Gloria La Morte | Crush / 2011

shall we dance?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominic Colón (screenplay), Gloria La Morte (director) Crush / 2011 [9 minutes]

 

Gloria La Morte’s Crush takes place at a Prom Night in the South Bronx. Michael (Sean Carvajal) has taken along his best friend Nikke (Gleendilys Inoa) to help back him up in his final opportunity to tell his friend Brandon (D. J. Afanador) that he is in love with him and has been for years.

     But everything goes wrong. The film begins with Michel in the toilet, vomiting, having mixed too many drinks before he’s even entered the dancing floor. He is ready to turn around and run, abandoning his last opportunity to express his love.

    When he does enter the dance proper, he sees Brandon and nearly faints at what he perceives as his beauty, but is even more terrified and he sees him approaching. Brandon asks he he’d like to join him and others for a “smoke,” but Michael quickly demurs, Nikkie prodding him to join his dream boat. He hands Brandon a lighter, but quickly drops it; and when they both bend to pick it up, they butt heads.

     Suddenly, he seems to get up the courage to tell Brandon how he feels, simply babbling out his long love for him. Brandon, at first, is put off, not because he isn’t mutually attracted or afraid of being seen as gay, but because it just isn’t proper to speak out like that.

     Nonetheless, he asks Michael to dance, Michael amazed by his friend’s audacity in proclaiming that it doesn’t matter what anyone else might say; tonight they own the dance floor, as they go floating off in one another’s arms.

    We know it’s all too good to be true, as the camera returns to a view with Michael on the floor, having been temporarily knocked out by the crash of noggins. Brandon helps him to stand, and again Michael is too terrified, now that his fantasy has been crushed, to move ahead.

      Once more, however, Nikkie spurs him on, and this time he puts it perfectly: looking into Brandon’s eyes, he asks simply, “You want to dance?” Black out.

     However it ends, he at least has not “punked out,” and brought his fantasies into a possibility in real life.

      This short film is simple, likeable high school fare, offering little more than what its title proffers, a high school crush come to life. But we’ve all been there, if not in real life, in our memories of what we might have done differently that long ago special night. I purposely made the situation clumsy by asking the female school photographer to be my date. I was certain nothing could happen between me and the camera she held strapped to her neck. I was safe from female pressures.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2025).