Michelle Bossy | Early Retirement / 2022

sex is dirty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Susan-Kate Heaney and Peter Sabri (screenplay), Michelle Bossy (director) Early Retirement / 2022

 

After breaking up with his boyfriend, Alex (Peter Sabri), at 30-something of age, moves in with his parents Pat (Adrienne Barbeau) and Farid (Maz Siam).

     His parents, particularly Pat are certainly more liberal, energetic, and open-minded than many of their neighbors in the elderly community in which they now love. Pat is disturbed by her neighbor’s “Vote for Trump” sign, and is determined to do something about it, despite the advice of her husband.

     But for the most part, their world has radically changed since Alex’s long-ago departure. Farid now speaks to TV set and his biggest worry is the numbers her receives from his oncologist. And there are older issues which were never settled, including Alex’s father’s tendency to get up and leave the room every time Alex’s former lover Travis’ name comes up in discussion or when Travis attempts to call Alex in order to talk with him about the causes of the breakup. Clearly, Alex has left because he feels that Travis has lied to him, but given Travis’ continued attempts to communicate with him, we can only wonder whether he might not be exaggerating what happened. Even Pat argues that he should at least give him a chance to explain. But Alex is as stubborn and unforgiving, evidently as Farid.

     When Alex suggests it’s easier just to cut the relationship off, his mother suggests that such a position comes far too naturally for her son. “Sometimes you keep people at a distance.

     Presumably, in order to comprehend what she means by that, he must confront his own father’s tendency to do the same thing, particularly with his son.

      The distance between the two of them is first revealed to us when Farid shows his disapproval of his son’s late rising, fixing himself breakfast at a time when his father is almost ready to in lunch. And then there’s there the matter of putting salt of his eggs before he’s even tasted them. “You’re going to get high blood pressure,” observes Farid. Angered by his father’s well-meant scolds, Alex finds this a good time to take the dog for a walk. Sitting on his own parent’s stoop, Alex lights up a cigarette, only to be told by a nosey neighbor that there’s no smoking allowed in the retirement community.

      Pat, returning home in armloads of groceries, finds that Farid has not even begun to prepare anything for their dinner, and she is understandably frustrated that at 5:30 in the afternoon he has not cooked anything. “I can’t believe you were here all day by yourself and you couldn’t come up with something to eat?

      But then, one might also ask, why hadn’t Alex pitched in to help his parents, prepared dinner for the both of them? This film hints at a problem the film itself doesn’t pursue: Alex’s own selfish behavior, pretending he is simply a guest to be served by his elderly parents.

      She storms off, arguing that she can’t do it all by herself. Both of Alex’s parents, it is clear, when frustrated have the tendency to storm off in anger, breaking off all forms of communication.

      But it is finally only when Farid again pulls away when Alex mentions his former lover that Alex begins to connect.

      Finally Alex poses the question he perhaps should have so many years earlier: “Why do you have such a problem with me dating another man?”

      “I don’t have a problem. In the beginning I was shocked. But by this point, all these years, I’m resigned to it.”

     Yet, he realizes, his father is still uncomfortable whenever his name comes. He never asks about Travis. Alex suggests that when Travis spoke to his own father, he thought the idea of two men having sex together was disgusting.

      Farid immediately responds, “Yea, so?” as if that should be the expected reaction. Evidently, however, Farid thinks that even sex between man and a woman is rather disgusting. “It’s not the cleanest thing in the world!” he laments.

      Alex’s response is somewhat equally bewildering: “As a parent should you really be thinking of the sex at all?”

       But finally it comes down to the perception that it was something unacceptable as Farid was growing up, and he simply cannot overcome what he has been taught.

       Both men, I would argue, are locked up in notions of sexuality that presumably might long ago have been abandoned: that sex is unclean, that sex is not something older people should even be thinking of, particularly in relationship to their children, or that sex is valued only in terms of what you have been taught long ago in the past.

      We don’t know if Alex or Farid have come to any deeper insights about sexuality through their conversation. But at least Alex realizes that notions of sexuality have to do with both him and his father leaving the room—or in Alex’s case, the relationship. Surely, Travis’ lie had to do with a sexual encounter outside of their apparently monogamous commitment.

     This film reveals, if nothing else, how we are still so very unable to accept the fullness of the sexual experience into our lives.

      If nothing else, Alex finally does pick up his phone, respond to Travis, and return to that world with the relief that at least he’s not just repeating the past. Alex is not ready to retire from one of the most remarkable experiences of life. Sex, in any form, isn’t dirty, but an opening up of the body, the essence of our reality, to truly engage with someone else. Why do we still have such a problem in doing that, why do we leave rooms, relationships, whenever a sexual encounter we didn’t expect appears on the horizon?

     Michelle Bossy’s fine short film doesn’t truly answer that, but at least it moves in the right direction, it’s heart in the right place.

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).