Leon Lopez | Where's Steve? / 2020

the beginning of loss

by Douglas Messerli

 

James McDermott (screenplay), Leon Lopez (director) Where's Steve? / 2020 [5 minutes]

 

In British director Leon Lopez’s second short film concerning COVID-19, an elderly man Eric (Terry George) returns home from the hospital where he himself has just recovered from the disease.

     Clearly he is joyful to be home, but suffers from early-onset dementia and is troubled since he cannot find his companion at home, Steve. He wanders the house looking for him.    

      Finally, when his nurse, Benny (Lopez himself playing the role) arrives, he asks him where’s Steve. Benny shows a picture of him in a hospital bed, since Steve too has been taken off to hospital with COVID.

     In the very next scene, we see Eric walking around the nearby woods in his pajamas, Benny running after him. He’s still attempting to find his long-time partner. And Benny reminds him that he’s sick in the hospital, Eric somewhat embarrassed to have forgotten.

     But the worry doesn’t disappear, and his absence is still noted from moment to moment.

     Benny comes running downstairs, his cellphone in hand. It’s a call from Steve. He’s better and being released the very next day.

      In the very last scene of the film, we see Eric standing in the driveway waiting for the car to return his companion. The car drives in, and the film comes to an end. We never see Steve, but we can imagine the difficulties of the two attempting to help one another recover from such a debilitating disease, and with Eric’s other problems, we know it won’t be long before it will be Steve who will once more have to suffer Eric’s disappearance, even if his body remains in the room. Eric’s inability to find Steve is the first of the loses both he and Steve must soon endure. Any time lost between such loving individuals that COVID has cost them, is a kind of small tragedy, one that brought tears to my eyes, despite the film’s basically positive ending.

      In a sense, they have both been forced to leave one another at the very time they needed one another most.

     The music by Myles Knox-Renshaw helps to establish the bittersweet tone that pervades this short movie.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).