Bryan Scot Cooper | Leanne Is Gone / 2013

sex as an expression of grief

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesse James Rice (screenplay), Bryan Scot Cooper (director, with Annie K. McVey) Leanne Is Gone / 2013 [22 minutes]

 

Just out of rehabilitation for heavy drug abuse, Dylan (Jesse James Rice) determines as part of his continued rehabilitation to visit his sister in California, who had invited him to stay with her and her husband Sean (David Hemphill) when he was able to leave the rehab center.

     In the meantime, however, his always stable and supportive sister has committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. Quite inexplicably, Dylan still makes the voyage across country to visit her apartment and stay for a few days with her quite obviously distraught husband.

     I should imagine that if I had just lost my wife and was visited by my brother-in-law only recently recovered from heavy drug use, I might be a bit agitated by his entry into my life. Sean certainly is, a man who in some ways is killing himself faster through his consumption of scotch than Dylan might have previously been destroying himself with cocaine and heroin (we can still see the needle marks on his arm).

      The two growl at one another for a day or so, until Dylan begins to suggest Sean stop his endless boozing. Angry, Sean orders him out of the house as he grows violent. But immediately regretting it, he apologizes, soon after breaking down in despair as he explains what happened between him and Leanne. Basically, it boils down to one event: she found him in bed with someone else. That “someone else,” he soon reveals was not a woman, but a man. And Leanne never spoke with him after that occasion.

   Dylan, who has also pent up his emotions, having lost the only connection to family with whom he has felt safe, now attempts to comfort Sean, the two in their pain and anger, attempting to help soother one another’s pain, quickly find themselves in an embrace, a deep kiss, and sex, a sudden and strange relief from the hate, perhaps even homophobia, that they both come to realize lay underneath Leanne’s calm and helpful exterior. If nothing else, as Dylan points out, she was selfish for her refusal to reach out and communicate one last time, to seek out an explanation for both of their hurtful behaviors.

      In the last few moments of this powerful and somewhat taboo film, Sean rises from the couch on which they have both fallen asleep, explaining that he’s going for a walk, needing some fresh air. Dylan asks him, point blank, “Hey, you’re not going to kill yourself or anything?”

      Sean leaves, but Dylan quickly rises, dresses, and joins him. Together perhaps that can get through their misery about their inabilities to express their sorrow and love to Leanne.

      If the general plot is perhaps a bit creaky and unbelievable, the issues of guilt and sorrow are well expressed, and the acting by the duo of Rice and Hemphill in Cooper’s short film is excellent.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).