Venci Kostov | El hijo (The Son) / 2012

no resolve

by Douglas Messerli

 

Enrique De Tomás and Venci Kostov (screenplay), Venci Kostov (director) El hijo (The Son) / 2012 [22 minutes]

 

If the relationship between father and son in Ben McCormack’s Family Outing seems impossibly complex by film’s end, in Venci Kostov’s film from Spain it is so perverse that it becomes even difficult to entirely explain.

         17-year-old Pedro (Ignacio Montes), according to his loving mother Pilar (Fanny de Castro), is the perfect son who gets good grades in school and loves her stewed lentils, which she prepares for him most evenings even though husband detests them. Her Pedro is obedient and loving.

     We happen to know that just before she utters these sentiments on the phone, he has been thrown out of a class, and storms out before the teacher can actually force him to leave. While she is saying these very words he is in the nearby bedroom fucking one of his fellow students, Luis (Mateo Rubistein), with whom he pretends to study each afternoon. After he fucks Luis, he pushes him up against the wall, slapping him hard for having looked at him in the classroom and possibly hinting where he lives.

     That evening the perfect son joins a group of urban terrorists who go about town breaking into and trashing local businesses. We observe him and his gang through a surveillance camera in the back of the shop. Soon after we see his or another group associated with it driving through a gay car stop in a park—common in urban centers in Spain and South America—name-calling and mocking various groups of gay men, some engaged in sex, others just waiting to be picked up or cruising the place. Eventually they jump upon an auto in which two men are engaged in sex, bashing in the front windows, and pulling the men out of the car and fucking one of them.

      In the midst of the melee, we see Pedro threatening the gang members and pulling the man away from their arms, helping the man into the car before driving off with him. The man is Paco (Pedro Casablanc), Pedro’s father who works to break up the violent gangs—the reason, so he tells Pilar, he is out late so many nights.

      They arrive home together, Paco making up some story as Pilar serves him up a bowl of her lentils. Paco sits at the table in anger, finally demanding the boy tell his mother what he was really doing that day, the boy responding, “Why don’t you tell her where you were?” Paco slaps the boy, reporting that they have the surveillance evidence to prove he was one of the group who trashed the small Chinese-run business which we observed being destroyed. Obviously the “terrorists” with whom the perfect son is involved are homophobic, xenophobic thugs.

      Basically ignoring his comments, Pilar tells the boy to take a shower, glowering at her husband for his comments as the boy retreats to the bathroom.

      As he showers, however, we observe the father entering the bathroom and watching the son for a long while before he pulls open the curtain, thanking the boy and reaching out his hand to caress him, Pedro pushing the hand away as he has done formerly at the table. “Get out,” he demands. “Is that what you want?” asks Paco, as if there might have been another reality.       

      The question suggests that Paco has perhaps been abusing his son, and that the son’s seemingly contradictory behavior, both his desire for gay sex with his fellow student Luis and his retaliation against his father by trashing the shops of immigrants and stalking gay men are related. Both father and son are gay, but Pedro clearly resents what he may believe has “made him” a homosexual. We cannot be certain, but we are led to suspect that the contrary forces at work in the boy’s life, the perfect son who is equally the evil punk, are connected to his father and his relationship with him.

       At school, despite Pedro’s stipulation, Luis approaches him insisting that he can no longer remain with his parents and suggests they both run away together. Pedro pushes him off, reminding him of his demand to never be seen with him at school, but this time Luis pushes back telling him that he’s simply a coward.

       If Pedro’s tense relationship with his father and his wild, unpredictable behavior sounds somewhat familiar, the film hints at a similar pattern as the English teacher at the school speaks of Rimbaud, hinting of difficulties in the boy’s relationships—obviously having to do with another older man playing the role of father, in love with a young boy, Verlaine. In the same class other “friends” of Pedro can be seen passing notes to one another with Nazi symbols. And together they confront the boy they now mock as “Peter” (he who denied Christ) outside the school building, perhaps for his behavior the previous evening, suggesting that he join them again that evening  “looking for baits in the park.”

     He refuses the boys as tensely gather round him, breaking away only as a teacher approaches. A moment later Pedro jumps on his motorcycle, joined by Luis and drives off. It is clear now that everything about his life has now been revealed to his former “mates.”

     If nothing else, the film has not loaded up yet another set of contradictions, of oppositional forces which seem nearly impossible to resolve. The boys, Pedro and Luis speed away, followed by a car filled with the gang toughs. When they reach Luis’ home, he insists that they will both leave that night, Pedro appearing to agree.

