Harry Jenkins | With You, in Our Town / 2024

unrecognizable

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harry Jenkins (screenplay and director) Harry Jenkins With You, in Our Town / 2024 [14 minutes]

 

British director Harry Jenkins’ short film might have been somewhat earth-shattering if it had been released in 1999 or early in the new millennium, but 24-years later the fact that a dear friend like Benny (James Leslie) returns home for the “gap” from the university to find that none of his friends are even recognizable, particularly his best childhood buddy Tom (Dan Trifunovic) is hardly surprising.

   Benny’s world, in fact, has completely been altered since he has realized at uni that he is gay, so that now Isaac and Kevin’s gay jokes sound fairly homophobic, and along with the fact that basically they are, all four of them, perfectly happy to spend a day playing football and drinking before they retreat to the local pub with their girlfriends, events quite literally turn Benny’s stomach.

     He sees Isaac as the “classic straight male into action,” and his continual gay jokes more than a little disturbing. And then there is Tom, whom—given their childhood closeness—he’s somehow convinced himself might have become gay, still acting probably like he always did, as the mindless straight boy he’s always been. Within a few moments after their pub gathering, Benny heads off home having, as one of them puts it, a “meltdown.”

      How to explain what he’s feeling. Isaac attempts to explain that just because of his jokes, he’s not a homophobe, but Benny now sees everything differently. His summary of the situation is at the heart of this film:

“I just can’t keep pretending that all the things you say don’t bother me, that it’s fine, ‘cause it’s not okay. Just so many things have shifted, and, and I’m so sick of people using words so personal and so conflicting, all for what? To tease someone, to poke fun all covered up because it’s just banter and it’s all right and, and who cares and whatever but I care.

     I’ve come home and I don’t recognize anyone. It’s like the faces are the same but the people are gone and there’s just so much that’s different now and you’re all so blissfully unaware of how things have…”

 

     There Benny leaves off, realizing what novelist Thomas Wolfe perceived nearly a century earlier, “You can’t go home again.”

     When Benny walks off, one of the boys asks, “Do you think he’s….”

     Tom interrupts them with his assertive response, “Yeah.”

    Benny’s childhood friend finds him laying in the grass on an open hill which they obviously regularly visited as kids. Upon establishing the fact that while he, himself, is sexually wired differently, Tom lays down next to Benny, assuring him that he’d long had his suspicions, but that “it” [Benny’s being gay] doesn’t matter, that even his sexual feelings for him are no problem (who wouldn’t love this beautiful face, he jests). They are still friends. Things are like they always were between them. 

    But, of course, they’re not. Everything has changed, even perhaps the attitudes toward homosexuality of his friends; this is a far more open group than one might suspect in a small town in which homosexuality as outlawed until just a few years before these boys’ birth.

       It is pretty evident that, except for occasional visits to his family, that in the future Benny’s return to town will become briefer and briefer until they will come to an end. And when Tom marries, surely even that friendship will probably perish.

     Given my own inability to travel and the death of my parents, I doubt I shall ever visit my hometown in Iowa again. There is nothing except for my brother and his family to draw me back.

     There are no revelations or even surprises, accordingly, in this cinematic narrative, just as there are no important revelations of LGBT life in Jenkins’ work—except for the fact, perhaps, that despite the insensitive comments of young men like Isaac and Kevin, they have perhaps become somewhat more accepting of a gay boy in their midst. Despite, Benny’s heartfelt and justified speech, what happens in and around this version of “Our Town,” has also somewhat changed just as it remains the same. The real changes have all been Benny’s, which is what university life  hopefully results in.

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).