Anthony Schatteman | Stories That We Could Have Told / 2013

one day, baby, we’ll be old

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Schatteman (screenplay and director) Stories That We Could Have Told / 2013 [6 minutes]

 

Throughout the teens and into the 2020’s Belgium/Flemish director Anthony Schatteman has produced more than a half dozen shorts, all which have covered fascinating aspects of gay erotic life, from a young gay boy overwhelmed by a singer father who refuses to even hear about his son’s sexuality (Kiss Me Softly, 2012), a young gay prostitute (Petit ami, 2017), a young man in love with his male teacher (Follow Me, 2015), a  drag queen who is caring for his son after his wife has left him (Hello, Stranger, 2016), and men both secretly in love with one another (When I See You, 2010). In almost every case, the gay individual has been pushed out of a normative social situation, but come through, nonetheless, with his own solutions that have made him stronger. Vulnerability has not stopped these young men’s attempts to discover and realize their sexuality.

     One might describe his early work, Stories That We Could Have Told, as being a kind of video for a far wilder variation of the song sung famously by the Everly Brothers, Jimmy Buffet, and Tom Petty. But this is not the same song, and its lyrics by Asaf Avidan & The Mojos (“One Day / “Reckoning Song”) describe a kind of desperate longing for the stories that, in fact, cannot be told because they never were fully realized.* The last stanza reads:

 

"… One day, baby, we'll be old

Oh, baby, we'll be old

Think of all the stories that we could have told

One day, baby, we'll be old

Oh, baby, we'll be old

And think of all the stories that we could have told"

      Working with two boys (Freek De Craecker and Maxim Debar) who had never previously acted and filmed without a script, the action was defined by the mutual ad-libbing of the director and the boys once the camera was focused on them for a 24-hour period.

      This short cinema tells a story that we’ve encountered many times of two friends, both of who seem to grown up perceiving themselves as straight buddies. From their earliest days of pushing, shoving, showing-off, and clowning for each other, there seems to have been a break in their relationship that, when they hook up again, they perceive was a friendship deeper than they had imagined. One of them now seems to be seeing a girl they both knew when they were kids.

      Yet, now as young adults of 17 or 18, they experiment, after one of them suggests “You want to do something crazy?”

     That craziness seems to involve making love, which they begin, at first, with just arms lain across the other’s back, but when they move into a swimming pool they begin kissing intensely. Whether or not their “lovemaking” goes any further, is never revealed, but it is clear that at some point it ended as the other returned to his more “normative” life leaving one of the figures in deep regret and loneliness, despairing over the loss of those “stories” he might have told others or shared with his former friend. Clearly, the two will not grow old together, and telling of their love late will mean little then to themselves and others. The singer of the original song (Avidan) truly wails of the loss of the stories they could have told based on a deep love that was cut short by unknowable events.

      The ending of this short is clearly the opposite of the standard ending: “And they lived happily ever after,” and we fear that the stories that might have told will sadly be left to the imagination (and perhaps frustration) of the one of them who chose to return to a heterosexual life.

 

*The video version of that song I watched showed what appeared to be a bi-sexual trio, two men and a woman, mostly dancing in their apartment and at a disco. The two men can be seen kissing at several moments.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).