Josh Appignanesi | Rufus Stone / 2012

two old men in a final hug knowing they cannot redeem the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josh Appignanesi and Kip Jones (screenplay), Josh Appignanesi (director) Rufus Stone / 2012 [31 minutes]

 

This is a painful reminder of gay life in small provincial villages, this based on social research into the older gay experience in rural south England and Wales by the Bournemouth University School of Health and Social Care.

    The first part of this film is a view back into the youths of the major three characters Rufus Stone (played in the younger version by Harry Kershaw), his male friend Flip (played early on by Tom Kane) and his supposed girlfriend Abigail (Martha Myers Lowe). All three spend a day in the wood, with the boys particularly getting to know one another better, but as they relationship develops, Abigail keeps popping up to drag Rufus away from Flip.

     At one point she actually seems to succeed, pulling him off to share a beautiful view from a hilltop, but suddenly Flip reappears, ramming his body into Rufus’ and dragging him to the ground, where the two pleasantly wrestle together. He pulls Rufus off to the old swimming hole, stripping naked and diving in, encouraging Rufus to do the same thing. The two pleasantly swim around one another and finally meet up for one looks like their first kiss. But once again, up pops Abigail, demanding Rufus’ full attention. When this time he doesn’t respond, she turns to another of the citizens enjoying their local woods, obviously spreading the rumor that the boys are homosexually involved, and that person, in turn, whispers in the ear of the next much like the old telephone game.

     Before the end of the day, Flip’s mother (Phillipa Stanton) is seen dragging her son behind her as, with knife in hand, she arrives at the Stone’s house yelling for him to stay away from her son.

Soon after, we see Rufus, with his head on a table, as he father (Jon Nicholas) beats him, his mother (Freyja Faraday) cowering in the background.

     Soon after, back pack on his shoulders, we watch Rufus hitchhike to London.

     Now, years later, Rufus (now played by William Gaunt) is brought back to the village in order to sell the home after both his parents’ death.

     He briefly wanders through his old home, clearly representing some fond memories, but also quite painful ones. He discovers his old camera, the one he held with him the day of his joyful discovery of love, but as he walks across the room he falls flat to the floor. Had I done so, an ambulance would have had to been called to help get me up. But Rufus can still crawl to his knees, awakening when the doorbell rights, looking out the windows to see the horrible memories of the past with neighbors pointing their fingers and his behavior.

    Hardly is he able to call a real estate agent to come round and check out the house which he immediately wants to sell that he is visited by the now someone heavy hipped neighbor come to check out the new man who has arrived next door, a glass of wine in hand suggesting that she is now an alcoholic who drinks the day-long. He wouldn’t have perhaps ever know this woman who suggests that it “just happens that I’ve opened a nice bottle of white [wine],” before she announces her name, Abagail (Lin Blakley), the same small-minded girl who destroyed his existence in his youth. On the search for any man, she does not recognize her new prey.

     When he denies her offer for a drink, she insists since he his christening his new home and she is his closest neighbor, she will not take no for an answer: “You’re a man after my heart.” But obviously he is a man he detests her for good reason.

     “I suppose you’re the married type,” she proceeds in her selfish interrogation, and she almost gurgles with joy as he responds with a simple “No.”

      “No children?” he asks. She declares some day her prince will come, he recognizing her as “Abagail White still looking. Well, you’ve got stamina, I’ll give you that.”

     And like a bolt of lightning, she recognizes him for the first time as Rufus. Startled as he walks off, she shouts out “I’m sure Flip would love to see you. He still lives down the road.”

      It is nearly all to much for Rufus who still carries with him memories of the boy he loved so long ago. And now those memories get interleaved with Rufus’ own adult return to the woods, his loss of a life that might have been loving and fulfilling, although having lived on in Paris all of these years with a successful career, he now realizes it could never have existed had he stayed. He visits the same pond with some nostalgia but clearly with a kind of bitterness, a profound sadness, if nothing else similar to Bergman’s Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries.

      And there, suddenly out of the blue, he encounters Flip, who suggests when he was a lad you used to bathe here.

       His final recognition of Rufus is expressed with “My God.” They briefly manage an uncomfortable hug, and walk back together. Rufus discovers that he is still “the confirmed bachelor type,” but even worse still looking after his mother, the terrible woman with a knife in his childhood scenes. Rufus explains he’s putting his parent’s place up to sale, and finally allows he might have time for a quick tea before he drives back to London in his lovely yellow convertible.

      And Flip is even slightly embarrassed for the condition of his own quarters. His “old mum” is still the horrific spectre she was long ago, a mean looking woman of the provinces, who his young dream boy has been caring for all these years. And suddenly observing the stare of the old woman, Rufus begs his forgiveness for not having realized how much time has slipped away, suggesting he cannot stay.

      Flip chases after, not wondering why he hates his mother for what she did, but admitting that “she’s all I’ve ever had.” “You have to forgive,” he insists.

     Rufus’ response is cruel: “Do you, I never did.” Flip tries to explain that he stayed and this is his life, despite hearing of Rufus’ great successes in London. He wonders if Rufus had ever wondered kind of life he left for him, sneaking off to town once a while for a buggering with no joys, no pleasures. “Go back to London with your fancy friends, you selfish bugger,” he hisses as he breaks down in tears. “I’ve been so fucking lonely, and there’s not a soul in the world who knows it.”

     The pain of this scene, the man left behind in such messes, is almost unbearable to watch. There is no answer for those too fearful to make the same kind of choice Rufus did. Rufus hugs him, but almost immediately several women exit and the tea shoppe nearby, one of them shouting out, “I know you, you’re that bugger Rufus Stone.” Flip has no choice but to escape, still living in such an intolerant community. Rufus gets into his lovely yellow car to make another escape, but this time, quite inexplicably, it won’t start up. And he is forced to perceive that he may have to remain in this homophobic and intolerant world, haunting him with memories, yet another night.

      The dreadful Abagail arrives to tell him the news, Flip has just hung himself, he monstrous mother only able to mouth a few pitiable “Oh, Oh, Ohs,” as Abagail calls the police.

      In dreadful anger and vengeance, Rufus drags out the family’s old grandfather clock and numerous other antiquaries they have treasured, hacking them to pieces on the front lawn to their house and burning them in a bonfire to rid himself of the past and this world. As the terrible neighbors stand about horrified, he drags yet more furniture, one by one, adding it to the huge bonfire, the stupid Abagail attempting, yet again, to stop him. The symbolic gesture is clear, this world needs to be cleaned out from top to bottom, despite the neighbor’s desperate attempt to keep the status quo. As they attempt to stop him, he pushes them away and drags out even more mementos of the post and adds them to the fire, representative also of his own furious anger with the world in which he’s grown up, without now a trace of possible redemption.

     But in the midst of fury and anger, all suddenly witness the same vision, the ghost of the young Flip appearing to bless the world that is so torn apart that there is no way of restoring it’s thread of history. Alas, I don’t believe in ghosts.

     This, Vito Russo, is why gay men still unnecessarily destroy themselves. Abandonment in small provincial towns is a sure death no matter how it is represented on the screen. Even today, some LGBTQ+ individuals are left behind by their societies in undeterminable loneliness and hatred.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).