Wrik Mead | Frostbite / 1996

how to unthaw a frozen lover

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (screenwriter and director) Frostbite / 1996

 

The lighthouse keeper (Don McLaughlin) discovers a body of a man (Don Pyle) that has evidently come ashore on an icefloe from the surrounding ocean. Upon his discovery of the nearly frozen man, the keeper does something we do not quite expect in life-saving movies, but then this is a Wrik Mead film, in which sometimes brutal truths are literalized. The would-be savior simply grabs hold of one of his legs and pulls him, inch by inch—including over two heavy logs that block his path—back to the lighthouse door, whereupon he pulls him inside and hoists him up into his bed.

     The room is clearly warmly heated by a wood-burning stove. But the lightkeeper’s further actions once more seem more than a little baffling. After briefly fondling the bearded “stiff,” he pulls his shirt off and then his pants, leaving the frozen man totally naked.

      Again quite unexpectedly, he takes out some sort of drug, and with a needle injects it into the man’s arm. Is it some sort of stimulant or a pain-killer? We are surely puzzled, particularly when he now gets out a bowl of water, takes out a barber’s brush, and lathers up the man’s left breast, shaving the hair away from the breast and nipple.

      He then pulls the razor blade from its holder and cuts out a heart over the man’s real heart, placing a cloth over it to mop away the blood.

      All of this is done with great deliberation and in rather slow pace, as if he has already planned it out. And so it appears he has as he lifts the man quite easily—an act he might have employed from the beginning—and carefully lays in into his bathtub, filling it evidently with hot water.

    In the hot water the man suddenly comes to life, spots the heart now tattooed upon his chest, and reaches up to embrace and kiss the savior who has brought him back to life, the two kissing over and over again in Mead’s recognizable jerking-like motion of the frame. The film ends with the two of them repeating the act, deeply embraced in a kiss.

      It is almost as if the lighthouse keeper has been waiting for this event to happen for his entire life.

     Once more, with sly wit and ironic understatement, Canadian director Mead plays out gay fantasies and fears with a kind of straight-forward logic that releases them from the heterosexual romantic fantasies within which they are generally cloaked. His gay cupids, closeted men, and sex-starved boys inhabit worlds different from those of the ordinary myths and fairytales.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2012).