by Douglas Messerli
Dennis Alink and Thomas van der Gronde
(screenplay), Dennis Alink (director) Out / 2024
The word “out” doesn’t quite have the same meaning
in the context in which Dutch Dennis Alink’s feature 2024 film places it as it
does in the hundreds of “coming out” movies over the years. Both Tom (Bas
Keizer) and Ajani (Jefferson Yaw Frempong-Manson) are sexually “out” in their
small conservative Dutch village, although feeling the same isolation and
repression of many closeted youths. Both have been long making home movies and
wish to attend film school in Amsterdam, which would not only allow them to
artistically express themselves but to escape into a world in which they might
live more sexually in the open.
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As this feature begins, Ajani has been
accepted and Tom awaits a letter, which when it finally arrives tells him that
he too has been awarded the coveted entry to the film program, met with mutual
joy. But if their new lives in the liberated world of the capitol city begins
with pleasurable games such as “Never Have I Ever,” wild limo rides, and
bathhouse visits, it quickly turns into a darker experience.
Ajani
almost immediately assimilates, joining in on the nights of drugs and
increasingly dangerous visits to a world of wild gay nightclubs with classmates,
while the wide-eyed Tom is determined to make it good. Yet none of his
colleagues, as Tom explains to the school administrators who confront him about
is unwillingness to work with others—so very necessary in filmmaking—even know
about his cinematic mentors such as Ingmar Bergman. All they seem to talk about
is the newest Richard Linklater movie, he complains. In short, Tom is seemingly
engaged in what his peers perceive as a kind of time-warp, alienating him in a
manner somewhat reminiscent of the small-town narrow-mindedness he has left
behind.
As his lover
moves deeper and deeper into what we eventually perceive is a dark S&M
world, Tom continues his positive and seemingly naïve behavior. While Ajani is
invited to move into an apartment in the center of the city, Tom is left to the
meaner outer quarters. And finally, his school advisors dismiss him as an
outsider. “You are not connecting,” they insist, without questioning what or
who they truly want him to connect to and with.
Alink’s black-and-white film captures both the sensuous wonderment of Tom’s more
archaic vision of filmmaking and Ajani’s movement into the darker aspects of Amsterdam
gay life.
Recovering,
Tom recognizes that the world into which his former lover has moved is not one
in which he might easily survive. Tom takes a quick side-trip to Berlin to
actually shoot a film, while presumably Ajani moves even deeper into the wild
scene in which he has embraced.
Tom
eventually gains some attention for the film that results from the German trip,
where he has finally had to learn about how to work with a photographer. But at
film’s end, he has returned to his former community, as Alink’s work morphs
into a muted color film where Tom, now visited by Ajani and some of his
friends, seems to have found fulfillment working on his films, while Ajani appears
to still be searching for the career and vision he has never fully embraced.
Alink
doesn’t moralize, and doesn’t diminish the sexual freedom that Ajani has
uncovered, but it is clear Tom has more fully come to terms with who he truly
is and has embraced his own vision of the world, even if he might appear superficially
far less adventuresome. Being fully “out” obviously means different things to
those who come to terms with themselves.
Los Angeles, October 22, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).
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