Erik Gernand | Non-Love-Song / 2009

the last day

by Douglas Messerli

 

Erik Gernand (screenwriter and director) Non-Love-Song / 2009 [8 minutes]

 

Two very unlikely friends, Josh (Joe Sinopoli) and Alex (Lawrence Kern), who have obviously grown up together, are facing their last day together as Josh is going away the next morning for college.

    The two, hanging out at Rogers Beach on the north side of downtown Chicago, are vastly different, and on this day those differences become evident and a source of worry, particularly for Alex. Josh, obviously straight, keeps describing the choices Alex makes—such as taking pictures with an old-fashioned Polaroid camera so that he’ll recall this special day and making a tape of “Josh’s” favorite song to remember him by—as gay or “faggety.” And because of Josh’s reaction Alex refuses to share the tape he is made as a reminder of their friendship.

    Moreover today, when Alex seriously shares his fear that when they meet up again they will each have quite radically changed, and finally succeeds in communicating just how much Josh’s constant description of his choices as queer, a true rebuke in which he explains just how much it hurts him, and in doing so tacitly admits to the truth that he is gay. For one of the first times in their life, he seems to actually make a true connection with Josh, the latter admitting that that he does comprehend, confirming his knowledge of their sexual difference.

     A couple of girls pass by, one of whom Josh knows. Alex encourages him to go after them, and Josh brings one of the girls back so that his friend might take a picture of them together, just to remember. Alex does so, slipping it into his own bag as a memory of the Josh he has known and, at the same moment, putting the tape he has made into Josh’s bag.

     It’s clear that when they meet up again, perhaps for the school’s homecoming celebration (although Josh thinks its ridiculous for him to return for such an affair), they will be different; by that time Alex may have come out, and Josh, having met up with a serious girlfriend may no longer want anything to do with him.

    The song Alex has recorded is simply one that he identifies with is friend; but in time it may certainly come to be “their” song, like an old couple who recognize a past that has not survived their own futures.

    I had such a friend, from the Northwestern Polish part of Chicago, who when he married felt even afraid, years later, that his wife would be upset for us having met up for lunch. When I look back I perceive that one day, years earlier, when we traveled together to downtown Chicago he had wanted me to seduce him, to introduce him to gay sex. But he seemed off limits as a straight boy, even if it was obvious that he was seeking for a way to explore his sexuality; and I did nothing. Now he was trapped in a relationship which he might soon have if not already regretted. Things had changed between us, and there was no way of bringing that special day back, not even with photographs.

    So it is with Alex and Josh. And in that sense, this is a most special day, the last of their innocent lifelong friendship.

    But this short film is also about something perhaps even more profound, outside of its plot. It is about the way film and photography differ in their relationship to memory and reality. Alex wants the immediacy and color of the photography so that he might remember the moment as it was. We never see the photographs he takes. The film itself is in a beautifully toned black-and-white work similar to that we see in films from the 1930s and 1940s and certain art films of the 1960s. They show us a world locked away in time, frozen as it were, in their non-reality of a time without color, without flesh. While the boys hope to capture the moment, the film which tells their story is already a dead and frozen one, projected to us from a world that no longer exists.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).