Caitlin McLeod | One Like Him / 2022

different directions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tareq Baconi and Caitlin McLeod (screenplay), Caitlin McLeod (director) One Like Him / 2022

[16 minutes]

 

As children Karim (the teenage version played by Mohammed Nizar, the adult by Kais Nashif) was in love with Ramzi (Hamzeh Shaker Mahadin and Loai Noufi), but when Ramzi’s mother found a love note that he had written Ramzi, any contact the boys might have continued to make was cut off.

    Years later, the two meet up in the city, Karim now an openly gay man, and Ramzi a straight man with a new-born daughter. Karim brings him a letter in an envelope to read later, and attempts to speak to his childhood lover about their lives then and now.

     Various possibilities of that communication are played out, with, in the first case, Ramzi simply walking out and refusing to permit Karim’s confessions from even being expressed. In a second version, more gets set, but ends up equally bad. In a third version of this Rashomon-like playing out of past events, Ramzi chastises Karim for having refused all further communication, arguing that even if they might have gone in different sexual directions there still might have been years of friendship and understanding.

     We cannot know which version of this frustrated attempt to communicate in Arabic that does not even allow the words to express Karim’s sexuality, In all versions, the enveloped communication that Karim suggests that Ramzi should read later, is soaked in the whisky Ramzi spills in their angry and hurt conversation, and is left behind, unopened.

     The director herself describes the tense situation: “These two Jordanian men and what they say to each other in the context of present day Amman is so powerful in this story that our approach was to showcase those elements as much as possible. There is a magnetic stasis to the shots that allow us to feel each twitch of a cheek or a jaw tightening. We are real and up close and personal.

     At the same time the film sits in a surreal, fantasy space. The elements, emotions, energies disrupt reality and make us (and Karim) question what is real and what is imagined. Overall we want an audience to think about what "closure" really means in relation to personal identity and another person.”

     In such a world, it appears closure is not possible, since each time the epistle brought as a token by Karim to Ramzi is left behind. In the last moments of the film, he opens the letter to reveal that it is a wedding invitation between him and a man named Tobias, obviously presented Ramzi as a token of a past that was never permitted to exist in their culture, and most certainly a direction closed off to his friend.

     Apparently, it is still a reality that is not permitted to exist in men like Ramzi’s world. Yet, in such a world even the victim is also the perpetrator of the homophobia that pervades the culture. McLeod expresses it quite succinctly:

 

 “The film looks at the significance and consequences of what is spoken and unspoken. Karim has been living with the burden of what has gone unsaid, never having had the words or language to describe himself. He never had a chance to explain to his childhood friend and first love how he felt. In this conversation, Karim finally finds the courage to speak his truth. But each time he comes up against obstacles – in himself and in Ramzi - and the moment is not cathartic. Saying ‘I am gay’ in English alienates Ramzi, who finds the expression ‘undignified’. Then none of the words in Arabic feel quite right. Karim finally loses control of the moment. He lets go of the need for Ramzi to understand him. He accepts that, as limited and reductive as his language might be, at least it’s honest. And that is when something unexpected happens: Karim hears that he was accepted and loved all along. No one turned away from him. He had, in fact, turned away from himself.”

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).