by Douglas Messerli
Joel Junior (screenwriter and director) Strangers / 2021 [14 minutes]
A man (Jake Howarth) is sitting in a roadside
tree reading. Another man (Joel Junior), who has stopped his car along the
road, seems to be waiting, for what we are not certain, but he is holding a
small box in his hands which leads us to certain conclusions.
After 13 minutes (the time clocked by an intertitle) he approaches the
man in the tree, trying to discern how long he intends to remain in the tree.
“I need this tree,” he declares in an unusual accent we later learn must come
from his Hungarian parentage.
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The
reader in the tree treats his requests facilely, not at intending to
immediately give up his perch. Whereas the man in a suit seems serious and
troubled, the man in the tree is somewhat cynically witty. Indeed, the two
types and the strange encounter centering upon an isolated tree seems almost to
be out of some parable or fable. And that, in turn, sets the tone for the
entire film, generally turning their necessary conversation into a kind of
didactic literary device—although the visual distinctions between the two are
well drawn, the man in the tree dressed orange shorts, green tennis shoes, a
yellow T-shirt topped by a sleeveless denim jacket represents quite the
opposite from the man in slick, black coat and pants with an open necked white
shirt. They are most certainly from different worlds.
But
as their conversation grows more contentious, we begin to perceive there is a
serious aspect to their strange obsession to inhabit the not particularly
distinguished tree. Finally, after an absurdly disjunctive series of attempts
to get rid of the other, the besuited man decides to give up and begins to walk
away, the other calling him back to say he’ll be the one to. “You’re clearly
going to do something ‘weird,’ so yeh!”
Obviously, their stories are about to pour out. The man in the suit
explains that he met a guy on “Tindr,” they became friends and found themselves
one day underneath the tree, a ring in his pocket about to propose marriage.
They had wine, sex, and before he could propose his friend did. That was six
years ago, and in the box are his husband’s ashes, who died of leukemia and had
asked to his ashes to be spread by the tree where they long ago had made their
commitments of love. As he tells the story, tears well up in his eyes and he
becomes emotional for the loss, the younger man attempting to comfort him.
The other explains that the tree is special to him for a far darker
reason. Reluctantly, he tells his story. One day his step-father was driving
him home from school, not a common event but one that occurred from time to
time. He stopped at the field, saying he had to urinate and asked the boy,
nine-year-old at the time, to join him. There, by the same tree, he told the
boy that sometimes he had difficulty with his penis and asked the son to
massage it.
What seems to disturb the young man more than the event itself, is that
he wasn’t threatened but still agreed to the act and never told his mother. His
mother being religious, she would have presumed, he fears, that his later
announcement of his being gay was on account of the childhood abuse. And it
wasn’t that at all, he insists, having forgiven the man but apparently not
himself for having let “the incident rot inside me.”
Now, both men have been able to share what they previously have not,
with another being, a stranger—one a joyful event than ended badly and the
other a terrible incident that basically left the handsome young gay man
intact. That fact alone should have been enough to justify this fabulist-like
event, in which an object of nature has served as a site significant for each
of them.
But the director, however, tries to hook it up with far larger issues,
quoting Haruki Murakami, that no matter how much suffering we go through, we
never want to let go of those memories. “Things that I remember the most are
ones that I wish I didn’t.” He explains that coming to the tree that day was an
attempt to come to peace with it, seeming to contradict his earlier comments
that he had forgiven and almost forgotten that long ago event. Quoting a
Hungarian writer, the other suggests that “When you close your eyes to tragedy,
you close your eyes to greatness.” And before long it appears that the two
young men having encountered one another under the tree has been turned into a
near mystical event, where frankly their rather mundane, if painful,
experiences of a love and innocence lost were somehow now of near
earth-shattering importance. These larger issues may add gravitas to the film,
but they also weigh it down in a kind of ponderous dialectic that just doesn’t
fit either the characters nor their experiences.
And finally, I must agree with the Letterboxd commentators, director
Junior should have cast someone else other than himself as the man in the suit.
Alas, both director and actor, despite some fascinating moments and situations,
are in general too obvious amateurs.
Los Angeles, January 5, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January
2022).
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