirely to Lucy Brown (Amy Cartledge). Even a decent game of backward soccer is near-impossible with Jamie’s constant breaks to hug his Lucy.

      With his mother out one evening, Harry asks if he might “crash” with Jamie, only to find himself in tent with Lucy. As Harry lays beside the couple who are busy fucking, he simply cannot any longer resist laying his hand upon Jamie’s exposed back. Jamie cries out in horror, sending Harry running off into the woods to mope. It’s clear that the love he feels will never be returned.

      Back at school (just outside of it), he apologizes for his behavior, which Jamie also describes as inevitable.

      “Look man, I was bang out of order.”

      “It’s fine, don’t worry about it,” answers Jamie as he kicks the soccer ball.

      “It’s not fine though is it?”

      “We know, and it’s cool.” Jamie answers, recognizing it appears his friend’s sexual interest in him. But there is a sort of selfish bravado in his next statement: “It’s bound to happen isn’t it?”

      Even worse he invites him to join Lucy and him, this time accompanied by Lucy’s friend Chloe (Lucy Acklam), forcing Harry to pretend a heterosexual reformation.

      After this day, I can only imagine, their friendship will be finally over, Harry realizing that

things can never go further and that given Jamie’s smugness about the whole thing, it may in fact be better. And presumably, Harry now knows that he has, indeed, “burned his bridge” to the idyllic boyhood of his past.

      But Welsh/Irish director Rhys Marc Jones doesn’t move in that direction, leaving us only with the horror of a long day of pretense, yet another reason for Harry to be unhappy with his current life. And the film closes with what most viewers might perceive as a healthy normative gesture, but what anyone in the LGBTQ community recognizes is a nightmare.

      O the woes of a young gay boy in an isolated heteronormative world!

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).