Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia | Pristine Books / 2003

love with an older man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Felix Stacia (screenplay), Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia (directors) Pristine Books / 2003 [7 minutes]

 

The good university student Travis (Samuel Evans) rooms with his friend / lover Luke (David G. Vigo) who evidently falls in a drunken stupor most afternoons. Travis has evidently been chatting on line for some time now with an older man from Sydney, Mark, who happens to be visiting the city where Travis and Luke are attending school.

      Travis meets up with Mark and they go for dinner, returning to Mark’s hotel room where the handsome visitor fucks the boy, as Travis expresses it, “like no one ever before.”

      In the very next scene of Australian filmmakers Adam Arkin and Felix Stacia’s film, the roommates are deep into a fight, Travis accusing Luke of doing nothing but drinking, smoking, and sleeping through his university days. Mark, he argues, cares for him and has ambitions. Taking up a knife, Luke threatens to hurt Mark or to tell Travis’ father about the situation. Or perhaps worse, destroy his “precious books,” presumably meaning the thing that most differentiates these two boys, the one actually reading and studying, the other simply partying away his hours.

      In his next meeting with Mark, the visitor argues that he needs to get away from Luke before he actually does hurt him. The businessman suggests he move into his apartment in Sydney, and as for his education, he might do that in the city as well, he’d even help to arrange it.

      But Travis questions his motives, and furthermore is simply not certain that it’s what he really wants. When Mark gets angry, Travis walks, meeting up with his roommate in the elevator, obviously having decided to return to the friend with serious problems, but at least of his own age. Together clearly they will have to work out a future between them.

      This short work has quite dreadful sound and the actors reveal their amateur status. But the worst problem is the simplistic narrative that simply doesn’t explain or even probe Travis’ feelings or his viewpoints. Why not join the far more handsome man in Sydney? Age seems to be a barrier here, but to me there doesn’t seem to be that many years at issue.

      Perhaps he loves Luke for reasons we’ve not discovered, but it the responsibility of the film to establish those reasons so that we can make sense of the decision which is at the crux of this short drama. As it is, nothing truly seems to matter. Travis, the good student with the “pristine” books will certainly graduate, while his friend will likely drop out. What interest is this to us? What does it all signify? Unfortunately, the writer and directors do not bother to explain.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).