Katie Smith | Crossroads / 2015

more than a friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katie Smith (screenwriter and director) Crossroads / 2015 [20 minutes]

 

Crossroads, British director Katie Smith’s 2015 film about a father-son relationship gone sour, is truly representative of how homophobia effects so many LGBTQ beings.

      The film begins with Rex (Laim Hallinan) waking early, having dreamt of his dead mother’s perfume. When he see him soon after in the kitchen of their Broadstairs flat making coffee for his permanently depressed father, we begin to perceive how the relationship between the two men is fraught with tension, his father Adrian (Paul Dewdney) asking after his son concerning his lateness, his answer being simply, “I was out with a friend.” “A girl,” asks his father, clueing us immediately in to the fact that he is somewhat worried about his son’s single status; but Rex answers again by sloughing the question off, “No just a friend.” When he reports that he will be out late that night as well, again meeting with a “friend,” we suspect that there is something he cannot or will not tell his father; and his father, we notice once the son has left, is worried, deep in depression, evidently triggered by his wife’s death.

      But this is a contemporary drama. Rex works as a graphic designer in a computer studio with several others such as Jaime (Chris Clynes), sitting only a row or two away. But when Jaime calls, obviously from another phone, to ask Rex to join him, we know something is up. The two meet in a stairwell on another floor of the building, intensely kissing one another. It appears that the two are in a healthy gay relationship and, at their age, are fairly safe from the effects of homophobia.

     Yet, at the same moment, we sense Rex’s fears. Might someone catch them in their furtive stairwell romance? Do his long evenings together with Jaime where they wander the town, from a light-hearted drinking session to a local game room, simply have fun together fulfill they desires? No gay bars or intense sexual sessions are involved. Presumably they do have regular sex, but that’s not part of dynamics of this movie.

       When Rex returns home, moreover, he finds his bedroom floor littered with torn and intact pictures that were obviously taken during other such joyful outings with the two friends. Clearly, his father had discovered his sexuality and has left in a furor. And when he returns drunk, he quickly damns his son, while Rex attempts to explain that he had long attempted to find a way to tell him. “Tell him what?” Adrian intones in a roar, “that my son is queer?” There is clearly no room in his homophobic fit for explanation. And Rex quickly leaves the house with a bottle of vodka in hand.

       Jaime calls soon after to relate his pleasure for their evening together, but senses immediately that something is wrong given his lover’s lack of response. By early morning, Rex, lying by the edge of the Strait of Dover, has finished his vodka and calls Jaime to tell his father he is sorry for what he is about to happen, immediately clicking off.

       Having observed a body bobbing on ocean waves in the opening scenes of the movie, we recognize what is about to happen, and so, apparently, does Jaime who immediately runs out to try to find and save his friend. Apparently, he know precisely where to look and, observing the same body with which the viewer had been previously tantalized, bravely swims out to retrieve the body, which looks bereft of life. But after several pumps of his chest, Rex spits up water and survives.

      Frankly the film loses a great deal of credibility—even if one has accepted the fact that a grown young man would have attempted suicide over his dad’s predictable reaction—when the hero Jaime immediately insists they call his father and clear up the issue. Before you can even wonder if Rex has caught his full breath, Jaime has made the call, told Adrian that there’s been an accident and he has pulled his son from the sea. Only when they arrive at his house door, does Jaime ask if Rex is up for the encounter.

      What happens next makes little sense if one wishes to believe that Rex’s father was such an incurable homophobe that his son had no choice but to sacrifice his life. But Adrian seems now broken and appalled at his son’s act, ready not only to completely accept his sexuality but to admit that since his mother died that he hasn’t been much of a father to the boy, so worried has he been about how they might carry on.

        It’s a nice ending if you want to believe in fantasies, that all you really need to do to bring out the love of a homophobic father is to threaten to do yourself in. But I’m, sorry to say, not convinced; I’ve seen too many fathers and mothers be perfectly happy to have their faggot sons and lesbo daughters go missing. And far too many parents, as we shall see in a later film under review here, are all too ready to put their “loved ones” into the hands of the uninformed and often barbarous conversion therapists or even relatives who insist they how to make a “man” or a “lady” out of their nonconforming kids.

       But the real issue in this film does not so much concern Rex’s father as it does the young man himself, who having been raised in a household of unspoken homophobia, as himself come to hate who he is. His happiness with Jaime doesn’t fully counter his own self-hate, which his constant fear of discovery by others intimates. It’s fine that his father has suddenly redeemed himself, coming round to except a situation which was previously unimaginable to him. But Rex will have to work hard, as must all self-haters, to allow the healing love of someone like Jaime truly pull him out of what John Bunyan called the “slough of despond,” not just the ocean waters. Over time he even may come to realize that Jaime is more than “just a friend.”

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).