Kieran Galvin | The Burning Boy / 2001

the fire within

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kieran Galvin (screenwriter and director) The Burning Boy / 2001 [11 minutes]

 

Australian filmmaker Kieran Galvin’s tale, like so many others, is of two close friends, boys who attempt to impress one another with their macho stories and behavior. In this case Ben (Cameron Ford) and Chill (Josh Roberts) reiterate the pattern while fooling around at the pool. Chill, obviously a straight boy and the more dominant of the two keeps making demands of his friend, for example, insisting he tell him five amazing facts.

      These are kids who love sexual innuendo, so it begins with the fact the Whales have the largest penises on the planet, Chill inevitably insisting that no, he does, etc. But finally, tired of the macho talk Ben adds one further “fact,” a darker element that pervades this short film: “You can’t kill yourself by holding your breath.”

      Soon after, as the boys lay out in the sun, Chill notices some serious marks on Ben’s back and enquires about them, the boy responding that he just accidently hurt himself. But already we suspect that either he has been beaten by bullies or, more likely, by his own father.

      And when he readily agrees to later on lather up Chill’s back with sun tan lotion we begin to realize that Ben has far more serious feelings for his friend than the simple teenage friendship; that he, in fact, is a highly closeted gay boy—perhaps being punished by his father or others.

      Chill jumps into the pool again, Ben after. Within moments, however, Chill has pulled off Ben’s swimming suit, the boy pleading for him return it.

      In the next frames, the action has turned to what seems to be a nearly abandoned house. There Ben asks Chill why he always talking about girl’s tits, and Chill confronts his friend about how he’s observed that Ben has been checking out the boys in the shower, even himself. Ben, of course, denies it, but as they sit on the floor together, Chill puts his arm around his friend’s shoulder saying that it’s okay if he wants to touch him.

      Ben’s dreams seem to have come true, but he is also terrified of the situation, as Chill turns to him and moves forward with a kiss. The boys kiss once again. And Chill suggests that he’s perfectly willing to have sex with Ben.

     Ben suddenly bolts in the full realization of what the act means, Chill suggesting it’s okay, that he knows Ben “wants to do this.”

     The terrified boy pushes Chill to the floor, accidentally knocking him out; and in the rush out of the place, he overturns a lantern, setting the place on fire.

      Only after he has run for a short while, does he turn back to see the place entirely on fire!

      Ben runs off in true terror, in time coming to the ocean. Walking about the rocks for a long while, he sits as the sun begins to set. He undresses and moves toward the water, as we fear for his life. But he only stands there, looking out in the darkness, his arms around his own body in the chilling night.

     The director gives us no reason to perceive these incidents as occurring in anything other than the context of realism; yet the melodramatic turn his story takes make it seem almost like a feverish dream, which, in turn, might allow us to see it as a kind of metaphoric drama about coming out, including the necessity of symbolically killing off your relationship with your best friend and love, before facing up to the cold reality of who you are. Certainly, I’d rather read it that way as opposed to yet another gay tragedy rooted in the difficulties of young males accepting their queer identities.

      It seems, as Vito Russo showed us, that by the start of a new century, when this film was made, the number of LGBTQ bodies killed in motion pictures had been stacked so very high that yet another might have turned the screen permanently black. Surely, even in the Australian outback the realization of one’s sexual fantasies can end better than yet another gay boy’s death—if we read Chill’s reciprocation of Ben’s feelings as defining him as gay.

      In some respects, this film reminds me a little of Galvin’s fellow Aussie filmmaker Peter Michael’s 2016 short film Bro, where—without the tragedy—a gay boy’s straight best friend agrees to try out sex with his buddy if only to keep the relationship they have intact. What a difference 15 years can make. In the immediate post-AIDS world of Galvin’s film discovering oneself to be gay was still too often perceived as a significant issue of life and death.

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).