Monday, January 20, 2025

Leon Lopez | Crossroad / 2016

a skinhead’s imaginary revenge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Rovira (screenplay), Leon Lopez (director) Crossroad / 2016 [11 minutes]

 

A British filmmaker of numerous short LGBTQ films, actor and noted writer Leon Lopez’s second film, Crossroad, concerns a married man Liam (Mark Kibo Rovira) who has also been in a relationship with a man, Matt (Calum Ewan Cameron).



    On the particular morning that this short film records, he rises long before his wife, Jade (Katie Collins), and leaves the apartment, purchases a pack of cigarettes, and broods for a while staring over a bridge overlooking the Thames.

     We don’t know what is brewing, but certainly it not something good, particularly when Liam, returning home, moves to the bathroom, shaves off most of his facial hair and then, in a rather startling decision, begins to turn himself into a skinhead.


    When he puts on a black hoodie and reaches for a baseball bat, we realize he has now become a dangerous being, on some sort of inexplicable path to revenge.

      He almost rings the bell of a home, as the film scrambles ahead in time to show us what is about to come. A black man, William (Ashley Campbell) answers the door. Liam enters, pushes the man to the floor and beats him to death with the baseball bat.


      We still have no idea of why he has determined to destroy both the man and, incidentally, himself.

      But soon after, brief flashbacks offer us the missing data. It is clear, while Liam and his friend Matt play pool that there is something special between them, and Jade clearly senses it as well, as she jealously kisses her man, hoping to pull him away from Matt’s influence. But it is clear that she must leave, and the two men will carry out their affair.


     It appears that she may have been quite correct in her fears, and we see her in other clips angrily confronting her husband, although these scenes are performed in mute so we cannot know the precise reasons for her distress. But we can guess that Liam has grown closer to Matt, that as a bisexual person, Liam has perhaps come to prefer his male lover’s company.

     Suddenly, in a later scene we see Matt on the pavement of a street, William having apparently been behind the wheel of a car which has accidently hit him. The bleeding lover clearly dies while Liam kisses him deeply on his bleeding lips.


    Fortunately, Liam does not ring the bell to William’s door, and soon after he tosses the bat away, while he stands at the end of the movie grieving, again on a bridge over the Thames, shouting out in pain, tears running down his face. He is doomed to a relationship with Jade, while we know that his true love has tragically died.

      If Liam returns to Jade, will surely be as a different man than one with whom she went to bed.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

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