Arya Patel and May Suri | Timeless / 2025

love is a present act

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abe Diaz and Arya Patel (screenplay), Arya Patel and May Suri (directors) Timeless / 2025 [24 minutes]

 

Silas (Rowan McIntosh), a handsome young gay man has lost his lover Alejandro (Paulo Infante) to some disease (although it is never designated, we almost automatically connect it with AIDS). He is lost, wallowing in silence, alcohol, and the refusal to meet up with old friends.

    His one evening out with his friend Gabby (Chloe Christina) ends disastrously with even great drunkenness that alone at home. At least in his private life he is granted, in a strange sci-fi manner with parallels the memories we all have of lost family friends, three-minute segments of complete immersion in the past. He almost lives for these computerized time moments, but also suffers for the experiences of love and sorrow they return to his memory. 

     Mostly they are moments of inconsequential acts, Alejandro’s potting of plants and his perhaps first admission to his absolute love of Silas; a memory in bed where their lovemaking ends in Alejandro coughing; in other moments of simple encounters; and finally, a dreadful moment wherein Silas can no longer quite reach through the vague curtain of time to comfort his dying lover. It is also at that moment when the time visits expire.

     He must now move on with only vagueness of the memories he has left. It is as if he has been given only a selected number of intense reencounters with the past, like that given to the dead character Emily in Our Town, which are finally so painful that they may not be worth reexperiencing.

    In some respects, this is quite simply a sentimental presentation of a love between to beautiful men cut too short. But both McIntosh and Infante are so charming and lovely to look at that we long for their next past encounter. If only we knew just a little bit more of their relationship, how they met perhaps, or why, at the end, they finally seemed to have moved into separate apartments, or perhaps what was the real nature of Alejandro’s illness. As it is, it stands simply as a testament to a love lost, from which Silas is not easily healing and which others can no longer share.

   These individuals were still young when one was removed from life far too early. Watching this was an older man, knowing that one of us, my husband or I, is likely to disappear in perhaps just a few years after such a long time together (now 56 years) is even more painful since we have no possibility of a new life after and our memories will surely have grown even vaguer without the help of this film’s metaphorical time device.

      Life is not timeless, but meted out always in brief and discrete moments which are difficult to put back together in the continuum of the ever-present flow of Bergsonian reality. There is no real past, not real future, just a constant present that slips through minds as we experience it. The beauty, desire, love, care, respect and all the other emotions we share with others disappear each day in that flow of life. We know we cannot really return. Not rise from grave like Our Town’s Emily even for a day. We have no magic device, except the vague shadows we hold without or brain, to take us back as Silas and sometimes even Alejandro are offered. Love is a present act only, something that can never really last.

    I found this work, finally, almost too sad to watch both times I saw it. This film is truly a dream play that leaves any living being in seeming status. If you cannot release yourself from that dream, living can never progress and death will creep over you without any new experiences in life.

 

Los Angeles, May 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).