Thursday, July 25, 2024

Wayne Kastenbaum | Intimacy / 2024

the reclining guest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wayne Kastenbaum (screenwriter and director) Intimacy / 2024 [3 minutes]

 

In Wayne Kastenbaum’s short film, the narrator attends with his camera to a friend (Maxwell Harvey-Sampson) with whom he has evidently been out on a long journey or some ordeal. The guest asks he might lay down on the bed, not feeling well.


     But his open-eyed stares at the narrator, the guest, also being a photographer, entices and excites the narrator who feels growing palpitations of his heart and apparently a growing fondness for the man on the bed, who doesn’t blink at his shared sexual feelings. The two have simply what he describes as a “unstoppered intimacy,” an intimacy composed of accidental glances, mind readings, and astro-lucunae, shared aspirations,” where in the end the guest slightly smiles.

     The short film moves clearly toward a sexual encounter without actually going there, simply expressing the felt relationship between the two men in a manner that might occur even between two straight men, although the statements in this case are certainly homoerotic and hint at a possible later relationship, since the narrator writes to him of what he feels, although the narrator reports that he later too became ill.

     Was it finally a rejection or simply an exhaustion from the excitement the narrator relates? No answer is provided.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2024


My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...