Dawid Ullgren | Mr. Sugar Daddy / 2016

the gap

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dawid Ullgren (screenwriter and director) Mr. Sugar Daddy / 2016 [14 minutes]

Hans (Bengt C.W. Carlsson), a man in his mid-sixties, takes in a night club where apparently young gay boys meet up with older men. He watches another older man, perhaps in his 50s, hugging and kissing a very young boy, as he orders up a couple of gin and tonics. A 20ish year-old dancing boy gives him a look, and when the boy stops dancing, Hans goes over to where the boy is sitting with two girls and introduces himself. The flirtatious boy identifies himself as Andrzej (Aleksandar Gajic).

     When asked if he’s having fun, Hans suggests things have certainly been better. He has just separated from his husband, he explains, after 30 years. The males leave Denice (Emelia Hansson) and her friend and move over to a quieter part of the room where Andrzej briefly asks how Hans is doing after the breakup before he begins to talk to the elder about the fact that he has never been in a relationship. His previous boyfriend cheated on him. And suddenly Andrzej seems to be insinuating that there are deeply shared feelings between the two of them, although he quickly interrupts it to suggest they “just have fun.”

   Unfortunately, that brief but intense conversation leads Hans to believe that there might be a possibility of at least a nice evening together, possibly even the beginning of a new relationship. But it is obvious from the beginning that Hans is not a likely “Sugar Daddy,” and that a friendship with so many years between them is not only impossible, but a mistake. He has come to the wrong place to seek out solace for his loss.

      Denice comes to get Andrzej, angry that he has left her alone on the couch, and is now ready to leave. The young couple argues.

     Seeing the fuss, Hans intrudes, suggesting the boy have just one more drink with him as Denice storms out. The older man imagines he has won the day. Again they talk, mostly about Andrzej, who admits he was deeply in love with the other boy who he was with for only a month, insisting that it will never happen again—either deluding himself or becoming a cynic far too young. What we realize in his conversation is that the problems of young gay men are so very different for a man who has spent 30 years with another before breaking apart, my word choice for a situation that is not just temporal but earth shattering in its ramifications, which is perhaps why Hans has attempted this evening to return to his youth, to start over again.

      Hans’ wise face takes in all the pain the boy is suffering, but obviously cannot answer for any of its seemingly insubstantiality, its almost trite meaninglessness. All Hans can say is that “all men are not like him.” The two touch hands in a moment of generational bridging.

      But at the very same moment a friend of Andrzej, Henrik (Erik Thosteman) puts his hands over the boy’s eyes and is heartily greeted. “Why are you sitting over here?” New drinks that Hans has ordered are set before them by the unshirted bartender, as the two boys go off together, leaving Hans quite alone.

      In the bathroom, Hans overhears the two boys laughing at the way he looked at them as they moved away, and having taken up the drink Hans had ordered for him, offers it now with some irony to Andrzej. Henrik takes out a small box of pills, and Andrzej offers Hans one, the elder demurring. Even nastier, Andrzej adds, “Weren’t you young in the 70s?” Worse yet, Andrzej puts a small pill in his mouth, moves over to Hans and gives him a long kiss, delivering up the pill to his “friend.”

      The effects it has on Hans are unpleasant. We see him trying to dance with the kids in the harsh pulsing lights. He takes another pill, there are more kisses. But before long the boys move off to a corner for more “real” kissing, Hans suddenly noticing their absence.

      Following them outside, Hans moves towards them angrily. “So you’re fucking him tonight? You fucking used me!” The boys are startled by his screaming reproach. “You’re drunk,” Andrzej responds as the two turn to go back inside again. A moment later, Hans follows, attempting to apologize, but a bouncer quickly intrudes, asking the boy if everything’s okay. Andrzej points out that the old man has been rude, and the bouncer tells Hans, gently moving him along, it’s time to go home.

     Hans stares back intently at the boy, as Henrik tries to draw him inside, Andrzej staring at his former “friend,” as Hans turns and sadly walks off—the gulf between 21 and 71 having grown more immense than either has ever before imagined.

     Swedish director Dawid Ullgren’s short work is a profoundly sad film, but also a kind of moral tale, reminding us that youth cannot be rediscovered by trying to embrace it as so many middle-aged and older men (and women) attempt to. And a breakup of a relationship at that age is so devastating that to even imagine comparing it, as Andrzej has, with a break up of a 20-year-old affair of one month is absurd and meaningless. Someday perhaps the young man of this tale will have his own regrets for not perceiving the reality with which that night he was faced.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).