a shell of being
by Douglas Messerli
J. E. Dufton
(screenwriter and director) Every Waking Moment / 2023 [20 minutes]
This rather arch short
British movie is based on the love and life of composer Benjamin Britten and tenor
Peter Pears, who lived together as a gay couple at a
time when simply being gay might, at any moment, result in the police arriving
at your doorstep, arresting you, and engaging in a kind of conversion therapy through
electric shock therapy and chemical alteration of your body.
The film itself begins, in
black-and-white, with a performance of Henry Purcell’s “Man Is for the Woman
Made,” a truly heterosexual declaration by the Baroque composer, whose work
Britten arranged and who had an important influence on the 20th century
composer.
The
characters in this work, however, are named Edward Talbot as the composer
(William Bennett) and Alistair Percy (Harry Coolan) as the singer. The director
shifts to full color for a day in their life, as Talbot out for a breath of air
in a public park notices a beautiful man (Michael Ainger) pass by.
Soon after, we see a British policeman pull
the beautiful man and a young boy out of a cottage (the British word for a
public men’s room).
The incident troubles Talbot, who the
very next day is scheduled to give a performance of his new song, “Every Waking
Moment,” which is a coded love song to Percy. Tortured by the reality that British
gay men of the time daily had to face, Talbot can’t sleep, getting up, pouring
himself some whiskey, and playing the music of several composers such as Tchaikovsky
and Schubert. Percy, awakened, puts on the tea, ready once again, apparently,
to face a long bout with his lover who is not only nervous about the next day’s
performance but even more troubled by the possibility that one or both of them
will one day be arrested and subjected to the tortures of sterilization or
chemical neutering that leaves the body an empty shell unable to feel any
emotion, or imprisoned as was Wilde.
These men clearly knew the procedures
applied to many of their kind, including the famed scientist Alan Turing, who
committed suicide through arsenic poisoning as a result.
Most of us can no longer imagine the fear of
such men, who everyday had to face the fears that their truest beings and
sources of love might be stolen away from them by the conventional values of
the society at large.
As images
of the “conversion” are displayed, and a later meeting between Talbot and the
now shell of the beautiful man who he attempts unsuccessfully to kiss back to
life, as if he were simply the sleeping Snow White, Percy calms him by
reminding him that no one, no procedures, and no imprisonment can ever stop him
from loving his partner in life, Talbot.
The song—not one of Britten’s but
composed with lyrics by Dufton himself—is sung in the small church in which
they perform it, received with heavy applause:
And every waking
moment
I long to see the
morning sun
cast its beams
across your face.
And every waking
moment
I yearn to see the
stars align
and etch you’re
your name across the sky.
This short film is another reminder—along
with the many histories of Oscar Wilde, and more modern tellings such as Sam
Ashby’s The Colour of His Hair (2019) and Thomas Hescott’s The Act (2020),
to say nothing of earlier film’s such as James Ivory’s Maurice (1987)—of
the horror of the British attitudes toward homosexuality for most of the 20th
century.
Los Angeles, August
24, 2025
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).
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