Katie Ennis and Gary Jaffe | Sunset / 2017

just go. not yet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gary Jaffe (screenplay), Katie Ennis and Gary Jaffe (directors) Sunset / 2017 [16 minutes]

 

It is early morning in the Spring of 1942, and two gay lovers, Arnie Solvik (Ryan Trout) and Peter Green (Niccolo Walsh) lie in bed after having sex.

     But this is no usual morning. Peter has to soon leave his lover for dinner at his parents’ house after which he, having volunteered, is off to war.

     The discussion between them, which sounds very much like a stage play, is a lovingly painful attempt on Arnie’s part to challenge his lover’s decision and a constant reminder on Peter’s part that he is committed to destroying the man who would have all Jews—Peter being Jewish— dead.

      Arnie has already been declared unfit for service by a psychiatrist at the recruitment center, where he explained that he had a tendency to mistake the male reproductive organ for a popsicle stick. Yet, later one, he displays the scar where he was knifed after a man in a washroom at Columbus Circle fucked him and then tried to steal his money, as proof that he is not afraid of fighting. But why, he wonders, does Peter want to fight for a country “that doesn’t want you, for whom you are nothing?”

      The answer is obvious, and the far more naïve and certainly less witty Peter states it over and over again. To Arnie’s insistence that he doesn’t “have to go,” the answer, although in tears, is “but I do.”

       Arnie cannot bear the situation of Peter going home for one last dinner party, a party he cannot possibly attend, even in drag. While for Peter it is a “good night,” Arnie perceives it as a “goodbye” with all possibilities of death and change that come with young soldiers at war.

      And in that anger and hurt for a few moments he plays the grande diva, exaggeratedly telling his lover just to leave since he clearly no longer loves him, insisting that their 4-month relationship has never evolved beyond a crude Central Park pickup. Yet they kiss, and he melts, logic returning:

“Go have dinner with your family.”

      Peter promises that he’ll seek out a clerical job, but Arnie, knowing of his friend’s idealism, announces: “I know what you’ve read—and I’ve read it too. Homer and his heroes. Shakespeare and his band of brothers. Not for one moment can I imagine you going across the sea with a

typewriter in your hands. No, it’s honor for you.”

       They painful conversation continues they way, Arnie half attempting to sway his committed friend while simultaneously realizing that it is just that commitment of values for which he most loves him.

       The discussion of director Katie Ennis and Gary Jaffe’s script must have been one that occurred in the bedrooms of so very man necessarily closeted gay men in the early 1940s, where one or the other and even both had made decisions which they realized would change lives forever, fighting for a cause by serving in the military of a country that was almost as restrictive as that of Germany, or in England’s case perhaps just as restrictive—the important difference being that in US and Britain they had not built concentration camps to imprison and kill Jewish, gay, and Roma individuals. But we might do well to recall that US and British prisons were populated by gay men, sentenced for their homosexuality.

      Finally, it truly is the time of departure. Arnie orders Peter to leave, but at the very moment calls him back for one desperate kiss. When Peter closes the door for the last time, we see Arnie peeking out through is windows. After declaring that he is no Madame Butterfly, we realize that he will wait out the days with the greatest of anticipation, no matter what he will have to face.

        This film smells of greasepaint and stage craft, yet it remains a moving picture (in the emotional sense, if not fully in the more common cinematic meaning) of an issue that has yet to be fully explored.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).