Joan Montesinos Aznar and Gabriel Virata | Wherever You Are / 2016

the boy friend

by Douglas Messerli

Joan Montesinos Aznar (screenplay), Joan Montesinos Aznar and Gabriel Virata (directors) Wherever You Are / 2016 [14 minutes]

 

The 14-minute film Wherever You Are (2016) presents us with a different perspective than most LGBTQ films. In this work a grieving father (Guy Hargreaves) is seen traveling around the British landscape in an attempt to find someone who may have known his son, killed in an automobile accident.

       Experiencing memories of his son as a child, mostly of their putting together a miniature train track upon which they ran the train, he himself speeds endlessly via railroad in search of someone who may have known Paul. The father has perceived that his son was gay and was traveling on most weekends to see his lover in another town. The elder’s search is to find that lover so that he might explain his son’s absence, but also, we suspect, so that he might share his grief with someone else who loved his son.

        Although his search seems unceasing as he tracks down the various coffee houses and restaurants that have appeared, evidently, on his dead son’s credit cards, he finds no one who seems to know him. Another friend, just a friend not the boyfriend, telephones, sharing in a brief conversation; but that friend also doesn’t know who Paul’s boyfriend was.

     He finally encounters a young server in a restaurant who recalls the young man and his friend regularly dining at her restaurant, even suggesting that the other man works at a nearby establishment called The Terrace. The father excitedly seeks out the place, but the young server there is new to the place, helping his grandmother who has evidently just taken over the restaurant.

      In frustration, the father visits his son’s grave, only to find a rose laid upon the stone along with a note apparently thanking the dead boy for his love and wishing him well “wherever you are.”

      Obviously, Paul’s lover has heard about the accident and has even reached out to share his own sense of loss. It offers the father the only small piece of consolation he can find, as he dutifully writes out the contents of the note, presumably the only communication, sadly, he will ever have with his son’s gay lover.

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).