Reid Waterer | Bed Buddies / 2016

friends and lovers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reid Waterer (screenwriter and director) Bed Buddies / 2016 [15 minutes]

 

This is the 6th film I’ve see of filmmaker Reid Waterer, most of them on quite different subjects and, I must admit, of varying quality, while they are all fairly well made and approach fascinating subjects.

     Bed Buddies, from 2016, like the 2012 film Performance Anxiety, is basically a work in the dialogue tradition, despite the fact that it begins in bed, when the central figures of the film wake up the next morning after what they gradually recall was a night a wonderful sex.

     But it is the very fact that they are in bed together that startles first Jared (Dylan Wayne Lawrence) and Brent (Daniel Lipshutz), who are each surprised after drunken pleasure to find he shared it with by a close friend Danny (Enzo Nova).

      For them this immediately creates a problem. They all rely deeply upon each other for comradery and advice and have apparently thought about one another sexually. But now…they realize that they’re not only attracted to one another, but have found the night one the most pleasurable sexual experiences of their lives.

      Moving from the box spring to the debating platform the three of them discuss their next options: to forget the great sex they just enjoyed and return to friendship—as they all realize, a very difficult thing to do—or they abandon their friendship and take on one another as lovers. But that too is problematic since there are three of them. Has a threesome ever dated, romanced each other as a trio, showed up as a truple to social events?

      It’s strange, as one critic pointed out, just how much things change in a few years. In 2016 there was not a great deal of talk about polyamorous relationships. Although sexual threesomes where often talked about in LGBTQ movies, and even occasionally portrayed, they were, as this trio suggests, one-night stands, not something that had grown out of years of friendship.

     As the director himself suggests, the problem isn’t generally one that appears in the heterosexual world. Heterosexual men and woman have same-sex friends without ever even imagining that they might find each other sexually attractive—although, obviously, such things have been known to happen. The wonderful fiction writer Harry Mathews devoted an entire work, The Journalist, to just such incident wherein two straight male friends suddenly found themselves head-over-heels in love, unable to stop kissing. But that is an exception to the rule.

      These men are terrified that if they are so literally “embrace” each other as lovers in bed, they will lose the easing-going confidentiality of the beer pub. Good advice will turn into to jealous strategies of how to keep the other close. Their personal comments about others will be interrupted as dangerous “outside interests” that might deter the relationship.

      Obviously there is a great deal of logic in this, although as a youth I certainly had good friends with whom I also regularly had sex, neither of us having any intentions of entering into a romantic relationship. But then that was the sexually open 1960s when you probably could have had sex with your brother and his wife without raising eyebrows in some quarters.

      Certainly, these men are worried that their sudden interest in each other’s bodies will mean giving up their easy-going rapport. And the three of them together further casts shadows upon their futures. As one of them suggests, it’s bad enough to have to deal with the suspicions of jealousies of one partner, but two is nearly unimaginable.

      They finally agree, that despite their attraction to each other, they’ll remain just good friends. That is until their eyes catch a glimpse of each other once again, which starts up the pattern of kisses, a leap back into bed, and—as Waterer turns his black-and-white figures into color—another round of pleasurable three-man sex.

     Perhaps this is the first recorded polyamorous gay relationship in LGBTQ cinema,* followed by Matthew Puccini’s Lavender in 2019, wherein we observe a polyamorous affair between two married men and a younger boy come to an end.

      The film is billed as a comedy, which it is given its conclusion; but the heart of this work is a dialogue of serious intent, which although not of great significance, certainly detracts from the “light entertainment” value of Waterer’s movie. Although I must admit, just looking at the three hunks together gave me a great deal of joy, and seeing them lined up in a row in bed certainly brought me to giggles. Debate all they want, now that they’ve seen each other naked there is no turning back. And as Jared mentions, Brent is surprising well-hung, which might not be so obvious if he hadn’t spent the 15-minutes of this film in his undershorts.

 

*The first film LGBTQ film that I know of to actually talk about polyamorous relationships was in Jon Fitgerald’s Apart from Hugh (1994) in which a female guest to the party hosted by two gay men talks about her happy relationship with a husband and wife. Before, obviously, there were many polyamorous relationships on film, described generally as a ménage à trois. Of the obviously male gay, two males and one female examples, you might begin with Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933). Other early two-male and one-female examples are François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Love Circle (1969), Harold Prince’s Something for Everyone (1970), and Carlos Hugo Christensen’s The Intruder (1979), the last of which concerns two brothers and a wife. None of these, however, contain what the boys of Bed Buddies are proposing.

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).