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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