Britt Randle | Run Rabbit / 2014

the chase

by Douglas Messerli

 

Britt Randle (screenwriter and director) Run Rabbit / 2014 [10 minutes]

 

I wouldn’t describe Britt Randle’s rather charming short film as a narrative, but rather as a series of events surrounding a gay cruising of a woods just outside a major Canadian city.

   Based on an autobiographical event, there are no apologies made for the thin young gay man (Adam Christie) observed cruising in this work. From the pre-title events we glimpse it apparently is a place that the central figure has regularly scoured for quite pleasant sex, a woodland park filled with men seeking men of all ages.

    Christie’s character is a mix of a seeming innocent and a knowledgeable cruiser, at one point approaching two handsome men already in the midst of making love, seeking out whether they are either open to a voyeur or perhaps even a third partner.

   Even the open-eyed stares of an older man, to whom the central figure is obviously not attracted, doesn’t prevent him from carefully looking back over his shoulder to see if the other has been stopped in his tracks. Like much of cruising, it’s the game that matters sometimes more than the sex.

    And that is precisely what we discover when the thin innocent encounters another attractive boy of a similar age (Michael Raymond Clarke). Clarke’s character, however, isn’t your standard stare and stand-back cruiser, but as the title suggests, much more like an eager bunny, a man on the run.

    Once he’s captured the attention of our cruising hero, he leaps off into the woods, stopping only long enough to see if the other is following. Seeing that he is, he rushes off again, this time pushing and leaping his way into denser and denser underbrush, at one point easily scaling and scrambling across a tight-wire fence.

     For a moment the two meet up there, as if the follower were considering whether or not it was worth continuing the game. But soon he too, not quite so effortlessly, makes his way over the fence, the other running off and playing, a bit like a child, a kind of hide and seek, popping out every so often behind different trees, each a bit further in the distance.

 

    Finally, as the “rabbit” moves to higher ground, our original boy realizes he will never be able to out-sprint the other, as they both turn for a moment toward one another, holding up their hands as if to release one another from the chase.

     Off goes the rabbit, as Christie’s character turns his head toward the sun brightly signaling him in another direction than the linear run previously has. A press-related comment describes it as representing something like euphoria, but at this point the excitement is over as the revelation and feeling of joy settles in, perhaps from the comprehension that one is still young enough to desire and chase love, or at least the sure-footed pan that signifies the pull of sex.

    There is no fulfillment at this end of the run, only the realization that he is desired enough to be worthy of that chase for love.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).