Charlie Tidmas | Pillow Chocolate / 2023

 

leave by the backdoor please

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charlie Tidmas (screenwriter and director) Pillow Chocolate / 2023 [10 minutes]

 

In case you’re never been to a medium-nice hotel, a “pillow chocolate” is what the management puts on your pillow to greet you into their comfortable space. Sometimes there are even flowers.

     Jamie (Peter MacHale) has the comfort of Vincent (Alan Turkington) who is evidently a celebrity of which we have no obvious evidence. And after a most affectionate night and evidently afternoon, the teenager is asked politely to leave by the back door so that no one might dare know that Vincent has been holed with him through the night.

      It’s not “the gay thing,” so Vincent asserts, but worse, which we might not even know except for the movie’s promotion, is that Jamie happens to a trans man, perhaps the worst criminal position left in the sexual world.

      It’s not that Vincent doesn’t enjoy his company, he even signs his photo with a telephone number so that Jamie can get back in touch. It’s just, well you know celebrities, it’s dangerous, impossible, unthinkable to even imagine that he might enjoy a trans man as a bedroom mate.

      The “pillow chocolate” nicely disappears through his back door throat and enters a nearby gay bar where he posts the picture to the bathroom wall, claiming that he has refused the invitation.

      This little vengeful piece is well directed and goes straight to the point. But I might have wished to see a bit more development, to comprehend how these two met up, what Vincent loved about their sexual night, and how such relationships might be even conceivable in this mixed-up world, particularly in the still up-tight British society or the downright frightened USA these days.

      This is a UK production. And what, I might ask was Vincent? An actor? Like Laurence Olivier who used to hook up with Danny Kaye in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel every time he visited the US? Or is this celebrity some second-rate record producer, an agent? Worse yet, a film director.

       This film needs far more explanation in order for me to feel that Jamie’s revenge was even successful?

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2024).