     During this same interchange we see Pilar cleaning house, reaching into a high cabinet to bring down hidden clothing, apparently to wash. From one folded denim shirt a VHS tape falls out. She sits and watches it, the tape apparently showing scenes from their wedding—that is until it cuts to a scene from a gay male porno tape. She attempts to move it ahead upon which for a moment it returns to the church, but then quickly shifts again to the porno scene.

      Luis kisses Pedro, the boys committing to meeting up that night, as he drives off to his own home, the car full of thugs still apparently following.

      At this point Kostov’s movie makes a seemingly radical shift to a car in which Pilar and her husband are traveling, she explaining to him that Pedro has been working so hard at school, but that there have been some weird things....”I think Perdito likes to see naked boys. Like that skinny friend of his.” 

      For a moment the film flashes back to Pedro in the garage caring momentarily for his motorbike before returning us to the car with Pilar and Paco, he driving into the park, explaining to his wife about how the night when he came home bloody that he had been in this park. She’s frightened, reaching for the car door handle as if at any moment she might run. As they drive slowly past shirtless men, he tells her that “it wasn’t the first time,” Pilar beginning to cry.

     Kostov cuts back to the garage where we see the gang get out of their car, clubs in hand. They grab him around the neck dragging him and hitting him, pausing before they finally club him, the boy falling to the concrete before they race away in their car.

       Back in Paco and Pilar’s auto she suddenly begins to hit him demanding why he has taken her there, why he has told her all these things, asking “Haven’t I been a good wife?” and pounding him again and again as she declares her life to be over.

       When they arrive back at the garage to their apartment they immediately discern Pedro’s body on the floor and run to it, Paco holding his son somewhat as in a pietà while Pilar cries out in despair with the realization that her good son is dead.

        Almost as an addendum we observe Pilar again at the table sorting and cleaning beans for her lentil stew—whose ingredients Pedro’s voice has been listing in a voiceover at several points throughout the film—as Paco tells her he is leaving. She tells him to put on a heavy coat, that’s it cold. He explains that he is leaving for good. She replies, “Don’t be too late. I’m making lentil stew, and Pedro doesn’t like them cold. ...He spends all day studying in his room. The poor thing works so hard. ...Then we eat stewed lentils...we sit on the sofa...and we watch TV as usual.” We hear only Paco’s voice, “goodbye.”

       Of all the family films I include in this selection, Kostov’s The Son and another Spanish director Miguel Lafuente’s Mi Hermano (My Brother), which I discuss below, are the most unforgiving of failed and forbidden familial relationships. In both works, as I suggest above, there is no possible resolve, no forgiveness for the sins of loving what both family and society has deemed the wrong people.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

 

Caru Alves de Souz | Assunto de Familia (Family Affair) / 2011

an “affair” to remember

by Douglas Messerli

 

Caru Alves de Souz (screenwriter and director) Assunto de Familia (Family Affair) / 2011 [12 minutes]

 

The family members of Brazilian director Caru Alves de Souz’s Family Affair may all live closely under the single roof of their apartment, but they can hardly be described as a functional family or in any way happy as individuals trapped by the coincidence of blood kinship.

     The mother, Eunice (Cláudia Assunção), spends long hours staring out the open window onto the street below evidently watching the activities of her neighbors such as we glimpse in a neighborhood barbecue. Her husband, like thousands of others around the world, spends his free hours staring at sports in the television, demanding his wife bring him sandwiches and beer.

      Their eldest son, Cauã (Thiago Franco Balieiro) treats his younger brother Rossi (Kauê Telloli) as simply a household object to kick and keep away from as much as possible, while demanding his mother cook and serve for him in a manner more abusive than even her husband.   

  The two of them, mother and younger son, have almost a pact. The minute the game is over, the elder son and the father leaving the house for other activities, they switch on another station, probably a movie channel or a soap opera. She gladly serves sandwiches to Rossi, who thanks her for them, while begrudgingly serving up the missed supper she has saved on the back of the stove for Cauã.

      Pulling away a bottle of wine which Cauã has purloined from the back of a cupboard, she retreats to the storage hall to smoke, evidently forbidden, as her older boy reminds her, by her husband. The minute Cauã returns from his outing with friends, she retreats to her bedroom for a “nap,” in actuality, staring at the lost beauty of her face in a mirror and obviously regretting all the years she has served as a virtual slave to family life.

