boy without a voice
by
Douglas Messerli
Arrival
is
what I would describe as a very strange coming out film. But given the version
B of the genre to which we have grown accustomed, in which a young man must
verbally declare his sexuality of friends and family, in this animated film
without any dialogue, the declaration remains entirely unspoken, expressed only
in the camera photographs, a habit our young hero as acquired since he was a
child living in a pastoral paradise with his mother.
The son, like many young boys, however,
grows up and desires the bright lights of the city, which could be any major
metropolis, but appears in this film to be very similar to an amalgam of San
Francisco and Manhattan. He moves there, spends a few difficult days or months
(time is irrelevant in this fast-moving fable) before he suddenly discovers a
good-looking young man winking at him.
Obviously, he likes what he sees since
again with time almost leaping through the whirlwind of images, he is soon seen
regularly dining and running together with the stranger. Within seconds, they
move into a rather swank apartment—obviously, his partner is a young
executive—and together they hit the gay night-spots.
Throughout all this time, our country boy keeps sending photos of his
new experiences, his food, his apartment, his friends (by not his lover) back
to his mother, who answers equally with pictures from his past. He affixes them
to long strings above his bed. And almost daily, so it would seem, receives
another from her, just as he mails out his photos.
But eventually the photos from home
stop. Presumably, his mother has simply run out of past childhood photographs,
while, of course, his are endless. He moves forward, but things have gone
somewhat sour between him and his lover, particularly since he has fallen into
a kind of funk.
In the morning, he finds his duffel bag
beside him on the bed with a note prescribing that he return him to visit his
mother.
He drives the long distance, seeking
out the lonely house which he enters to find his mother missing. He visits his
old bedroom, returns downstairs and places a picture of himself and his lover
on a bureau. Suddenly his mother reappears and the two embrace, delighted to be
together once again. They share another perfect afternoon as they had when he
was a child. But later as they return, she spots the picture, he slight
troubled. What will her response be?
She pulls him off into her bedroom,
demanding for him to keep his eyes closed until she has left the room. There
upon her all, unlike his at his city apartment, she has strung up ropes of a
universe of possibilities, the photos he has sent her hanging in swirls of
possibilities lit up with small lightbulbs. She has imagined nearly a world for
him, while he has simply treated her photos as treasures and trinkets.
He returns to his car and drives back
to the city, now realizing that whatever world he makes will be treated at home
as part of an imaginary universe that will include wherever it might take him.
Arrival is a beautiful, even if a
bit predictable fable of a deep mother and son relationship. But alas, it is just
a pretty picture without any depth. Who is this young man? With whom has he
fallen in love? What does he do now in his life? How did his mother and he
survive? Does he have any true plans for the future? Does he have any interests
outside of his mother, running, and his boyfriend? Can the two young men truly
reunite after what seems to be a kind of rupture?
This is a work without a voice, simply a chalk-talk
of chronological events, nothing but a surface.
Los
Angeles, July 9, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).
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