Joseph Barglowski | Vermont / 2023

city lights

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Barglowski (screenwriter and director) Vermont / 2023 [19.50 minutes]

 

Vermont if very much a state of mind in Joseph Barglowski’s 2023 short film. The young man who has been holed up in a small cabin in a snowy few weeks in New England (Ryan McDermott) has just returned to his home in Brooklyn, where he has clearly been emotionally troubled by his experiences there.

      Throughout the early part of the film, director Barglowski shows us heavily bearded bears of men, who might have been said to have hibernated in the wild, getting the severe trims necessary for them to reassimilate back into the city.

      For our “hero” something has definitely not gone right in the isolated beauty of the frigid cold state. And the rest of the movie portrays him trying to reenter the equally harsh but stunning lit-up world of Brooklyn and New York City as if he has been dropped into a Martin Scorsese-like landscape. If these are “mean streets,” they are clearly also far more lovely to the eye than the

several winter landscapes we see later in the film, reminiscent of common postcard portraiture of the winter wonderland everyone believes Vermont to be. Clearly Barglowski, along with me, prefers the hot-lights of the city over the frozen north.

   We perceive that something has not gone right from the very first frames of this film, with McDermott returning home with two of the central figures who later play roles in the movie, showing up at a party hosted by McDermott’s female friend (Kathryn Isaac). Did one of them show up in Vermont unexpectedly, shifting the relationship of the central figures.      

      Back in NYC we see our central figure trying to reassimilate into his other world. He meets up with an older man (who we also see in the early segments as undergoing a new haircut) who claims to love Vermont. He, in fact, as a small painting on his wall depicting its wonders. The two have what can only be described as cold and efficient sex, stimulated it appears, mostly by the central character’s own memories of Vermont.

      Meanwhile, the young man we have seen next to him on the subway in the first frames seems to have had sex with the other man in the same scene. And McDermott’s character visits him just as the other is leaving.

      It almost plays out as a return of the prodigal lover, both men having realized that perhaps, despite what happened in Vermont, they still love one another.

    Vermont, frankly, cannot compete with the brightly lit-up streets that cinematographer Robert Orlowski captures along with the slightly discordant piano score by Cody Boyce.

     Love is definitely better for the two major figures of this film back home in the warm lights of Brooklyn.

     

Los Angeles, October 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).