Claire Zhou | Stille Dorst (High Tide) / 2018

peace

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claire Zhou (screenwriter and director) Stille Dorst (High Tide) / 2018 [22 minutes]

 

Tarik (Mouad Ben-Chaib), a Moroccan married man with a child, is in the midst of divorcing his wife, and escapes to a nice woodland cottage rented out to him by an attractive gay man, Jonas (Joshua Albano).

     The brick cottage is quite beautiful, but when Tarik goes to take a shower there is no water, which brings Jonas back in order to try to fix it. It will take another day, and in the meantime, Jonas promises him a “jerrycan,” back to basics, bathing in a tub.

      In the meantime, his hunky landlord has gotten all sweated up and has stripped off his T-shirt. Tarik loans him is as the other is put out on the line to dry. But in the meantime, Tarik has somewhat explicably been attracted to his bare-breasted landlord. And alone again in the next morning he can’t resist going to the clothesline to touch the drying T-shirt. Something unexpected is happening to him or perhaps it was been at the base of what he wife and he finds in their life together now impossible.

      Soon the landlord his back, taking a walk, and wants to know if Tarik will join him. Tarik talks about his 8-year-old daughter Laila, “way too smart.” Suddenly Jonas stops on their walk and closes his eyes for a few minutes, and then asks Tarik to try it. “What do you hear?” he asks. Tarik clearly hears nothing, until Jonas explains it: “Peace.” And so begins the cure this unintended self-help guru provides the confused and hurt elder man.

      By that evening they are drinking beers and looking in to a box containing Jonas’ memories of a confused youth, in which evidently his own father left them, retreating into the house his son still owns and rents out. Finding a packet of his now-friend’s adolescent poetry, Tarik asks to read.

      Humorously, they’re basically all about sex. As Jonas suggests, they call me “the Shakespeare of jerking off.”

      When Tarik asks him to read another, Jonas picks one but asks Tarik to read it, the content obviously suggesting the hidden feelings of the reader as well as the young boy who wrote the poem:

 

                          With no sight of daylight

                          I swim in the deep

                          hunted by need

                          and my desire for men

 

                          because I float lonely

                          with my wish unheard

                          floating as a coward

                          who does as he should.

                          

                          So I keep searching for love

                          with a heart that can’t breathe.

                          And the light of the world

                          I drown in my own deceit.

 

    (Presumably it reads better in Dutch). That poem, which Tarik describes as “beautiful,” truly troubles him as he spends a sleepless night. When he rises for a glass of water, however, he finds his young landlord sleeping on the couch, obviously too drunk from all their beers to return home.

     Of course, they fall into a kiss, Tarik pulling back with the shock of it, but Jonas reassuring him that it’s okay. And after a few brief touches, Jonas returns to the couch to let Tarik work out his own feelings.

      In a roundabout route Tarik eventually joins him on the couch for sex.

      The film ends with Tarik and Jonas once more in nature, sitting, as Tarik sheds tears, recognizing, as he simply says, “32 years, I did this to her.” He has finally come out. Jonas asks him to close his eyes. Peace has finally arrived.

       This is a truly lovely but somewhat odd film, given that it almost seems like many of young gay man’s dream, to help a handsome older man to come to terms with his own sexuality with himself as the new object of his affection, all written by a Dutch woman of Asian descent. Claire Zhou made this emotionally moving film for her thesis project at HKU The University of Arts Utrecht after discussing the creator of the Moroccan float for the Amsterdam Gay Pride celebration just how many married men over 40 from his country were secretly gay, another example of the way film programs in colleges and universities throughout the world have helped to stimulate over the last several decades an explosion of LGBTQ cinema.

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).