Tommy Garcia | Discretion / 2015

losing battles

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tommy Garcia (screenwriter and director) Discretion / 2015 [35 minutes]

 

Derek Scerbo (Colin Lawrence) seems to have everything a young gay man can desire in the first quarter of the 21st century, a loving husband, Franz (Tim McCord) who works apparently as a highly successful businessman, an adopted daughter, Cara (Caige Coulter), a lovely California home, and a new job as a creative writing teacher at a local university, having temporarily given up his career as a writer after the limited success of his last novel. His life appears to be the model of contemporary LGBT life.

      But, as always, everything is not quite perfect. Franz is often too busy to deal with Cara’s busy schedule, which includes shuttles back and forth to school, oboe lessons, and the usual parent-teacher meetings, etc. Derek’s husband, moreover, is often called to take business trips to the Toronto branch. This even after they have both determined to build their lives in southern California, allowing Derek to put his efforts into expanding young minds through the act of imaginative writing, a calling about which he, as a new teacher, is excited.

     Classes begin nicely until one handsome young man shows up late, asking if he might add the course. Trysten (Zach Gillette) is a highly intelligent young man who has clearly spotted Derek as a handsome teacher, who it is almost apparent from their first meeting he is out to seduce.

      Derek appears to be innocent about the frontal assault, at first just a bit startled by the young man’s intelligence, his self-assuredness, and his beauty. And from the beginning he is attracted—who might not be by such a perfect model of university intellectualism and bodily perfection. But, as his feelings gradually creeps into desire, he truly recognizes the justifiable apprehensions. Although nothing is particularly mentioned in Tommy Garcia’s script, anyone who has taught in the last 20 years knows that the most carefully attended university situations are not those going on in the classroom, but in the offices and off campus locations where students and faculty might meet up. Many campuses demand office doors must be kept open at all times, and particularly gay and lesbian teachers are watched closely by administrators for tell-tale signs that they might be attracted to the numerous specimens of youthful beauty the college setting offers.

      In my day, I often invited my students, male and female, to semester-end parties. I became good friends with a couple of my students, both heterosexual. Such fraternizing would certainly not be allowed today.

      Yet Franz’s long hours, his disinclination to help with care of their daughter, his grumblings about wishing they might relocate to Canada, and the open sexual relationship of one of their mutual friends and his very young lover, all help to send the normally discrete Derek into a kind a spin—landing him in the arms of the waiting Trysten.

     When Derek announces office meetings with each of his students to discuss they special semester projects, Trysten is careful to make it at the very end of a long day, at 5:00 which might easily spill over into the drinking hour or, at the very least, justifiably keep his teacher from running home on time to his perfect family.       

     We sense immediately that the two will finally enter the gap, the desire simply having grown too powerful for either to resist. But Garcia cleverly doesn’t show us that sexual encounter until he has completely laid out the territory of the apprehensions, as Derek, arriving home late to find Franz attempting to cook dinner—unsuccessfully—cowers momentarily in the toilet, vomits, and later breaks down into tears over his fears of what his actions may result in and his guilt for lying to his husband.

      The director quite nicely detonates brief scenes from their sexual encounter by interweaving them with Derek’s private breakdowns regarding his behavior and his attempts to reconnect with his true lover and the life they have created. Trysten, himself, having checked up on Derek’s Facebook page to witness a picture of Cara, has second thoughts also, and in all discretion is clearly ready to back off from any further encounters, not even showing up for the last day of class.    

      Derek, in a sense, is saved by the decency (the discretion of the title) of his young student, but in this plot contrivance and in Derek’s sudden tearful suggestion that he now does want Franz to take the Toronto job after all, I believe the director has not truly faced the serious issues that he has raised.

     What if Trysten had continued in his pursuit, even if Derek truly was willing to live up to his statement to the boy that “This cannot happen again”? What if Derek, having so enjoyed his tenure as a teacher, was determined to stay with teaching in California? What if Derek were to admit his indiscretion, seeing it perhaps as a somewhat justifiable “slip”? Would the walls come tumbling down upon him, the university administration demand his firing, reporting the incident to the police. Would the rather naïve Franz break up with his “perfect” lover? Would Cara suddenly be faced with a broken family, a shamed father?   

     These are the truly interesting questions to ask about our society’s conventions, but which this otherwise intriguing film refuses to engage. Perhaps Garcia knows that our perfect LGBTQ societies are not built on deep bedrock, but on a shallow layer of shale and gasses ready send shivers of a temblor through the society whenever individuals behave in a manner unapproved by the moral codes of the day. What if Derek had invited Trysten over for a discussion with him and Franz to explain why desire is finally not enough? What if the administration, having heard of the sexual encounter between one of the faculty members and a student, attempted to council the teacher instead of hysterically firing him and calling him out as a kind of child abuser, which in this situation—and in many such situations—Derek and others are often not. Obviously, society prefers earthquakes.

      Clearly Garcia sensed that his film was taking up issues that were far more serious than the answers he eventually arrived at in this work. In his “kickstarter” page, hoping to raise money for the project, he wrote: For a couple such as Derek and his husband Franz, in a backdrop where homosexuality is more or less accepted, we must ask ourselves, “When the big battles have been (mostly) won, what smaller battles exist—both within and outside of the gay community?” I’m not so sure, finally, that this is a “smaller” battle.

 

Los Angeles, January 15, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2022).