by Douglas
Messerli
Søren Grinderslev
Hansen (screenwriter and director) Sidste Kys (Please Stay) /
2009 [4.48 minutes]
Søren Grinderslev
Hansen’s short comic melodrama, Please Stay, which I might have
translated as “The Last Kiss” given the original title is Sidste Kys, begins with a seemingly strange
disclaimer from the director: “Dear You Tube. This is a fiction. The penis is
not real.” I’ll come back to that.
The scene begins with what sounds like
sex between two lovers, ending in orgasm, with the words “I love you.” But
almost immediately after a voice, presumably the other, announces, “Mikkel,
it’s over.”
After the initial shock, Mikkel (Allan
Hyde) answers, “How long have you felt this way?” receiving the answer “For a
while.” Obviously “their” relationship has come to an end, unexpectedly for
Mikkel.
Is he seeing someone else? Anders, Thue,
Nikolaj? Doesn’t he know that he sees how excited his friend is when he walks
into the room? He does realize that he’s straight?
When the other declares they’re just not
a good match anymore, Mikkel insists, “We’re the perfect match. You’re a part
of me.”
The other voice insists that things have
changed, “You’re not twelve anymore.” And they argue about Mikkel’s inability
to change, his friend suggesting he’s in a rut.
But suddenly Mikkel reveals his right
hand, covered in plastic wrap, and we begin to suspect that perhaps something
else is going on that we had not counted. Particularly when the voice wonders
why he won’t share him with others, Mikkel angry that he wants to sleep around.
Obviously the unseen “other” in this comic “dialogue” is Mikkel’s own penis,
reprimanding him for not having come out, for being attached only to himself
through his hand.
The penis finally insists that he “wants
to come out,” to which the intransigent Mikkel can only reply, “We can’t do
that.”
But the other insists that if he
doesn’t “share him” that simply can’t be together any longer.
Like any lover fearful of his loss, he
demands his friend “stay.” But the answer is obvious: “Then let me out. Tell
the world about me.”
It’s the same old story, Mikkel
insisting that if he told his parents about them, they’d disown him. “They’d
kill me at school. My life would be over.” Sadly, these are the logical excuses
made by all boys of his age who cannot deal with the possibilities of peer
rejection and homophobia in general.
But what are the alternatives, the real
alternatives, the director asks indirectly, by playing out the absurdity of a
solution that does not involve sexual openness.
His final cry, an absurd one—“people
would think I was insane!”—is answered even by his inner voice with the truth:
“You are insane. …Talking to your own dick.”
The only solution for someone so insane
as to not accept his sexuality, is to entirely abandon one’s sexuality suggests
the director. Mikkel pulls out a grater and apparently dares to do what he
threatens since the final image of the boy is of a mad scream.
But then it is madness, isn’t it, not to
be able to love the way you were born to love?
In Danish director Hansen’s short fable,
I take the scream as the metaphor for the logic of boy not listening to what
his own desires advise, to share himself with the world, to seek out others
outside the closet no matter what pain that costs. Surely it is better than the
pain of symbolic-castration, of sacrificing one’s sexual organs to the demands
of normative society. And of course, this metaphor can be taken much further
than a 17-year old boy trying to come to terms with his homosexuality at home
in his bed.
Los Angeles, June
10, 2022
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (June 2022).
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