Craig Boreham | Drowning / 2009

rejection of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Craig Boreham (screenwriter and director) Drowning / 2009 [20 minutes]

 

From the very beginning of Australian director Craig Boreham’s 2009 short film, you feel something is eerily wrong as a long-haired handsome young man, Mik (Miles Szanto) changes clothes, standing for an over-long moment against the doorway before telling his mother that his friend has arrived and that he’s going out. She looks up from folding her clothes and says nothing, a frown on her face.

      Finally, the son leaves the house and enters his friend’s car, and for the first time one feels returned to somewhat recognizable territory, the other young boy Dan (Xavier Samuel), even more dashing than Mik, greeting him as they head off to his new girlfriend’s house, explaining that he just wants his friend to accompany him. His reasons are never explained.

      But once they reach the beautiful moderne home in front of which Dan is even embarrassed to park his car, things return to being odd, Mik’s behavior, in particular, almost inexplicable. A young, good-looking girl, Phaedra (Tess Hubrich) greets Dan, happy to see him but surely curious about his having brought along Mik, a friend she’s obviously only heard about.

      She invites them in and before she can even formally greet him, Mik observes that her father is obviously wealthy, she, immediately put on the defense, countering that he’s worked hard for everything he has. Mik quickly responds that his father has worked hard all his life but never had even a dream of something like this, immediately establishing, unnecessarily it appears, the wide class difference between Mik and Phaedra and, probably by extension, between Dan and his new girlfriend. She later picks up this theme by telling Mik that she’s about to attend a prestigious at school and wondering whether or not he’s applied to a university. After pointlessly suggesting that he needs to proceed, he barks back at her that his grades are no good and his parents could not possibly afford a college education for him and need him to stay at home and work.

       A little taken aback, as is Dan who tries to shush his friend from such hostile remarks, she suggests they try out the pool, Dan arguing that he hasn’t brought along his togs. No one can see you here, she replies, suggesting they go in their underwear. Mik readily agrees and strips to his briefs, Dan soon following.

       And for a moment again, as the two boys frolic in the pool, grabbing and wrestling one another as they clearly have done for years, things again seem somehow “normal,” as she goes off to change into her bathing suit.

        It is obvious that in both the situations of normalization it was been times when the two boys were alone and sharing their lives, the score by Pete Goodwin always hinting at danger, ceasing whenever the two are alone together. But until the end of this remarkable work, this is the last moment we do not feel a sense of uneasiness or dread.

       Once Phaedra returns, Dan going over to her and almost predictably, despite her requests he not do so, pulling her into the pool, things seem akilter once again, Mik being reduced to a background figure as the two, Dan and Phaedra, meet up in kisses and hugs under the water. Alone in a far corner, Mik finally rises to the surface, gets out and trots back into the house to get another couple of beers. But by the time he returns, they have already begun sneaking up stairs to her bedroom, Mik following behind like he were a criminal voyeur, sitting down before the small crack in the door to hear them talking about his bizarre behavior—Phaedra suggesting that it’s clear he doesn’t like her—and to watch them begin to engage in sex.

       When they return to the pool, Mik is sitting in a brood beside it. The two continue to kiss and make out, Mik going inside again and pissing in the kitchen sink before reentering the pool area where the couple are now cuddled together as they sleep in a large pool chair. Mik reaches for Dan’s face, but moves his hand quickly away, simply stirring the boy’s comfortable sleep with his girlfriend in his embrace.

       Mik dives in, with the film flashing back to show us several scenes about his loving relationship with his older brother, Tommy. In the central scene, where Tommy shares some potent pot with him, at one point gently blowing the smoke into brother’s mouth, we see the boy not only in complete adulation of his elder sibling but almost overwhelmed with love for him in a way that is not quite normal. As Dan and he have previously done, they wrestle together on Tommy’s bed.

       In a brief later scene we see Mik discover his brother dead in the same room, mucus running from his nose and mouth, evidently having overdosed from some ever stronger drug. And we now recognize the source of much of Mik’s confused behavior. Tommy has apparently only recently died.

      By the time we return to the narrative present, we see Dan in the pool trying to retrieve his buddy’s seemingly drowned body, pulling him out, and eventually, after a struggle, bringing him back to life.

     Dan can only apologize to Phaedra as he dresses his friend after, given Mik’s drunk and almost comatose condition, he must have had to carry his friend to the car, where Mik, in an apparent daze, is now waiting.

       On their ride back to Dan’s house, Mik weakly apologizes, but otherwise nothing is said. Arriving at Dan’s house, he half-carries Mik inside, undresses him, and forces him into the shower, the naked boy finally coming full back to life and explaining that the girl doesn’t love his friend, that she’s only using him, and, at the very same moment lunging toward Dan, embracing him, and engaging in a deep kiss.

        Dan quickly pulls away so suddenly, that Mik falls into the nearby tub, curled up like a fetus in fear of his friend’s abandonment. And suddenly we understand the strangeness of all that has proceeded this moment: Mik is desperately in love with Dan and has no one else in his life. As he tells his friend, his parents no longer even speak. 

     Confused and attempting to assimilate what he has just learned, Dan nonetheless is able to coach his friend into bed. And as Mik breaks into uncontrollable tears, he crawls into bed with him, holding his head against his chest. So the film ends.

     There are no answers provided in Boreham’s movie, after what we have just witnessed perhaps no longer even questions. All we know is that through the cinematic power of his images these two young men need one other more than the wealthy girl needs anything or anyone. Whether Dan can come to terms with Mik’s love is unknowable, but we do perceive that without his love Mik will surely fall to pieces, be symbolically torn apart by the mythical horses which killed Hippolytus  for having rejected Phaedra’s embraces in Greek mythology, only here Mik rejects the love in Dan’s name.

        Like other significant short LGBTQ films of the first decade of the 21st Century—Alan Brown’s O Beautiful (2002), Welby Ings’ Boy (2004), Gabrielle Russell’s Keel (2004), Roberto Fiesco’s David (2005), Soman Chainani’s Davy and Stu (2006), Etienne Kallos’ Doorman, Christian Tafdrup’s Awakening (2008), Till Kleinert’s Cowboy (2008), Marcus Schwenzel’s Brotherly Love (2009), and Dominic Leclerc’s Nightswimming (2009)—the film provides no solution, not even an ending. The characters and we have come to perceive the problem even if there can be no resolve. And recognizing that problem, the tragedy of the short and brilliantly filmed work has been revealed, its only purpose.

       One might suggest that given the gerund form of the film’s title we must imagine the process of suffocation has only just begun. Both boys will either drown in one another’s love or without it.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).