Fernando Reinaldos | Leo / 2023

childhood friends say goodbye

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fernando Reinaldos (screenwriter and director) Leo / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

This short US film is a rather brave work, although you wouldn’t know it from either Dekkoo, where I watched it, or from IMDb, which simply describes Leo as Kai’s best buddy, with whom he plays basketball and decides to hide out with him in the gym after hours to say goodbye with some nice pot before Leo goes away to college on the West Coast, while beautiful Kai stays home flipping pancakes in a diner.

    In some respects, the actual refusal of either description to actually name the differences between these two young men can be seen as a rather healthy perspective, but the film itself goes out of its way to make clear that Leo’s love for Kai, which finally gets played out in kisses between the two, a shower and perhaps more, is a bit different in this instance since Leo is clearly a transgender individual whose scars from the removal of his former female breasts are still quite visible throughout the film.

     The wonder of this little gem is that for Kai it doesn’t seem to matter, even though it’s evident that he grew up with Leo as being a woman. That is what is important here, not labeling Leo as transgender, but in recognizing that the love Kai feels for him goes far beyond gender, and that despite his attempt to hide his feelings for Leo, he ultimately reveals not only will he be sad the next day for his absence, but that he has perhaps sexually loved him all along as well, both as a female and a male, something that very few films have actually shown us.

   Here we finally realize a love that truly does transcend gender, and that does hold firm despite the changes he has obviously observed in Leo’s life as he has grown up near him. This is something generational perhaps, or at least new in gay cinema, and it should be applauded. Kai and Leo may not be right for one another; in fact, Kai himself recognizes that Leo may some day become an important author while he will still be flipping pancakes in the city (the film was shot around the Columbia University sports center), but that does not stop them from confessing their love before they move on.

    The film is mostly talk, and structures itself around a common trope in gay films, one of the two lovers immediately moving on to a new world. But the theme is original and refreshing, particularly in a time such as ours in which transgender individuals are being so severely attempted to be again erased from our consciousness.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).