Katie Parker | Company / 2023

finding love in your own back yard

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katie Parker (screenwriter and director) Company / 2023 [11 minutes]

 

James Jenkins (Bejamin Stubbs) has recently lost his lover, probably through death but perhaps through a breakup since there are some paintings missing from the walls. In any event, he’s become a recluse, not even responding to his best female friend’s telephone calls, trying to invite him out and to introduce him to a similarly creative male friend of hers.

     James is a sketch artist and walks through the beautiful Cheshire park near his home, sketching and observing the flowers, the overflows of water, the shrubbery, and a young man who he keeps encountering.

     Clearly James is attracted to the man, who daily greets him. But every time he appears, the self-conscious artist scurries off, terrified of actually having to communicate with someone, particularly given his self-imposed isolation.

     He’s currently reading a book on how to date in the digital age, and even takes a picture of himself to post on-line. But he’s still terrified of the possibility of actually reaching out even through the internet.

     A flyer about a gay bar mixer is balled up and tossed into the wastebasket.

     But suddenly he does remember that there is someone to whom he might talk, someone to spend a little time with if only he can get up the nerve.

      This time when the man, Simon (Jacob Taylor), speaks to him, he answers explaining that the flowers on a nearby tree bloom for only a couple of weeks. Simon comments that what they are witnessing then is something truly special, which brings a smile to James’ face.

       For the first time, they sit together on a nearby bench, Simon asking about James’ drawings and wondering if he might see one of them.

       James is fearful, as he explains, of showing them. Afterall someone might not like them. But Simon argues that anything that is done with love is meaningful and worthy of sharing, finally convincing James to show him.

       The drawing is of two men, their arms around one another, looking off from the nearby bridge that only a day before has become surrounded a large puddle about which Simon had briefly commented. Simon loves the drawing, making it clear that he has no difficulty about gay relationships, even given the possibility that it might be a short of fantasy picture of James with someone like him as the other.

       James signs the drawing, pulls it from his sketch book and gives it as a gift to Simon. A phone call sends Simon off, but with the hope that he might see James again the following day.

       He thanks James, who when Simon has left, openly expresses a thank you to his new friend. He now has found “company,” someone who he immediately has come to like and may perhaps develop a full friendship, maybe even something more serious without having to make an appointment on line or visit a dreaded gay bar.

       British director Katie Parker’s work is not particularly profound, but its quiet way offers up the possibility that what we sometimes are looking for may be closer than we might imagine, that simply observing our own neighborhood might lead us to discover what we are missing in our lives.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).