the pull of gravity
by Douglas Messerli
Jon Fitzgerald (screenwriter and director) Apart
from Hugh / 1994
Jon Fitzgerald’s 1994 black-and-white film Apart
from Hugh begins with a young man, Collin (David Merwin), sitting in a
small village coffee house, apparently late in the evening, writing a letter.
From the looks on his face and the accompanying score we know it’s a rather sad
letter which, when finished, he folds up and puts into an envelope. That letter
will, in fact, follow in this superficially likeable tale throughout, appearing
next in a sketch book hidden away in one of the drawers of the country house in
the Pacific Northwest where he lives with his lover Hugh (Steve Arnold), and
eventually is set out for Hugh to read two days later.
Their relationship is partially established the next morning as they
wake up in bed together in a large brick building, apparently an old
schoolhouse or apartment building, which inside their first floor rooms Hugh
has decorated with numerous rugs, pillows, and knick-knacks enough that it
looks to be quite comfy. Hugh has just had a “bizarre” dream: “I was back in
high school...in my English class taking an exam in my underwear. The period
was almost over and I couldn’t answer any of the questions. I was so
frustrated. I got up and I walked over to the window, unlatched it and flung it
open, and just totally flew out. Or was I sucked out? ...I flew over the city
and the mountains and the forest. It was so beautiful! But it was so hard to
fight the gravity.” Evidently, it is the kind of dream Hugh often has.
When asked about his own dreams, Collin says he never remembers them. “I
always wake up and there’s nothing there. Just kind of a vague gray feeling,
like dirty white socks. I guess it’s just lack of imagination. Not to be flying
around like Superman all the time.” For Collin, Hugh has all the imagination,
“always inventing, always wandering into buttercup meadows. Always wondering
about all the ‘what-ifs.” For Collin, everything has to have its opposite,
“rain/shine, dark/light, you/me.”
So
we learn almost immediately that Collin feels a lack of experience and a
paucity of wonderment, while his mentor, Hugh, is always questioning
alternatives. Indeed, the dream Hugh has just had is not about him, we can
guess, but about his own somewhat frustrated lover, who wants to escape the
exam with which Hugh is constantly testing him: the examination of his own
life.
We
also quickly discern that despite the likeability of these two gay figures,
they speak in a world of clichés, not only of “buttercup meadows” and notions
of everything having its opposite, but, as we soon discover, with lines such as
“Love at first blight,” “You feel sexy when you grovel,” or interchanges such
as:
Collin: “You know you’re something, you really are.”
Hugh: “What? What?”
Collin: “No. Nothing.”
Hugh: “Is there something you’re not telling me?’
Collin: “You know it’s funny how you can spend so much time with
someone.
Do all sorts of criminal,
crazy things with them, rely on them so
much. And then one
day...poof...it all comes to a sad screeching halt.”
As
with Hugh’s dream, the person who Collin is describing is not the one we might
think, not Hugh with whom he is planning to end things, but Frieda, a woman
with whom he lived previously who one day he simply left very much in the same
way he’s planning to leave his current lover. It appears that our handsome
young man has a history of leaving others in order to further discover himself;
or perhaps he is just prone to seeking out strong personalities who help to
mold his personality.
Fortunately for the viewer, Frieda (Jennifer Reed), is a highly
eccentric being who has already arrived in town and headed over to the local
bar, drinking several beers with a ridiculous British couple, playing pool
(badly) with a couple of local yokels whom the lesbian bartender quickly
challenges and beats, and hearing the sad tale of a cowboy who has just lost
his male lover.
Hugh has invited Frieda up from the city (my guess is that the two
lovers live near Bellingham since Hugh is described as attending the
university) for a party that evening to celebrate his and Collin’s first anniversary.
The Freida we meet, thank god, is much more entertaining, and now lives
in a polyamorous relationship with a married couple who paint houses, happy
with her sexual relations with both husband and wife. She, moreover, takes an
immediate liking to Hugh, advising Collin, when he reveals his plans to her, to
think carefully about leaving his new lover in a manner similar to the way as
he previously left her. She understood why he had to leave, she reveals, but was
nonetheless hurt for a long while.
The
gay boys’ party, which takes up a nice chuck of the film, is a carefully
constructed exercise in representing diversity to which Hugh has invited local
heterosexual couples, appealing gay men, two competitive heavyset drag queens,
a black woman or two, and a poet who, after the group finishes playing
charades, reads a Beat-inspired poem.
Collin is still determined to leave in the morning with Frieda with the
intention of finding a life as rich as he believes Hugh’s has been. Actually,
however, we realize that Collin probably has lived a much more adventuresome
life with Freida than Hugh did in his vagabonding year, particularly after Hugh
tries to remember the smells of France (bread and coffee beans), Holland
(chrysanthemums and beer), or Norway (sweaty men and fish), all of which seems
to suggest that the writer has never ventured out of his world atlas.
If, as a sentimentalist of sorts, I first might have wished Collin try
to stick it out with Hugh, by the time of his and Frieda’s departure, with Hugh
tucked safely away in bed, I truly hoped the boy might escape if not into a
long trek across Europe or at least into a better script.
But the young Collin, evidently cannot escape the force of gravity any
better than Hugh describes feeling in his flights of fancy in the first lines
of this film. He returns, scoops up the letter he has left upon the bookcase,
and breaks eggs into the frying pan just in time for Hugh’s breakfast.
Los Angeles, February 21, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (February 2021).
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