Séamus Rea | Two Minutes After Midnight / 2003

every man’s fantasy lover

by Douglas Messerli

 

Séamus Rea (screenwriter and director) Two Minutes After Midnight / 2003 [11 minutes]

 

Two Minutes After Midnight is a comic gay fantasy that explores the various dream partners that a wide range of dancers at a gay club in Britain can conjure up in one evening. It’s a frightful thing, particularly for a nice-looking average gay boy just wanting to find someone to whom he’s attracted to go home with.

    Our hero John (Andrew Hinton-Brown) thinks he’s spotted the perfect person and approaches him on the dance floor, but the guy quickly walks away to the bar. Not to be easily sloughed off, John follows him, but is told to go away. John suggests he may not know what he’s missing: “I may be the answer to all your dreams,” predicative of what is about to happen.

     Disappointed by the abusive rejection, our average boy retreats to the bar toilet where he meets up with an angel (Mark Wakeling). When John snaps back that he thought “Angels didn’t have any vices,” the angel replies, in Oscar Wilde fashion, that vice is just what some call different kinds of pleasure.

     Strangely testy with his new angel friend, he finally is convinced that he can get back at the guy who rejected him and perhaps become the perfect companion of anyone else he desires by the obeying the instructions given to him by the heavenly messenger: “Just turn around the ring three times on your finger, and you will turn into any man’s sexual fantasy.

     The first time he attempts it, he indeed becomes a beautifully muscled hunk (Adrian Bouchet), with whom, when he returns to the dance floor, everyone is awed. The nasty boy who refused him cannot resist, telling him suddenly that he is the “sexiest guy I’ve ever seen.” John plays with him for a moment before he refuses his offer to go home with him, responding, “You’re so far up your ass, I don’t think there’d be room for anyone else.”

     So begins a series of transformations where, observing someone not so bad looking, he turns the ring to become their sexual idol. The results, however, are ridiculously unfulfilling as he transmogrifies throughout the evening into a woman, a grandmotherly drag queen, a man dressed all in rubber, a man-baby, a leather number, Brunhilde, Hitler, and finally a dog, making him wonder whether anybody is normal anymore.

     Finally, he spots a good-looking boy and returns to the toilet for one last try. Three turns of the ring and he comes out looking—just like himself. Convinced that he’s gone just beyond the midnight deadline, he dejectedly heads home alone. Meanwhile the last truly handsome boy, encouraged by his friend to “go after him,” argues what is the point? “Obviously he isn’t interested. He was perfect.”

     This is not at all a deft or truly clever film, although it does provide a few giggles. Unfortunately, the film is available on YouTube only in a miniaturized version with Russian subtitles, not the best way to watch British director Séamus Rea’s short work.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).