     Like his mother, Rossi also spends long hours staring out the window, seemingly having no friends and certainly not being allowed opportunities to make his own acquaintances. He and Eunice seem trapped in a world controlled by the macho patriarchs who themselves lead empty lives.

      The two friends Cauã returns with serve little more than buddies who share liquor and random comments on the soccer game and women. They might as well be looking out the window, even if their world is defined more by the television and the street itself.

      One of Cauã’s friends, however, seems somewhat more open to allowing Rossi into their presence. Seeing him peeking through the kitchen door, Cauã tells his brother to get lost, but the friend suggests he just wants a glass of water and demands he be let in. Once there, Rossi attempts to grab a glass of the whiskey they’re sharing, which his brother insists he leave alone. But the friends suggest he let the boy try it, which he does, somewhat reluctantly and not with great pleasure, while Cauã, treating it like a challenge as he does nearly everything, forces him to drink the whole thing, taunting him for wincing in dislike of the sweet bitterness. Again Cauã orders him out of their presence, chastising his friend for even talking to him.

     A short while later, the friend appears to have left the kitchen, encountering Rossi in the hall and asking him where he might find a cigarette. The boy takes him to the service room where the mother hides them, and offers him a smoke and a light. Once more, he offers the boy a new experience, a puff of his cigarette. And again, Rossi coughs and finds the experience unpleasant, the friend rubbing the boy’s chest a little as he asks if it burns.

     Cauã’s friend suggests he try once again, this time inhaling. The boy asks, “What’s the secret?” the friend responding, “You only have to breathe in. Like in a straw.” Rossi does so, coughing even more. The other boy laughs, moving directly in front of him to blow smoke in his face, a second later pulling his head toward him for a deep kiss which Rossi returns with a passionate force he has evidently been saving up for all these long years, the two engaging in what is clearly Rossi’s first kiss ever for a rather long few moments on screen.

    Finally, breaking away Rossi turns away with a huge grin on his face, hardly believing his fortune in having experienced such a sensuously enjoyable moment. This new sensation, unlike the drink and cigarette, is clearly something he totally enjoys.

     In the film’s last scenes Cauã and his friends are seen strutting down the street, shouting out about the soccer win for São Paulo, one neighbor throwing a flip-flop from an above window that hits his face. Swearing at the assailant, Cauã and his buddies continue their celebrational stroll, staring back to watch a woman who has just passed them.    

     But Rossi, back in the house, we now know has a secret that has changed everything for him, something that he can never share with his elder brother, but offers him a new sense of power in the fact that he has now been loved by one of his macho brother’s buddies. LGBTQ liberation begins always in such small ways, but has such huge ramifications. Certainly, we can suppose, Rossi will never again feel tortured by his brother’s constant dismissals of his very existence.

     As Alves de Souz demonstrates once more in her taut cinematic work, is just how heteronormative patriarchal attitudes negatively affect not only women but LGBTQ individuals as well. That both Eunice and Rossi remain so strong despite those forces is a testament to their own personalities and intellect.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021)

Marcus Schwenzel | Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love) / 2009

checking out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcus Schwenzel (screenwriter and director) Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love) / 2009 [16.35 minutes]

 

German film director Marcus Schwenzel’s, a beautifully filmed work of melancholia with cinematography by Eduardo Ramierz Gonzalez, is oddly described by the few online sites that even mention this 2009 masterwork as a story of “two brothers with different intentions.” However, I’m not sure what “intentions” either of them might have had or how those intentions were different from one another. Someone obviously was confused about or is purposely attempting to confuse a rather straightforward, if very sad tale, of two gay brothers who fell in love and, to the “utter shock” of their community, were found having sex with one another.

     It begins with the still extremely handsome elder brother, Peter (Thorsten Feller), arriving in his former hometown, having been just released from prison. The voiceover tells us that the only person he ever loved was his brother Ben.

       He checks into a local hotel, almost immediately and quite without intention seducing the hotel clerk, Raoul (Levi Meaden) who reports that since it’s off season he doesn’t have many customers and he’s bored. He gets off, so he tells the new man he’s registering, in an hour.

     But even before he relieves some of his tension with the sexual interlude with Raoul, Peter has visions of his brother Ben (Anthony Gorin) presumably killing himself since the voice over—which helps to tell this story, along with the clippings Peter carries with him, later discovered by Raoul, tell the story as opposed to narrative dialogue—observes “I could not protect you.” So in a sense, we already have most of the story. What remains are simply further details, an expression of Peter’s guilt, and ruminations of what couldn’t perhaps have ended any differently given the absurd restrictions of most societies throughout the world. Brotherly love of the kind that this tale tells is forbidden.

