Lee Haven Jones | Want It / 2015

insiders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roger Williams (screenplay), Lee Haven Jones (director) Want It / 2015 [11 minutes]

 

British director Lee Haven Jones’ Want It begins with a simple desire to have something that doesn’t belong to oneself. An intruder Rob (Jamie Andrew Cutler) breaks into a moderne mansion, wandering its rooms, eating a small cake and drinking from a bottle of wine from the refrigerator before he passes as if awed and almost struck down by desire with the beauty of the living room as he reaches to the ceiling and falls to the floor.   

     Soon after, we observe him in the master bedroom trying on the owner’s T-shirts, which he fits perfectly, and we realize, now fully, just how beautiful this intruder is, trim and well-built. Surely this body has been shaped by a gym subscription as opposed to living on the streets.

      A moment later, in a reflection we see that the owner, Simon (Alan Turkington) has returned, a kind a bat in hand. Surprised by the appearance of the other, Rob slowly takes off the shirt, and is ordered by Simon to also take off his pants. Standing naked, revealing all his beauty, he appears so very attractive that Simon rushes to him, grabs him around the neck, and simultaneously begins to masturbate his unwanted visitor, now clearly an object of the owner’s desire.

      Rob reacts with outrange, hissing “I’m going to kill you,” but Simon, grabbing him tighter around the neck, reacts, “That’s a strange thing to say with your cock in someone’s hand.” Together the two men, obviously now erect, begin to thrust themselves at each other, kissing as they ejaculate.

       This might have been what the promotional blurb suggests it is, a tale about “longing and desire in all its forms,” until the game comes to an end with Rob asking, “What time to do they come?” presumably referring to their mutual guests expected for dinner.

        What appeared to be a statement about need and desire has now been transformed into a short film about two rich boys who like playing out the games of the acquisitive behavior to enhance their sex lives. Too bad. We, like the boys who have finished jacking off, find ourselves with limp cocks and empty heads, disinterested in what might have been at least fascinating as a metaphor about the relationship of social classes, those on the inside and those on the out. These gay boys are obviously both insiders who live so similar to well-to-do heterosexual couples that they need to play games simply to arouse themselves.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).