Damian Overton | Arlo and the Sea / 2023

message without evidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Damian Overton (screenwriter and director) Arlo and the Sea / 2023

 

Recently I have been encountering a great many LGBTQ short films that instead of using dialogue have returned, quite strangely, to the techniques if silent cinema, employing narrative voices instead of intertitles.

      These are often very lovely to look-at works, as is Australian director Damian Overton's Arlo and the Sea, with quite lovely-to-look-at actors, who remain voiceless, thus not giving us a real clue to their acting abilities. Perhaps it’s simply cheaper. You buy pretty boys for their looks instead of their acting talents.     

      The pretty boys, as in so very many gay movies these days, lay out on the beach and smile, sometimes pretending to engage with the other.

     Consequently, since we have no voice involved we are dependent entirely upon the storytelling-like narrative, which frankly, in most cases, is quite empty. Arlo (Ruben Russo) a young man who loves the sea, falls in love with Finn (Paris Moletti). How they meet, what is the basis of their love, and most importantly since this is the film’s apparent theme, why Finn leaves him is absolutely and almost insistently not established. This reads like a fairy-tale of disappointment and resilience.

      Poor Arlo goes into a deep depression, as in many a gay 21st century gay films bathing fully clothed in a bathtub under whose water he sinks for endless minutes.

      Despite the funk into which Arlo retreats after the disappearance of his magic lover Finn, life goes on for Arlo, who, we are told, will eventually discover another lover.

      The end. Good for the myth, but how this film empties out everything else but pretty pictures and an overly-annunciated narrative voice (Kieton Beilby) doesn’t give me a clue why I should care about anything that happened to Arlo or what he might do in the future.

       This film, along the several others of these narrative-told movies, are some of the emptiest cinematic productions I have ever encountered. I never much liked the New Critical Theory dictates, but I certainly must agree, in this case, that a story should show us instead of tell.

       And I have to admit, like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, frankly Arlo, I don’t give a damn.  

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).