two lovers who have lost their direction in life
by Douglas Messerli
Michael Lovan, Hernando Bansuelo,
and Josh Walton (screenplay), Hernando Bansuelo (director) A Reunion / 2014
It’s hard to say whether or not I
find this film intriguing and charming or an obnoxious portrayal of two men,
who had been lovers in college, who were never strong enough to be able to acknowledge
or resolve their failed relationship.
I’ve like to give it the benefit of the doubt to various moments of
their unexpected reunion, 10 years after Michael (Michael Lovan) ran away
without warning to Japan, who returns suddenly to his former lover Josh (Josh
Watson) who lives in a truly beautiful home in Los Angeles, where he is ready
to hunker down without voyaging through a past lover’s lane.
But why, if he is the supposed one who got it together as an adult, has
Josh been unable to make new gay friends and establish a stable relationship?
We feel he’s been nursing for all of these long years his “intrigue” as he
describes it, with a truly immature, unpredictable young man who now suddenly
shows up in his life again to drive with him half the way across the country
for their 10th reunion in Chicago.
I can only say that if I had a lover who suddenly, without a word, left
me to teach in Japan, who had been perhaps a sort of pouting, verbally out of
control liar even when we were in a youthful relationship, I doubt I might want
to let him into my life again.
But Josh, not only appears at LAX to pick up Michael, but is willing to
travel with him on a long loop through Arizona and Texas and on to St. Louis,
stopping at various odd tourist junctions along the way. Except for the fact
that it is clear Bansuelo, with Lovan and Walton as his co-writers, saw this as
a great way to show off the American landscape while exploring these
individuals’ previous relationship, the trip is a gesture of pure absurdity,
and not truly that interesting.
They stop in Las Vegas to play to slots and participate in all the
tourist cliches of that meaningless testament to American’s outrageous desire
to replace reality with an audaciously commercial fantasy of dreams (something
that never has made my heart pound; I was as bored in Las Vegas as never
previously in my life, as well as being overheated and feeling like I’d entered
a freak show). European thinkers love to visit it as a symbol of US absurdity,
but ultimately it is a ridiculous, meaningless, and truly unrepresentative of
US life as Donald Trump.
They roll on through Route 66 through Arizona, stopping by to admire the
grandeur of the Grand Canyon, the final stop for Louise and Thelma in the 1991
movie bearing their names. And eventually, for utterly no logical reason, they stop
by to visit an old friend Lisa (Maria Monge) who they once shared sexually—vaginally
and anally—but is now nicely married in suburban brick-house luxury and is
pregnant. Michael, quite stupidly, becomes a fool as he refuses to do anything
other than recount their sexual adventures at the dinner table in front of her
not very amused husband, a scene that reminded me some of a far more outrageous
and superior comedy adventure Best in Show (2000) where Cookie
Fleck (Catherine O’Hara) drags her husband Gerry (Eugene Levy) to visit one of
her many old sexual conquests on a trip to the Mayflower dog show in
Philadelphia.
They stop for no obvious reason at the famous Wigwam motel, obviously
just to keep us alert of the delights of that ancient highway trip.
Yet
soon after they do visit a regular, hauntingly lit US motel where suddenly they
rediscover their sexual enjoyment in one another, and where Jason admits to
having been in love with Michael all these years and quite devastated by his
sudden departure, while Michael admits to his inability to act in any manner
that imitates an adult. Their rediscovery of the joy of the bed almost gives us
hope—we’re indoctrinated in this from birth, I assure you—that they might join
up together as a couple, although it has been clear all long that they are
truly incompatible.
On they move to the sone monoliths of Grants, New Mexico, where in a
rather inept conversation Michael wonders at taking a thousands years to come
to life as a stalactite; before moving on to visit Michael’s brother in St.
Louis—a city whose wonders have long alluded me—where we discover a happy and
quite stable man (Joe Fingerhut), married to his Japanese wife Michiyo with two
children.
There, by cellphone accident, Joe discovers that his brother is engaged
to marry a Japanese woman, which Michael finally admits but attempts to play
down as if it doesn’t matter in front of the now truly shocked and desperately
hurt Jason. The marriage may be only so that Michael can stay in Japan, but it
is a betrayal beyond all the others he has had to endure.
By the time they reach Chicago for the class reunion, Jason simply
places his friend’s backpack outside the car and drives off, seemingly without
any possibility of further re-unionizing.
Both men pout their way through the beautiful city of Chicago, Michael
mostly from a dorm room, probably very much like the one in which they lived as
students, while Jason wanders through the city sites brooding.
And yes, Jason does show up to the reunion waiting outside for Michael’s
arrival. And Michael does arrive. They talk but without any resolution except a
final kiss from Jason which can represent either a goodbye or an invitation—at
this point god knows why—to a relationship.
He leaves to enter the party, while Michael sits, finally trying to make
his way in his mind through his endlessly passive and mindless behavior. By the
end of the movie, we only see him suddenly coming to a very small smile of
recognition, but it should be enough for anyone with a bit of hope in their
heart, to realize that he has found his way through the confusion to enter the
reunion with Josh, not as a strange, gangly, confused teenage boy, but a man
who has chosen real love.
Most commentators were irritated by the lack of an obvious resolution.
But what a bore that would have been. As it is, I was bored by their off-kilter
and quite predictable travels across the nation that all the French theorists
have made in order to prove how very strange the US is. We are a very strange
folk, but not because of Las Vegas and Route 66, which were always meant as
tourists spots for just such travelers through space. Our contradictions have more
to do with our Puritan roots at war with our various demands of multicultural
dreams, which you might almost say is the issue between Jason’s tightly
controlled vision of life and Michael’s crazy delusions of other worlds to
which he doesn’t feel totally invited. One has put himself in prison while
other keeps seeking how to escape. Maybe together they can balance one another
to make their own life and home?
Los Angeles, May 13, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(May 2026).
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