Saul Singelton | Since the First Day We Met / 2017

speed dating

by Douglas Messerli

 

Saul Singelton (screenwriter and director) Since the First Day We Met / 2017 [5 minutes]

 

I truly don’t quite know what to say about this feel-good film. It is not that the film is at all difficult to comprehend. Max (Frank Harris) is a deaf student who transfers from to a regular high school—he can lip read—which still presents great difficulties, particularly when the teacher turns her back to him.

    Finn (Kaleo Goldstein-Coloretti) takes an interest in the new student and almost immediately encourages him to teach him sign language, which he seemingly becomes an expert in almost immediately. But early on in their friendship, when Max goes to kiss him, he pulls back, and hurries off.

     They remain friends however, regularly meeting up in the nearby woods (doesn’t every school have a woods nearby?) declaring their friendship.

   Yet one day, Finn doesn’t show up for their usual meeting, Max storms back into the school discovering that he stands by the locker talking to a woman.

     Max almost immediately presumes of the worst, perceiving himself as a “pity project,” and declaring that he thought Finn was different, but is now disinterested in their relationship continuing.

       One has to wonder at his such an immediate outburst and peevish reaction given that Finn has spent hours with him and even bothered to learn sign language.

       Moreover, Finn soon joins him explaining that he does care. When Max explains that he loves him, Finn says that he has know that since the first day that they met, and that he too loves him. The two kiss and all is well.

     But why has Finn, one must ask, held back that love for all the time he has spent with the deaf boy?

       Basic behavior patterns seem almost inexplicable in this film, perhaps having to do with the terribly abbreviated time director Singelton has used in which to tell his story. Perhaps if he might have more thoroughly dealt with his characters and their needs, explained Max’s urgency for a new friendship more carefully and not simply treated him as “a deaf student,” and explored Finn’s hesitancies and the reasons for them, we might have more thoroughly cared about these figures. As it is, these are simply sketches of kindly and loving individuals with surface beauty, but lacking real flesh.

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).