Zeb Daemen | Fan Letter / 2025

getting everything they didn’t really want

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joshua Willdig and Zeb Daemen (screenwriters), Zeb Daemen (director) Fan Letter / 2025 [15 minutes]

This British film directed by Antwerp, Belgium-located Zeb Daemen, a former photographer turned filmmaker, is a rather weak attempt to return us to the kind of black and white weepie that made for the careers of the likes of Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, and so many others.

    This successful mid-1950s singer, however, is a gay male, Ricky Boyd (Ben Wilson) pretending to sing heterosexual ballads that in his mind play out his unfulfilled teenage relationship with Alfie (Alex Britt), the boy he left behind in order to seek out his dreams of becoming famous.

     As he waits backstage in the hometown theater to please the audience of yet another sold-out performance, he picks up his fan mail from which an unsealed note to Rich falls out, a letter from the gay lover he has left behind.

    How that letter got into his pile of fan letters is never explained, and why the note from Alfie provides his telephone number is even less explicable. But Ricky doesn’t even take the time to read it before he makes the call.

     All he can burble out is how much he still loves Alf, and how every song he sings is still sung to him, as he recalls their last night-time mating by a river, their young bodies glistening under the stars.

     We could have guessed it. A young child’s voice calling for her daddy intrudes, as Ricky/Rich realizes that even if Alf admits that he felt the same way about him (and Alf does make that much clear), time has moved on. In England, where the story is set, being gay was still a crime. As with so many men tempted by their desires, Alf has given up his sexual proclivities to marry, settle down, and pretend a “normalized” life.  If you read British fiction you might be tempted to believe that more than half of the boarding school raised boys in the “sceptred isle…Eden, demi-paradise” are pretending heterosexual bliss while longing for their former boy lovers.

     Alf hangs up, leaving Ricky to sing his heart out to a longing possibility that now he knows can never again exist.

     Both men have sold out their hearts to other demands: fame, wealth, money, normality, familial happiness. It’s sad, but it’s also ridiculously sentimental, in this case made even more so by the stylish, semi-noir look of the quite beautiful black-and-white images. But it’s hard to cry your eyes out knowing that these men got what they didn’t really want before they even knew it.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).