Laura Scrivano | The Language of Love / 2013

amour is a masculine noun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kim Ho (screenplay), Laura Scrivano (director) The Language of Love / 2013 [10 minutes]

 

Student writer Kim Ho’s brilliant monologue filmed by Australian director Laura Scrivano is among the better short LGBTQ films of the second decade of the 21st century.

     The monologue, framed in the duration of a written French-language exam moves outside the moment and the reality of the room only through the central character Charlie’s (Kim Ho) imagination, as he attempts to explain why he’s having difficulty on keeping his mind on the exam while at the same actually fulfilling the requirements of the exam, to “describe your best friend”—even though we hear what he might have written in French in his own English voice with numerous asides that obviously wouldn’t be included in such an test essay. But the “rub” or all the difference in the world, in this case, is that he is asked by the exam question to answer in the form of a letter, which in this instance turns his comments into a gentle love story that, in fact, seemingly cannot be expressed in any other manner.

      But Charlie has a problem, as he admits, in expressing himself. He can do all the grammar questions, but to express himself naturally in French is still difficult. And that was the aim, to speak fluently in another language in taking the course in the first place—although, he admits, the original aim was to “pick up chicks by sounding like a Frenchman.”

      He briefly comments on the difficulties of any language: “You can know all the words in the dictionary, but that doesn’t make you fluent in the language. He points to the French word “baiser” which generally means “to kiss,” but it can also mean “to fuck,”—and although he doesn’t mention it, “to caress,” “screw around,” or even “commit adultery.” But almost immediately his mind turns to the subject of his best friend, Sam, with whom he does everything: “eat, piss, etc.,” they might even have sat in the schoolroom together but the teacher put the students in alphabetical order which placed Sam right in front of him, so that in order to see the films shown by the teacher he has to keep peering around the edges of his best friend’s head. But even this somewhat comic image immediately turns serious when he mentions that Sam’s parents are getting a divorce, and that Sam comes to school, “all morose. …He smiles and all that, but you can see it in his eyes. He’s hurting pretty bad inside.”

      So begins his spoken essay that quickly shifts from a short series of what almost might be described as arpeggios about school life before he suddenly interrupts himself with the straight-forward admission, “I’m in love with Sam. I’m in love with my best friend. I don’t know how it happened. I just…somewhere along the line of listening to his secrets and seeing how hurt he was I realized how much I care. I want to hold him and tell him everything’s going to be okay.” And just as suddenly Charlie suffers a kind of panic attack, the room completely emptying out in his imagination, as he struggles to continue his tale.

      Even during the French films, he admits, he gets distracted by the back of Sam’s head, by his desire to touch his cheeks, press his lips with a kiss (as in “baiser”). In this young man’s world everything has been upended by his sudden rush of new emotions, of desires he’s never felt before and can’t express even to himself, let alone to the one he loves and now in another language.

      One of the clearest pieces of evidence concerning our culture’s continued hetero-domination is expressed in Charlie’s statement that he googled “how to tell your friend you love him,” and all the results came back with statements on much make-up to wear. Whether it’s true or not, it is how young gay people perceive the heteronormative world. And surely the fear about telling someone of the same sex that you love him is far more problematic than the problem of coming out to one’s parents. “I wouldn’t dare say a word to him. I mean, how would I even start? ‘Heh Sam, hope your parents haven’t murdered each other yet. I’m gay, are you gay? You want to cuddle or something?’”

       He admits an overwhelming fear. For him it’s not because Sam is a boy, but that he just happens to be one. “And I can’t figure out whether that’s wrong…or special.” The signs of his true love reach the surface of his externalized inner expressions when he comments that he truly wants what’s best for his friend. But that he wants him for himself as well, that he wants to be part of what is best for him.

      Perhaps, he contemplates, the best thing to do would be to keep his feelings inside, to squash them. Yet Sam opens up to him, he trusts him, and Charlie ponders, “Shouldn’t I do the same?”  This short masterwork nears its end with Charlie’s wise comments: “You always hear people say that it’s weird and it’s just not normal,” speaking presumably of gay love. “But isn’t that the point of love? To transcend normalness and become something special.”

      By film’s end he realizes that he has to take “the punch,” to open his mouth and tell his beautiful friend how he feels, and so he begins his French letter. He will probably pass his exam if his teachers are not prudes; but if such a letter is passed on to his “beautiful boy” no one cannot know the result. But that too is one the necessary chances people in love must take.

      This film not only received excellent newspaper and magazine reviews, but was selected as the best short in a couple of Queer Film Festivals and personally endorsed by actor British gay actor Stephen Fry, who called it “Amazing.”

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).