dancing
by Douglas Messerli
Anders Thomas Jensen and David Rakoff (screenplay, adapted
from Jensen’s original Danish short film De Nye Lejere), Joachim Back
(director) The New Tenants / 2009 [21 minutes]
Almost as if David Mamet were attempting to write a
play in the style of Harold Pinter, Joachim Back’s 2009 dramatic comedy begins
with a long harangue by Frank (David Rakoff)—as he sits across a small table
from Peter (Jamie Harold)—concerning the terrible world we live in including
mass shootings, meaningless deaths, etc., all of which, he argues, none of us
can properly assimilate. We assume that before death we can make sense of
things, but we all disappear with kind of whimper and a desperate cry out that
death has come too soon.
Peter is
attempting to consume a lunch of shish kabob, but finds I difficult to eat
given all of the smoke coming from Frank’s cigarette. They are clearly
opposites, the one quiet, patient, Peter, dressed in a white T-shirt, the
other, Frank, garbed in a beanie hat, scarf, and coat as if he were freezing on
an icy street, with a demeanor that suggests he might be trying to channel Peter
Falk. They can hardly bear each other’s company, yet here they sit, a gay
couple, we soon find out, who have just moved into this apartment.
Jeffrey
Bowers, writing in the online magazine Vice nicely summarizes the
situation:
“The tenants are an ‘opposites attract’ gay
couple—Frank (writer/actor David Rakoff) and Peter (Jamie Harold). Frank, is a
chain-smoking, world class loather who can’t stop ranting about life’s
insignificance to his annoyed, yet caring lover. Peter, playing the film’s only
caring character, is in for quite a ride when the apartment’s burdens literally
come knocking on the door. First to arrive is a mad make-uped Grandma
desperately seeking flour for a cinnamon bun recipe being baked for her
granddaughter.”
Frank,
who answers the door, responds with the straight-faced jocular manner answering
the old woman’s request that his relationship to flour is “not all it could be”
due to not having baked since 1987. Perhaps she might try the couple who live
below them.
Delighted to share the gossip, she explains
since they were shot; well, Jerry, the previous tenant who lived in their
apartment was shot and when they came to see what all the noise was about, they
too were killed. Didn’t he know that? Jerry comments that they hadn’t been
apprised of terrible event when they signed for the apartment.
Peter
suddenly appears with a plastic bag of flour he has found in the kitchen cabinet,
left we soon discover, by the previous tenant, finally sending Grandma (Hannah
Hanft) on her way.
It that
same cupboard, Peter has also found some potato chips which he now begins to chow
down, despite the odious cigarette fumes that once more make their way toward
his nose and throat.
Yet they
hardly get another moment alone before the there is again a knock at the door,
this time Peter answering it, as a rather obese man, Jan (Vincent D’Onofrio)
pushes his way in, armed with a crowbar. He’s out to seek revenge on Jerry, who
has evidently been seeing his wife Irene, whose mother, so it seems, is also
the “Grandma” next door.
When the astounded couple explain that they
have just moved in and have never seen or even known of Irene, the sad husband
sits and, with tears alternately flowing between bouts of further anger,
briefly bleats out the sad tale of his wife’s unfaithfulness and her refusal to
even let him touch her.
But with
another knock on the door, he again raises the crowbar into the air, and goes
to face what he apparently believes is the miscreant with whom his wife
cheated. He is immediately shot and killed by the newcomer, a local drug dealer
Zelko (Kevin Corrigan) who perhaps was the man who killed Jerry and the couple
downstairs. Pulling in Jan’s dead body, he demands to know if they’ve, by
chance, found the bag of heroin for which Jerry still owes him.
What
else can the new tenants do but to deny any knowledge of such a bag, despite
the fact that Zelko has noted their very brief contact of eyes in recognition
of what was actually in the cupboard. He is ready to do them in as well and
look around the place for himself. That is, until Grandma knocks loudly at
their door, complaining even more she makes contact with them about the contents
of the flour they have loaned her for her Cinnamon buns.
Zelko shoots her dead through the door,
opens it, and drags her body into the apartment to join Jan’s corpse.
Do they
know how much they now owe him, given the fact, as he perceives, they have
handed over the heroin to Grandma? Cowering as he raises the gun, another
interloper opens the door and conks Zelko with the crowbar over the head as he
too joins the duo on the floor.
She is the faithless Irene (Liane
Balaban), now stoned out of her head. She curls up on the couch, recognizing
her husband on the floor as well as her Grandma before she falls into a deep
sleep from which she may not ever awaken.
This
film won the Best Live Action Short at the 82nd Academy Awards, which is somewhat
surprising, given that except for the strange camera aspect ratio of 2.35 : 1,
making for a very narrow screen in which the action is shot up most close that primarily
results in a sense of intense claustrophobia, this production, nonetheless,
smells entirely of greasepaint and stage boards.
Los Angeles, October 6, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October
2025).
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