Beatrice Schreiber | Harley / 2014

the unlikely couple

by Douglas Messerli

 

Beatrice Schreiber (screenwriter and director) Harley / 2014 [12 minutes]

 

Director Beatrice Schreiber’s feel-good drama Harley is both unlikely and rather preachy. But then we’re in San Francisco where such gay stories always seem possible.

     Lucas (Caleb Hoffman), a cute, slightly effeminate gay boy shares an apartment evidently with Harley (Lars Slind) a musclebound beauty performed by an actor who in real life was a football player and model from Seattle. Also sharing the flat is Kira (Hannah Elder) who seems to be convinced that Harley is her man. Both appear to have basically ignored Lucas for several years until one day, in a terrible incident of homophobic rage, Lucas is beaten and raped so severely that he falls into a coma, unlikely to come back to life.

       Suddenly, so we’re led to believe, Harley’s deep homosexual feelings for Lucas come to surface as he writes daily diaristic love letters to the comatose Lucas and works out with the intention to find and kill the assaulter.

       Understandably, Kira perceives the radical change in Harley’s demeanor, attempting to bring him back into her life and reality, since it appears that Lucas is gone. Kira is convinced he will end up in jail.   

   But in a kind of miracle, in which this short film trucks, Lucas wakes up and comes back to life, returning home into the apparently now ready arms of Harley, who forces the boy to read his journal, kisses him and promises to makes things well again.

        Neither Kira and Lucas has known anything about Harley’s interest in boys, but Lucas, after reading his love letters, is only too happy to snuggle up into his new relationship.

        This is pure fantasy, cooked up in the imagination of a woman who suspects, presumably, that musclebound hunks often secretly hunker for sweet nerds like Lucas. Most gay men will surely realize this is just a kind of gay boy’s dream, and not what happens in real life. And that it takes a near-death experience to get there should clue everyone in to dangers of such fantasies.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).