by Douglas Messerli
David Bobrow (screenwriter, adapted from the
short story by Richard Hall, and director) Country People / 2016 [22 minutes]
Richard (Mike Burnell) has moved from New York
with the death of lover to live in a small Southern rural community. Evidently
a high school teacher previously in New York, he’s now opened up a consignment
antique shop and hired an assistant. Perceiving his boredom, she suggests he
teach a night course at the local college, not something he’s that interested
in doing. But when she says it will not be like New York, no knives, no drugs,
sweet country people, and he’s able to teach gay literature, which he could not
do in New York, he agrees.
His
students all look like throwbacks to another century, two young handsome boys,
James and William, (John J. Hansen and Marco Kengott) looking vaguely like
Civil War veterans, a woman, Millie Herkimer wearing a long 19th-century style
dress. And older man, Isreal (Paul Uhler) claims he used to run the drugstore,
replacing the original owner, Solomon.
Richard
is rather startled and rather put-off by their oddities, the fact that they
don’t have money, they claim, to buy the books and don’t have easy access to
computers. He places his own copies of the books they read—everything from
Socrates and James Baldwin to Willa Cather and gay Afghanistan War memoirs—in
the office so they can share the books.
They all demonstrate interest in the books, although some of them find
the stories all too sad (imagine had they taken a queer cinema course, how sad
they might find their plots). But they begin to open up in strange ways. James
and Bill suggest they live in a commune, since James was not able to return to
his family home after his wartime experiences. Millie reveals that the Herkimer
clinic which used to be a girl’s school was founded by her aunt. She (hinting
at Millie herself) got got into difficulty when they found correspondence
between her and another teacher. Isreal hints that the classmate he used to
work with in the drugstore was someone he so loved that he’d go to work just to
be near him, but he could never tell of his attraction.
James and Williams show him a postcard of them dressed in Civil War
costumes which they claim they had taken in Albany.
But slowly, as the course comes to a close and he begins to travel about
the small town, Richard discovers that things just don’t add up. The place
where James says they had the picture taken closed, so reports Richard’s clerk,
50 years ago. Solomon was the head of the pharmacy long
The joke is on him. Pretending to be figures of another age, who may or
have may not have been gay and couldn’t reveal it, the contemporary figures
seem all rather well-adjusted and accepted in their community. They seem to
have been testing him to see if he believes they are still as backward in their
community as it was decades ago.
In
fact, Richard’s class is now full for the next two semesters with a waiting
list. His subject is obviously a quite popular one for a community that
supposedly would not even talk about gay life.
There may have some small truth to what they claim about the families
thereabouts, but it’s clear by film’s end that this rural valley community is
far more open-minded than outsiders might have ever imagined. The good country
people of this community are not only “sweet,” but rather witty, not only
curious, but starving for more information on a subject in which many larger
communities throughout the US (New York City included evidently) is not always
easily taught what with the outcries and parents and community authorities.
Los Angeles, April 1, 2023
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April
2023).
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