Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Marco De Luca | Park Life / 2024

a one-night romance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Silver (screenplay), Marco De Luca (director) Park Life / 2024 [13.15 minutes]

 

This British film of 2024 has a very simple storyline. Two handsome men discover one another in the woods cruising, Noah (George Turner) actually in the middle of getting a blow job when he locks eyes with the beautiful Medhi (Alexander Da Fonseca). The two get a quick taste of one another’s cocks (no ejaculations involved) before Medhi suggests it’s late and he has to be on his way back home.


     Captivated by his new friend, Noah “walks” him back home, they have breakfast together, and end up back in Medhi’s public housing apartment, truly enjoying sex together.

     Why author Adam Silver determined that Medhi was just visiting London for a few days or why Noah will not provide him with his phone number is not fully explained, as Noah simply mumbles something the effect that it will only end in a slow resistance to a meet-up, while holding out the possibility that he will again be at the cruising park at the same time tomorrow morning.

      If this “blossoms into something romantic,”—as the IMDb site describes the story—why aren’t we allowed an appropriate ending? Yet author and director simply return to the transactional aspect of their characters’ lives, not permitting anything at all to blossom in the way I interpret that word.

      In demanding that in order to meet up with him again, Noah requires his friend trot back into the park cruising life, and the fact that Medhi has to leave for somewhere else, perhaps to Athens, both characters are determined to not permit anything at all to blossom. They might be temporarily infatuated with one another—and with such a beautiful couple, who wouldn’t be?—but here’s nothing going to happen here.


     Cinematographer Jack Hamilton, moreover, has escaped the responsibility of showing us their lovemaking and bodies, by shooting the entire film in near darkness, while De Luca blurs their bodies together in their brief scene that supposedly represents the actualizing of the newborn love. (I have brightened the photos so that they might even be visible on a printed page.) We can observe the gestures of the park far better than we can even determine the actions of their bedroom lovemaking, a strangely unromantic way of handling a supposed meeting up of two perfect lovers.


      De Luca also has made several horror films, and this so-called romantic work borders on the same genre. Both men, Jew and Arab, (it is established early on that both men are circumcised) seem forever trapped in their own worlds.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

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