      Wandering around the village in the cold of winter, drinking directly from a large bottle of wine, Peter recalls the joyful times between him and his brother, a run in the park, pausing in the park gazebo for a brief loving interlude.     

     Soon after the two of them check into the local gym where they undress together with intention of sharing their pleasure in one another’s bodies without knowing that they are being tracked and followed by a group of local boys, whose fingers we see pulling themselves up for a view of what is happening in the cubicle.

       Peter revisits the gym where the event happened, describing another kind of truth to his brother: “You are not dead, and I am not alive,” Ben being still completely alive in Peter’s memory, but Peter himself walking around like a dead man with no will and no meaning left in his life.

 

    Returning the next evening to Peter’s hotel room for sex, Raoul finds his new friend still out and reads articles from his notebook whose headlines scream out that the then 18-year-old was sent for three years to prison for brother love: “Bruderliebe! 3 Jahre Haft fuer 18 Jachringen.” Another headline reads “Jüngerer Bruder begeht Selbstmord nach Verurteilung im Incest – Skandal!” (Younger brother kills himself following incest sex – Scandal!).

      Peter, meanwhile, after the gym has closed, goes for either an endlessly long swim in their Olympic size pool, his body to be discovered the next morning; or eventually comes up for air, released, for a while, of his guilt and never-ending pain. I’d like to imagine the latter since I see myself as an optimist; but given the torture our society has put this man through I can only presume he chooses to entirely forget, to become the dead man he describes himself as.

    How can such true love of a brother be so terribly punished by a society that pretends to espouse love as its major moral value? One need only to live long enough to know love is very seldom chosen over fear and hate. In the end, these boys had no familial secrets except that they did truly love one another, the younger in no way being forced into sharing what he felt. The “different intentions” attributed in the several entries about this film, I presume, were someone’s attempt to suggest that younger brother Ben was somehow not totally aware about what was happening between the two of them. But the film does not in any way suggest that.

      This film was produced by the Prague Film School.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (2021).

 

J. C. Oliva | Brotherly / 2008

brothers needing love

by Douglas Messerli 

 

Joe Brouillette (screenplay), J. C. Oliva (director) Brotherly / 2008 [11 minutes]

 

The short film Brotherly. directed by J. C. Oliva in 2008 is more of a confession to a tape recorder than a narrative, although it tells slight slivers of a fragmented story as well.

     Two brothers, Paul (Malcolm McRae) and Michael (Mathis Fender), growing up in the 1970s, are the sons of an alcoholic mother and father, who mostly leave them alone after hours of consuming drinks, and often, so we glean from Paulie’s nightmares, growing violent as well.

   One night Paulie wakes up screaming, obviously terrified of his dreams and having, at 10 years of age, just wet the bed. His brother Mickey, in high school, comes to care for him, helping him out of his wet clothes and accommodating the younger boy’s request to sleep that night in his bed.

      Unable to sleep, Paulie talks to his brother, asking him to promise that he will “never ever leave him.” His brother’s response, turning and hugging him in his arms, not only provides comfort but, as the grown man telling this tale observes (the older Paul, Kevin Fabian) for one of the first times in his life he felt “warm and safe,” “my best memory,” he summarizes.

       Their simple efforts to comfort one another soon lead to the 10-year-old’s need to sleep in the arms of his brother. And “We started to mess around, sexually,” he confesses.

       This lasted apparently until Michael went away to college two years later. Paul’s feelings of complete abandonment are poignant. “In my head I thought we were married like my mother and father. That he would take me with him...I guess...to be his wife.”

        Eventually Michael is married, and the two boys have never since talked about it. Michael’s wife, Nora, doesn’t know. And “you” he concludes, “are the only one I’ve ever told about it”—presumably meaning his audience, since the film ends with him sitting behind an empty desk clicking off this tape recorder.

        In that sense we have all been priests and are somehow being asked, presumably, to forgive him and his brother for whatever sins he might have imagined he has committed.

       In most cultures incest is taboo and illegal, some countries punishing it with heavy sentences of imprisonment and even death. In the US, strangely enough, it varies from state to state, but in most states it is illegal for parental-child relationships (defined also as child abuse) and siblings who are male and female, without including male/male sibling relationships.

