Anthony Schatteman | Volg mij (Follow Me) / 2015

teacher and student

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Dhondt and Anthony Schatteman (screenplay), Anthony Schatteman (director) Volg mij (Follow Me) / 2015 [16 minutes]

 

This happens probably more often than we like to admit. A young male student falls in love with his male teacher or someone a few years older who is not ready to fully commit to gay life. In this case, in Belgian-Dutch director Anthony Shatteman’s small soap opera, it is 20-year-old Jasper (Ezra Fieremans), who evidently works as the barkeep in a gay sauna, who has begun an affair with Gerard (Maaten Ketels), an individual who suddenly is no longer available to receive his phone calls.

    The two clearly have had a series of quite passionate sexual encounters, but suddenly that seems to have ended, as Gerard appears to have begun an affair with a woman, Vero (Lien Maes), and we have entered the territory of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name of two years later.

    Still obsessed with his teacher, young Jasper follows Gerard and his new girlfriend around the museum and overhears them in bathroom sex. When he finally confronts his former lover, he is told to not only stop following him, but basically to get lost.

      But we know, at least from the final scenes which may or may not be in the past, that the obsession between the two will not end that simply. If the last scenes are only those of Jasper’s memory, it is obvious that boy will to scarred for the rest of his life. But if they are a repeat of their relationship, it is even more terrifying for what Gerard and his new girlfriend will have to face in their future lives.

      So many gay men still appear to sublimate their queer passions by attempting to put them out of their memory in the arms of a heterosexual marriage. It almost always ends in disaster, and the results in a still unforgiving society are revealed in the kind of desperate pain we see in films such as Making Love (1982), The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), and so very man other films, long and short, which I have discussed in these volumes.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).