Segev Gershon Green | Adam / 2013

clueless

by Douglas Messerli

 

Segev Gershon Green (screenwriter and director) Adam / 2013 [23 minutes]

 

This film begins quite predictably with a mother Ronit (Michal Yannai) who is finding it difficult to communicate with her teenage son, Adam (Moti Lugassi). The only thing quite odd about this narrative is that her son is still playing with dolls, two male dolls in fact, through which he creates scenarios between himself and another school mate, Jonathan (Shahar Roth) who inevitably tell one another that they are good looking and would like to have a relationship.

     In fact, Jonathan, clearly a heterosexual dating a girl, does not really even know of Adam’s existence. Accordingly, Adam begins to write him a long letter telling him of his love for him. He’s scared— as well as he might be—to tell him, but he’s convinced that they would make the perfect couple. Besides, he argues, in his written narrative, he’s the only one might make Jonathan truly happy. All others will be jealous of them. And at the end of his computerized letter, he hopes Jonathan feels the same way about him.

     Frankly, I’ve never before seen such a naïve character in a film. Innocent yes, I can remember how innocent and unaware of feelings about love I was at that age. But I was not delusional as Adam appears to be. I imagined that such a desire was totally aberrant to all the boys I admired; although over the years I’ve discovered that I might have been somewhat mistaken; not everyone had been kept in the dark about sex as I had been. But Adam seems truly unable to perceive the nature of those around him, as if he’s been set down upon a planet in which he’s never even heard a heterosexual male talk about the opposite sex—or others of his own gender for that matter.

    We might imagine a young dreamy-eyed boy writing such a letter, but this one actually sends it. “Thanks for letting me know. Talk tomorrow,” Jonathan writes back, the young boy having evidently been taught some serious lessons in ironic mendacity.

     By this point in the film, only 4 minutes in, I was terrified of what might come next.

    Apparently even the director was afraid to show us precisely what happened. The next day we see the mother on the phone in conversation with her presumably divorced or estranged husband begging for money simply in order to survive, when a door slams signaling the arrival home of her son. She yells at him for slamming the door, but quickly recognizes that he has returned home with a black eye.

     Her demands to know what happened, lead nowhere. The boy’s answer is that he simply fell. She immediately leaves the room and returns with a towel and some water, caring as best she can for the swollen eye.

     She asks him if he was beaten, but he denies it. She asks him to explain it, but he refuses. That is common for those who have been bullied, fearful for even explaining to adults what’s truly happening on the immediate level, that their son or daughter is being maltreated because of a differences—most often sexuality or social behavior having to do with normative notions of gender.

     Before Adam knows it, the internet is filled with the news of his being gay, with further threats from Jonathan and his friends. Adam’s solution is to skip school and go shopping for more male dolls. He hangs out the next day as well in the local shopping mall, observing two young males engaging in sex in the bathroom, who wonder if he wants to join them.

     But clearly this clueless young boy is not yet truly ready for sex. Love is all a romance, sex is undefinable, a simple rubbing of one body against the other as he does with the dolls.

     Finally, the school principal’s office calls to question if Adam is all right, explaining to his mother that he has not been to school since the “incident.” It is now in her court, and her behavior will help define what is about to happen.

     She enters his room, searching through his drawers and finding the dolls. At that moment, he returns, startled to find her in his room. She challenges him, demanding to know what he’s doing with the dolls, even questioning whether he might be stealing them from little girls. She calls him a liar when he answers her question of where he’s been with the words, “at school.” When he refuses to explain what is happening, she begins to gather the dolls up into a trash bag, but when she pulls the dolls from his hands, he begs her to leave “Jonathan!”

     “Who’s Jonathan?”

     “I love him.”

     But the answer receives only a slap in the face. The mention of his love is met with hostility even from his mother.

     After quietly pondering the situation, Adam dismembers one of his favorite dolls, beheading him and tossing the others away as well. He holds, finally, only the one that he calls Jonathan. Going online only to see more crudely created pictures of himself as a subject of mockery, he fantasizes that Jonathan suddenly appears, asking him to get ready. Alas, we know too well where this is leading.

     His fantasy Jonathan dresses him and kisses him.

    At work in a hospital, the mother receives a cellphone message that says only, “I’m sorry.”

   When she attempts unsuccessfully to reach Adam, she drives home, an extremely troubled look on her face. She rushes upstairs and pushes open the door of her apartment, racing to Adam’s room

where she finds his hanging body, which no amount of resuscitation can revive.

   This film describes itself as part of “a multinational effort to keep the conversation of teenage bullying alive,” with apparently Israel, Indonesia, and the US involved in its making. And if one is at all caring, there can be no argument about the good intentions of such educational works.

     My only wish is that they had made the teenager who was so awfully bullied a bit more believable. As it is, he seems less like a queer boy and more like an alien child from outer space. We know that schools do not have a very good track record of resolving such problems and often exacerbate such problems, but if knew of such an “incident,” why didn’t they further investigate what truly happened? And how could the mother, supposedly a doctor or nurse, not have perceived that a teenage son still playing with dolls needed some immediate psychiatric attention? Or simply logical perceive that the black eye, a doll named Jonathan, and a secretive son added up to a severe problem?

     Or why not just create a more typical situation, where the child is not even fully aware of his difference, but simply senses it as the others torture him for what they imagine his sexuality to be?   

That is the way most of us lived out our lives with bullies.

     This film not only has created an absolutely clueless character but his been rather clueless itself in its narrative surrounding such horrific incidents. And in the end, it seems difficult to feel full sympathy for so many imaginary characters that have little relationship to our real lives.

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).