Jason Bradbury | We Once Were Tide / 2011

postponed escape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matthew Kyne Baskott (screenplay), Jason Bradbury (director) We Once Were Tide / 2011 [18 minutes]

 

This is truly one of the most beautifully poetic films of 2011, which I saw several years ago but only now come to review. I don’t quite know what made me delay in writing about it. Usually such delays involve problems with the film, dilemmas or confusions of the movie which I need to work out before returning to it. But this film was quite brilliantly straight forward in its representation.

      Anthony (Alexander Scott), living a truly lonely life on the British Isle of Wight at the southern end of England, is more than a little depressed since he mother now clearly has Alzheimer’s disease and cannot even recognize him anymore. His one solace is his friend Kyle (Tristan Bernays) who helps  evidently as his mother’s caregiver, but is also his gay lover. Together the two escape for a few moments to engage in kisses. But even that results in a problem, since in their absence his mother Annabelle (Mandy Aldridge) has wandered off to the ocean’s edge, ready to enter it at the very moment he finds her.

      Anthony himself is ready to leave, having packed his suitcase for a quick escape. But he realizes that he cannot yet leave his mother in Kyle’s capable care, a man who seems to be able to offer her more delight than her clearly despondent son is able to.

      The boys have sex, but even upon awakening he realizes his mother is missing, Kyle having whisked her away in a wheelchair to take her to a view of the ocean she so loves and in some vague sense wishes to return to, hence the film’s title. For the first time in a long while, when Kyle turns her chair toward her approaching son, she recognizes him as Anthony instead of the man who presumably was her husband, Harrold.

       Kyle has been given a Polaroid snap camera by his mother—which if you recall spit out pictures immediately after taking them, which had to be waved in the air to dry before being witnessed. And he has taken several photos of Anthony and his mother, before he leaves for the day, also slipping a piece of important news through Anthony's mail box: he has been accepted to photography school in England.

       Upon reading the letter, Anthony is left even more alone and isolated than before. He watches Kyle disappear via bicycle, leaving him in a world of utter isolation, as tears form in his eyes. Yet there is also a recognition through the photos left behind that this is his lover’s destination.

       British director Jason Bradbury’s work is a melancholy film that does not end well—perhaps why I put off writing about it—but still is a beautiful testimony to devotion and love. Despite his pain, it is clear Anthony cannot resist his lover Kyle’s movement into a new life, even if it is one he cannot yet enter.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024).