Robert W. Gray | Zack & Luc / 2014

generic gay relationship 101

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert W. Gray (screenwriter and director) Zack & Luc / 2014 [15 minutes]

 

The first time I saw Canadian director and teacher Robert W. Gray’s short film, Zack & Luc, I thought it was basically trite. But knowing that he is a respected filmmaker and professor of film at the University of Brunswick, I gave the short a second and even a third try. It did appear somewhat more interesting, but then all films are more fascinating to me as I begin to look at them for other things than one attends to on first viewing, particularly when the first time around one is generally focused on plot.

     Fortunately, there is no plot, in the old-fashioned meaning of that word, in Gray’s movie. It begins in a single frame declaring a break-up of a gay relationship between two young good-looking boys, and ends with one of them (Ryan O’Toole is Zach and Greg Profit is Luc) leaving the car, breaking up the scattered moments of memories of what he early on describes as a cliché—all breakups of relationships appearing to those involved as clichés.

     What the rest of the movie attempts to do is to explore those very ordinary moments by splitting the screen and presenting at all times two views of each situation as the two go through very ordinary acts of getting on the bus each day to go to work or school; eating, reading, and just staring into space; sharing special moments as they look into a tree—one seeing a bird the other simply observing the tree itself; attending movies together; kissing; sharing park outings;  having sex; and finally arguing or ignoring one another, faces turned away or hidden behind a newspaper, or both sharing long rainy walks across a bridge to talk things out.

      Just like the rivets to this steel-girded bridge hold it up, so these moments are what make up any relationship. But each bridge is somehow different just as are relationships. And we can’t see the breakup coming except that one of them obviously can’t abide arguments, while the other more often pouts and pulls away, finally being the figure who leaves the automobile in which they sit at the beginning and the end of this relationship.

      But somehow, despite attending to these mundane actions three times, the movie didn’t convince me that their world ever rose above being anything but a cliché, not a cliché of a life together but the cliché of what a good-looking gay couple actually do together: walking in the rain, lying in the grass with one’s head upon the other’s chest, dining on a park bench on prosciutto and green olives, pointing out the planets and stars to one another, running, and biking. The only thing that seemed to be missing is a scene of the two pushing and shoving up against one another as they somersault and leap-frog through a park or walk somberly hand in hand along an ocean strand.

      Except for the scenes of them reading and pouting, eating and rubbing their bodies up against one another, I could only wonder where such figures’ real lives might have gone. What they do at work, if they work? Who are their friends, if they have any? Do they travel separately or together? What movies are they watching, what books are they reading? Did these boys have any political views and do they discuss them? Everything in Gray’s film looked like it came out a cinematic photo shop named generic gay relationship 101. And all of this wasn’t helped by the fact that the figures spoke their lines as if they were reciting the New York School poetry of the second generation, trying to remove any emotional content from their voices as they recounted “I did this, I did that.”

      Sorry, as pretty as the images were, they didn’t fully convince me that they represented a relationship let alone these young men’s lives.

 

Los Angeles, April 25, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2003).