Leaf Lieber | Burrow / 2023

extinction or survival

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leaf Lieber (screenwriter and director) Burrow / 2023 [14 minutes]

 

In this sci-fi gay parable, a man named John (Christian Coulson) begins to perceive himself—somewhat as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—as perhaps the last man standing.

     Yet suddenly, in the cold world of frost and snakes (a bit unbelievable given that most cold-blooded serpents by this time would have surely died), he discovers another nearly frozen survivor, Arian (Marc Crousillat), who was once a ballet dancer and is clearly gay. The two begin cohabiting, with John fighting any desires for sexual contact.

    The two get on well together, John cooking up his mix of hunter’s stew, which includes the snakes he still discovers surviving, along his last remaining can of beans. But they clearly have to move on as hunters if they are going to survive.

      One night in the spotlight of a barbecue fire, Arian not only dances, but teaches his co-survivalist how to himself become a participant in the sexual dance of life.

      There’s a night of deep sighs and problematic co-existence for John as he eventually perceives that he needs to let go of his new-found friend so that he might discover a new world for himself. Snakes eat one another, so the movie proclaims, in order to survive.

       Yet as the time comes when the two must separate, they kiss, which momentarily leads to John's sexual breakdown, in which for a few long seconds it appears he might kill Arian out of a homophobic disgust.

        But finally, John lets go, coming out into a world in which he has no one else to come out to, and in which any remaining gay terror no longer has meaning.

         Arian can only plead that John join him in the adventure of their hunt. 

        This is a metaphoric coming out story, in which two men finally realize their mutual love. But it is also a somewhat frightening tale of survival, perhaps a recognition that all gay men must accept their desires if they are to continue to exist in the hostile climate in which they find themselves. The "war," this short student film from the New York University Tisch School of Arts seems to proclaim, is ongoing, and a full acceptance of gay love may be the only way out.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).