Joshua Chislett | The Dirt Between My Fingers / 2020

picture of two boys skipping rocks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joshua Chislett (screenwriter and director) The Dirt Between My Fingers / 2020 [10 minutes]

 

     Canadian director Joshua Chislett’s The Dirt Between My Fingers (2020), is not precisely a fantasy, but since it involves a relationship between two young men that is basically still one of the imagination which by film’s end reads more as a work of desire than an actual series of events, although a recitation of brief events is perhaps the only way this film can be described, like reaching out for something that never quite materializes.

      Part of the problem with this otherwise subtle story of tentative love is that we never get enough background on either of the two central figures, Gabriel (Jack Parsons) and Liam (Shawn Vincent), to really know why they are participating in the events the film portrays, denying us to fully comprehend what they are even seeking in one another.

       What we do know is that Gabriel, living at home with apparently only a mother, is a retiring and shy boy who spends much of his time without human companionship. His mother seems to not mind if he leaves the house in late afternoons, presumably after school, and stays out all night, as this boy does. In fact, his mother evidently disappears for long periods of time herself, leaving only a message that she will be back in a few days.

        Fortunately, what Gabriel is doing is not partying, drinking, partaking in drugs or other self-destructive activities, but merely retreating to the nearby wilds, sometimes simply laying down on the ground and listening to nature or falling asleep outside. He seems to be a naturalist in the making, except that we also perceive that he is seeking something and is also attempting to express his feelings and ideas in art, evidently without much success.

     It is only when he accidently encounters the long-haired Liam, of whom we never learn anything whatsoever, that Gabriel seems to have found some purpose in his vagrant travels. He first discovers Liam asleep in the grass, gingerly kicking him awake as the boy rises and almost resentfully runs off, obviously seeking to have no connection with the other.

      We can only presume the kid, whom we soon after observe simply skipping rocks across a seemingly urban riverbed, is homeless with no other place to go. And Gabriel presumes that, returning to the same spots when his mother announces she’ll not be home for a few days.

       This first time out he does again spot Liam, the boy, surprised to see Gabriel return, challenges him with the question: “What, are you following me?”  In fact, he follows Gabriel, curious why anyone who had another place to go would purposely choose the outdoors as a place to sleep. When he finds Gabriel, lying in the grass, scanning the skies, he lays down in the other direction and soon spreads out beside him.

       In the most eventful moment of the film, Gabriel slowly opens his hand and inches toward the other’s boy’s fingers, momentarily touching him before Liam jumps up with some alarm. A few seconds later, however, he leans over and plants a kiss on Gabriel lips, as if sealing an unspoken pact between the two. It does not seem so much an expression of sexual desire or love as it is a token of appreciation, a commitment to friendship.

         Over what seem like the next couple of days, Gabriel again seeks out his new friend, but without any success. His return home to sketch some figures in his pad, presumably images of Liam, doesn’t appear to please him since he crosses them out, at the same moment as hearing someone riffling in the refrigerator, presumably his absent mother having briefly returned home.

Obviously, it is Liam seeking something to eat. Nothing is spoken between the two, and Gabriel again returns to the out-of-doors to spend the night.

     When he finally does run into Liam again, he sits down on a rock near to him, taking out a piece of red licorice the chew on, a few moments later reaching into his backpack to pull another string and hand it to his friend, who responds, “You fucking kidding me?” but accepts it nonetheless before beginning to chew on it. 

       The two soon both stand and together skip rocks across the stream, their friendship—or whatever it is—obviously consummated.

       It is not that this film has no story. It’s quite obvious that two lonely and abandoned boys have, by film’s end, made a friendship that removes at least some of their isolation. But that story is so terribly simple and inconclusive that it might as well have been a kind of fantasy, an empty dream. Do they ever do anything together than skip rocks across a stream? Well, of course that’s up to our imaginations, but in the director’s demanding that we fill in the imaginary plot, as he does by closing down his film soon after, he suggests it’s all simply a fantasy now of our own making. He’s simply drawn a picture of two boys who desperately need someone else in their lives. What they do with the gift of one another is up to our personal fantasies, a world not to be shared in the “real” one in which individuals meet up and communicate, if only in the process of sharing a movie. The movie, by and large, is an empty screen on which we are asked to play out our own imaginative fictions. I might create an entire world of adventures for them, but then it isn’t truly my responsibility and I might certainly have chosen far different characters in the first place. It is as if the director has given up and gone home to do more important things. The only concrete evidence he has provided us is that sleeping on the ground as they have, there probably indeed is dirt between their fingers even we will never able to identify the personal pronoun of the title.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).