Dan Fry | My Son’s Best Mate / 2022

the coward

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Fry (screenwriter and director) My Son’s Best Mate / 2022 [10.20 minutes]

 

In another of the movies Australian filmmaker Dan Fry describes as his homemade films—most of these not even listed on IMDb—Fry plays an errant father who has been having sex with his university son’s best friend, Carlos (whose face we never see).

     It isn’t that he hasn’t been in a moral crisis of sorts which he has even shared with his lover, but the younger boy doesn’t see anything wrong with it and—well what older man can resist younger, muscular flesh so freely offered up to him.

      To ease his sense of guilt, the father spends most of his time in this film recording a computer video message to his son Michael in an attempt to explain his and Carlos’ relationship. The first thing he has to make clear, obviously, is why he and Michael’s mother were divorced. Although it has been hard for their son, neither parent ever provided a reason, evidently to comprehend their break up. He now admits to having lived a lie most of his life.

      Another scene between the man and his lover intrudes upon the videotaping as Carlos seems hardly able to keep his hands off the older man, who keeps attempting to tell him that he’s got some work to do.

      Continuing with the video, the father finally announces to his son that he’s gay, and that’s why he had leave Michael’s mother. And, he adds, he also has a thing for younger boys in their 20s. He doesn’t feel necessary guilty for that however, explaining that there are so many heterosexual politicians who have young girls on their arms all the time. “I just need to tell you because I don’t know how you’d feel about that, and uhhhh….”

      The film cuts again, leaving out, of course, the real reason why this man might feel some fear of a break in his relationship with his son if not with his own moral scruples. Indeed, in the very next scene we see the older man and Carlos in his bedroom having sex while in the next room, apparently, the narrator’s son is sleeping. He begs the boy to be quiet, obviously hoping to keep the relationship a secret.

      Indeed, this time Fry as director offers up an entire collage of sex scenes between the two of them using various cinematic experimental devices, including a spectral rainbow overlay outlining their hand-holding and various shots in slow-motion shot through different screens to indicate their sexual ecstasy.

      Finally, back at the video, he admits that he’s been sleeping with Carlos. And although Carlos has thought it best to keep the relationship a secret, the father feels he must be honest, at last, with his son. “I don’t think it’s right to keep it a secret from you.”

      As the father finally admits that throughout his life he’s been a coward and that he no longer wants to be one, Fry splits the screen into three, one showing the father posing at an attempt to look more fit and younger that he is, described as “The Fantasy”; the second with an image of the always faceless Carlos described as “The Reality”; and third with him, bare-chested and almost in tears described as “The Truth.” No one has ever accused Fry as being a subtle director.

      He plans to talk it over and if his son cannot accept it, he insists, he’ll stop the relationship, wanting nothing to come between dad and son.

      But just a few problems still remain: for one the relationship with the son’s best friend has already occurred and is still ongoing; even if the father were to stop seeing Carlos, it is still a difficult reality for a young college boy to digest about his father along with the fact that he’s just discovering that his father is gay. Secondly, he has chosen to first send a disembodied voice to reveal the truth, refusing to face up to his son in person. Whether or not they really meet up face to face to “discuss” the matter, the subject has been rolled out before the boy without any being behind it to further explain or react to his son’s emotional response.

     If the father has chosen not to be a coward any longer, he has certainly gone about by proving just how cowardly he still is.

     It’s hard to tell how writer/director Fry perceives his own character: does he truly see him as a man attempting to finally speak the truth or is he aware that the man is still hiding behind a screen instead of in a closet? If I were this man’s son, I’d find it more than a little difficult to forgive a father who had dished me out lies all my life and hadn’t the gumption to drive himself over to “uni” to speak to me as a real person. I also might wonder, is Carlos a kind of “replacement” for the older man’s sexual desires for me as his son. And then there’s the little matter of my best friend’s betrayal. The film seems to be heading into far more dangerous territory without really knowing it.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2023