Sam Balharrie | Bookends / 2021

regrets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Balharrie (screenwriter and director) Bookends / 2021 [12.30 minutes]

 

Two long time friends, Ali (Sam Balharrie) and Lou (Hector Rutter) are long-time best friends who both have actually hoped for me. They have fallen in love with one another and even hugged and kissed, but inexplicably, perhaps because of Lou’s reticence, have never taken it further.

    Now as they meet up again, some time later, they both regret it. Lou a nice apartment and, apparently, a girlfriend. Just being together does certainly arouse old feelings, but it is clear too late. Ali has been offered an excellent job in Dundee, Scotland, and even Lou’s final admission that he has loved Ali all this time, comes to nothing. Ali’s girlfriend calls, and he’s off in a hurry.

     Yet they do again meet up sometime later, after the film reveals their almost ritualistic at earlier love-making. This time both are more honest, Lou expressing his deep reluctance at they not shifting their friendship into something much deeper, the way it was “should have been.” They discuss for a long while the difficulties they both have had in fully committing to a love which has grown up between them without consummation. Lou also admits that he has broken up with his girlfriend. But finally Ali must admit that he is taking the job offer and will be leaving within a week.

    Ali hopes that they can continue to be close friends, but for Lou everything seems wrong. He just wishes they could go back and right the earlier time when they came so close to beginning a sexual relationship. Yet, as he well knows, you cannot go backwards in time. And Ali walks out the door, seemingly forever.

    The two meet up again when Ali returns for his Dad’s birthday. This time Ali announces that he really has found someone with whom he is happy; what gender is never established. And Lou has found job he truly likes. But again there is their still unspoken love that won’t go away. Both describe the first time they actually fell in love with one another. And they finally admit that they don’t want that love ever to disappear even as they both go on about their lives in very different places and directions.

     This often happens, good friends, would-be lovers just have the wrong timing in their lives, and miss out in the love that might have been. The regrets are endless, but must be tamped down and basically ignored in order for them to go on living. In the famed gay film The Boys in the Band, the group even played an evil game of forcing each other to call up and tell their first loves, those loves that came to nothing, of their youthful feelings, a cruel and meaningless action that accomplishes nothing. In this case the couple has truly come through discussion to a place in their lives where both can be happy for what they wanted to happen but never did.

    I myself have so many regrets for not having responded to sexual invitations when I so much wanted to; but it is meaningless to dwell on them given the full live I have lived. Besides, what might they have led to or even meant in the larger picture of my life. I can only explain to myself, I just wasn’t ready.

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026).