where to from here?
by Douglas Messerli
Art Bezrukavenko and Chris Stanley (screenplay), Kat
Holmes (director) Just Friends / 2025 [7 minutes]
In this wordless 7-minute movie, two friends (played
by Art Bezrukavenko and Chris Stanley) do almost everything together from
playing video games, their daily runs, workouts, and dining at their favorite of
Zillions Pizzas (who obviously paid well for their movie plug). Almost
everywhere they go Chris snaps a picture of Art.
But then something begins to shift as Chris
spends more and more time on his cellphone, just look at, but perhaps also
texting women. What we perceive is that Art has begun to fall in love with Chris,
and as the latter increasingly begins to beg off of their games, shy away from their
group selfies, and doesn’t even show up for their daily runs, Art begins to
feel apparently more and more like a grieving lover who’s lost his life-long
companion.
The final
straw is when he spots Chris eating in a restaurant with a blonde-haired girl.
He knows it’s over, even if the intertitles, who have been quoting Shakespeare
all along, add a quote from Hamlet: “We know what we are but know not
what we may be,” which I suppose gives at least a faint hope for a shift of Art’s
sexuality.
Meanwhile, stay tune; this is the second of the pair’s film. Maybe they’ll
even find their voices?
By the way, how do these two “friends’ manage to
live in a high-rise apartment with a view of the Manhattan skyline?
Los Angeles, October 19, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema review
(October 2025).
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