Krit Komkrichwarakool | Freefall / 2017

leaping into pity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Krit Komkrichwarakool (screenwriter and director) Freefall / 2017 [19 minutes]

 

I wanted to love this short film by Canadian director Krit Komkrichwarakool, particularly because of the gentle acting by both Chris McNally as Lucas—the lover and now full-time nurse of Ivan, suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known in US as Lou Gehrig’s Disease)—and Andrew Jenkins (playing Ivan). Both beautiful men have created an intense quiet drama that deserves the viewer’s attention.

 

   Yet the film is so surrounded by sentimental and, at moments, even kitsch images and devices that it’s hard to focus on the drama itself. First of all, both men are musicians, Lucas an amateur pianist who begins the film playing against the city skyline as busy workers hurry by, and Ivan, evidently a professional pianist who cannot resist joining Ivan that morning, the two of them creating a “beautiful ballad.” The resultant piece, which we later see Ivan—before the development of the disease—performing is described, at several points, as “a song written to his dream,” while “he put the dream into the song.”

     Mostly we see Lucas playing nurse to his lover. The major dramatic incident having happened long ago in the past, the night Ivan was first diagnosed in the hospital, when Lucas determined to finally leave him, unable to deal with what lay ahead (or, as he puts it, “I jumped.”) But obviously he returned, and Ivan is determined—now, after having lost most of his use of his legs, that he is even losing the use of his arms—to know why? Later, Lucas answers the question in the now quite traditional linguistic reversal in situations of love: “I didn’t stay because you needed me. I stayed because I need you.”

     But with all the pretty music, the repeated images of the lone piano player being joined by a partner, and the needy kisses of a man soon to die, this film, alas, is nearly all sentiment. If there are a few witty moments, a mockery of its own skydiving metaphors, they are simply too few such moments to escape the overwhelming sense that we should break out the tears and rend our garments in the desperate fear that is overcoming Ivan and the endless sacrifices made by Lucas.     

     Although Ivan is resentful about Lucas’ possible pity, the film itself wallows in it. And by the end of this short work we feel only pity, since we actually know so very little about the characters themselves.

     Besides playing early morning piano, what did Lucas actually do for a job? What did Ivan’s musical career consist of? Certainly, it cannot have had it its high with the little ditty by composers Samuel Kim and Blake Matthew. And what were our loveable fellows’ lives like before that fateful day by the lake? Did they have any friends? Why has Ivan fired all the other nurses? And what does he mean that they were “flirty”; did they hire only gay nurses? In short, who is this suffering man and his saintly nurse?

      Empathy is one thing, and I’m a born sentimentalist; but if I’m going to invest my tears in a movie I want to know why and what I’m blubbering about.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).