Dan Brody | Love Trip / 2009

what is love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Brody (screenwriter and director) Love Trip / 2009 [9 minutes]

 

Before he goes off to work, a recently widowed father (Dan Brody) wakes up his 7-year-old son (Natan Michael), who has been dreaming, probably about his dead mother.

     The boy asks what love is, and the gentle father sits down on the bed and explains how wonderful love is, as it begins as a warm fuzzy feeling in the heart the permeates the entire body, describing to his young son that love is the feeling when you like someone special, and the “cool” thing about love is that once you feel it, it need never go away.

     After breakfast, the father sees his son off on his school bus before heading off on his own bus to his job.

     The rest of this short film toggles back and forth between the father and his son, and many large and unpleasant people get on, both father and son attempting to prevent them to sit next to them on their respective busses.

      Then suddenly, a beautiful woman (Lina Corollo) enters the father’s bus, and he quickly moves over to allow her to sit next to him, a sort of silent appreciation of each other obviously flowing between them. If you can’t precisely call in love, it is certainly the start of something the may be close to it, and we only imagine them eventually striking up a conversation to meet again.

     The son also prevents a great many unpleasant and girls from sitting beside him until a truly cute boy (Johnny Nutt), enters the bus. He too moves over letting the young boy join him. The two play a slight game of footsie, truly enjoying on the brief trip, one another’s company.

      Of course, young boys generally first discover love through other boys, even if society still doesn’t like to accept that fact. But, of course, this film is suggesting, without claiming, that perhaps the young so might be gay. At the age, one can never know, but always takes many forms in our life, and hopefully adults will embrace them as fully as they do their own emotions.

      It’s true this film relies almost entirely on physical beauty, not popular in many corrective LGBTQ+ movies these days. But let’s face it, we all love still love beautiful people falling in love with other beautiful people, and both the father and son and their chosen next-seat riders with whom they share their momentary love are precisely that.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).