Peter Browne | Firsts / 2025

snap judgment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Browne (screenwriter and director) Firsts / 2025 [7.20 minutes]

 

A highly self-conscious gay man, Peter (Charles Realubit), suffering from a bipolar condition, finally chooses to date someone he’s met on-line, Dante (Quentin Boyer). You’ll have to pardon the quite obnoxious narrative voice constantly interrupting the story-line instead of the director simply providing the conversation the two may actually engage in. The lines, moreover, are all stolen from too many other gay movies about dating, but this time with a certain twist.

    Dante has a sister, Sam (Kristen Caroselli) who, so he realizes with a phone call, “is off her meds again.”

     Is she going to be okay? asks Dante.

   The answer is what cuts him off again from the world he has finally thought he has entered, a possible male relationship.

    “Who knows,” answers Dante. “She’s bipolar.”

    The stigma is there, and the date is off.

    As the obnoxious female narrator reports, for Peter it suggests again that there is something fundamentally wrong with him, “which, let’s be honest, there was.”

    As someone who has lived most of my life with what I have believe is a person with an undiagnosed borderline bipolar condition, I can well understand. One moment your companion is sweet and charming, the next angry and even violent. At times he is positive and fully contributing to the world, the next depressed and unsure of where he’s going. If you don’t like Ferris Wheels, I suggest you don’t marry a bipolar person. For frankly, there is no way to calm or correct the radical shifts in personality. They are only to be expected and survived.

    But the love for that person does not cease, and that is where Peter is totally mistaken, having judged his new friend on the basis of a single statement.

    For a moment, in a split camera view, we see both men suffering the sudden break in possibilities, sitting by their cellphones as they attempt to re-instate the relationship, foot to frame almost as in Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk.

    Then one day Dante, out walking with his sister Sam, runs into Peter, confronting him nicely with the fact that he never texted him back, when at least he could have just…. We know the empty part of the phrase: he might have just explained he wasn’t interested. And suddenly Peter opens up telling him it was comment about his sister, that he too has often gone on and off his medicines: “Sometimes you don’t want a soft dick! Or the constant hunger, or the weight gain, right?”

    Peter proclaims he’s so “So sick of guys making judgments based on one line of dialogue.”

    Dante: “You mean the way you judged me off of one line of dialogue?”

    Dante explains: “She’s my sister. I love her. You’re wrong.”

    The sister turns to the camera and continues to analyze the situation, as if we needed further explanation.

     But the sister, fortunately, does quickly resolve the problem as they head together to the pharmacy for more meds, after which they will share a pancake breakfast.

     And they all live happily ever after.

   This film is more than slightly irritating in its tone and approach, and certainly is a piece of fluff despite its quite serious topic about how bipolar people are forced to live in a world of constant alterations of mood and perception about their worlds. But I do believe, having a sister with the same condition will most certainly help Dante live in a relationship with Peter, is he so chooses. The absurd narration already has them married.

 

Los Angeles, July 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).