Lily Dommart | Before You Go / 2019

the open hatred of gay desire

 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Burbs L Burberry (screenplay), Lily Dommart (director) Before You Go / 2019 [13 minutes]

This film, which takes place evidently on the Isle of Man in 1972, begins with Eddie (Joshua Moore) bicycling up to his friend Jack (Liam Rice) to express a notion that repeats throughout the film: “Ready whenever you are.”

     What apparently Jack is not ready for is the imagined kiss that Eddie places on his lips. Jack is heading off to become a fisherman, in all inevitability leaving his friend behind forever as he heads off to the difficult work of sudden indentured adulthood. He doesn’t at all want to be a fisherman like his father, which requires him to move to an entirely other world, on a new island.

    As Eddie asks his friend, “What do you want?” they come together in a deep kiss; but obviously given the repeat of the same scene, that is not what actually happens in the reality of their world. Jack can only reply, “I don’t know.”

     But Eddie tries to push their love just a little closer to real-life experience, noting that he will miss his friend, and “You don’t realize about how much you love something until you are about to leave,” that something clearly including one another.

     Eddie insists that he is not going to forgot his friend, but both know that Jack’s dramatization of the event is serious. Eddie insists, however, that he now needs to go to Paul’s (Jeremy Theobald) to return some books.

     Paul, evidently a former teacher of the two, has loaned out a copy of Orwell, which the intelligent Eddie is not entirely pleased with, not being a fan of dystopias, he claims, while Paul thinks it a semi-realistic viewpoint from the view of 1948. We are obviously talking about his 1949 fiction, 1984, which concerns Orwell’s fears of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of individuals within their societies, a book we might well imagine as significant in 2019, if not the 1972 date of this movie.

     Of course, Eddie’s right in his complaints that even the conception of a state having that much control over what we like, how we think, and what we feel, is unappealing. But what he doesn’t comprehend is that he, himself, is a product of just such an estate. But he is convinced that the government isn’t out to get him.

     Eddie asks Paul what he most remembers about university, Cambridge, to which their former teacher replies: “The people I guess. They were some of the best people I’ve ever met.” He made friends there, although of course no longer sees them. Cambridge was the home of homosexual relationships during the period in which Paul must have attended, the world of spies recruited from the intense relationship between friends. Nothing of this is spoken about in Dommart’s movie, but it’s there nonetheless, just as is the invisible relationship between the would-be lovers Eddie and his friend Jack who is about to be thrown from the intellectual towers into a work-a-day world. 

     This film, as much as it is about homosexual relationships, is also about the British class system, which in 1972 these young men still had to face, a world not that much different, in fact, from E. M. Forester’s Maurice or Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The Manx boy Eddie is facing just the forces that separated school chums from both Oxford and Cambridge in those now cinematically rendered tales.

      Paul admits that there was someone at school which changed his life, and whom he has loved very much, but hasn’t spoken to for years.

      “Why?” asks Eddie.

      “Because that was the way of things back then,” Paul expresses his cowardice. He never jeopardized their friendship.

      “You could have had that time together,” Eddie insists, while Paul, still the coward, expresses his excuse, “He wouldn’t have wanted me.” Paul suggests that Eddie might benefit from reading some Isherwood, and hands him a book to bring back at Christmas.

 

      But if you might think Eddie, the intelligent student would support his obviously gay mentor, you would be mistaken, and, in fact, we have been wrong in our perceptions all along. It is Jack who argues that Paul has certainly never told anyone else about his sexual desires, and that besides what might they do? Eddie, on the other hand, is invested in reporting him, although he doesn’t want to become involved in anything like this; “I don’t want it on my record.” Moreover, it’s irresponsible for his being around kids, although Jack argues it doesn’t truly bother anyone. To Jack’s insistence, that “He’s never hurt anyone,” Eddie comes back with the terrified and angry: “Jesus, Jack, you always come out with such stupid stuff!”

     The coward is Eddie, not Jack who is about to be sent into the heterosexual workhouse with a woman surely identified as his mate for the rest of his life. It is Eddie, the supposed intelligent and perceptive one, desperately in love with Jack, who cannot break away from the deep, dark fears of the dear, stupid heteronormative Britain.

      Why are you doing this, Jack wonders. “Mr. Kelly practically got you into university, and you’re ready to disown because he’s in love with another man.” Jack points out that he respected him an hour ago, but now he is ready to hate him, although he is still the exact same person, and Eddie is the exact same person, and—he adds, shifting everything in this taught little melodrama—“I am still the exact same person.”

      “What have you got to do with this?” asks Eddie, knowing full damn well Jack has everything to do with Eddie’s homophobic terror. Jack almost moves into a kiss, until Eddie again demands to know about his involvement. Jack stands, picks up his backpack, and answers the only way someone can to the Eddies of the world: “Nothing. I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

    “You just get to leave,” Jack shouts back to Eddie’s pleas to stay, “but the rest of us don’t. We’ve got to sit behind and figure out what to do with the rest of our lives.” Everything is expressed in the image of Jack having to lift his leg over the wire fence of where previously they have sat in appreciation of the homeland’s beauty, he escaping to someplace where he doesn’t truly want to be.

      Of course, Eddie shows up to say goodbye, with a summary hug before he pulls away into a new world that he is clearly not prepared for. To himself, Jack mumbles, “See you at Christmas….Eddie.” But we know that they won’t find a way to truly get together again. In 1992, The Isle of Man decriminalized homosexuality, 20 years after these 18 or 19-year-old boys had permanently broken the love of their childhood. Eddie, perhaps, found his way into a gay relationship, while Jack was stranded, wishing for a past that could never have existed, just as for their teacher Paul Kelly. Class had everything to do with British homophobia, as Forester, in particular, recognized.

     Dommart’s short film is a far more profound study of the British problems with homosexuality than many a feature film and documentary.  

 

Los Angeles, December 31, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).