Maximilien Blanc | My Best Friend / 2018

sharing a blunt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Rivera (screenplay), Maximilien Blanc (director) My Best Friend / 2018 [17 minutes]

 

If Daniel Rivera and Maximilien Blanc’s short film My Best Friend doesn’t have a lot to say, it certainly expresses what it does quite beautifully both through its images and language. The handsome young actors speak in a relaxed manner, with a great many silences, that might not have been allowed in a more amateur film. These are, after all, the much clichéd best friends, who don’t always need to talk endlessly in order to communicate. 

    But gradually, both reveal a great deal, Ari (Colin McCalla) slowly expressing his deep hurt and inner turmoil over a long-ago fact that is never completely explained, but strongly suggests that his older brother was cast out of the house for being gay, his name never spoken again and all images of him destroyed. Ari has recently uncovered a photo of him and his brother representing the great joys they shared together, and suddenly it has returned all the pain of his brother / friend’s loss. He is embarrassed for his sudden tears, the other boy Dante (Daniel Rivera) assuring him that it is not inconsequential that he has these feelings and that are important to express.

     There seems to be something so deeply lonely about Ari, despite his long-time friendship with Dante that he cannot even express his feelings to himself let alone his “best friend.” Dante almost seems to be toying with his friend as he suddenly offers his non-smoking friend a blunt, a pot-filled cheroot of the kind he’s been smoking recently with a male friend of a girl who apparently Ari has been seeing, Naomi. Dante suggests the boy seems interested in him.

     When Ari asks about what kind of interest, it turns out it may be of the romantic sort, and that Dante doesn’t at all mind that sort of attention. One might expect some glimmer of startlement, jealousy, curiosity if nothing else, but Ari seems quite silent about the entire casually expressed confession.

      And he is equally nonreactive when Dante gradually reveals that is father has obtained a university position in Chicago, and that the family will be moving there at the end of the summer.     

    All Ari can seem to express is his happiness for the good news, a behavior which even Dante quickly queries his about feeling with no results. Clearly Ari’s was not the response he was hoping for, even expecting.

     But as they lay back and smoke, the weed taking its effect, Ari opens up again, expressing his dismay about the possibility of losing such an imaginative best friend, just as he has previously lost his brother—a metaphoric parallel that the script fortunately does not feel the need to ponder. Ari’s feelings, in fact, appear to be more triggered by Dante’s drug-induced poetic imagination of a kind of mystical universe of birds who, when they die fly off to different universes, responding to human emotions. But the effect is the same, the connection made. Ari’s remarks are as good as a love letter: “You see things Dante. You see things the way no one else does. It’s pretty beautiful. You’re pretty beautiful.”

      And Dante realizes that his friend’s comments are also meant as a deep admission of the words he cannot utter, about more intense feelings he has not fully identified yet. In response, he leans over and kisses him gently on the lips.

      The boys lay back on the grass again face up, waiting for their mutual reactions. Of course, Dante, having full well known what he has done, simply smiles at finally being to actuate his feelings. Ari’s face registers some confusion before a wave of near euphoria registers, a lovely smile suddenly appearing on his face as well.      

     Perhaps they have finally moved beyond the cliché and become something more than simply “best friends.”

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).