       Most of the taboos and laws were created because of the high amount of shared DNA that occurs in familial relationships which, if children are produced, often results in a smaller gene base that accentuates negative family traits that might cause diseases and delimit mental capacities.

       Frankly, to my way of thinking, it makes utterly no sense to perceive sexual intercourse between two young brothers, if it has been consensual and not forced, as a crime; but obviously it always can be argued that the elder has an inappropriate influence upon the younger. And it remains a serious taboo also because of the continued cultural attitudes toward homosexual sex.

       My instincts in this case would be to simply say that there is utterly no need for "our” or even a priest’s forgiveness, unless it helps in healing some sense of guilt the participant(s) still harbor. Yet even the presumption of this film which begins in hushed tones, a seemingly secret meeting place (presumably made with the narrator with himself or with some other individual who might later receive his recording) and the confessional like attitude of the major player, the grown Paul, all reifies the notion of taboo and the presumption that two behaved in a terrible manner outside the norms. If this was not the case, surely Paul might have told acquaintances, even if he had ever discussed it with his brother or Michael’s wife. In short, the whole tone of this 11-minute work is one of hushed shame.

        I would gather that such incestuous relationships happen much more often between male/male and female/female siblings that we might ever imagine, perhaps even more often than sibling heterosexual sex. Certainly, we know that parental abuse toward children of both sexes is far too common, as is sexual contact between children and their uncles and aunts. Sociologist-friend Miriam Olson once mentioned to me that it does appear to be statistically true that uncles represent the largest proportion of male-on-male child abusers. I should check to see what Dr. Kinsey had to say on these subjects.

        The abstract of a study published on the website of The National Library of Medicine by D. Finkelhor reads:

 

“In a survey of 796 undergraduates at six New England colleges and universities, 15% of the females and 10% of the males reported some type of sexual experience involving a sibling. Fondling and touching of the genitals were the most common activities in all age categories. One-fourth of the experiences could be described as exploitative either because force was used or because there was a large age disparity between the partners. Reactions to the experiences were equally divided among those who considered them positive and those who considered them negative. Females were more likely than males to have been exploited and feel badly about it. Few participants of either sex ever told anyone. The research finds evidence that such experience may have long-term effects on sexual development. Females who report sibling sexual experiences, both positive and negative, have substantially higher levels of current sexual activity. Their level of sexual self-esteem may also have been affected, but more selectively. Those with positive sibling experiences after age 9 have more sexual self-esteem. However, experiences with much older siblings taking place before age 9 are associated with generally lower levels of self-esteem and no increase in current sexual activity.”

 

     A 1991 study in The New York Times reported that 52 percent of identical brothers were gay men and that there was a with 22 percent of gayness between fraternal twins, and 11 percent of genetically unrelated brothers, which not only asserts that male twins are more prone to both be gay (which is only logical they share 100% of DNA), while also suggesting that homosexuality is in-born rather than occasioned by psychological and social conditions.

      However, another study headed by Tuck Ngun, a researcher at the Daivd Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles found that in a comparison of 47 pairs of twins, in 37 pairs one brother was homosexual and the other wasn’t. In 10% pairs both brothers were gay.

      Of course, this is not immediately relative to any discussion of incestual love, but the gay community through their expressions (even if they are simply fantasies) in film and literature have long asserted that twins who are gay often have sex with one another. I can find no medical study that either denies or confirms this.

      What might have interesting in regard to the film above would be to explore Paul’s adult sexuality. Is he a gay man? Is he happy in his sexual relationships? Has he been able to resolve his painful youthful loss of the only one who appeared to truly love him? I do wish Oliva and his writer Joe Brouillette might have taken his narrative further since this was presumably based on a real-life situation between two Ohio boys in the 1970s.

 

Los Angeles, January 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2021).

Gregor Schmidinger | The Boy Next Door / 2008

forbidden domain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregor Schmidinger (screenwriter and director) The Boy Next Door / 2008 [13.59 minutes]

 

A businessman, Mr. Brown (Damon Preston) on the road, sitting in his motel room is watching TV, interreacting to what appears to be a talk show interview, furious at the actor’s statements since, apparently, he is her agent. He seems nervous, ready to pounce, monstrous in his anger and obvious frustrations. What we soon also discover is that he has been waiting for his favorite male prostitute, a beautiful young man, Mark (Michael Ellison) who knocks on the door and receives a kiss and a kind of quick down payment in a wad of bills upon arrival

     A moment later, however, Mr. Brown receives a phone call, an emergency having occurred regarding one of his clients. He tells his trick to make himself at home, that he’ll be back in a short while, and leaves.

