Mario Galarreta | Wayne / 2015

love lost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mario Galarreta (screenwriter and director) Wayne / 2015 [10 minutes]

 

Mario Galareeta’s Wayne was one of the best LGBTQ films I have seen in a long while. It’s a very simple but totally affecting work.

      Wayne (Stu Klitsner) is an elder man with senile dementia, unable to even recognize any longer his own wife, Louise (Martha Milton Stookey), whom he unintentionally awakens in the night during a dream in which he remembers himself as a younger man (played by Ross Neuenfeldt) in the barn wrestling, embracing, and preparing to kiss a fellow rancher or ranch hand, Ron (Jeremy Kahn).

      We have to presume that since the couple have been wed for 50 years that he was already married to Louise and that these meetings were forbidden secrets, which she perhaps knew about or came across—since we see things basically from the perspective of the demented Wayne, we have no possibility of filling in full back stories. All we know is that she is more worried about his having wet the bed than the content of his dream. She helps him to stand, and when he begins to wander off, asks him where he’s going.

      Ron is waiting for me, he answers, to which she replies, “For goodness sake let the dead be dead,” hinting that she knows of his secret past.

     She patiently sits him down again and goes off to run some bathwater. But Wayne wonders off, returning the barn of his dream, Louise, having discovered him missing, desperately going on the search.

     She calls out her husband’s name several times, and tries to follow him down a path, but when she sees where he’s headed, she pulls back, half-smiling, half-in tears, knowing that he is seeking a love that he can not longer have, and perhaps was never fully permitted to enjoy.

      The young Ron visits him again in the barn, kissing him gently on the lips, stroking his hair. Wayne sits there, perhaps for the very last time in his life, enjoying the pleasures of a forbidden life.

    I have often brought up the issue through many different films about how men and women who discover or admit to their same-sex passions after heterosexual marriage bring pain both to themselves and their companions. But, in this case, Louise already knows that she has gone missing in his life, recognizing that his true lover perhaps was always another man despite their long life together. This film is most closely related to French director Olivier Peyon’s 2022 film Lie with Me (Arrête avec tes mensonges), in which a young Cognac region farmer gives up his youthful gay love to remain on the farm and marry, finding gay love again only in the arms of a fellow farmer living at a distance from time to time. For him also, it is an unfulfilling life, that ends in death and the memory of his young love, the facts of which, in this case, his son comes to uncover, bringing the love of his youth, now a famous writer, back to the region to help him comprehend his father’s forbidden romance.

     In some respects, the true hero of Galareeta’s film is Louise, who knowing that she has lost her husband’s love to a dead romance, still watches over him and cares for him, loving him even if he no longer even knows of her existence. The film, notably, is dedicated to the filmmaker’s mother.

     But the power of the film comes from the poignant sadness that neither of them has fully found the love they sought.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).