Amy Gebhardt | Look Sharp / 2006

evidence of what doesn’t exist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amy Gebhardt (screenwriter and director) Look Sharp / 2006 [9 minutes]

 

Australian director Amy Gebhardt creates a tough series of sequences as photographer Jo (Rhondda Findleton) spends the night in bed with her subjects in the Melbourne of the 1970s, drinking a great deal and fucking as a three-some mostly just to keep them close and to put the boys as ease for the actual photos she wants.

     Like all such manipulative but also brave and challenging female photographers such as Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, and Carol Jerrems, Jo has gotten two grungy but good looking Sharpie gang members into her bed, hoping to push their somewhat bisexual sharing of heterosexual sex just a little further, to challenge their macho defenses just enough so that she might capture the two men in a tender moment together which might hint at their homosexual “allowances,” if not tendencies beneath their layers of self-protection.

     It is a dangerous task. At any moment the men, Jason and Darren (Charlie Garber and David Lyons) are ready to explode with the recognition of what she is asking them to perform and the fact that she is manipulating them into the situation with which they feel intrigued but obviously also uncomfortable. Violence is most certainly a possibility, as it is always with on the edges of society concerning sex.

      As the Gay Celluloid reviewer nicely summarized this work:

 

“Filmed over two days in an urban squalor set reminiscent of Derek Jarman's The Last of England, here writer and director Amy Gebhardt has added many a neat touch, with the bedsit now akin to a boxing ring, one that finds David Lyons as Darren / Des hitting out when forced into a corner. In short and behind all of the 4-Xs of the piece, lies the issue of repressed feelings, with Jo…. determined to edge ever closer to the truth beneath the macho exterior of hard-as-nails gang member Des and here cue Lyons in an emotionally to the core performance.”

     If Look Sharp does not reach the artistic merit of its mentors, it certainly pushes the limits of the normally nicely contained short LGBTQ cinema works, introducing a far grittier energy into short gay cinema, even while Gebhardt’s characters are not necessarily gay and are most certainly permanently closeted to admitting and expressing it. Yet here is the evidence to which Jason and Darren will most certainly never admit.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2023 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).