Jerry Carlsson | Nattåget (The Night Train) / 2020

orange juice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Carlsson (screenwriter and director) Nattåget (The Night Train) / 2020 [15 minutes]

 

Swedish director Jerry Carlsson’s The Night Train presents a young traveler, Oskar’s (Erik Nilsson), beginning of a new experience as ensconced on the night train, heading home after an what appears to have been a school or job interview in Stockholm to his country family home. The ruddy faced Swedish boy is still obviously an innocent, who catches the eye of a lovely Muslim boy, Ahmad (Khalil Ben Gharbia), traveling with his mother and father.

     Like any such innocent, his first reaction is to simply look away, to concentrate on the music he’s hearing through his headphones. But he can’t resist looking back at the beautiful young man, perhaps just a little older than he is and certainly more experienced which we recognize by his far more straight-forward and intense smile at Oskar.

      Time after time Oskar catches his eye, perceives the smile of complicity cross his sensuous lips, and turns away, only to look back again as if compelled to do so. When Ahmad’s parents fall to sleep, he takes out an orange, breaking apart the segments and, in a scene almost suggestive of the long ago sexual eating sequence in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963) begins to suck on the segment, its nectar gathering and dripping down upon his lap.

     Soon he begins a more forward approach, standing and bringing the orange to Oskar, inviting him to share another segment, again the nectar falling upon the boy’s blue jeans as he bites into it.

     Instead of returning to his seat Ahmad moves on through the train car, Oskar attempting with all his inner powers to resist following, but finally taking the bait. When Oskar reaches the second car, he observes Ahmad moving into the next car, as if challenging him to a long adventure. In the that car, evidently filled with closed cabin segments, he finds an empty one and enters.

       Oskar pauses, almost backing away, but finally moves forward and past the selected cabin entering the bathroom, breathing deeply, and locking the door. But when, as he might have expected, he hears a light tap at the door, he opens, slowly allowing his friend to enter the bathroom cabinet where he remains.

       The boys pause for a moment, hardly knowing how to begin what they both desire, but finally when Ahmad takes the lead, falling into a frenzied kissing session, Oskar obviously cumming in his pants in the process, made evident by Carlsson’s somewhat heavy-handed return to the image of the nectar dripping from the orange. They almost laugh at their juvenile love-making.

 

      At that very moment the female ticket conductor knocks on the door checking up, the boys refusing to answer or open until finally she threatens to break the lock, Ahmad opening it and moving out, followed by Oskar who dares never to look back.

       Both make their way back to their seats, Oskar eventually falling to sleep to be awakened by the cabin attendant to tell him that the next station is his destination.

       He stands, grabs his backpack and makes his way past the now sleeping Ahmad, pausing a second in what we realize is a kind of regret of his inability to express his emotions for having, for the very first time, taken the steps to accept his sexuality that the sleeping beauty has shown him through his sharing of the same feelings, we might imagine, that Oskar has long felt for other boys.  

      His parents greet him with the usual chatter about sleep and breakfast, but as he moves forward in the cold snow we recognize what they cannot: he is no longer the same son who left them a few days earlier on a voyage to Stockholm. Whether or not he is accepted in the Stockholm school or company, he has now experienced an entirely different world with new possibilities for which he still has no words.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).