by Douglas Messerli
Fabio Youniss (screenwriter and director) A
Stable for Disabled Horses / 2012 [13 minutes]
This British short film by Fabio Youniss could be a
hilarious surrealist skit if it weren’t also so very sad.
Benny
(Daniel Swan) has invited his newfound friend Kanoute (Daniel Simonsen) over
for a late evening party since the next morning Kanoute is leaving London,
returning to the pig farm which his father has been working alone since his
departure. There’s a strong sense of guilt about his having remained in London,
and yet it’s clear he’s not entirely excited about returning home.
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It’s also clear that he’s not exactly found
a large group of new friends in London, given that, apparently, his “best”
friend is Benny. Both of them seem like slightly mentally disturbed boy-men who
have a difficult assimilating into the general society.
Kanoute is a kind of country bumpkin and the half unshaven Benny is
possessed of an embarrassingly horsey laugh that might startle even a fearless
British horsewoman such as the former Princess Margaret.
Benny’s
father, in fact, worked at a race track, his job being to “put down” (read
shoot) all the lame horses. Benny’s own dream is to leave the city and work at
a stable for disabled horses, obviously a psychological response revealing his
hate of his father, but also hinting perhaps of how he sees himself. One arguably
could describe that both of these uncomfortable men as similar to “disabled or
lame horses,” unfit for the activities of the metaphoric race track of life.
Benny
even remarks about how his colleagues mock him, and not always behind his back.
He names several of the almost meaningless phrases, odd-sounding even to most
of us who speak English—“iron hoof,” “chutney ferret,” “curly flies,” “poo pirate”—to
which Kanoute responds with an even more absurd Norwegian phrase meaning, “Don’t
worry, it could be worse, your father might have been Swedish,” which to me
sounds very much like Norwegian humor.
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The clumsy attempts of Benny to literally “drop beads,” or make evident his sexuality, is to leave out a small iron workout bar on his coffee table along with a chic physique magazine, to gift his friend with a T-shirt with images of the two of them on it suggesting that they are Best Friends Forever, and, later, to clumsily attempt to seduce his friend with a long dance, while simultaneously relating a truly sad story of how as a child he used to dance endlessly around the house until his father caught him, demanding he stop it immediately, insisting he dig a huge ditch to work out any such possible desires or tendencies to be a dancer.
But
Benny is mostly determined to simply get both of them drunk, and when he feels
he’s finally almost achieved the right effect begins a slow move toward Kanoute
which understandably terrorizes the young man. Kanoute stands, ready to leave
as Benny argues that he is sure there something between them, demanding that Kanoute
admit it. He runs and locks the front door in order to hold Kanoute hostage
until he admits it.
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It appears
that there may be some shared emotions or even desires between these two
unhappy men with fathers they do not love after all.
Los Angeles, October 11, 2023
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2023).
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