Matthew Puccini | The Mess He Made / 2017

reckoning

by Douglas Messerli 

 

Matthew Puccini (screenwriter and director) The Mess He Made / 2017 [11 minutes]

 

It’s strange how today almost all gay men and obviously many other viewers immediately recognize the very first image of Matthew Puccini’s short 2017 film for being an AIDS test. One can have a blood test of thousands of reasons, but standing as it does at very first instance of this gay film, we know the central character, Jude (Max Jenkins) is having a Rapid HIV Test, particularly when he’s told, moments later, that he’ll need wait only 15 minutes, sometimes less.

      In this fifteen minutes, which Puccini actually collapses into only ten, we encounter a man whose life has just gone into a spin, hence the film’s title The Mess He Made.

      Although he obviously hasn’t smoked in a while—he has no cigarettes nor a lighter—the crisis suddenly leads him to try to bum a cigarette off of another waiting patient. And when he reports he doesn’t smoke, Jude is led on a journey through a rural or suburban strip mall in search of cigarettes and, soon after, groceries, as well as a birthday card. Like everywhere in the US, this tiny neon-lit world seems to have nearly all you need to help correct and further corrupt a life you feel you have totally fucked up.

      We don’t know what led Jude to have his test, but a telephone call from his male lover who begs him “Can we please just talk,” in response to which Jude immediately hangs up, clearly hints at the reason. Did his lover just reveal to him that he was HIV-positive? Has he discovered that his lover has been having unprotected sex with others? It seems to be precisely a time in which he should sit down and rationally talk.

      But we readily perceive that Jude is not now rational, feeling all the guilt and sorrow that having gay sex in the US for centuries, despite the remarkable strides the LGBTQ+ community has made in general acceptance, is not easily dismissed, particularly when one feels he himself might have become another statistic in the long decades since 1981 when AIDS began to be described as the gay disease.

      The questions we have about his life with the mysterious voice, moreover, are just the beginning of a series of endless speculations that arise in our attempt to comprehend Jude’s dilemma, to empathize or even possibly judge the behavior of a man who believes he has made a mess of his life.

     His next stop in his endless 15-minute wait is a supermarket where he seeks out an appropriate birthday card for someone (Puccini not even permitting us a clue by blurring out the notation of the category from which he grabs his card). Ice cream is next on his list, but a telephone call from “home,” with a young girl’s voice, April (Maya Piel), interrupts even that activity. He reports he’ll be home soon, that he’s just picking some things up and he’s almost finished.

      April obviously is someone close to him, who speaks of another person asking when he’ll be coming home. She might, in fact, be his sister. But Jude appears to be a bit too old to still be living at home, with the other person possibly being his father.

      And particularly when he asks April is she’s done all her homework, it appears that she may, in fact be his daughter. And the way he asks her about her day at school—what was fun about it, etc.—is not the way a brother usually talks to a younger sister, whether or not he helping to raise her. When she asks if she can watch TV, he asks if she has asked “Dan”— of course wondering if we have misheard it; is it really “Dad.” But when she reports that the other man has told her she should ask Jude, it doesn’t sound like an older father deferring to his son. And that comment further blurs the issue of April being Jude’s sister.* She might, in fact, be describing her other father as “Dad.”

      When Jude tells April that “a little bird told me that it’s someone’s birthday tomorrow,” and that he’s thinking about getting off work early and picking her up at school, we further become convinced that he is talking to his daughter, one that he shares with “Dan” or whoever the other caretaker of April is. She asks if someone else can also come, to which Jude answers, “Sure, if he wants to.” April immediately proceeds to ask him, with an answer that makes it rather clear that there is some resentment between the two, “He wants to but is not sure that he can come.”

      That answer, played out with a hand to chin gesture by Jude seems to reveal one of the reasons why he feels he’s messed up everything. He has perhaps been having sex outside of his marriage with another man, the result of which finds him where he is at this very moment in space and in his life.

      But the director does not confirm this, and with all the other possibilities available, I too might be creating a fiction.

      The fact that when he returns to the car to put groceries in, a meter maid is writing up a ticket for his parking illegally in a handicapped space causes almost a complete breakdown of this troubled man. “I’ve had a really hard day,” he pauses, and in near tears, continues, “and I wasn’t thinking.” When the meter maid (Zenzi Williams) asks “Are you handicapped, sir?” we want to respond, yes, at this moment our character truly is. Everything seems to be going against him, and he isn’t thinking rationally. 

     When he finally returns to the clinic and is called for the results, Puccini continues to keep his central character’s life private. We might suspect the news is not good, since the consulting nurse seems to spend too much time explaining things. And the camera catches a remarkable range of expressions that keep altering Jude’s face. First his slightly open mouth closes as if excepting what has been stated. Then they open again with a look of fear and doubt, his eyes seeming to focus on some distant point that he knew he might one day be facing. A slight smile forms, but it might be the kind of smile that comes over one when coming to terms when what one expected, just before tears well up in the face. But then, the mouth closes, eyes slightly looking skyward with a sense of hopefulness. 

    In this case, the excellent acting of Max Jenkins keeps us from knowing the whole truth. Yet even in the act of attempting to decipher the reality surrounding this unfortunate man, we have been forced to imagine the life of another, the possible realities for ourselves.

      Even if he is free from being HIV-positive, Jude realizes that he still must face the “others” in his life, whoever they be: a wronged lover, a husband whom he has betrayed and may never be fully able to forgive him, a daughter or a sister with whom he might have lost or still may lose contact forever.

      In the old days, police swooped down on bathrooms and movie houses, rousting out single and married men for indecent behavior, ruining their closeted lives. Today, the truth often comes raining down in the form of the medical profession, bringing with it all the sense of shame, fear, and possible death that those gay men of another age also had to face. Some things change for the better; but AIDS changed the sexual landscape for the worst seemingly forever.

 

*In attempt to confirm the name, I moved from a Vimeo video with no captions available to a YouTube version; but it too provided no subtitles which might resolve the puzzle.

 

Los Angeles, October 10,2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2023).