missing out on life
by Douglas Messerli
Nick Corporon, Johnny B. Dunn, and Gareth
Dutton (screenplay), Nick Corporon (director) Last Call / 2009 [17
minutes]
Having just made an appointment to meet up
with his ex-lover, and while driving to the location to meet him having run a
red light and caused a serious traffic accident, Gavin (Travis Dixon) shows up
at a bar, where a friendly bartender (Jody Jaress) inexplicably knows his
lover’s name, Mark. Terrified, Gavin attempts to leave only to find himself
re-visiting the bar through another door. We have entered the “twilight zone.”
“Now, how ‘bout that drink?” the bartender calls out.
All
Gavin wants to know is how to get out of there, but the bartender serves up
three shot glasses, explaining, “For the longest time you’ve used drinking to
forget. Tonight you’re going to use it to remember.”
By the second drink, it’s clear that he and Mark have serious problems.
Gavin returns home with alcohol on his breath the night before the couple, now
obviously married, is planning to go for an interview about adopting a child.
Even Gavin has second thoughts about the possibility of an alcoholic and a
“kid” who sits around playing a guitar all day of being responsible parents.
And surely no sane adoption agency would permit such a child to enter such a
house—but that is not an issue which with this short film concerns itself.
Gavin leaves the house again, declaring
that drinking is what he’s best at, while Mark tears up, realizing the
hopelessness of their situation.
Indeed, so we soon discover, Gavin left the relationship that day for
almost one and a half years, only to make the appointment to see Mark again,
finally admitting to the bartender that in the accident he died. “For a
moment,” Gavin declares, “I had it back, but fate had something else in mind.”
She pours him out something else instead, which he drinks, discovering himself back in the car as in the first frames of the movie, on his way to possibly make it up with Mark.
As he approaches the meeting place, however, he discovers Mark with a
child, a little girl calling him Daddy, and soon after, another man entering to
pick up the child to take her away as Mark plans his visit, he tells the child,
with “an old friend.”
Mark has clearly gone on to make a new life with another partner. And
now Gavin has no choice but to turn away, realizing his mistakes were
irredeemable.
Back at the bar, he realizes that Mark had no other choice, despite
their love. And when that realization comes, as the bartender puts it, “you
just have to let go.”
Gavin does so, opening another door into a kind of heaven, only to
discover he’s been given the chance to start all over again, as he meets up
with Mark for the first time.
This is a professionally filmed student work, with excellent acting.
It’s just too bad that its script is so centered upon a basically Christian
presentation of a moral conte, taking it into the science fiction
framework that I hinted at in my first paragraph. Perhaps centering the work on
the actual relationship and developing the characters and situation in which
they discover themselves instead of focusing on the hokey “after life”
perspective, might have enriched the plot to give it the dark beauty of this
film’s visual elements.
Los Angeles, June 19, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2023).