Stewart Hendler | The Closet / 2008

out of time

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Bloom (screenplay), Stewart Hendler (director) The Closet / 2008 [4 minutes]

 

In this very short film, an older man (Jay Edwards) walks down the street with a cane. His shoelace has suddenly become untied. On the other side of a high hedge of trees a young boy (Andy Scott Harris) is playing with a small ball which suddenly comes flying over the hedge.

   The man looks down upon the ball, reminding him of his childhood when he threw back just such a ball for another young boy (Dalton O’Dell), whom he later visits through his window. The two become fast friends, and for a few frames we see the relation between the two quickly becoming something close to young love, each time the boys entering through the window but leaving through the door.

     But one day, suddenly, the door becomes a closet, obviously the father (James Bolt) of the boy from the 1940s, having sense his child’s relationship with the other boy, having closing off the access between the two young innocents.

     For a moment, it is more than a sigh of loss and recognition of something that might have led to a relationship, but a regret for how the world since has treated him. There he stands, still shoes untied, not sure he can go forward without regret. His own age has removed him from queer love, and now stands along simply as an old man with the Beckett like dilemma, “I can’t go on/I must go on.”

    Suddenly out of nowhere a beautiful young female child appears, Hope (Chloe Bookmyer), bending down to tie his shoe. A minute later we see her father appear, and behind him her second father, the two men obviously being from a queer household, encouraging her to walk on with them.

     In some senses, the last scene makes the story even sadder since we know the old man has lost out on those possibilities simply because of when he was born. Yet, obviously, this film does declare that things have changed. There is indeed new hope for gay men and women, which this couple and their daughter reveal.

     This little film is so light and fragile that it threatens to blow away at the slightest attempt to read in more than it simply makes obvious. Yet, in its simplicity it expresses one of the most complex and deepest of issues: how do gay men and women rectify that past. Some of us cannot experience what so many younger queer individuals of our generation can now enjoy. Perhaps we can only thank the heavens that if we came of age in the 1940s, we did not have to suffer AIDS, we did not have to see our friends die in order for us to survive. But there is still a sadness there, a kind of saudade for a past that slipped through the hands in order to survive.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026)