Andree Ljutica | How to Say I Love You at Night / 2020

love at last sight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andree Ljutica (screenwriter and director) How to Say I Love You at Night / 2020 [18 minutes]

 

This short film reads somewhat like a nightmare version of a Grindr date. Benny (Mat Vairo) and Paul (Chris Petrovski) have evidently made a digital date for an evening in Benny’s apartment. But Benny strangely runs into Paul already wandering through his apartment, someone evidently having let him in after his attempts to text Benny without success.

     Within minutes, Paul is charging his phone near the kitchen sink and has wondrously taken up a carving knife expressing his sense of its beauty, while Benny begs him to put it down while simultaneously asking him to lower his voice because of a sleeping roommate. In another moment Paul has asked where the bathroom is and before Benny can even wonder where he’s gone, encounters him already in his bedroom.

      Once there, Paul has taken up Benny’s glasses and put them on, Benny a bit startled to find the situation so suddenly advanced asking him to please take off his glasses. Paul suggests he likes them, with Benny begs that he needs them to see, Paul responding, “Oh I know! You’re blind as a bat, I can’t see anything with them on.” Finally Benny pulls them away for his rambunctious guest.

      Paul suddenly exits the room, as Benny stands in wonderment, only to have Paul enter the door again, saying, “Hi, I’m Paul,” explaining that since they got off to rough start perhaps they should start all over again, with Benny, he suggests, now responding, “I’m Benny,” etc. When Benny doesn’t respond Paul insists upon going out again to repeat the gesture, as if it were some vaudeville skit for which Benny had forgotten his lines. The second time is obviously no better.

       A second later Paul has spotted one of his favorite DVDs, “one of the great love stories of all time,” from which Benny has evidently not even removed the wrap, having never seen it, a great disappointment for Paul.

       Small talk, moreover, hardly gets them nowhere, since when Benny asks him where he’s from, Paul answers Yugoslavia. As Benny attempts to politely observe that wouldn’t have imagined that given that he doesn’t even have an accent, Paul quickly turns the conversation into a discussion of Benny’s parents: “Is your dad comfortable with having boys in your bed?” A moment later he moves into even deeper issues, Paul wondering has Benny ever questioned how many things are happening in the world at the very same time as “we talk right here in this room?”

        Before Benny can even begin to answer, Paul goes into a kind of monologue speaking about their fathers, “You see your dad was planning his 401K and shopping for cruise lines with you mom at the time when while my dad was planning his great escape,” beginning a conversation that is far more serious and complex than Benny is capable of quickly assimilating. And a moment later, in any event, Benny discovers himself with a bloody nose, Paul grabbing a towel to help him as he lovingly leans him back against his chest.

       When Benny moves off to the bathroom to clean up, he discovers upon his return that Paul—who we now realize a quite handsome and buff guy—has taken off his shirt, ready for sex.

        By this time Benny is so exasperated and confused that he determines to call the entire thing off, perplexed by the quickly shifting conversations and the evident role-playing that seems to come natural to Paul.

         Paul, however, suddenly declares that he has no attention of leaving.

         Benny tries to reason with him, saying he just doesn’t feel like it, insisting that Paul should just leave; but intruder puts up even further resistance arguing how freezing cold it is outside. And we begin to wonder whether, in fact, Paul isn’t homeless, that he has planned to spend the night with Benny as a matter of survival.

         But by this time, however, Benny is someone understandably pissed, and when Paul stands his ground and attempts to kiss Benny, in his eagerness pushing him against the wall, Benny lashes out, slapping him, Paul turning away in true hurt, immediately leaving the room.

         There is a moment or two of quiet, before finally Benny, himself shocked by his violence, grabs up the boy’s shirt and goes on the look for, discovering that Paul truly has left. He rushes outside running down the street calling out, but there is no sign of Paul who seems to have vanished, half naked, into the winter night.

       The final scene was, in fact, a replay of the first frames of this film, which helped us realize all along that Benny, in his fussiness, his ambivalence, his sense of privilege, and frankly his lack of quick-wittedness and intelligence had missed out on an opportunity to meet a truly eccentric but quite lovely human being, one you might soon discover is very worth loving.

      Ljutica describes his character Paul as being “obscenely honest,” and defines love itself as often involving a sort of “obscene contract,” something which we cannot immediately recognize because of its consequences which demand something far more difficult than our transactional and expedient actions require of us. I’m not sure I fully agree, but I do feel that Benny was seeking a quick transactional relationship but discovered something instead that bothered and troubled him in its fluctuations and unpredictability. By the time he recognizes what he has lost, it is too late to reclaim.

      The film’s title sounds clumsy, as if it has been translated. Surely Benny was not ready to say I love you, and probably might have said it no better in the day time than the night. But those of us who are not afraid of a mercurial, fast-thinking and very cute kid, might have found a way to say it by pulling him into bed, and shutting down his odd verbal circumlocutions with a deep kiss.

As it is Ljutica’s very witty dialogue has suddenly turned into tragedy since we cannot imagine how Paul without a shirt, having already been coughing in the last scene, might possibly survive the cold New York winter night.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2022 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).