by Douglas
Messerli
Mark O’Halloran
(screenplay), Peter Mackie Burns (director) Rialto / 2019
Metaphorically
speaking, Peter Mackie Burns tale of Dublin docks worker Colm (Tom
Vaughan-Lawlor) is one long dirge sung in the darkest of bass voices. The
excellent musical score by Valentin Hadjadj punctuates this with dissonant tone
clusters that alternate at moments with something similar to lyrical moans.
On top of this, his abusive father has father
has just died, and given Colm’s inability to communicate to his own son, Shane
(Scott Graham) he is terrified that we too will be perceived upon his death as force
more hated than loved. Raised in traditional Catholicism, Colm, despite is
father’s abuse—which even his mother confirms—also feels an intense guilt for
not having loved his father or being unable to serve him as a loyal and
committed offspring.
All Colm really has going for him is a
good relationship with his daughter Kerry (Sophie Jo Wasson) whose warmth a
friendliness only reiterates the iciness of Shane’s reactions to even the most
tentative of attempts his father makes to communicate with his disapproving
son.
His wife, Claire (a role beautifully
acted by Monica Dolan) deeply loves and cares for him, but even her worries for
his sudden return to alcohol and her internal suffering for his inability to return
that love adds to his sense of guilt. Indeed, as numerous critics have
observed, although Colm seldom speaks, many of his statements are simply
apologias, as if he were responsible somehow for most of the problems in his world.
Writing in Variety, Jessica Kang makes specific note of this seeming “tic.”
“The
diffident Dubliner Colm…apologizes a lot. When he bumps into someone. When
someone bumps into him. When he answers the phone or forgets a household task
or mishears his wife. All those little excuses are partly the accurate
observation of an authentically Irish verbal tic, as detailed in Mark
O’Halloran’s cleverly colloquial screenplay, based on his own stage play. But
there is also the sense that Colm’s frequent exhalations of apology are flak
cannon fire, sent up into the ether to disguise and distract from an enormous,
deeply repressed guilt that there’s no “sorry” large enough to cover. Rialto
pivots claustrophobically around a crisis moment that drives Colm to act on the
very desires he has perhaps been apologizing for all along.”
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In the midst of the dilemmas of his losses
of father, son, and job—or perhaps, in part, because of them—Colm’s mid-life
crisis is even more highly impacted by his sudden realization that he is
attracted to, one might almost say obsessed with, a local 19-year-old boy,
almost the age of his own son. He’s obviously been watching him for a long
while and has communicated with him on a message service for gay sex. The
meet-up at a shopping center near the docks, early on in the film, comes almost
as a shock for Colm, as the handsome kid, with bleached spike hair immediately shows
up and lures him into a bathroom stall where the elder immediately gets cold
feet while at the same time being irresistibly attracted to the boy. He
attempts to pull out of the situation, particularly when the boy demands
payment, but at the same time cannot resist telling him how long he’s been
observing him, and surprised at how young he is. It ends in a threat and Colm slugging,
with deep regret, his way out of the situation, while losing his wallet to the
boy in the maneuvers.
The boy, who soon turns up to his workplace
office, demands money €200 or he’ll tell his wife and boss. “Do you want me to
shame you? I can shame you”—as if there were any way to further shamed this
already guilt-ridden being.
The situation, both Jay’s aggression and
his underlying fragility further play into Colm’s own condition, particularly
when out of his own sense of guilt and failure who goes missing from his family
on all night drunks. And it isn’t long before he’s seeing Jay regularly.
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They first meet up in his car in a late-night
empty parking garage where Colm simply watches the boy masturbate. The act
might be represented as one of thousands of such elderly men’s abuse of young
boys across the world as they seek out a voyeuristic relationship that
generally goes no further than watching or mutual fellatio. In such situations neither
the male or the prostitute see themselves as actually being “gay” or
homosexual, but simply as needing some release or, in the kid’s case, money.
And in this case both Kolm and Jay are typical in claiming that neither of them
is homosexual.
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Like so many men, Colm obviously went
through much of his life on automatic. Himself a product of abuse he has apparently
slept-walked through his early years, following the traditional established
restrictions of work, marriage, and family life. They are roles played out by
millions by rote, carefully laid down by their parents from the earliest days
of childhood. Other emotional pushes and pulls, seldom permitted to bubble up
from within the cauldron of daily life, are easily ignored, scorned, dismissed.
Only with a series of crises do they push forward, demanding to spill out into
the world as truth.
Colm obviously wishes for a return to “normalcy.”
He arranges for his father’s “month’s mind” (the ritual of the Catholic church
that brings together survivors a month after the death of a loved one)—even inviting
his father’s secret mistress to the event—while attempting to mend some of his
relations with family members by trying to talk with his son (he’s immediately
rejected) and inviting his wife out for dinner so that they might “talk” (she’s
absolutely delighted).
His return home is met by a frantic wife
who no longer able to deal with the worry is on her way to live with her mother
until Colm can work things out. When his son Shane once again dismisses him, he
angrily declares how little his son knows him or perhaps even knows how or why
he should hate him, sharing with his son the fact that he is seeing a boy of
nearly the same age and enjoying being fucked by him. As one can imagine, only
further violence follows.
Escaping once more to the bed and board
with the boy he now perceives as a lover, he attempts to explain to Jay what he
means to him, offering to help pay for his expenses and suggesting that he
offers him the needed friendship in his time of great need.
Jay has no choice but to disillusion him,
to make it clear that there is no relationship between them and that their
meeting represent only business. Colm’s would-be love turns and leaves in which
will clearly be their last meeting.
Where can such a man go, a man still with the energy of middle-life
while living without love, without self-respect, in a household that either
doesn’t know how to help him or hates him for even
Yes, the critics are correct, Eric
Andrews of The Queer Review summarizing their frustrations:
“Rialto is
a punishing, dour exercise that probably could have used a bit of relief.” But
a dirge doesn’t permit that does it? If only his son could have been less
selfish, if his wife could have been wise enough to have stayed even while
suffering fear and pain, or if only Jay could have been a little smarter,
kinder, empathetic, himself less needy. Such fantasies, alas, don’t exist in
such working-class worlds.
Los Angeles, April
26, 2024
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).
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