Rebecca Ann Bentley | Stepping Out / 2022

coming to terms with reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rebecca Ann Bentley (screenwriter and director), Stepping Out / 2022 [9 minutes]

 

In this rather simplistic Australian film, first shown in international festivals in 2022, despite IMDb’s 2024 dating of its release, writer and director Rebecca Ann Bentley presents a rather simplistic view of coming out.

     Will (Will Hutchings) in this short film has just kissed Max (Darcy Smith), the popular soccer player of the elite all-male school which both boys attend, and Max is terribly disturbed since he truly liked it, and has made Will promise to no longer further discuss it.

 

     But Will, who is clearly quite comfortable with his sexuality, can’t resist making further advances.

     There is a tradition of gay films since 2020—perhaps even before—where smart sisters (Tori, in the series Heartstopper is a perfect example) clearly know what’s going on sexually between their older or younger brothers. In this case Liv (McKinely Markham) takes her brother aside to discuss his new “friend” to which he has just introduced her; “What do you know,” hisses her uptight brother. I know nothing she declares, “but if you don’t fuck that boy immediately, I will.”

     Max, however, despite is regular visits to internet gay sites is still haunted by the notion that everything he feels is wrong and rotten, and it takes a visit from Liv, who notices his appetite for young men, to finally get him to realize that there’s nothing wrong with his sexuality, and that even if his soccer-boy friends reject him, that no one should ever reject such deep love. Besides, she informs, she’s pansexual. O the progress (?) that has been made. Rugby player Nick (Kit O’Connor) from Heartstopper didn’t do anything more that blink before he described himself as bisexual. But Max has the problems that most gay boys share, how do I get from here to there?

     His sister Liv is the conduit, and it only takes a good conversation with his sibling and a plate of friendly cookies from his disappeared mother to set things straight, or perhaps we should say, in a crooked way. On the particularly school-day morning on which Max comes alive, we walks over to his clearly disappointed friend Will and plants a deep kiss on his lips. Even the student (Jeffrey Li) notices, and surely it will soon be all over the school. But who cares? The boys have a great deal of love to enjoy in the viewer’s imagination.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2024)