Welby Ings | Sparrow / 2016

wing boy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Welby Ings (screenwriter and director) Sparrow / 2016 [15 minutes]

 

New Zealand director Welby Ings, trained as a designer, creates films with slightly eccentric characters dropped into landscapes that are stunningly beautiful and original despite the banality and blindness of most who walk the same turf, the films’ images themselves often overlaid with written sentences and fragments of language that attempt to make sense of the characters’ absurd acts. I previously reviewed his remarkable portrait of a small town outcast, Boy, in which the central character finds a way to bring those who have tortured him to justice.

      The young ten-year-old boy of his 2016 film Sparrow shares elements of that earlier work. In this case the boy, Jim (Merrick Rillstone)—somewhat autobiographically related to the director—believes he can fly, a fantasy somewhat tolerated by his father but which still results in his being demeaned by his fellow students and other outsiders.

      The problem is that this determined child wears his homemade “wings” nearly everywhere—his father refusing to let him wear them to the dining table—even on his way back and forth to and from school. And when he isn’t wearing them, supposedly doing a writing assignment in class, he draws pictures of birds, infuriating the teacher, who rips his drawings up.

     On his way home from school several other boys gang up and attack him for his oddities, his father (Paul Glover) rescuing him, but demanding—since he himself apparently was once a boxer—that he learn how to box in order to protect himself. The boy refuses to hit him, and the lesson ends with the father’s frustration.

     In his private time, the boy watches old films of his grandfather, a foot soldier in Egypt during World War II, in which the film glorifies his past, demonstrating frame by frame just what a hero his grandfather was, winning a prestigious medal. He was killed in war and buried a hero, so proclaims the old movie, even today his son, the boy’s father, wearing his war medal and marching in local parades in memory of him.

      While trying to repair his broken wings Jim visits the work shed in back of the house, and looking in an old drawer for bits of parchment and string he discovers a box in which trinkets of a soldier (buttons, a ring, etc) line a tray beneath which lays a trove of letters which the boy secrets back to his bedroom.

       As Jim begins to read the letters and postcards he discovers that, in fact, his grandfather, Gordon (Matthew Arbuckle) had not wanted to go to war but, called a coward by the locals, finally joined up. In the trenches he “bunked” with a close friend who was shot and wounded. Together they two had a caged pet sparrow with them in the trenches, who also seems to suffer as the wounded soldier lays deep in pain for days, the sores becoming infected.  Trying to bring him back to health Gordon holds him in his arms, kissing him, revealing to the others the intensity of their relationship.

        The outraged commander orders the wounded friend to stand at attention, who, as he attempts to do so, is shot and killed by German gunfire. Outraged by the incident, the boy’s grandfather rises from the trench, strips naked, and refuses to any longer serve this country as he picks up his lover’s body in an attempt to walk away with him from the battle site. One of their own soldiers shoots him, he falling to the ground with the body.

     Apparently he survived and was shipped back to New Zealand, where mentally and spiritually broken, he was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. He grew old with no one showing up to see him, his son, wife and relatives obviously embarrassed and disapproving of the rouge deserter and secret queer. The letters the boy reads were sent by his grandfather to his father, never to be opened, the boy himself reading the truth for the first time in all these years.

        Ings reveals these facts to us through recreated wartime images that play out in silence except for a musical accompaniment and sentences imposed upon the images—as in the earlier film—such as “They brought him home,” “broken,” “and “he died alone”—all of which provide narrative but force the reader to imaginatively fill in what the letters are revealing in far greater detail to the ten-year-old boy.

     At school we again see our young “queer” boy being taunted by his fellow-students, male and female, who throw things at him, calling him “wing boy” and other names. When two boys throw the sandwich he is trying to eat, his lunch box, and finally the boy himself to the ground, he stands, strips open his shirt and tells them: “Hit me. Come on hit me.” They back away. “Come on, just hit me.” They move away almost in fear, unable to comprehend his seemingly masochistic demands.

        In the last scene the boy visits the now empty psychiatric hospital, wandering its decaying rooms where images of the aging grandfather haunt him like death itself. Still, he moves from room to room almost as in search of the man he now feels has taught him how to be brave while the others have just pretended it. And he too, he must now realize, is alone in a world where most likely he will always be disparaged and attacked for his differences.

       He finds a small bird trapped in a room hugging a wall lined with leaves. He carefully picks up the sparrow, carries it to a window, and releases it into flight, just as his grandfather has done for him through the truth of his letters too long buried in that hidden box.

        Once again, Ings’ film is not about the complexity of narrative or even the depth of its ideas. Rather it is the emotive power of this director’s images that make his movie into something profoundly moving and disturbing. Even the wide-open, always-in-motion eyes of his young hero help us to realize his wonderment of the world around him despite the general brutality of those who inhabit it.

       I can’t wait to see the movie he is currently working on, Punch, in he takes his young hero Jim into adulthood.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).