     Mark is also wound up, evidently in need of more pills to calm his anxiety, but as we have heard in his hallway phone call, the pills are expensive—perhaps the very reason why he has sold his body to the visiting agent. Clearly he is uncomfortable, if not inexperienced, with the whole thing. He takes off his shirt, finally his pants, and sits on the bed to wait.

    But something unexpected happens. A preteen boy, Justin (Truman Chambers) has just entered the room wondering where his father is. When asked why he is there, the stranger answers, oddly given the fact that he is dressed only in his briefs, “I have a business meeting with your daddy.”

     Mark suggests he go back to bed, but the boy insists he can’t. There’s a monster under his bed. There are no such things as monsters, answers the slightly irritated and now even more nervous call-boy. “That’s what my daddy says,” Justin responds, “but there are monsters.” “And why are you naked?”

     The question says everything, suggesting both the absurdity of the situation and the potential danger both the boy and the man face in their contact with one another.

     But if it hasn’t already struck us, we can only now be fairly shocked by the fact that the agent has gone away on business without even checking in on his son in the next room or even bothered to find someone, in his absence, to look after him.

      “Monsters exist, really,” the child again insists.

    And even the half-naked Mark has to agree, “Maybe you’re right.” Clearly there is something monstrous about a man leaving his child alone without protection.

      Inevitably, the job now falls upon the visitor as he puts back on his t-shirt and suggests the boy might want to play a video game with him, Justin immediately ready for challenge, jumping into the bed with anticipation of an adult actually paying attention to him.

      They quickly graduate to more imaginative bed-bound games, one frame showing their heads rising from behind a pile of pillows like indians or perhaps western cowboys shooting the intruders dead.

      Soon we see them both asleep on different sides of the bed, but when the boy whimpers out of fear in his sleep, the elder slips his arm around the boy’s small body.

     At this very moment the father returns, somewhat startled by what he observes. Yet, his anger is not aimed at his boyfriend but at his son, of whom he speaks almost always in the third person, using in an odd locution: “He knows exactly he’s not supposed to be in here.” Why, we can only wonder, does the boy know “exactly” or even “precisely” except if speaking is stressing the fact of the degree of his “knowing,” hinting, it seems to me, that the child has been previously punished for having entered the forbidden domain—and almost making it quite apparent that the kid is locked up in his motel room with nowhere else to go for the days and nights of their visit. The father summarily dismisses the child, turning to his lover to chide him, “I don’t pay you to be my son’s friend. I pay you to be mine.”

   As the father moves into a deep kiss with his paid lover, the younger man at first accepts the introductory sex move as inevitable, the boy watching through the open door.

    Suddenly, the prostitute pushes his john away, the man astounded by the action, demanding what right he thinks he has for his behavior. Our young “hero” throws the money he received upon the bureau and leaves, pausing outside the door in breathless amazement and some terror for his behavior.

      The child joins him in the hall, standing near to the anxiety-stricken young man who slides down to sit on the floor for a moment in contemplation.

     The child moves closer, holding out something to him: “I’ve got 25 dollars. You wanna be my friend?”

       The action is shocking because we now know the boy has learned that to find love or even someone just to pay attention to you, it has to be purchased.

        But the suddenly wiser Mark resolves the situation by saying, “I’m already your friend.”

        Like the young boy in George Stevens’ Shane the boy cries out, “Please don’t go.”

        The man stands, bending down to the child and hugs him, “You already killed a monster tonight. You know how to do it.”

        The ending lines are a bit disingenuous since it is he who has killed the monster by tossing away his dependencies on both pills and prostitution. But the child has only learned it by reaching out to another human being, something which we doubt he will have the opportunity to do again in the near future. Or, perhaps, he may reach out to someone less pure in his response.

        What is clear is that the secrets the father has been attempting to keep, that he has a son in the next room and that he is meeting up with young males to find love have been exposed. How he will react in the future given the knowledge that such lies no longer will protect him from the consequences is unknowable. When we last see him alone in his room he seems troubled, but that also appears to be his natural condition. Whether or not he will openly embrace his responsibilities as a father and accept truth of his empty sexual life is something we can only ponder.

         This excellent short film was produced by the Bowling Green State University, presumably in conjunction with their film program, representing once again just how important university and college based film programs have become to LGBTQ cinema and to the development of young gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender filmmakers. This is certainly one of the most compelling short dramas of 2008.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).