shanghaied on his way to coming out
by Douglas Messerli
Chadlee Skrikker (screenwriter and director) Hand
Off / 2019
Of the four gay fantasy films I’ve chosen to
discuss in this essay, the one that perhaps irritates me most is Chadlee Skrikker’s
Hand Off (2019), about a pair of South African rugby players, one of who
discovers he has fallen in love with the other.
Skrikker
begins his story where so many others end up, with a young gay sports player
Jaco (Andahr Cotton) admitting that he’s broken up his girlfriend Em to his
buddy Willem (Arno Horn). When Willem asks what happened, Jaco vaguely tenders
the issue by admitting, “I told her something.” When Willem probes further, he
admits that he told her “That I have feelings for someone else.”
Most directors, simply to develop the drama, would leave it there to
spin out gradually over the course of the film until finally the character,
desperately in love with his straight mate, would have to admit that fact, the
consequences determining the ending of the tale. But I have to give credit to Skrikker
for having his character so quickly leap into the fire:
Willem: Shit, do you cheat on her?”
Jaco: No man, that’s not...
Willem: So, what’s the girl’s name?
Jaco: It’s not... ...It’s not a her.
Willem: Fuck. Listen, I’ll always be here for—
Jaco: Willem.
Willem: Yes? [silence] What?
Jaco: It’s you.
And
when in the next frame we see Willem marching away from his friend with hardly
a look back, when Jaco follows, you can almost hear a collective gasp of
recognition for what we might all have predicted. And when Jaco shouts out,
“I’ll see you tonight,” we recognize just how naive this character is, while
recognizing that for the next half hour or so he’ll be forced to suffer through
some very painful moments to explore just how deep his friendship truly runs.
Will Willem “be there for him” if that is precisely what his friend most
desires?
At
least you can say that Skrikker’s film is not predictable, at least not
precisely. For while Jaco most certainly does have to suffer those long moments
of utter fear that he has lost not only his best friend but his potential
lover, the director radically intrudes upon his own narrative, taking us into
new territory.
Jaco begins his journey by simply attending a college party where he has
been scheduled to meet up with Willem. Instead, he runs into his former
girlfriend (Rebecca Patrick) sitting alone in a room. She hugs him in sympathy
and perhaps with a little hope of reviving his heterosexual lust, but in the
end hands over a bottle of liquor with which, presumably, she was herself
attempting to swallow away the taste of her recent rejection.
For a moment I even imagined that perhaps our director was taking us
into a corner of an LGBTQ movie that I have long sought out, possibly exploring
how the other half of a relationship handles the news upon hearing that his or
her companion is more interested in the same sex. No such luck, for in the next
frame our young sufferer, having evidently consumed too much of the medicine Em
provided, wakes up to discover himself in gay fantasy all done up in gold and
ornate paintings where a beautiful genie-like white robbed boy with gold-leaf
appliques upon his face, rings on his fingers, and rows and rows of gold-plated
bracelets tells him: “Words don’t really mean much in places like this.”
I’m sure they don’t. In the place it seems to be, a kitsch palace of gay
dreams, designed as one of the movie’s respondents described it by a drunken
window dresser, Jaco is hugged, kissed, pampered, and introduced into a harem
of gay boys who look a bit like something out of the gay commune to whom the
worn out queer hero of Rosa von Praunheim’s It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is
Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives is proudly introduced after he
has explored all the other sexual avenues available to gay men.
However,
Skrikker’s fantasy world is very much perverse, particularly since these pretty
Aladdins’ idea of relieving his loneliness, longing, and disorientation is take
him into a Louis Quartorze piano room in order to bathe him in an orgiastic
imitation of love and anything that looks like gold.
I
suppose if you gotta suffer, cooking up a fantasy in your imagination that
fulfills your longings is better than just sweating it out. But if this is a
young gay neophyte’s vision of gay life, I’d keep my hands off him as
well—especially if I were playing the most touchy-feely sport of all,
rugby!—while handing him off to a good shrink instead of leaving him in hands
of this little blue boy cult.
To
abandon an innocent, who’s just discovered he likes boys by asking him to sign
up for this preposterous fantasy is truly derelict. It’d be one thing if Skrikker
were somehow undermining the genre with a good dose of campy satire. But sorry
to say, it appears the director truly believes these golden-mangled angels will
help our hero to survive his crisis while Willem and the director go silent for
twenty some minutes before the former buddy comes round to say, it’s okay, I’ll
still be your friend.
In
other words, Skrikker, just like the other fantasists I write about, gives up
on his movie the minute when he might have dug down deep into the psyches of
his central figures, in this case Jaco, Willem, and Em all three, in order to
find out what’s truly the problem besides the superficial homophobia that
they’ve been taught to rely in such strange situations.
Given the choice of the suggested therapy or coming to terms with what I
most fear, I’d choose the poison pill any day. But none of our so-called
characters get that choice. And we never do find out how they come to terms
with the real-life situation or what happens when Willem and Jaco walk arm and
arm off into the land of nod and shake hands to just being friends. Does poor
Jaco even get a kiss? Did he get a chance to pull off all that damn gold leaf
before meeting up with the team to swig down a drink?
Perhaps this director, after his brilliantly horrifying film about
homophobia, Beyond Repair just one year earlier, needed to create a more
lovely alternative for his gay figure; but I strangely find this fantasy as bad
as the previous film's attempted cure.
Los Angeles, June 7, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2021).
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