Jeremy McClain | You Like That / 2023

costume drama

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy McClain (screenwriter and director) You Like That / 2023 [11 minutes]

 

The featured reviewer on the IMDb site for British director Jeremy McClain’s 2023 film, You Like That nicely summarizes my feelings about this short film: “In essence, crumbs of story, put together by imagination of [any] viewer who can be interested more by image than by story itself.”

    In fact, this doesn’t really make clear how flitting and silly this cinematic narrative truly is. An effete gay American student, Joshua (Jeremy McClain), studying, apparently, 19th century romance fiction, is attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. By day he spends his time mostly in the library reading romance fiction and poetry or drawing the gravestones and other sculptural objects strewn about the city.

      But to pay for his student loan and other costs, by night he dresses up in 19th costume and performs sexual acts in front of his computer for pay. In a sense he plays out his world of romance in 21st sexual terms by combining the most contemporary of communication tools posing as the romantic figure of a deep “gay” love he would like truly to become.

      A meet up with a real fellow student, the equally good-looking Sebastian (Marcus Hodson) evidently ends up in disaster—although McClain is great with still-lives he cannot sustain a narrative beyond the length of a wink, so nothing is full established in his story—as in attempting to make love to his would-be lover Joshua imagines himself dressed as a young soldier madly dancing with an equally handsome cavalryman, which makes him so dizzy, presumably, that he passes out in a faint.

      The writer or McClain’s promotional team would like you to believe that the film is perusing far deeper issues: “While his beloved books speak of transcendent love, his modern reality offers only fleeting digital encounters. …You Like It explores whether authentic romance can survive in an age where connection is just a click away.”

      What the copy doesn’t actually tell us whether that fleeting click is that of a computer key or a camera which dotes on pretty images that can’t possibly be fully connected up. The result is just all to silly to imagine that there might possibly be any deeper exploration of ideas.

      Pretty boys, city scenes, and costumes alone do not a movie make. And actually, I didn’t “like it,” even if, as the IMDb reviewer observes, McClain has the looks of a Caravaggio model.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).