a space in the bed
by Douglas Messerli
Nancy Hughes and Jean-François Monette (screenplay, based a story by Derek Brown), Jean-François Monette (director) Take-out / 2000 [37
minutes]
Working after school three nights a
week and on weekends, Rory (Gianpaolo Venuta) serves as the Chalet Hut chicken
delivery boy, even though as the movie’s prologue reveals, he absolutely hates
chicken and even as a child stopped eating it.
As the movie begins, other than his eccentric reaction to chicken, we
know very little about the likeable young Rory except that despite his very
normal activities of playing soccer, boxing around his high school chum, Enzo
(Benjamin Plener) who works on alternate nights as a delivery boy but on most
nights as a dishwasher, and making a film of a girls’ soccer team so that Enzo
can might easily make contact with the girls. Indeed, Enzo is one of those
young high school braggarts who is always talking about the girls he bedded and
inquiring about Rory’s newest heartthrob, about whom Rory remains extremely
vague, hinting she’s an older woman in college.
We also know that he hasn’t a very good relationships with his father,
with whom he lives, darting out of the kitchen the moment his car pulls up and
shouting down to him that the leftovers he’s brought home for his father are in
the refrigerator.
Other than that, in the first few
moments of the film, Rory seems simply displaced, not totally happy much in the
way that many teens of 18, still stuck in high school because of a late year
birthday might be.
Pete is otherwise personable and appreciative of Rory’s sweetness toward
him, commenting that he’s found the other boy (Enzo) rude, and that he’ll try
to remember to order take out chicken only on the nights Rory is working.
Something, we don’t know precisely what,
clicks with Rory and the sad elder but handsome man, who might almost be the
age of his own father. And at first we guess that his curiosity about the
man—who on his second visit invites him in, asks him to play a question to a
board game (“What was Tevye’s of Fiddler on the Roof profession?) and
even later wanders out back of the house to observe the man dancing alone—may
have something to do with a search for a true father figure to replace his
absent dad.
But we quickly realize, just as Rory
does, that it’s actually a case of a love of young man for older man, which
just as younger men and girls fall for older women and men, often happens. But
it hits Rory, who apparently hasn’t even pondered the possibility of his being
gay, a bit like an out-of-season Quebec blizzard. He stops by a roadside grocer
and flips through the pages of a gay photo magazine, one of the many popular
back in the day, only to be dismayed by Enzo pounding at the window, hiding it
quickly behind a nearby male exercise magazine, Enzo mocking him for finding
anything of interest regarding sports other than soccer.
When on his next shift, Enzo describes delivering chicken to the
“faggot” dressed only in his track jockeys with an erect cock and playing him
with 12-dollar tip—all apparently fabricated since we know that Pete doesn’t
like him—Rory nearly goes out of his mind with gay lust, imagining his next
visit to him, as a true invite into not only the house but into his arms.
When he does arrive, he finds a woman in the house packing up boxes, the
two of them sorting through their possessions. Obviously the break-up Pete has
suffered has not been with another man but with a woman, which means that he is
probably not gay. When he invites Rory into the house offering him the board
game which he might play with his friends, Rory stares back in amazement,
mumbling that he and his “friends” don’t play those kinds of games. When Rory
tries to offer anything else of interest he might spot in the house, Rory
finally becomes so despondent that he refuses, angry and hurt, even though
Peter tries to clear up things offering it instead of tip as a “gift,” in
recognition that there has been something between them if only frustration and
loneliness.
Rory hurries off, rushing through the
traffic, and making a stop off at his school outside of which, in the dark, he
furiously masturbates. A statement perhaps to his old school and his new sexual
orientation as well as a much-needed relief from his previous sexual fantasies
of Pete.
When he returns to the restaurant, Enzo suggests they get drunk, which
they do, sitting outside a doorway talking. Enzo, again trying to probe about
his friend’s older girl friend, demands to know at least what color her hair
is.
Drunk and confused, Rory mumbles “he’s a
brunette.” Enzo suggests he must be drunk since he just used the wrong pronoun,
not he’d mind really if…. If what, Rory
demands. If you were… If I were what,
Rory shouts out, seemingly ready to come out to his friend. “If you were a
faggot.”
The boy wonders upstairs and into the master bedroom. There he spots the
four holes in the carpet which signify the precise location of the bed. He lays
down in the center of the space, claiming as his gift a space on the bed in
which Pete slept each night.
It’s clear that for Rory, regarding his
sexuality, there is no turning back.
Actor Venuta is so very personable and charming and the interactions he
has with actor MacIvor so endearing that along with the quite beautiful color
photography of the film, that I’d argue that Canadian director Jean-François
Monette’s Take-out is one of the best shorts of the year.
Los Angeles, November 7, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (November 2022).
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