by Douglas Messerli
Gabriel Shanks (screenwriter and director) The Least Untrue /
2022 [16 minutes]
Caleb (Nicholas Michaels) enters an apartment,
telling the person he expected to be there to answer his phone, he was
downstairs texting. He discovers that no one is there. He checks out the
refrigerator and drinks some tomato juice; he doesn’t particularly approve of
the taste. He discovers a note: “Getting dinner now.”
He
hears the door open and close: “Well that was fast. Why didn’t you text?” But
suddenly he sees a stranger who immediately asks, “Who the fuck are you?”
Where’s Ben? Asks the stranger, Ethan (Nathaniel P. Claridad).
He
begins to answer, but quickly realizes that he would be discussing a private
matter with someone who he doesn’t even know. “How do you know Ben?”
“Does Ben know you’re here?”
“Does Ben know you’re here?
“How did you get in?” Caleb queries.
Unable to get Ben on the phone, Ethan explains: “I’m Ben’s
husband.”
Sitting now at opposite ends of the orange sectional, they are silent
until Caleb suddenly speaks: “Four months.”
Ethan responds: “Two and a half years.”
“Shit.”
It
soon comes out that Ethan is a pilot, away for long periods on international
flights and has returned home early unexpectedly. Caleb and Ben have met on
Grindr.
Both threaten to exit the house, leaving to the other to face Ben; but
neither wants that privilege and they find themselves unable to move, stunned
by the revelations of Ben’s mendacity.
Ethan, who finds Caleb far more attractive than himself, fears that he
might lose out if he were to let Ben choose. But Caleb, who declares his
relationship with Ben was not yet become love, wants nothing to do with his
boyfriend anymore.
They talk, Ethan wondering if Caleb is a gifted kisser, which he must
feel Ben has been seeking. When he tests it out with Caleb, he realizes at
least one of his failures; he admits to Caleb that he’d like to learn how to
kiss like that. But Caleb sees in Ethan a far more intelligent and cultured man
that he is (the drawings and paintings on the walls are Ethan’s). In fact, both
become interested in each other, attempting to comprehend, perhaps, why Ben has
chosen to have a relationship with men who appear to be so very different.
Both are angry, but more than anything shocked; the world they both
lived obviously centered on Ben, but has now shifted in the sudden recognition
that Ben is a liar, their relationship a sort of illusion, and the patterns
they have created around Ben merely a set of mythologized acts.
It’s a clever story, with a substratum that might have permitted an even
stranger series of dialogical challenges. After the wonderful first few
moments, Shanks returns it, however, to the ordinary. I’d like to have more
fully observed each of them attempting to make sense of their own worlds and
how they each fit into Ben’s, and perhaps even asking more fully what each them
wasn’t offering to Ben that the other did?
Shanks is happy enough to leave it at the level of an upside-down farce:
instead of lovers hiding in the closets and under beds, ending with an empty
room which Ben will soon discover he has no longer any human complications
because he no longer has any lovers. Ben is a Godot who when (or if) he ever
appears will find no one any longer there waiting for him.
In
a truly adventuresome work, they might even have both return with the
realization of what they each offer Ben that he evidently needs, and even learn
from one another, through their own mutual love, how to become fuller beings.
But that work would presume a sophistication of the short gay film genre that
it has not yet attained.
Los Angeles, August 5, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August
2023).
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