Fabio Youniss | A Stable for Disabled Horses / 2012

horse and pig

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fabio Youniss (screenwriter and director) A Stable for Disabled Horses / 2012 [13 minutes]

 

This British short film by Fabio Youniss could be a hilarious surrealist skit if it weren’t also so very sad.

     Benny (Daniel Swan) has invited his newfound friend Kanoute (Daniel Simonsen) over for a late evening party since the next morning Kanoute is leaving London, returning to the pig farm which his father has been working alone since his departure. There’s a strong sense of guilt about his having remained in London, and yet it’s clear he’s not entirely excited about returning home.

     It’s also clear that he’s not exactly found a large group of new friends in London, given that, apparently, his “best” friend is Benny. Both of them seem like slightly mentally disturbed boy-men who have a difficult assimilating into the general society.

       Kanoute is a kind of country bumpkin and the half unshaven Benny is possessed of an embarrassingly horsey laugh that might startle even a fearless British horsewoman such as the former Princess Margaret.

       Benny’s father, in fact, worked at a race track, his job being to “put down” (read shoot) all the lame horses. Benny’s own dream is to leave the city and work at a stable for disabled horses, obviously a psychological response revealing his hate of his father, but also hinting perhaps of how he sees himself. One arguably could describe that both of these uncomfortable men as similar to “disabled or lame horses,” unfit for the activities of the metaphoric race track of life.

       Benny even remarks about how his colleagues mock him, and not always behind his back. He names several of the almost meaningless phrases, odd-sounding even to most of us who speak English—“iron hoof,” “chutney ferret,” “curly flies,” “poo pirate”—to which Kanoute responds with an even more absurd Norwegian phrase meaning, “Don’t worry, it could be worse, your father might have been Swedish,” which to me sounds very much like Norwegian humor.

      What these phrases hint of, if nothing else, is how odd people see Benny, and perhaps they function as a kind of code about his love and commitment to horses and possibly reference his latent homosexuality. If nothing else, we perceive that he’s been highly attracted to Kanoute ever since he’s met him, and is hoping that on this last night together, Kanoute might finally admit his sexual attraction or possible even engage in sex.

      The clumsy attempts of Benny to literally “drop beads,” or make evident his sexuality, is to leave out a small iron workout bar on his coffee table along with a chic physique magazine, to gift his friend with a T-shirt with images of the two of them on it suggesting that they are Best Friends Forever, and, later, to clumsily attempt to seduce his friend with a long dance, while simultaneously relating a truly sad story of how as a child he used to dance endlessly around the house until his father caught him, demanding he stop it immediately, insisting he dig a huge ditch to work out any such possible desires or tendencies to be a dancer.

       But Benny is mostly determined to simply get both of them drunk, and when he feels he’s finally almost achieved the right effect begins a slow move toward Kanoute which understandably terrorizes the young man. Kanoute stands, ready to leave as Benny argues that he is sure there something between them, demanding that Kanoute admit it. He runs and locks the front door in order to hold Kanoute hostage until he admits it.

       The Norwegian, however, quickly pushes the galoot off and captures the key, starting out the door. Observing the now quite drunken Benny cowering in a corner, however, he stops, returns to the couch and sits, the two of them obviously at a kind of standstill.

       It appears that there may be some shared emotions or even desires between these two unhappy men with fathers they do not love after all.

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2023).