Omid Iranikhah | People (Who Need People) / 2024

the split

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Grant (screenplay), Omid Iranikhah (director) People (Who Need People) / 2024 / [8 minutes]

 

Alex (Patrick Sprague), recently separated from his husband Raj (Adron Duell), breaks into his former house with its front-door lock now changed to steal back the Barbra Streisand album he has signed and given to his ex-lover as an anniversary gift.

     Raj grabs back the album and threatens it as hostage if Alex will not sign and countersign the waiting divorce papers. Evidently, at least as Raj puts it, Alex has not listened to him in years and has cheated on him several times, the former evidenced by the fact that he has never known that one of the Christmas balls Alex holds up as ransom has held the ashes of Raj’s great-aunt.

     Yet, Alex wants the album, he argues, because it reminds him of Raj and their better days.

     Clearly, both of these men who find it nearly impossible to live with one another, are still very much in love, or at least have a nostalgia for when they were very much in love.

     Writer Eric Grant keeps the reasons for their break-up vague, which shifts most of their highly dramatic and slightly campy actions into a kind of fast-flowing surrealist sketch. This work might be described as a comic riff on relationships. Even the set, filled with boxes, including a cardboard-covered couch, seems like something out of a Eugène Ionesco short play. Their world as been empty, a makeshift reality that never allowed either of them to become totally adults.

     Yet we feel there is something more serious going on here, and are almost disappointed when Alex finally accepts the facts, slicing the album in two and signing at least the first and most crucial page of their divorce papers.

     We long to know more, however, given both their crazy likeability about what really happened between the two of them; and it is apparent that director Omid Iranikhah and Grant might have made a very different film if they had relented and given in our desires. Probably it would have tipped the short cinema into a sort of painful realist apologia of which we have all seen far too many. As it stands, the work is a kind of absurdist emblem of all the relationships that, in hindsight, end for reasons that even the parties no longer remember unless they are the kind that hold a grudge and define their ex-companions as evil.

    In the glimpse of what once was, we see two men near insanity which is probably what drew them to one another in the first place. It is unfortunate that now they see that aspect of themselves only in the other.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).