Harry Jenkins | With You, in Our Town / 2024

unrecognizable

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harry Jenkins (screenplay and director) Harry Jenkins With You, in Our Town / 2024 [14 minutes]

 

British director Harry Jenkins’ short film might have been somewhat earth-shattering if it had been released in 1999 or early in the new millennium, but 24-years later the fact that a dear friend like Benny (James Leslie) returns home for the “gap” from the university to find that none of his friends are even recognizable, particularly his best childhood buddy Tom (Dan Trifunovic) is hardly surprising.

   Benny’s world, in fact, has completely been altered since he has realized at uni that he is gay, so that now Isaac and Kevin’s gay jokes sound fairly homophobic, and along with the fact that basically they are, all four of them, perfectly happy to spend a day playing football and drinking before they retreat to the local pub with their girlfriends, events quite literally turn Benny’s stomach.

     He sees Isaac as the “classic straight male into action,” and his continual gay jokes more than a little disturbing. And then there is Tom, whom—given their childhood closeness—he’s somehow convinced himself might have become gay, still acting probably like he always did, as the mindless straight boy he’s always been. Within a few moments after their pub gathering, Benny heads off home having, as one of them puts it, a “meltdown.”

      How to explain what he’s feeling. Isaac attempts to explain that just because of his jokes, he’s not a homophobe, but Benny now sees everything differently. His summary of the situation is at the heart of this film:

“I just can’t keep pretending that all the things you say don’t bother me, that it’s fine, ‘cause it’s not okay. Just so many things have shifted, and, and I’m so sick of people using words so personal and so conflicting, all for what? To tease someone, to poke fun all covered up because it’s just banter and it’s all right and, and who cares and whatever but I care.

     I’ve come home and I don’t recognize anyone. It’s like the faces are the same but the people are gone and there’s just so much that’s different now and you’re all so blissfully unaware of how things have…”

 

     There Benny leaves off, realizing what novelist Thomas Wolfe perceived nearly a century earlier, “You can’t go home again.”

     When Benny walks off, one of the boys asks, “Do you think he’s….”

     Tom interrupts them with his assertive response, “Yeah.”

    Benny’s childhood friend finds him laying in the grass on an open hill which they obviously regularly visited as kids. Upon establishing the fact that while he, himself, is sexually wired differently, Tom lays down next to Benny, assuring him that he’d long had his suspicions, but that “it” [Benny’s being gay] doesn’t matter, that even his sexual feelings for him are no problem (who wouldn’t love this beautiful face, he jests). They are still friends. Things are like they always were between them. 

    But, of course, they’re not. Everything has changed, even perhaps the attitudes toward homosexuality of his friends; this is a far more open group than one might suspect in a small town in which homosexuality as outlawed until just a few years before these boys’ birth.

       It is pretty evident that, except for occasional visits to his family, that in the future Benny’s return to town will become briefer and briefer until they will come to an end. And when Tom marries, surely even that friendship will probably perish.

     Given my own inability to travel and the death of my parents, I doubt I shall ever visit my hometown in Iowa again. There is nothing except for my brother and his family to draw me back.

     There are no revelations or even surprises, accordingly, in this cinematic narrative, just as there are no important revelations of LGBT life in Jenkins’ work—except for the fact, perhaps, that despite the insensitive comments of young men like Isaac and Kevin, they have perhaps become somewhat more accepting of a gay boy in their midst. Despite, Benny’s heartfelt and justified speech, what happens in and around this version of “Our Town,” has also somewhat changed just as it remains the same. The real changes have all been Benny’s, which is what university life  hopefully results in.

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Ahuatl Amaro | Physical Therapy / 2024

no real choice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ahuatl Amaro (screenwriter and director) Physical Therapy / 2024 [9 minutes]

 

Ronnie (Jason Genao) is a cute gay physical therapist working with poor Hispanic children such as the one represented in this short 2024 film by the charming physically disabled Leonard (Aidan Gutierrez), whose mother and he have been forced to move because of finances, making it difficult for Ronnie to even find them, the subject of the first few frames of this film.

     Today, since the new apartment is still filled with boxes, Ronnie suggests that he take Leonard to the park for his therapy, a delight for the boy, who obviously enjoys the company of and looks up to the kind and friendly physical therapist.

      Since he doesn’t have a father, and at school it’s going to be the fathers’ visiting day, he wonders if Ronnie can come and talk to his class. Ronnie wisely says he’ll have to think about it, which means he’ll need the permission of his superior, something, after we later encounter her, that is highly unlikely. But even the half-promise gives the child joy.

     Yet as the boy encounters other children playing nearby when goes to retrieve the ball and they make fun of him, he pauses, wishing that he were “normal.” That word sets off a trigger in many a gay man who has been treated and called by others as something perverse and abnormal since childhood. Ronnie explains that there is no “normal,” and mutters a rap of his own wishes:

 

“Yeah, I wish I was stronger too.

And I wish, I wish, I wish

‘I wish I were a little bit taller

I wish I were a baller,

A billionaire, private jet

Record label, shot caller.’”

The boy points to the nearby tree, “Well at least you could climb a tree.”

    How can Ronnie resist in helping Leonard get to the first notch of the tree, from which the child calls out joyfully, only to fall the very next moment?

    An ambulance is called. Leonard is all right, no bones broken, but Ronnie’s superior puts him on desk duty until things are settled with the boy and his mother, which means he himself won’t be paid until he’s given permission to see patients again.

    Meanwhile, he receives a call from Sylvia Sommers (Sarah Owens) at the Canyon Springs Rehabilitation and Self-Realization Center, a private organization that caters mostly to wealthy whites whose children are physically disabled; we see one well-dressed parent on the phone to his woman friend describe his child as a dim-wit, wishing he’d made his wife have an abortion. Syvia, who wears an LGBTQ+ pin, finds Ronnie, as a gay Hispanic, to be the perfect candidate and offers him to job, to begin the very next Monday. She appears to have not even bothered to contact his current employer.

     And now Ronnie must make a decision whether to remain in a job with low wages and little future or babysit children who their parents want out of their lives.

     There is little question in this small film, full of heart, what Ronnie’s decision will be, which for me is the movie’s failure. Amaro’s film has a case to make, and succeeds in making it; and anyone with an ounce of empathy—now seen as a detriment by our current government officials—would agree with Ronnie’s decision.

      But then we have no real tension in this narrative other than the basic poverty of Ronnie’s patients and his own life. The poor are always ready to help their own kind, while the wealthy and even the middle class seek out differences from which they can remove themselves or mock.

     Yet life doesn’t always fit that banner of goodness. Many of the poor and abused were among those who voted for precisely the ones who desire to squelch any empathy that might remain in their minds. And occasionally, it is those of wealth and those with middle-class values who reach out to help the poor and disadvantaged. Alas, this film, for all its good attentions, portrays human behavior as narrowly as do our current government leaders. Perhaps the director might have at least given Ronnie some deep soul-searching and doubts about his good deeds. Even the saints suffered for their “alternative” choices and actions.

      And, finally, it is perhaps the children of those who least care for them that might just need someone like Ronnie.

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).