Timothy Ryan Hickernell | Foreign Lovers / 2017

love with a stranger

by Douglas Messerli

 

Timothy Ryan Hickernell (screenwriter and director) Foreign Lovers / 2017 [19 minutes]

 

US director Timothy Ryan Hickernell’s short film Foreign Lovers seems like a trailer for a full feature old-fashioned romance movie in the manner of William Wyler’s 1953 Roman Holiday or

Jean Negulesco’s 1954 Three Coins in a Fountain—only with everything reversed, the romance with a celebrated Italian being carried out in Manhattan instead of Rome, and the lovers being gay instead of heterosexual.

     The “American” in New York (Timothy Ryan Hickernell) tries to hook up with a friend to a dance concert at the Joyce, who doesn’t show up. But he’s clearly been impressed by the dancing, particularly of one young Italian man (Lucio Nieto).

      Afterwards, on a whim, he stops by nearby gay bar and runs into an old friend (Joshua Cruz) with whom he discusses the changes in their lives. Apparently once a naysayer to on-line dating, our handsome American hero now regularly makes a phone call and moments later shows up naked in someone’s apartment, as he puts it, suggesting he’s now a Grindr regular. He’s clearly grown somewhat cynical about finding someone with whom he might settle down. After all, he couldn’t even find a date for the dance concert.

       And then, just as he is about to leave the bar, he runs into the Italian dancer, who has also noticed him from the stage, even observing a slight altercation at the end of the performance as our friend attempted to snap a photograph. The two return to the bar, a celebrity hanger-on attempting to get the attention of the Italian dancer and almost pulling them apart until they finally escape together and join up in the dancer’s bed for what is obviously perfect sex.

     For a few hours the next morning they wander the New York streets as they begin to realize they are falling in love, despite our American friend trying to briefly deny it. The Italian asks, “How do you know this isn’t love?”

    But there’s only one more concert that evening before the dancer returns home. And after a lovely encounter neither of them will ever forget, our “hero” kisses his all too brief lover, leaving him at the theater door with the deepest of regrets.

    In the full movie they would have obviously found a way to reunite—or perhaps not, since Audrey Hepburn has to leave Gregory Peck and all three women gathered around the suddenly empty Trevi fountain are fearful of losing the men in their lives.

       This film does seem to harken somehow of another time, oddly making a big thing about the “foreignness” of the main character’s love, even describing him as the “Foreigner” in the credits. It’s hard to imagine in these days of such international communications and travel as anything or anyone seeming to be “foreign” in any major city, particularly New York. But then, having made it nearly impossible for any but the wealthiest of families to live in Manhattan, perhaps it has once again become a provincial city to which everything else seems foreign. And even Hickernell’s camera (the cinematographer being Eun-ah Lee) treats the city streets like an American director would have once presented Rome or Paris.

 

Los Angeles, December 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).